A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  Maybe he did it so frequently because his own family life was a bit disheveled. Anthony says his parents, both of whom he cherishes, “were good to everybody but each other” and “were basically getting divorced my whole childhood,” finally achieving the split when he was twenty-one. Whatever the reason, he spent enough time in the more structured Aldridge household to qualify as a third son. Cathy Patterson calls Anthony “a brother by another mother,” with all the benefits and complications such ties entail.

  Johnny and Anthony and all the other kids attended the Edward J. Bosti Elementary School, but neither there nor later, in Connetquot High School, was either of them anything other than an average student. Mostly both men remember being boys in the woods, and the shared experience connected the Aldridge and Sosinski tribes both geographically and emotionally. That meant dirt bikes and forts, yes, and later, when they were in high school, getting away from grown-ups, hanging out with the gang, sneaking some beers. “The woods was everything,” Johnny says—his getaway, the place he loved to be—and his oldest friends remember him as an “outdoor guy,” a guy who felt at home in the natural world, away from streets and towns.

  There was a whole gang that grew from boys to men together—Danny Keough, Pat Quinn, Steve D’Amico—along with Johnny and Anthony. They were in and out of one another’s houses and in and out of one another’s lives. And across time and distance, for the most part, they still are. “We all hung out,” Steve D’Amico remembers. “What didn’t we do? We were out of the house at seven in the morning and not back till dinner. We got in trouble without trying.”

  But if they operated as a group, their personalities were nevertheless distinct, and no two of them were more different from one another than Johnny and Anthony. By consensus, Anthony was a maniac—“the far end,” in Steve D’Amico’s phrase—a crazy man always ready to do anything and everything. Pat Quinn swears this story is true:

  One day when he and Anthony Aldridge, Johnny’s little brother, were about eleven or twelve they decided to hide in the woods and play sniper, shooting a BB gun at a bunch of kids playing street hockey on roller skates, Anthony Sosinski among them. Sosinski in particular kept getting stung, and when he had had enough, he eyeballed the woods, caught sight of the gun barrel, and took off—straight toward them. “All of a sudden,” as Quinn describes the scene, “Anthony is running on skates with a hockey stick. A madman on the loose, he chased us all the way back to the Aldridges’ house, leaped over the fence, and threw a stone that shattered the glass sliding door.”

  Anthony’s reaction was par for the course—this was a guy quick to respond to anything he considered an aspersion or insult against himself or those he cared about. From boyhood he had a finely developed sense of who he was and what he valued, a sense of self he carried into adulthood. The same can be said for his outgoing nature, as inherent now as when he was a little boy of eight or nine and his mother referred to him as “The Mayor.” “He seemed to know everyone,” says Hope DeMasco. “I would drive him somewhere, and he would roll down the window and start talking to everyone along the way. He knew them all, and they knew him.” His sociability could have an edge: even as a kid, his mother recalls, he spoke his mind—loud and clear. “He liked to bust my chops to try to get what he wanted—but I could give it back to him.”

  Johnny Aldridge was different—slower paced, quiet, “never involved in anything crazy,” says Pat Quinn. “He was the first guy to go home” when everyone else started “making stupid mistakes.” He didn’t make a fuss, just walked off quietly. But then, says Quinn, “Johnny was always the smartest… a very strong-minded guy.”

  The two boys looked different, and as men, they still do. Both are built slight and wiry, but that’s where any physical resemblance ends. Anthony is fair with straight blond hair that hangs longish. The surfer-dude appearance is not off the mark: the man surfs, does every water sport you can think of. Johnny, by contrast, is olive skinned with thick, jet-black hair and a groomed beard that ends in the flourish of a goatee, like a Spanish grandee in a museum portrait.

  The two men move at different speeds: here is sinewy, kinetic Anthony ready to jump out of his skin; there is brooding Johnny taking everything in and taking it slow. When work on the Anna Mary is done and the catch has been distributed, Anthony is just beginning to hustle; he’ll grab his kayak if the tide is low and go clamming or oystering—and he’ll pull in another hundred or two hundred bucks selling what he harvests. He doesn’t do it for the money; he does it because he’s not a man to sit still when there’s a chance to do something. By contrast, when the Anna Mary is safely docked and the catch has been landed, Johnny will head for home and just soak up the quiet and the solitude.

  To this day their minds still work differently—Johnny’s methodical and in a straight line, Anthony’s in inventive surges that sometimes surprise even him. Johnny is the orderly one, a stickler for tidiness and for keeping everything in its place. Anthony has little sympathy with schedules or with rules and procedures handed down by authorities; such things strike him as just so much regimentation. It is too simplistic to see them as free spirit versus disciplinarian, for they are complex individuals, but that they have different but complementary attributes is undeniable.

  Yet disparate as their personalities have always been, right from the start, the two of them shared something central to their lives and essential to the men they became: a passion for fishing. Steve D’Amico says that Johnny clearly had been “bitten by the fishing bug,” as if the passion to go fishing were an infection there was no use fighting, while where Anthony was concerned, fishing was the thing that just seemed to come naturally to him—a connection as basic as flesh.

  For both, the love of fishing went way back, as if inexplicably dropped into their DNA. Though neither can claim an ancestry of professional fishermen, both their fathers loved being around the water. John Sosinski, Anthony’s father, had served in the Coast Guard as a young man. Later, throughout a twenty-year career driving a tractor-trailer for Georgia Pacific, he rarely missed a weekend working a second job on fishing charters out of Montauk, acquiring knowledge he eagerly passed on to his eagerly receptive son.

  Johnny Aldridge, says his father, “was always a fisherman.” When his two-year-old toddler had to undergo a hernia operation, Aldridge senior recalls, “the day he came out of the hospital, Johnny wanted to go down to the dock and fish.” Anthony Sosinski can brandish a photo of himself at the age of three on a fishing boat on Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, a nascent version of the commercial fisherman he would become. His earliest memories are of evening walks with his father down to the edge of Gravesend Bay, where they would watch the amateur fishermen casting off from the rocks for striped bass. “All Anthony ever did was fish,” says his mother.

  Fishing is what connected the two as boys, and fishing together is what forged their friendship and made them a standout duo among contemporaries given more to cars and motorcycles and team sports. They practiced what would become their trade early, often, and wherever they could: going after trout in the streams and lakes of the Connetquot River State Park Preserve just over the Sunrise Highway, fishing off the dock in the next-door town of Sayville for weakfish from the Great South Bay, catching blue claw crab in the canals of Oakdale, and casting off under the train trestles of the Long Island Railroad—a great way to get away from everybody and everything. They used a net to catch killifish—killies—that they could sell to the bait shop, and they went clamming and sold their catch to anyone who would buy. And what they couldn’t sell, they ate. Every bit of it.

  It was very likely those boyhood outings that shaped the smoothly reciprocal working relationship still so evident today. They are partners who both know every task of the job but who split the tasks between them automatically, intuitively, without discussion or the need for discussion, in a routine that has by now become ingrained. Both men have complete confidence in the routine, as they have complete confidence in one anothe
r. “It’s like driving a car,” says Anthony. “Both driver and passenger know the car has to turn left at the light, but the passenger doesn’t have to make the turn himself to know that the job is getting done.”

  Just watch them together aboard the Anna Mary, dressed in their oilskin waterproof bibs and smocks, big blue rubber gloves on their hands, bearded Johnny with a hat on, Anthony hatless with his long blond hair whipping in the breeze. The satellite radio is blaring—anything from seventies classics to contemporary alternative rock, depending on their mood—and when they’re hauling traps, the music tends to blare very loud indeed. Anthony’s body will be bopping to the tune as he winches up trap after trap, while Johnny holds himself steady against the railing, head down, a smile on his face but bent to the work: unfurl and release the knot, open the trap, collect the catch, move on. No chatter is needed—at least not about the work; each man knows in his bones what the other is doing and thinking and exactly where in the process each of them is. They are two bodies geared to mesh smoothly with one another, a perfect union of efficiency that the two men have been fine-tuning since they started learning every aspect of the job by doing it together.

  By the time he was in high school Anthony had an actual fishing job. His father’s second job, the weekend job, was for the Viking Fleet, a sizeable operation that runs fishing trips, whale-watching trips, ferries, and fishing charters on a fleet of some eight boats out of Montauk. By the time Anthony was ready to start ninth grade he was working a similar schedule, traveling out to Montauk with his father on Friday nights and getting back home on Sunday nights. They would bunk with friends or friends of friends—among them, Frank Mundus, the sport fisherman Montaukers insist was the inspiration for Quint, the shark hunter played by Robert Shaw in the movie Jaws. As if this weren’t cool enough, Anthony even got to spend the whole summer of ninth grade living on a houseboat in Montauk Harbor, working as a deckhand on charter trips up to Nantucket or out to Georges Bank. He’d come back from the weekends and from that summer to tell Johnny all about his adventures on the water, and, says his father, “it was eating Johnny up.”

  Not that Johnny wasn’t busy. Like Anthony, he was working after school—in his case, in a boatyard, painting the bottom of boats for a dollar a foot. He and Steve D’Amico also had a “side business” making fishing poles. They bought the fiberglass parts and the reels and line, and in their “workshop” in the Aldridge garage they threaded the poles together in patterns. Their handiwork was “kind of artistic,” D’Amico recalls, and he remembers that Johnny sold some that had “tuna patterns” on them. But using the poles—not making them—was what Johnny really wanted. And when Anthony told him that another weekend job had opened up at Viking, Johnny jumped at the chance.

  Now the two of them rode out to Montauk with John Sosinski on Friday nights, again bunking with friends and spending their days serving as deckhands, gofers, fishing line untanglers, clam openers, anchor pullers, gaff hook wielders who would stab and bring onboard fish too large to reel in—whatever needed to be done at the most basic level of boats and fishing. The work provided an invaluable education; Anthony calls it “the Viking College of Fishing Knowledge—all-hands learning that you can’t buy.”

  Still, Johnny was pretty sure he was headed for construction work once he graduated from high school, while Anthony had hopes of becoming an airline pilot. He flew Cessna 172s in high school and attended pre-pilot classes in ground school in his final two years. But in the end he didn’t achieve the grade point average he needed, so he quit school, and instead, as he says, “I went fishing.”

  He began his career on an offshore dragger called the Donna Lee. An offshore dragger tows a large net that scoops up everything in its path—or at least it did in the days Anthony was aboard the Donna Lee, the days before any rules were in effect except for size limits. The Donna Lee went out for trips of four days at a stretch and caught “everything,” says Anthony, and he soon was put in charge, becoming, at the age of twenty-one, “the youngest captain of a boat taking men out to fish.”

  He also got married at the age of twenty-one and soon thereafter became the father of a daughter, Melanie. He and his wife, Liz, who had also worked at Viking, settled in Montauk, and Anthony went to work on a St. Augustine trawler, the kind of wooden shrimp boat audiences saw in Forrest Gump. A second daughter, Emma, was born in 1992, but another child didn’t do much to strengthen a marriage that had been shaky from the start. Anthony had come to realize that nothing made him happier than being with his daughters, while his marriage was providing no joy whatsoever. In the summer of 1994 the couple formally split up, Liz and the girls moved out, and Anthony determined he would seek custody of his children. Husband and wife were due to appear in court to discuss custody arrangements, but four days before the court date, after a wrenching feud between Liz and Anthony’s sister, Michelle, who had been babysitting Emma, Liz piled both baby girls into the car and drove off. The three of them simply disappeared.

  Anthony had been away on a late-spring swordfishing trip and arrived home to find his family gone. He went to court anyway as planned—this time to complain that his children had been taken from him. The court, however, could provide no legal assistance: the children were with their mother; they could not, therefore, be presumed to be missing, to have wandered away, or to have been abducted. They were not “lost” in the legal sense, and neither the court nor the National Center for Lost and Exploited Children had the power, standing, or ability to do anything to help.

  Thus began a traumatic odyssey, lasting for years and costing Anthony a fortune in time, anxiety, effort, and, of course, money until he was able to reestablish his daughters and himself as a family in Montauk in 1996. The first fourteen months of the odyssey were an agony of ongoing worry and fear over the children he could not find, as Anthony made frantic but futile attempts to identify anyone who might have been in contact with or even just seen his wife and children—anyone who could help him guess where they might be and whether they were all right. He appealed to relatives of his wife, but they knew nothing. He tried everything he knew how to try and came up with dead ends everywhere. Months passed without a hint. Anthony felt utterly helpless. All he could do—and he had to do it—was work: keep busy and make a living. In December 1994 he went off swordfishing again to the Caribbean and South America; he did not return until the end of January 1995. He then got work on a tile-fishing boat, one that was at least harbored in Montauk. He began his search again.

  In the waning days of the summer of 1995 he hit pay dirt. By chance, the woman who ran the hot dog stand near the Montauk jetties told Anthony she had received a letter from Liz, postmarked Laguna Niguel, California. Anthony called the Laguna Niguel Chamber of Commerce and said he might be moving his family there and wanted information on the local schools: Could they send him some? His thought was that with summer winding down, Melanie, who was due to enter school in the fall, would have to be registered somewhere.

  The Chamber of Commerce could and did supply Anthony with information on local schools—as well as on local malls, local art museums, local playgrounds, and every other possible local attraction—and he stashed the brochures and paperwork in his Bronco along with his toolbox, a thermos of coffee, and a cooler of food, and at seven o’clock on a hot August evening he set out heading south, with a plan to take Interstate 70 to Interstate 40 and the southern California coast. By 7:00 a.m. Monday he was, in his words, “twelve hours past DC,” but by the time he reached Missouri he knew he had to stop. He gave himself a forty-five-minute nap at a Missouri truck stop just off I-70, then pressed on. Twenty-four hours after he had started, he was in Texas, and by hour forty-seven out of Montauk, he was pulling into Laguna Niguel, California.

  Imagine it if you can: it wasn’t just that Anthony did not know where his children were. Until at some point that spring when Liz phoned him and let him hear their voices—briefly—he literally could not be certain they were alive. There is a kind of
fear that hovers always in the back of the mind that will not go away and that colors everything in life. There is nothing you won’t do to get rid of such fear. Anthony drove the forty-seven hours flat out because he was a man compelled by a desperate necessity, a man in whom the need to find his children and get them home and safe was visceral, was breathing down his neck, was powering his forward motion. The guy who bristles at the very idea of being told to focus his attention on something can concentrate like a demon when it counts. It would count twenty years later too, when he was searching the ocean for his friend and partner and exhibited a similar visceral compulsion.

  In Laguna Niguel Anthony found a motel and drove to the first school on the list, clutching photos of the kids. He was spotted at once. A school official approached him. “May I help you?” the man asked, adding a request for ID. “Sir,” Anthony said, “I am searching for my children.” He showed him the photo of Melanie. The school official took the photo and instructed Anthony to wait right there. Anthony was sure the cops were on the way, but it didn’t turn out that way. The official was the school principal, and while Anthony waited, he had done a search to ensure there were no court orders against Anthony seeing the children. Satisfied there were none, he returned with the name of the school Melanie was enrolled in and the name of the principal. Anthony headed to the school the next day, waited and watched from the principal’s office, and was there when Liz showed up, with Emma in the baby carriage, to collect Melanie at the end of the school day. It was the first time he had seen his children in fourteen months, and for the moment all he had was this glimpse.

  But it was a step up from not knowing for sure where or how his children were, from those fourteen months that were the lowest point of his life. Now he could act. Anthony hired a local lawyer and began court proceedings for custody. He returned home to Montauk to get back to work but flew back to California regularly for court appearances over the course of the next year-plus. Anthony remembers that some of those court appearances coincided with the O. J. Simpson trial in the same building—Building 604, as he recalls it—and he remembers the crowds of reporters, photographers, and public and the brouhaha that went along with every bit of that event. He slid past it all to get to his assigned courtroom.