Last days for Marine were true Finest hours

By Denis Hamill, The New York Daily News, Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Tuesday, December 9th 2008, 6:49 PM

Sometimes when old Marines die they do fade away into unmarked graves in Potter’s Field.

Such might have been the case for Gaspar Musso, USMC 925050, who fought in the Battle of Tinian in the Marianas Islands in 1944 and who died Nov. 15 at age 84 in a Brooklyn nursing home.

Enter Police Officer Susan Porcello, a PBA delegate at the 68th Precinct in Bay Ridge and one of those big-hearted New Yorkers who still make this the best city on Earth.

“No way was I going to let this brave old Marine who fought for his country in WWII get buried in Potter’s Field,” she says.

Porcello first met Musso back in July when she responded to a 911 ambulance call to the retired insurance broker’s one-bedroom apartment on, appropriately, Marine Ave.

“When my partner, Eddie Ennis, and I arrived at his apartment Gaspar seemed a little bit down about himself,” Porcello says. “He said he felt alone in the world. We talked to him a bit and as I looked around his tidy apartment I noticed that he had served in the military – the Marines to be exact.”

Porcello asked him about family and friends. “Look around you, what do you see?” Musso said. “I have no family or friends.”

To which Porcello said, “Well, I’m your friend.”

Right there, with those four beautiful words, Gaspar Musso was destined to die with the dignity he’d earned with a rifle in his hands, fighting in a USMC uniform, in a war that saved civilization.

If she didn’t already wear a badge, you’d want to pin a star on Susan Porcello.

Musso, a diabetic with a host of other age-related maladies, had accidentally overdosed on his prescription medications. Porcello accompanied him to Lutheran Medical Center.

“I told him I’d be back to visit him and take him to a senior center where he could make some friends,” said Porcello, who comes from a big Italian family with a mom, dad, three sisters and a brother.

“I told him I was making him my ‘Grandpa,’ and if he liked, he could spend Thanksgiving with my family. Eddie and I discussed alternating holidays with Gaspar so he wouldn’t be alone for any of them.”

Two days later Musso was placed in critical care. Porcello asked hospital staff where he’d be buried if he didn’t make it. “Potter’s Field,” said one administrator.

“This infuriated me,” said Porcello. “There was no way I was going to let a man who fought for our country be buried in Potter’s Field. Not on my watch!”

Porcello told the hospital to keep her apprised of Musso’s condition. She had a local priest visit him. Porcello even asked NYPD‘s Missing Person’s Squad to search for next of kin.

No luck.

Musso had been an only child to Anthony and Marie Musso, both deceased. He had no other relatives. Musso’s only friend, an upstairs neighbor, had died the year before.

After his health improved, Musso asked Porcello to become his official health proxy.

She transferred him to Caton Park Nursing Home, where he was treated extremely well. She visited him often, learning that Musso was born May 7, 1924, joined the USMC in December 1943, finished training at Camp Lejune in March 1944 and was fighting with the 2nd Marines on Tinian Island by July 1944.

“I visited Gaspar on Nov. 13, bringing him rosary beads, a Bible, and his reading glasses,” she said.

“The next day, Nov. 14, I returned and found Gaspar sitting up in a chair, dressed in his own clothes. Looking great.”

Porcello washed his hands and face, trimmed his nails and eyebrows and asked if he was coming to her house for Thanksgiving. “I’m trying!” he said. He also asked Porcello to bring him a Christmas wreath for his room.

The next morning Porcello received a phone call saying that Gaspar Musso had died peacefully in his sleep.

No way was she going to let her good friend be toe-tagged and buried in Potter’s Field.

Porcello paid out of her own pocket for a wake at McLaughlin’s on Third Ave. and a mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Ridge, where a crowd of good-hearted cops from the 68th Precinct filled the pews, six serving as pallbearers. Sgt. Angel Rosa of the 68th, also a Marine, arranged for a USMC honor guard at Musso’s funeral.

Then taps blew over Gaspar Musso, United States Marine, as he was buried next to his mother at Resurrection Cemetery in Staten Island.

With the dignity he deserved.

Semper Fi.

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FORMER SECRET SERVICE, PRESIDENTIAL PROTECTION

J.A. LaSorsa & Associates
1645 SE 3rd Ct., Suite 102
Deerfield Beach, FL 33441
(U.S. SECRET SERVICE – RET.)
954-783-5020 (24 hour contact)
www.lasorsa.com
e-mail: jal@lasorsa.com
Providing Global services: Security Expert Witness, Anti-Wiretap and Audio Countermeasures, Consulting, Investigative, Polygraph, Executive Protection Estate & Yacht Security Systems & Consulting, Workplace Violence Training & Intervention and Executive Protection Training.
Specializing in Europe, Central and South America.

We provide Confidential Private Investigator Services to insurance companies, businesses, financial institutions, andprivate citizens. Our team of highly experienced private investigators can provide law firms of any size with the Litigation Support Resources necessary to secure the evidence they need for any case. We provide both domestic andinternational services, to include: Antigua, Anguilla, Aruba, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Dominica, St. John, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Grenada, Montserrat, Netherland Antilles, Nevis, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Turks & Caicos and Trinidad & Tobago, Bermuda, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, New York, Los Angeles, U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Cayman, Trinidad, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, Mexico, El Salvador,Venezuela and South America, Europe, Italy, Rome, Milan, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Asia, China, the Far East, India, etc.

Inside the Presidency
Few outsiders ever see the President’s private enclave.
By Elisabeth Bumiller

History always makes a sharp turn in Washington when a new American President takes the oath of office, and so it will once again on January 20, 2009. There will be new Cabinet members, a new Congress, a new foreign policy, a new style in the East Wing, new embarrassing relatives (if the past is any guide), and new first friends.

But many other things in the private world of the President of the United States will stay remarkably the same. The maids on the permanent White House housekeeping staff will make the presidential bed, just as they always have. The kitchen staff will still peel potatoes and scramble eggs. The gardeners will have planted 3,500 tulip bulbs to bloom in the Rose Garden in the spring.

The permanent care and feeding of the President of the United States is an industry staffed by hundreds of people, largely supported by taxpayers, and little understood beyond the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. First families move in and out—”They get a four- or eight-year lease,” says Gary Walters, former chief usher of the Executive Mansion. But the staff, customs, and mechanics surrounding the world’s most powerful chief executive endure, often for generations.

Walters knows this well. As a deputy manager and then manager of the most famous address in the U.S. for 31 years, from Gerald Ford to the second President Bush, Walters spanned six presidencies and crises both global and domestic until his retirement in 2007. He ran a house with a 90-member residence staff of butlers, maids, chefs, maître d’s, elevator operators, florists, curators, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. In some ways it was like running the world’s most exclusive hotel, except that Walters was in charge of a building with four major and often conflicting functions: home, office, grand museum, ultimate event site. Incredibly, the White House has welcomed up to 30,000 guests in a single week.

Walters, an Army veteran and a former officer in the old Executive Protective Service (now known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division), brought military precision and the utmost discretion to a job that was never 9 to 5. His worst times, he recalls, were when one first family moved out, typically around 10 a.m. on January 20, and the other moved in—by 4 p.m. the same day.

Walters’s goal was to have the departing family’s possessions out and the new socks in dresser drawers, personal furniture arranged, pictures hung, family photos displayed, favorite snacks in the kitchen—all in that six-hour time frame. There is no chance to get a head start, since the new President does not officially take office until January 20 at noon, two hours after his moving van pulls up under escort in the White House driveway as the outgoing President leaves for the Capitol. To make the deadline, Walters would deploy the entire 90-member staff at once, divided into teams with specific tasks. Months of planning included repeat verbal dry runs. (No such rehearsals took place before Richard Nixon’s early departure, however. Word went out that the First Lady had made a request through the usher’s office for packing boxes. “That’s how we knew,” said Betty C. Monkman, a former White House curator.)

Some transitions were especially rocky. Bill Clinton stayed in the Oval Office until 4 a.m. on January 20, 2001. “Then he had his desk that had to be cleaned out,” Walters recalls. He had to wait until the President went to bed before he could swoop in and help Clinton’s staff clear out the office to make way for George W. Bush.

But once things settle down, “the White House is first and foremost a family home,” Walters says. “It is the responsibility of the residence staff to change to the needs of every family, and not pigeonhole the family to the White House.”

To ensure such comfort, Walters would begin questioning the First-Lady-to-be after the election in November, as soon as the outgoing President had invited the new one to visit. What rooms would you like to use for your bedrooms? What time do you want to get up in the morning? What kind of toothpaste should be in the bathroom? What snacks would you prefer stocked in the pantry?

Bush 43 said pretzels, which got him into trouble in 2002, when he choked on one while watching a football game in his White House bedroom, lost consciousness, hit the floor, then came to, with only the presidential dogs as witnesses. Bush’s father requested easier to swallow Texas Blue Bell ice cream. He did not, however, request pork rinds, despite making a regular-guy show of nibbling them in public. “It was totally bogus,” Walters says. “He didn’t eat them.”

The second Bush also liked to keep a stainless steel water dish at the foot of the South Portico’s curved granite staircase, and Dale Haney, the superintendent of the White House grounds, could be seen moonlighting as the walker of the presidential terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. Chelsea Clinton had her friends over for pizza in the State Dining Room. Susan Ford hosted her junior prom in the East Room. In the Reagan Administration, known publicly for its old Hollywood glamour, the President and First Lady liked their private, just-the-two-of-them dinners served on trays in front of the television.

So what’s for dinner? First Ladies and Presidents generally haven’t cooked at the White House, although they have a second-floor kitchen in the family quarters, separate from the main kitchen on the mansion’s ground level. The Clintons liked to use their kitchen for post-party glasses of champagne and raided its refrigerator for leftovers. But most families have simply selected a weekly menu from choices offered by the White House chef. State dinners, barbecues for Congress, and holiday receptions for the diplomatic corps are paid for by taxpayers, but the President is billed for all food consumed by his family and his personal guests. In the first months of a new administration, sticker shock is routine.

“I can’t remember anybody not complaining,” Walters says, recalling in particular Rosalynn Carter’s astonishment at the size of the bills. “Mrs. Carter came from Georgia. Things were a little cheaper there at the time. But let’s face it, you’ve got world-class chefs. The garnishes they put on foods, the way they dress them up, it’s like eating in a restaurant.”

Food comes from various Secret Service–approved commercial suppliers, but also from farmers markets and occasionally just the grocery store. Sometimes the White House chef will stop in at a local butcher on the way to work and pick up a last-minute chop for the President’s dinner. Wine, always American—the White House stopped serving French wine in the Ford Administration—comes directly from the wineries and includes offerings from Virginia and Idaho as well as California. (White House Francophile customs died hard: Mamie Eisenhower once had her favorite apple brown Betty listed on a state dinner menu as Betty Brune de Pommes.)

The first family pays its own dry cleaning bills, although the staff takes care of sending out the clothes to high-end establishments in town. The President’s shirts are done in-house, as are all the family’s sheets and towels. The President’s valet keeps his shoes shined and deals directly with the housekeepers to replace missing buttons. Presidents select their own suits from the closet each day, although staff members have been known to reject presidential ties as too busy for television. “I can’t think of any President who had somebody else pick out his clothes,” Walters says.

When the President leaves the White House, he travels within an enormous, ever secure bubble, whether seated in the armor-plated limousine referred to internally as “the Beast,” flying on Air Force One, or sleeping in one of the 600 to 800 hotel rooms required for each stop on a foreign trip.

The President’s road show includes a caravan of White House staff, State Department officials, Secret Service agents, communications technicians, crews for Air Force One and Marine One (the presidential helicopter), Department of Defense staff, and press. A big foreign trip typically includes up to 800 people, among them 30 White House staff members, more than a hundred members of the Secret Service, and some 150 representatives of the media—television and radio correspondents, camera crews, sound technicians, print journalists, wire service reporters, and still photographers.

The group is actually transported in two planes: Air Force One for the President, his staff, his Secret Service agents, and a small pool of reporters in the back; and the White House press charter, usually a United 747, for the rest of the media. (Reporters are rotated in and out of the 14 press seats on Air Force One, but on either plane, media organizations pay dearly for the seats, typically the price of first-class airfare or more.) The entourage is accompanied by cargo planes that transport the President’s limousine and a spare, plus sometimes Marine One, to each stop.

The nucleus of the bubble, referred to within the White House as “the package,” consists of the President, his senior staff, the Secret Service detail assigned specifically to him, and a small pool of reporters. The package essentially isolates the President from the rest of the bubble and the outside world. Inside the package life is serene; humming outside is the 24/7 infrastructure required to keep the peace.

The head of the road show in the Bush 43 Administration was Joe Hagin, former deputy chief of staff in charge of operations, who believes in striking a balance between protecting the President and allowing him some exposure in public. “You can’t lock him in a steel box and move him around,” Hagin says. “You have to get him out.”

Hagin would begin planning Bush’s foreign trips up to a year ahead. Every November or December, he’d sit down with the White House chief of staff and national security adviser to block out what usually amounted to five or six annual presidential trips overseas. Some were built-in, such as the yearly Group of Eight meeting of industrialized nations or the NATO summits, both must-attends for the American President. But others, like Bush’s trip to Africa in February 2008, were designed to highlight administration policies and to show the White House flag.

“My geography’s not good enough to do it without a map,” Hagin says. So with maps unfolded all over the conference table in the national security adviser’s office, and with the Air Force One pilots on hand to consult, the group would figure out what stops made geographic sense. There were all-important political considerations as well. Bush 43, who grew increasingly unpopular overseas as his administration progressed, often augmented his European trips with stops in former Soviet-bloc nations like Albania, where he could count on pro-democracy, pro-American crowds to cheer him on.

The White House Communications Agency, or WHCA, builds its own communication system for each destination, and on foreign trips the leader of the free world can push a button on the telephone in his hotel suite and be instantly connected to a direct-dial U.S. system. Bush hasn’t carried a personal cell phone for security reasons, but he had access to any number of them while traveling.

One cell is specifically for the presidential limousine, where there is never a problem with background noise. People who have been inside say that the limo is eerily serene, as if the outside world were on mute. The President can see the crowd, but he can’t hear it, especially not over the deep rumble of the Beast’s big V-8.

Air Force One is the President’s refuge. He can sleep in his cabin, a suite in the nose of the plane with a shower and two daybeds. Or he can work out; before Bush’s knees gave out and he abandoned running, he had a treadmill set up in the Air Force One office on foreign trips. The jet’s kitchen serves full dinners prepared by military stewards, but they are unlikely to win culinary or nutrition awards. Steak, chicken, and pork chops are normal fare. In June 2002, when Bush was on a trip to Florida to promote dietary and physical fitness, the Air Force One lunch menu, printed on gold-edged cards for all passengers, was corned beef sandwich, steak fries, and strawberry cheesecake.

As the President moves with ease from meeting to meeting, an intense choreography churns around him, all outlined in hundreds of pages of briefing books. “We can go to the other side of the world and land precisely to the minute,” Hagin says. “But you’ve got to know what you’re doing. These trips are not for the faint of heart.” Only experienced staff members go overseas, and they are expected to know where to stand, what to wear, how to address foreign dignitaries, and when, literally, to run.

In spite of the briefing books and the overall efficiency of Hagin and his team, travel foul-ups occasionally occur. In May 2005, only a malfunction in a live hand grenade, tossed into an ebullient crowd of tens of thousands in Tbilisi, Georgia, averted what could have been a lethal attack. In 2004, Bush waded on his own into a group of security agents to pull a Secret Service agent out of a shoving match with the Chilean police. In 2002, the Beast came to such a sudden stop en route to lunch in Beijing with then President Jiang Zemin of China that the wire services reported a blowout, conjuring images of Secret Service agents rummaging through the trunk for a jack. The problem was in fact mechanical, and the President was moved to the spare limo within moments.

Not surprisingly, the President, like everyone else, is happy to get home. Although Ronald Reagan said he often felt captive in the fishbowl of the White House, many other Presidents and their families have loved it there.

And why not? There is, after all, a recently refurbished movie theater, suitable for viewing major Hollywood films sent overnight from the studios. (In the past couple years Bush saw The Kite Runner and The Perfect Game.) There is a swimming pool, the same one where Gerald Ford spoke to the press in his bathing suit. There is a tennis court, too, and the Children’s Garden, a shady spot created by Lady Bird Johnson, its walkway lined with bronzed handprints and footprints of presidential grandchildren.

Most of all, there is a sense of home and history, coupled with the knowledge that a first family, however well cared for and fed, can only pass through. Or as one of the permanent household staff gently reminded Barbara Bush during her time as First Lady: “Presidents come and go. Butlers stay.”

Excerpted from: ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT-ERRI Risk Assessment Services-Saturday, December 12, 1998-Vol. 4, No. 346

LEAD FOCUS

SECURITY WILL BE TIGHT FOR POTUS VISIT TO THE MIDDLE EAST
By Steve Macko, ERRI Risk Analyst

WASHINGTON (EmergencyNet News) – In what is being described as a massive three-way security operation will surround POTUS (President of the United States) when he meets Israelis and Palestinians on his venture into the traditional lion’s den of Middle Eastern violence this weekend. On the eve of the three-day visit to Israel, White House officials kept a tight lid on the plans for protecting the President from the suicide squads, car bombs and assassins who have bloodied the region’s history for decades.

National Security Council spokesman P.J. Crowley said, “Every trip has security challenges, and the president will have the security he needs.” But with tensions high in Israel over the faltering peace process and POTUS a potential target for both Jewish and Palestinian extremists, security experts said precautions would be at least as tight and elaborate as on any previous trip anywhere.

Joe LaSorsa, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service, who now runs an executive protection service in New York State, said, “You’re talking about being in the heartland of terrorism. We’ve experienced so many previous threats and incidents in the region is that you’re always at a heightened sense of awareness.”

Two Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank on Friday during violent protests. About 50 protesters were wounded, two seriously, in the clashes near the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya during Palestinian riots over Israel’s handling of the release of Palestinian prisoners under the Wye River peace deal.

The deaths brought to four the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces this week in widespread disturbances in the West Bank. More than 200 have been injured. Both of the male youths who were killed on Friday were 18-year-old. One Palestinian doctor said, “They were shot in the head with live ammunition.”

Three Israeli soldiers were slightly injured by stones thrown at them. One witness said demonstrators had held a sit-in following Friday Muslim prayers, then proceeded to an Israeli checkpoint near the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank where they clashed with the soldiers.

ERRI senior analyst Clark Staten reiterated warnings that he has voiced all week. Staten said in a statement disseminated to U.S. military intelligence services: “Although we are sure that appropriate protective measures are being taken, possible retaliation for these two shootings only reinforces our concerns about security during the POTUS trip to this region. Add to this a “threat statement,” published in Al-Hayat by Egyptian Jihad, within the past 24 hours. At the very least, the OPFOR (those opposed to Wye or Oslo) could pick the coming days as a time for a peripheral terror act, which would generate major publicity. Great caution and preparedness is urged at this time.”

The Egyptian Jihad “threat statement” Staten was referring to was published in the Arabic-language Al-Hayat newspaper on Friday. Egypt’s banned Jihad threatened a prolonged war against the United States, which it accuses of being an enemy of Islam, and said the most potent weapon in the hands of Moslems was an economic boycott.

The Jihad statement said: “Let the Americans know that we have resolved to fight them in a severe and long, drawn-out battle to be passed on to generations.” The terrorist group is led by Ayman el-Zawahri, a close ally to Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden.

The statement urged Moslems to boycott the United States which it said was “the biggest enemy aiming to undermine Islam.” It also said: “The most dangerous weapon in the hands of the Moslem community is an economic boycott.”

The United States is sending several batteries of Patriot missiles, which take out incoming missiles, during the visit as a partly-symbolic gesture to ward off attacks from other regional states, including hostile Iraq, during the visit.

In Jerusalem, National Police Commander Yehuda Wilk said although police had received no specific warnings of attacks, “the working supposition is that there will be an attempt to carry out a terror attack in order to upset the event.” He told reporters the huge media coverage would give added incentive for an attack by militants who have killed scores in bombings in Israel in recent years.

Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian police and other paramilitary groups are engaged in a web of protection centering on the President and his own close guard of U.S. Secret Service agents. Most of Clinton’s travel outside of Jerusalem will be done by helicopter, including visits to Gaza and Bethlehem, with security forces alert to the possibility of missiles.

Gaza is seen as a playground for violent anti-American groups. They range from Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon and elsewhere, Kurdish separatists, Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Afghanistan-based Osama bin Laden. Palestinian and Israeli officials say there has been close cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service in setting up a protective web around the President.

LaSorsa said there would be a thoroughly professional, close cooperation between the three. He said, “It’s a hand-in-glove relationship — even with the KGB. There’s a very close-knit brotherhood between security agents.”

There are no plans of a POTUS meet-the-people outing on his visit. 500 police will be on duty round-the-clock at the Jerusalem Hilton hotel, where he will stay. Israeli police say that they have taken into account the recent surge in West Bank violence in drawing up their plans. At least 10,000 police will be deployed around Israel for the President’s visit — 3,500 in Jerusalem.

After spending Sunday in Jerusalem, POTUS will spend Monday in Gaza. There remains considerable support among the strip’s more than one million residents for the militant terrorist group HAMAS. The No. 1 HAMAS militant on Israel’s wanted list, Mohammad Deif, remains at large and is believed to be hiding in Gaza.

On Friday, a leaflet in the name of HAMAS vowed to bomb Israeli targets if the Palestinian Authority did not release the movement’s spiritual leader from house arrest by Christmas Day. The statement, sent to an, international news agency, also ridiculed the visit of POTUS to Gaza, saying: “The Palestinian Authority claims that Clinton’s visit reinforces Palestinian sovereignty, but this is a mere illusion. We condemn and reject this visit and consider it … a visit with ulterior motives that aims to dash real Palestinian hopes.”

A top HAMAS terrorist who asked not to be named confirmed the statement was genuine. The leaflet called POTUS “the enemy of the Arabs and Muslims.” The HAMAS statement was meant to put pressure on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to release HAMAS founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from house arrest.

Yassin was placed under house arrest on 29 October after a suicide bomb attack against Israeli children. The HAMAS leaflet said: “We give the leadership of the Palestinian Authority until December 25 to lift the house arrest on our leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin or else the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades will be free to commit any new bombing attacks against the Zionist entity and their forces.” Izz el-Deen al-Qassam is the military wing of HAMAS.

The high-pitched voiced, 62-year-old, bearded Yassin is an icon for Muslim militant suicide bombers who have killed scores of Israelis since the first interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deal was signed in 1993.

(c) Copyright, EmergencyNet NEWS Service, 1998. All Rights Reserved. Redistribution without permission is prohibited by law.

The ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT is a subscription publication of the EmergencyNet NEWS Service, which is a subsidiary of the Chicago-based Emergency Response and Research Institute. This publication specializes in Corporate Security/ Terrorism/Intelligence/Military and National Security issues.

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