1993 World Trade Center attack remembered 30 years later

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the terrorist mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being flown on the last leg from Pakistan to New York City for trial when an FBI official pulled back the terrorist’s blindfold and gestured below to the Twin Towers.

“Look down there. They’re still standing,” the official told Yousef over the East River that night in 1995.

Yousef squinted, his eyes adjusting to the light. “‘They wouldn’t be, if I had enough money and explosives,’” the official recalled him saying. 

Feb. 26 marks the 30th anniversary of the bombing, in which a small cell of Islamic extremists blew up about 1,200 pounds of explosives in a van parked in a below-ground garage in the north tower. 

Six people were killed, and more than 1,000 were injured.

Two of the six who died — administrative assistant Monica Rodriguez Smith, 35, of Seaford, and dental equipment salesman John DiGiovanni, 45, of Valley Stream — were Long Islanders. Rodriguez Smith was pregnant with a son.

The bombing presaged the far deadlier 9/11 attack on the Trade Center eight years later.

“It was Part One and Part Two. It was all the same thing. … It was a major target,” Robert Daddio, now 58 and living in North Carolina, recalled Friday. In 1993, he was living in Holtsville and working at the World Trade Center for a company that installed pay phones. 

According to an FBI history, Yousef "wanted the bomb to topple one tower, with the collapsing debris knocking down the second."

When the bomb exploded about 12:17 that Friday afternoon, Daddio was by the main escalators going down into the Trade Center’s PATH station. The floor shook and black smoke filled the air.

Daddio, an Army veteran and volunteer firefighter on Long Island, escaped with his co-workers, and he helped grievously injured victims, including one with a detached eye, another with a broken leg and another with a head injury.

Bill McGarr, who is now 74 and lives in Mineola, was in lower Manhattan for both the 1993 and 2001 attacks. That February afternoon 30 years ago, he was high up on a trading floor as a corporate bond broker for Cantor Fitzgerald.

“Suddenly, it felt like somebody kicked the back of my chair. Now I’m on the 104th floor, and I felt that impact all the way up there, and then within moments, the room started to fill with smoke,” McGarr said. He climbed down 104 stories over the two hours it took to escape.

On Sept. 11, 2001, when Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 people at the Trade Center, McGarr was at his office at another firm two blocks away. 

Ceremony, Mass Sunday

The 30th anniversary is being commemorated Sunday at Ground Zero with a ceremony at noon hosted by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, followed by a Mass at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on nearby Barclay Street. The names of the six dead from the 1993 bombing are among nearly 3,000 etched in bronze at the memorial; the rest were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, the service was held at a granite memorial fountain built at the World Trade Center complex. The fountain was destroyed in the 2001 attacks. 

Ed Smith, 60, the pregnant Long Islander's widower, will be in New York for the ceremony. He was flying in from the Southwest on Saturday night.

That Friday 30 years ago was supposed to be last day at work for his wife, Monica Rodriguez Smith, before she was to go on maternity leave to give birth to their son, to be named Edward or Eddie.

Ed Smith had been in Boston for work when he saw a TV news report about a fire at the Trade Center. He tried to call his wife but couldn’t reach her. Several phone calls later to different police stations and he found out that the fire had been caused by a bombing.

“I spent the next, I don’t know how many hours, till probably almost 12 o’clock at night, calling hospitals, looking for my wife, and then ultimately called the New York City morgue, and they told me that I should come there, and obviously I knew what that meant, at that point,” said Smith, who later founded a charity to help military personnel acclimate back to civilian life.

“You try to focus on some of the good that comes out of it. But during this time of year, it’s always very sad,” he said Friday. 

'I will tell them what they took'

In the years after the 1993 bombing, six men were convicted and sentenced to prison; they had connections to a metropolitan-area mosque and Islamic terrorist networks overseas.

One of the terrorists had been arrested after he returned repeatedly to a Ryder truck-rental dealer in Jersey City seeking his $400 deposit refund on a van used in connection with the attack and found in the rubble.

A seventh plotter remains at large and is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. 

Smith addressed the court when four of the bombers were to be sentenced to prison. He told Newsday in May 1994 what he planned to say: “I will tell them what they took. About the baby. And what my wife and me never got to experience with the baby, the first steps, the baby getting sick and holding the baby. I'll never get to see the kid play baseball. Watching him write for the first time. Making those noises. Calling me Daddy. Going home, just holding another living thing, and knowing I created that.”

The couple had met at the Trade Center in the early 1980s where she worked and where he was selling equipment to her bosses. The two had been living in the house in Seaford where Smith grew up and which they bought together and remodeled.

How does one begin to come to terms with, or perhaps to move on from, such a devastating loss?

“The first step of that was selling the house and moving out of Long Island and New York, because there was just, you know — everything was a memory, right? And so I needed almost, like, a new start, a new view,” he said.

He moved to Phoenix, where he lives now. He remarried in 2015.

“When you’re in New York, everybody knows who you are, all your neighbors know what you’ve been through, all your relatives, everybody, they walk on eggshells around you for a while,” he said. “So I decided to leave.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.