Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I’M ON THE WAGON, I’m drinking water, I gotta lose weight. I gained like, ten, fifteen pounds since the attack. A lot of it has to do with the long hours I’m putting in at the precinct. They bring tons of food into the station house. It’s a busy time. If you’re not at the Morgue or at the Fresh Kills Landfill or down at Ground Zero, you’re sitting in the office, working and eating. For about a week straight when it all first happened, we were on duty all the time.

  See, we’re officially treating the attack on the Towers as a homicide case. One gigantic homicide case, some 3,000 victims strong. Basically, in a homicide investigation, you try to collect enough evidence to bring to the DA so you can make an arrest. Initially, the First Precinct got assigned, but then, right away, it became a federal jurisdiction. Meaning we were handling the initial investigation, doing the grunt work, and the feds muscled right on in and took over. The FBI. I call them the “Famous, But Incompetent.” Or “Forever Bothering Italians,” depending on where you grew up. You can quote me on that.

  Most NYPD guys feel the same way about them. These feds aren’t street people; they’re college graduates. They got degrees in accounting. What the fuck does that have to do with the street? It gets in the way. They got no common sense, no street smarts. I mean, I can talk to a person for ten, fifteen minutes and get a sense for what type of person he is. But I’ve done numerous interviews alongside FBI agents. The way they question people? Man, are they missing something.

  Picture it: You got some guy from Iowa coming over here to interview people from the streets of Manhattan. It doesn’t work. Me? I was born and raised in Brooklyn, I got a sense for this city. These guys? Yeah, you got a few good federal agents. But ask around, you find that the good ones are ex-cops. They know how to communicate. But I don’t want to get into the feds. Please don’t get me started. It’s just gonna piss me off.

  I been on the force eighteen years. I could retire if I want when I get my twenty years in, but I won’t. I like the job. What I do now is like being the CEO of a company. To me, homicide is the ultimate crime. Everything else? Not exciting. You steal something from someone. so what? Money, property, whatever—it can all be replaced. But can you replace a life?

  In my business, you see bodies, you see killers, you see assholes. If you let a case get to you emotionally, that’s when the problems start. You work a child murder or an elderly person is killed? That’s when it gets to you. You get a store owner gets killed when somebody holds him up? Any normal person got no business getting whacked? That’s the stuff that gets to you.

  But if a street person gets killed? No problem. You take that as being part of the street. You’re a wise guy, you get whacked? You’re a drug dealer and somebody kills you? You’re robbing somebody’s store and you get shot? Hey, you’re in the game and those are the rules.

  Like I say, it’s the innocent people that get to you, and that’s why September 11 was such a giant wake-up call for this country.

  To me, freedom is not free. A lot of people don’t realize that. These liberals! They got this attitude that we shouldn’t bother anybody. “Leave everyone alone.” Oh yeah? Well, look what happened to the USS Cole.21 The liberals and Clinton didn’t do a goddamned thing about that. And the message we sent was, “You can do whatever you want to this country and we won’t do anything back.” These are the liberals I’m talking about here, not the working-class people who know what it is to make a living.

  What I mean when I say freedom is not free … if you get to a checkpoint on the highway and you get stopped? Don’t complain about it. Or when you get on a plane now and you’re being frisked, you gotta take off your shoes? Don’t complain about it. I just got back on a plane from Los Angeles, right? And coming back, the pilot of the plane only showed one ID at the gate. Security wanted two. So they put him through the search like anyone else. The pilot was not too happy about that. You know what? Fuck him. That’s for your safety. That’s for everybody’s safety.

  A lot of people don’t feel that way. And you know where that comes from? Being born in this country and thinking you can do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want. Civil rights and “you can’t touch me.” Bullshit. Tell that to the 3,000 victims at the Towers. Or better yet, tell that to the families of the victims.

  You know, the same thing goes for when you’re working homicide. I mean, say that—Jesus, knock on wood—but say that somebody in your family gets killed. Do you want me worrying so much about how the killer feels about his civil rights when I’m conducting my investigation? Or would you rather I get the job done? God forbid, your brother or your mother or your sister gets killed. You want me talking to their murderer in a nice manner, making it easy for them to get away with it? Or do you want results? If I gotta break your balls to get results, I’m gonna do it.

  You treat people accordingly, though. I only break balls if I have to. See, if you start out high? You got no place to go from there. You gotta start out here.22 And then? According to where the conversation goes, you adjust accordingly. If you earn the respect, you get the respect. If you act like an asshole, you get treated like one.

  A wake-up call, that’s what I’m telling you. Liberals? They’re the most annoying people on the face of the earth. To me, they’re in la-la land. It was a few days after the attack and I’m driving down 42nd Street. There’s people out there protesting us bombing Afghanistan.

  Now see, I’m at the point now where I’m older; I don’t get as uptight like I would’ve. But those people? They don’t look at the big picture. They don’t realize that they’re able to protest only because they’re in this country and they’re allowed to. They got these signs out: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” What the fuck are you talking about? Are you a mental midget? I got an idea! Why don’t we let the terrorists do whatever they want and leave them alone so they can attack us again?

  Those people with the damn signs? I guarantee none of them were down there at the World Trade Center when the attack happened. They didn’t see the aftereffects. I guarantee no one who was down there turned around and held up a sign saying, “No more war.”

  You know what I call a conservative? A liberal who got robbed.

  Was I down there that day? Yes, I was. What happened was this:

  Homicide detectives work what’s called a turnaround tour, meaning we work two four-to-ones—from four in the afternoon to one at night. Then two eight-to-fours, which run eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. When you work your third shift, you get off at one in the morning and you gotta be back at work by eight. So we sleep at the precinct. That’s the turnaround part.

  September 11 was the morning we slept over, so we were up and working real early. My partner and I were in the racks.23 We got up, my partner looked at his beeper and said, “Oh shit. Look at the date. It’s 9/11—911, like the emergency code. I wonder if we’ll catch a homicide today.”

  I says to him, “Hey. You never know.” And we brushed it off, right? This is eight o’clock in the morning.

  We went upstairs and almost immediately got a phone call from our detective bureau to respond down to the World Trade Center. “A plane hit the World Trade Center.” When we initially heard that, we thought it was one of those Cessnas that went off course. But then we turned on the TV and said, “Holy shit. Now there’s a problem.”

  There were six of us working. We split up, three guys in one car, three guys in another. At any given time, you’ve got five detectives and a sergeant, so essentially my whole team went down.

  I was driving. We took the FDR down, I guess, ’cause I knew it would be easier to go around the Trade Center that way.24 The second plane hit as we were heading down. We didn’t see it, but we heard it. We got near the Brooklyn Bridge and then we saw it. Or what I’m trying to say is you could see what was left of it, the Towers, through the outline of the city. That’s when we said to each other, “Holy shit. This is not an accident. We’ve got problems.”

  We went down b
y the Battery Tunnel, went around that loop, and parked the car underneath the overhang just outside the tunnel. I figured, if we had to get outta there fast, that was the best way—there was no way to bring the car up any closer, anyhow. We got out and started walking up West Street, a couple blocks south of the South Tower.

  Christ, it was a mess. There were cops everywhere and fire trucks pulling up. EMS was there, treating people who were injured with cuts. There was glass all over the place, so deep you were afraid to walk. I saw one body on the ground that was already covered. Somebody had put this yellow poncho over it.

  We had our shields out on the lapels of our suit jackets, but nobody cared, it was mayhem.25 We were trying to tell people, “Get the hell out! Get the hell out!” but some people just weren’t getting it. I don’t know if you want to call it shock or stupidity; people were just sitting there. They were strolling along as if they were going to see a play. I was like, “Let’s get going! What are you doing? We have to be here, you folks don’t. Get the fuck outta here! Move your asses!” Nobody really paid attention.

  So three of us stuck together. We made a pact that when we got down there, that we would stay with each other because it was total mayhem. But I says to my guys, “You know, this’ll sound funny, but I gotta go to the bathroom in the worst way.” I’d had two cups of coffee that morning, which I normally wouldn’t have, and it was running right through me. Bad timing.

  As it turns out, I do a part-time job further south of the Towers on Trinity Street. So I knew the area, and I said to my guys, “Hey, you know what? Why don’t we go over there to my job, and I’ll use the bathroom. We can get on the phone to find out where all the detectives are gonna be.”

  See, we didn’t know where everyone was. Turns out all the detectives had been sent to the north side of the Towers; we were the only morons on the south side. So we started walking down Greenwich Street, straight south.

  We got to Thames Street when we heard a rumble. Sounded like an explosion. We looked up and there it was, the building was starting to come down. We broke into a run, and as we’re going, this thick cloud comes down and covers us. It was like being in a wind tunnel, everything turned black. We were literally blown off our feet, this hurricane picked us up off our feet and threw us.

  We landed and none of us could breathe. The smoke and the concrete dust was so thick, it burned our eyes.

  Now, I always carry a hanky. Always.26 So what I did was, I kept passing it back and forth so we could all breathe through it. I knew where we were in terms of the geography, and I knew we had to head south in order to get away from everything. South was where the water was, and I figured it’d be a little easier to breathe down there. So we held onto each other’s belts and I basically led the way.

  One of the guys with us—not my partner but the other guy—he couldn’t breathe at all on account of his asthma, and we were getting a little nervous for him. I wanted to pick him up and carry him out-ta there but he didn’t want that, he absolutely wouldn’t let me, you know? Personally, I can understand that. He’s a man. Getting carried around like some little baby isn’t the way a man wants to feel.

  Still, we weren’t in too great a situation. It was like walking around at midnight. Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. You know those little street carts where you get your cup of coffee sometimes? We didn’t see one of these things until we walked right into it. It was totally deserted so we went into it, got bottles of water, and poured water onto the hanky. We took a few bottles with us for backup and kept passing the hanky back and forth. Like that, we kept moving.

  Then, outta nowhere, this guy appears, walking next to us like a ghost in the smoke. And he says, “’Scuse me. Am I all right? Hey. Am I all right?”

  He had this big, nasty-looking cut running across his forehead over his right eyebrow. A middle-aged man in his late fifties.

  I said, “Listen. You’re all right. You just got a bad cut. You’re going to need stitches.” Plus a whole lot of antibiotic, because the cut was covered in filth.

  We rinsed his wound out with our water bottles. I wasn’t gonna give him the hanky, I hate to say it, that was all we had. Instead, I said, “Listen. Put something against your head to stop the bleeding and follow us.”

  At this point, we’d made it a couple of blocks further south and our eyes were starting to see things a little better. Now we could make out the hazy forms of people running around us. But we didn’t want to run yet ourselves because visibility still wasn’t good enough, and we were worried we’d run into something again.

  Then a female hooked up with us, too. I guess she saw our shields. And she said, “Do you mind if I come with you guys?”

  “No. Go right ahead. We’re just gonna try to get to the water.”

  So that’s what we did. We kept walking toward the water and, little by little, the air started to clear.

  I’d remembered to call my wife on my cell phone when I first got down to the Trade Center. This was about ten, fifteen minutes before the South Tower collapsed. And I’d told her, “I’m right underneath the South Tower. It’s mayhem down here. I can’t talk to you but I want you to know I’m okay.”

  She wanted me to find her brother, who works on Barclay Street, very close by. At that point, he’d been on his way to work and nobody could get hold of him. She gave me his cell phone number and, of course, I couldn’t get through.

  I’d just spoken to her and told her where I was, and she told me she was watching all this on TV. Then the building fell; she thought I was killed in the collapse. I didn’t realize this until I finally got through to her four hours later. She was hysterical.

  I been married fifteen years. We got an eleven-year-old daughter at home. When I finally talked to my wife. I made her go to my daughter’s school right away. I said, “I don’t care what you gotta do, pull her outta there.” She’s in a Catholic school in Staten Island.

  Does that sound paranoid to you? Hell, maybe it was. But, you know? When I saw this happen, I didn’t know what was gonna happen next. What other kinds of attacks would there be? Schools? Bridges? I knew we were in a lot of fucking trouble, and I knew it wasn’t over. So I took precautions for my own family.

  See, what was going through my head during all of this was, we’re in for a lot of shit. We—meaning the country—are in for a lot of shit. Because if they attacked here? If they could bring the Towers down? Jesus. We didn’t even know about the Pentagon at that point, or the other plane in Pennsylvania. We didn’t have radios. We didn’t know what was happening.

  But I said to myself, one thing’s for sure. Life, as we know it, has totally changed.

  I’m getting a little ahead of myself. We walked all the way down to Water Street and Battery Park, where we met up with a lieutenant I know from the detective bureau and a chief I know who just happened to be there, directing people to walk up the FDR Drive.

  They told us to get to work. “See this building on the corner? This building’s gotta be evacuated, there’s still a lot of people in it.”

  So we tried to get everyone out, but people were saying things like, “Well, the building personnel told us we should just stay where we are.” It was the most frustrating, aggravating thing, like being in a comic strip. You just couldn’t understand what the fuck these people were thinking—I mean, these are educated people, they have white-collar jobs. You’d figure they’d have a little common sense.

  I said, “Listen, the Towers just fell. Manhattan is obviously a major target. I don’t think they’re gonna attack Brooklyn, know what I mean? So get the fuck outta here.” We tried to get them to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge—just get them outta the buildings! We didn’t want anyone in buildings.

  At that point, my partner panicked because he heard a jet overhead. I said, “Take it easy, that’s one of ours.”

  “How the fuck do you know?” he says.

  “I spent three fuckin’ years in the Marine Corps. I know what the hell a fighter
jet sounds like. Trust me.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “If I’m wrong and the terrorists got hold of a fighter jet, we ain’t got a prayer in hell anyway, so don’t worry about it.”

  I wasn’t really thinking then. Logic tells you that, if they’d had fighter jets, they wouldn’t have used commercial planes. They would’ve attacked with missiles or something else.

  Then we started walking up Water Street, ’cause we were told there was a temporary police headquarters set up by Pike and South over by the Pathmark grocery store. We learned about it through a radio one of the guys had, so we started walking toward there.

  We didn’t realize how bad we looked. We were covered head to toe in soot and dust. People walking by stared at us. And the weird thing was … we’d look at each other, but we never really thought, I must look like that, too. I guess we must have been in shock a little. Plus there was this instinct of “let’s get to where we gotta go so we can start doing something.” I wanted to get in the game. Up until then it was like, okay, this is a fight. Now it was time to take a swing at someone.

  We got all the way up to Pike? Cherry? One of those streets over there. We were walking underneath the bridge when this uniformed guy started screaming, “Get back! The bridge is gonna blow! Get back! Get back!”

  Well, we started running for our lives. Again. My shoe went flying off, and I got a cramp in my leg. My partners were ahead of me and felt me slow down, so they turned around and started screaming at me, “Come on! Come on!” It was insane.