Deep Undercover

From fighting in Vietnam to infiltrating the mob, John Ligato has led a life made for Hollywood. But it’s his time at SRU and in Butler County he cherishes most.

A decorated Vietnam War veteran, Ligato founded a group home for people with developmental disabilities before becoming an FBI agent who went undercover with the Italian Mafia and other organized crime groups. His life’s work also includes being a pilot, radio talk show host, stand-up comedian and author of five books.

But scenes from Slippery Rock University must be part of his story. Ligato fondly recalls SRU as an idyllic campus setting and also the turning point in his life.

“When I first got to Slippery Rock, it was like a college campus I used to see in the movies,” said Ligato, a South Philadelphia native who enrolled at SRU in 1965. “I’ve since been to tons of campuses, but it’s still a movie to me. I get chills when I go there, even now. The feeling I get at Slippery Rock, it’s tangible.”

Yet Ligato, who earned bachelor’s (1971) and master’s (1974) degrees in education at SRU, would like to delete a few scenes from his time at SRU, which he does when recounting his story. He was expelled from the University for an incident he said he’s too embarrassed to share and then enlisted in the U.S. Marines and fought in the Vietnam War.

“I was in the hospital bed, and I wrote this letter to the (SRU) president at the time, Albert Watrel,” Ligato recalled. “I said, ‘Dear Dr. Watrel, I lie in a bed in the Philippines, wounded in Vietnam, and I would like nothing more than to come back to Slippery Rock and continue my education.’”

Ligato’s request was granted, and he re-enrolled in the summer of 1969. More than 50 years later, he was honored by SRU in 2021 as a recipient of its annual Distinguished Alumni Award. So how does someone go from expulsion to commendation? Here’s a synopsis of that movie, according to Ligato.

MISSION IN VIETNAM

Ligato’s sudden departure from SRU in 1967 meant he no longer had a student deferment for military service. Knowing he would receive a draft notice, Ligato opted to actively seek enlistment. He chose the Marines over the Army or Navy after a recruiter told him he could land embassy duty in Rome rather than go to Vietnam. He signed his papers. But then he wound up, four and a half months later, as a basic rifleman in the jungles near Quang Tri, Vietnam.

In hindsight, Ligato said, it was one of the best things to happen to him. He was assigned to the Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. After four months fighting in the bush and witnessing tremendous casualties near the demilitarized zone at Con Thien and Quang Tri, Ligato said the military airlifted him and half his company to an Air Force base at Phu Bai for rest and recuperation.

Not six hours after arriving there, on the morning of Jan. 31, 1968, Ligato said they awoke to orders that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) compound nine miles away in Hue City needed help. They boarded trucks and were told they’d be back by noon. What those 80 Marines didn’t know was 10,000 North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops were positioned around Hue City for an offensive to end the war during the Lunar New Year festival, a surprise campaign known as the Tet Offensive.

During the first days of the month-long battle for Hue City, Ligato said Alpha Company lost all its commanding officers, and Ligato observed the heroic acts of Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez and Gunnery Sgt. John Canley, both of whom earned the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the U.S. Armed Forces. Ligato said Alpha Company was stuck on the outskirts of the city with no reinforcements and its retreat to Phu Bai blocked by the NVA. Gonzalez and Canley lobbed grenades and light anti-tank weapons, known as LAW rockets, at machine guns before running across an open rice paddy firing their M16s. Their bravery saved the lives of many men in their company, including Ligato’s.

“It was an amazing time of valor for Americans that is lost in history,” Ligato said.

Ligato and other Alpha Company Marines later captured enemy strongholds, including the NVA headquarters located inside the St. Joan of Arc church and school complex in Hue City. While storming the headquarters, Ligato said he ripped a Viet Cong flag from the wall and stuffed it in his pocket. That flag, stained with dirt and Ligato’s blood, later hung in his apartment in Slippery Rock before he donated it to a Marine Corps museum in 1991.

After being wounded several times with shrapnel, Ligato was transported from Hue City to the Philippines, where he set his sights on a return to SRU. He later received a Bronze Star for his valor during the Tet Offensive and he received three Purple Hearts.

MISSION IN SLIPPERY ROCK

When Ligato returned to SRU for summer session in 1969, he did not have housing. The dormitories were already filled for the start of the fall semester. He instead pitched a tent at the nearby Rock Falls campground and showered in the locker rooms at Morrow Field House.

“I thought I was living large,” Ligato said. “I had a mattress, a lantern and a tent I could stand up in. After Vietnam, this was the Hilton. But Slippery Rock had a winter, so I later found a room in a house to rent on Elm Street for $50 a month.”

The friendly environment at SRU was also something he appreciated more in his return to campus. He said it was unlike anything he encountered in South Philadelphia, let alone South Vietnam.

“In my neighborhood, if you went up to someone and looked them in the eye and said ‘Hello,’ you were spoiling for a fight,” Ligato said. “I get up to Slippery Rock and everyone I see looks me in the eye, smiles and says ‘Hello.’ It took me a week to realize that they were sincere.”

One of those "hellos" came from a fellow student named Lori Olson, the first of many hellos for a couple that has now been married for 53 years.

“Being expelled from Slippery Rock was the best thing that ever happened to me in so many ways,” Ligato said. “Had I not been expelled, I wouldn’t have appreciated The Rock as much as I did, I wouldn’t have joined the Marine Corps, and I wouldn’t have ever met my wife who was four years younger than me.”

SRU was a turning point for professional reasons, as well.

“The education was great,” Ligato said. “It was as good as any Ivy League school, but the difference was that we were the kids of teachers, cops, mill hunks and steelworkers. Our parents were hard workers, and we got that character trait from them. We couldn’t afford to go to the Ivy League. But if we’d gone, we would’ve kicked butt. That’s what always impressed me about Slippery Rock.”

Like many of his fellow students at Slippery Rock, Ligato aspired to be a high school teacher. But he was “sidetracked,” he said, while getting his master’s degree in education psychology when he saw an unmet need for people with developmental disabilities.

He began working with at what is now The Arc of Butler County as a senior house parent in a group home program that took higher functioning people from state facilities and integrated them into the community. In 1973, The Arc opened the first community residences for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in western Pennsylvania. The residence offered 24/7 supervised housing for eight individuals, and today The Arc continues to provide this service through its Community Living Arrangement Program.

“We were at the forefront of starting group homes, which provided an opportunity for residents to live a normal life,” said Ligato, who became the organization’s director of community living arrangements. “There were people who had no business being in (state institutions) who were just blossoming when they got out. People ask me what the greatest reward I had in my career – the Marine Corps, the FBI or The Arc. It’s not close; it’s The Arc. I did that for 10 years, and I loved it.”

After a while, though, with the federal government starting to fund group-home programs, Ligato saw his role reduced to doing paperwork. Desiring something greater, he opted to follow a new path.

MISSION IN THE FBI

As a Marine and the son of a police officer, Ligato decided to pursue a career in law enforcement. So in 1982, he applied to become an FBI agent.

“They recruit the best and the brightest,” Ligato said. “I had my doubts at first when I entered the academy because whenever we introduced ourselves, and I said ‘John Ligato, Slippery Rock State College, lance corporal, Marine Corps,’ there were some good humor and chuckles in the room. I’ll never forget that, because there were all these Harvard- and Yale-educated attorneys and accountants or former colonels, majors and captains, and I thought, ‘How am I going to compete with these guys?’”

His fears were unfounded: Ligato finished first in his class of 38 agents and was selected to give a speech at the graduation ceremony.

After a few months working as an FBI agent, Ligato dabbled in undercover work, first in Memphis, Tennessee, and then in New York City and Buffalo, before landing a four-year-long deep-cover assignment while based in Cleveland.

“When I was an agent, it was the pioneer days because they (would) rarely let people go undercover,” Ligato said. “It was (like) the Wild West, but I felt more comfortable doing that because I grew up in South Philly around wise guys and I knew the culture and what makes them tick. I knew who was who and the chain of command. And I don’t look like an agent and I don’t talk like an agent; they are usually tall and blond-haired.”

Ligato was sent to Las Vegas, where he met Ronald Marrazzo, an ex-felon with connections to the Gambino crime family. He hung around the bar that Marrazzo owned and started laundering money with him. He became Ligato’s first “vouch.”

“The easiest way to meet a bad guy is a vouch from another bad guy,” Ligato explained. “We became ‘friends’ over the next year, and I started meeting other members of the mob in Vegas and did some cases on them. But this one case took off into eight cities, and they even sent me overseas and I worked with Scotland Yard because I had a vouch from the (mob).”

Marrazzo’s vouch led to Ligato becoming the silent owner of a high-end gentlemen’s club in Cleveland, where his undercover work led to nearly 100 arrests, half of which were cops and correctional officers who were charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and cocaine. Ligato said it broke his heart to see law enforcement corruption up close, given his professional and family background.

Ligato also worked with the likes of Joe Pistone, who operated undercover as Donnie Brasco targeting the Bonanno crime family, one of the “Five Families” of the New York City Mafia. Like Pistone, Ligato’s experience going undercover was portrayed on the silver screen, although more loosely as compared to the 1997 film “Donnie Brasco” with Johnny Depp playing the titular role of Pistone’s alter ego. The 2006 movie “10th & Wolf,” starring James Marsden and Giovanni Ribisi, and featuring Dennis Hopper and Val Kilmer, was filmed in Pittsburgh. It was about a Marine from South Philadelphia who returned to his neighborhood after military duty and became an FBI informant to disrupt a Sicilian mob trying to take over the heroin trade. Ligato made a brief appearance in the film.

Real life undercover work was not all glamorous. Ligato, who went by the alias John Calabria, couldn’t live near his family while on deep cover, and he couldn’t be unreachable by a mob boss for more than a few hours without suspicions arising. Driving a few hours just to see his daughter’s dance recital was a harrowing experience.

Ligato worked undercover for parts of eight years during his 20-year FBI career, and the record says he was good at it: His work led to 104 convictions. He also spent time as a pilot for the FBI.

“I was successful when I went undercover because I didn’t have to act,” Ligato said. “You can’t put an undercover agent in an environment that they are not familiar with because they will get caught. You’re living that 24/7. I loved it. When my last case ended, I didn’t want to go back (to office work). Sometimes the office is more treacherous than being with the wise guys.”

Still, it was dangerous.

“You didn’t have your badge and gun, and if someone didn’t like you, you couldn’t call timeout and say, ‘You can’t hit me, I’m an agent,” Ligato said.

MISSION IN RETIREMENT

Ligato had another passion. He wanted to be a writer. He fulfilled that even while still working for the FBI.

“I always said to myself, ‘I could do better than some of these authors,’” Ligato said. “The first book I wrote I used a pseudonym because I was with the FBI. I submitted it to St. Martin’s Press, and they published it immediately, and so I thought, ‘This is easy!’ But it wasn’t.”

After retiring from the FBI in 2003, Ligato continued writing. His fiction and non-fiction titles published by Post Hill Press include “The Near Enemy” and “Dirty Boys,” both fictional accounts of an FBI agent’s fight against the Mafia and terrorism, as well as “The Comey Gang: An Insider’s Look at an FBI in Crisis,” Ligato’s critique of former FBI director James Comey and the Bureau’s culture.

He also wrote about his time in Vietnam, especially the battle for Hue City, publishing an account of the three missing days of Marine Corps history and the heroic actions of Canley, titled “The Gunny.” He’s working on another book about Canley, who died in 2022, that will be released later this year.

If all his experiences weren’t enough, in “retirement” Ligato became an adjunct professor teaching counterterrorism and international security at Campbell University. Additionally, he hosted a radio talk show for Salem Communications in Cleveland, for which he interviewed the likes of boxing promoter Don King and journalist Chris Hansen, and he continues to host his own podcast.

Ligato added filmmaker to his portfolio, producing a documentary titled “Against the Odds: The Marines at Hue” and “The Last Muster,” about a Marine division in World War II that reunited every year from 1957 to 2015 at Camp Lejeune near Jacksonville, North Carolina, where Ligato, 76, now lives with his wife.

He even dabbled in stand-up comedy. Ligato performed in a comedy show called The Patriot Tour, hosted by Hope for Warriors, that showcased comedians who were former military and first responders. That experience led to Ligato being invited to perform stand-up at Gotham Comedy Club in New York.

He jokes now about being expelled from college, but reflecting on his life and career, he recognizes how consequential his time at SRU was to his story.

“Now there’s a sort of jauntiness about being expelled, but at the time I was petrified, and I thought I failed,” Ligato said.

His advice for college students today?

“Don’t get expelled,” Ligato said with a smirk before asserting the moral of his story. “Don’t give up on your dream.”