Wednesday, August 26, 1998

NEW YORK–On a foggy July night in 1956, 52 people died when the cruise ship Stockholm rammed the luxury liner Andrea Doria off Nantucket Island.

But 42 years later, even as the Andrea Doria lies a rusting hulk 240 feet under the Atlantic Ocean, its appetite for blood has not been quelled.

From 1981 through last year, seven divers had lost their lives in search of sport or riches rumored to be beneath the ship’s collapsed deck. Since June 28, three more have died in the dark and deep waters of the North Atlantic.

For divers, the Andrea Doria holds an almost mystical allure.

But it is sinking deeper into the seabed, and its insides are rotted out, with webs of cables everywhere that often snare divers. They risk being blinded by silt stirred by their own motions. And the ocean itself is subject to capricious changes.

Craig Sicola of Surf City, N.J., died June 28 after suffering decompression illness while exploring the wreck.

The body of Richard Roost was discovered July 9, floating face-down in the mud inside the ship’s first-class bar and lounge area. Like Sicola, Roost, 46, of Ann Arbor, Mich., was an experienced diver.

Vincent Napoliello, a 32-year-old stockbroker who lived in Brooklyn, was the latest of Andrea Doria’s victims.

Napoliello was a careful man, those who knew him said. He came home to his apartment one day to find his fiance, Marisa Gengaro, sitting on the sofa wearing a helmet.

“Marisa, what are you doing?” the puzzled Napoliello asked.

“Well, Vincent, accidents do happen in the home, you know,” Gengaro jokingly replied.

“I was making fun of him because he was just so careful about everything,” she said.

By all accounts, Napoliello took that care to his sport, where he was recognized not only as a top-notch diver, but also as a conservative, well-prepared wreck explorer.

William Cleary, a 37-year-old lawyer from Hackensack, N.J., who had been Napoliello’s dive partner for several years, said Napoliello always told everyone not to take foolish chances.

Napoliello’s message was simple: If you run into trouble, leave. You can always go back.

“Vincent had been there for me inside shipwrecks, on a few occasions saving my life,” Cleary said, “including on the day that he died–on the dive prior. He freed me from an entanglement.”

Built at a cost of $ 30 million shortly after World War II and called the Grand Dame of the Sea, the 700-foot, 11-story Andrea Doria was a virtual floating museum of murals, rare wooden panels, and ceramics and mirrors commissioned by its owner, the Italian Line.

Designed with 22 watertight compartments, it was advertised as unsinkable.

It was en route to New York City on the night of July 25, 1956, from Genoa, Italy, with more than 1,600 people aboard when it was broadsided by the smaller Stockholm, whose 750 passengers and crew were bound for Sweden.

It took the Andrea Doria 11 hours to sink, plenty of time for valuables to be removed. But that has not stopped rumors of treasures being locked in her compartments or strewn on the ocean floor.

And a purser’s safe, where passengers kept jewelry and other valuables, is one of 16 still believed to be in the wreck 46 miles off Nantucket.

The most famous explorer of the Andrea Doria was department store heir Peter Gimbel.

In 1981, Gimbel brought up a Bank of Italy safe from the wreck. It contained only soggy paper currency.

His quest for the safe nearly killed Gimbel. He was brought up unconscious, suffering from oxygen poisoning, on his first dive that year. Afterward, he declared that the wreck had a “malevolent spirit.”

The ship’s reputation doesn’t deter several hundred technical divers–those trained to go below 130 feet–from exploring the wreck each summer. About a dozen charter vessels ferry divers from late June to early August.

Napoliello was one of them.

On his first trip of the season, in late June, he and other divers discovered a china closet full of cups, saucers, bowls and pitchers, all bearing the Italian Line logo in gold leaf.

Napoliello returned a week later, on the Fourth of July weekend, and salvaged more artifacts.

On Aug.3, Napoliello was among 12 passengers and three crew members aboard The Seeker, the most active of the Andrea Doria dive vessels, as it departed Montauk Harbor on Long Island.

Anticipating success on this last trip of the season, Napoliello brought cigars and Scotch. The boat reached the site about 8 a.m. the next day, and about an hour later, Napoliello and Cleary made their first dive.

Later in the day, Napoliello dove without Cleary, who was exploring another deck on the ship. Instead, he went down with a man making his first trip to the Doria.

Cleary said Napoliello went into the foyer deck through an opening known as Gimbel’s Hole, down to a depth of about 210 feet, then swam toward the back of the ship to the china closet.

According to Cleary, Napoliello had been breathing the necessary pressurized gas mixtures out of just one side of his double tanks, instead of both. A valve that regulated breathing from both sides somehow had shut off, Cleary said.

So Napoliello thought he was running out of air. He motioned to his partner that he was going up, Cleary said. But instead of using the anchor line on which the Seeker was moored to the wreck, Napoliello swam toward the anchor line for another dive boat, the Sea Inn, a move that has puzzled his colleagues, because Napoliello had not made other mistakes that disoriented or panicked divers make.

At that point, Napoliello had been in the ship for about 17 minutes. Instead of ascending slowly, taking about an hour and breathing gas mixtures with more oxygen to expel the helium and nitrogen from his system, he surfaced in three minutes.

Cleary said Napoliello must have passed out outside the hull of the Andrea Doria, and his lungs ruptured as he floated to the surface.

He had no vital signs when he was pulled aboard the Sea Inn. The Coast Guard was called and helicoptered him to Cape Cod Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

Medical examiners are still waiting for results of tests to determine what killed him.

Cleary said it would be an insult to Napoliello for him to stop diving.

“I could picture him saying, ‘I’m dead now, and you are not going to do this anymore?”‘