It’s a huge hassle for everybody—me included. I start getting barraged with calls from other Department bureau chiefs and DAs and federal administrators and even some City Council members, all chewing my leg about their department’s official cars being towed: Hey, whaddaya doin’, you towed my guy’s car! It’s like I stole their children or something.
Unfortunately, the towing program worked. The parking situation around City Hall and other government buildings did get better—and not only did the City Council notice it, but the press did as well. In one of the few positive newspaper editorials ever directed my way, one of the tabloids praised Commissioner Kelly for “sending in the Marines”—that is, IAB—to successfully attack the illegal parking problem.
So why do I say it was unfortunate that it worked? Two reasons.
One is that after we got it up and running, I tried repeatedly to pass this towing thing back to where it belonged—the Transportation Bureau—but Kelly wouldn’t hear of it; why change it when even the press is saying it’s working so well? So because IAB had done a good and effective job, I had this political albatross hanging around my neck for the rest of my IAB career.
And the second reason it was unfortunate is because while towing a few vehicles may sound like a small thing, it damaged the Internal Affairs Bureau. You have to remember that one of the founding principles of the new Internal Affairs Bureau was that IAB was only going to handle serious cases of police misconduct and corruption. The minor stuff, the “white socks” violations—smoking in public view in uniform, not wearing your hat, conducting personal business on duty, and so on—was handled by the individual Patrol Borough Investigations Units or a precinct’s integrity control officer. It was the only way that IAB could ever expect to be respected within the Department. But now IAB is towing cops’ illegally parked cars? That’s about as white socks as you can get—and IAB’s hard-fought-for reputation for concentrating on serious corruption and misconduct cases suffered accordingly.
Of course, these are just a few examples of the sort of politicized controversies that IAB so often got saddled with; I could give you a lot more, large and small.
I’m not complaining about it. It comes with the three stars, and I knew that from the day I took the job. Still, sometimes I wondered what it would be like if everybody could somehow put aside their personal agendas and bureaucratic turf wars and petty resentments and work together for some common goal.
Given human nature, you wouldn’t think it could ever happen. But one day it did.
And it happened in the worst way imaginable.
* * *
It’s a Tuesday morning in September, a little before nine o’clock, and I’m in my office on the twelfth floor of One Police Plaza. As usual I’ve been there since 4:15 a.m., reading through the overnight logs, glancing through the newspapers, trying to move some paperwork before people start coming in and the phone calls and meetings start piling up. It’s a beautiful morning, bright, clear, sunny—a Chamber-of-Commerce-brochure kind of day in New York City.
And then at exactly 8:46 I hear it—a kind of low, distant boom.
My first thought isn’t a bomb, or terrorism. It’s been eight and a half years since radical Islamic terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand, and terrorist attacks aren’t high on most people’s radar. I’m thinking maybe it’s a gas leak explosion in an apartment building, or an electric transformer blowing up; it happens.
Then I look out my window and there, less than a half mile away, black smoke is rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I call the NYPD Operations Center on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza and the first report is that a plane—a small plane—has hit the tower. Again, I’m not thinking terrorism. This isn’t unprecedented. In 1945 a military B-25 bomber got lost in heavy fog and crashed into the Empire State Building, killing fourteen people including the crew. Today is clear, but maybe a private pilot had a heart attack or something and accidentally crashed into the tower.
Then, at 9:03, as I’m watching through my window, telling the Ops Center what I’m seeing, I see another plane, a commercial airliner, swoop in low over the city and punch through the corner of the South Tower in an explosion of bright orange flames and billowing black smoke.
And that’s the moment that the city, and the world, changes.
Right now I’m the senior chief in the building. So I tell the Ops Center: This is not an accident, this is a terrorist attack! Evacuate the building and mobilize on the Triangle!—the Triangle being the mall-like area in back of One Police Plaza. I grab a radio, my cell phone, and an NYPD raid jacket—I usually wear a business suit to work, reserving my uniform for ceremonial occasions—and head out the door. In the Triangle I grab some supervisors and we start organizing the milling crowds of people—civilians on one side, cops on the other, ten cops to a sergeant, a lieutenant to every three sergeants, and so on. I’m not sure yet what we’re going to be assigned to do, but I know we’re going to be doing something. I call IAB headquarters on Hudson Street to make sure everyone there and at the borough IAB offices is doing the same. I also send teams of cops out to divert traffic the length of Canal Street, blocking off access to lower Manhattan.
Then I started walking, then jogging, then running toward what will soon be known as Ground Zero.
By this time hundreds of NYPD cops, FDNY firefighters and EMTs, Port Authority Police, and other emergency service personnel are at the scene, trying to rescue and evacuate survivors; my police radio is crackling with frantic calls describing the chaos. Thousands of dazed people are streaming out of the buildings as cops and firefighters are rushing in, while people trapped on the burning floors are leaping out of windows, choosing death by falling to death by flames.
And then miraculously, at the corner of Center and Chambers Streets, I see my youngest son, Vincent.
Like virtually everyone else in New York City that day, I’m worried about my family. No one knows if there will be other planes, other attacks, maybe on buildings, maybe on bridges or tunnels or subways. I know that my wife is safe in Queens, and my oldest son, Charlie, is at the Police Academy. But my youngest son, Vincent, is an NYPD Police Cadet who works as a computer tech in One Police Plaza, and he takes the subway to the WTC station every morning. And I haven’t heard from him.
So when I see him walking toward me, for a few seconds, with chaos all around us, I’m not a cop, I’m a father. I hug him, and send off a small prayer of thanks. He’s a tough kid, but I can tell he’s shaken; he saw some of the people leaping out of the burning buildings. Finally I send him back on his way to One Police Plaza and start heading back toward the WTC.
And then, a couple of minutes before ten a.m., a little over an hour after the first plane struck, when I’m still a few blocks away, the South Tower collapses. One moment it’s there, some of the upper floors burning but still largely intact, and ten seconds later it’s gone, a million tons of steel and concrete collapsing in a roar, sending roiling clouds of acrid, smothering ash and dust and smoke cascading through the surrounding streets. People are running past me, covered in ash, some of them screaming, trying to get away. I can’t see, I can’t breathe; I can’t get any closer. Twenty-nine minutes later the North Tower collapses.
The rest of that day and the days that immediately follow are a blur of work, little or no sleep, and then more work—and trying to come to grips with the enormity of the destruction, and the enormity of the task ahead of us. As a senior chief, I spend most of my time in the Ops Center, coordinating logistics—who needs what, where, and how much of it—grabbing a few minutes of sleep on a cot when possible; it’s three days before I get home to see my wife and grab some fresh clothes.
At this point there’s no such thing as Patrol Bureau cops, or Detective Bureau cops, or Internal Affairs Bureau cops; we’re all just cops. Ordinary Internal Affairs work comes to almost a complete halt, as does ordinary poli
ce work in general. Arrests drop by almost two-thirds in the week after the attacks—even the criminals in the city seem stunned into inactivity. And at the same time, there’s a huge outpouring of public support for cops and firefighters; civilians are waving flags and cheering and shouting “God bless you!” whenever cops pass by—something I’ve never seen before, and hope never to see again under these kinds of circumstances. No one is making any complaints to IAB about cops.
So most of our IAB investigators are doing the same jobs that other cops are doing. Some are sent to Ground Zero to prevent looting, of which thankfully there is very little. (A dozen or so civilians, some of them caught wearing stolen FDNY gear, are eventually charged with stealing expensive watches, jewelry, and other items from damaged stores at the site.) Other IAB investigators and supervisors are assigned to security details at bridges and tunnels, or at the morgue, or at the victim and family assistance centers. And some IAB cops are assigned to The Pile and The Landfill.
The Pile is what cops call the mountain of twisted steel and rubble at Ground Zero. At first it’s a rescue effort, trying to find survivors buried in the rubble—and although it’s a hard, dirty, and dangerous job, cops and firefighters are desperate to be there, because while they’re looking for any survivors, they’re also looking for their brothers and sisters—the 343 FDNY firefighters and EMTs, the 23 NYPD cops, and the 37 Port Authority Police who never made it out of those buildings alive.
Sometimes cops are working at The Pile even when they shouldn’t be. On the day after the attacks, I’m at Ground Zero, talking to some cops who are about to go to work, finding out what they need, when I see that one of them is an old friend of mine, Sergeant George Ferguson, who was an instructor with me at the Academy back in the 1980s. The thing is, I know George is retired from the Department, and therefore has no business being there. The Pile is still burning, rubble is shifting, there are explosions as air pockets open and feed the flames, the air is thick with toxic fumes; it’s a dangerous place. But when George sees me looking at him he calls me over and says—Charlie, please don’t tell anybody I’m retired, I just want to help, I have to help, please don’t send me away.
And I don’t. In the days after the attacks, there are a thousand other stories just like that.
Unfortunately, few survivors are found in the rubble, only twenty, with the last one found alive twenty-seven hours after the attack. And there are relatively few people seriously injured, either. The grim fact in almost every case is that if you made it out before the towers collapsed you lived, and if you didn’t you died. So while hope remains for days, even weeks, it eventually becomes not a rescue but a recovery effort, with cops, firefighters, and volunteers from across the country painstakingly digging through the rubble, trying to recover the dead and remove almost two million tons of debris.
Some of the debris is being taken by truck to The Landfill, specifically the old Fresh Kills Landfill, a one-hundred-seventy-five-acre plot on Staten Island. (“Kill” is a Dutch word for “stream.”) Hundreds of cops—including IAB cops—and others wearing gloves and protective suits are there to sift through the debris in piles or on conveyor belts, looking for evidence (pieces of the planes) or clues to victims’ identities (ID cards, documents, articles of clothing) or more important, bodies—or in actual practice, parts of bodies: charred bones, pieces of flesh, anything that might be used for DNA testing. Again, it’s hard, dirty, sometimes even revolting work, and it goes on for weeks, then months. And yet cops are eager to do it.
So like I said, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, IAB cops are out there doing the same jobs that thousands of other NYPD cops are doing. But there is one unique role that IAB plays.
IAB is also tasked to find the living among the dead.
You have to remember that when the towers came down, no one was certain how many people made it out and how many people didn’t. Based on NYPD and FDNY records and private company records, along with missing persons reports filed with the Red Cross and other agencies, the initial estimate was that about six thousand people were missing and believed to have perished in the World Trade Center attack.
But to be missing isn’t necessarily to be dead. We have to be certain. So we set up the Missing Person Task Force in the IAB headquarters on Hudson Street, staff it with dozens of IAB investigators, and start working our way through the six thousand names on the missing list.
Some of the people on the missing list are quickly confirmed as being among the dead. Cops, firefighters, employees at firms like Cantor Fitzgerald—even if the bodies haven’t yet been positively identified, there are records and witnesses to confirm that they were in the buildings and haven’t been seen since. But what about the mother from Thailand or Nigeria who calls her embassy and reports that her son, an illegal immigrant who worked under-the-table as a busboy or a janitor in the World Trade Center, is missing? Or the man from California who calls the Red Cross and reports that he thinks his brother was visiting the World Trade Center when the planes hit—and he hasn’t heard from him? There are hundreds, even thousands of names of people like that on the missing list. We have to find out who they are.
Sometimes it’s just a case of cross-checking the names in various databases to determine that the missing person isn’t really missing—at least not under that name. For example, we find one woman who was reported missing under both her married and maiden names; sadly, she died in the attack, but it means one other name is taken off the missing list. In other cases, especially with immigrants whose names don’t easily translate into English, it’s simply a case of a missing person’s name being spelled two or three different ways. And sometimes the database searches and follow-up calls and interviews show that the missing person on the list never existed at all, or has been dead for years. Almost forty people in New York City were arrested for making fraudulent claims about missing relatives in attempts to get survivors’ benefits; a few other names on the missing list came from emotionally disturbed people who reported their multiple-personality alter egos or some fictional person as being among the missing.
But with many of the missing, it’s a case of someone having called to report a loved one missing and then not notifying anyone when that loved one turned up alive and well; not until our IAB investigators show up at their doorsteps do they or the loved ones even realize that they’re on the missing list. In many other cases, we find that a person whose name is on the missing list is, in fact, alive, but for whatever reason he hasn’t contacted the person who reported him missing.
In both those kinds of cases, once we or another local, state, federal, or foreign law enforcement agency meet with the person and confirm he or she is alive, their names go off the missing list and onto our “Found In Fact Alive” list. And then we ring the “Found Bell,” a small bell that the Missing Person Task Force investigators set up in the hall outside their office to let everyone know that someone once feared dead isn’t dead after all.
Over the weeks and months, that bell rings hundreds of times. In a time of fear and funerals and worries about the future, it’s one of the few happy sounds I hear.
In the end, through phone calls, checking databases, knocking on doors, contacting foreign embassies, working with the Medical Examiner’s Office and other agencies, and weeks and months of dogged, double-shift detective work, our IAB Missing Person Task Force dramatically reduces the estimated number of dead—from 6,000 to 5,000, then 4,000, then 3,000. On the first anniversary of the attacks, through our work and that of others, the official death toll in the World Trade Center attack stands at 2,801—less than half the initial estimates. Sadly, that number will grow over the years as hundreds of cops and firefighters and other rescue and recovery workers suffer and die as a result of the toxic chemicals they breathed day after day at Ground Zero—including IAB Detectives Sandra Adrian and Thomas Weiner.
Of course, the spirit that drew New York City together in those days couldn’t last forever. The waving of Americ
an flags, the cheering of cops and firefighters, the shared determination and selflessness—eventually they all faded away, and the city returned to its fractious and divided ways.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not nostalgic for those times. Who could be nostalgic about an act of evil that destroyed so many lives and damaged such a big part of a great city?
Still, I’m proud of the service that the NYPD—including the men and women of the Internal Affairs Bureau—provided in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In those hard times, they proved to the city and to the world that they really are New York’s Finest.
And I’ll never forget the ringing of that bell.
* * *
It’s almost over.
It’s February 2014 and Bill de Blasio, the former city public advocate—that’s sort of an elected city “watchdog” position—is the new mayor of New York City. Many of the positions he took during his campaign are perceived by the NYPD rank and file as antipolice, especially his suggestion that the Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic is inherently racist. So to forge better relations with the Department rank and file he has appointed the well-regarded Bill Bratton as police commissioner.
I said earlier that it was ironic that a guy like Bill Bratton, who had first served as police commissioner under a law-and-order mayor like Rudy Giuliani, would later wind up as PC under a perceived antipolice, soft-on-crime mayor like Bill de Blasio. In fact, this is doubly ironic, since it was Bratton who had greatly expanded the stop-and-frisk policy under Giuliani as a proactive method of getting weapons off the street and reducing crime, which it did.
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