Vittorio "Tory" Mangione is the latest addition to the Pinecrest Police Department and if the last name rings a bell it is because he is related to the famous trumpet player.

"Yes, he is a distant relative," said Mangione, who also is a musician, playing both trombone and drums. "He’s a third or fourth cousin in the family and I’ve met him only once."

Mangione, 34, grew up in Miami after moving here with his parents from New York when he was just a year old. However, he comes to Pinecrest from the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, WA, where he spent eight years as one of 160 police officers in the community of 120,000 residents.

"The last four years I specialized in community police work," Mangione said. "I started a new storefront police office with a partner five miles from the main station in a problem area of town. My assignment was to identify the problems and fix them. I was given a police car and a bicycle and did my own investigations and surveillances."

Mangione is a 1983 graduate of Coral Park High School, where he played one season of football. He attended Miami-Dade Community College and the University of Miami, before joining the UM Police Department and going through the Miami Police Academy. He worked as a UM officer for three years before moving to Washington.

Mangione said Seattle was an interesting experience, but that the inclement weather played a major role in his decision to return to South Florida.

"I had eight years of miserable winters," he said. "The snow wasn’t bad; it was the constant rain. We get more rain here in Miami in inches, but the duration in Seattle is ridiculous. In just the winter weather this past year we had 101 straight days of rain, and it’s a constant drizzle all day and night. The day is a dark gray, very depressing. Seattle has the highest suicide rate in the country and I pretty much just had enough of it. So I decided to come back to weather that I was accustomed to. The summers are beautiful once they get there, they just don’t last very long."

Mangione is a bachelor and lives in unincorporated Miami-Dade near South Miami. He’s an outdoorsman and says he loves camping, snow skiing, bicycling, canoeing and all types of water sports. He says he plans to enter the triathlon tournament scheduled for Key Biscayne in August.

Mangione said police work is his career and he hopes, in time, to move up in the ranks of the Pinecrest department.

"Life is what you make of it," he said. "We all possess the skills, the drive and the direction to lead our lives. You control your own destiny."

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