A warrior faces toughest battle
Hero Leatherneck facing charges he killed 2 Iraqis
By BRIAN KATES
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
New Yorker Ilario Pantano gave up a six-figure salary as a film and TV producer and left his pregnant wife and 2-year-old son, to serve in Iraq after the devastating attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Pantano, who has been called an oustanding Marine, is now on trial for his life.
Jill Chapman, who modeled for Robert Mapplethorpe, and Ilario Pantano, a second lieutenant who served in Iraq, wed in 1999.
Weapons at the ready, 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano (left) and a fellow soldier stand by a Humvee in Iraq.
Ilario Pantano, a TV and film producer with the company that made "Sling Blade," was walking past Madison Square Park on Fifth Ave. when he saw the World Trade Center erupt in flames.
Pantano, a Marine sergeant in the Persian Gulf War 10 years before, went into "warrior mode" almost immediately, said friend J.R. McKechnie, who stood by his side that day.
Pantano lived in an apartment on W. 43rd St., next to the FDNY's Rescue Co. 1, which lost 10 men on 9/11 - three of them ex-Marines. Several friends also died in the twin towers.
When he came home that terrible night, Pantano's head was shaved. In a burst of patriotic fury, he had decided to reenlist. He gave up a six-figure salary and left his pregnant wife and their 2-year-old son in New York while he went to Quantico, Va., for training as a Marine officer.
Last March, he was shipped to Iraq as a newly minted second lieutenant. As a platoon leader in Easy Company 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, Pantano survived eight months in the Sunni Triangle, including the bloody battle for Fallujah.
But now, more than three months after his return to the states, he is fighting for his life as never before.
The 33-year-old New Yorker faces premeditated murder charges in the killing of two unarmed Iraqi detainees. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to death.
The Marine Corps charge sheet paints Pantano as a self-appointed executioner. Pantano insists he acted in self-defense.
The incident happened last April 15, in a bloody month when the number of Americans killed in action skyrocketed to 126 from 31 in March.
Pantano and his men, a Marine sergeant and a Navy hospitalman, opened fire on a white sedan fleeing a suspected insurgent hideout in Mahmudiyah, near Baghdad.
Two men were pulled from the disabled car. Initially they were handcuffed, but Pantano ordered the cuffs removed and told the suspects to take out the seats to see if there were any hidden weapons or explosives.
Pantano would later tell investigators that the detainees began talking to each other in Arabic. In his limited Arabic, he ordered them to stop. They pivoted toward him, he said, and, fearing they were attacking, he opened fire.
The charge sheet presents a dramatically different picture.
After ordering the hospitalman to remove the handcuffs from the detainees, the report says, Pantano told his men "to take up posts facing away" and then shot both suspects - identified as Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil - "in the back with an M16A service rifle."
He then placed the bodies "on display to send a message to the local people" and placed "a sign stating 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy'" above their corpses.
The slogan is the 1st Marine Division motto, oft-repeated by its commander, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, one of Pantano's heroes. But weeks before the incident, Mattis had added an admonition: "First, do no harm," he said. It was a pointed warning not to engage in unnecessary bloodshed.
Pantano's defense team maintains the case is based solely on the allegations of the sergeant at the scene, who did not report it for two months. They describe the man as "disgruntled" because Pantano had removed him as a squad leader.
"What you have here is two guys shot in a combat zone with limited witnesses - Lt. Pantano and the two men who were with him - and those two did not see what happened at the time of the shooting," said Pantano's chief military counsel, Maj. Philip Stackhouse.
Said Maj. Matthew Morgan, spokesman for the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade: "The Article 32 hearing will reveal why the prosecution feels there is merit to the case."
The hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury, has been put off until at least April 25.
"My son will not be a scapegoat or a sacrificial lamb," said Merry Pantano, a media-savvy literary agent who has mounted a massive Internet-based public relations campaign on his behalf and formed a nonprofit corporation to raise money for his cause.
Pantano's family and friends portray him as a superachiever of virtually unassailable character. Former Gulf War comrades paint him as a born warrior - not a stone-cold killer.
No one has come forward to contradict that portrait.
As a teen in Hell's Kitchen, Pantano won a scholarship to the tony Horace Mann School in Riverdale.
Though bright, his grades were spotty.
"He got As and Ds, depending on what interested him," his mother said. "I couldn't figure out how he could memorize all the parts of a helicopter but not the parts of German grammar."
Fascinated by the military since boyhood - he celebrated his 16th birthday by parachuting from an airplane - Pantano enrolled in the Marine Corps delayed-entry program before his senior year. When classmates headed to Ivy League schools, Pantano went to boot camp at Parris Island. He was 17 years old.
At 19, he was in an anti-tank platoon in Desert Storm and later, in 1992 and '93, he was a scout sniper during peacekeeping operations off the coast of Yugoslavia.
"He was an outstanding Marine and showed very good leadership," said Charles Jackson, a Federal Aviation Administration specialist who served with Pantano in the gulf. "He took care of the people in his squad like they were his little brothers."
Pantano made sergeant in only three years but, his mother said, "after the Gulf War he thought the real challenges were in the corporate world - and Ilario always had to have a challenge."
At 21, he left the military and joined Goldman Sachs as an energy trader. At night, he went to New York University, earning a degree in economics in only three years.
Unhappy about working with companies like Enron, Pantano quit and co-founded an interactive TV consulting company, Filter Media. In 1999, he married Jill Chapman, a one-time model for photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
When Filter Media went belly up, Pantano became an executive for the Shooting Gallery, a film company that produced "Sling Blade" and "You Can Count on Me."
He later worked for CameraPlanet, a production company where he oversaw security for reporters Linda Ellerbee and Peter Arnett in Afghanistan.
"There is never a time that we found him to be anything other than thoughtful, focused and rigorous," CameraPlanet says of Pantano on its Web site. "We ... have every expectation that he will be found not guilty and returned to his family with his reputation restored."
Despite the seriousness of the allegations, Pantano has never been jailed. He was relieved as a platoon leader, but he continued to work as a communications officer in Iraq.
He lives with his wife and children in Wilmington, N.C., near Camp Lejeune, and until he was released to prepare his defense, he performed military duties.
For the past month - after a Pakistani Web site posted a picture of Pantano's face superimposed on a beheading victim - his home has been surrounded by a cordon of supportive former Marines.
Originally published on March 6, 2005
Where white turns to black and black into white.
