Shawn Ryan Show - #13 Bernie Kerik - September 11th 2001 NYC Police Commissioner

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

9/11/2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the deadliest attack ever on American soil. September 11th 2001 not only changed our country here in the United States, but the events reshaped the entire world moving forward from that point on in many ways. 2977 people died in the attacks that day, 2606 alone died in The World Trade Center when the towers collapsed, many more firefighters, police officers, and first responders died in what became the greatest rescue mission of all time saving those left to survive in the attacks amongst the rubble. In this episode to mark 20 years I interview the man who led the entire operation in New York City on that day. I get the inside and exclusive story behind his entire decision making process, his unparalleled, heroic, and relentless leadership that would turn the most tragic attack to ever happen on United States soil into the greatest rescue mission of all time. Please welcome former NYC Police Commissioner Mr. Bernie Kerik to the Shawn Ryan Show. Follow Bernie Kerik: https://www.instagram.com/bernardkerik https://twitter.com/BernardKerik Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Man with the gun, robbery and progress, shots fired, somebody got stabbed, somebody got raped, somebody threw somebody off a building, somebody pushed somebody under a train, all day long and I don't care if it was a day tour, an afternoon tour or a midnight tour, and it was the best fucking job I ever had. It was a Friday night. I got a call from the mayor about 11 o'clock at night. You get a lot of calls from the mayor. I get a lot of calls from the mayor but you'll notice they're always at fucking midnight. This guy does not sleep, you know, and he said, um, tomorrow morning, I want you to be at City Cole at nine o'clock, and you're going to take over the NYPD as the city's 40th

police commissioner. Nine o'clock tomorrow morning, you get all my guys, all my friends, all our friends. These are cops I was involved in, gun battles with, really battle-tested cops. They had fucking medals up to their ears, right? They all showed up. And the fucking cops loved me. Why? Because I was a cop. I think I was a cop more than I was a police commissioner.

I'm pushing trans-reading the Mayday. Where are you, Kate? I just told you! If you're not the police of high-spirited, there's an odd addition point. I think it's possible the law of high-spirited. You led the greatest rescue mission in American history. I could hear the aviation pilots yelling on the radios that a second aircraft had just

hit tower two. It was at that minute that I realized we were under attack. In my mind, I was trying to think of other targets that there may be. I was also thinking, at the time, did they have ground the tax plant? The mayor got to me about three minutes after Tower Two was hit. Met me at Barclay and West Broadway. He's watching all this debris come off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, he realized that it wasn't debris.

And he was like, oh my God. I get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the fireman assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents, and you can see the two towers, a huge explosion, now raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way. Nobody thought the buildings would come down.

We missed that by 15 to 20 minutes. And we stayed 15 to 20 minutes. We were at that also. We got probably over a million, and a half people at a southern Manhattan over about a four, five- hour period without incident. Ladies and gentlemen, it is September 11th, 2021. Welcome to this special edition of the Sean Ryan Show.

I want to start by saying thank you to the massive influx of patrons that have subscribed to our Patreon from the last couple of episodes. It's people like you who make this show in this entire production possible. Also, thank you to everybody who left us a review on iTunes. If you have not left us a review on iTunes, please click the link below. Go to iTunes and leave us a review, even if it's just one word. With that being said, let's get on with our next guest. On September 11, 2001, 20 years ago today, the entire world witnessed the deadliest attack ever to happen on American soil.

It changed our country, and it changed the entire world from that day forward. Ladies and gentlemen, for the 20th anniversary of when the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center went down, we've brought you a very special exclusive guest. If you take anything from this episode, look at the ones you love tonight and hold them tight. You never know what tomorrow will bring. Please welcome Mr. Bernie Kerrick, the New York City Police Commissioner who was active on that day. Mr. Bernie Kerrick, it's truly an honor to be able to interview you for the 20th anniversary of September 11th. Thank you.

So just for the audience, you were the Acting Police Commissioner when September 11th, 2001 happened, which triggered the longest war in American history. And you led the greatest rescue mission in American history. And truly, I mean, it's, it's, it's really long to be able to sit across from you here and get the opportunity to be able to interview you. Thank you. Before I go on, I just want to ask you, do you believe in fate or destiny or things happen for a reason?

Yeah, I do. You know, it's something I thought about a lot. You know, in my career, I've had some crazy times, right? You know, 9-11 happened. I could remember walking into the conference room to our first press conference. It was about two in the afternoon. I was used to the press and media, but there were 200 reporters in the room.

International press going crazy. And I remember turning around looking at the clock. And it was like 10 after 2 or something like that. And I thought to myself, this is one of those days, sort of like a day in infamy, right? That's going to last forever. I've had a couple of those in my life, you know, when I was appointed by George Bush and sent to Iraq as the minister of interior, my first press conference, I had to go up into the conference center where probably four weeks before that Saddam was there. And he had a big throne that was in the middle of the conference center. It was leopard skin or tiger skin or something like that.

And my press information officer says, Commissioner, you're going to go up. You're going to sit in that chair. And that's where you're going to do your press conference. And I looked at him. I said, dude, I got to sit in the throne. Really? You know, so it's times like those that I've thought, what am I doing here? How did I get here?

I've had some positives, really great positives. I had had negatives where I thought, what the hell am I doing here? But I think your destiny, I think where you go and how you get there is, you know, for me, it's been hard work. It's been being in the right place at the right time. It's been a little luck. Sometimes it's a little stupidity. but I wouldn't change anything for me. I wouldn't change anything. I'm extremely proud of my career, what I've done, and what I've accomplished. And I've had the honor to oversee and manage some of the greatest men and women in this country in the NYPD.

You know, I had the opportunity to run the largest police department in the nation. I had the opportunity to run the largest jail system in the nation. So, you know, two enormous jobs. But I had great people working for me. And people look at me and they say, you know, you did a phenomenal job You're a hero and all that stuff, you know what the people that work for me were heroes I led them But at the bottom at the end of the day, so to speak they were the real heroes

They carried the city well, you demand a tremendous amount of respect and I think Those people respected you and We're gonna do whatever you asked of them because you commanded so much respect and we're gonna revisit that question a little bit later in the interview, but When I first asked for you to come on, I thought we were just going to talk about kind of your timeline and actions on objective when September 11th happened and the towers came down. But after researching you, I realized how much

more there is to your story, both before and after the tragic event. And so I kind of want to start with their childhood and what happened when you were three years old. I, you know, I came from pretty humble beginnings, right? My father was pretty much a severe alcoholic, a good man, taught me a lot, a great man, but he had his own problems that ultimately later on in my life they were resolved. He stopped drinking. We became extremely good friends, loved him the death. And he was sort of a hero for me. And I say that from a very serious perspective, because when I was three, my mother, my biological mother, abandoned me, left me with a family out in Ohio and took off. And she was later run.

She was found beaten to death, murdered. When I was about nine years old, I didn't know this until I was about 17, 18 when I went to service. And one of my uncles, one of her brothers called me and said, you know, he was very proud of me. I went in the military. We got into this conversation. And he told me my mother was dead.

He didn't say how she died. He didn't say when she died. But I knew she was dead. Later on, many, many years later on, in the year 2000, I was writing my autobiography about my life, my career. And I started to do some research on my mother. And basically wanted to find out where she was, you know, when she died.

I didn't even think of, you know, how she died. I knew she had passed away. I had one of my best friends, an investigator from the NYPD, go out to Ohio. And he came back. When he came back, he said, look, I found her, but I've got some bad news. And he hands me a file folder. And in the file folder, it had a series of documents, one of which was her arrest record. She had been arrested numerous times for prostitution and other illegal activities. She ran, you know, she had four or five aliases and then we got into her death records and as it turned out, she had been beat. A death murdered, probably by her Pimp. It was one of three men.

I was involved in a, now I was involved in a 27 year old cold case investigation with the state of Ohio. And we determined that the three men that were surrounding her at the time were dead at the last one of which had died about six months before I got involved. So I never knew her. I didn't know much about her. I didn't know what I got from the family. But my father pulled me out of that life, pulled me out of that home with that woman that she had left me with.

And eventually I moved to New Jersey with my father. He got remarried, and my stepmother is the one that took care of me until I left home at 18 to go in the service. You went to an interstate school, which is somewhat famous. Yeah, I went to East Side High in Patterson, New Jersey. You know, there's a movie called Lean On Me, Morgan Freeman played in the movies as the principal of that school.

His name was Joe Clark. Joe Clark came to Eastside High to clean it up. It was one of the worst schools, worst high schools in America. Well, I often tell people, I went to Eastside before Joe Clark ever got the and cleaned it up. I was there about seven or eight years before Joe Clark showed up. It was predominantly a black high school. Patterson in Jersey was a rough town. I was probably one of, I don't know, 25 or 30 white kids that went to the school. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about survival. Got involved

in the martial arts at 13. Got my black belt at 16 and this is when this is back in 1972 before anybody really knew what karate was or what the martial arts were. You know, it's I think the only thing they know about the martial arts at the time was Bruce Lee, you know, you had a weekly show. That's what people thought martial arts was. But yeah, I went to East Side High. I dropped out. I quit high school in the 11th grade for the next year, year and a half.

I pumped furniture for a moving company up and down the east coast of the US. I'd go, I'd go from New Jersey to Florida every week, every Monday morning, I'd leave out of Patterson, New Jersey, go to Florida, drop the load, come back home, get home by Friday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, I'd leave, start all over again. Why did that for about a year and a half? And I realized, hump and furniture was not a long-term job. It's a difficult job being on the road as hard. I give the American truck drivers that basically move everything under the sun around this country.

I, for one, give them a lot of credit because I don't think a lot of people realize how difficult the job is. But I learned. And then in 1974, I joined the Army. I had a bunch of friends that were becoming cops that I knew from my younger years. I wanted to be a cop at the time. I didn't have high school diploma. So I figured I'd go in the service, get my high school diploma, get some experience and take it from there. And that's kind of what I did.

One of the reasons I wanted to bring up your childhood is and today in today's world, we hear nothing but excuses on why people can't seem to find success. And it sounds like you're one step above growing up on the streets and grew up in inner city school. You didn't have the greatest home life. And yet, you're probably have the greatest home life. And yet, you're probably maybe the most accomplished person that I've ever met. And come from that background, it should show everybody that if

you want something, you can fucking go get it. You know what's shown that that's that's a great question in it. And it's a point that I don't think, and I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about, you know, every day around this country, people make excuses. People want to be victims for me and people like me. You know, I'm not the only one that's done what I've done, but it sickened me. And it sickened me because I know better. There were young black kids that I went to school with.

They went to college. They had good careers. Not many, not many, because a lot of the kids I went to school with, they wound up in prison, they wound up dead. But there were, you know, it really depended on the person, you know, if you have drive, if you have self-determination, if you know what you want, if you think you know what you want, and you set your mind to go and getting it, you can get it done. And I had, I don't know, you know, when I went into service, and I think I think a lot of

guys that go in the military, I think this happens to them as well, you may not know what you're looking for. You may not know where you're going, but then you get there and you find a niche, right? You find something you enjoy doing, you find something that you can do well. You know, when I went in, I joined to be an MP, a military police officer, and that was my thing, right? That's what I wanted to do. And the military gave me the opportunity to do that. You know, my uniforms were sharp, I was impeccable. I did the job, I did it really well. And then you move ahead, you grow up. But your point, I only wish that people today in America could take a step back and take a bunch of examples,

people like me and others that moved ahead against all odds, against all odds. I remember in the aftermath of September 11th, I went back to Patterson. I forget, I think it may have been Fox News who was doing a special on me in the aftermath of 9-11 or from my book. Went back to Patterson, walked the streets where I grew up, ran into people that were still on the streets, I ran into them and they come up to me and they basically said, who would have thought? Who would have thought? You know, it's unbelievable where you've come from and where you've gone. You know, what there's a lot of people out there to do it. I just wish that that the general public, especially, especially these, you know, the people that, you know, they, they, they call everybody victims or they, you know, or they, or they basically

say, nobody has the opportunity. That's bullshit. Everybody has the opportunity. Everybody has the opportunity. It all depends on your mindset, your focus, your drive, maybe a little luck, maybe some of the people around you. But you know what, whether you grow up in a inner city community, a ghetto, or you know, some, you know, Wall Street arena, it doesn't make any difference. You know, good and bad, right from wrong and it's up to you. Just do the right thing. Focus on what you want to do and you know and you can do it. That's the good thing about the United States. Anybody can do anything they want if they put their mind to it and they try and try hard.

100% agreement with you on that and wanted to cover that because I think it's important. Last night at dinner, we kind of covered that. So moving on, you joined the army, you became military police, and you went to Korea? I went to Korea. I was in Korea for 13, 14 months, came back. Was it Fort Bragg? My last year and a half in the service year, I guess, a little over year.

Finished out my time at Fort Bragg. I was an MP. In Korea, I was a dog handler. I was an MP dog handler. When I come back to Bragg, I was a garrison MP in the 118th Airborne Corps. And I was actually going to reenlist in 1977. Delta had just been put together, I think 76, right? It was just starting up. It was the talk of Fort Bragg. I thought you know what I'm gonna realist and I'm gonna apply. And then I found out, no you can't

realist because I was involved with a thing where I broke a kid's finger one time and got an article 15 out of it. And back then, if you had an article 15, if you had any discipline in the military, you couldn't apply for any of the special operations teams. And ironically, for me, it was a disappointment because at the time, I was an MP in the 118th Airborne Corps, but I was teaching at the John F. Kennedy Center at the Uncommercial Warfare Center. I was teaching self-defense, knife fighting, stick fighting.

I was teaching there with a bunch of guys. So I basically wanted to stay in the community, but I couldn't do it because of this stupid article 15 and I got out. No, shit. Yeah. There it goes. Maybe everything does happen for a reason. Exactly. Exactly.

So then you started contracting, correct? Well, then I, yeah, my first job out of the military, I, I was hired by an independent group that was doing investigations, illegal cigarette transportation. It was a federal task force, really, that was doing investigations on untaxed illegal cigarettes out of a seven state jurisdiction at a North Carolina. And I did that for about 10 months and then one they got a phone call. One of the guys I knew from I think 10th group at Bragg, one of the guys called me up and said, listen, I've got a job in Nicaragua.

If you're interested, we can go down. You can go down with us. And probably within a month or so after I get the call, I got a call back saying that was going to work out. But there's a new assignment. There's a new job in Saudi Arabia. I didn't even know where fucking Saudi Arabia was. I mean, like, this is like 1978, right? Nobody at 77, nobody, nobody, nobody knew anything about Saudi Arabia. And me, I'm like, yeah, whatever, I'm good, I'll go, you know, it was probably four or five times the money I was making, working for this task force. So I said, okay, I'll go to Saudi and I remember,

I lived in Fadal right outside of Fort Bragg and I came up to Jersey and I told my father, I just took a job, I'm going to Saudi Arabia. My father sent me to the dining room table and he looks and he goes, Arabia. He goes, you know, I heard it at place. He said, there's a movie, Lauren sort of Arabia or something like, he said, I think it's hot there.

It was fucking hot, all right. But I, yeah, I jumped on this job, went to Saudi, and that time the Saudi government was building the King College military city, up about 35 miles south of Kuwait, right outside of Haif al-Batin. And I went, I was supposed to do an 18 month gig, and I wound up staying about two and a half years, just over two and a half years. Was it because they needed you to stay or because you wanted to stay?

Money was good, dude. Okay. Money was good. You know, it's, listen, it was, and I was a young guy. I was, you know, I just got out of service. I was 22 years old. I'm working in Saudi Arabia, I'm making three or four times what anybody was making in the States. I came home at 24 years old, I think, 25 years old. I built a house, I had a brand new core. That, I was living large, right? It was okay.

And so I stayed in North Carolina for about a year, year and a half after that. And I joined the police department, but it was slow. It wasn't what I was looking for. And I left and I moved back to New Jersey. Went to work for the Sheriff's Department in Patterson where I grew up. So, you know, I actually worked in the Pasey County jail

so it was pretty comical. I would go to work every day and run into, you know, all the inmates, most of the inmates in the county jail, were like, they were from my time. And I knew all these guys from school. I knew every, every inmate, you know, that was in the jail. I knew them or I knew their kids. You knew all of them. Oh, it was insane. I'd be walking down, I'd be walking down a card and somebody, go, hey, B, what's all

man? What's happening? I'm like, and my guys, you know, I eventually I became the warden of that jail. And all the guys that work for me would be like, I don't even know, I don't even know these guys. Like, I don't know you. As it's a long story, I said, but I actually, I actually lived here. And I know a lot of them. So, so I stayed, I started in the county jail.

I was there about 10 months in a friend of mine called. He said, you know, I just went down to, I forget where it was. I want to think it was in Nashville or it was somewhere down in Tennessee. Went down for an interview for a job at the King Fiesle Hospital in Riyadh. And he called me up. He said, they're looking for a director of investigations. job at the King Fiesel Hospital in Riyadh.

And he called me up. He said, they're looking for a director of investigations. They want somebody to take over the investigation group at the King Fiesel Hospital. And they were asking about you. You know, it's sort of like the contracting business now, right? You, you, and the guys, all the guys we know, right?

They go overseas, they work in a certain area, certain job. You know, they may take off, go home for a while, and then all of a sudden, a buddy calls up and says, hey, there's a new gig over here. And you know, somebody was asking if you were looking, and this guy called me up, asked me, and I said, I don't know, I'm not sure. Tell me, tell me the money. So I went to the sheriff of Pasey County. I told him I wanted to leave a absence for a year.

And I took off, and I went back again. I went to Riyadh, I was there for about a year, and then I extended another six months. What kind of work were you? I mean, what do you investigate at a hospital? So at the, the King Faisal Hospital's the Royal Facility, it's the, we're basically all the Royalty, is right? So all of the VIPs would come into that hospital, everything from the king, the crown prince on down. You know, it's ironic today, you know, the king of Saudi Arabia today, at that time, in 19, from 82 to 84, it was actually the governor of Riyadh.

His older brothers, Fahad, Khalid, I worked for them when I was there. He was the governor of Riyadh. He would be at the hospital all the time. So when you had my job, you basically, you insured that the doctors, the nurses, the staff, especially the American staff, they were abiding by the law and by the policies of the hospital. Because there's a lot of corruption that goes on. There's a lot of prostitution that goes on. There's a lot of a lot of things that goes on in those areas. You know, people come over

and they go to work there and they get a lot of fucking trouble. And it was our job to make sure we kept them out of trouble. Make sure that the hospital that can get embarrassed, things like that. It was an interesting time. It, I made some good money. I stayed about a year and a half and then I went back home. In another interview. Oh, no, I've seen tons. Yeah. What? For the most part, old homicides or rape? Homicides are rape. I think I've seen, I used to know the numbers. I think it's 22, I think 22B headings. I've seen a bunch of dismemberments, you know, and I'd take a guy's hand off. I saw one stoning,

where they stoned a young girl, the death, that had a baby out of wedlock, with her cousin or of wedlock with her cousin or something. She was stoned the boyfriend or the father of the kid. He was beheaded. That's the way it's done. Then you were friends with the executioner, correct? Well, I was a cult coworker. No, he worked. You know, the king today, Salman, he was the governor. Well, the executioner was his senior bodyguard, right? One of his detailed guys. So I knew him from the hospital.

You know, we were sort of friends. You know, I knew him. I would, you know, it's weird. I would see him during the week coming in and out and then on fucking Friday, you know, after the afternoon mosque, you know, one o'clock in the afternoon, he'd be out in the square whacking somebody and I'm thinking, nice guy, you know, two days ago we were having tea like at the hospital. So were any of those executions that you witnessed, were those were any of those a result of your investigations?

No, no, no. No, mostly there were homicides that happened in Riyadh or around. I remember, and I think this was the first go round, because I was there. I was actually in Saudi Arabia in 1979, when they took the embassy in Iran and when they seized Mecca and Saudi. And I remember that, I don't think I witnessed, but I know it went on in Dahrar on a lot. They took all of the intruders that went into Mecca that were involved in that seizure, they took all of them. They split them up all over the country and they killed them all on one day.

Wow. You know, they were a bunch of them. They put them in cities all over the country. It's pretty routine over there at that time. Well, listen, you know, people say, you know, the death sentence doesn't, you know, it has no impact on crime. I don't know.

I don't know. You know, you witness some of this stuff that goes on over there. You don't have an impact. Is that... Did they do that in a... Is it like a public? Oh, yeah. Did everybody show up it's, listen, you go to the

main mosque in Riyadh on a Friday afternoon, everybody goes into pray. Everybody comes out. And you know, when you come out of the mosque, if they have the square roped off, there's going to be an execution. And it's right after you come out of the mosque. So if you have a thousand people in the mosque and they all come out, they basically form a circle in that square. They have a black, you know, one of these, I just call it a black mariah, it was a black minivan, we'll pull up into the square. A couple officers takes the dude out, stands him in the middle of the square, puts him on his knees. The executioner comes out.

They have a cop car there that reads over the loudspeaker in the car, would read the decree, whatever this guy did, and then he'd do him. That was it. And you know, it's weird. We've all, you know, cops, people in the military, you, you know, there's times you see death and you, you know, you see the aftermath of death. The first time I ever saw a beheading, the first one, I actually, you're watching this and when it happens in your head, you're going, all right, do this. That's fucked up. Is that, you know, is that real?

Like your head can't comprehend. You know, and you're looking at it thinking, shit, that's crazy. And after a while, I just, you know, I used to get new guys that came into the kingdom. And on Fridays, you know, Thursday and Fridays was a holiday, right? It was like our Saturday and Sunday. So on Sunday, we would all go out, no, on, what was Friday, but we would all go out to the intercon we go somewhere for brunch every Friday. Why get these new guys and they'd go out we'd have them go out grab something and then we'd leave right around the time they were doing the execution and these guys had no idea where we're

going. So we would take them to the mosque put them right up front they'd puke their So we would take him to the mosque, put him right up front. They puked. They watched this and get sick of the dog. But it was, it was crazy. It was a different life. Yeah. Would you say that's probably maybe the most traumatic thing you've seen up to that point in your life up to that point?

Yeah. If you see it, you've seen a lot working in the present or being a, uh, no, I mean, you see, you see violence, you see things as a cop, you see it you seen a lot working in the present or being a No, I mean you see you see violence. You see things as a cop You know, you you see stuff like that Not not like that though. Yeah, right Normally you see the aftermath unless you're involved in an incident right you're involved in your shooting or stabbing You know, I was stabbed in the line of duty. I've been shot at in the line of duty, things like that. But you don't see that.

This is the intentional execution of someone. Yeah. It's different, you know, it's different. So you wrapped up your study contract and came home. Wrap up my study contract 1984. I came back. I applied for a job with the NYPD and I was working in Jersey. Became 1985.

I became the wardener of the Pasey County J. So I was 20, I was 30 years old. I was 30 years old. I was the chief of department. I had 300 people working for me. Ironically, it was the actual jail, the Pasey County Jail in Patterson is one of the biggest county jails in state in New Jersey. in New Jersey. And that's where I grew up. So I knew the area, I knew the people, I knew the inmates, I knew a bunch of the staff. And I was in charge. How long do you take you to be put in charge? I started there when I came up, say, in 1981, December of 1981, I was there for a year and a half, one to Saudi, came back from Saudi, worked another two years, and I was appointed warden. Holy shit, I've never met anybody that excels at that pace with everything.

I did. Yeah, you know, it's kind of ironic. If you look at my career, you know, I always started on the bottom and I wound up on top and I get there pretty quickly. Yeah. And I'll talk about that in a minute in the PD, but yeah, I became the the warden of the county jail. I was running the jail. I was having a great time, but I didn't like correction number one. And number two, I didn't like county politics. I worked for a sheriff. Sheriff is elected in the state of New Jersey. I didn't like the internal politics of what was going on. I wanted to get out and I had applied for the NYPD Because ever since I was I joined the military

I wanted to be in New York City cop but I was never around long enough Take the test take the physical take the medical take the psych. I Just wasn't around. Well now I'm home. I Came home from Saudi in 1984. I I apply for the NYPD. I take the test, take the physical, take the medical, take the psych. And you know, in July of early June or early July of 1986, my applicant investigated from New York City calls and says, all right, dude. So here's the deal with your military time

which was three years the The maximum date maximum age for the NYPD at the time was 29 With your military time you've moved that up to 32 You're 31. This will be the last class you can get into. So if you don't take this class, you don't go in the NYPD, this class, you're never going. Now with that, he says,

now this was a, this was a, you know, old time detective in the NYPD. He goes, now, now that I said that, he said personally, I think you're fucking crazy. For you to leave that job, you're at. He goes, you're wearing a white shirt, stars, a skull shield. You got a car sitting outside. You're fucking nuts. If you take this job, he goes, you do realize,

you're gonna be walking a fucking footpost somewhere in the city, like you have no idea where you're going, no idea where you're gonna work. I said, all right, let me think about it. And I thought about it, I called him up, I said, dude, I'm taking a job. And he said, are you sure? You sure you wanna do this. And this, you know,

what's on this goes back to your your your question of of destiny. It's something I always wanted to do. You know, a lot of people, you know, we were talking about this last night, people that leave, leave the military, right? You're walking a final line. Do I stay for retirement? Or even when you even when you make retirement when you make that date and you could leave, you know, there's this apprehension. Do I take that step? Do I go? Or do I not go? It's easier to stay, you know, if I take that step, it's the unknown. What I've learned take the step. You'll figure it out as you go, but take the step. If it's something you really want,

take the step. If it's something you, you know, you've dreamt about, you think you want to do. Don't let that apprehension hold you down. You know, that's the one thing I've never done, never. And I think that was the biggest example. Here I am, the chief of the department. I've got 300 people under me. And like I said, white shirt, dress uniform, office county car gold shield people saluting the old day long nice job clean no fighting within mates no gun battles none of that shit and that's not what I wanted said I'm real comfortable right really comfortable and I said know what, I've always wanted to be a city cop.

And this is my last opportunity. I'm gonna take it, or I'm never gonna do it. So I called the dude up and I said, this is what I'm going. Wow, and that was a 50% pay cut as well. I actually went bankrupt. No shit. Like legally bankrupt, because I had no fucking money.

I was in the middle of a divorce. I was getting divorced and I was like, you know, taking that job, cut my salary in half, you know, more than half, because you know, I had to buy my uniforms, I had to buy my guns, I had to, all the new shit you have to do as a recruitment academy, you pay for most of that yourself. So it's like not only did I take the pay cup but I have all these expenditures, I have to put out.

And I did it. And I have to tell you, and I've said this many times. One to the academy, the academy was a pain in the ass. I think it was probably third police academy I'd been to when it was getting annoying. But the day I graduated and I got sent to Brooklyn, I think my first actual day in the street, I wanna believe was like Christmas Eve in 1986. I think that was my first day on patrol,

walking a footpost in fucking Bedford, Stuyvesson, Brooklyn, which was a shithole. I couldn't have been more happy. I could not have been more happy. I, it could not have been more happy. I think it was an afternoon tour, went out, walked the footpost in New York City. Keep in mind, this is in 1986. This is the height of the crack epidemic. This is the height of crime in the city. We were doing over 2,000 murders a year in New York.

We had more murders a year in 1986 through in 1993 than the cities today of LA, Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis combined. That's what New York City was like then. I remember going to my first roll call. I was assigned to the 777 precinct in Bedstine. I remember going to the roll call, walking into the roll call, and guys had walked in, guys had a vest on. They had their revolver on.

They had a small backup in their gut. And like there's two guys standing in line. They've got a side piece, a backup, and another backup in their back pocket, like a five shot 38. And I thought, where the fuck are we being? What kind of places is this? And I didn't realize it until we hit the streets, it was the crime haven of America. That time working as a cop in New York City was like being in a fucking war zone all day long.

So that was my training command. I was there for about six months. Then I got transferred to Midtown. I got transferred to what they call Midtown South. Midtown South precinct. It's actually the precinct that covers Times Square. And in my first assignments, my primary assignment in Midtown South

was a walking footpost on West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, one block. There were 10 cops on that footpost. On one block? On one block, 10 cops. You had four cops on one side, Massageant, four cops on the other side, Massageant, and all you did for eight hours a day was run from one end of the block to the other. Man with the gun, robbery and progress, shots fired. Somebody got stabbed, somebody got raped, somebody threw somebody off a building,

somebody pushed somebody under a train all day long, and I don't care if it was a day tour, an afternoon tour or a day tour and afternoons or a midnight tour. Times Square from 12 at night to 8 in the morning you couldn't tell the difference between then and a day tour. Same amount of people the city was always lit, always awake, thugs were everywhere, and thugs and guns. That's all you did. Wow. And that's, and it was the best fucking job I ever had. It was, if you like that kind of work, I was on uniform patrol for about a year, just over a year, and I got transferred to plain clothes.

a year just over a year and I got transferred to plane clothes. In plane clothes in Times Square was the most fun I've ever had being a cop. Wrote around in a yellow cab, you know, three people in a car, right? You have a driver, you have two passengers in a back seat. They're all cops. Yellow cabs, everybody sees yellow cabs all over Manhattan, but many of those yellow cabs, they're cops. They're plain clothes anti-crime cops. And your job, as an anti-crime officer, is to respond to everything in progress. All the hot jobs, so it's, you know, men with a gun, robbery in progress, burglaring in progress, shots fired,

those kinds of jobs, that's what you do all day long. That's all you do. What kind of area were you covering? As a foot cop, it was one block. What kind of area were you covering when you went into plainclothes? You're within the precinct boundary. So Midtown South, the precinct was from 29th to 45th Street. So it's 15 blocks from 10th Avenue to Lexington Avenue. It's a 15 block square radius, so to speak, but keep this in mind. 15 block square radius, during a day day tour you probably had 8 million people within that area. Wow, coming and going people that live their work there,

want to school their visited their tourist and a day tour you could have 8 million people in that you know that 15, 20 block square area. So it was fucking, there's a big sign in the Midtown South precinct. I don't know if it's still there today, but there was a sign above the desk. You know, it's, it looked like a typical NYPD police station, right? Had the, you walk in and on your left, you had this big ass desk and you had the sergeant lieutenant behind the desk. They're about you know five feet above you right but there's a sign that hangs over that desk and that sign said this is the Midtown South precinct. It is the busiest police station in

the world. Wow. So that's where I went. I went there as a patrolman, went to plane clothes, and about two years after I was there, I got transferred to narcotics as an undercover. And I went from Midtown South, where you had the best food in the world, you had all the girls you could look at, you had the most fun you could have being a cop, and I got fucking transferred to Manhattan, North, narcotics, which was Harlem,

Spanish Harlem, and Washington Heights, the gun capital of New York City. And that's why I did my narcotics time. Sounds like a beautiful area. Well, before we get into the narcotics and undercover stuff, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and hit it. Good. 1,5kg 1kg 1kg 1kg 1kg 1kg

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1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc All right, so we'll pick up where we left off, you're undercover now, and you're working Harlem scene. So I get transferred to narcotics as an undercover. There's two ways you can get your detective shield in the NYPD You can go to an investigative route, which means you're in a precinct You go to Anti-crime plainclothes Then you go to a precinct detective squad and you work in an investigative capacity for two three good before years

And then you get your detective shield. And then you go to a detective bureau, you may go to narcotics, but in the investigative track, usually it's another investigative command, or you can become an undercover, and you can get your narcotics, your detective shield in about 18 to 27 months. It's expedited, but it's expedited because you have a completely insane job. And that job is to go out and buy drugs every day. That's all you do.

As an undercover, there is no enforcement. You don't do any enforcement. As an undercover, you don't make a rest. You only make a rest in extreme circumstances. If there's a shooting, if there's something happens during the course of your undercover buy, well, then you make an arrest and then you're sort of, in your normal capacity as a cop. But as a UC, as an undercover, all you do is buy drugs. So I get transferred to Manhattan North and my buy areas was Harlem, Spanish Harlem and Washington

Heights. And I can remember getting up my first command was in the 23 precinct, it was Spanish Harlem. And I can remember standing in front of the fucking precinct, listening to gunshots like down the street, like on the, you know, two blocks from where we're at. Gunfire going off in a cop stand outside going, which direction is it down here?

No, it's that corner. Yeah, I know where it is and I'm like, nobody's fucking. Like this place is crazy. It's like a, it's like a war zone, right? So our job every day, we would suit up, the investigators would load up in a van, a couple cars. You would put a tracking device on you, and you would go out and do buys.

So there were two types of buys. You would do outside buys. You know, walk up on a street corner and say, yo, hook me up, give me two, give me five, give me, you know yo hook me up. Give me give me two give me five You know give me an eight ball. Give me whatever did you have a specific drug you were targeting? Or it depends on location Depends on locations, you know if you you know 110th Street in Lexington, Evan It was a big heroin spot, you know, we knew that so you'd walk down the block

Walk on the set, you know give me me a dime, give me a 20, give me, you know, whatever. And you'd buy heroin. There were spots, this was big in the crack time, you know, you'd buy vials of crack or you'd buy hard cocaine or whatever. I can remember my first buy. Now keep in mind, my entire career, I've been a cop, a correction officer,

I'm in uniform, everybody knows who I am. My first undercover buy was up in Manhattan North. They sent me into a park. They sent me into a park. It said, see the guy in the middle of the park. He's standing in the middle of the park. It's fucking cold outside, he's got a coat on, people keep walking up to him, talking to him, you're gonna go up,

you just say, give me five, he's gonna hand you five vials, you're gonna hand him 25 bucks, and you're gonna walk off. Okay, that's it, yep, that's it, give me five, hand him the money, Yep, that's it. Give me five. Hand him the money and take off. Okay. Got it. So I'm dressed down or dressed like a bum. I walked out of the street. I walk up to them. It's a weird feeling because you know, you're always used to being in charge. Now you're not in charge. Now you're you're worried whether the guy's going to make you whether he's got a gun. You may not have a gun on you You know you don't want to get searched and have a piece on you So I'm walking down the street. I walk up to the doodam like give me five. He hands it to me I get back. I get in the car. I'm all excited shit. I got this

All right Confirm by Sergeant goes. All right, give me Sergeant goes, all right, give me the script, huh? What do you look like? Uh, I don't know, I'll get right back to you. I had to run to the fucking court. I was so focused on getting the five vials.

I forgot what the fucking guy looked like. I had to go back to the corner, looking to yard, get the script, come back to the car and go, okay, he's got a green jacket, he got blue jeans, got this, got that. Outside buys are easy. Outside buys are in the middle of the street. The worst part of being an undercover in the NYPD

is one day a week you have inside buys. And basically what that means is, you know, people, you know, they'll call 911 and they'll say the guy next door to me is buying it, it's selling drugs. The guy next door to me is selling this, is doing this, is doing that. Well those complaints get transferred

to the narcotics division. And once they get so many complaints on a certain location, it goes into a file that goes to the undercover units. And then all of a sudden, Arlo Tenen comes in and says, okay, we're going to 160th Street and this building, this apartment, you're going to go in and the guy is doing, you know, he's doing a crack. All right, I fucking hated inside buys and I hated inside buys for a couple of reasons. Bunch of my friends got shot inside, bad stuff because when you get in those buildings, your transmitters transponders don't work because of all the concrete.

Nobody can find you so I used to You know I used to you know a sharpie, right? You know what sharpies are I just take a fucking red sharpie and I'd have it in my pocket the big thick ones I had my that red sharpie my pocket. So I had to do it inside by I Go in a building and I take that fucking Sharpie and I run along the wall. I just ride along the wall, ride along the wall. And when I got to where I was going, right outside the door I was going, I put big letters. B, K, like a graffiti artist, right? Why graffiti the fucking location I was going to? Because I was always worried if I get inside

and something goes bad, at least when they come looking for me, they're gonna be able to find where I'm at. You know, if they take my transmitter, if the transmitter doesn't work, if I get into a gunfight inside and I'm down, there's nobody to call, you're not calling, you're not calling for help. Did you develop a cover story by this point?

Oh, yeah, I was from Jersey. I had Jersey plates on my car when I rolled up on a set. I had Jersey plates. In Washington Heights, this was the heart of, this was the heart of crack and cocaine for all of Manhattan, right? It was a heavy Dominican population. It just ensane, ensane drugs at the time.

We had a bunch of cops that were killed there. I came into that unit in 1989, in October, on October 18th of 1988. We had two cops in separate incidents killed on the same night up in heights. Michael Busek was shot and killed the brown nine o'clock at night, shot in the chest,

and then Chris Holbein was shot and another cover by just like I was doing. Went into an apartment with another kid. They're in the middle of doing a buy and a fucking dude walks in behind him and says, yo, you know these guys? And they're like, no, we saw him outside. They're looking to buy. And they're like, what is a fucking shit load of cops about four blocks in here? Check them. And they started the search room. And I think Mike, your mind had a gun down in a belly band

in his lower abdomen. They found it, they touched it, then they got in a gun fight in the fucking apartment and Chris got killed. So it was that kind of stuff, you know, that's the kind of stuff you were worried about. So I was an undercover for about a year and a half, almost two years, got my shield, my detective shield got transferred to major case, started doing some major drug

investigations. And we had a big major case, a drug thing. Guy was doing heroin and cocaine. The mannequin took him down during a course of one of the takedowns of one of his salesmen, got in a gun battle, he shot my partner, I shot him and then right after that I get transferred to DEA, to the DEA task force. How long did that gun fight last? It was sort of a run and gun battle so we we watched this guy we were doing a surveillance

We're up on a wiretap on a phone and the guy called who was from Massachusetts. He said I'm coming down to pick up five So five kilos So we see him go into an apartment Comes out of the apartment Follow follow the car, he's in a livery cab, which we thought for us was good, right? Levery cab drivers, they don't want nothing to do with nothing, they just, you know. So better than that, he knew this guy, we figured that out later because when we tried to stop him, he took off and we stopped the car, had a uniform car,

stop him and as they tried to take the passenger out of the car, the fucking car takes off. So we get in a chase through Upper Manhattan, finally get him pulled over in front of these apartments on Dykman Street and he comes out and fires three rounds into the car immediately behind him. First round is my partner's in that car, puts up his hand like this and the round goes to his arm, comes out of the car, falls out of the car, the second round goes right through the fucking head rest and then I'm in the car next to him. So I open fire, that distracts him and then we get into this run and gun battle up into the apartment complex.

And he finally goes down. He's hit like six or eight times, lives, he's paralyzed, but he lives. He's still in state prison. But I thought it was funny, you know He got shot literally like six or eight times. We'll have a cop Standing at a door doing a search warrant the guy will fire through the door You know hit the cop in a side where the vest isn't it'll hit the cops liver lungs

Heart, you know the cop would be dead in 10 seconds. This fucking guy gets shot six times and he's still alive, still living today, but we took him down and then right after that, actually right after that shooting I got transferred and I went to the DEA task force. You got a medal for that, correct? Yeah, I got to get the medal of valor for that one. Went to the DEA task force. So the task force in New York,

the DEA task force in New York is one of the biggest ones in the country and these task forces consist of federal agents, local cops and state troopers. And it's a great job because you have federal authority. You're sworn in as a federal agent, and you work some of the biggest cases going. And I was lucky enough to be in a group

where my partner and I, we oversaw one of the most substantial investigations, drug investigations in New York at the time where we posed as importers and exporters, a company that was based out of the World Trade Center. And we were introduced to some Colombians who got us started and basically how it worked is these guys had 400 keys that wanted to sell. So we went to them and said, look, no, it was reversed. We told them we had 400 keys. So we went to them and said, you know, we have this 400 keys, we'll show it to you. We did a flash dump where we, you know, the 400 keys was in the base of a truck. Showed a tomb in a warehouse, told them to call us back in the morning, let us know if

they're interested. They called us back in the morning and said they're interested and we said, dude, too late. Somebody, one of the guys we were talking to, they took it last night. But if we get anything else, we'll call you. If you get anything else, you call us. Boom. Okay. Well, we now have their phones, we have their pages, we had everything, we were up on their stuff. So one thing like we're not there and they would they would call and they'd say, you know, we have 800 kilos in, you know, Bogota. We're trying to get into the states. in Bogota. We're trying to get into the states. We say, okay. That's like a ton of coke. Like that's almost 2000 pounds. Dude, that's nothing.

What's down? Listen, we're going to give you a great coordinates in fucking Guatemala. You're going to fly that shit from Bogota over to Guatemala. you're gonna drop it and then we'll get it to New York. Okay, well we did loads out of Guatemala, loads out of Costa Rica, out of Brazil, out of Guayaquil Ecuador. We did a boat, we did 1400 keys that was buried in the keel of a fucking boat That was in Guayaquil Ecuador And this is the kind of stuff that you know, this is the kind of shit you see in movies, right? We're doing a we're doing a surveillance We're up on a guy's phone these Colombians out of out of Jackson Heights Queens and They're gonna meet some guy at the Hilton

in Manhattan. And they page him with where they're going to meet him in the Hilton and they give him a room, a room number. So we get to the Hilton, go up to the floor, we get the room across from the fucking room, the guys in put a we exchanged the people camera with the the people in the door We take that out we put a fucking camera there and out of the room walks this old dude He looks like he's grizzly atoms is some shit. He's got fucking Overalls a plaid shirt beard. He's right out of's right out of a grizzly out of his movie, right? Like he looks like he belongs

in the fucking mountains of Vermont or something. So we call the team, it's like guys, I think we fucked this up. This can't be the guy. So they say, well, stay on him until we figure it out. He goes out for a walk. My guys call me and they go, guess what? He just met our targets.

They handed them a brown paper bag. He's back in the hotel. So I fuck it. Let's go. Knock, knock. Guy opens the door. D-E-A, how you doing? Listen, we know about the bag.

We know about Kalice. That was the main guy. We were looking at, we know about the team you just talked to. And he said, we know about Kalice, that was the main guy, we were looking at, we know about the team you just talked to, and he said, you know everything, he said, you know about the boat, yeah, we know about the boat, he says, you know about the load we did in Alaska, yeah, in Alaska, yeah, we didn't know shit, we knew nothing, but he was talking up a storm, we basically said, look, how much is in the bag? 150,000. What's it for? It's the higher a crew on the boat and Guayaquil to bring it to

Galveston, Texas. Said, okay. So here's what we're going to do. You're going to work with us. We're going to let you go. You're going to walk out of here right now. You're going to facilitate going to walk out of here right now. You're going to facilitate everything we need. You'll go about your business, we'll take the Colombians. And lo and behold, it worked. And he went about his business. And we sent a team down to the Guayaquil Ecuador. We put a sad track on the monitor on the top of the boat, on the after the boat, tracked it from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Galveston. When the boat arrived in Galveston, we basically had to rip up the floor, like saw through the concrete, saw through the floor, the wood, what they do is they pack the dope in the key of the boat and then they completely fucking rebuild the boat around it. So open it up, 1400 keys, 1494, I was 1500 keys.

So it's a quarter of a billion dollars street value of cocaine. And we took it. And then when we took it, the guy that sent it was a guy named Philippe de As, he was in Colombia. We had the old man call him and say we wanted to celebrate the load, but we're going to meet him in Geneva. He showed up in Geneva, Switzerland, and we fucking snatched him. And then about, you know, he fought extra edition, about about six months later, we fucking threw him on a plane, a Swiss air jet brought him back to the States. Holy shit. Yeah. You guys were just going everywhere. No, it was great. It was great. We had, we had, you know, listen, if you're doing that kind of work, that's the kind of shit you want to be doing.

You just have to be creative so you don't get caught. And you, you know, you're creative because you, you know, you're, you have a target, right? Like, you're the guy we're looking at. But we don't touch you. We don't touch anybody you're talking to on the phone. But the guys that are talking to you on the phone, we're looking at everybody they're talking to. So we're tagging every one of those teams that's doing them. It's never touching you. It doesn't touch your guys around you. So you're never suspect of me. See what I'm saying? Yeah. That's how you do it and And it works That's amazing How many how many different countries were you going to and you were after we did in

two and a half years We did ten and a half tons And about 60 million cash Wow tons and about 60 million cash. Wow. 10 and a half tons. We had three, we had 3000 keys in Houston. In Houston, just on a whim, just doing what I said, where we're not talking to you,

we're not talking to you guys, but catching the third party, fourth party guys, getting up on their phones, you know, LADEA calls up and says, dude, you guys know this guy, ABC, yeah, he's our guy, we're looking him. Well, guess what? He just met somebody that dropped in 3000 keys in Houston. Where? Boom, hit the place. And but eventually, eventually, you know, it all starts to unravel. And when those guys and those lawyers start talking, because in that case, that was a case where, you know, where the guys were coming back going. You know, that guy in New York, Jerry Barton,

I don't know something. He knew these guys, and he know the other guys and he knew these guys You know, so they start to put it together and at that point you figure fuck it. Okay, we're good Let's take them all and you start grabbing everybody Wow And you were after the old cell over others. They were the primaries in that case. Philippe Diaz was connected to them. All the guys, all the main loads we were doing. Gilberto Achoa, the brother, forget his name.

They were the primaries. They were a charge of the Kale cartel, correct? Was it actually supposedly more powerful than the Medellin cartel that Escapaar was running. They were the real king pens. Whatever happened to them. Prison dead. That's what happens. That's what happens. You play the game, you know, it's some time, you know, it comes the end of the end of the ropeway, but

it was, it was a great time. I mean, I had, I had a lot of fun. Like I said, if you like that type of work, you couldn't ask for a better job, you know. Well, why did you leave? Ironically, I didn't want to leave. In, you know, I was in the DEA task force from, I think, 90 to 91 to 94. But in 1992, I met somebody that was running from mayor, who was Rudy Giuliani. And the first time I ever met him, I had hair down to the middle of my back.

I had seven diamond earrings. I had six diamond earrings and a gold loop on the bottom. I had a big goatee. I looked like fucking Charles Manson, right? First time I ever met Giuliani, I had to speak at an event and that's kind of what I look like and Got to talk into him about New York City about You know drugs in New York City what it was like How how the city was diminishing under their prior mayor David Dinkins and

how the city was diminishing under their prior mayor, David Dinkins. And over time, over the next year, two years, I started helping him with his campaign. And, and Lombie Holt in 1994, Rudy Giuliani runs for mayor, and he wins in 1993. So in January 20th, I think, January 1st, January 20th and 94, he becomes the mayor of New York City. I was still working at the DEA task force. I was having a blast, but ironically, I knew the mayor, right? And the new mayor, which in New York City, it's, it's, you know, it's like knowing the fucking president, right? So, uh, how did that, how exactly did that connection happen? So I was a member of what they call the honor legion. The honor legion is

a fraternal group of cops in New York City that the only way into the Honolige is you have a certain metal for heroism or above. So if you have a accommodation, you know, for a gunfight or a shooting or, you know, whatever, something, you know, a violent act, you get that metal or higher. I had five accommodations. I had an exceptional merit. I, the medal for valor, so you get inducted into the honor legion. Well, Giuliani came to the honor legion and he was actually coming to speak at an event for that cop that was killed in 1988, Michael Busek that I told you about. He was coming to that and I was there and I was going to introduce him and I introduced him and We had a side conversation about you know thanking him for coming and about what was going on in the city and about a week later

I got a call from his office and his as assistance says Mr. Giuliani's going out to the Hamptons for the weekend and he wanted to know if you could drive them out to the Hamptons and hang out with them for the weekend He'd like to talk to you about the city I'm like, dude, I'm a fucking detective like But I've never been to the Hamptons so fuck it, I'm going I'll take them out to the Hamptons, I'll hang out with them for the weekend And this is true story We wind up in to this some fucking mansion on the ocean. This big mansion on the ocean and it's Susan Luchi's house.

And she comes walking out to the car, takes us inside, shows me my quarters where I'm gonna live for the weekend. I've never seen no shit like that before, right? I'm like, damn, so hung out with him for the weekend. And that's how he started to get to know him. And then, you know, as he was running for mayor, I was helping put together a security detail for him. I had a bunch of volunteers until he's actually the candidate and he's running

in a primary. You don't get protection from the intelligence division in NYPD. So I took a bunch of volunteer cops to put them assigned to him in their volunteer time to make sure that he was okay when it was campaigning. And that went on for about a year and a half, almost two years, and then he fucking won. Then he won and he was the mayor. So I was in DEA, I was great, everything was good. And I get a call one day from his personal counsel who said the mayor was asking for you, like, where are you?

Like all the guys that had worked with him during the campaign, they all got transferred to the intelligence division. So they were working on his campaign. And then they got assigned by the intel division, assigned to the mayor to his protective detail. And I said, I'm not going, I don't wanna go to intel. I like what I'm doing.

I want to say right here in DEA, and I figured I got the best of both worlds. I know the mayor personally. That's great, but I got a great job, like I'm having a good time. We had just extra-dited Diaz back to the country. Just brought him back, I think January in 1994 and so I stayed in DEA and I think it was like somewhere around the middle of April my lieutenant walks back to my cubicle in my office at DEA and he goes do congratulations. I said what's my what's up? He said, you guys, you just got transferred. Is it transferred to where? He goes to Intel. I said, no. He said, yeah, he said,

we just got a telephone message. You got transferred to Intel. You're going to the mayor's detail. And I called up his counsel. His name was Danny Young. I said, Danny, I don't want to go. I don't want to do this. He goes to late. I said, Denny, I don't want to go. I don't want to do this. He goes, too late. He said, the mayor wants you. The mayor keeps asking, where are you at? Well, I'll come you now down here.

I said, fuck it. All right. So I get transferred to Intel. I go down to City Hall. I get assigned as, I didn't want to be one of the bodyguards, you know, the number one or number two, where, you know, so I said, they said, what do you want to do? I said, I don't know, I'll do the advanced stuff. I'll be in advance, that way it gives me a little freedom to do what I want. And, you know, you're not stuck around the mayor all the time, right? So I said I'll do the events. So I

started doing the events and I was it wasn't like I don't know a month. I Get a phone call go down and see him. So I go down to City Hall and I walk in and he said listen, I have a problem. He goes, yesterday, I had a riot at Rikers Island. He goes, and I went to the hospital, he said, it's a mess. So I'm hiring a new correction commissioner and that correction commissioner's gonna take over. I want him to clean up Rikers.

He goes, they're averaging about 150 stabbings and slashings a month. He said, I want that to stop. He's got to clean it up and I want you to go help him. He said, you ran a jail in New Jersey. I know how you work. I said, no, no, hold on. I ran like a jail, like one jail. I had 1100 inmates. I said, that's not Rikers. There's 16 jails in the New York City correction system, 130,000 admissions per year, 150 stabbings and slashing per month. It's the most violent criminal jail system in the country. That's not where I was. It's not the same. He said, that's okay. You're going to do it anyway. You're going to go with the

commissioner. You're going to be as executive assistant and you're going to help him get through this. I said, I'll do it for six months. Six months. God, done. I said for sure six months done. Okay, six months. Well, just about on my six-month anniversary, I get a midnight call to go to Gracie Mansion to see the mayor. I walk in. He sits me in this room sitting across from me, so listen. Tomorrow I'm firing the commissioner. I'm not happy with what he's doing. I'm bringing in a new commissioner. And I want you to focus on the unions.

And I want you to, you know, to help clean that place up. And I said, okay, I said, look, I'll do it. I said, but some of the stuff you tell me you want me to do, that's really, I can't step on a commissioner's toes. And he goes, oh, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, I forgot to tell you, you're going to be the first deputy. As what? He said, you're going to be the first deputy, which is number two in charge. You have the commissioner, the first deputy commissioner. He said, so you're not going to have an issue with

authority. I said, Mr. Mayor, there is a first deputy commissioner. He goes, yeah, I know. Fire him. Do whatever you're going to do. He said, he's not doing his job anyway. Get rid of him. I want a whole new team.

You pick new team. You picked the team. Boom. Next morning, next afternoon, one o'clock, I think, any afternoon. He makes the announcement. And over the next two and a half years, I was the first deputy commissioner of the largest jail system in the nation. And in that two and a half year period, we reduced in a inmate on

mainmate violence, probably by 60%. Wow. At the end of that two and a half years, the commissioner that I was working with retired, I became the commissioner, taken over the department in full. And August of 2000 we had reduced the stabbings and slashings by 93%. We reduced over time spending by close to 40. We reduced staff sick abuse by 50. We reduced assaults on staff by 60. assaults on staff by 60, completely revamped the department, took it from being the most violent, filthy, dirty, mismanaged jail system in the nation and turned it into an international model for efficiency accountability and security. And that was over a five and a half year period.

And it sounds like you did that by, I'm not trying to simplify it, but it sounds like the main thing you did is hold people accountable. You know what's on, it's, that's the the primary the primary result is holding people accountable right as as an executive as a chief executive of one of these agencies or as a military commander your job is to basically look at the mission statement for what we're supposed to be doing, establishing goals and objectives for how you're going to hit that mission statement,

and then holding people accountable to ensure that they hit the goals and objectives. And that is exactly, I mean, it sounds super simplistic, but that's exactly what we did. That's what I did. Here's the mission statement. Here's the goals and objectives to hit the mission statement. And now we're going to hold everybody accountable. We're going to hold the staff accountable to do their jobs. We're going to hold managers accountable accountable to do their jobs. We're going to hold managers accountable to ensure that they're supervising. We're going to hold the executives

accountable to make sure that their oversight is responsible, efficient. And then we're going to hold the fucking inmates accountable. That was probably equally as important as anything else because the inmates up to that point. You know, they didn't like you. You went to sleep. They put fucking tissues in between your toes and the fingers and lit them all on fire so you would wake up in the middle of a fireball. They would, you know, they didn't like you. They'd stand there, shitting their hand and throw it at you, you know, pissing a cup, throw it at you. That's the kind of things that went on and there were notorious for slashings and stabbings.

You know, we had guys that would take a piece of dental floss, take razor blade, chips of razor blade, tie it to the dental floss, five or six pieces, and fucking swallow it and tie it to the dental floss five or six pieces and fucking swallow it and tie it to the tooth. So they'd have they'd have five or six razor blades that they would swallow and they'd have it tied to the tooth so they could pull it up anytime. So you could search them all fucking day long you could strip search them. You could do everything you anything You wanted you never find them

You put them in a cell with another guy for 10 minutes and the guy'd get all cut up and you couldn't figure out how they were doing it so I bought a shitload of new equipment. I bought these things called the boss chair the Bob body or if it's scanner So if they sat in it, it could tell you if they stuck something up the rouse. You had a thing that they could put their neck on and they would tell you if they had anything ingested. So you would identify that stuff. And then I put them in a cell that had traps inside the sink in the toilet. So if they went in the cell and they knew they were going to get searched,

they would dump this stuff and they'd flush it down the toilet. The trap would catch it. Now, once the trap caught it, I would lock them up. I would charge them with criminal possession of a weapon. That began the difference. Historically, nobody got charged with a crime. The first major event that I had as the first deputy, I remember these two Spanish kids,

how the black kid down on the ground, and they carved LK into his back with a fucking chicken bone, a sharpened chicken bone. Probably give him 100 stitches, right? A sharpened chicken bone. Probably give him a hundred stitches, right? Latin Kings, LK, they put it in the middle of his back, carved him, right? So I said to my guys, I said, what are you doing with this guy? What do you do? They said, well, they were impunitive segregation solitary. I said, I know, but what are we doing with him? You know, what are

you gonna do with him? What are we charging with them? You know, what are you going to do with them? What are we charging with? Well, we don't really charge them. It's up to the Bronx DA. We don't charge them because the Bronx DA looks at this stuff as, this is jail, this is prison, that's what happens. It's a fuck that. Because if I walked outside the building, if I went outside the building right now and I cut you

If I slashed you across the face with a razor blade chip and it gave you 30 stitches I'd be charged with criminal possession of a weapon Assault with a deadly weapon. I they'd have five charges to charge me with But because it happened behind a prison wall, no, we don't charge them. As that's bullshit, effective immediately, they get charged. Wow. And that's what we started doing. So I started charging the inmates, you know, if they lit something on fire, they get charged with arson. If they were involved in gang activity, I called in the feds. You know, gang activity, put 10 of them together, it's a Rico case.

So that's what happened. At the end of my five and a half years in command, between Commissioner and First Deputy, we went from 150 stabings and slashings per month. On the month that I became police commissioner, we're one. We had one incident. And I was pissed about that one, right? I was pissed.

I wanted to clean slate. But we reduced violence to levels that they had not seen in 30, 40 years. That's amazing. How, how old quick, most sounds like it was extremely quick, but how fast did you start to begin to see results by holding people accountable and then facing the consequences for their actions both on the immense side and the correct side? Three months.

Three months? Three months. You start seeing Three months? Three months. You start seeing it immediately within three months. You know, it's like today, it's like today in the US today, where they have these deep fund the police moments. You know, the fund the police, the funds the police means you're reducing police capacity, staffing, right? Resources. You're reducing

training, you're reducing equipment and other resources. All this is all stuff that over the last 30, 40 years, we've tried to enhance to make the jobs of the cops easier, to make the jobs of the cops put them in a position where they didn't have to use lethal force, lethal weapons. And all of a sudden, now we're going to take all that shit back and put them in a position where it's them in a gun. Like, what are you nuts? You know, people don't think long-term. They're not thinking these mayors and governors and people like that. They have no conception of what the job consists of. They don't really give it to them.

They don't look into it. And then they make these decisions and what happens within a month. You see substantial increases in violent crime, shooting some murders. And then they're sitting around in a fucking circle jerk in Washington going Can't understand what's happening. Why's crime going up? Why's crime going up you morons are doing it. You're doing it to yourself But that's what was happening in correction in the notorious thing and I know you've seen this or heard this in the military

You know somebody new comes in they took a look at it and they go, all right guys, this is really fucked up. We got to change it for this reason. And somebody looks at you and goes, yeah, but that's, that's the way we've always done it. Right. I know. It doesn't work. Yeah. And you guys continue to fucking do it the same way you've always done it. It didn't work then, it's not working now. It doesn't work. And that's how you make change. You know, I was going to wait till the end to bring this up, but we have a we have a Patreon subscription account that is full of NYPD police officers.

And we asked them when we told them you were coming on the show, we asked them if they had any questions. And we probably got 500 questions. But one particular question that really sticks out is a, it's from a woman. And she's been with the PD for I don't know several years and has made a career out of it and she wanted to ask you what is it going to take to get the NYPD back to what it was when you were a commissioner. You know what it's going to take it's going to take it's going to

take a new mayor it's going to take a It's going to take only. It's going to take a new mayor. It's going to take a new mayor and I'd say a new commission. You know, whether you liked Giuliani, whether you liked him today, you don't like him. Giuliani was in my eyes the best commissioner, the best mayor in the history of New York City for this reason. When it came to the NYPD and Rikers, he took under his command, under his tenure as mayor, Rikers saw the most substantial reduction in violence in its history, right? Turned a jail system, the largest jail system in the country into an international model that people replicated or tried all over the nation. In the city, he had the most substantial reduction in crime in the history of the city, a 65% during his eight years, a 65% reduction in violence, a 70% reduction

in murder, and in the black community, in the inner communities, the communities of color where the violence was the highest, where all the shootings and murders, most of them were happening, the murder rate there dropped almost 80%. Why? Because he let the cops do their jobs. When I was the correction commissioner and I said, you know, I've got 40 guys in emergency service. 40 for a 13,000 man department. I've got 40 guys in ESU. I Need 120 Mayors at 120. See seems like a lot. I So it seems like a lot if you go from 40 to 120. I said, but here's

Here's my here's my idea and here's why I want that enhancement every tour on Rikers Island, I want a 30-man response team on every tour. So if there's a problem, that 30-man team responds. But more so, when they're not responding, I want them searching facilities. I want them looking for weapons. I want them to take the prior reports from the day before where they may have had a spike in violence or they've had gang activity or say the warden of a jail sees that there's a spike in inmates going to religious services. Now nobody would think anything of that, right?

When there's a spike of inmates going to religious services, that means they're getting together to communicate. The gangs, they're spread all over a facility, right? How do they get together to go to religious service? When you see a spike at religious service, you know there's something going on. When you see a spike in commissary, when fucking inmates start loading up food

in their commissary, you know there's gonna be a riot. Nobody thought outside the box like that until I came along and I said, you know what? We see those spikes, we see those commissary things going on. You're gonna fucking hit those housing areas. You're gonna go after the gang members. You're gonna go through their stuff and make sure that there aren't weapons.

Make sure they don't what they should be doing. Watch every move they make. Well, that's what that ESU system was for. That's what they were for. The mayor gave it to me. The end result, I had a, I had the most substantial reduction in the make violence than any of these ever had in this country. Okay. And the NYPD same thing, no matter what I asked for in the PD, mayor gave it to me. If I thought we needed more cops in narcotics, we got them. If I thought we needed more equipment, we got it.

The result was increase increases in efficiency, accountability, management, and decreases in violent crime shootings and murder. Simple stuff. If they want to change what's going on today, right now you have a fucking mayor that's a Marxist. He's an admitted Marxist, Bill de Blasio, whose real name is fucking Willem, right? Bill de Blasio, in 1986, was running around supporting the sentinises. He is in a mid-end Marxist. He despises this country Right he believes in all this fucking leftist

Marxist socialist Communism shit. He believes that That guy got elected to be the mayor of New York City. He's done everything in his power to diminish the police and victimize the thugs villainize the cops Take resources away from them He he actually called for the defunding of a billion dollars out of their six billion dollar budget He authorized removing 600 plain clothes and that crime cops off the streets of New York

City, which is the most ludicrous poposterous thing that you can do in an area like New York. What happens? And if you go back and look at a year and a half when he did this two years ago, when he did it, you know, reporters called me and they said, what do you think? Is it what do I think? You're going to see an immediate spike in shootings and murder. It's common sense. You're either take the guns off the streets or you leave the guns. You take the anti-crime cups off the streets, you're going to leave the guns. That's, so that's, that's, you know, the answer is, you know, there's a bunch of elements

to it, but the bottom line is, you need a fucking mayor. It's going to allow the cops to do their job, and you need cops that have the courage to go out and do their job. Cops today, the morale of cops today, some of these guys are shitting in their pants. They don't want to be sued. You know, New York City voted, the City Council voted on this thing to, you know, the men should remove the immunity for cops doing their job. Really? Yeah. That's, that's bizarre. I mean, it's just, it's just an attack on law and order. And that's what we have now. We have mayors, city council members, governors

that are attacking public safety in law in order. It's a, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't sound like anybody's ever gonna be held accountable for what's happening, but there is definitely a consequence. But I'm gonna tell you something, and there is definitely a consequence. But I'm going to tell you something, and this is brand new, right? This happened within the last few days. There's an attorney, by the name of Rosemary Arnold at a New Jersey, that actually within the last two or three days, filed a lawsuit against the City of Austin, Texas. And she filed that lawsuit because the City of

Austin voted to defund their police. And during the course of that defunding in the aftermath of that defunding, there was a young man that was murdered in Austin. And basically what the family of this young man said, if you didn't defund the police and you didn't remove and diminish the amount of police you have in the streets, that homicide wouldn't have happened. So keep this in mind. You know, mayors, governors, city council members, they have sovereign immunity, you know, when there are positions like that because You know, there may things may happen that are negligent, but they weren't directly responsible for right? So they get this blanket of sovereign immunity

But if you intentionally change the policy, intentionally, for political gain, you don't get that sovereign immunity. And I honestly think, I think this lawsuit that was just pushed in Austin, I think this is going to be a movement against a bunch of these mayors and governors and

city council members to basically hold them accountable for doing what they're doing because there's nothing positive about defunding the police. There's nothing positive that comes out of that. I mean, I think it's been the same result in every major city that's done that. Every major city that has defunded Which started in Minneapolis? They defunded they eliminated cops they they forced cops in the resignations force cops in the retirement all of that has been

Redone they're refunding, they're rehiring. And the problem with this now is guys with the long term experience, guys that could be training officers, guys that know the job, know the area, know the people, know the places, they're all gone, they left. So now you get a fucking hire a bunch of new guys, right? That have to come in and get trained up. And over time, they'll get that experience. But at the end of the day, you're defunding destroyed the morale, destroyed the department, destroyed community relations. That's what you do when you defund. Not to mention reduce manpower, resources,

training, stupid. If the system does happen to clean itself up, do you think any of the experience will come back? I do, you know, look, the people that are in this line of work, it's like the teams, right? The people that's in this line of work, it's like the teams, right? The people that's in that line of work, they love their job. They love their job. Nobody goes out and puts their fucking life on the line, you know, on a daily basis, because they don't like to do it. You know, call it what you want.

I loved my job. I loved doing what I did. I loved it. I wouldn't want. I loved my job. I loved doing what I did. I loved it. I Didn't want to do any other job Didn't want to do anything else. I know guys in special operations whether it's the army or Navy They love their job They leave the job Because of politics. They leave the job because of a lack of leadership

That's why they leave the job. They don't leave the job because of a lack of leadership. That's why they leave the job. They don't leave the job because they love it. They leave for other reasons. If you get the right leadership in place, you get people that's gonna inspire, that's gonna motivate, it's gonna enhance morale. You have leaders like that,

fucking people will flock back. You know, it's said something earlier about, You have leaders like that, fucking people will flock back. You said something earlier about leadership and people following. When I took over the NYPD, keep in mind, when I became police commissioner, I had been in correction for almost six years, but I left the NYPD as a detective. And I came back as the commissioner. When I came back as the commissioner, the chiefs, the deputy commissioners, they didn't like it.

And there was, we had some issues like this where, you know, I had a two-star chief that basically made a statement in front of a bunch of other chiefs. He said, I'm not working for some fucking detective. That ain't happening. He'll be gone. I'll still be here. Well, that didn't work out so well because he was gone about two days later. That being said, by the end of my term, my chiefs, my deputy commissioners, and my cops will tell you.

Unless I fired them, or unless I disciplined them, and they hate me, mine is that they will all tell you. Everybody else will tell you. If I yell charge, they fucking run, they would charge, they wouldn't even have to know where they were going, because they knew I would support them, I would indemnify them, I'd be there right there with them fighting, I'd go to the mayor for them. They also knew they had a mayor that would, he was on their side. Unless they were an administrative fuck upup where they did something criminal, unless there was that Mayor Giuliani was going to support you.

That's what you need. So to get back to your question is, people will come. Guys will come back to the job. The experience will come back. Trainers will come back. But they're not coming back to work for Marxists. Yeah, you know, it's, uh, what's the thing about that on the way in today? And a nation that does not back its war fighters and law enforcement, that's dangerous, but it could get more dangerous because a nation where the war fighters and law enforcement

turn their backs on the nation because they don't get the support that becomes even more dangerous. And I think that we're teetering on those lines right? We're right on the edge. But let's move on to when you left Rikers. So August, I guess it was August 18th, it was a Friday, I think it was the 18th. 2000, it was a Friday night, I got a call from the mayor about 11 o'clock at night. You get a lot of calls from the mayor.

I get a lot of calls from the mayor, but you'll notice they're always at fucking midnight. This guy does not sleep. You know, and recently, you know, I worked with him on the election rebuttal for President Trump. He ran the legal team and I worked on the investigative side of the house and There was some point in time back in December in January November I actually told them I said, you know, it's been 20 fucking years since we left office You need to get some sleep like you really need to get some sleep You know when I was police commissioner my last call to him at night was midnight one in the morning.

He called me every morning at 605. I would step into my car at six o'clock. I'd look at the com step reports of all the things that happened in the city last night. And just about the time I got done, my phone was rearing in the car last night. And just about the time I got done my phone or during in the car, and it would be him. He's already read all the newspapers. He's already listened to the news. He knows everything that happened in the city the night before. And he was fucking full of questions at 605. He lives on three to four hour sleep a day. It's all he gets.

He was like that back in the 90s, in the 2000s, and he's just like that today. He's no different. But that being said, I got a call from the mayor about 11 o'clock on that Friday night. And the police commissioner had resigned, retired about 11 days prior to this. So it was up in the air. Who's going to be the new police commissioner? And there were reports in all the New York tabloids, the New York Post, the Daily News, the New York Times, News Day, every day that was a different story.

It's going to be Bernie Bernie Kerrick the mayor likes ABC No, the next day it's gonna be Joe Dunn. He was a chief at the NYPD Next day, it's back to Bernie Kerrick. Then it's Joe Dunn. Then it's Bernie Kerrick. Then it's Joe Dunn well On that Friday night 11 days after the police commissioner retired He calls me and he says Burned listen, I just hung up with Joe Dunn and he hesitated. And I remember thinking of my head. It seemed like an

hour. It was probably only 10 seconds, but it seemed like a fucking hour and I'm thinking of my head. Who do you call first? The loser or the winner, you know, and he says I Talked to Joe and I've asked Joe to you know to take a step up from chief and become the first deputy police commissioner And he's he saying that I'm trying to trying to grasp my head where we're going, right? What's what's and he said Tomorrow morning, I want you to be at City Hall at 9 o'clock. And you're going to take over the NYPD as the city's 40th police commissioner. Big day. Big day, emotions, emotional. You know, a lot of people don't know. The first New York City Police Commissioner

was Teddy Roosevelt. You know, who later became the governor of New York. Later became the president of the United States. And in his shield, his badge, was actually made by Tiffany's, by a jeweler. And that's 18 karat gold, five platinum stars. And that shield is the shield that you get when you take over the NYPD,

which in the United States is the biggest police department in the country, right? So under my command, as of that Saturday morning, I had 55,000 men and women that worked for me. 41,000 uniformed, 14,000 civilians. I had a $3.5 billion budget at the time. And you're responsible not only for the men and women of the NYPD, but you're also responsible for the 12 million people that visit, live, work, go to school in New York

City. So it's a pretty big job. Yeah. I'd say so. I'd say so. What did that, I mean, what was going on through your head when he announced that the next day? You know, it was a cray, I don't know, like I said earlier, it's one of those things, you're sitting there, just like on September like when I was on September 11th when I'm, you know, I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking, wow, you know, this

is, this is going to be a day in history for me, you know, that all started on the morning of the 19th of August in 2000 when I was basically sitting up on a stage and the mayor's introducing Joe Donas the new first deputy and introduces me as the New New York City Police Commissioner and Howard say for hands me that shield and gives it to me and you know It was a crazy crazy day, you you know, the feelings, the emotions. And for me, it was something going on that maybe other PCs didn't feel or they didn't

have the same feelings. And the reason was in the audience, between the time the mayor called me about 11 o'clock that night. And nobody knows this story. This is pretty slick. The mayor told me, so listen, this is in barcode until 3 a.m. I don't want you to tell anybody until after three because the daily news in the New York Post can get it on the front page up into two.

Right? I don't want nobody to know this into two. Right. I don't want nobody to know this is going to happen. I don't want nobody to know who it's going to be. We're going to call a press conference in the morning and it will be announced. I said, okay. So about one o'clock. Now, I'm still not asleep. I can't sleep. I'm fucking wide awake. But at one o'clock, sleep. I'm fucking wide awake. But at one o'clock, one of my best friends, my former partners, the kid that got shot in that gun battle with Carlos Carreon. I mentioned earlier, the guy put his hand up, got shot. Well, he was, he was a bodyguard for a New York state Supreme Court judge who was assigned to the intelligence division. At one o'clock in the morning, that morning, he called me and I answered my phone and he said, Hey,

how you doing? I said, I'm good. He said, uh, let me have something. You heard anything? No, I can't, I don't want to tell him, right? Mary said, don't tell him. Don't tell nobody. I said, um, well, I said, I don't know, we'll talk about it tomorrow. I said, well, why, what's up? He's why I heard something. I said, you heard something? What's with you here? He said, well, you know so and so that was, you know,

he was the head of the detail for Howard Safer, the former police commissioner. I said, yeah. He said, he former police commissioner. I said, yeah, he said he just called me and he said that Howard Safer told him that you're the man. I said, really? He said that. I said, he said, yeah, I said, well, listen, I don't want to talk about it right now. As a bit, here's what we're going to do. Nine o'clock tomorrow morning. You get all my guys, all my friends, all our friends.

I said, and make sure they're at City Hall in the blue room at 9 a.m. He goes, yes sir, and he hung up. Now the guys he brought with him, these were all battle tested cops. These are cops I was involved in, gun battles with. These are cops that, you know, they were other guys that were involved in gun battles. Their partners were shot, killed, really battle tested cops. They had fucking medals up to their ears, right? They all showed up. They all came in the blue room.

So when I became the police commissioner, right? It wasn't about the chiefs, it wasn't about the commissioners, the deputy commissioners, was about them. And that's what they knew. That's, you know, people, you know, they knew me as one of them. not as some executive that's going to make a fucking policy or a decision, you know, not having any fucking clue what he's talking

about. He's going to make a decision because he's really done this job, you know. And there were times when I was police commissioner that I did things. I'll tell you this one story. So in August of 2001, about a month, a month and a half before the World Trade Center attack, I was promoting a cop by the name of Joe Vigiano. He was an emergency service cop. Super highly decorated, had been involved in two different gun battles. One in 89 and one in 94 I think, had been shot seven times. Sean and Chess, both times I think, Sean Oleg, Sean and Sholders, all fucked up, but he stayed on the job and he went to ESU.

So he was like in the NYPD SWAT team, right? We had about 450 guys in ESU. Well, that's where he wanted to go and that's where he was. That's where he was assigned. Why was promoting him to Second Grade Detective? And he came down to my office and I knew him. He was a big muscle bound kid. And I congratulated him. And he was walking out of my office and he looked over in the wall and he saw

photos of me when I was young, repelling out of a helicopter, you know, when I was in Pasey County, New Jersey, I started their SWAT team. So he was he's looking at, yeah, he goes, and that's you, and it's right, he goes, yeah, he said, listen, every Saturday, we go down to the base of City Hall, he said, and we walk up on the Brooklyn Bridge, he said, we go up to do some training, have breakfast, he said, you should come, I said, you should come where? He said, come up on the bridge with us. Let's come up on the bridge. He said, yeah, yeah, we walked the tunnel with a pole. As he want me to come walk on the pole. So for what?

He said, well, we go training. We're going to have breakfast up there. I said, okay. I said, I've done that shit. See those photos? I've done that shit already. He goes, come on. So he's walking out the door.

And as he gets to the door, he turns around and he said, you know, we've asked the last four or five police commissioners, they never have the balls to go up there. I see a motherfucker. All right, I'll say, okay, all right. So I called my team. I said, listen, Saturday morning, 10 o'clock,

we're going down to the bridge. And naturally, and by then, that cop that made that call to me, that cop that got shot in the arm, he was my number one on my protective detail. So I called him, I said, listen Saturday, we're going up in a bridge. He goes, really, dude, really? He goes, like, I'm your number one Saturday.

I said, imagine, you're gonna go on a bridge and we walked up on the fucking bridge. So I walked on the bridge, and anybody that knows any of this stuff, it's the only way to get up there is you have to walk on these, it's around pole. It's like this tube, right? You walk up that tube you hold on to these two wire cables and You fucking walk all the way to the top of the bridge takes about 30 minutes to get up there and

It's pretty crazy, right? You go up and the crazier thing is you got to fucking walk down when you're going up You're looking up. You don't see nothing when you're coming down You're looking at cars that are about see nothing. When you're coming down, you're looking at cars that are about this big, right? So, and it's all about walking on that pole and holding onto the cables. So, I went up and here's the most ironic part of that day. I remember him telling me we go up to have breakfast.

So, I walk up with him, there's about 20 guys, they go up and the reason we go up to have breakfast. So I walk up with them. There's about 20 guys. They go up and the reason they go up is because every day in New York City, you know, a lot of people don't know this. There are jumpers that want to fucking jump off the George Washington bridge, the Brooklyn bridge, the Varuzano bridge, you know, there's all kind of craziness. That ESU has to respond to, right? They got to go up and get these knuckleheads off the bridge. So that's why they go up. They go up. They practice, you know, their ropes, their, you know, all their technical equipment, everything they need. But when we were going up in the bridge, he said we go up for breakfast.

Why climb up the fucking bridge? It was like a restaurant. On the top, they had lunch, orange juice, coffee, bagels, locks. They'd look all this stuff up there to have breakfast. And I started laughing. I said, where do I have to get all this fucking food up here? They said, well, two guys flip a coin and the guys that lose, they have to put all that shit on their back and they got to bring that shit up there and we have breakfast.

And lo and behold, I hung out with all these ESU guys, had breakfast for the morning, came down and took off. That's the good part of the story. The bad part of the story is Jovijono died on September 11th. This was a guy that, you know, was a heroic cop. He was a dedicated cop. He was a cop, like I said, involved in two different gun battles

over a four-year period, shot five or six, seven times, and still chose to stay on the job, be assigned to our emergency service. And the first time I ever met him, when I heard about him getting shot and I heard about all this stuff, I asked him, we were in a group of a group of cops that had been injured in the line of duty. I asked them, I said, Joe, why are you still here? Like why aren't you retired? Like a line of duty retirement, you know?

You actually make more money being off the job than you do on the job. He goes, commission, I'm not leaving this job, I love this fucking job. He said, I love this job. He died on September 11th. So, you know, it's, and today it's kind of weird for me because he has three sons. He had two young sons, very young, and actual, his wife had a baby right around the time he died. Today his two older sons, one is in the 75 precinct that wears his shield. Another one is in the Marine Corps. The cop that's in the 75, he's in the Marine Corps reserves and the other one's in the Coast Guard. So his three boys, his three boys that he pretty much barely got to know, they barely got

to know him. They were probably seven or eight at the time, eight or nine maybe, right down to the baby. Today they're serving the city in this country. So talks a lot about that family. Wow. When you took, when you accepted the position and they made the announcement when Julie police commissioner, how confident were you that you could lead? Was it 55,000 police officers? I was a thousand percent confident. You know, it's like we talked about earlier, about taking that step. I'm not one of these guys that's going to say no. You know, when

he actually, when he wanted to make me the first deputy, I kind of balked and I said, look, it's not the same. You don't understand. And the mayor said, just do what you do. All it is, it's a bigger job, but do what you do. You enhance morale. You motivate people. You hold people accountable. Do what you do. It'll work. I promise you it'll work.

He was right. He saw something in me. I guess that I didn't see it the time I didn't understand. Over time, I get it. I got it, right? Over time, I get it. I got it, right? Over time, I understood it. Today, I understand it better than probably anybody because I've been through it more times than you can count. But when I became police commissioner, I knew I had a three-pronged job at the time. Continue crime reduction, enhance the morale of the men and women in the NYPD, and enhance community relations. That was my three focal points,

and I thought there's no fucking way anybody could do this better than I can. And I took off. And over the next 18 months before the attack, I had already reduced violent crime by almost 15 percent more than what had happened already, which the mayor thought was impossible. I remember the mayor telling me, he said, whatever happens, the crime can't go up. Even if it's a 2 percent reduction, that's fine. But you know, we've done a lot, but crime can't go up. Even if it's a 2% reduction, that's fine. But, you know, we've done a lot, but Crime can't go up. I dropped it by 15% by the following year.

I had the best community relations, you know, interactions with the black community, with the Hispanic community, than anybody, and the fucking cops love me. Why? Because I was a cop. I think I was a cop more than I was a police commissioner. Police commissioner, you put together the right team, you get the right people under you, the right leadership.

I had a phenomenal chief of department that I grew up in. This is a guy that had a combat cross, had a medal for valor, been involved in a number of gun battles, highly respected by the men and women in the field. That's who my chief of department was. My chief of patrol, who runs the patrol division for the NYPD, this is a guy that was a cop up in Harlem in uniform. And as a chief of patrol would go out in the middle of the night

You know, it's ironic. I used to do these runs in the middle of the night as police commissioner I would go out and stop it. I had a precinct at 2 30 in the morning walk in or you know switch my The had the bodyguards switch my frequencies to local precincts. So cops get a radio run, shots fired, men with a gun or whatever. I'd roll up on the scene as the police commissioner.

And these cops would be like, what the fuck? This is crazy. Like they'd never seen, the only time they see the police commissioner in New York cities on TV or if there's a promotion ceremony or they're getting a lot of fucking trouble, that's it. That's the only time you see them. I was constantly in the field. He laid by the front now, then the fucking leader. He laid by the front. If you lead by example and These men and women the men and women that work for you know that you're gonna support them You're gonna be there for them and the other thing is I'm not asking them I would never ask them to do anything I wouldn't do whether it was walking up on that fucking bridge

Doing an undercover buy-ins Harlem or Spanish Harlem or getting out on patrol in the middle of bedstuy. I did it. I did it. So don't tell me it can't be done. You know, don't tell me, you know, you're doing something that I don't understand. Oh, I understand. I get it. I understand it. And you know what? The men and women that did it and did it well, I took care of it. You know, New York City, and for the New York City cops that watch this, they'll understand this really well. There's a lot of politics in NYPD, right? When I took over and we were going through the promotional reviews for detective, for example,

who's going to make detective? Who's going to make grade in detective? In other words, there's three grades in detectives. You start as a third grade, there's a second, there's a first. A first grade detective makes the same equivalent pay as it's between a lieutenant and a captain. It's a shitload of money for a cop, right? So when I did those reviews, I started looking at the reviews for detectives and I see a bunch of fucking names, you know, this detective works for the chief of administration. He's like the fucking guy.

He gets a coffee in the morning. You know, he picks up the newspapers. He drives the chief of administration. No, no. He's already got a really good job and he's getting paid well for what he does. He doesn't need to be promoted to a second grade detective. Now, give me a guy that had three gun battles. Give me a guy that's never called that sick. Give me the guy that has 60 medals. This is a true story. In 1991, I got the Medal of Valor when Hector got shot, and we were involved in that gun battle.

At that, it was 1993, I think. When I got the medal, there was a kid that was getting his third combat cross at that medal ceremony. Well, here we are, you know, eight years later, I'm the New York City Police Commissioner, I'm having a ceremony. They call, you know, for the Medal of Valor recipients, and that fucking dude comes up. He's got literally, he had 200 medals, 200. like three combat crosses, two metals for valor, and 185 other metals, right? The most, I believe, is the most substantially decorated cop in a history of the NYPD. He was from the sixth heaven precinct. And when they introduced him, Detective Third Grade, I forget his name,

Detective Third Grade. That fucking dude was a Detective Third Grade when he was getting the comeback across the last time when I saw him. So immediately after we left that ceremony, I called him my chief of staff and I said, Dude, Detective Third grade really. I said, How can that be?

How is that guy not been promoted since I saw him last time? He's got to be one of the work in his cops in the NYPD. I sent him downstairs, comes back, he goes, all right. You're not gonna like this answer. He goes, but the chief of the burrow, the chief of detectives in the burrow doesn't like him. He doesn't like him. He doesn't like him. Why? Because he embarrasses the other cops. Doesn't like him. Why? He's, I don't know. He just doesn't like him. He won't put him in. I was all right. I was alright.

I said, go downstairs to the chief of detectives. This is a citywide detectives. Bill Ali, I said, go tell Chief Ali. If that guy is not on the next round of promotions, tell the chief of the borough, put in his retirement papers. I don't give a fuck if he likes him. He don't like him. I don't care what it is.

Whatever I don't I don't know what it is. Don't care. That kid better be in the next set of promotions or that chief is gone. Any got promoted. I don't think there's a cop on the contrary. They would not want to work under your command. That's the way I managed. That's the way I worked and and all these guys knew it. Do you think yours and Giuliani's leadership styles were parallel? Yeah. Yeah. Giuliani, first of all, he came from a family of New York City cops. His uncle, Uncle Rudy, was actually in emergency service, was in New York City emergency service cop, you know, 20 years before I came in a job. So number one, he knew the job, he knew, you know, he knew all about the NYPD, then he became the US Attorney.

First an assistant US Attorney, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and then he became the Associate Attorney General, the number three in the Justice Department under President Reagan. So nobody knows this field, this, you know, the law enforcement community better than he does. He knows that he gets it, he understands it. And he was extremely supportive of the men and women around him. And I'll tell you something,

in the correction arena, normally correction officers are like the black sheep of criminal justice, right? Nobody gives a fuck about what happens to inmates once those doors close, right? Therefore, nobody pays attention. Like, you don't want to talk about that. You don't want to hear that. You don't want to see that. Jails and prisons are like something that nobody really they don't want to know about

When I came along and went to Giuliani and and I I pretty much said that to them I said, you know the New York City correction department It's got 13,000 staff members. You got a hundred and thirty thousand in-mated missions a year It's a big fucking agency But it can't be treated like the black sheep because guess what? inmate admissions a year. It's a big fucking agency, but it can't be treated like the black sheep. Because guess what? The cops that are out there making the arrest, if we don't have a place to hold them,

and the place we do hold them isn't safe, and the morale is shit. Well, you know, it makes the job worse. It makes the city worse. If I can change the morale in the department of correction, if you can get the prosecutors to do their job, we could have the best of both worlds and that's kind of what we did.

So the city on the outside got cleaned up and the jail system got cleaned up. Unlike anything that had ever happened before in New York. That's a hell of an accomplishment. Let's take a break and when we come back we'll start to get into the attack. Okay. On September 11th, at 8.45, the American Airlines flight 11 struck the North Tower. And not only changed our country and New York, but it also changed the entire world forever. 2,996 people were killed in the Trade Center attack, 343 firefighters and medics, 23 police officers, 37 poor to authority officials, 189 people were killed at the Pentagon and flight 77. Pennsylvania flight 93, 44 people died. In 2018, there were an estimated 10,000 people

who have been diagnosed with 9, 11 cancer. There's been over 7,000 troops that died fighting for America's freedom from this event, not to mention all the veterans that have died and police and firefighters from PTSD and suicides, overdoses, all from, triggered from this event. It sent us in to the longest war in American history.

You led the greatest rescue mission of all time in American history. The reason I asked you about fate at the beginning and if things happen for a reason is because we received a ton of questions on how you manage the stress and how you made your decisions. And I think that the only answer is fate, everything that you saw from childhood, from your mother being murdered, to the beheadings and Saudi Arabia. So the shit you dealt with as a cop that was all stress and it was forging you into who you became when September 11th happened and led that rescue mission.

I don't think there's anybody in the world that could have done a better fucking job than you did that day. And so that's why I asked you that, if you believe in fate. You know what Sean? I was there. I was in command. And I just, I try to tell people that I did the best I could under the circumstances. When the North Tower was hit, I was actually in my office.

Just finished working out. I was standing in the bathroom, getting ready to take a shave actually. And my chief of staff and Hector Santiago came banging on the door, yelling that a plane had just hit Tower 1. And I honestly, I didn't think anything of it. I thought, you know, it was a small aircraft. I thought it was one of these small planes or a helicopter that may have flown up and down the Hudson River given tours. So I walked out of my bathroom and I looked up at the television that was above a treadmill and I could see the damage to the building on TV and I realized that wasn't what I thought it was.

So I walked out of my office, into my primary office, through there, into my conference room. I pulled back the drapes and I could see the building. The building was only about a quarter of a mile from police headquarters. The top of the building, I had to look up in the air at the top of the building and I could see the damage to the top of the building and I knew that wasn't no small aircraft. So I went back in to my desk, I picked up the phone to call the mayor, and the mayor was actually on the line, said he was on the way downtown. He would meet me at seven world trade. Seven world trade was directly across the street from Tower One. That's where the city's emergency command center was.

It was on the 23rd floor of that building. So we were gonna meet there, and that's where the mayor would oversee the response to the accident. What we thought was an accident. I was downtown at Seven World Trade at Tower tower one probably within seven or eight minutes. I threw on my clothes, the bodyguards got the cars revved up, took some of my staff with me and we took off and we came down West Broadway and got to the corner of Vessie

where the the towers were really. And as we tried to turn on to the block to get to tower seven, there were a bunch of cops there. They stopped the motorcade. Didn't know I was in it. Told the guys in the car, you can't turn on to the block. And they wouldn't let us through. And my guys would get annoyed.

They were going to push their way through. I rolled down the window of the cop that was a sergeant. He saw me. He stood at attention, saluted me, said, Commissioner, you can't pull onto the onto the street. They're jumping. And I didn't know I didn't know what he said it quick, you know, he said, you can't get on the block, they're jumping. I didn't know what that meant. What's he talking about? And I got out of the car, walked around the cars, got to the corner, and saw this debris

coming down off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, I realized it wasn't the brie, it was people. And they were jumping, you know, one, two, three at a time. Over the next four or five minutes, I guess, I watched a couple dozen people jump from the building to the ground. They were hitting the ground on Vessie. The courtyard between one and two, and they hit the ground. They basically evaporated. We backed the vehicles up. I told the guys, get back away from the front of the building.

We backed the vehicles up, where it's brought away, almost to Barclay Street, which was two blocks north of Dessie. We told the guys get a hold of the mayor's vehicle and tell them the meet-ups there. In the meantime I called for a temporary command bus. I was going to put a temporary command post on Barclay and West Broadway because there was no getting into Tower 7. What I didn't know until I walked down to the corner was that the front of Tower 7 had been damaged, destroyed almost, from all of the debris from one, from the impact. The front of 7 was also on fire. So we backed

our vehicles up, was at the corner of Barclay and West Broadway. I was in the middle of calling for a temporary command bus, and all of the sudden there was this enormous explosion above us. And when I looked up straight up in the air, now keep in mind, I'm standing directly in front of Tower 2. I'm about three blocks north of the building, but the top of the building is Straight up in the air. I look up and there's that big orange fireball That you see if you watched it on TV when you see that big orange fireball blow out the north side of the tower tower 2 I'm standing in front of it underneath it. And I look up, I see it, I didn't see the second plane. The second plane came around

the southern end of Manhattan and hit the north, the south side of the tower, blowing out the north side of the tower on top of us. We ran up behind tower seven and behind the post office, got behind those buildings until the majority of the debris came down to the ground. As we were running, one of the detectives got hit in the back of the leg with a shaft piece of the wheel of the plane. That's how close we were to the stuff that was coming down. I could hear the aviation pilots yelling on the radios that a second aircraft had just hit tower two. It was at that minute that I realized we were under attack. Prior to that, it was an accident. Prior to that, the response for the city would have been measured. There were policies in place, you know, from 1990, 1996

on Giuliani created the Office of Emergency Management. So there were policies and protocols in place for major responses, major crisis, anywhere in the city, all over the city. But this was different. This was going to be very different because it was, this was an attack. And we had the respond differently. And at that point, the response change, instead of the protocols and policies we had in place for, a much smaller crisis, we now had other things to worry about, where there are other planes in the air. What would the other targets be? Evacuation points. Who's going to get

evacuated? I called for the evacuation of police headquarters, city hall, the UN, the Empire State Building. In my mind, I was trying to think of other targets that there may be. I was also thinking, at the time, did they have ground the tax plant? Somebody who ever did this. Keep in mind, this is going on as it's happening, right? You know, we were a police department. And this is, it's comical to think back now in a way of what happened, what was said, and how it happened. But my chief of staff was with me at the base of the towers when all this was going on. And about two weeks after the attack, I was sitting in the command center up at the pier

with the mayor and my chief of staff was sitting across him. He sort of where you are. And he was talking to some other guys, and they were looking at me, and they were smiling and laughing and joking. And I looked over and I said, we guys laughing at him.

He said nothing. I said, what is it? I said, what are you laughing at? He said, come here, we're just talking about, you know, that day, the day the attack. I said, what are you laughing at? He said, Commissioner, we're just talking about, you know, that day, the day the attack. I said, what are you laughing at? He said, do you remember what you said to me? He said, what you were yelling? I said, not really what? He said, after the second plane hit tower

two, he said, you were in the middle, middle of calling for the command center. He goes, you sn in the middle of calling for the command center. He goes, you snatched the radio away from me and you yelled at me. You said, get me some air support and close the fucking airspace. He goes and I said, and you turned around to say something to somebody. And I remember looking to the other guys going, give me some air, like, is there a fucking 1-800 number for an F-16? Like, who am I calling? Like who you call?

Who do I call to like shut down the airspace and get us air support? We're a police department. It was comical when he said it. But think of the reality. We were now mixed into a basic war zone. We weren't, this wasn't a military unit, this is a police department. You know, we were prepared for just about anything under the sun you could imagine, right? Any kind of crisis. We had manpower like no other police department in the country. We had

resources like no other police department in the country. But nobody imagined that you would have two jet-sized missiles flown into those towers. So we had to do everything in our power to secure that area. Worry about the rest of the city. Worry about the mass transit system. You know, if you dropped seren gas in Grand Central Station at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, you can kill half a million people. Did these guys have something like that planned?

Were there other things like that that was going to happen? We didn't know. So we had to do the best we could under the circumstances. The protocol at that point was to basically activate operational mega. That's what the title of the response for us. And that basically was every precinct in the city with every active cop would respond to include the fire department in every city agency. So we had the correctional staff, we had the fire department, we had the NYPD, we had the port authority police, everybody was going. And when you talk about the magnitude of the rescue, this was 9 o'clock in the morning,

right? 8.45 when the first plane hit 902, when the second plane hit, and at the end of the day, there were 20 to 25,000 people in and around the towers at that point. If it was, if it was later in the day it would have been much worse, but it was early in the morning. So we evacuated 20 to 25,000 people out of the immediate area in the buildings. Anybody that was below the impact zones got out, right? Anybody that was above the impact zone died. There was no getting out. Then we evacuated close to a million people out of New York City, out of Manhattan, out of the southern portion of Manhattan, into the other burrows. So you had them going into Queens and the Bronx. You had them going to Staten Island by

ferry. You had them going to Jersey. Just the boat, the evacuation by boats into New Jersey was enormous, right? You had the state police, the New York City Harbor Division. You had civilians in civilian boats pulling up right near the financial center downtown, grabbing people, throwing them in the boats and running to the other side of the Hudson River. This evacuation and the rescue, the initial rescue operation went on all day. You can see, if you go back to footage from that day on the Brooklyn Bridge, there are shots

of people walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. There has to be 100,000, 200,000 people on the bridge that's walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn, going over the Brooklyn Bridge. That went on all day. That went on all day. The mayor arrived. The mayor got to me about three minutes after Tower Two was hit. He rolled up, got out, met me at Barclay and West Broadway. And I remember when he came up to the, he got to me. He was standing right next to me and he's watching all this debris come off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, he realized that it wasn't debris. And he was like,

oh my God, he put his hands in his head and his hands and he was yelling, oh my God. You know, it's funny, you mentioned earlier that, you know, whether it was fate or my experience or, you know, my, the past, you know, what I had done in the past, I've seen a lot of this stuff, a lot of, a lot of death in my life, right? The mayor, he's never dealt with anything like this. This was something to him that, you know, although being a US attorney or being the mayor or being, you know, the associate attorney general, this was not, you know, what he's ever dealt with. And those first images for him, I think, were more than stunning.

and stunning. He grabbed me by the arm and he made a statement, he made a comment that we're in an uncharted territory. And I thought at the time he was talking about the magnitude of the damage, the attack itself, whatever, the devastation. I realized later in our conversations, he wasn't talking about that. He was talking about an attack on U.S. soil. In his mind, we had just been attacked on U.S. soil, and it never happened before with the exception of Pearl Harbor, which was a military attack. This was not a military attack. This was an attack by radical Muslims who despised this country, who we had known about for years. This wasn't the first attack on the US.

First attack on US soil, but not on the US by no means. You look at the USS Cole, the year 2 before, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Alkabar towers, the embassy in Beirut in 1983. This stuff had gone on for years. Nobody ever focused on it. Nobody ever looked at it. Nobody was ever concerned with it as much as they were in the aftermath of the attack on the towers. So the Maranai, after he got there, he wanted to see the damage to the other side of Tower 1 So we actually walked down to West Street Went to West Street went to a commons and a temporary commons and are there

Where there was the the first deputy commission of the fire department Chief of operations for the fire department chief of department and Father Michael, and Father Michael Judd, who was the chief chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. They were all at that command center, and we spoke to them. Some of those guys had worked on the Oklahoma bombings, the courthouse bombing and the federal building in Oklahoma. They told us, they said, the chief of the department, against he said, look, we're going to lose everything above the impact zone, the possibilities of rescues and evacuations from above the impact zone. We're not going to be able to do. It's not going to work.

Can't get nobody off the top of that building. We're going to lose those people and we're going to lose the tops of the building. But that was it. Nobody thought the buildings would come down. And the mayor said, okay, at that point, the mayor wanted to call the White House. And the mayor said, okay, at that point, the mayor wanted to call the White House. He wanted to speak to the president. He wanted to make sure that we had federal resources at our disposal. And he also wanted to make sure that we had air support and that the air space would be closed down. So if there was something else coming, somebody would be on it, right?

So my guys had secured a my Roll Lynch office on that corner of Barclay and West West Broadway where we started. So I told the mayor we're going to go back to where we were. We have an office there who set up a temporary command post you're going to go in there. You can call the president from there. So we walked back up and as we were walking away, father judge from the fire department, he grabbed the mayor's hand, he put his hand on his head, he crossed him and he blessed us. He said,

God bless you guys, be careful. And we walked away. We went back to the office at Barclay and West Broadway, we went inside. They secured a phone line, Tony Carbonetti, who was the Mayor's Chief of Staff, got the White House on the phone, and the mayor was on the phone looking for the president. They said, the president's not in the building. The vice president is going to come to the phone in a minute. And about a minute later, Chris Henning, who was a special assistant to the president, Chris Hennic came on the phone and he told the mayor, Mr. Mayor, we have to go. They were evacuating the White House.

We think the Pentagon just got hit. And Giuliani hung up the phone and he was sitting, he was sitting about where you are to me and I was standing here. I was standing in this doorway and he was sitting, he was sitting about where you are to me and I was standing here. I was standing in this doorway and he was sitting at a desk. And he looked at me, he put down the phone and he said, shit, that's not good. And I said, what is it? What did he say? He said, they think the Pentagon just got hit.

And before he got to say that they were evacuating the White House, the building we were in started to shake like a freight train was coming through the side of it. It just started to shake the entire building and all of a sudden the door flew open and it was my chief of department, Joe Esposito, the chief of the NYPD, kicked open the door, ran inside and he said it's coming down, everybody get down. I didn't know if he meant the building we were in or what he meant. I didn't know what was going on, but the building we were in started to shake more and more and more and you know there were people jumping under these little desks and all this shit and I thought

It's fucking desking and I helped nobody. I basically stood in the doorway I braced myself in the doorway and just stood there and I'm like if the his buildings coming down a fucking desk And gonna help you And it went on for about ten seconds enormously loud and then all of a sudden there was this gush of smoke and gas and sutt all the windows on the outside of the building we were in blew out, and there was this flush of white dust inside the building and as the door they they opened the door we I could see that hallway all the window blew out There was dust and there was paper and there was stuff in the wind stuff in the air

um And as we got over there I realized there was no getting back out the way we came in Tower 2 was, you know, two blocks south of us. Tower 2 had imploded. That's what was coming down. Tower 2 imploded. And to give you an idea of how much damage there was two blocks north, my first deputy commissioner was in a Dodge minivan. That Dodge minivan was about 13 inches high,

right outside where we were. So basically we were stuck in this small office. And I could remember thinking like, all the shit I've been through in my life for a gun battles stabbed stabbed, craziness, right? My whole career, I'm going to fucking die in this office because I can't breathe. I mean, I could not breathe. Nobody, you know, everybody's holding their, trying to hold their clothes up around their mouth. You couldn't see, it was all this shit in your eyes. We're trying to figure

out a way out, and I was going to get my guys basically at some point you know we knew there was a series of doors that went in the opposite direction to church street. I was basically going to tell the guy start shooting the hinges off the doors that were locked. Could you see? You could barely see. Inside you could see a lot better than you could see outside.

Outside you couldn't see nothing it was clear white Inside you would just you know you were having a difficult time seeing because of the shit that was in your eyes You know some guys had stuff in the end of the rise will bleed they were getting all red But we were doing a lot better off inside than people outside there was electricity Or flashlights or no there was electricity in our building. There was electricity, it was still lit. So we're looking at these doors and I'm thinking, I'm going to tell my guys, basically shoot the hinges off the doors and we'll just take the doors and head toward church

see if we can get to church. And all of a sudden, this fucking door opens. Like one of these doors open. And there's these two short, little Spanish guys, they were maintenance guys, in maintenance uniforms. They had a shitload of keys on them. And they were about surprised. They were about as surprised to see us as we were to see them.

Imagine they come, they come they come you know walk it They don't know what happened. They don't know what's going on outside. They just know you know It's like the fucking world's coming to an end They open the door and there's the mayor the police commissioner the fire commissioner We're all in one area And I said to this guy said you have keys to these doors. He said yes, sir I said open this door, where's it go? Goes down this hallway. You have a key to that door. Yeah, open that door. So we started going

through the building through this maze of hallways. We finally came out on church street, which was about two blocks to the west, two blocks east of where we were. And we came out into that building and I know that building well. 100th Shared Street is where the General Council for the City was, the Corporation Council, right? We came into that corridor, into that the hallway, that building, the massive hallway. And I remember looking at the windows thinking, what's outside? Because I've been in that lobby a hundred times. I knew the lobby well. They had floor to ceiling plate glass windows around that lobby. I couldn't see anything on the other side of the windows. It was solid white.

It was like somebody took up fucking white sheet and laid it up on the window and I'm thinking I mean I remember at some point and I don't know if it was then or a little later thinking Was this and was this a nuclear blast like what is this? What is all this white shit because I can't you can't see anything out those windows So there was a rotating door on that side of the building to get outside. And that door spun and as that spun, somebody was coming in and it was my deputy commissioner for administration who was actually outside when the building came down.

He came in, his name was T-Borke Carekis. He came in to the building and he had fucking blood dripping down in front of his face out of his eyes. He was covered in white dust and he could barely see. We had some guys lay him down. They were pouring water into his eyes, trying to get rid of all the shit that was in his eyes. And I walked over and I walked out that vestibule door that he came in. I walked outside and now keep in mind where five blocks from tower two, maybe a little more. I walked outside and on the ground there was this much dust at least on everything. Five blocks away.

There was this solid white dust. And there was no fucking sound. There was no sound. It's like, if I just, if I put you in a soundproof booth right now, that's what it was like. There was no sound. There was no birds, no sirens, no fucking movement. No, it was like somebody took something and put it on your head in a limited old sound. That was one of the areas feelings of that day for me because

you know how much material had to come down to muffle every bit of sound out there, right? In the city of New York? No sound, not. So I got the mayor. We couldn't go back to City Hall. His guys wanted to go to City Hall. They wanted to go earlier. So he could call the White House.

I didn't want him to go earlier so he could call the White House I didn't want him to go back to city hall. I figured if we went back to city hall and there was something else planned we wouldn't be prepared for it. Luckily we didn't go to city hall because had we we would have been walking behind tower two when it came down. So by getting him out of the danger zone, getting him back to Barclay, that part was safe. Now I'm thinking, where are we, where are we going? City Halls closed, police headquarters is evacuated. What are we going to do? I didn't want anybody to know where he was. You know, it was my job at that point. More than anything else, secure the mayor.

You need a leader to lead. He's not doing this any fucking good. If he gets, if he dies, you know, if something else happens. So I decided we're gonna, we're gonna walk up church street. We're gonna go to the Soho Grand Hotel. I sent my guys to the Soho Grand and I said, take over the hotel, take over the inside of the hotel. We use that as a temporary command center until we can figure out what else is happening. Because in my mind, if they hit the Pentagon, they hit both of the biggest financial buildings in the country. What else is there? Right? I didn't know about 93 at the time. So we walk up to the Soho Grand. We walk in one door. We're walking in the advanced teams up there. They're

trying to get a bunch of phones at place. I walk in, I look around. The whole fucking base of that hotel was glass. I looked around, I took one look around, I looked at the mayor, he looked at me, I said, when you stay in here, gotta go. Walk through the lobby, in one door, out the other door and started walking continued down church street until we got to Houston. There was a fire station in Houston Street. It was completely locked. There was nobody in it. Everybody from that station had gone to the trade center. We broke, broke into the fire station. The mayor used the phone inside and at that point I decided you know what I got to get him out of the danger zone. I got to get him in a place where it's going to

be secure. Nobody's going to know. I pulled up the car. I told my guys throw him in a car. We're going to the New York City police Academy. New York City Police Academy was in Grammacy Park, so to speak, on 20th Street, 20th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. That's where the Academy was. We're going to the Academy. So it's my administration, my deputies, the people of it with me,

his immediate staff, we all jumped in the car. We took off series of cars and we went to the police academy. We set up a temporary command post there. I called all the press. There was a press pool, there was a number of reporters that were with us. I had to meet me outside.

I got a mole in one group. I said, so listen up. Here's the deal. This is going to be our temporary command post. This area in everything around it and buy it is embargoed. I don't know photos. I don't know pictures. I don't know locations given over the networks. I want nothing. If you do it, I will arrest you. I'll lock you to fuck up. Nothing. I don't want nobody to know the mayor's here. I don't want nobody to know where we're at. Clear? Yeah. Okay. Good. Boom. Went back inside. side. And then basically that's where that was our the beginning of our operational day. Mayor was talking to the by then the mayor talked to the president because the president was in Florida. Mayor talked to the president, talked to some of the other city leaders, talked to the governor, the governor was on the way to see us. That was the beginning of our day. How much time had passed from the

time you were trapped in there to the time we got the mayor and the command center? Probably an hour, an hour and a half. What was the drive like? I mean, where the streets? Streets were pretty much clear at that time. Everybody was, you know, keeping in mind, this was the World Trade Center. So you could see the World Trade Center all the way uptown. If you're looking down seven, that I'm going to see it.

It was gone. Trade Center was gone. As we were walking up church street, going to that firehouse, Tower One imploded. We heard it imploded. We heard it come down. People around us, people were screaming, yelling. Every time one of the buildings came down, there was this mad push of this debris and the dust and the papers and all that stuff, you know, that stuff pushed for blocks and blocks. So all of a sudden Manhattan was saturated. During the course of calling for the rescue and the response teams, we shut Manhattan down from 14th Street all the way south. That was, you know, that was

30 blocks north of Tower 1 and 2, but we closed all of southern Manhattan down. The only people allowed to, this is another thing that I think was historic at the time. It was probably the first time in the history of the city. New York City was closed. There were signs of you go back, you'll see. I called for the closing of the city. New York City closed. There's big signs at the tunnels, at the bridges.

Nobody was allowed to come into the city unless you were a first responder. The only people allowed to come in were first responders. That's it. How fast were we able to make that decision to evacuate the city? Was that any more? It was one thing after another.

Yeah. You know, the evacuation was all part of the... The other thing about the evacuation that I think people don't realize, we got probably over a million, and a half people let a Southern Manhattan over about a four, five hour period without incident, without incident. No headaches, everything was smooth, cops were doing their job, people were uniting, people were doing their job, you know, we had a lot of volunteers, a lot of people were coming to help. You know, you'd be surprised at how a country can come together when they have to.

Regardless of the color of your skin, your religion, your political party didn't make any difference. There's a story. This is a true story, but there's only a couple of people that can tell it. One of them is me, one of them is mayor. We were actually there. President Bush came to Ground Zero on September 15th. It came down to Ground Zero, looked around.

When he got up on the big pile with the bullhorn And he said, you know the people that did this they're gonna be held accountable They're gonna hear us. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna do to them what we need need to do all that You know, he'd like motivating inspiring Well when he was done he wanted to go see the the families of the people that were missing You know, all that list you had, right? 23 cops, 23, my guys, 37-40-30 cops, and their executives, they lost 343 firefighters. The families of those missing, they were in the Javits center up on 34th Street, so the president wanted to go see them.

And so the president says, come on, let's go. You'd get in my car. Well, he was in a suburban. The president's suburban has four fucking seats in it, right? Well, the six of us. So it's me, the mayor, Governor Patakis, like six, seven, right? me, the mayor, Governor Patakis, like 6'7", right? Richie Shire, the OEM guy and the fire commissioner, were pretty big boys. So the president goes getting a suburban. And I said, Mr. President, I said we'll have to get another car, because, you know, it's too many of us. He said, get in, everybody get in.

So literally, we get in the suburban. And we're like this. My legs are over the president's leg like this. Everybody's in the suburban. And we drive from ground zero, we go up the West Side Highway and going up the West Side Highway to 34th Street, there's thousands of people. And they're in the streets with these big fucking signs, you know God bless America Go get a Mr. President George Bush with big fucking hearts and all this all this shit, right?

And the president as we're going up with the one side highway Bush is looking at the window and he says look at this. He says to Giuliani. He's so look at us He said I can't believe the unity. He said I love these people. These are God loving people. These are they love this country And the mayor looked at the president. He said mr. President. He says I Hate to be the one to tell you this But we are on the west side of Manhattan Not one of those people voted for you.

And everybody burst out laughing, right? Governor Pataki was laughing the loudest. And the mayor looked at him, he said, Governor, I don't know what you're laughing at. None of them voted for you either. Because this is the West Side of Manhattan. Super liberal, right? But here's what bothers me. Yeah, this super liberal was the West Side of Manhattan. Those people fucking hated George Bush before that day. But on that day, and in the days after, and on the time during the attack, they loved this country.

They loved that flag. They loved George Bush. This was this was hallowed ground. This was the first battleground in this 20 year war against global terrorism. Where are those fucking people today? Yeah. Where are all those people today? Where are those people that were fucking scattered like mice battered like mice that were scared to death. You know, you know, with a rat, they're attacking cops. The colon for a socialist society.

They're talking, everything that they can talk about when it comes to an anti-America. I don't get it. What do you need a September 11th to like, you know, bring them back to reality? I fucking hate it. I hate it. I hate it more than any, you know, up until four or five years ago, from that day on, from September 11th on, I don't think anybody was more of a proponent to go after radical Islam than I was. I knew it, I understood it, I was a witness to it, I was there for the most substantial terror attack in world history. Up until five years ago, if you asked me, what is the greatest threat against this country, I would have said radical Islam. I would have said the same people that attacked

us on September 11th, they're still out there. They have the same mindset it hasn't changed. It's not going anywhere. But today, that's not my greatest fear. Today, my greatest fear is the infusion of socialism in this country. My greatest fear is that we have fucking congressmen. We have people in the House of Representatives that are Marxist, that are far left-wing radicals, that despise this country. We have leftists in the House of Representatives that think it's okay to be a Venezuelan or Cuba or China or Iran. We have members in the House of Representatives that despise Israel and what it stands for to me

That's insane That's insane, but what's more insane than them being there is we have fucking Americans devoted those people into office I don't get that. I just don't get it so I don't know I'm rambling. I'm talking too much, but I don't get that. I just don't get it. So I don't know, I'm rambling. I'm talking too much, but I don't get it either. I never will. I don't know. How long was New York cities shut down for? Well, look, the initial rescue attempts, and I say attempts because there were no rescues. Really, nobody was rescued. If you were in the building above the impact zone or in and around the base of the building when the buildings come down, you died.

That was it. Every one of those guys that we met at that command center, the Fire Department priest, the father judge, that blessed us, and told us to go and be careful. He died. The chief of the Fire Department died. The chief of operations for the Fire Department died. The first deputy commissioner for the Fire Department, they were all at that command center. We missed that by 15 to 20 minutes.

Damn. Had we stayed 15 to 20 minutes at that longer where they were, we were that also. So the initial rescue attempts, that stuff went on for two weeks, three weeks, and it turned into a recovery mission. And the recovery lasted pretty much right up into the time that the last piece of debris was pulled out of ground zero and that was almost six months to the day of the attack. And keep in mind that debris was moved, that rotation of removing debris from ground zero, getting that stuff out of there, that six months was 24 hours a day.

They had construction and trucking teams working on that debris 24 hours a day for six months, around the clock. Everything that was at ground zero was taken to fish skill in Staten Island. And basically that turned into the biggest crime scene and evidence collection site in US history. Because everything that was in ground zero

was transferred to Fischskill. And we went through it there. And so think of this, you know, two of the biggest buildings in the US, 110 stories tall. The metal beams that were, that the buildings were built out of, made out of, there were 1700 pounds per linear foot. All of that material was taken to Staten Island, and then it was sifted through right down

to the point that we found earrings. We found wedding bands. We found driver's licenses. Every bit a material, physical material, from ground zero, eventually, went through a sifting mechanism where we could find evidence, personal belongings, and things like that. That went on for almost another year.

How are you able to identify remains and notify families, get an accurate count? You know, initially, if you go back to those times, you know, we lost, you know, just over 2,000 people that day, but the numbers that were coming in of anticipated losses. We were up like 16,000, 20,000, 22,000. People were calling from all over the world, saying, my son was in the building, my son was supposed to be there.

I think my daughter was there, whatever the case may be. That went on for quite a few weeks, until we finally get the numbers down, where we had a pretty good idea of what the losses were, but still, I think one of the untold stories about 9-11 was the DNA process. And here's why. So picture if you had a family member, if you lived in Scotland somewhere, and you had a family member that was in the building, you thought it was in the building that day, where you knew they were. And you file a report that they were in the building and they're probably lost as a result.

Well we would have to get DNA, right, to prove that in our collection process. So in Scotland, you'd have to send a local constable to the residents. The local constable would get a hair sample, a brush, a toothbrush, whatever, wherever you would collect DNA from, they would do the packaging there. They would take it from that local constable to Glasgow. Glasgow would send it to Interpol. Interpol would send it to Glasgow. Glasgow would send it to Interpol. Interpol would send it to London. London would send it to the Bureau. And the Bureau in New York would send it to us. And we would then transfer it to the morgue.

That DNA came from all over the world. Holy shit. Nobody has any idea like that that kind of stuff was going on. We had DNA coming from all over the world. And it was a process to finally get it to get it to the morgue, right? Because keep this in mind. And this is, you know, it's a bit morbid. I lost 23 people that day. 23 New York cops that were from me, right? If this was a cup,

I could give back most of them to their families unless I've a cup than this, because they vaporized, they disintegrated. Much of what we found were not human remains. Much of what we found were not human bodies. Most of what we found were pieces of meat. We find a shirt with some blotches of human remain on it. We find, you know, you find a finger.

You find a foot or a piece of body. You found more body pieces than you found bodies. And that's something we had to deal with as well. That in a lot of instances, there was just nothing left. The first two cops that we found, I'm almost positive, was Delara and Langone. I got notified that they had found these two cops that worked for us. I went down to ground zero and, you know, to be there when they brought them out. And they basically came out with two orange home depot buckets. And when I looked in the home depot buckets, it was a block with the metal portion of the lock intact.

It was a spring from the lock. It was a handcuff key. It was a pair of handcuffs. There was a shield pin for one of the guys badges from a shield. There was a metal buckle. But think of this. There was nobody. There was no vest.

No pants, no shirt, no nothing. Two guns and all that material that they had on, every piece of metal they had on, was side by side. But there was nothing else. That's the kind of stuff, you know, it was like that that we had to deal with. Some you found more, much money you found less. How were you not in the families? Initially, the first notification was that afternoon on the 11th, around 530. I had been out with the mayor. I had been to the temporary command post.

The mayor and I went back to ground zero a couple times. I think we were sort of denial. We kept going back to, you know, just to see what was going on. We drove by the hospitals going downtown. I can remember driving down 7th Avenue and, you know, passing St. Vincent's thinking that's gonna be loaded with people, you know, passing St. Vincent's thinking that's gonna be loaded with people, you know, survivors.

And there was nobody, all the doctors were sitting on the sidewalks, just sitting on the sidewalks sitting next to Gurney's, all these Gurney's lined up. Nobody, nobody came. They were all just sitting out there, waiting, hoping that there were survivors. And I can, I remember getting back to headquarters that afternoon, my first deputy, Joe Dunn, came into me and he said, Commissioner, we have the missing, we have the families.

They brought them in by helicopter from wherever they were. Many of them out on Long Island picked them up, brought them to headquarters. And the role in the auditorium, Dale Steers. So around 5.30 that night, 6 o'clock that night, I walked into the auditorium and met with the 23 families, my 23 that were missing. Walked in and basically told them, look, you know, right now we're trying to be as optimistic as we can.

We hope that there are survivors. You know, the reality was for me and Giuliani and the fire commissioner, anybody that was down there, if you were down there and you got to see what we saw, you pretty much knew the chances of survival were really slim. But there were pockets of, you know, especially under, you know, we're at tower two and tower one were of, especially under, you know, we're at Tower Two and Tower One, we're underground. There were a whole, you know,

it was like a whole community under there, right? Three, four floors, five floors. There were shops and stores and, you know, walkways and carters and all the stuff. So, you know, in our mind, you're hoping maybe somewhere down there, there's a void, right? Maybe somebody, you know, somebody, you know, they're in that void, they're down there in an area where they were saved, but the heat, the damage, the devastation, everything that we saw on top, you know, you

pretty much knew the chance of that were pretty slim. When I walked into that room and I had to tell the families, you know, one, we're going to be optimistic until we feel otherwise. Two, we're going to do everything in our power to find them. Three, we're working as hard as we can. And four, anything you need, whatever it is, no matter what it is, you let us know and we're going to get it for you. And from that point on, we assigned a cadre of staff to each family. Drivers, cars, resource officers. So every family had a sort of a designated team of people around them. From that command,

that was with that family pretty much until they were buried. After everything had happened and the city was kind of returning back to normal. How much longer did you have his commissioner? Three and half months. What was the morale of the city when you left? I honestly think the morale was okay. Look, we had been attacked. We had suffered the most substantial terror attack in world history.

It hurt us and it hurt us bad. But the one thing that came out of that attack in the aftermath was the resilience of the American people, the resilience of the people of New York. of the American people, the resilience of the people of New York. I remember the first Yankee game after the attack, President Bush going out onto the field to throw the ball out. That kind of stuff was amazing for the morale of the city. You've never heard a president cheered, like they cheered for President Bush walking out in the Yankee Stadium that day.

I don't give a damn if you like you could be the biggest Democrat, the biggest liberal, the biggest left-wing lunatic going, you were still screaming and yelling, George Bush's name. I think the unity that came out as a result of the attack was something that's been unparalleled in this country. You know, I've heard about it, and I'm sure you have to, in the aftermath of World War I and World War II, where, you know, the country came together, and, but I got to tell you some,

I don't know if there's anything more substantial than what we witnessed in the aftermath of September 11th. I had fucking school kids like every grade you can imagine in classrooms all over the country sent bags of mail cards to the NYPD. I mean they came in and bags like you know reminded me of that you know the show you know the Christmas show where they're walking to the courtroom with the bags of mail for Santa Claus. That's what it was like Those kind of bags were coming into the NYPD They didn't know they were writing to they didn't know why they were writing. They were just sending notes of support and love and compassion

It's unlike anything we've ever seen before and Like I said I often wondered today Where the fuck are those people today? Like, what happened? What happened between then and now? You know, we should be stronger today than we were. We should have learned from that. You know, and I think, look, I think a lot of it is, you know, the millennial generation is just not educated on history. I think, you know, our teachers in schools today, grammar schools, high schools, colleges, they're not teaching history. You know, I have two daughters, 21 and 18 years old. Both of them, both of them, no more about the attack on the World Trade Center, the most grown adult sign now, but they didn't learn a damn thing in school.

They didn't learn it from school. They learned it from me. They learned it from friends and colleagues and people that I work with. That's how they learned. One of them wasn't even born. My 18 year old wasn't even born then. She knows more about that attack prior to and after in most adults, most teachers, because the fucking teachers don't teach.

You know, they're too busy indoctrinating our kids today, you know, with socialist ideas and all this leftist woke bullshit. That's the problems we have today. I remember how you noted we were. I just got out of boot camp. I was going to still training and I don't remember when I started to see the country divide again probably because I was fucking fighting and I didn't have time to look at that shit. But at the beginning of this whole thing, I asked, do you think things happen for a reason?

And do you believe in fate? And you said yes. And then we brought it up again when you took commissioner about how that molded you into what you needed to be to handle that situation and what happened that day. Do you think maybe We're at where we are right now. Was a country Going through what we're going through You think we're gonna come out

Some way or you think we're going through this for a reason and we're gonna come out stronger than we were before I think we're going through this for a reason and we're going to come out stronger than we were before. I want to believe that. I want to believe that this is a learning curve for the United States. I want to believe that there are far more many people out there that love the country, that love our flag than not. I want to believe that But I also, you know, I'm not a genius, but I followed history

um And I've looked at countries where they have infused and in turn to socialism You know whether it's Cuba whether it's Venezuela or others How that happened? you know, when it started, how it started. And when you look at that, I see the same thing here. I see it, I feel it. Talk to somebody, talk to somebody in this country today that lived in the Soviet Union and got out, got out and escaped to the United States. Talked them about why they did,

what they were experiencing, what they were seeing, what they were living through, and then ask them today, what are you afraid of? Because they'll tell you right now, they're scared to death because they're seeing the same fucking things that they went through back in the 70s and 60s in the Soviet Union. Like, they can't believe their eyes. Like, I can't believe what I'm going through right now. I left a country to get away from that shit and this country is reverting to it.

I hear it constantly, constantly. That's what scares me. And I think, you know, I think we need leadership in the White House that's going to put this country first or flag first. I think we have to stop electing people. And I'm not talking about just Democrats. I'm talking about Republicans as well. Stop electing people that don't think of this country first. They think of their own fucking careers first. You know, they're really a part of the political swamp. Stop electing those people. Start focusing on local elections. I don't give a fuck of it. It's your PTA, your city council, your county freeholder, your, you know, your borough,

whatever, start looking at your local elections because that's where these people come from. These people that wind up in the House of Representatives or in the CUS Senate, well, they started somewhere. They started in those fucking positions I just talked about. Stop electing people, they're socialist. I think what you're saying too is stop looking, stop looking and electing the party and look at the

fucking person that's right you're elect person. That's right. You're electing. Now, the party. Look at the person. That's right. I mean, I just, I have to, you know, I've known all the political players, right, since Bush, right? I know, you know, I was nominated for Homeland Security by President Bush. I worked for him in Iraq. I got to know him through 9-11.

You know, then there was Obama. I didn't know him personally, but I know everybody around them. I knew Hillary. You know, she was a U.S. Senator in New York. I've worked with Giuliani. I've known Donald Trump since 1995. I know him long before he ran for president. I've known Joe Biden for fucking 25 years, right?

Ever since I worked for Giuliani, I knew Biden. Here's the bottom line. I think the political parties kill us. I think they kill us. I think our military commanders, they're way too political today. I think cops, I think police executives today are too fucking political. You know, we live by a constitution. We swear to that constitution,

whether it's the military or law enforcement. You raise your right hand and you take an oath to protect and serve this country. It doesn't talk anything about your fucking political party in there. You have a job to abide by and enforce the rules and the laws of that constitution. But people don't do it. They're following the party line. And it's wrong. It's destroying this country. You know, we've got to stop indoctrinating kids in grammar school and high school in college. Teach them history.

Nothing will do more for them to teach them real history because you can't fix something that you don't know is broken. You have to teach them. You know, it's sort of the way I govern, right? It's sort of the way I manage. You can't fix something if you don't know it's broken. You can't, you don't know how bad something is unless you actually measure it. What gets measured gets done, right?

Teach them history. If they learn history, they'll learn the difference between good and bad and good and evil. They'll learn what's right and wrong. They'll learn all those bad things that happen in World War II and World War I, you know, and the result of 9-11, how do we get there?

What was going on before that? The fucking kids today don't know. They don't know because nobody's teaching them. I just think it's devastating to the future of this country if we don't fix that If we don't fix it and you know, it's got to fix it parents Because the parents, you know you see now only now only recently with this super left-wing walk mentality You see parents now standing up. So whoa whoa whoa wait a minute critical race theory No

We're not gonna do that We're not I'm not gonna tell my kid that he's Substanded to another or I don't want to tell my kid. He's better than another You know we've we've spent a lifetime telling everybody they're equal They should be equal and now we're doing everything in our fucking power to tell them, no, you're not equal. This one's better. That one's upstander. This one's better. Now, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're contradicting everything we have tried to do in the last 200 years. And it's only happened in the last, in the last 20 maybe, in the last 15. Barack Obama began this movement. He is the one I blame. I blame him because, and I

blame him for one personal reason. This is personal to me. I spent my whole life with my kids, for my kids, from the day they were born. I've taught them everybody's the same. I don't care what color they are, I don't care what religion they are, where they come from, no different, nobody's different. They may be good and bad. They may be different different types of people But the role equal everybody's equal and it wasn't until Barack Obama

Barack Obama stood in the fucking White House and told my kids that they're different That was wrong. He started this movement and I fucking hate him for it. I think we're going through something. There's an old saying a lot of people say it. Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men and weak men create hard times. And right now we're at the weak man's. We're in that circle, right? That's right.

I believe it. I believe it. Hard times created you. Well, hopefully we fulfill the circle. I hope you're right. I hope we do too. But one burning, I just want to say again, truly, it was an honor to have you here today and to relive that. And I think it's extremely important. It's the 20th anniversary. And hopefully we educate a lot of America's youth

on what happened that day. And... So let me, let me say this before you close. Living through 9-11 taught me a lot. As we talked about, I've had the honor and the privilege to lead a group of men and women that without doubt affected one of the greatest rescue missions in this country's history. But the job didn't stop there. That was the beginning. That was only the beginning of something that had to be done. And what had to be done is we had to search out and eliminate the enemy that hit us on that day and had hit us many times prior.

And it was, you know, it was 9-11 that put that motion and as a result we basically ramped up our military, people like you, people like Eddie Gallagher, people like the guys that took out of some of them in Latin. The men and women on our special operations community, the men and women on our military that sit in, you know, intel bunkers and, you know, locate these terrorists all over the world. It was really an honor for me in the aftermath of 9-11 to get to meet people like you and others that basically went to defend us, to fight the fight that had to be fought.

When George Bush stood up on that mound and said, the people that did this is going to hear from us. Well if anybody had any doubts, they didn't have any doubts after those first special operations teams went into Afghanistan on horseback. They didn't have any doubts when we went into Fallujah, Mosul, or you know, when after the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, all over this world. So, you know, for me to be here today to talk to you about the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is one thing, but it also gives me an opportunity to say thank you to you and to the men and women like you that have served this country, selflessly, almost, served this country.

And in the name of, you know, the United States of America to come to our defense and really fight back for the losses that we took on that day. So thank you. Thank you. I have one question left. Is there anything you would have changed about your leadership that day for the NYPD and the people of New York? I don't think so.

I don't think so. You know, it's weird. You know, a day like that, I'm sure there's certain times in your career. There's one or two times in your career where you, you know, it's something you think of constantly. I think of 9-11 every day, every single day. Whether I think of it on my own, whether somebody walks up to me in the streets and thanks me for my service. Whether it's, you know, I'm walking down the street and I see an aircraft flying super low that I think is super low. It takes me back to that day. I think about it pretty much

every day. And I look at it this way. I'm not perfect. I'm not an angel, but I did the best I could on that day, and in the aftermath of that day. And I had the privilege and honor to serve some very heroic and dedicated men and women that did a job that most people, especially the critics of today, would never have the balls to do in the first place. I don't think I can ask to change anything. I think we do what we could under the circumstances and I'm proud of what the men and women in the NYPD fired apartment in the Port Authority police.

I couldn't be more proud of what they've done. I think the majority of the country is extremely proud as well, and I am too, and... God bless you, and... Thank you. God bless America. God bless America, thank you. It's time to get away in a new Hyundai vehicle during the Hyundai Getaway sales event at Woodhouse Hyundai.

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and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of day jub is sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from Inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way. All of the positive things have come out of this,

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