Co-workers Loved 'Their' Towers

By Olivia Winslow and Nedra Rhone | STAFF WRITERS

September 20, 2001

For both James Barbella and Joseph Amatuccio, their jobs went beyond taking care of the World Trade Center. Both men loved the Twin Towers.

"He loved it. Those were his buildings," Monica Barbella said yesterday from her home in Oceanside. Barbella, a 53-year-old ex-Marine, even incorporated one of the towers into his exercise routine. At least a couple of times a week, he would run up the stairs - all 100-plus flights of them - to keep in shape.

Debra Amatuccio of Ozone Park described her husband's devotion to his job the same way. "He thought those buildings were his."

The two men, who knew each other, both worked in the Port Authority's property management department at the trade center. Barbella escaped from the explosion eight years ago. Amatuccio was hired to replace someone killed in that bombing. On Sept.11, both men were among those Port Authority workers who joined in efforts to save others. Both remain missing.

Sometime between the attacks on the towers and their collapse, Monica Barbella received a call from her husband.

"He called me from the operational command center, which was downstairs in the basement and asked me what happened because he didn't know," she said. "I relayed the information to him and he relayed it to the people behind him and said, 'OK. Goodbye.' The last sighting that anybody had, he was going up the stairs, back into the building with Port Authority police."

Debra Amatuccio said it was her husband's love for the buildings and the people who worked there that made him return not once, but two, three and maybe more times to pull workers and friends from what remained of the towers.

"I have to go, I have to go and help," the 41-year-old Amatuccio yelled to his wife over the phone when the first plane hit, she said. He called her again, after the second plane struck. She screamed for him to get out. But she said he wanted to make sure "his people" were safe.

Amatuccio was last seen in the lobby of Tower Two, his wife said.

Both Amatuccio and Barbella are among the 68 Port Authority employees who are unaccounted for, said authority spokesman Pasquale DiFulco.

Barbella began working for the Port Authority 29 years ago. He was a general maintenance supervisor at the time of the attack, an authority spokesman said. He worked in a variety of sites over the years, landing at the Twin Towers about 10 years ago. "He never wanted to go anywhere else."

"He was a very physically fit man," Monica Barbella said of the man she met in the old neighborhood, the Flatbush section of Brooklyn - "he was one of the older boys" - and married 30 years ago. They have three grown children.

"He used to run up the stairs of the World Trade Center from the basement level to the top." She believes that was why he accompanied Port Authority police up into the building to help others. "They knew he could do it."

Landing a job with the Port Authority, where he currently was chief maintenance supervisor, was part of Joseph Amatuccio's quest for a better life. The same ambition led him to obtain a bachelor's degree in business administration from Queensboro College in 1998, his wife said. He came to the authority after stints as a toll booth collector and carpenter.

The couple, who married in 1986, merging their two families into one, was in the process of closing on their new house at month's end. But that's on hold now, Debra Amatuccio said. She has collected every toothbrush, dental record and razor sample she can. Called all of the hospitals and searched all the missing person and body-parts lists she can stomach. But, she said, "I know in my heart I'm never going to see him again."

Though James Barbella is officially listed as missing, his wife said she believes he's gone. Yet, she is comforted by the fact that he perished trying to help people in the place that he loved.

"If my husband had a choice to die, it would've been in those buildings. The Port Authority has a very strange relationship with the buildings, a personal relationship. He never would've left that building before it went down."