Mark Harmon of the long-running “NCIS” franchise will be the special guest at a fundraiser in San Pedro on Thursday night, Nov. 21, to send up to 50 Dana Middle School students to visit the United Nations headquarters in New York.
General admission tickets are available at Eventbrite.com for $75; admission includes a copy of the book “Ghosts of Panama” co-authored by Harmon and San Pedro Rotarian Leon Carroll, who has worked as a technical advisor on “NCIS” for 21 years. They’ll sign copies of the book at the fundraiser, set to begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, 3720 Stephen M White Drive, in San Pedro.
The San Pedro Rotary Club hopes to send up to 50 students in the sixth- to eighth-grades to New York during their spring break in April, Carroll said.
“You can imagine that many of these students have never left San Pedro, let alone traveled across the country to one of the most exciting cities in the world,” said Carroll, a longtime Rotarian who has worked with Dana Middle School for years.
For the last five years, Carroll has overseen the San Pedro Rotary’s police-student dialogue at the school. The goal is to improve trust and understanding between law enforcement and young people in the community.
“Rotary focuses on building goodwill and understanding through better friendships,” he said. “The student-police dialogue was a great start and now we want to take it a step further by showing these kids how the U.N. brings all nations together with a goal of promoting peace.”
Since 1922, San Pedro Rotary has donated about $3 million dollars locally and internationally, consistently giving $30,000 or more per year to causes, organizations and individuals that “lift” the community.
Harmon and Carroll have worked together for years through “NCIS” and published an initial book together, “Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor,” which spent multiple weeks on The New York Times’ Best Seller List.
Their new book, “Ghosts of Panama,” blends research and interviews with NIS (National Intelligence Strategy) agents to reveal the untold, clandestine story of counterintelligence professionals placed in a pressure-cooker assignment of historic proportions set during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, when Gen. Manual Noriega was the de facto ruler of Panama (1983 to 1989).
Carroll has served as a technical advisor for 21 seasons of “NCIS,” which stars Harmon as Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
On “NCIS: Origins,” a spinoff that debuted this season, Harmon narrates and serves as executive producer; Carroll is also working on that show. Harmon received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor for “The West Wing” and for Outstanding Supporting Actor for “Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years.” His other credits include “Reasonable Doubts,” for which he received two Golden Globe nominations; “Chicago Hope,” “From Earth to the Moon,” “St. Elsewhere,” and “Moonlighting.”
Carroll served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, attaining the rank of major, followed by a 21-year career as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — or NCIS. He served in seven locations, including tours as a special agent afloat on the USS Ranger (CV-61) and as the special agent in charge of NCIS offices in the Republic of Panama and the Pacific Northwest.
