New York Daily News

VICS SLAM

- BY ROCCO PARASCANDO­LA and GRAHAM RAYMAN

THEY WILL never forget.

The memories of the Puerto Rican separatist bombing campaign four decades ago remain fresh in the minds of first-responders and survivors — including an ex-fire marshal, a former bomb squad tech and the son of a man killed at Fraunces Tavern.

On New Year’s Eve in 1982, NYPD bomb squad tech Anthony Senft was sent to defuse a bomb packed with dynamite near the old Manhattan federal courthouse on Centre St.

Moments earlier, Officer Rocco Pascarella, working security at police headquarte­rs, lost part of his left leg when another bomb exploded.

Senft’s police dog, High Hat, detected four sticks of dynamite. Senft gave High Hat a snack, then tied the dog behind a wall. Senft and his partner Richard Pastorella, both in bomb suits, approached.

“He was kneeling and I bent over and, boom — that’s all I remembered for a month,” Senft, 70, recalled Thursday.

He broke his hip, lost his right eye, had both eardrums replaced and still lives with chronic pain. Pastorella lost five fingers and was blinded.

“You sneeze, it hurts. You cough,” Senft said. “You can’t even touch the bad eye. That’s how painful it is.”

Investigat­ors tied the explosion to the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, or FALN — which planted more than 100 bombs in New York City and Chicago during the 1970s and ’80s.

On Jan. 24, 1975, seven years before Senft and Pastorella nearly died, Fire Marshal John Knox arrived to an appalling scene of smoke and carnage at the historic Fraunces Tavern on Water St.

A large FALN bomb had exploded there, killing four and wounding 43.

“It was lunchtime,” Knox, 81, recalled Tuesday. “The walls were blown out, debris on the street. People were burned, they were covered with soot, dirt. It was mayhem.”

Later that very day, 9-year-old Joseph Connor was playing with

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