FRANCIS JOSEPH TROMBINO, CLOSE CALLS NEVER COUNTED

Three people were killed in the 1981 Brink's robbery in Nanuet, N.Y., and Joseph Trombino barely escaped being the fourth. Shot in the shoulder, his left arm hung on by only a thread. It was sewn back on in three operations.

He returned to work as an armed guard two years later. "He'd done that for so long," said his wife, Jean, "it was like he didn't know what else to do."

Joseph never spoke about the danger involved in his job. In 1993, he had been making deliveries to the World Trade Center just hours before it was bombed. A close call, but after the 1981 robbery, close calls didn't really count.

Now 68, he was at last planning to retire in a year or so, his wife said. But on Tuesday, as ever, he was up at 2:30 a.m. and out by 3:30 a.m., to make it to work in Brooklyn by 5 a.m. A little after 9 a.m., he was waiting in the armored truck in the basement of the trade center for his three fellow guards to return from the 11th floor. They made it to safety. Joseph called into Brink's from a pay phone, his wife said, to say a policeman had told him to move the truck. The building was shaking and water was cascading down, Joseph said, before the line went dead. Profile courtesy of THE NEW YORK TIMES.

TROMBINO - Francis Joseph, on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, of Clifton. Beloved husband of Jean (McNulty). Loving father of Lisa Trombino, Bovita Kirby and the late James Trombino. Brother of Anthony Trombino, Antoinette Barcellona, and the late Sarah Ferrente. Grandfather of Stephanie, Alyssa, Caitlyn and Mackenzie Kirby. Survived by several nieces and nephews, great nieces and great nephews and great great nieces and great great nephews. Funeral from the Intelisano-Scarpa Funeral Home, 492 Clifton Ave., Clifton on Saturday 8:30 AM and a 9:30 AM Mass at St. Paul's R.C. Church, Clifton. Interment St. Nicholas Cemetery, Lodi. Visiting Friday 2-4 and 7-9 PM.

FRANCIS J. TROMBINO, SURVIVED ONE ATTACK TO MEET ANOTHER Francis Joseph Trombino knew danger, and he knew tragedy.

In 1981, while driving a Brink's armored car, he had an arm almost blown off in a shootout with members of the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army during a robbery attempt at a mall in Rockland County, N.Y.

It was the second holdup of his career with Brink's, but the first one that turned bloody. His partner and two local policemen were killed in the botched heist of $1.6 million.

Twelve years later, while still employed by Brink's but no longer a driver, Mr. Trombino barely escaped the first bombing of the World Trade Center.

On Sept. 11, 2001, however, Mr. Trombino was in a Brink's truck that was trapped in a parking garage under the World Trade Center when planes commandeered by terrorists slammed into the buildings. He never made it out.

Known to everyone as "Joe," Mr. Trombino was 68 and had lived most of his life in Clifton. Before signing on with Brink's in the late 1960s, he'd been a truck driver.

Though it forced him to change his job assignment, the infamous Brink's robbery did not measurably change Mr. Trombino's outlook, those who knew him noted.

"He was a very strong guy and recovered pretty well," said Jack Walter, a friend from boyhood. "He never cried or moaned, even though he was patched with nuts and bolts and his fingers were bent the wrong way after that. His feeling was, 'This is part of life.'"

According to Walter, Mr. Trombino came close to dying from a loss of blood in the bungled holdup. Though he recuperated well enough over the next two years to return to work, he was also left with an impaired left hand that resulted in his switch to guard and messenger duties.

Mr. Trombino's wife of 42 years, Jean, said her husband had no problem adapting to his new duties, making deliveries around New York from a base in Brooklyn in a job that began at 5 a.m. each day.

After a regular stop at the World Trade Center, Mr. Trombino would leave his armored truck and deliver millions of dollars in securities on foot to numerous stops around Wall Street, getting picked up several hours later.

On the morning of the terrorist attack, Mr. Trombino stayed behind to guard the truck in the parking garage while three colleagues made a delivery to a bank on the 11th floor of the North Tower. Though separated in the chaos, the others fled with their lives.

"They couldn't go down and he couldn't come up" was the way Mrs. Trombino characterized the dilemma that confronted her husband and his crew.

"He was a devoted worker," added Walter. "He wasn't supposed to leave the truck, and it cost him his life."

Walter said his friend placed several calls to a Brink's office that last morning, one expressing concern for the welfare of those upstairs and another to say the walls around him were starting to crumble and water was seeping into the garage.

He was never heard from again, and Mrs. Trombino said she still doesn't know where her husband's body was discovered. Mr. Trombino's body and the armored car were recovered, but the body was not in the truck. "We've asked, but I guess we haven't gotten the right person yet," she added.

Beside his family, Mr. Trombino took his greatest joy in keeping up with old friends, particularly those he grew up with in the Delawanna section of Clifton. "If you met Joe, you had to like him," Walter recalled. "In all the years I knew him, I never got angry at him once. That says a lot about a person."

Mr. Trombino served with the Army during the Korean War and was a communicant at St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church in Clifton.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Trombino is survived by two daughters, Lisa of Clifton and Bovita Kirby of Verona; a brother, Anthony of Montvale; a sister, Antoinette Barcellona of Cedar Grove, and four grandchildren.

Visitation will be 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the Intelisano- Scarpa Funeral Home in Clifton. A Mass will be offered at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Paul's. Interment will follow in St. Nicholas Cemetery in Lodi.

I print this to remind readers of the anonymous courage of average people and also to point out that Joseph Trombino's first confrontation with terrorists was a Nanuet Mall in Nyack New York when a gang of black thugs and the offspring of affluent white liberals robbed a brink's armored car. Another Brink's guard Peter Paige was murdered by these scum and Trombino nearly had an arm traumatically amputated. Subsequently he was at the WTC shortly before the first raghead terror bombing. On 9-11 he was the truck diver for the Brink's pickup at the WTC. He could have bolted out of the garage but waited to for the other Brink's guards and for police instructions as to movement of his vehicle. In his final cell call to his wife he said he had been told to drive the armored truck out of the garage and he was about to. He stated that water was pouring into the garage from fire fighting efforts above and that the whole structure was beginning to shake ominously. Mr. Trombino did not escape , he was buried in the collapse of the WTC with his truck. I post this both to honor a brave man and to note that the running buddies of the garbage that conducted the Nanuet robbery were Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. We all know that the Mahdi started his climb at a reception in the elegant residence of this squalid pair. A far larger and finer residence than anything Mr. Trombino and his family could ever afford.

There is a long but very good coverage of the Brink's robbery and its antecedents and fallout at: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/1.html

Yes, well Mr. Ayers seems to be doing well:

Steve Grineski, a professor in MSUM’s School of Teaching and Learning, said that Ayers’ radical past doesn’t bother the school’s administration.

Bill Ayers is now a feted ‘visiting scholar’ at Minnesota State University Moorhead
5:06 PM 03/23/2013

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Eric Owens
Education editor

School officials at Minnesota State University Moorhead have selected left-wing radical and admitted terrorist Bill Ayers as the 2013 College of Education and Human Services “visiting scholar,” according to Campus Reform.

In an announcement last month, MSUM proclaimed that Ayers’s campus-wide address would be called “Teaching from the Heart: Education for Enlightenment and Freedom.”

Ayers reportedly spent three days on the school’s campus. Social justice was the big theme of his visit.

Steve Grineski, a professor in MSUM’s School of Teaching and Learning, said that Ayers’ radical past doesn’t bother the school’s administration.

“I guess if they had been really concerned, they would have canceled his presentation and not allowed us to do it,” Grineski told Campus Reform.

Grineski added that he and his colleagues chose to celebrate and honor Ayers because of his long history of trying to commingle own social justice principles with the American education system.

While Ayers received a stipend for his appearance at MSUM, the taxpayer-funded school refused to disclose how much it was.

Ayers, the son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group.

He was involved in Chicago’s “Days of Rage” riot in 1969 and fled prosecution after an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 killed three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb that prematurely detonated.

In a 2001 book, he admitted that he participated in bombings of the New York City Police Department headquarters, the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon in the early 1970s. (RELATED: Inside TheDC’s dinner with former Weather Underground terrorists)

After his days as a federal fugitive ended (because charges were dropped due to illegal FBI snooping), Ayers earned a Ph.D. He eventually became a faculty member in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ayers also achieved notoriety as a “family friend” to a youngish politician named Barack Obama. Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn still live in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Obama formerly resided.

In 2010, the year he retired, Ayers was famously and unanimously denied emeritus status after a passionate speech by the University of Illinois system’s board chair Christopher G. Kennedy, who is the son of assassinated U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy.

Christopher Kennedy urged the board to vote against Ayers because Ayers had dedicated his 1974 book “Prairie Fire” to a list of people including his father’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.

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