Posted by Bill Norvell 65
      Beccaccio, Albert  died on September,17th 1997.... A picture of Livio Al Beccaccio at the age of 20 stood at the head of St. Patrick's Church in Newburgh during a memorial service held in his honor Sunday. Beccaccio, 58, a native of Newburgh and former FBI agent, died on Sept. 17 with four other Americans when a United Nations helicopter crashed into a mountainside in Central Bosnia. Beccaccio, the son of the late Albert Joseph and Catherine Murphy Beccaccio, was born and raised in Newburgh. Sunday, 80 of his friends and family members gathered in the church where he once served as an altar boy. They came together to remember the man they said embodied all good things. Hilda A. Kogut, an FBI special agent had the opportunity to work with Beccaccio on several occasions. ''When I first met him he was an embodiment of what I thought an FBI agent should be,'' she told mourners at the memorial service. ''It was my privilege to work with Al, I learned a lot from him.'
  The Newburgh Free Academy Class of '57 had their 40th class reunion this past weekend, but after the reminiscing, memories of Beccaccio were still strong in the hearts of his former classmates. One of those classmates, Judge Anthony Austria, fought back tears as he spoke about the good times he shared with Beccaccio. But Austria got the mourners to laugh when he told a story of attending elementary school with Beccaccio.''I remember being determined to get all the words right on my spelling test like Al did,'' he said. ''And the next test I got all of the words right, and I remember telling my mother and she asked if I copied off of Al's test.'' Paul Flanagan, another classmate and neighbor, put into words what many were thinking. ''I think he was an embodiment of what everyone wished they could be. He was a good athlete and had strong character,'' he said. ''But he never thought he was above the rest of us; he didn't think he was special.'' Gert Babcock, Beccaccio's first cousin, said she will always remember him for being a good person.''He was a nice guy and a nice cousin - that's just the way he was,'' she said.Although the Rev. John Budwick didn't know Beccaccio well, he said he could tell there was something very special about him. ''I knew he was close to his faith - he sent a personal note to me after his father passed,'' he said. ''And I thought that was very nice of him considering he was so busy. ''He really touched me in a very short time.

NEWBURGH - The worst accident in the Bosnian peacekeeping effort Wednesday claimed the life of a 58-year-old Newburgh native and All-America athlete everyone assumed was ''indestructible.''  Livio Al Beccaccio, a retired FBI agent and 1957 Newburgh Free Academy graduate, was one of 12 passengers killed when a United Nations helicopter crashed into a mountain in central Bosnia. Beccaccio left with his wife, Anne, for Bosnia in May to do police consulting work for the U.N. Also killed in Wednesday's accident were high-ranking diplomats from Germany and England, and four other Americans. Four Ukrainian crew members survived the crash, which was blamed on dense fog. But for many people in the Newburgh area, the murky thicket of the Balkan conflict came home in a painful instant. Gone was the strapping, immensely popular Beccaccio, who co-captained the high school basketball and football teams but had the compassion to bring less-popular classmates into his circle. Gone was the man who made his hometown proud by earning All-America honors in baseball at Florida State and then blazing up the ranks of the FBI, where the former Marine was head of Physical Training Defensive Tactics at the FBI's Quantico, Va., headquarters. ''We couldn't believe it; he was like indestructible,'' said his brother-in-law, Ron Britzke, a former editor of the Newburgh Evening News and Cornwall Local who lives with Beccaccio's sister, Alberta, in the Town of Newburgh. Beverly Napello Sharp was going over response cards for next month's NFA Class of '57 reunion last night when she received the news of her classmate's death. For her, it was the horrible realization of her worst fears upon hearing in the spring that Beccaccio was headed to Bosnia. ''There's so much trouble over there,'' she said. ''When you've known someone your whole life and you like them and they're going to a place like that, it scares you.'' She said although Beccaccio has faithfully attended just about every reunion, he had regretfully written her that Bosnia would keep him away from the 40th. ''I always called him 'Dick Tracy','' said Sharp. ''With his chisled features, he was tough and could handle things, you know what I mean?'' David Roe, who was two years behind him at NFA, recalled how kind Beccaccio was to his younger teammates like Roe. ''He was just one in a million,'' said Roe, now a vice president with M&T Bank. Classmate Tony Austria, a Newburgh City Court judge, said Beccaccio was the closest thing this city saw to radio hero ''Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.'' But Austria, who met Beccaccio at Liberty Street Elementary School, said what many people didn't know about his friend was just how devout a Catholic he was. ''Every time he went up to bat, he said a prayer,'' said Austria. His faith only intensified as he got older, said his brother-in-law. ''In fact, when he moved to Spotsylvania, Va., there was no church and he spearheaded a drive to get a church, and he was successful. He was very strong on family values,'' said Britzke. Flashing integrity that Britzke said made Beccaccio ''the straightest guy you'd want to meet,'' Beccaccio opted to pay his own way to Florida State when a back injury kept him from fulfilling his football scholarship. Then he went out for baseball, got a scholarship in that sport, and baffled opposing batters with a 1.86 earned run average as a star pitcher. His love for sports and physical fitness didn't abate with age. ''He couldn't wait to come up here and run across the Newburgh Beacon Bridge or run the track at NFA,'' said Britzke. Joining the FBI in 1968, Beccaccio was assigned to the House of Representatives, also worked in bank robberies and fugitives, and then was transferred to the FBI academy in 1975. He earned a master's degree in public administration in 1975 from the University of Oklahoma and another master's degree in health fitness management at American University in 1984. Beccaccio was not the only representative of the Hudson Valley in Bosnia. Two Ulster County police officers stationed in Bosnia as U.N. police monitors knew little of the crash last night, only what they saw on the news. Sgt. Paul Van Blarcum of the Ulster County Sheriff's Department and SUNY New Paltz campus police Officer Phillip Gildersleeve are among about 2,000 American police officers stationed in that war-torn country under United Nations command. Van Blarcum is a former Onteora school board member. Both men are stationed in Trebinje and left for Bosnia in June on a yearlong assignment.
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Lifelong friends went on to serve country   Best friends in Newburgh
Hours after receiving the crushing call last week, Rodney Coleman was sitting in the den to his Arlington, Va., home tearfully trying to get back to 1950s Newburgh. The Newburgh of pick-up games behind South Junior High and Hi-Y dances at the YMCA, Friday night shows at the Ritz and pizza at Pepe's Tavern. The Newburgh that took a black kid from Clark Street and an Italian and Irish kid from the Heights and thought nothing of forging between them a bond of brotherly love that followed them out of the Hudson Valley and into the highest levels of government service. A helicopter crash in the dense fog of Central Bosnia Wednesday ended at 58 the accomplished, focused life of that Italian and Irish kid, Livio Al Beccaccio. Coleman tried to cope that night by turning to a bulging scrapbook assembled during their Little League days when the 11-year-olds squared off as opposing pitchers. The tattered newspaper clippings, moistened with fresh tears, didn't diminish Coleman's sense of loss. But they took him back. ''All of those headlines that meant so much to us are in good memory, but my buddy's gone and that hurts,'' he says. The last time either Rodney Coleman or Livio Al Beccaccio lived in Newburgh was 1957, the year they graduated from Newburgh Free Academy. They both went on to live successful, at times dangerous and often high-profile lives that took them to distant places. But, in many ways, they never floated far from the small city on the banks of the Hudson. Coleman joined the Air Force, took the Bronze star in Vietnam, worked with the Washington, D.C., City Council, and served as an executive at General Motors before being sworn in as assistant secretary of the Air Force in 1994. Beccaccio was an All-America baseball player at Florida State, served in the Marines, became an FBI special agent - once jumping from a plane to rescue a kidnapped heiress - before being promoted to chief of the FBI's Physical Training Unit and then its National Academy Program. After retiring from the FBI, he left for Bosnia in May to spend a year with the United Nations helping train local police forces. They were both standouts in high school - particularly Beccaccio. His chiseled features, athletic ease and natural way made him the guy every girl wanted to date and every other guy wanted to imitate. He dominated so many different varsity squads that ''All-everything, Captain Al'' appears under his yearbook picture. Unlike many popular jocks, Al and Rodney both knew their achievement wasn't going to end with high school. In between talks about girls and sports, they discussed their game plans for life. But mostly it was just understood between them, ''with the wink of an eye,'' Coleman says, they told each other: ''I see it; I know you're going to make it.''  Yet somehow they intuitively understood that their Newburgh experience would be the template for their success. ''I learned all that I learned in life in Newburgh,'' says Coleman, speaking from his office at the Pentagon. ''Same for Al.''
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Of course, it was a profoundly different Newburgh that was doing the teaching. Like many suburban areas in the 1950s, Newburgh was an innocent place of sockhops, safe streets, football ''lassie'' squads and hometown pride. A place where parents freely fed and disciplined each other's kids. Yet Newburgh was distinguishable from much of suburbia. Its round-theclock factories had an insatiable appetite for workers, drawing lots of new residents, many of them blacks from the South. Its commerce was bustling. It was a dynamic but eminently comfortable place to be growing up in, and the teenagers seemed to recognize that. ''Whether the remainder of our lives is spent here, or whether we never return again,'' reads the dedication in the NFA Class of 1957 yearbook, ''we graduates of '57 will be forever indebted to the associations made with the people living in this city, held in the gentle slope on the west bank of the Hudson.'' What's more, they actually believed it. ''I don't know what in the hell it was,'' says Coleman. ''There was a white cloud that rung around the city. It was such a thriving, caring place.'' As for the thorny issue of race, which has alternately pricked and lacerated Newburgh over the last three decades, Coleman carries only rosy memories from the Newburgh of his youth. Certainly his white friends were aware that he was black. But to hear him and most of his contemporaries tell it, race easily bled into the background in those days. ''We were Americans first, Newburghers second, Catholics and Protestants third and then whatever else you want to put in there,'' says Coleman. ''But there wasn't any kind of artificial barrier.'' The first time he heard the ''n'' word he was a freshman at Howard University. The message is the same from Tony Austria, a NFA classmate who is now a Newburgh City Court judge. ''We were like one big family. Coleman happened to be black - whoever thought of him as black? Another guy was Jewish. You zeroed in on his batting stance, not his background.'' At the core of the family were Al Beccaccio and Rodney Coleman. ''They were as tight as they could be,'' recalls M&T Bank vice president David Roe, who graduated two years behind them. As they look back on their youth, members of the Class of '57 tend to contrast it with the racial strife that divided Newburgh in subsequent decades. But what they might not take into account is the underlying problems that preceded them. They may well have been going through school during a truly golden and all too fleeting period of growth and harmony.
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Alberta Britzke never liked the idea of her little brother trying to fight a thousand years of history as part of the Bosnian peacekeeping effort. But once he got there in May, what worried her most was his daily run. Her brother's 58-year-old body, she said, was still ''like steel.'' But she knew her warnings to him about all those land mines buried in the Bosnian hillsides wouldn't keep him from jogging his requisite 10 to 20 miles a day. Al's wife, Anne, a nurse, was spending the year with her husband in Bosnia. In a phone conversation from the Balkans after the crash, she told Alberta that for the last three weeks Al had been passing a throng of poor Bosnian children during his runs. Every day he greeted them, but they just stared back. He told his wife he wished he could find a way to reach them. The evening before his death, he came home with joy in his eyes. As he had jogged past the kids and said hello, one of them smiled and said, ''Hi, man!'' When he turned back to respond, several kids took his hands and began jogging with him for a good stretch. ''He was so thrilled,'' said his 64-yearold sister, who still lives in Newburgh. ''That's my mother in him.'' Their mother, Catherine Beccaccio, was as soft spoken and retiring as her husband was demonstrative and demanding. But there were two areas she was unmovable on: religion and humanity. While her husband went to Sacred Heart parish with the rest of the city's Italian families, she took Al and his two sisters to St. Patrick's, where all good Irish families belonged. And before her children entered school, she pulled them aside and told them, ''If you see someone in the corner, it's your job t play with them.''  It's a message Al took to heart his whole life. Austria recalls that, at the height of his high school popularity, Al brought into his circle a classmate who others had poked fun at, saying he looked like a midget wrestler. ''Here's a person Al liked, and bang, he's in the group,'' says Austria. It's just one of the traits that made him far more complex than the stereotypical Big Man on Campus. At his core, Al was a shy, modest, deliberative and unfailingly decent kid. His mother would often complain to him that she had to hear about his accomplishments in school from the neighbors. ''When I do something good, Ma, I'll let you know,'' he would say. His sister says he was more than a little embarrassed with the steady flow of phone calls he got at home from girls during a time when they weren't supposed to make the first move. Coleman recalls seeing his friend, who got into lifting weights early on in life and ''had a buff bod when there wasn't even such a thing,'' tenderly petting the head of a neighborhood cat.
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Everybody always said Al and Rodney were as close as brothers. ''We thought alike, we dressed alike, we acted alike,'' says Coleman. ''I ate at Al's house as much as he ate as mine. His dad disciplined me and my dad disciplined him.'' Rodney's own brother was handicapped and was unable to play catch and do many of the other traditional brother activities. Al had only sisters, so the two filled roles for each other. But just because they were close didn't mean they weren't competitive. Fiercely competitive. They met at age 8 on the basketball court behind South Junior High. The competitive friendship really blossomed a few years later when they were ace pitchers on opposing teams in Newburgh's newly formed Optimist Little League. ''Little Al'' (as opposed to his father, ''Big Al'') Beccaccio hurled for the Red Sox. Rodney ''Hot Rod'' Coleman threw for the Dodgers. Coleman says when he took to the mound, besting his buddy was his biggest concern. There was little variation to the mantra bouncing around in his head: ''I gotta beat him, I'm going to beat him, but I'm going to do it fair and square.'' To this day, says Coleman, ''Whenever I compete for anything, I'm also remembering Al Beccaccio.''
But here's one great aspect to their brand of rivalry: It ended as soon as they got off the field. They'd hug and go to Bucci's for ice cream. Here's another: Cheering their kids on game after game, their respective parents became close. They found out how much they had in common.  In that way, the 60 or so Little Leaguers - close to a third of whom were black - weren't just forging their own friendships that transcended race; they were providing the setting for their parents to do the same. ''These kids were pioneers in solving racial problems which, unfortunately, have gone backward since,'' says Bo Gill, the newspaper columnist who put together the Newburgh chapter of the Little League in 1950.
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Rodney Coleman has been back to Newburgh to speak a couple of times within the last several years. Although he enjoys sharing his message with his hometown's young people and serving in the role of success story, it breaks his heart to drive through the city. ''It's absolutely deplorable what's happened to this place,'' he says. Alberta Britzke says when her brother would return to Newburgh to visit her or attend a class reunion, he'd try to avoid driving down Broadway. Its crumbling buildings and empty storefronts seemed to violate the memories of his youth that meant so much to him. Then again, although Newburgh's decline was steeper and more painful than most, it would be hard to find the nurturing yet eclectic environment of 1950s Newburgh anywhere in the nation today. ''I think the world is too kinetic to let that happen,'' says Coleman. ''I know my son and daughter just zipped through high school and college. It's so impersonal now.''
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Al Beccaccio hugged his father for the first time in 1980. The occasion was his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and the younger Al thought it was overdue. So the 41-year-old with the washboard stomach, who that year was named to head the physical fitness program for all FBI recruits, leaned over and embraced his dad. His father seemed so delighted he must have wondered why he had never hugged his son before. Al's sister says her father loved her brother more than life itself, but like many 1950s fathers he had a hard time showing affection. Whenever teammates would be congratulating Al for a great game, his father - larger and louder than life - would tell him, ''Yeah, but you could have done this better...'' Al aimed to please. ''He was always so terribly concerned with what his father thought of his performance,'' says teammate Tony Austria. Maybe that's why the deeply religious Al said a prayer before each at-bat. Though Sam Coleman and Albert Beccaccio had different personalities, each father loomed large in his son's life. Both instilled an unwavering drive for perfection that never went away for either Rodney or Al. When Al graduated from NFA, he went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It was never where he wanted to go, and he hated the entire year he spent there. Maybe it was the hierarchical atmosphere that governed every interaction and conflicted with the humanistic sensibilities his mother had instilled in him. Or maybe it was something else. Either way, he knew it wasn't for him, but he stuck it for the year to cushion the blow to his father. His sister says their father was crushed when Al left West Point. But when he hit his stride after transferring to Florida State, earning All-America honors, his father was happy once again. He only got happier after witnessing his son's success with the FBI. ''He was so proud of Al,'' says Alberta Britzke. When their father got sick and had to move into a nursing home, he always kept a picture of Al by his bed. As touching as that was, there was nothing more painful for Al than seeing his robust father enfeebled by disease. After visiting his father, who died shortly before Al left for Bosnia in the spring, he would often leave the nursing home with a tear in his eye. His brother-in-law, Ron Britzke, says as horribly tragic as Al's death last week was, the one consolation is that a man so identified with his powerful presence will not have to endure the erosion he saw overtake his father.
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It was supposed to have been a great week for Rodney Coleman, with several events planned to mark the Air Force's 50th anniversary. Instead of pure pageantry and self-congratulation, the military branch had to cope with three Air Force aircraft crashes, part of a spate of six crashes involving military aircraft in as many days. And the Air Force's No. 2 man had to grapple with the even more personal loss of his lifelong friend - the best man at his wedding and the man he had been comparing himself with since grammar school. As Al and Rodney got older, they didn't see as much of each other as they might have liked. Earlier in their careers, when Rodney was working for the Washington, D.C., City Council and Al was working out of the FBI office down the street, they had lunch together regularly. When their jobs took them to distant places, they got together less frequently, but stayed in touch through phone calls and the occasional special event. Al and his wife surprised Rodney by rearranging their plans so they could be in the audience that April day three years ago when he was sworn in as assistant secretary of the Air Force. Mostly, though, Al and Rodney were both busy working hard and raising families. Rodney and his wife have two children. Al and his wife raised five; two are now CIA agents and another two also work in law enforcement. The youngest is an artist. They also, of course, bonded with different friends. Al became close friends with fellow FBI official David Kriskovich. They even built their homes on adjacent 20-acre plots in Spotsylvania, Va., Kriskovich convinced Al to join him on the police-training mission to Bosnian. He was also killed in last week's helicopter crash. Among the people that Rodney became more friendly with was the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Their fathers had known each other when they were young boys, and Rodney's father used to stop by the Harlem hotel the Brown family ran when he took Rodney and Al into the city to see a game. Rodney and Ron reconnected when they got older and realized they were working in similar fields. Ron Brown was the man who convinced him to take his current Air Force post. Sadly, Rodney Coleman lost two friends to aircraft accidents in the Balkans. Yet the 58-year-old Coleman says that, for him, Al's death has hit him like no other because it goes to the heart of who he is. Gone is his lifelong competitor and surrogate brother. That eye that winked and told him he was going to make it has been abruptly closed. Mortality never felt so near. ''Both of our moms and dads are gone,'' says Coleman, ''so I know they're all up there now looking down and possibly waiting or me to come play one more ball game.''
Articles from the Times Herald Record  
Contributed by Doug Kendo 51  ........ Livio Beccaccio, In 1998 at age 58. Police training specialist killed in a U. N. helicopter crash in Bosnia during a tour to revive local police forces in a war ravaged country. Prior to his death, Beccaccio was on the training staff of the F. B. I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where he provided training to 1,000 police officers per year. A very competitive man with a quick sense of humor, he was once surprised by a class of 270 men who donned masks with Beccaccio's likeness. "I've been here 15 years", said Mr. Beccaccio without pause, "and I must tell you that this is the best looking class that's ever come through this academy."