Speaker 1: Disclaimer.
Speaker 2: We'd like to know before the start of this interview
Speaker 2: that the opinions about to be expressed by the guest
Speaker 2: of tonight's Getting Salty Experience Podcast are that of the
Speaker 2: guest and do not directly or necessarily reflect the views
Speaker 2: of the host of the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 3: You're listening to the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hello, Darren DeFries. Who's gonna be busy tonight. He's
Speaker 1: gonna be my head on a swivel looking for guys
Speaker 1: who get out of line and kick out of this job.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Get Experience Podcast. It's the only one
Speaker 1: that brings the firehouse kitchen table to you. And tonight,
Speaker 1: doozy man, we got a doozy. We got a guy
Speaker 1: on here who's I got more emails and texts. But
Speaker 1: you know how the brothers are bro right? Yeah? What
Speaker 1: of the What are the brothers like? But one of
Speaker 1: the brothers. Two things that the brothers.
Speaker 4: They don't they would hate the way things are and
Speaker 4: they don't like change.
Speaker 1: Right, That's the brothers. That's it. I was. I was
Speaker 1: on the beach after Louis posted that on our social
Speaker 1: media and guys would send it in these ship on Facebook.
Speaker 1: My wife is looking on him like these guys are
Speaker 1: man babies? What is going on?
Speaker 5: I put the disclaimer too, you.
Speaker 1: Did, right, I'm just gonna put a disclaimer right now.
Speaker 5: That was a lot. There was a lot of good ones,
Speaker 5: a lot of you know, that's what everybody, You're not
Speaker 5: gonna we're gonna get. This is what we do. We're
Speaker 5: gonna we're gonna talk to the guy. We're gonna get
Speaker 5: some of the questions that people had asked answered because
Speaker 5: he's not afraid to answer the questions. Does I don't know?
Speaker 1: In fact, the guy were trying to get on. Chief
Speaker 1: Pritchard said that he has no problem. I'm asking questions.
Speaker 1: He's gonna be tuned in. I don't know if he's
Speaker 1: in the chat right now. I'd love to put him
Speaker 1: against you know, right up to him and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you coming on the show. What Chief Richard? But he
Speaker 1: was saying, the guy answers questions. So every side has
Speaker 1: two stories. Every story has two sides. Right, just wait
Speaker 1: here to hear the man's side of the stories. Three
Speaker 1: sides that actually happened. Well, that's what happens, that happens
Speaker 1: with your wife. I don't know if it happens with
Speaker 1: the commission. So I'm just gonna tell you right now.
Speaker 1: If you get disrespectful, I will boot your ask right
Speaker 1: out of this chat. I will not allow you to
Speaker 1: hijack Louis and and Gonzo show. It's not happened. You
Speaker 1: got a question, ask it respectfully. Otherwise beat feet, You're
Speaker 1: gonna get kicked out.
Speaker 5: Pay for it, you cheap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you got a question, put it up there
Speaker 1: and pay for it, will you. I'm on a fixed income.
Speaker 1: Paycheck to paycheck you, Speaking of which, Gonzo play some
Speaker 1: of the commercials so I can get paid. I can
Speaker 1: put food on the table for crying out.
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Speaker 1: All right, all right, we'll roll one more. The commissioner
Speaker 1: knows that you know what's fine colt coins, So we
Speaker 1: got to do what we can. We got to scratch
Speaker 1: out some money.
Speaker 4: These smirking emails.
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Speaker 1: There we go, guys. You're asking how how you made
Speaker 1: out in the storm guns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I got stuck. Wy don't you tell him?
Speaker 1: He made that really good? He stayed with me for
Speaker 1: about a week. The kids will call him Uncle Gon's album.
Speaker 4: It was a permanent fixture at the kitchen table for
Speaker 4: a little while.
Speaker 1: That's all right.
Speaker 5: You have a lot of water.
Speaker 4: No, uh, you didn't.
Speaker 5: You didn't get hit that over by you?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 5: No, it was.
Speaker 7: It flooded the north part of Florida and the and
Speaker 7: the Big Bend as they call it up there. But
Speaker 7: that's that area always gets bombarded. Man, when the storms
Speaker 7: come up that way.
Speaker 1: It's I guarantee you that the hurricane wouldn't blow your
Speaker 1: hair out of whack, bro, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: Trying to make sure I appreciate the comments.
Speaker 1: By the way, I can feel you. All right, remind
Speaker 1: me we got to do health and safety tip towards
Speaker 1: the end. Yes, I'm leaving that with you, gotcha. All right,
Speaker 1: let's say it for I don't want to call him Tom.
Speaker 1: You want to call him the commissioner. You want to
Speaker 1: miss the commission. You're like Tom though, like you call
Speaker 1: kill Duff and right, I got to bring him in there.
Speaker 5: You bring him in all for fd N Y commission
Speaker 5: to Tom von Essen.
Speaker 1: He wanted.
Speaker 5: To keep He said he had to keep his wits
Speaker 5: about him. He didn't want to get off to uh.
Speaker 8: You know a bet you started up. You started off
Speaker 8: with a good name. Then killed Uf was top of
Speaker 8: the line.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 5: See, and I like to call him Louis.
Speaker 1: Louis calls him and I call him chief killed Uff.
Speaker 8: I don't know throwing whatever you want.
Speaker 1: I n felt funny calling you Tom, he said, call
Speaker 1: me Tom. I don't know about him.
Speaker 5: It's the voice. All right, let's do the uh.
Speaker 1: Patriot, we gotta patriotic quick, here we go.
Speaker 3: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States
Speaker 3: of America and to the Republic, for which it stands,
Speaker 3: one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
Speaker 1: And one other thing we haven't done for a while.
Speaker 1: That commission von Essen brought to our attention is our
Speaker 1: word of the day guns. Yes, today, his word of
Speaker 1: the day is.
Speaker 5: I think that's what he said in the pre show.
Speaker 5: He's not going to drink tonight because he might use
Speaker 5: that word fifty times tonight, so cool is probably going
Speaker 5: to be tipsy and about.
Speaker 4: I'm right there with you, so hopefully.
Speaker 1: How many guys told you not to do the show, Commissioner.
Speaker 8: Well, I told you my brother who always gave me
Speaker 8: good advice. He was three thirty two engine a delegate,
Speaker 8: and when he drove me for a long time, he said,
Speaker 8: do not do that show.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 8: Those guys are do to show are good guys, he said,
Speaker 8: but you get some real blockheads and.
Speaker 1: What about hairbags?
Speaker 5: And he oh, all right, let's take it easy.
Speaker 1: You just got here. First of all, thanks were coming
Speaker 1: on the show, even though your brother told you not
Speaker 1: to come on the show. Well, you appreciate it, Commissioner.
Speaker 1: He was always right too. This time he's wrong. We're
Speaker 1: gonna make sure his time he is wrong. All kyla, Shoot,
Speaker 1: I was watching too. He probably not watch I don't
Speaker 1: see him anyway. Let's go. Let's go back a little
Speaker 1: bit to the beginning, because guys probably don't know. Let
Speaker 1: me find you a little bit about your history on
Speaker 1: the job. Commissioner, Uh, tell us about what made you
Speaker 1: want to be a finman.
Speaker 8: Was anybody in a family of fiming or No, I
Speaker 8: didn't come from a firefighter family. I was uh in
Speaker 8: college and I was a real screw up. Screwed up
Speaker 8: a couple of times, got thrown out a few times.
Speaker 8: I joined an officers program. They threw me out of
Speaker 8: the officers program. I was in Submarines. So I went
Speaker 8: in Submarines for a couple of years, had a wife,
Speaker 8: a baby, another baby on the way. I came out.
Speaker 8: I really needed a job, so I went on thinking
Speaker 8: I'll go back to school now and study and leave
Speaker 8: and get another job. But then when I finished college
Speaker 8: on the job, I really loved it. It was so
Speaker 8: much fun. The guys in the South Bronx that I
Speaker 8: worked in were just a really great company, a lat
Speaker 8: of forty two, and so I stayed. I loved it.
Speaker 8: The guys were just great, and it kind of ruined
Speaker 8: me for you know, the rest of my thirty two
Speaker 8: years on a job, because I never had any patience
Speaker 8: with hairbags. I'll try to use the sound the fact
Speaker 8: after working with such phenomenal guys in in South Bronx
Speaker 8: all those years, well he.
Speaker 1: Got out in seventy, which was like the middle or what
Speaker 1: was that like over the war years? How was it
Speaker 1: over there? It was crazy.
Speaker 8: I mean they say that the worst years were sixty
Speaker 8: five to seventy five. Those are the worst years I
Speaker 8: think in the fire service as far as fire doing
Speaker 8: so caught five you know, quite a few good years,
Speaker 8: and then you know, they were the worst years. But
Speaker 8: it was busy for a long time. The company I
Speaker 8: was in was an occupied area in sixty five, and
Speaker 8: then it became more and more and more vacant as
Speaker 8: the neighbors deteriorated. So it was the South bronx Halem
Speaker 8: parts of Brooklyn. That's where you know, all the crazy
Speaker 8: work was at the time, and that's where everybody you
Speaker 8: know made their bones. It was just good places. The
Speaker 8: good guys stayed. The other guys realized they were in
Speaker 8: the wrong place, and it was It was a terrific experience.
Speaker 8: I think for a young guy.
Speaker 1: Some of the guys you had to weed out, right,
Speaker 1: they didn't know necessarily that they were in the wrong
Speaker 1: place maybe, or that those guys just you know, you know.
Speaker 8: The funny thing. The funny thing about the fire duty
Speaker 8: you didn't have to weed anybody out because it was
Speaker 8: real easy to get out of those units.
Speaker 1: At the time.
Speaker 8: It's hard to get in, so when you got in one,
Speaker 8: you could easily get out if it was wrong for you.
Speaker 8: It wasn't all the guys that that left weren't bad guys.
Speaker 8: Some of them just thought like, well, what's the point here.
Speaker 8: You know, I'm getting paid a dollar a guy in
Speaker 8: slow houses getting paid the same dollar. What am I doing?
Speaker 8: You know, taking all the risks and everything. So the
Speaker 8: guys had to be a little nuts, But I enjoyed
Speaker 8: being with guys a little nuts with some of the guy.
Speaker 5: You remember, Okay, I was just gonna say that.
Speaker 1: You seenior guy there was? You know who was you
Speaker 1: seeing the guy was? Were there a lot of World
Speaker 1: War two vets that were seeing the guys there?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, well they were They weren't that old, you know,
Speaker 8: they weren't World War two vets. It was one of
Speaker 8: two guys. They kind of left. It was so busy
Speaker 8: that the older guys really left.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: The old guys were like thirty five and forty an
Speaker 8: old guy. Then it was just so much fire duty.
Speaker 8: And they called the house the Elephant house at the
Speaker 8: time because the guys were so big. I was about,
Speaker 8: you know, six foot, like one ninety and I was
Speaker 8: tiny at the time, and guys are really powerful and
Speaker 8: strong guys. The house next to it, we were the
Speaker 8: Elephant house. The engine was Latasa Kaka, right, Yeah. The
Speaker 8: guys in the truck, you know, it was really a
Speaker 8: German guys. Everything was clean and spotless. The guys in
Speaker 8: in the engine I think deliberately kept the place as
Speaker 8: shitty as possible just to annoy the guys.
Speaker 5: That sounds about right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, nothing changes, you know, that's it.
Speaker 1: But did you stop becoming interested in the union and
Speaker 1: representing the guys?
Speaker 8: You know? I I finished college, I finally got my
Speaker 8: act together, and then I got a graduate degree and
Speaker 8: I was going to teach. And then I started teaching,
Speaker 8: I realized I didn't like kids as much as I
Speaker 8: like my own kids. So I said, you know, the
Speaker 8: guys in the Union had asked me to run, and
Speaker 8: I said, you know, oh, I tried it, and I
Speaker 8: wound up winning. They were like eight guys that ran
Speaker 8: for Trustee and it was a runoff and then I won,
Speaker 8: and it was just I guess, just for a change,
Speaker 8: you know. Yeah, and I liked it. There's a lot
Speaker 8: of parts of the Union you don't like. You know,
Speaker 8: you don't like all the work you have to do
Speaker 8: for the hairbags, but you do like, you do like
Speaker 8: what you do for the good guys, because a lot
Speaker 8: of good guys get jammed up and you want to
Speaker 8: help them, So that was the fun part of it.
Speaker 8: The other guys that if you had a business, you
Speaker 8: would have fired them too. But that's the union's job
Speaker 8: to represent everybody.
Speaker 1: So were you were? You were a delegate before you
Speaker 1: ran for trustee though, right, so what yeah, what made
Speaker 1: you want to you know? Where did that come from? Though?
Speaker 1: Just time?
Speaker 8: I didn't I didn't want to be a delegate. The
Speaker 8: delegate was a senior man. His name was Werner van Helsing.
Speaker 8: He was about he's about up there, man. Yes, yes,
Speaker 8: he came up to me one day and he said,
Speaker 8: you're the new delegate.
Speaker 1: And that was it.
Speaker 8: He didn't want he didn't want to do it anymore.
Speaker 5: So I was a delegate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know those I used to get all that,
Speaker 1: like eleven o'clock at night, Hey, keV, because I was
Speaker 1: a delegate. Listen. I went down to the quartermaster. I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to get two pairs of shorts. The guys only
Speaker 1: gave me one pair of shorts. I'm like, you call
Speaker 1: me eleven o'clock, call me a eleven o'clock, me one
Speaker 1: pair of shorts. It really is a factless job. Man.
Speaker 8: You get to the union and you see another side
Speaker 8: of the job. You know, right, So then you ran
Speaker 8: for what Brooklyn trustee. No, it was a Bronx trustee box.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 8: Then it ran for secretary and uh. That's when I
Speaker 8: started getting involved in safety, which was really an eye
Speaker 8: opener for me because I always thought that as busy
Speaker 8: as we were, we really weren't interested in safety. We
Speaker 8: were we were very aggressive. We enjoyed the excitement, and
Speaker 8: I saw so many injuries and everything, and I thought unnecessary.
Speaker 8: I saw you know that, and we mentioned we talked
Speaker 8: about it before. The good chief, the conscientious chief, the
Speaker 8: major do woll things to keep you safe. You didn't
Speaker 8: like him. You like the other guy who drank with
Speaker 8: you and let you do whatever you wanted to do,
Speaker 8: and he was the popular guy. So I got kind
Speaker 8: of I turned off on it. I started to visit
Speaker 8: all the fight departments around the country, and I found
Speaker 8: out that the safest fight departments the ones who were
Speaker 8: able to train and equip and everything else, So the
Speaker 8: ones that didn't do any fire duty. And it was
Speaker 8: really hard to keep guys safe because even if you
Speaker 8: don't do fire duty, you're going to get a fire
Speaker 8: once in a while, and you really have to be prepared,
Speaker 8: and I don't think odd job worried about that years back,
Speaker 8: training everybody and keeping everybody sharp because they thought all
Speaker 8: the guys were doing fire duty. Well they knew what
Speaker 8: they were doing. They didn't have to bother with them,
Speaker 8: you know what I mean, So you kind of let go.
Speaker 8: All the people would need the most training. The people
Speaker 8: will be getting friars infrequently. So it opened up my
Speaker 8: eyes and I for me it became safety became like
Speaker 8: a mandate for the rest of my time on the
Speaker 8: job and for my you know, rise up in the
Speaker 8: department and or the union and then president and then
Speaker 8: five mission.
Speaker 5: Right, well you when did you get to when were
Speaker 5: you in the union? From what years? You remember?
Speaker 8: Like yes, eighty three to the ninety. Wow, we all
Speaker 8: got thrown out because we had an arbitration that we
Speaker 8: warned the guys not to go to.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 8: Nick Mancuso as the president at the time, he begged
Speaker 8: the guys not to go. Bruce Simon was a really
Speaker 8: bright labor attorney. He begged the guys he used to
Speaker 8: come to the meeting. Do not go to arbitration. Do
Speaker 8: not go to arbitration. You have so many perks in
Speaker 8: your contract that you know, you aren't even aware of.
Speaker 8: When you go to an arbitrate, all that all that
Speaker 8: shit disappears, and then you you're almost starting all over.
Speaker 8: We had battalion detailing. I mean, what a perk that was.
Speaker 8: You you never got detailed out of your battalion, right,
Speaker 8: So that was a lot of money for the guys
Speaker 8: in the pocket because you had to detail more people
Speaker 8: in every battalion because you you couldn't take guys from
Speaker 8: one battalion and detail them to so things like that.
Speaker 8: So we went to arbitration, we got crucified. Of course,
Speaker 8: the members blamed Nick and all of us. They threw
Speaker 8: all of us out, which was pretty funny. I went
Speaker 8: back to the firehouse and almost retired, and then I thought,
Speaker 8: you know what, I'm gonna run for president. I went
Speaker 8: back and ran for president after that nineties.
Speaker 1: I want to touch on one thing that we spoke
Speaker 1: about a little briefly when you were talking about the chiefs.
Speaker 1: You know that the guys love like we talked about
Speaker 1: my brother a little bit, Chief Steve, and you wouldn't.
Speaker 1: You can't find a guy who loved the job more
Speaker 1: you did, like forty two forty three years, oh, there
Speaker 1: we go. And he was a professional. He loved the job,
Speaker 1: he loved that fun. But he was a professional. He
Speaker 1: wanted you away to the right uniform. He wanted you
Speaker 1: to drill. He did not put up with any drinking
Speaker 1: in the fire house and nothing like that. And the
Speaker 1: guy couldn't stand him for that. They like the guys
Speaker 1: who they think is a great guy, you know, the
Speaker 1: great guy who hangs out with you or you know,
Speaker 1: let you get away with ship. So that's that's the
Speaker 1: whole misconception on this job that drives me fucking crazy.
Speaker 1: The guys that that the brothers deem as really great guys.
Speaker 1: Me and Louis say it all the time. Are they
Speaker 1: really great guys? Ben? You know, like when I got
Speaker 1: on the job I used to write things down in
Speaker 1: a little journal about how I would check the rate.
Speaker 1: The guys took it and tore it up and threw
Speaker 1: it in the garbage on me. So I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: or you know, if you wore your rope or whatever
Speaker 1: it was the guys used to hide on me. I
Speaker 1: don't wear that. We don't we don't, we don't wear that,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: So well, hold on, you could still have You could
Speaker 5: still have a good a guy who's less what's the
Speaker 5: word down the line or you know, and still yeah,
Speaker 5: less strict, and he could still be sure a great guy.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's not one or the other. But I
Speaker 5: get to bear somebody just because he Because what I
Speaker 5: say all the time is I know Steve not for
Speaker 5: I grew up in Kevin's house, Like I was in
Speaker 5: his house every day he had, His father was on
Speaker 5: the job, his two brothers were on the job. So
Speaker 5: I know Steve as a ball breaker, funny guy, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean. Like, but in the fire department
Speaker 5: he was you know, like you said, he was straight
Speaker 5: on the money. You know. I would see him at
Speaker 5: jobs and it was all business.
Speaker 1: You know, if he did the right thing, you never
Speaker 1: had to worry about the guy. But they didn't like him,
Speaker 1: So I don't I never understood that logic.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well it's I think it's pretty much systemic, and
Speaker 8: I think it's pretty much always been like that. I
Speaker 8: don't know the answer to it. All I can say
Speaker 8: is you the more work you have, the easier it is,
Speaker 8: I think to manage the guys, you know what I mean.
Speaker 8: It's when you have nothing going on that the guys
Speaker 8: become more of a problem, like they don't know what
Speaker 8: to do with themselves. He gets stuff more in trouble,
Speaker 8: and then there's more of stuff that the chief has
Speaker 8: to react to, and then they're annoyed at him because
Speaker 8: he's he's putting a hammer down on him and stuff.
Speaker 8: So when there's plenty of work, you know, years ago
Speaker 8: you came back, you had a beer after a job,
Speaker 8: and you thought nothing of it because now lady had
Speaker 8: another job. You can't have a beer and a beer
Speaker 8: and a beer and a beer and have twelve beers
Speaker 8: and have no work and then get a call face.
Speaker 5: So you know.
Speaker 8: That is different. When we're really busy, you could have
Speaker 8: a few beers. I mean, so you didn't. You can
Speaker 8: understand the chief turning his head to that a couple
Speaker 8: of beers. You know, a guy's sitting in a place
Speaker 8: that doesn't have a run for twenty four hours and
Speaker 8: he's having drinking every time somebody says heir bag, you know.
Speaker 5: You know, Oh, so I've got a real block.
Speaker 8: You got my own problem. Keep the guys safe. You
Speaker 8: gotta have that balance. I think you got to care
Speaker 8: about them. You got to care about the training and professionalism.
Speaker 8: You got to think about the you know the excessiveness
Speaker 8: of injuries and everything else.
Speaker 5: But you can still be a good guy. I mean
Speaker 5: you don't have to buy Oh listen, you got to
Speaker 5: take care of the guys in the end. I mean
Speaker 5: we'll just talk. We were talking about it in the
Speaker 5: pre show with you about you know, Kevin's particular situation
Speaker 5: and other guys like that's not by the book, right,
Speaker 5: So you all took care of the guys. You still
Speaker 5: took care of business, you know, and not to be liked,
Speaker 5: but that's what you felt was the right thing to do, right,
Speaker 5: So you know.
Speaker 8: You know guys like killed off, guys like Pete Gancy,
Speaker 8: you know, they were there were a lot of good
Speaker 8: chiefs uh uh downy. I mean those guys that they
Speaker 8: knew the difference, you know, and then all of the
Speaker 8: other guys that were really strict that the guys were,
Speaker 8: you know, less popular. I mean Callan's in that picture.
Speaker 8: Calln was a phenomenal chief Alturi. Really they were good chiefs,
Speaker 8: you know, like and they were liked guys, I mean
Speaker 8: hand they were. They weren't disliked or anything. They managed
Speaker 8: and they still understood the camaraderie and the spirit you
Speaker 8: need to ask people to do some of the things
Speaker 8: we asked the guys to do, you know what I mean.
Speaker 8: It's not just a regular job sometimes, you know, like
Speaker 8: I said to Steve before the you know, everybody wants
Speaker 8: to be the man until it's time to be the man. Well,
Speaker 8: it's just like going to a job, right, you know,
Speaker 8: this job is great except for you know, getting hurt
Speaker 8: and really laying it all out there. So it's not
Speaker 8: just mutuals in time off. You know, sometimes you got
Speaker 8: to you got to put it out there. And the
Speaker 8: good chiefs will always get more out of the guys,
Speaker 8: I think than the bad ones.
Speaker 5: You know, I think, Yeah, that's come to any officer
Speaker 5: is like that, right. When did you feel like when
Speaker 5: you were in like it was like a wake up
Speaker 5: call to you in the union when you would whether
Speaker 5: you were the delegate or when you became the trustee,
Speaker 5: When did you start waking up to that? You know
Speaker 5: the political side of all of that.
Speaker 8: You know, the first couple of years there were just
Speaker 8: you know, servants and the guys. The trustee really gets
Speaker 8: down and dirty, just running all the injuries and hospitals
Speaker 8: and stuff. The drunks and and all that stuff, and
Speaker 8: then the secretary gets more involved. I got involved, like
Speaker 8: I say, with well, I met Chief Brunusini. I was
Speaker 8: working on getting back demanding that we lost even when
Speaker 8: I was secretary, that we were able to get back
Speaker 8: when I was president. So it was probably a couple
Speaker 8: of years into being secretary that I realized that you
Speaker 8: could really do a lot, you know, you could do
Speaker 8: a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so now we were talking about like you were
Speaker 1: talking about, like you know, Guanty and all those other
Speaker 1: chiefs Calendar right, like you thought they were really good chiefs.
Speaker 1: But there are some guys who think that you have
Speaker 1: a disdain overall for chiefs. What do you say to
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 8: No, I just I don't get it, you know, I
Speaker 8: see it now. I look at people in Congress, right,
Speaker 8: you take an oath, you swear you're going to do
Speaker 8: the job, and then you don't do it. I don't
Speaker 8: get that, you know, I take an oath I'm going
Speaker 8: to be a commissioner. Well, I'm going to do stuff
Speaker 8: is commission The commissioner's job is not to make you
Speaker 8: happy every day, to bring you a nice warm blanket
Speaker 8: and hot shalutput. The commissioner's job is to keep eight
Speaker 8: million people safe and get you to do your job,
Speaker 8: but keep you safe along the way. That's the main
Speaker 8: job of the commissioner. So there are an awful lot
Speaker 8: of chiefs in my opinion, as managers.
Speaker 1: Horrible, horrible.
Speaker 8: I think I think that I sent you guys a
Speaker 8: picture of that one where I got the headquarters and
Speaker 8: I got rid of half of them. They as people
Speaker 8: in headquarters running the job, in my opinion, terrible. I
Speaker 8: think that you can do a much better job with
Speaker 8: a young pure No. No, there was another one with
Speaker 8: von Essen becomes commissioner, gets rid of half of eighth floor.
Speaker 4: That kind of oh the article.
Speaker 8: Anyway, I had guys, I had a PhD in physiology
Speaker 8: that I had out in at a division of training.
Speaker 8: I had guys who who loved you know, who loved
Speaker 8: the technology, who loved the part of the of the
Speaker 8: job that we could help modernize it. Would you rather
Speaker 8: have a lieutenant with who's a marathon runner and he
Speaker 8: has a PhD in physiology? Would you rather have him
Speaker 8: running physical fitness at training? Or would you rather have
Speaker 8: some forty year old chief forty year chief who just
Speaker 8: wants to you know, on his way out, wants to
Speaker 8: be ahead of training. That was my point that you
Speaker 8: can make the job is but the police do a
Speaker 8: much better job, but that they don't have the four ranks.
Speaker 8: They have three, we have four, we have deputies. I
Speaker 8: wanted to do away with the deputy rank and just
Speaker 8: pick the best battalion chiefs in a job. Get the
Speaker 8: look at the pool of battalion chiefs and take the
Speaker 8: best ones. There's hundreds are terrific battalion chief There's hundreds
Speaker 8: are terrific. I see the guys in the job now,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of military guys, lieutenants and captains, and
Speaker 8: they're spread out through the squads and stuff like that.
Speaker 8: Those are the guys you want to lead the job
Speaker 8: because when they're in the military, they were accountable. You
Speaker 8: don't get you don't just coast in the military, and
Speaker 8: when you got twenty five years in the military, they
Speaker 8: tell you you're going nowhere, you probably should retire it. That
Speaker 8: doesn't happen in the fire department. It's a civil service.
Speaker 8: You're here forever. You can coast, or you can or
Speaker 8: you can give it a thousand percent. I wanted everybody
Speaker 8: to give a thousand percent or else just go back
Speaker 8: to the fire house or retire. That's my feeling about
Speaker 8: the chiefs. I think they are allows the managers in general.
Speaker 8: I think this bologna about having a chief that's is silly.
Speaker 8: I think one of the best ones we ever had
Speaker 8: was Safer. He walked in there and he said, Holy mackerel,
Speaker 8: this guy is. You guys are a rinky think operation here.
Speaker 8: I'm gonna we're gonna get a headquarters. We're gonna do this,
Speaker 8: We're gonna modernize, We're gonna do this. I was in
Speaker 8: the Union and I realized, like, Wow, we don't have
Speaker 8: to be sick and fiddled to the cops. We can
Speaker 8: really get emergencies. We can do this, We can do that.
Speaker 8: We were always like behind the cops because we've always
Speaker 8: pissed off every mayor we've ever had. We figured a
Speaker 8: way to have him hate us, and Juliani was the first.
Speaker 8: Juliani was the first one that didn't. He loved us,
Speaker 8: He loved me, he loved the guys, and he gave
Speaker 8: us so many things other than the two zeros that
Speaker 8: you guys will always whine about that. Juliani has said
Speaker 8: to me, I'm so sorry I did two zeros. I
Speaker 8: should have just done one.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean. But you.
Speaker 5: Before we get too fat, I just want to say
Speaker 5: one question because I think get be wound up.
Speaker 8: I'm sorry, I don't.
Speaker 5: So commission, let me ask you this. So when you
Speaker 5: get back to the story with the chiefs. So it's
Speaker 5: the system. It's not it's not the guys so much.
Speaker 5: It's the system, right or no?
Speaker 8: Some of those guys are great guys. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 5: I mean, you want to hang out.
Speaker 8: With them, You want to be with them at a
Speaker 8: fire You want to you don't you know, you don't
Speaker 8: need somebody that's running the Office of Information Technology and
Speaker 8: just say, well, you know he knows how to do Firefox.
Speaker 5: And well that's what I'm saying. He's thirty years in
Speaker 5: the fire, forty years in the firehouse, he's in front.
Speaker 5: You know, he knows how to deal with guys men.
Speaker 5: You know, he knows how to do it. Now all
Speaker 5: of a sudden he's in charge of this. That doesn't
Speaker 5: make any sense to me, right, So it's not it's
Speaker 5: not their fault so much like I don't know why
Speaker 5: guys would say that you had dislike for those guys
Speaker 5: if it really isn't their fault because they've kind of
Speaker 5: that's the path, right, isn't it.
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 8: Of course, well, of course the chiefs are gonna say
Speaker 8: on us and hates us because they just got rid
Speaker 8: of half of them in fire quarters, you know what
Speaker 8: I mean after September eleventh. They just went back to
Speaker 8: the way it was. So you guys haven't witnessed any
Speaker 8: changed in improvement and management. But you don't have to
Speaker 8: in the fire house. You just want you just want
Speaker 8: to be left alone and have fun and go lift
Speaker 8: weights and train and and have and have pone with
Speaker 8: the guys. When the commissioner's job is to make sure
Speaker 8: overtime's not abused. He's to make sure medical leave is
Speaker 8: not abused. He's to make sure that everybody is safe,
Speaker 8: that all the all the all the all the procedures
Speaker 8: and everything are in place, that there's that there's not
Speaker 8: a prejudice or there's not all these things that can
Speaker 8: go on in the fire house. So you need people
Speaker 8: to help you do that. The civilians do a much
Speaker 8: better job with that stuff. The chiefs belong, in my opinion,
Speaker 8: and you know, people don't agree, and that's fine. They've
Speaker 8: never run the department or or seen what I've seen
Speaker 8: in the Union. The best, the best people are guys
Speaker 8: like Sayer. Joe Bruno is a great commissioner, but he
Speaker 8: had a horrible time with the mayor. You know, you
Speaker 8: have to have the support of the mayor. I mean
Speaker 8: I was very fortunate. I mean, Nigro spent eight years
Speaker 8: with the worst mayor in the history of mayors. I mean,
Speaker 8: has ever been anybody worse than uh de Blesio? I
Speaker 8: don't think so. So you gotta you can only do
Speaker 8: so much when you have a mayor that really is horrible.
Speaker 8: And now Adams seems to be, you know, on the
Speaker 8: same track. They've got Banks, who is running in the
Speaker 8: fire department of police bomb It's it's not a good
Speaker 8: way to go. They well, that's another thing. You guys,
Speaker 8: what's your next question?
Speaker 5: Let me let me just he's wound up.
Speaker 1: Well, he's wound up.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just push back a little bit. Like you said,
Speaker 1: they should get rid of the deputies. But there are
Speaker 1: some good deputies at that. Like to think my brother's
Speaker 1: a good deputy who did not put up with overtime abuse,
Speaker 1: did not put up with medical leave abuse. Uh and
Speaker 1: and he and he ran a fire because I drove
Speaker 1: him my last year before I got out. I thought
Speaker 1: he was a great chief. So I think sometimes they
Speaker 1: feel like you're painting with a wide brush, like like
Speaker 1: all the deputies.
Speaker 8: No, So it's that's the point.
Speaker 5: It's not.
Speaker 8: It's not the individual deputy.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 8: Let's say there's forty deputies, right, those guys could be
Speaker 8: forty senior battalion chiefs and you could take the best
Speaker 8: battalion chief instead of having to take a deputy. That's
Speaker 8: the point. It's not the individual. It's a system. Now,
Speaker 8: your brother's a great guy. Added the forty deputies, there's
Speaker 8: probably thirty great guys. That's not the point. They were
Speaker 8: great guys maybe in managing the firehouses and managing the field,
Speaker 8: manning the operations at a fire. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 8: they're going to do a great job as the assistant
Speaker 8: commissioner for diversity or the Assistant Commissioner for planning and
Speaker 8: programming incident management teams or anything like that. That's the point.
Speaker 1: But what I hear you saying is that that leaf
Speaker 1: to staff chief where they find little nooks and crannies
Speaker 1: to hide out. And that's the problem at the front light.
Speaker 1: It's at the front line guys who will going to
Speaker 1: fires absolutely okay.
Speaker 5: And that was money.
Speaker 8: Those guys are great guys. Those guys you have to
Speaker 8: have them for fires. I mean, God, you got to
Speaker 8: have those your chiefs who have been around. I would
Speaker 8: imagine a big problem in the department today is that
Speaker 8: there's so few chiefs that actually have fire experience, right, right,
Speaker 8: I mean I see a lot of the guys they
Speaker 8: came on in two thousand, they came on in nineteen
Speaker 8: ninety eight. Well since nineteen ninety eight, you haven't had
Speaker 8: a lot of fire experience. So that means it's all
Speaker 8: book learned, and it's all you know, learned from whatever
Speaker 8: wherever they're learning all this stuff. It's not the same
Speaker 8: thing as you know, being in combat. So it's much
Speaker 8: harder for them, I would think. But they but a
Speaker 8: lot of them are going to do a great job.
Speaker 8: But it doesn't mean that they need to be running,
Speaker 8: you know, operations on fire state. I mean when I
Speaker 8: was when I came on a job, they used to
Speaker 8: call fire prevention luids, right, because anybody who was there
Speaker 8: on light duty and fire prevention. They had a miracle,
Speaker 8: they were cured. So the work lewis you know what
Speaker 8: I mean. I can't see myself absolutely, but I mean
Speaker 8: that's the point. That's the point. Fire prevention is very important.
Speaker 8: We should be so you guys can laugh like you
Speaker 8: don't want to prevent fires, you want to go to fire.
Speaker 8: If you're the commissioner, you should be trying to prevent fires. Duh, right,
Speaker 8: I mean that's your job as commissioner. It's not to
Speaker 8: let you guys have fun twenty four hours a week.
Speaker 8: It's to prevent fires. Have you ever seen a commissioner
Speaker 8: come out and say he really wants to prevent fires? No,
Speaker 8: because the guys are get pissed off.
Speaker 1: It's nuts.
Speaker 8: It's not so we started fire safety education and fire prevention.
Speaker 8: Try to bring a civilian in to run fire prevent
Speaker 8: You can't have fire guys running fire prevention. There should
Speaker 8: be a fire chief there to make sure that this
Speaker 8: crazy civilian engineer doesn't do anything stupid to put firefighters
Speaker 8: in danger. Absolutely, But all these processes and everything else,
Speaker 8: that's a big business. Fire it's a big business. It
Speaker 8: should be run like a big business.
Speaker 1: You know what.
Speaker 8: They came up to me one day when at five inventions.
Speaker 8: They said, Commissioner, I said, I got a call. I
Speaker 8: told them, I said, I got a call that you
Speaker 8: guys won't let the Secretary of Navy land on the Intrepid.
Speaker 8: They said, yes, Commissioner, it's it's a museum. So I said,
Speaker 8: the Intrepid is a museum. Yeah, I said, so I'm
Speaker 8: going to tell the Secretary of Navy that he can't
Speaker 8: land his helicopter on the interpret because you guys say
Speaker 8: it's a museum. Get out of here. Put an engine
Speaker 8: there with a charge line. If he crashes and burns,
Speaker 8: put the flavor. What are you kidding me? This is
Speaker 8: the mentality.
Speaker 5: So this was the thing I wanted to ask you.
Speaker 5: It kind of segues into this so, I mean, even
Speaker 5: for myself, I think before you even came on, when
Speaker 5: we had the little issue with the with the computer,
Speaker 5: I was talking to Gonzo and I'm like, I'm like,
Speaker 5: why would they wouldn't they take Faifa? They took Tucket, right,
Speaker 5: And that comes back to your point, like do you
Speaker 5: feel like the guy who's the field is the commissioner
Speaker 5: or gal is the commissioner should be outside of the
Speaker 5: fire service. Is that What do you think about how
Speaker 5: that generally works out, because the way you were just
Speaker 5: explaining it, you feel like it might work better for
Speaker 5: that type of scenario.
Speaker 8: I think, first of all, it's hard to generalize, okay.
Speaker 8: I mean, I'll take Safe for an example. He's comes
Speaker 8: to witness Protection and after Julian he gets elected, they
Speaker 8: bring me in and they say, we're going to do
Speaker 8: you a favor. We're going to give you chief what
Speaker 8: the hell is his name, good guy, nice guy. We're
Speaker 8: going to give you Chief so and so as fire commissioner.
Speaker 8: I said, oh my god, he's horrible. I don't want
Speaker 8: that guy. I said, he's a great fire chief, nice man.
Speaker 8: He's a what his name it was with dinkins and stuff.
Speaker 8: I forgot his name anyway. So he said, well, who
Speaker 8: do you want? I said, I don't have anybody. I said,
Speaker 8: I'd like somebody who thinks big. And he's a friend
Speaker 8: of the mayas well. A month later, Safer arrived. He
Speaker 8: was exactly very full of himself, you know, bigger than life.
Speaker 8: You know, didn't on a listen to anybody, think he
Speaker 8: knew everything. But he didn't put up with anybody's shit,
Speaker 8: and all he did was ask questions. When he sat
Speaker 8: in the room with a bunch of chiefs, he would
Speaker 8: call me. We had a great relationship, he say, he said,
Speaker 8: these guys, he said, what is it with these guys?
Speaker 8: They just whenever you ask them something, they say, well,
Speaker 8: that's the way we always did it. Does that mean
Speaker 8: you got to keep doing it that way? Because he
Speaker 8: always he used to ask why, and they couldn't give
Speaker 8: good answers. He couldn't wait to clean house. They hated him.
Speaker 8: It's just that he was only that two years, so
Speaker 8: they were really ready. When I got there, he hated
Speaker 8: me even more. But I got rid of most of them.
Speaker 8: But after September eleventh, you know, Scopetita didn't have the
Speaker 8: stomach to do anything. And then Cassano was the chief
Speaker 8: and I was a chief. You know, it's hard for
Speaker 8: the chiefs to stand up to them. I always thought
Speaker 8: it was like the Catholic Church. You know, the Catholic church.
Speaker 8: You get a priest that fools around the little boys.
Speaker 8: They sent them to a girls school, you know what
Speaker 8: I mean. The fight apartment is like that. You guys,
Speaker 8: you get a guy that's really bad in the South
Speaker 8: Bronx of the queens. Well after twenty years, After twenty years,
Speaker 8: you had some really bad chiefs and queens. So what
Speaker 8: do you think is going to happen? Are they breaking
Speaker 8: the guys in the right way? Are they teaching the
Speaker 8: guys the way it should be, the way they do
Speaker 8: it in Harlem, the way they're do it in the
Speaker 8: South Bronx and Brooklyn and all the good No, Manhattan,
Speaker 8: Manhattan is a you know, they never had a lot
Speaker 8: of fire duty, but they had tough jobs, really tough
Speaker 8: job you don't want to go to. The chiefs were
Speaker 8: really good chiefs and they would discipline. Why because they
Speaker 8: want to walk into a building, you know, and look
Speaker 8: like the way we used to look and bron I mean,
Speaker 8: we couldn't figure out a way to look more shitty
Speaker 8: with holes in the you know, the quartermaster at least
Speaker 8: made us start to look like we're professionals until the quartermaster.
Speaker 8: I mean, you got a uniform allowance and use it
Speaker 8: for Christmas, Christ Christmas time. You never don't spend any money, Yeah,
Speaker 8: it came in good. You never spend any money on you.
Speaker 5: So you feel like you would go that way, like
Speaker 5: you would lean more towards not having somebody that's been
Speaker 5: involved in the fire.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, absolutely, but you need somebody who's compassionate and understands emergencies.
Speaker 8: I would have gone to military. I had recommended to
Speaker 8: Bloomberg and to Adams to go with a former military guy,
Speaker 8: because the military guys are accountable, but they also understand
Speaker 8: warrior mentality. They also understand people who put their lives
Speaker 8: at risk. I mean, she was she was a bad
Speaker 8: choice from the beginning. She was at the Blasio person.
Speaker 8: She took no advice. She she just hit her hete.
Speaker 8: She hid in the office every day. I think she
Speaker 8: was afraid, you know, she just she was a disaster.
Speaker 1: But they said her planner, that's what her resume was.
Speaker 1: She was a party planner.
Speaker 8: She was just a real political You can have a
Speaker 8: political appointee, you know. I mean they used to be
Speaker 8: like that. Joe Bruno was was a judge. She became
Speaker 8: a judge leader on. Joe Spinando was a big commission somemer.
Speaker 8: Joe Hines was an attorney general additionrict attorney. So you've
Speaker 8: always had political people, but they also understood, you know,
Speaker 8: how to manage things. I don't think she ever managed anything.
Speaker 1: You know. No, let me ask you a question, Commissioner.
Speaker 1: I'm now speaking about the optics of it. When you
Speaker 1: went from the head of the union to the commissioner.
Speaker 1: Do you think that that was bad optics? Do you
Speaker 1: think that was I mean, how would guys look at
Speaker 1: that as going from.
Speaker 5: Well, how did that even happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay.
Speaker 8: So one of one of the reasons I thought I
Speaker 8: would do this show, one of these that before. One
Speaker 8: of the reasons I actually agreed to do your show,
Speaker 8: against the advice of my brother. I saw some of
Speaker 8: the comments. I saw some of the comments on a
Speaker 8: letter I had written to the Post, and one of
Speaker 8: them talked about how I committed treason, you know, And
Speaker 8: I thought to myself, you know, this guy might be
Speaker 8: a nice guy. He might he might have an IQ
Speaker 8: higher and forty, but he might not. So I thought
Speaker 8: I should at least be able to explain to you
Speaker 8: guys what happened. We did a tremendous amount of work
Speaker 8: for Juliani, mostly because the city was in a toilet dinkins.
Speaker 8: Our guys hated him. They hated him out and out
Speaker 8: hated them. I became president, and I said, well, even
Speaker 8: that even the screaming uh union guys on my board
Speaker 8: all were in favor of supporting Juliana. So we support him.
Speaker 8: We really support him. We got five hundred uh they
Speaker 8: call him pole watchers. They were certified by New York State.
Speaker 8: Danny DeFranco did an unbelievable job organizing everybody. My brother
Speaker 8: was doing it in Brooklyn. We had a lot of
Speaker 8: guys that really helped out in every borough. So after
Speaker 8: he gets elected, he's very appreciative, and I guess he
Speaker 8: brings me in, finds out who I want to be commissioner,
Speaker 8: They bring in Safer. Safer and I had a great
Speaker 8: relationship for the two years. And then he calls me
Speaker 8: one morning and he says, and I heard the rumors
Speaker 8: that he was going to PD. He always wanted the
Speaker 8: p D.
Speaker 1: He was.
Speaker 8: He was basically a copy he was and he took
Speaker 8: I guess he took the fight upon it as you know,
Speaker 8: second choice.
Speaker 1: But he was great for us, I thought.
Speaker 8: And then so he calls me, it's like seven o'clock
Speaker 8: in the morning and he says, I'm going to PD.
Speaker 8: I start cursing at him. I don't want to curse now,
Speaker 8: and you can and I said, you fuck. I said,
Speaker 8: I can't believe you. You're doing all that. I said,
Speaker 8: but you've been great for us. I really appreciate all
Speaker 8: you've done. I wish you good luck. He said, there's
Speaker 8: another part to this. We want you to become fire commission.
Speaker 8: I said, what are you crazy? You're going to get
Speaker 8: me killed. I said, I'm running for election. I'm running
Speaker 8: for election in August. I said, guys are cruc I
Speaker 8: don't throw my name out there because I know what
Speaker 8: they do. They always throw three names out there. They
Speaker 8: know who they want, but they throw three names out
Speaker 8: there just to see what the press and the reaction is.
Speaker 8: So he said, no, you're the only you're the only one.
Speaker 8: I said really. So he says, yeah, if you want
Speaker 8: it to, May is going to call you. I said, yeah, yes,
Speaker 8: you know. I went in my room. My wife said,
Speaker 8: what's that? I said, they want me to be fire
Speaker 8: COMMISSI And he says, what you know? We were like nobody.
Speaker 8: I mean, the people that hate you don't believe that.
Speaker 7: What's That's a stack of money in there, That's what
Speaker 7: it was.
Speaker 8: It was. It was weird. So anyway, then I go
Speaker 8: over there, they they vet me out you know, down
Speaker 8: the basement all day and there's some really good stories
Speaker 8: about what happened that day. And the guys in the
Speaker 8: union were drinking all day and they weren't using the
Speaker 8: word hairbag, but they were drinking. Thing there was, there
Speaker 8: was a lot, We had a bar in my office,
Speaker 8: so you know, then I'd hit commission, and like you say,
Speaker 8: half the guys, UH thought it was the best thing
Speaker 8: that ever happened, because now the fox is in the henhouse.
Speaker 8: The other half thought you sold out. So you couldn't
Speaker 8: You couldn't possibly please everybody. I remember UH going like
Speaker 8: this taking my hat off at my swearing in, and
Speaker 8: Tommy Lamancha says to me, the word in the Bronx
Speaker 8: was the litter is off.
Speaker 5: Oh boy, I was gonna say, God, I had to
Speaker 5: believe the Bronx was on your side.
Speaker 1: No, but I mean drink yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So you know, no matter, you couldn't please everybody,
Speaker 8: but I knew, and I think I sent you guys
Speaker 8: this one. You know, this talks about all the stuff
Speaker 8: that we didn't that didn't happen to us, because you know,
Speaker 8: there were so many perks that we got from me
Speaker 8: being in a position like that that the fight Department
Speaker 8: didn't suffer from and the mayor loved the fight apartment,
Speaker 8: you know, he really did. And you know, I think
Speaker 8: it was all positive.
Speaker 1: To me.
Speaker 8: It was the greatest job ever until September eleventh, and
Speaker 8: it was the worst job ever.
Speaker 1: And why do you think they looked to you like
Speaker 1: you're sitting on the other side of the table, right,
Speaker 1: Why why do you think that they thought that you
Speaker 1: would be the best guy for that job? Oh?
Speaker 8: I think they thought, first of all, I was smart,
Speaker 8: I was honest, I had balls, and they were The
Speaker 8: merger for EMS was in March, right, that I supported
Speaker 8: as a union president because I thought it was good
Speaker 8: for the guys, money wise, training, safety, everything else. So
Speaker 8: it happens in March. I get appointed in April, So
Speaker 8: they I think they want I think they wanted to
Speaker 8: reward us, the fire department me, and they also wanted
Speaker 8: somebody who could make it work, because the guys did not,
Speaker 8: you know, as much as they've I voted, I put
Speaker 8: out a ballot and everything when I was president about
Speaker 8: doing EMS work, and they said the guys voted yes,
Speaker 8: But when it really came, they didn't want to do it.
Speaker 8: You know, the busy engine companies now had too much
Speaker 8: to do, and then the camps didn't want to do anything.
Speaker 8: So it was a mix. But I think in a
Speaker 8: long run, and that was one of the things that
Speaker 8: I talked before about going around the country as a
Speaker 8: as a secretary, I found that that's where all the
Speaker 8: departments were going because they really fired. Duty was going down, down, down, down,
Speaker 8: and it was a way to protect jobs.
Speaker 5: For me.
Speaker 8: I did it for selfish reason. I thought it would
Speaker 8: make our guys safer. I thought, if if someone was
Speaker 8: having a heart attack, if someone I saw how shitty
Speaker 8: an operation EMS was when they were at Health in hospitals,
Speaker 8: they were terrible. Tum Fitzpatrick a terrific Deputy Commissioner, and
Speaker 8: I went over to meet with Health and hospitals after
Speaker 8: I was commissioner. You would have thought they did everything,
Speaker 8: but ask me what EMS.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
Speaker 8: Like they had They were clueless on how difficult the
Speaker 8: job that people in EMS had and how little support
Speaker 8: they had, how they didn't have good amblers, how they
Speaker 8: didn't have good training. Most of them, I shouldn't say
Speaker 8: most of them, but an awful lot of people were
Speaker 8: really out of shape too. And so we tried to
Speaker 8: raise the whole level of EMS as we called out
Speaker 8: a lot of people. We started giving more training, make
Speaker 8: it harder to get on. And the EMS people have
Speaker 8: been screwed because they never got the right money that
Speaker 8: they were supposed to get. We made promises to them
Speaker 8: that and it's like twenty five years ago more than that,
Speaker 8: that they would not We didn't promise parody, but we
Speaker 8: promised that they would sometimes get to like where sanitation
Speaker 8: was eighty percent. I can't believe how much what those
Speaker 8: guys make. It's incredibly terrible. It's terrible. But the starting
Speaker 8: em T guy makes and du Blasia. When I was
Speaker 8: at FEMA, you guys got me on a roll here
Speaker 8: when I was at it. When I'm at FEMA, the
Speaker 8: Blazer said to me one day, he says, what can
Speaker 8: I do for you? Because now everybody loves you? When FEMA,
Speaker 8: because I had a checkbook, I was just given everybody.
Speaker 8: I mean, when I was at FEMA during COVID, I
Speaker 8: really gave a lot to the city. I got in
Speaker 8: trouble with Cuomo for andever that's another story. So the
Speaker 8: Blaiser said to me, what can I do for you?
Speaker 8: I said, or you can really wanted do something for me,
Speaker 8: take care of the MS, because I made them promises
Speaker 8: twenty years ago when nobody's delivered. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 8: do it. He's done shit for them too, So they
Speaker 8: have really been screwed. And what I saw them do
Speaker 8: during COVID phenomenal. What they did, the doctors and nurses
Speaker 8: and the emergency rooms and the EFTs and paramedics going
Speaker 8: to and from the emergency rooms for remarkable. What they did.
Speaker 8: They deserve every award or nobody wants awards, they want
Speaker 8: better salaries. They really deserve to be compensated and reward
Speaker 8: for what they've done.
Speaker 5: In my opinion, MS saved firehouses too, right, Oh, I.
Speaker 1: Was just gonna say that, cheap chief, I mean, commissioner,
Speaker 1: that was we would we would have been closing firehouses,
Speaker 1: no doubt. But during your tenure, I believe that you
Speaker 1: that you start one thirty three. Uh you also uh
Speaker 1: Jamaica Avenue too, Jamaica Avenue, that was my next one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and let me get back a one new division and
Speaker 1: two new companies added rights two ninety four in Richmond Hill.
Speaker 5: And the fire and the fifth Man.
Speaker 1: Thirteenth Division yeah, right, So do you think that because
Speaker 1: we were doing more now with the MS that allowed
Speaker 1: you to open these companies?
Speaker 8: Absolutely? Juliani was so supportive. First of all, I was
Speaker 8: able to make a good case because I mean, I mean,
Speaker 8: you can you can see I mean, you can hate me,
Speaker 8: but you gotta believe I'm telling you the truth. I mean,
Speaker 8: you know, I've never had a reputation for being anything
Speaker 8: but an honest guy. Maybe not that smart, but not
Speaker 8: stupid and honest, okay. And I could make cases to
Speaker 8: Julianni and everybody else for stuff that I was able
Speaker 8: to convince them. I mean Whenihan came up with the idea,
Speaker 8: I think it was Bill or the heml fits about
Speaker 8: changing uh slow engine companies into squads, which is something
Speaker 8: you guys, thank you the squad the squads to me,
Speaker 8: other than the fact that you know, losing ninety guys
Speaker 8: on September eleventh at a special operations, which is like,
Speaker 8: so that's a separate thing. But the creation of them
Speaker 8: was phenomenal. Right, So we get these camps and some
Speaker 8: weren't that slow. One was was. They were pretty slow.
Speaker 8: So we come up with the.
Speaker 9: Idea was really slow. Yeah, you could say, you can
Speaker 9: say and again and again. So it starts because some
Speaker 9: of the chiefs are telling me, he said, boss, you
Speaker 9: know I can have a fire and have nobody at
Speaker 9: the fight and sell.
Speaker 8: They're doing. This is really he says, yeah, and and
Speaker 8: and it's always in the best neighborhoods. It wasn't in
Speaker 8: the shitty neighborhoods. It's always in the good neighborhood The
Speaker 8: good neighborhoods always got the worst. Yeah, worst, excellent, I said,
Speaker 8: when we were when we were crazy in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 8: where was the worst fire companies? College Point, white Stone,
Speaker 8: Staten Island, North Bronx, Eastern Queens. Really good, those are
Speaker 8: the places. They got the oldest piece of equipment, they
Speaker 8: got the oldest firefighters, they got the least motivated firefighters,
Speaker 8: and then all the good stuff was happening where the
Speaker 8: poor people were. So how do you how do you
Speaker 8: help the chiefs get good people at the jobs. So
Speaker 8: the idea was, let's create the squads, and it was.
Speaker 8: It was a big investment, but not like having five
Speaker 8: new companies, because we're just we had the people, we
Speaker 8: had the engine, but we you know, we gave him
Speaker 8: more equipment more training, everything else. They were an awful
Speaker 8: lot of training.
Speaker 5: Well that's how it was sold. That's how you solved it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it sold it. It was it was strictly it
Speaker 8: was all me selling it because no matter how much
Speaker 8: we we uh, I used to go through this at
Speaker 8: the union. You know, we used to sit with the
Speaker 8: ten guys on the board and we'd make all these
Speaker 8: arguments and we'd say like, okay, well we've convinced ourselves.
Speaker 8: Now we just have to go and convince the city.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
Speaker 8: It's it's it's great to sit in the firehouse and
Speaker 8: have all these solutions, but then somebody's got to go.
Speaker 8: The mayor ultimately is the guy who says yes and
Speaker 8: no for all this stuff. So we convinced them to
Speaker 8: do it, and it was just it was for now.
Speaker 8: And the best part of the squad is the way
Speaker 8: we did it. I don't know if I told you
Speaker 8: guys that, but we we picked five captains, right, good guys,
Speaker 8: Tommy Richardson, Dennis Uh you know really, uh, what's the
Speaker 8: training guy? Tracy? Terrific guys. Terrific guys. Right, So then
Speaker 8: we bring him in and we say, okay, I'll give
Speaker 8: you guys one pick. It was like a little league drafted.
Speaker 8: They could pick lieutenant so and so each one got
Speaker 8: a pick and then they would trade, you know, and
Speaker 8: then we allowed them. The best part, the best point
Speaker 8: was the tryouts we had. So we have uh Terry Hatton.
Speaker 8: We put him in charge of the tryouts. Terry, he
Speaker 8: was a phenomenal guy, but he was he could really
Speaker 8: be you know, he could be rough. So anyway, he
Speaker 8: has the tryouts. So the Union sues me right away.
Speaker 8: They said they wanted the tryouts.
Speaker 5: On it, right, Yeah, we were, That's what we were were.
Speaker 8: Godde the Union wanted. So what did I do? I
Speaker 8: had it really fast before they could get to the arbitrator.
Speaker 1: So I had the tryouts real quick.
Speaker 8: Terry and Ray Downey are over there saying that guy's
Speaker 8: he's slowly ship, he's fat, he's that. We don't want
Speaker 8: that guy, we don't want it. So they pick all
Speaker 8: these guys and we wound up with a great group
Speaker 8: of people. I mean people who wanted to be in
Speaker 8: a busy place, people who wanted to go for more training,
Speaker 8: who wanted to work for Tommy Richardson or Jerry Tracy
Speaker 8: or Dennis which I don't know anybody that wouldn't want
Speaker 8: to work for those guys. I forget who the other
Speaker 8: two camps, but we're all really solid, wonderful guys, you know,
Speaker 8: And it was just the greatest experiment that I can remember,
Speaker 8: except for you know, who would you think you're going
Speaker 8: to have higher and further into harm's way on September eleventh,
Speaker 8: But those guys, you know. So anyway, it was one
Speaker 8: of the best things I did.
Speaker 1: Betch let me tell you something. You just said something
Speaker 1: that just struck a chord with me. When I went
Speaker 1: to what we all went to the squad, Dennis Murphy
Speaker 1: sat us down and just said said to us, listen,
Speaker 1: I love you guys. You guys are very motivated, but
Speaker 1: I just want you to understand you just put yourself
Speaker 1: in that much more harm's way because you're going to
Speaker 1: be going to everything. So that fact that you just
Speaker 1: said that, now, I'm like, holy shit, I can't believe
Speaker 1: that's the conversation that Dennis Murphy had with us. But
Speaker 1: you know, he had a whole roster of motivated guys
Speaker 1: who just wanted to work.
Speaker 5: We talk about like on the other podcast, like in
Speaker 5: your career I'm sure it's even similar for you. You
Speaker 5: have like these sweet spots. You know, not every year
Speaker 5: and not every time is great, right, but there's a
Speaker 5: couple of times in there where it's a couple of
Speaker 5: years you're working with the same guys before people get
Speaker 5: promoted or they get retired or whatever, and you just
Speaker 5: have these sweet spots. And we say all the time,
Speaker 5: like from nineteen ninety eight to two thousand and one
Speaker 5: was like such a special time, especially for us because
Speaker 5: we had, you know, the whole the whole company changed
Speaker 5: over a lot of places. Some of the guys stayed, right,
Speaker 5: but our whole company was twenty five new guys, all
Speaker 5: new officers, and everybody was on the same page, and
Speaker 5: we had a good mix. We had seen a couple
Speaker 5: of senior men. Hank Mauley, we still call him senior dude.
Speaker 5: He's always in the chat.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we still, uh.
Speaker 5: We still you know, we were really into the job,
Speaker 5: and uh, you know, we talk about how special that
Speaker 5: time was because you don't get that, you know, the
Speaker 5: career is great, but there's really some good times every
Speaker 5: once in a while that you really look back and say,
Speaker 5: until you're you're done, right, you look back and you say,
Speaker 5: oh my god, that was such a special time. And
Speaker 5: so you know we were talking about Joe Hunter in
Speaker 5: the pre show, right, he was one of our favorite guys,
Speaker 5: you know, missus Hunter, you know, real Irish brogue, you know,
Speaker 5: all the time in Brockville Center. So it was just
Speaker 5: a great time.
Speaker 1: But let's just throw this up. Here's a guy who
Speaker 1: doesn't want to put his own name in there. He
Speaker 1: just puts Hughes name. They didn't close firehouses, they just
Speaker 1: pulled the fifth man. I mean, here's the guy that
Speaker 1: they didn't. You're right, they didn't close firehouses bro and
Speaker 1: they didn't pull the fifth man from every company? Right,
Speaker 1: How did that work out cheap?
Speaker 5: That was based off of medical leave? I think if
Speaker 5: I remember, what are.
Speaker 8: You talking about? I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Some guy just wrote in the chat, who was not
Speaker 1: of who's not does not the balls enough to put
Speaker 1: his own name in there, said they didn't close firehouses,
Speaker 1: they just pulled the fifth man.
Speaker 8: Oh you mean when we looked when we went to arbitration, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: we lost uh one hundred and thirty companies. I think
Speaker 8: lost the fifth man. No, we didn't they didn't close firehouse.
Speaker 8: I mean they were closing fire houses separate from the arbitration,
Speaker 8: you know. Uh, and even catch apologize for the way
Speaker 8: they closed the tin house that time.
Speaker 1: Remember they sent them out.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, we've had a few guys on the
Speaker 5: show from that. Yeah, that was just there there. They're
Speaker 5: a little pissed off about strategy. That was bad, bad
Speaker 5: plan strategy.
Speaker 8: I mean, when did that happen that they pulled the
Speaker 8: fifth man? Did this guy's ross the staffing? So it
Speaker 8: was an I guess in ninety Yeah, I guess it
Speaker 8: was ninety right with the arbitration, I think it was
Speaker 8: then the roster staffing was.
Speaker 5: They kept sixty sixty of the busiest companies, right, kept
Speaker 5: the fifth man unless medically went down to like some ridiculous.
Speaker 1: So Usana, who throwing that out there? Tell me what
Speaker 1: you what? You what your elevance is right there? Because
Speaker 1: you know it was ninety you weren't even the commissioner then, right? No?
Speaker 8: No, I know, I had no, No, that was just
Speaker 8: you know, you're I was part of the union. Like
Speaker 8: I say, Bruce Simon, the attorney told all the guys,
Speaker 8: do not go, do not go.
Speaker 1: We didn't.
Speaker 8: And I give you some advice to the guys that
Speaker 8: are listening. Whether or not you think your union guys
Speaker 8: are terrific or they're horrible, listen to them.
Speaker 1: You're better.
Speaker 8: They're better to listen to them than to the kitchen table,
Speaker 8: because the advice you get at the kitchen table. And
Speaker 8: you know what I did when I was the secretary,
Speaker 8: I decided, you know what, I'm going to start sending
Speaker 8: the fire lines to the home because I wanted the
Speaker 8: wife to see it. Because my experience was that when
Speaker 8: you when you got the guys individually, very intelligent guys,
Speaker 8: a lot of our guys, you know, when you sit
Speaker 8: down in the kitchen with them, with ten of them,
Speaker 8: you say, holy shit, what what is it? Is this
Speaker 8: Jurassic call?
Speaker 5: I say all the time, the end of I remember going.
Speaker 8: I remember when I first got involved with the unions.
Speaker 8: And you know, Nick was terrific, Jimmy Boy was terrific.
Speaker 8: Jimmy Boy was surrounded like with morons, but he was
Speaker 8: a good guy himself. You know, But you go to
Speaker 8: a union made it be four hundred guys, and it'd
Speaker 8: be a hundred guys, you say, like, holy shit, these
Speaker 8: hundred guys really are stupid. But the other guys were
Speaker 8: just laughing. In other words, they would never call a
Speaker 8: guy out and say, you know, you know you were moron,
Speaker 8: but they would just laugh at them. So you didn't
Speaker 8: accomplish anything. The hundred guys are driving the driving the meeting,
Speaker 8: I mean, so it's just and the kitchen is like that.
Speaker 8: You know, you get a couple of guys that listen.
Speaker 5: If you want to be negative, right, it's like anything,
Speaker 5: let the negative steed. You're gonna get negative right here.
Speaker 1: The guy that didn't close fires and just pull like
Speaker 1: that guy could be nice, you know, if you didn't
Speaker 1: have the balls to put it out right.
Speaker 5: Put So I had to be nineteen ninety three because
Speaker 5: I got on in ninety three, and that's when we
Speaker 5: lost the twenty five group shot and we or the
Speaker 5: twenty We went to the twenty five, twenty five, twenty
Speaker 5: four yeah right, and then we lost the mini vacation
Speaker 5: and some other shit, if I remember right, like right,
Speaker 5: I only had that for like a couple.
Speaker 1: Of he wasn't the commissioner.
Speaker 5: Then, No, no, I understand, no, I got it.
Speaker 8: I got half of it back when I was commissioner
Speaker 8: and that's a good story. You want to hear that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 8: So we go to arbitration and Safer is Safer as
Speaker 8: the commissioner. I'm the union president. So we get this arbitrated.
Speaker 8: A guy named Arthur Gelhun, really distinguished old guys. I
Speaker 8: think he had been in the vers Sign meeting or something,
Speaker 8: I don't know. It was a real arbitrator, really smart guy.
Speaker 8: So he says to me one day, he said, you
Speaker 8: didn't convince me that all your guys, that you five
Speaker 8: men and all your companies. And it looks at Safer.
Speaker 8: Uh no, he said it to me, and then he
Speaker 8: said it to Safer. He said, you haven't convinced me
Speaker 8: that they don't need five men and some of the company.
Speaker 8: So he said, work it out. So we work it
Speaker 8: out where I get sixty companies back, We get you know,
Speaker 8: a medical leave range that if we were abusing it,
Speaker 8: we were going to lose the stuff, which never happened
Speaker 8: until a couple of years ago. I think they took
Speaker 8: some of the engines back because of medical leave. But so,
Speaker 8: and then what happens. So Gelhoun dies and uh so
Speaker 8: I hear it that he died and I told Safer,
Speaker 8: I said, my guys got there and I have the decision.
Speaker 8: It was at his bedside, and I won the decision.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: So he says to me, full of shit. My guys
Speaker 8: got there and we I got the decision and we
Speaker 8: won a decision. What he could have easily just shit
Speaker 8: candid and we would have to start all over again.
Speaker 8: He went to the mayor, and the may said make
Speaker 8: the deal, and we made the deal. We got back
Speaker 8: fifty companies, which was how was the phenomenal when one
Speaker 8: that's how that goes?
Speaker 5: Huh?
Speaker 8: Absolutely absolutely Gil Hunt died and they could have screwed
Speaker 8: us good, but they didn't. Again, wow, because of the
Speaker 8: relationship that that that we had, you know. So it's
Speaker 8: just you know, for a guy to say, you know,
Speaker 8: it's trees and this and that, they just they just
Speaker 8: don't get it, you know.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, listen from the brothers to get it.
Speaker 5: So there was another one that I think we talked
Speaker 5: about it in the in the pre show. I was
Speaker 5: I wanted to ask you because that was like a
Speaker 5: hot topic in the chat and some of our social
Speaker 5: media things. And it seems like so long ago, but
Speaker 5: obviously it's still pertinent because there was some guys who
Speaker 5: died about the ropes. Right, So when when I had
Speaker 5: my I got my rope in nineteen ninety three, I
Speaker 5: don't remember. I was trying to look for it. I
Speaker 5: couldn't remember when they when when they took the ropes away,
Speaker 5: the personal safety harness, right, what do you remember those years?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, we The criticism afterwards was that I took them.
Speaker 8: I got rid of the ropes because of money, and
Speaker 8: that wasn't true. You can look if you look at
Speaker 8: any of the records from my six years as a commissioner,
Speaker 8: there was more money spent on on so many things
Speaker 8: that you you could never really think that it was
Speaker 8: because of money. The ropes weren't that expensive. We had
Speaker 8: spent all the money on bunker gear, We had spent
Speaker 8: all right on the everything, I mean, thermolimity, integrated trucks.
Speaker 8: There were so many things that we spent money on.
Speaker 1: The ropes.
Speaker 8: I got rid of them because doctor Bizan at the
Speaker 8: time and some of the experts were saying, you want
Speaker 8: to make the guys as light as possible. As light
Speaker 8: as possible, they were bulky. A lot of guys weren't
Speaker 8: using them. They it wasn't say that again.
Speaker 5: Say that again. A lot of guys weren't using them.
Speaker 5: Absolutely nobody was using it was used a fact, and you.
Speaker 8: Guys can say otherwise. But a lot of guys weren't
Speaker 8: using them. I don't want to say nobody was using them.
Speaker 8: I'm sure there were a lot of guys using them,
Speaker 8: and a lot of animalts of guys use them even
Speaker 8: when I got rid of them. Okay, But the unfair
Speaker 8: part of this was that was I think in so
Speaker 8: I left in December of two thousand and one, or
Speaker 8: let's say January first, two thousand and two. That fire
Speaker 8: was in two thousand and five, if I remember right,
Speaker 8: that's three years later. It was two thousand and five.
Speaker 8: So Scorpettita even said he was interviewed afterwards and he said,
Speaker 8: there wasn't one person in the department that asked me
Speaker 8: to reinstitute the ropes. Not one person, not one chief,
Speaker 8: not one firefighter, not one anybody went to scopetit. Unless
Speaker 8: he's lying, and I don't have any reasona believe he was.
Speaker 8: He's lying, and he said nobody asked me to put
Speaker 8: the ropes back in. So now they have this fire,
Speaker 8: which was a total cluster.
Speaker 1: Fuck.
Speaker 8: Let's remember if anybody's ever looked at that fire with
Speaker 8: frozen hydrants, illegal partitions throughout the apartment, guys being a
Speaker 8: of the fire, without a line, all, all lots of
Speaker 8: issues that were that were wrong, like many of our fires,
Speaker 8: like Watch Street, like Deutsche Bank, like many of the
Speaker 8: fires that go bad. Horrible tragedy happens. So let's blame somebody. Well,
Speaker 8: the best guy to blame is the the old fat
Speaker 8: guy who is uh former commissioner. You know, it's just
Speaker 8: it's it's sad, like I had to testify it was,
Speaker 8: it was, it was terrible. I felt so bad for
Speaker 8: you know, one of those guys that commented last week
Speaker 8: he lost his friend, he lost his buddy. I get that.
Speaker 8: That doesn't mean you have the right to distort what
Speaker 8: really happens.
Speaker 5: You know, what was that ever plans to get a
Speaker 5: better bag like at that time or was it always
Speaker 5: pushed after like obviously after after the guys jumped, and
Speaker 5: you know, we had you know a lot of scenarios
Speaker 5: coming with you know, I have.
Speaker 8: No idea, you know, uh, First of all, like when
Speaker 8: I made a decision, he was already were already I was,
Speaker 8: you know, when I was gone, And so now it
Speaker 8: happens in two thousand and five, they have all these
Speaker 8: lawsuits and everything else, and I think they've they've gotten
Speaker 8: a lighter, better one since I hope, I hope it's good.
Speaker 8: But I don't know anything about all that stuff, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Kevin was saying, like I know, I carried mine.
Speaker 5: It was a brick, you know, from Provo school, and
Speaker 5: I had it in my old turnout coat, and then
Speaker 5: when we got the new turnout coat, it was it
Speaker 5: was a brick, and to the point where I actually
Speaker 5: made my own rope, you know, set up. We talked
Speaker 5: about this. I appreciate Kevin and I A lot of
Speaker 5: guys made their own setups with their own little aides
Speaker 5: or whatever, just like you said, for that fact. But
Speaker 5: I never thought about, you know, writing to the job
Speaker 5: or doing any of the other stuff. I just did,
Speaker 5: you know, what I wanted to know for myself.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you like I had my own setup,
Speaker 1: which guys made fun of me all the time, bro
Speaker 1: other companies. When I used to carry the personal rope,
Speaker 1: guys used to hide it on me. You don't need that.
Speaker 1: What are you doing?
Speaker 8: Man?
Speaker 1: You know So I used to see guys who just
Speaker 1: take the personal rope. They'd be tied up their boat
Speaker 1: with it. They'd be highing and stuff in their garage
Speaker 1: with it. I mean, did some guys carry it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of guys carry it.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 1: I had my own system worked out. My friend Matt Neary,
Speaker 1: who've had on the show, who was a volley, He
Speaker 1: helped me put together my own system, which I carry
Speaker 1: all the time. And I didn't care. Even when I
Speaker 1: carried that, guys used to break my balls from other things.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I would never criticize guys for taking an extra
Speaker 8: safety precaution if you don't feel I mean, some guys
Speaker 8: are lighter and quicker than other guys. Some guys don't
Speaker 8: want an extra five six seven pounds to worry about.
Speaker 8: It makes it makes a big difference. Maybe you get older.
Speaker 8: I remember as commissioner. You know, I used to go
Speaker 8: to a lot of fires and I'd be going up
Speaker 8: the stairs and you know, chiefs would be running by
Speaker 8: me to go up the stairs and you okay, commission Yeah, okay.
Speaker 8: Then I'd slip into a stairway and you know, trying
Speaker 8: to catch my breath. So everybody's in different levels of conditioning.
Speaker 8: So maybe they don't want the rope, maybe they don't
Speaker 8: want this, they don't want that. I get it. We
Speaker 8: used to wear work shoes instead of boots because it
Speaker 8: was lighter, and if you had the roof, used to
Speaker 8: wear dungaree jackets. There was a lot of things that
Speaker 8: weren't as safe. But if you had, you know, twenty
Speaker 8: runs a day and you run into the roof looking times,
Speaker 8: you know you you had to. You had to make
Speaker 8: it work for you. So I get guys using not using.
Speaker 8: What I don't like is this misrepresentation. Money was never
Speaker 8: an object.
Speaker 5: Well, that's all I was going to ask you, just
Speaker 5: now was it? What what was the reason that to
Speaker 5: get If guys were just keeping it well, then what
Speaker 5: was the reason like to stop it like altogether? Was
Speaker 5: it just.
Speaker 1: You know, I.
Speaker 8: We well, I guess it was. We had a we
Speaker 8: had to buy them, right, and we've made a decision
Speaker 8: not to buy them because they were too clumb, they
Speaker 8: were too heavy. The amount of guys used, so you
Speaker 8: made that decision. So if somebody, if somebody already had them,
Speaker 8: they had them or whatever. It wasn't I don't remember
Speaker 8: us going around telling everybody. You can't do it. I
Speaker 8: don't remember that, but I wouldn't blame a guy. I'm
Speaker 8: not trying to take any blame away from, you know, anybody,
Speaker 8: except for the fact we did. We didn't get rid
Speaker 8: of it. I mean I got rid of scaling the
Speaker 8: scaling ladders and the guys were breaking my chops.
Speaker 5: Remember the scaling ladderader. Yeah, only in probably school. That's
Speaker 5: the only time.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the only time you ever used So what you do,
Speaker 8: somebody's got something to say. Unfortunately for the ropes, we
Speaker 8: had that horrible tragedy. And uh, I guess the ropes
Speaker 8: would have been helpful at that particular job. I guess.
Speaker 8: I don't know. I don't I never knew why there
Speaker 8: wasn't a regular roof rope rescue, you know, come over
Speaker 8: the side of the building whatever. So it was just,
Speaker 8: you know, when those kinds did, they were just too they.
Speaker 5: Didn't do it.
Speaker 1: Chief Ibby, Chief Commission. Here's a guy who was he
Speaker 1: was at that job, Jeff Coole. He said the ropes
Speaker 1: and harnesses were taken away in ninety nine. There were
Speaker 1: thirty three documented cases that the ropes were being used
Speaker 1: before they were taken away. If they saved one guy's life,
Speaker 1: then it was worth it. That's just from a guy
Speaker 1: who's coming from who was there at that job.
Speaker 8: No I, And he's the guy, if I remember right,
Speaker 8: that said I committed treason. But he's also the guy
Speaker 8: that said that he lost someone who really he really
Speaker 8: loved and he cared about at that fire. And I
Speaker 8: totally understand that. I'm sympathetic to that. All I'm saying
Speaker 8: is the thirty three times that that rope was used,
Speaker 8: I would like to see the documentation of the thirty
Speaker 8: three times. Was it somebody going up a portable ladder
Speaker 8: and he hooked on to help him raise a hose
Speaker 8: or was it somebody that actually went out a window,
Speaker 8: you know, using it. So we made a decision. It
Speaker 8: wasn't just me, it was people that we talked to
Speaker 8: before we made these decisions that for twelve thousand guys
Speaker 8: at the time, we didn't think this was a smart
Speaker 8: way to go. The guys would be better off not
Speaker 8: hav any extra weight until somebody could come up with
Speaker 8: a with a better way to do it.
Speaker 5: And even the system now the guys aren't using the
Speaker 5: thing all the time, Okay, I mean, I mean I've
Speaker 5: seen in her cases where guys aren't you know, now
Speaker 5: they have different systems. I think it's in the coat
Speaker 5: because it's a little.
Speaker 4: Bit on the on the hip. If I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 5: It was on the half. Yeah, it was on the half.
Speaker 1: Now it's in the coat, I think.
Speaker 4: Okay, so.
Speaker 8: I'm not gonna you know, I feel very bad that that.
Speaker 5: No, it's a bad situation, right, no win situation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, Jeff that texted me and I understood,
Speaker 5: you know, he's pissed off, but we want to make
Speaker 5: sure that we know what the facts are. And I
Speaker 5: don't know what a good answer is that, even even
Speaker 5: after hearing both sides of the story, it's still not
Speaker 5: a good answer.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: Well, if someone really wants to look at that job,
Speaker 8: I think they ought to look at some of the
Speaker 8: other parts of that job, you know, the the hydrant,
Speaker 8: the the illegal petitions, the then not having a line
Speaker 8: up floor. But there were a lot of things that
Speaker 8: were you know that they don't mention any anyway, I
Speaker 8: don't I don't want to get into No, yeah, we
Speaker 8: don't have to go the law suits and all that stuff.
Speaker 8: It was it's a horrible horrible thing. You know, I'm
Speaker 8: very sorry for that guy.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 8: You know, he may not think that I care, but
Speaker 8: I do.
Speaker 1: Hmm, what's the other question I had? Yeah, hold on, I.
Speaker 5: Saw him as I have on your thing here the
Speaker 5: bone marrow program. What was that?
Speaker 8: Oh man, that's a great that's a great program. You
Speaker 8: know that started because I I lost a nephew with leukemia.
Speaker 8: And then a guy named Mark kulwats that came to
Speaker 8: me one day. He actually started with Safer and uh,
Speaker 8: he went the Safer and he said he lost I
Speaker 8: think a sister with leukemia and he was in rest
Speaker 8: in starting this bone marrow program. And I don't know
Speaker 8: if they officially started it with Safer, but then Safer
Speaker 8: left and I got involved and we really went with it,
Speaker 8: and uh, what happened was we it's now the biggest
Speaker 8: program I think in the country, I think more. And
Speaker 8: we're the perfect group you know of guys, because we
Speaker 8: got balls. We're not afraid of a little pain. They say,
Speaker 8: it's like it's like a real I've never been selected
Speaker 8: to give bone when you're old. They don't want it,
Speaker 8: but nobody wants your bone marrow when you're.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pickled.
Speaker 5: I don't have anything left.
Speaker 8: That I can donate, but uh, but we started the
Speaker 8: program and I even have a picture right here.
Speaker 5: Holy Patsos did the bone marrow.
Speaker 8: And yeah, he was on the plaque, so this is yes,
Speaker 8: he was. He was the first one, so he is
Speaker 8: that right, he gives the marrow. And a year later
Speaker 8: she comes. She was in Las Vegas. And a year
Speaker 8: later she came and safer. You know, we paraded her
Speaker 8: around everything and I was there and oh guy.
Speaker 1: Was it was.
Speaker 8: So they used to call she for a year. You're
Speaker 8: not supposed to tell a person who gave you the ball,
Speaker 8: so she used to call him miss the nice man.
Speaker 8: I guess her parents there was a nice man that
Speaker 8: uh all the missing It was just one of the
Speaker 8: most rewarding things.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 8: I have a deal a lot of guys.
Speaker 5: There's a plaque in when you go to the medical
Speaker 5: office or whatever, there's a plaque there that it has
Speaker 5: like all the guy's names. I remember a guy from
Speaker 5: the squad Polyipatzos. Uh he did it, and I remember
Speaker 5: always looking at his name when I used to go
Speaker 5: on there. But there was always more names every year,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 8: Great, great program. So one of the One of the
Speaker 8: best stories for me was, which was pine of part
Speaker 8: of my m O.
Speaker 1: I used to speak to.
Speaker 8: The Proby's every year, every every class, you know, so
Speaker 8: I speaks to them. I would say, you know, we
Speaker 8: have a voluntary program to join. If you can join
Speaker 8: the Bone Marrow program, you you know, give a sample
Speaker 8: and everything. And then I said, it's voluntary, but I
Speaker 8: use the list when I decide where people are going
Speaker 8: from provary school, like what units they're going to. So
Speaker 8: the lawyers come to me and they said, you can't
Speaker 8: do that. You know, you can't keep threaten number of value.
Speaker 8: You're not going to get a company you want if
Speaker 8: they don't join this voluntary program. But I kept doing
Speaker 8: it anyway because I didn't try.
Speaker 5: We'll put the thumb on them, you know what I meant.
Speaker 1: Pressure great program, Great I got. I got a couple
Speaker 1: of questions here. The guys set me here, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna just shoot them to you, all right. One of
Speaker 1: these is have you ever spoken to any member of
Speaker 1: the current executive staff or are you just speculating on
Speaker 1: why Capital left the department.
Speaker 8: Well, I've spoken to a couple of people. I don't
Speaker 8: want to mention their names. But and I spoke in
Speaker 8: the Kavanaugh and I don't believe that she left for
Speaker 8: the reasons that she said she leaving. I think she
Speaker 8: realized that this wasn't the job for her. They had
Speaker 8: set her up, I think, with some really bad advice,
Speaker 8: and besides that she did a lousy job. I had
Speaker 8: offered to help her with a couple of things with
Speaker 8: I don't know if you guys ever heard of Peter Onell,
Speaker 8: but he's a genius in brand marketing and stuff. When
Speaker 8: I was commissionedly helped me with candle fires. We had
Speaker 8: a program, and we had a program throughout the city
Speaker 8: with billboards and everything else, and we were able to
Speaker 8: make a big difference in the candle fires immediately. Now,
Speaker 8: candle fires were a lot simpler problem, I think than
Speaker 8: lithium batteries. But I offered to help her with Peter
Speaker 8: Onell back, Oh, she's over a year ago. And then
Speaker 8: Peter Onell gets me on a phone call one night
Speaker 8: and he's got snoop dogged on it, and I said what,
Speaker 8: I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe the guy's unbelievable.
Speaker 8: And then we get somebody I want to mention her name,
Speaker 8: and we're offering to do help them with minority recruiting
Speaker 8: for the firefighters exam and Snoop Dogg wants to do it,
Speaker 8: you know, pro bono is gonna help us and everything else.
Speaker 8: We told him about that and he never even followed up. Guys,
Speaker 8: I think he just they paid him a million dollars
Speaker 8: to do the Olympics, but we were like too backward
Speaker 8: to even think of using him for minority recruiting in
Speaker 8: the fight, Bob. So I think she just did not
Speaker 8: listen to anybody. I think she got stand bagged, you
Speaker 8: know with some of those meetings that she had early
Speaker 8: on when they were taping and all the other stuff.
Speaker 8: But I do think that she was the wrong person
Speaker 8: for the job, did a lousy job.
Speaker 1: Right, So I'm gonna I'm gonna just throw this out there,
Speaker 1: and just for perspective. So when she got in there,
Speaker 1: there was obviously thought she was doing a lousy job.
Speaker 1: So obviously you think that the chiefs thought she was
Speaker 1: doing a lousy job. Is that is that a correct statement?
Speaker 8: Well, the chiefs are supposed to help her do a
Speaker 8: good job, right, Well.
Speaker 1: A lot of them took a lot of them took
Speaker 1: demotions because they didn't think she was she was doing
Speaker 1: the right job, right. That is that is that if
Speaker 1: you like I'm.
Speaker 8: One of the chiefs actually took a demotion because he
Speaker 8: couldn't stand the job she was doing and he went
Speaker 8: back and you know, gave it up for the regiment,
Speaker 8: then knock yourself out.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, I know a couple of guys that
Speaker 1: some of them are really good guys, but good. What
Speaker 1: I'm going to say to you is you had some
Speaker 1: chiefs that are outstanding, right, I mean yeah, and they
Speaker 1: never took a demotion because you were the commissioner of
Speaker 1: the job. Correct.
Speaker 8: Well, I mean I had a couple of chiefs. Frank
Speaker 8: Polini was one of them, phenomenal chief. Phenomenal chiefs. Pete
Speaker 8: Hayden was another, really good chief, good fire officers. They
Speaker 8: did not want to take on the brotherhood, you know,
Speaker 8: the the inefficiencies and all the stuff. So they just
Speaker 8: wanted to stay in the field. That's what they did.
Speaker 8: So I totally respect that.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say, there ain't nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 5: If you realize that absolutely.
Speaker 1: Put yeah, will buy on the sword for the guys.
Speaker 1: I mean that, Yeah, absolutely as a whole. What I'm
Speaker 1: saying to you, you had Guancy. You had Guancy. I
Speaker 1: mean you had all those chiefs who never said, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't want to work with this guy, right right,
Speaker 1: But she had a bunch of chiefs who said, I
Speaker 1: can't do this. I mean, she's she's not doing a
Speaker 1: good job. Right. So I'm trying to draw the contrast
Speaker 1: between the job that she was doing the job that
Speaker 1: you were doing. Because guys that we respect, like you know, Guancy,
Speaker 1: had no problem working with you. Correctly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm different. Never, never in a million years put
Speaker 8: up with the ship that she put up with. Not
Speaker 8: in a million years. And if you don't want to
Speaker 8: work for me, that's fine. I would be glad. Like
Speaker 8: I said, I was really glad to get rid of
Speaker 8: a lot of those guys.
Speaker 5: Well, it's something to be said about that having balls, right,
Speaker 5: you respect people in a position like that. You don't
Speaker 5: want to have wishy washy ship.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, you need you need people around you. I wanted
Speaker 8: people to tell me how the really felt. And when
Speaker 8: Felini came in my office to day, he said, you know,
Speaker 8: he said, I don't want to do this. I don't
Speaker 8: want I said great. And I remember him as a
Speaker 8: fire officer and a bron terrific, terrific, you know. And
Speaker 8: there were guys that that didn't like some stuff. I
Speaker 8: remember one of the one of the assistant chiefs one time,
Speaker 8: won't mention his name is. He was a great guy.
Speaker 8: He goes down in the field. He comes back to
Speaker 8: me one day and he said, boy, they're mad at
Speaker 8: you out there. And I and I thought to myself,
Speaker 8: they made at me. They're not made at us.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
Speaker 8: Are you you know you're you're on this. I mean, man,
Speaker 8: I'm taking trapped here, taking game. You're on the team,
Speaker 8: you're you're and but they made it me. And I
Speaker 8: thought to myself, Okay, here's a real loyal soldier.
Speaker 5: I'm taking grenades here.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So I mean disagree, you can disagree, but you
Speaker 8: want to. I mean, I think there's a lot that
Speaker 8: The first of all, I never heard the unions complain
Speaker 8: about huh. And they usually the first one to complain.
Speaker 8: So from what I can, from what I can you know,
Speaker 8: put together, the unions thought she was she was doing
Speaker 8: deals and everything with them, and she was okay, if
Speaker 8: you guys know otherwise, I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't I don't know much.
Speaker 8: I only heard good stuff. Not They didn't go around
Speaker 8: and they're not going to go around saying everybody are
Speaker 8: great she is and then they'll never do that. But
Speaker 8: I didn't hear them knocking her Brosie or Ansbrono's guys.
Speaker 8: So I don't want to speak for them, but ask them,
Speaker 8: you know. So if they thought she was decent, why
Speaker 8: couldn't these guys jump on and support her? You know
Speaker 8: what I mean? Come on, guys, you know you can
Speaker 8: make a difference out there. You have the ear of
Speaker 8: the troops and stuff. So, and I think she just
Speaker 8: wanted She had complaints that it was the same old
Speaker 8: stuff with them, that they weren't looking to make any
Speaker 8: change and everything. She she told me a few scenarios, and
Speaker 8: I dond, oh my god, nothing's changed. But but you
Speaker 8: have to Yeah, we can disagree on that.
Speaker 1: On them, all right, we can. I want to throw
Speaker 1: out a couple of things that some guys sent to me,
Speaker 1: some emails, because a lot of guys, as many negative
Speaker 1: emails I got, I got a lot of positives. So
Speaker 1: let me see, Yeah, let me try to start training
Speaker 1: begins at for Totten new squads eighteen sixty one two eight.
Speaker 1: Purchased lighter Scott cylinders for the brothers. Created a lot
Speaker 1: of one thirty three first new company in ten years,
Speaker 1: created Soccer Italian. Purchased individual face piece. Uh May, Julie.
Speaker 5: That was a big thing, man, Yeah, that was a
Speaker 5: big freaking thing.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 5: You know that might not seem like a big thing
Speaker 5: when I remember getting on the job and putting that
Speaker 5: face piece on for the first time. Didn't fit, no,
Speaker 5: but it was like scratched up. You couldn't even see dude.
Speaker 1: Look at his face. Yet they used to call me egghead. Right,
Speaker 1: No face piece fit me until I got my own
Speaker 1: personal face piece. Yeah, I forgot.
Speaker 8: I forgot about that. That was like I say, money
Speaker 8: was never the object. You know. We always tried to
Speaker 8: like come to me with stuff, come to me with stuff,
Speaker 8: and you know, talk about Okay, you want me to,
Speaker 8: can I say something?
Speaker 1: You got another question?
Speaker 8: So I'm thinking about Downey, right down He's a perfect example.
Speaker 8: So I'm in the Union and all I hear these
Speaker 8: guys complaining about Downey and they're telling me like he's
Speaker 8: got horrible These guys from Rescue too, they come, they
Speaker 8: take the line away from us, and they do this,
Speaker 8: and they do that, bottles off. So now I'm in
Speaker 8: the Union. I'm in the Union. So of course you
Speaker 8: know this is bad. So I become commissioner. And so
Speaker 8: I said to Fie and I said, you know, this downy,
Speaker 8: I don't know, I don't know who he thinks he is,
Speaker 8: Like he's running a department or you know, just running
Speaker 8: soccer or whatever. So we go out to sock to uh.
Speaker 8: So he makes the presentation to us right when he
Speaker 8: was finished, and I said, to the end, we got
Speaker 8: to get more guys like this guy. This is this
Speaker 8: is my achieve I want. The guy was making deals.
Speaker 8: He's he's doing stuff for the guys that rescue that
Speaker 8: the fight upon wasn't doing. Where did every where did
Speaker 8: the rescue guys all get these cameras from? I said,
Speaker 8: what where'd they get these cameras? Where'd they get the
Speaker 8: where they get the money for it? He was making
Speaker 8: his own deals, he was making his own he was
Speaker 8: a one man band. He could have had his own
Speaker 8: fight apartment. It was phenomenal. So I said, and that's
Speaker 8: when we decided to do the square. Let's give this
Speaker 8: guy more guys. You know what I mean, Let's not
Speaker 8: make them small, let's make them bigger. But you know,
Speaker 8: I mean I also had a You also had to
Speaker 8: rain him in it a little bit too, because I
Speaker 8: mean he would he he was a leader, There's no
Speaker 8: question about that.
Speaker 5: And when I think of in the pre show, you
Speaker 5: look like Walter Cronkite, Eddie Rooney.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 8: I remember him. Boy. He remember in the day of
Speaker 8: September eleventhies walking by me and he say, boss, you
Speaker 8: know these buildings can.
Speaker 1: Come down, just like that.
Speaker 8: I was like, wow, you know you only I wasn't
Speaker 8: thinking like that up that point. And but I knew
Speaker 8: when he looked at me, you know, with a good
Speaker 8: looking guy or those eyes and stuff. And he didn't
Speaker 8: he didn't say, Tommy, get the f out of here.
Speaker 8: You know, these buildings are coming down. It wasn't like that.
Speaker 8: I never believed that he thought in one hundred and
Speaker 8: two minutes from beginning to end, both those buildings are
Speaker 8: going to come down. And we had some of the
Speaker 8: best chiefs. You talk about chiefs and talking about my
Speaker 8: problems with the chiefs, but I mean you had Callen
Speaker 8: in that lobby, had Hayden in the lobby, you had
Speaker 8: the Burns in the other lobby. So many guancy out
Speaker 8: in the street. You had so many good guys, so
Speaker 8: many good chiefs. And I remember speaking in India one
Speaker 8: time for Honeywell, and some guy says to me, you
Speaker 8: should have known the those buildings are gonna gonna come down.
Speaker 8: You know, he's like a little engineer type. My first
Speaker 8: reaction was I wanted to go back in the room
Speaker 8: and bang his head on the frigging concrete floor. I
Speaker 8: controlled myself, you know, and I said, you know, like
Speaker 8: I said, you're in a frigging in a room with
Speaker 8: a computer.
Speaker 1: I said, these guys are.
Speaker 8: In a lobby. We didn't We didn't know anything that
Speaker 8: was going on. We had no clue. Everybody knew much
Speaker 8: more than us, the guys in the lobby. Nobody in
Speaker 8: we didn't know anything. What we knew was this is
Speaker 8: this is bad. That's all we knew. A. Hayden and
Speaker 8: Kalan Kalen was trying to get everybody out of there
Speaker 8: from the beginning.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: It just we had so many guys that got so
Speaker 8: far up it just took them so long to get down.
Speaker 8: We just couldn't do it fast enough, you know. But
Speaker 8: when it comes to like stuff like that, these chiefs
Speaker 8: are great, you know, so many really terrific guys, but
Speaker 8: you know, you want to run physic uh, you know,
Speaker 8: fitness that the training, it's probably not the right guys.
Speaker 5: What was he like? What was Bush like?
Speaker 8: You know Bush that day? And I saw him a
Speaker 8: bunch of times after that too. He was you know,
Speaker 8: I always thought it later on, maybe a lot of mistakes,
Speaker 8: you know, going at Iraq and Afghanistan all that stuff,
Speaker 8: But as far as feeling for our guys, I had
Speaker 8: seen him like two years before that, he came to
Speaker 8: one of our memorial ceremonies up in the Central Park
Speaker 8: and not Central Park, Riverside, and he was phenomenal and
Speaker 8: you could see it, like I had to pull him away.
Speaker 8: The Secret Service guy says to me, a boss, can
Speaker 8: you get my guy out of here? You know, it
Speaker 8: was I think he was one of running for president.
Speaker 8: I was, and I was in the Union, and he
Speaker 8: was just so legit, you know, like he cared so
Speaker 8: much about our guys and about everybody there. I just
Speaker 8: found him to be totally sincere and totally upfront, honest, guy.
Speaker 8: I always thought, this is a regular guy. I felt
Speaker 8: like he was. He was like me. I didn't think
Speaker 8: he was the smartest guy in the world, but he
Speaker 8: certainly was. He certainly cared, you know, and and and
Speaker 8: and you could feel it. You can feel the compassion
Speaker 8: when them, you know. I don't know if you guys
Speaker 8: heard that story. When I was in the call with him,
Speaker 8: I said, we'll meet you over with the thing, and
Speaker 8: he said, no, why don't you right with right with us?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: So I get in the call with him and he
Speaker 8: looks at me and he says, commission, you look beat.
Speaker 8: He said, you're getting any rest? I said, well, my
Speaker 8: wife came home last night. I got lucky, so I'm
Speaker 8: feeling better. Yeah, he did.
Speaker 4: He looks to me.
Speaker 1: So now.
Speaker 8: I thought attacking shoot his pants. But Julianne knew me.
Speaker 8: Gulianne knew I was crazy. So he's just shaking his head,
Speaker 8: you know. And so the president says, you're the only
Speaker 8: guy in this car. I got lucky last night. So
Speaker 8: so then a couple of weeks later, I go to, uh,
Speaker 8: what's it sink?
Speaker 1: Want?
Speaker 8: Was it fourteen engines?
Speaker 1: Some? Uh?
Speaker 8: What call it forty four? Well, anyway, the engine that's
Speaker 8: a single engine. And so he's he's there, he's having
Speaker 8: pizza with the guys. So I was there late. I
Speaker 8: got there late. I walk in and one of the
Speaker 8: guys says, sit over here, Boston, and the President said, no,
Speaker 8: come over here, committ He grabs a chair, he puts
Speaker 8: it next to him. He says, how are things at home?
Speaker 8: I mean that kind of guy, the check fifty, he
Speaker 8: could make it in the firehouse. You know, he was
Speaker 8: that kind of guy. You know, he you could see him, uh,
Speaker 8: you know, dealing with the craziness of that we deal
Speaker 8: with and the and the people are the heroes, and
Speaker 8: I know he.
Speaker 5: Could had to be the following year. It had to
Speaker 5: be the following year. I did h whatever. It was
Speaker 5: something at the U N right, they had. I ended
Speaker 5: up going with one of the deputy chiefs, a friend
Speaker 5: of mine, and we were in like the main area.
Speaker 5: So there was two firemen, two fire department guys, two
Speaker 5: secret service too, cops the issue all you know, swat guys.
Speaker 5: Everybody's in this central hub right and all the you know,
Speaker 5: you see all the limousines coming in and you know,
Speaker 5: people from you know, presidents and whatever from all around
Speaker 5: the of the world, and all of a sudden, somebody
Speaker 5: says President Bush is here. So everybody gets up and
Speaker 5: we kind of all, you know, just come outside the room.
Speaker 5: And you know, they had the rope there and everybody
Speaker 5: was kind of lined up waiting for him to come in.
Speaker 5: And he's like walking in and everybody starts going, you know, hey,
Speaker 5: what's up us USA? Whatever. He looks There had to
Speaker 5: be fifty people he and I was in my class
Speaker 5: as he looked right in my face, he was walking
Speaker 5: like this, he went like this. He came right over
Speaker 5: to me and shook my hand and he says, you
Speaker 5: know whatever, thank you for your service or something. I'm like,
Speaker 5: holy shit, man, like the freaking president. Man, awesome.
Speaker 1: You know, I went he saw you on the bill
Speaker 1: He saw you on the billboard.
Speaker 5: I think he said.
Speaker 1: I had a call from the Secret Service right after
Speaker 1: that that like, uh, yeah, we want you to come
Speaker 1: to the Catholic Charities. President Bush is gonna be there
Speaker 1: with his wife. We're gonna have dinner. I'm like, all right, like,
Speaker 1: what's your show security number? What do you asked me
Speaker 1: fifty questions. I went there and we had dinner with
Speaker 1: there was probably about fifty guys from the Union. I
Speaker 1: think it was from the Union because I was a delegate,
Speaker 1: and uh, I love his wife. She was the bomb bro.
Speaker 1: She was awesome.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He was a cool dude too, Like he sat down.
Speaker 1: I got a picture. I don't know what were looking
Speaker 1: for it now. I got a picture with him. His wife.
Speaker 1: They were just real people, you know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, she was. She came to a lot of the
Speaker 8: firehouses with me and her and Libby Pataki also really
Speaker 8: nice ladies. Really you could feel like they weren't phonies,
Speaker 8: you know, they really you could see it. They can't,
Speaker 8: you know, they really can't.
Speaker 1: Let me finished, Let me finish these hold lot of
Speaker 1: a minute, let me find it right here, right here. Second.
Speaker 5: I like the library that tom Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, keep slipping down here in front of it. I
Speaker 8: actually read. I actually read one of those books.
Speaker 1: There we go, What do you do?
Speaker 5: All right?
Speaker 1: May and Giuliani funded a forty four million dollar renovation
Speaker 1: of the Fire Academy of Randalls Island, including a car
Speaker 1: simulation and a burn building, turn the Academy into the
Speaker 1: premiere fire training facility in the country. FDI provided a
Speaker 1: faster relief and a health support for units fire scenes
Speaker 1: to reduce the stress at the fire scenes. There's another one.
Speaker 1: Uh Juliani secured purchase of the thermal imaging cameras.
Speaker 8: Wait, wait, wait, let me give you one thing. Let
Speaker 8: me get one story on the training academy. Okay, so
Speaker 8: we go through all kinds of hoops and we get
Speaker 8: for Totten, which Tommy Fitzpatrick and some of the guys,
Speaker 8: I don't know how they did it from the federal government.
Speaker 8: It was I don't know. I don't remember all the details,
Speaker 8: but it was a nightmare trying to get it. So
Speaker 8: we're gonna move our training academy to Fort Totten. So
Speaker 8: the mayor is gonna support it. We're gonna give us
Speaker 8: all the money for it and everything. We're gonna get
Speaker 8: a brand new training academy at four time. So now
Speaker 8: we sit down and we actually say, okay, what are
Speaker 8: we gonna do a four ton And then they find
Speaker 8: out we can't do this, you can't burn, you can't
Speaker 8: do this because it's like a lot of rich people
Speaker 8: live over there and they don't want anything to do
Speaker 8: with characters like us. The federal government owns this, so
Speaker 8: you're gonna deal with derbureaucracy and all these other things.
Speaker 8: So I go back to Juliani and I said, I
Speaker 8: changed my mind. I don't want for Totten. He said,
Speaker 8: what are you nuts? And this is the relationship that
Speaker 8: we had. You know, I still love the guy today
Speaker 8: with all the ship that he's been through. I still
Speaker 8: I can't believe it what he's gone through. But anyway,
Speaker 8: at that time, so he says, you know, what, are
Speaker 8: you crazy? We just went through all the sud I said, Boss,
Speaker 8: it ain't gonna work there. I said, you gotta let
Speaker 8: me rebuild a new academy at at Randall's Island. I said,
Speaker 8: this is the place for us. You know, it's it's
Speaker 8: already said. It's next to the waste water place. Here.
Speaker 8: We can do whatever ship we want at Randall's Island.
Speaker 8: Nobody's going to say anything. So he says yes, And
Speaker 8: then we decided we got to get a shovel in
Speaker 8: the ground right away because we're running out of time.
Speaker 8: If you if when you're in the city like that,
Speaker 8: or I think feds are probably just as bad. If
Speaker 8: you don't get a project started, the new guy comes
Speaker 8: in and it ain't gonna happen, you know, what I mean.
Speaker 8: So we start in December of two thousand and in
Speaker 8: two thousand. December of two thousand, we put a shovel
Speaker 8: in the ground and he gave us fifty million. I
Speaker 8: think they did it for forty four and it was
Speaker 8: it's a phenomenal Uh. Great, and we still have four time.
Speaker 8: I still don't know what the hell they're doing out there.
Speaker 8: Looks like an ambulance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a little weird.
Speaker 8: Talk about the buildings. That's a great example of inefficiency
Speaker 8: four times and getting it pretty. They gave everybody a
Speaker 8: little house to hang out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, little house scuba.
Speaker 1: Let me finish with the rest that got secured the
Speaker 1: purchase of thermal imaging cameras for the FDNY given a
Speaker 1: fight as disability to see the fires beyond the walls
Speaker 1: and locate victims.
Speaker 8: Uh thought it would ray downey and then we just
Speaker 8: expanded it to everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a game changer. You know what the
Speaker 1: best plot was, Tom, You know what the best plot was,
Speaker 1: My wife made that sale to the FDM. I like apples.
Speaker 8: You like apples, like the apples sounds to me like
Speaker 8: you have a conflict of interest doing.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 1: One of the questions you got.
Speaker 5: I got one one, and I asked him before that
Speaker 5: if you wanted to talk about it. I actually wanted
Speaker 5: to make it the word of the day, but he
Speaker 5: said that's no good. So, uh, you know what I have,
Speaker 5: all right, so the suck it up? Okay, all right?
Speaker 5: How did that? When did that come about? I remember
Speaker 5: it as a fireman, but I don't really remember too
Speaker 5: much about it.
Speaker 8: This is the perfect example of when people want to
Speaker 8: take you down, how they can just you know, uh,
Speaker 8: change shit around. So I go on David Lettiman. After
Speaker 8: September eleventh, Juliani was like a control free in his administration.
Speaker 8: He never wanted us to do press or anything after
Speaker 8: September eleventh. He wanted us, everybody to do as much
Speaker 8: as possible to get the worried out there. What a
Speaker 8: great job all of our guys have done, how much
Speaker 8: support we need, how much money we need to rebuild
Speaker 8: the city, visit you know. He we just couldn't do
Speaker 8: enough press. So they invite me to go on David
Speaker 8: let Himan, And I go on David let Himan, you know,
Speaker 8: and he's so he's saying to me, like, how do
Speaker 8: you do it? You know, how do you go through
Speaker 8: it all these funerals day after day after day. And
Speaker 8: I said, well, you know what I mean, the guys
Speaker 8: just have to they have to suck it up. And
Speaker 8: it's all about the families. You know. We don't have
Speaker 8: the luxury of, you know, worrying about ourselves at this point.
Speaker 8: Everything we do is about the families, and we just
Speaker 8: need to you know. And that suck it up. And
Speaker 8: that turned around into you got kid me.
Speaker 5: That's how that went.
Speaker 8: You guys can get the tape from David let him
Speaker 8: and that's exactly how it went. So then I had
Speaker 8: been on sixty minutes and that guy and you mentioned before,
Speaker 8: I think his name was Harry Resoner. He calls me
Speaker 8: up and he says, what is all this stuff with
Speaker 8: the suck it up? I saw what you said. He said,
Speaker 8: there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I said, no,
Speaker 8: but that's that's what happens when you know, Can I
Speaker 8: read something.
Speaker 1: To you guys, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 8: Because I saw this. You know, I was trying to
Speaker 8: prepare you believe.
Speaker 5: That's that's that was like, that's like worse than what
Speaker 5: they're taking out of context with Trump, for God's sake,
Speaker 5: Like that's.
Speaker 8: Exact, and I swear to you. I swear to you, guys,
Speaker 8: that's exactly how I happened. But check it out if
Speaker 8: you don't believe me. So I had done his chapter
Speaker 8: for a book and some at some college, and it
Speaker 8: was like how to fight upon the COPD. So I
Speaker 8: was looking at it the other day and I saw this,
Speaker 8: and I said, I I like the guys to see this.
Speaker 8: So this is just on page sixteen. We mistakenly began
Speaker 8: to deal with the deaths as as we always had
Speaker 8: when our ceremonial unit met. During the first few days,
Speaker 8: we were clear and the changes we would have to
Speaker 8: implement because of the vast numbers, but felt that we
Speaker 8: would somehow get it done. There was a few weeks
Speaker 8: later that it really hit us. We brought in a
Speaker 8: disaster assistance company. Kenyon was the name of it. I
Speaker 8: wish we had called them the first day. They are
Speaker 8: experts in the psychology of sudden public death. We learned
Speaker 8: many things from them. These are some of the things
Speaker 8: we learned. It would be two years before some families
Speaker 8: would even begin the grieving process. We could write down
Speaker 8: our own rules because it would be difficult to find
Speaker 8: any and ask the truth. There was no you know,
Speaker 8: there was no playbook. Nope, the families would organize. They
Speaker 8: would demand investigations and information. They were a cry of
Speaker 8: funding and get legislation. They would build memorials, some certainly
Speaker 8: were not relevant for right now. But they also warned
Speaker 8: us of being prepared for unbridled anger. They would be
Speaker 8: terribly exacerbated by not recovering remains of their loved ones.
Speaker 8: They would need an outlet for that anger. They would
Speaker 8: come at us. We can only manage our reaction to it.
Speaker 8: We would never be able to satisfy them because what
Speaker 8: they wanted, the return of their loved ones, we could
Speaker 8: never give them. And that's exactly what the guys from
Speaker 8: this disaster management company came. And you know it was
Speaker 8: it was something that I just I just realized, like
Speaker 8: there was no matter what we did. I mean, we
Speaker 8: gave them pensions, we put I was the first one
Speaker 8: to promote somebody it was dead, you know, I put
Speaker 8: them on even I even promoted somebody and I won't
Speaker 8: mention who it was, who wasn't even on the list,
Speaker 8: but we promoted them anyway. And then the tops and
Speaker 8: everybody had been doing that ever since. But there was
Speaker 8: nothing that we could do. The money, the pensions, that
Speaker 8: there was nothing, and then it was worse. It wasn't
Speaker 8: bad enough that you told missus so and so that
Speaker 8: her husband is gone. It was it was even worse
Speaker 8: because you told missus so and so her husband is gone,
Speaker 8: but I don't know, I can't give you his remains.
Speaker 8: So there was nothing worse than that there was nothing
Speaker 8: we could do. And the guys from the union, you know,
Speaker 8: some of them were stand up and some of them
Speaker 8: supported us and everything, and as other guys just said, hey,
Speaker 8: you know, they just it was much easier to just
Speaker 8: you know, let them blame us.
Speaker 5: Then I remember there was a freaking bumper stick and
Speaker 5: that said suck it up. Oh god, I still can't
Speaker 5: get over there.
Speaker 1: That we should make a T shirt that says suck
Speaker 1: it up.
Speaker 5: That's like so, I mean, that is like, what do
Speaker 5: we have to give you?
Speaker 8: What do we gotta give you that.
Speaker 1: For that? It was totally it was terrible.
Speaker 5: That's ridiculous.
Speaker 8: And talk about you know management. If you remember, right
Speaker 8: when they had that incident at thirty three and seventy.
Speaker 1: Five, there was you know that's yeah, yeah, that thing right.
Speaker 8: Anyway, anyway, that was just one of the one of
Speaker 8: the hot hart things that had to deal with.
Speaker 1: Let me let me bring something up to it up.
Speaker 5: Hold on, yeah, yeah all I thought so in appreciate
Speaker 5: you said that one of your things that you enjoyed
Speaker 5: the most about the job was that you were able
Speaker 5: to make those kind of decisions quote unquote you know
Speaker 5: that weren't like by the book or whatever and make
Speaker 5: things kind of go away, right.
Speaker 1: I mean that you Roofi, good brother.
Speaker 5: So I'm gonna bring this this and again there's a
Speaker 5: lot of guys out there probably who made some poor
Speaker 5: decisions and uh and uh you know made the call.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to bring this up, but I'm gonna
Speaker 1: bring it up.
Speaker 5: But everybody forget they suck it up right here was
Speaker 5: this is what happens.
Speaker 1: And I told uh, uh, mister van Essen here in
Speaker 1: the pre show, I had gotten jammed up something. Here
Speaker 1: we go, Here we go. I got jammed up.
Speaker 5: I got look at him chuckling.
Speaker 1: I got thrown in. I got thrown in jail, and
Speaker 1: uh I did something stupid. Uh I got locked up.
Speaker 1: And the lawyer for the union came and said to me,
Speaker 1: you remember Clegman yeah, sure, sure right.
Speaker 8: He was the criminal guy he was. You must have
Speaker 8: really done something.
Speaker 1: It was crazy, he says to me. He says to me, listen,
Speaker 1: mister cool, this is what's gonna happen. You're gonna go
Speaker 1: on the department order. You're gonna you're gonna lose your vacation,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get a rip, and you probably you might
Speaker 1: lose your job. I'm like, all right, good talk. So
Speaker 1: I go to my captain, Captain Dennis Murphy, and I
Speaker 1: tell him what happened, and he calls von Essen and
Speaker 1: von Essen said one thing to him, is he a
Speaker 1: good guy? Is he worth saving? And Kat Murphy said absolutely.
Speaker 1: And I never heard another word about it in my life. Bro.
Speaker 1: And what I want to say is, that's not the
Speaker 1: first guy that I've heard. I talked to Hank Mullay.
Speaker 1: I talked to Hank Mullay, I talked to Paul harsh Hagen,
Speaker 1: and they brought guys to the same thing. Uh. And
Speaker 1: when I got on the show, Tom didn't even know
Speaker 1: who I was. He doesn't know who I am from
Speaker 1: a hole in the wall. But I said to him,
Speaker 1: not only did he save my job, he created the
Speaker 1: squads in which I went to the squads and then
Speaker 1: my wife was selling from MSA the cameras and whatever
Speaker 1: that has been. I met her in the firehouse, so
Speaker 1: I had not I saved my job, went to the
Speaker 1: squads that he created and was working in the day
Speaker 1: that my wife would. The man changed my life single handedly,
Speaker 1: and that's something that I hear was not something that
Speaker 1: was irregular to him, that he saved a lot of
Speaker 1: guys shops. So I wasn't going to bring this up
Speaker 1: because I don't like to say I like to try
Speaker 1: to be impartial, but you know the amount of heat
Speaker 1: mail and I got, I gotta say the guy did
Speaker 1: some good things.
Speaker 8: Yet you definitely have a conflict of interest. But I
Speaker 8: don't tell you the reason I didn't remember it was
Speaker 8: because I don't want to brag about it. But it
Speaker 8: had happen, I don't know twenty five times in my time.
Speaker 8: It just so many. And I told you a story
Speaker 8: of a guy in to it at the event, at
Speaker 8: one of the Fight Upontment events, and he told me
Speaker 8: the same story. You know, he punched the cop and
Speaker 8: they weren't going to hire him, but he turned his
Speaker 8: life around, and you know, just to me, and I
Speaker 8: told you that I was a screw up and I
Speaker 8: got away with a lot of stuff. And I always
Speaker 8: felt like, you know, the second and third time, well
Speaker 8: that's different. Now we got to fight the guy, but
Speaker 8: second chance, you got to give people a chance. And
Speaker 8: then I found this letter I was reading to you
Speaker 8: guys before about a guy. They called me up and
Speaker 8: they said, you know, they just closed out the Captain's
Speaker 8: list and the guy who was left number one has
Speaker 8: seven kids. And I said, really, they said, and they said, yeah,
Speaker 8: you know, it's terrible. And then somebody said that's horrible,
Speaker 8: and I said, well make them. And then you know,
Speaker 8: he said letters to me and sell me, thanking me
Speaker 8: and stuff.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: It just it was the best part of the job,
Speaker 8: being able to do things like that.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: I thought maybe you guys would bring up the famous
Speaker 8: ty story too, So we've I had some guy for
Speaker 8: not wearing a tie, right, Louis Gotcia comes in to
Speaker 8: me and he says, I got this fire Marshal. He's
Speaker 8: a complete mutt. He does everything, you know, blah, I
Speaker 8: got a million things. I can't stand him. I haven't
Speaker 8: able to nail him down. And I just had him
Speaker 8: at a meeting and you didn't have a tie on.
Speaker 8: I told him you doesn't where a tie, he's gonna
Speaker 8: get fired. So I said, all right, let's fire him.
Speaker 8: So we fired him. All the lawyers wrong, all the
Speaker 8: lawyers came to me. He said, you can't fire a guy.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, well it's done now. So of course he
Speaker 8: went to court. He won, he got his back pay
Speaker 8: and everything other. But we had an awful lot of
Speaker 8: fun fire in this guy firing.
Speaker 1: Don't worry about it.
Speaker 5: It was like that part. I like that part of
Speaker 5: the little bit of because you're saying to yourself, there's
Speaker 5: no way it could be all like straight on. You know,
Speaker 5: there's like those little conversations like, yeah, this guy's a mutt,
Speaker 5: what can we do? Yeah? Talking to my guy all.
Speaker 8: It was so much, so much fun. Help guy, you
Speaker 8: know if you can. But you know, I can't win
Speaker 8: a walk.
Speaker 5: What So this was this was the other question. I think,
Speaker 5: I uh, chief digar with this. If you had to
Speaker 5: do it all over again, would you would you would
Speaker 5: you do it? Would you take the jump? Would you
Speaker 5: take the would you go sell real estate like you
Speaker 5: were going to do, or retire out and have no
Speaker 5: aggravation and be you.
Speaker 8: Know, no, I wasn't gonna sell real estate, was managing
Speaker 8: a building in Manhattan, but I would definitely do it.
Speaker 4: Super crystal.
Speaker 8: To me, it was the best job I ever had,
Speaker 8: you know, it was it was It had all the
Speaker 8: combinations of the craziness, the fun of the firehouse. I
Speaker 8: got to go to fires once in a while. Even
Speaker 8: that audible talks about, you know how he was in
Speaker 8: the fire for an hour and a half as commissioner.
Speaker 8: Commissioners don't go in fires, you know what I mean.
Speaker 8: It's but I was a fireman, so I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: It was fun, you know.
Speaker 8: So I thought it was the best job in the
Speaker 8: world for me. I got a chance to really help
Speaker 8: a lot of people. And then, if you's it, I
Speaker 8: really thought as horrible as September eleventh was. And I'm
Speaker 8: saying this, maybe maybe it's you guys will say it's
Speaker 8: my ego, whatever, but I thought I was the best
Speaker 8: guy to do it at the time because I cared
Speaker 8: so much about the guys and the wives and the kids,
Speaker 8: and you know, bringing the city back and everything. I
Speaker 8: think that so that was a sacrifice for me. You know,
Speaker 8: people say how did you how could you do it?
Speaker 8: How'd you get through it? And I say, like, was
Speaker 8: I supposed to do?
Speaker 1: Quit?
Speaker 8: You know, it's it was horrible. It was absolutely horrible.
Speaker 8: But the relationships, the things that we could do for
Speaker 8: the families and for you know, the guys, and we
Speaker 8: did them, and the things we couldn't do, you know,
Speaker 8: we suffered from and they suffered from. You know, if
Speaker 8: I was doing it again, I would do a lot
Speaker 8: of that very differently. I think I would. I wasn't
Speaker 8: in charge of, you know, the mitigation, you know, as
Speaker 8: far as you know, some of the things that the
Speaker 8: job and everything. But I think we probably made a
Speaker 8: mistake by leaving the guys in there way too long,
Speaker 8: especially when we knew there was no nobody was alive,
Speaker 8: you know, just to find remains as important as remains
Speaker 8: are too loved ones to put all those people that
Speaker 8: these answers today, But again that's Monday morning quarterbacking. I'd
Speaker 8: never criticized the chiefs for the way to handle the
Speaker 8: fire that day, because I don't think it's that's fair,
Speaker 8: But I do think it should be done differently if
Speaker 8: it happens again. I think when I saw what happened
Speaker 8: with Deutsche Bank. I was totally in shock. I thought,
Speaker 8: how could we be sending all these people up in
Speaker 8: a construction elevator without any way of getting them out?
Speaker 8: I mean that that sound like good planning. So you
Speaker 8: know you've got to be you should be able to
Speaker 8: get out of something you're sending people in. I mean
Speaker 8: that's like one O one, right, So yeah, the question
Speaker 8: I would I would do it all again. I I
Speaker 8: My latest emergency was COVID with FEMA. I really enjoy
Speaker 8: getting back in it. It was a horrible, horrible time
Speaker 8: for New York City. I was glad to be able
Speaker 8: to make a difference, and I may even have one
Speaker 8: more emergency left to me.
Speaker 5: But I was gonna say, how old are you know?
Speaker 8: Almost nine, almost seventy nine, So like, I'm really old.
Speaker 8: I'm falling acros good hair. You still say that, bro
Speaker 8: just goes back any further. It will be in the
Speaker 8: back of my head.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you don't have this. You don't have this going on, right,
Speaker 5: you don't have I don't look yet.
Speaker 1: Good for you?
Speaker 4: Yeah yet?
Speaker 5: Uh commissioned.
Speaker 1: If there is anything that you could change about yourself
Speaker 1: and the way you hand something, what would it be.
Speaker 5: That's a good question.
Speaker 8: Well, I'm thick as ship.
Speaker 1: I've heard that from quite a few guys. But it's
Speaker 1: a good heart thickish.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I am thick. I mean, you know, I hear
Speaker 8: from people that care about me a lot.
Speaker 1: But I don't know other way other.
Speaker 5: Than that change man what. I'm kind of like that too. Man,
Speaker 5: Once you have your own ideas, it's not an easy
Speaker 5: thing to other than that.
Speaker 8: I'm almost perfect.
Speaker 5: Good for you. Oh, I know, I want to ask
Speaker 5: you if somebody told me this, because we're gonna we're
Speaker 5: getting close, is it like a fifty rate that commissioners
Speaker 5: don't last their full tenure?
Speaker 1: Is that?
Speaker 4: Is that a full Is that any we're gonna ask about?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, yeah, I forgot about it. I don't I
Speaker 5: don't know.
Speaker 8: I know Lowry they crucified he was the first black guy.
Speaker 8: They crucified him. They call him you know. They were
Speaker 8: saying he was selling drugs and everything else. So they
Speaker 8: came after him. Oh, Hagan was when I was a
Speaker 8: young firefighter, I used to tell me o'hagen was a
Speaker 8: drunk and he was this, and he was that. As
Speaker 8: I get older, I found out o'hagen was probably the
Speaker 8: best commissioner we've far as like making making improvements in
Speaker 8: places like I mean, Manhattan is a very safe place.
Speaker 8: All the all the buildings in Manhattan the very safe.
Speaker 8: The ones that we regulate, I mean we can regulate
Speaker 8: them because we can hit all those companies up for money.
Speaker 8: We can't regulate a six family in the South Bronx
Speaker 8: or in BEVs Ivesant. So we were able to regulate
Speaker 8: people that have money. So that's why Manhattan is so safe.
Speaker 8: I think because of people like o'hagen, Bill fi Han
Speaker 8: when you know he was early on. They they they
Speaker 8: passed a lot of laws. It was a great fire commissioner,
Speaker 8: young smart uh you know, chief of department then fire commissioner,
Speaker 8: Like I say, Lowry got crucified, Bruno got crucified. We'd
Speaker 8: be out of outside his office saying jump Joe Jump.
Speaker 8: I was there in the union and he was and
Speaker 8: he was a good guy, a good a good commissioner,
Speaker 8: but no support from the mayor. Horrible budget. Cities in
Speaker 8: a toilet. So really a lot depends on the conditions
Speaker 8: of the city. To get conditions of the city, you know, Scoppetta,
Speaker 8: when I was leaving Bloomberg had asked me to stay,
Speaker 8: and I was, you know, you guys can probably see emotionally,
Speaker 8: I'm uh, you know, I have some tough issues with
Speaker 8: this stuff. So I had to go, you know, but
Speaker 8: Bloomberg had asked me to stay. And if I had stayed, Man,
Speaker 8: we would have really solidified a lot of these changes
Speaker 8: that we got in place. I mean, we started a
Speaker 8: comstat in the fight department. As soon as I left,
Speaker 8: they got rid of it. They don't want to be
Speaker 8: managed or accountable, you know, they just don't. They just
Speaker 8: don't have that mentality of a business mentality. I remember
Speaker 8: working for Honeywell, and Honeywell the president says, he says,
Speaker 8: we're not the government. We don't have to be inefficient,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 4: What I mean.
Speaker 8: There's a there's a civil service mentality that you know.
Speaker 8: I saw it a FEMA. You see the fight upon
Speaker 8: we see any city agency, there's they just wait for
Speaker 8: people to you know, wear them out, you know what
Speaker 8: I mean. And even a good chief keep trying to
Speaker 8: change stuff, change stuff, and finally uh they gave Yeah.
Speaker 8: I mean Cassano, uh, you know, had his time. Dandy
Speaker 8: lasted eight years. Like I say, with the worst mayor
Speaker 8: and history of mayors. I don't think he accomplished much.
Speaker 8: But you know, I don't know. I don't know if
Speaker 8: the history, I don't remember the leabody.
Speaker 5: Somebody gave me that call. I don't know if it
Speaker 5: was sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well my dad drove Gus Beatman.
Speaker 8: Okay.
Speaker 1: Did he leave before his term was up?
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 1: But he was a good guy man.
Speaker 8: He was a good guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I got a picture him with Until. He's
Speaker 1: a nice man.
Speaker 5: Good companies too.
Speaker 1: I think he was up in Halem right.
Speaker 8: Uh, yeah, he was one of them, A good fights
Speaker 8: that The name I was tarted to think of before
Speaker 8: was Charlie Rivera.
Speaker 5: He was a yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had a lot
Speaker 5: of pictures of him, like we've had guys on the
Speaker 5: sh show show pictures of the early days. I forget
Speaker 5: what companies, but and he was in there, you know,
Speaker 5: and and you know in some legit companies, you know.
Speaker 8: Good good fire ups. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, doesn't mean
Speaker 8: you're going to do a good job.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: Politics are rough, you know, because they're not honest. The
Speaker 8: finous is pretty honest. They may they may not be honest, Yeah, they.
Speaker 1: May not be right.
Speaker 5: But I think that's what I would take away from
Speaker 5: this podcast.
Speaker 8: That's how that's how they mean that they're right.
Speaker 5: But that's what's that rough I would say I would
Speaker 5: take that away from the podcast, is that I can't
Speaker 5: just because you it's not an easy thing to to
Speaker 5: to work the politic area, you know, it's an easy thing.
Speaker 5: I mean, even the union is not an easy thing
Speaker 5: to do, you know what I mean. And that's it.
Speaker 5: That's like the minor leagues, right, that's not that's not
Speaker 5: even like the major leagues. That's like a ball, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean, like in comparison doing political wise anyway.
Speaker 7: Right, So that would be maybe a good question to
Speaker 7: maybe give some advice for somebody maybe looking to fill
Speaker 7: your shoes someday in fd U, Y or even anywhere
Speaker 7: in the world.
Speaker 5: And Tucker, what would you tell Tucker right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what would you.
Speaker 1: Tell What would you tell Tucker? Well, he probably already did.
Speaker 8: Well, then you can share with us. I hope, I hope. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I want to help him succeed, you know, and I
Speaker 8: think he can. He's a I think he really loves
Speaker 8: the guys, he loves the job. I think he'll be
Speaker 8: shocked at how poor poorly it's managed. When he gets
Speaker 8: when he really gets into the weeds. But he's a businessman,
Speaker 8: he's uh, he's around a long time. He's a smart guy,
Speaker 8: and I think he's got an opportunity.
Speaker 1: He can go either way.
Speaker 8: He can just be uh you know, the guy that
Speaker 8: goes around uh, you know, having some fun and making
Speaker 8: the guys feel good. Or he can actually go in
Speaker 8: there and you know, maybe make a difference. And that'll
Speaker 8: be up to him. And he's got to watch out because,
Speaker 8: like I say, they stand begged her at city Hall
Speaker 8: and they could easily stand bag him too.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't do it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you can give you some hairbags to work.
Speaker 1: Alcohol. You did it.
Speaker 5: I can't feel my face.
Speaker 8: If he doesn't get a good team, uh he, he
Speaker 8: won't succeed.
Speaker 5: Why why is that?
Speaker 1: Why is it that the hot road, the hotter road
Speaker 1: to tow is to do the right thing? Don't Is
Speaker 1: that backwards in this job? No?
Speaker 8: No, But you when you use the expression, like I
Speaker 8: remember that expression in the union, do the right thing?
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 8: What is exactly does that mean? Do the right You
Speaker 8: know when you hear the teachers Union say it's about
Speaker 8: the kids. You really believe that that's a bullshit? Is
Speaker 8: it true with a particular teacher. Absolutely, I've seen teachers.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's just like, oh, guys, they love their job,
Speaker 8: they love the kids. For every one of those guys,
Speaker 8: or every five of those guys, there's one guy that'll
Speaker 8: just screw the system.
Speaker 1: Right and left.
Speaker 8: So do the right thing for who. The union is
Speaker 8: like a like a defense attorney. The defense attorney doesn't
Speaker 8: walk into the room and say, listen, lou is a
Speaker 8: really good guy, but he's guilty of sin, so give
Speaker 8: him a break. That's not the lawyer comes in, he
Speaker 8: lies his bullsoff to get you off. And that's what
Speaker 8: the union does. So the union's got a hard job,
Speaker 8: you know, But that's not the commissioner's job. The commissioners
Speaker 8: job is to is to run a bill and run
Speaker 8: a department with seventeen thousand people as efficiently as possible
Speaker 8: for nine million citizens that are that are trying to
Speaker 8: You know, the guys are funny because there was a surplus.
Speaker 8: One time when I was some time in the union,
Speaker 8: they said there's a surplus of a million dollars. So
Speaker 8: immediately our guys thought, oh good, we're gonna get it,
Speaker 8: you know what I mean. Forget about the bridges, forget
Speaker 8: about the subways, forget about the school sanitation talks, forget
Speaker 8: about it.
Speaker 5: I'm getting zero. Come on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it was with terurrific.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: It was those two zero's when you said that before.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I remember that. I remember that, like
Speaker 5: uh and again I had, you know, I just I
Speaker 5: guess I remember where I.
Speaker 1: Was when the guys told this Juliani. It was two zeros.
Speaker 1: I remember exactly where I was.
Speaker 8: But remember he gave it every city employee, not just us.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah no, but that didn't matter. Why would
Speaker 1: you let the facts matter?
Speaker 8: But you got to remember too, it was a five
Speaker 8: year contract. It was a five year contract.
Speaker 5: It was zero zero two right, two three or something?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 8: No, I think it was fifteen or fourteen the other
Speaker 8: three years you know between. I think so so it
Speaker 8: was the fourteen percent contract for five years.
Speaker 5: I think I remember saying that he would have been
Speaker 5: better off if he went two two three, it just
Speaker 5: spread it out over five. Nobody would have said shit,
Speaker 5: you know what I mean?
Speaker 8: I think I think I said that before Giuliani said
Speaker 8: that to me one time. He said, I really screwed up.
Speaker 8: I should have just done one zero. You know, he
Speaker 8: admitted that.
Speaker 5: You know, somebody said zero, there are three, three, six.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you talk about optics, you know, and now you talk.
Speaker 1: You know. That was a tough way to start with
Speaker 1: all you all of your employees. You know.
Speaker 8: I really thought he made it up to us in
Speaker 8: so many other ways though, But I was you know,
Speaker 8: for me, I was on the inside, so I knew
Speaker 8: what he was doing, what I was doing. Yeah, rich
Speaker 8: guy in the Fai house, Like I said, they they
Speaker 8: don't know who to believe.
Speaker 1: You know. I gotta tell you if being an outside
Speaker 1: and not knowing Julianni and this speaks for even the cops, Bro,
Speaker 1: you always felt no matter what, that guy really legitimately
Speaker 1: had your back, no matter what happened. He believed you
Speaker 1: before he believed what happened to the city.
Speaker 5: I mean, look what the what happened to the city
Speaker 5: when he came in. I remember my first year or
Speaker 5: second year, right, he wasn't in And I went on
Speaker 5: on the July fourth on independence. They went at fourth
Speaker 5: of July. I went to like seven jobs or some
Speaker 5: ridiculous thing. He came in like that was it fought.
Speaker 5: The July was done. It was like zero, right, were like,
Speaker 5: come on, you're killing me here, you know what I mean?
Speaker 8: You know, like Tom was saying like he was he
Speaker 8: was a tough though, like even with the cops, like
Speaker 8: he supported the cops big time, but as soon as
Speaker 8: he were a bad cop, he crucified you. So right,
Speaker 8: But I always gave you Remember the black face and
Speaker 8: Howard Beach, Ye remember something? So I had that one.
Speaker 8: So the lawyer comes out to me as a good
Speaker 8: friend of mine, Mike Block, who just recently died.
Speaker 1: He said, oh, he just died. I don't know, he
Speaker 1: just died.
Speaker 8: Really good guy. He says, man, I want to talk
Speaker 8: to you about these guys.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: I said, yeah, okay, come on in.
Speaker 1: So he comes in.
Speaker 8: Of course he doesn't come in just me and him.
Speaker 8: We could talk off the record. He brings in like
Speaker 8: a whole bunch of other people at Sam bagged me
Speaker 8: later on, but I told him, like, I don't think
Speaker 8: we should fight these guys. They're just morons, you know,
Speaker 8: fight every moron holy ship.
Speaker 5: We have like six guys. We have like six guys.
Speaker 8: So Julianni calls me up and he says, what are
Speaker 8: you talking about. You have to fight these guys. I said,
Speaker 8: boss that I'm wanna fight them. They're good guys. They're
Speaker 8: just ship heads, you know. Mistake, he said, Tommy, He said,
Speaker 8: that's not how it works. It's the city of New York.
Speaker 8: We have a tremendous population of minorities. We have to
Speaker 8: show them support. We can't do so, I said, you know,
Speaker 8: he convinced me. So of course, now the guy's criticized you.
Speaker 8: You rolled over. You know you didn't care, I said,
Speaker 8: I said, I didn't roll over. I think he's right
Speaker 8: to tell you the truth. And I wasn't going to
Speaker 8: give up my job for these two morons, you know
Speaker 8: what I mean. I mean, I don't want to fire them,
Speaker 8: but if it comes to firing them or and not
Speaker 8: and having all these lawsuits of people, you know, with
Speaker 8: the minorities that they insulted them so much, that's what
Speaker 8: you have to do. Anyway, they won the case, they
Speaker 8: got back on the job done. The city appealed and
Speaker 8: they lost the case.
Speaker 5: And I was like, did they.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it was like the case in My daughter's a lawyer,
Speaker 8: and she said they actually was a case and that
Speaker 8: they studied you know, all the you know, whether or
Speaker 8: not you have the right to say whatever you want
Speaker 8: even though you're not in uniform and all that kind
Speaker 8: of stuff. So you know, it's not easy to be
Speaker 8: the mayor of the city in New York. It's to job,
Speaker 8: you know. I feel bad for, you know, people who try.
Speaker 8: I mean I think I think Juliani really tried, and
Speaker 8: I think he did a great job as a man, true.
Speaker 5: Putting out like legitly putting out fires every day, Like
Speaker 5: every day there's some ship that you don't like, even
Speaker 5: if you're personally having a bad day, like yourself and
Speaker 5: your own life, Like you got to hear some shit about.
Speaker 1: Black face or some ship like this guy urinating in
Speaker 1: public fighting right, Oh my god, we are our own
Speaker 1: worst enemy. I don't know how.
Speaker 5: I don't think I would. I don't think I would
Speaker 5: have done it. I don't. First of all, I don't
Speaker 5: think I could do it. Like I was thinking about
Speaker 5: that before when you said, when they called you and said, hey, listen,
Speaker 5: we want you to come for but a commissioners thing,
Speaker 5: and you were like, you know, and then you talk
Speaker 5: to your wife. I'm like, I don't think I could
Speaker 5: really do that job. Like, I don't know if I
Speaker 5: had it, like how it worked. I mean maybe because
Speaker 5: you were in the in the politics for so long
Speaker 5: it was a little bit easier.
Speaker 8: But you know, I was going to say that coming
Speaker 8: right from the firehouse.
Speaker 1: Forget it.
Speaker 8: No, they eat your life. I mean, I think the
Speaker 8: biggest education I ever got was in the Union. Like
Speaker 8: a lot of the chiefs criticized me when I got
Speaker 8: the job, He's not a chief, he's a dope.
Speaker 1: Failed to the can man.
Speaker 8: That's when I heard the can man I never studied for,
Speaker 8: lieutenant says, see I failed him. I would have failed
Speaker 8: twenty of them if I took them, because I never
Speaker 8: studied for You know, I had gotten a graduate degree
Speaker 8: and everything I was I knew after ten years in
Speaker 8: the Union. I really knew the department better than any
Speaker 8: chief in the department, you know what I mean? Except
Speaker 8: fee hand. And you know that's funny because when Sayer
Speaker 8: call me that morning, the only condition they had, he said,
Speaker 8: there's one condition.
Speaker 1: I said, what is it?
Speaker 8: That figure they were going to start, you know that stuff,
Speaker 8: you got to keep fee in. I was going to
Speaker 8: ask you that, I said, keep fee in geez, I
Speaker 8: sure hope he stays. You know, he's a phenomenal guy,
Speaker 8: a phenomenal leader, and he had the respect of of
Speaker 8: all the people. And he admitted to me later on,
Speaker 8: he said, you know, I was really pissed off when
Speaker 8: you got the job. You know, I thought I deserved it.
Speaker 8: You know, I was older than you. I knew more
Speaker 8: at the experience and everything, he said, but he was
Speaker 8: mad enough to say it to me. He always supported me,
Speaker 8: He was totally loyal, gave me such great advice, never
Speaker 8: tried to take me down and embarrass me. And a
Speaker 8: couple of years later he said to me, you know
Speaker 8: they were right. He said, you know you had the
Speaker 8: balls to take all this stuff on. He said, I
Speaker 8: didn't want to do that, you know, he was he
Speaker 8: was fine with just trying to keep the guys safe
Speaker 8: and putting out fires and stuff like that. He didn't
Speaker 8: have the stomach for, you know, dealing with all the
Speaker 8: dirt bags.
Speaker 1: And I went to provy school with his son, Johnny
Speaker 1: f Hen. He's a great guy too. Man.
Speaker 5: He's a chief now.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, he's a chief too.
Speaker 8: He's probably the reason you talk about the squads. He's
Speaker 8: probably the reason, one of the main reasons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was at two fifty two, right,
Speaker 5: he was.
Speaker 8: Probably home whining to his father on a.
Speaker 1: Daddy whiner.
Speaker 5: God's a good man, he's a good guy. I haven't
Speaker 5: seen him in a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So is there anything else, Chief, that you want
Speaker 1: to just get out I'll be Chief stupid. Anything else
Speaker 1: commission about acid that you want to get out there?
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 10: It was.
Speaker 8: It was fun and it's painful and it's dead and
Speaker 8: it's it's all rolled up into one for me. So
Speaker 8: I'm very proud of my time as Commissioner, very proud
Speaker 8: of it, and uh defended stand up to anybody for it.
Speaker 8: I spent a lot of time, you know. I was
Speaker 8: blessed afterwards. I was in busied with Giuliani for a
Speaker 8: while and that ended, and I was working for Honeywell
Speaker 8: and Underwriter's Laboratories, and I was all over the world
Speaker 8: talking about improvements and safety and communication. And I had
Speaker 8: a chance that everybody would say, oh, you would have
Speaker 8: you would have fired commissioner on September eleventh, andah, and
Speaker 8: I had a chance to tell everybody, you know, you
Speaker 8: have great The guys were about what a job they
Speaker 8: did that day. And I felt that people would say
Speaker 8: to me, do you think anything good came out of
Speaker 8: September lefth And I always said no, I couldn't think
Speaker 8: of anything good except the fact that the people around
Speaker 8: the world understood then.
Speaker 5: How great, how brave? Yeah, how brave those guys, we.
Speaker 8: All guys did that day was they raised the boat
Speaker 8: of every for every firefighter throughout the world, because everybody
Speaker 8: then so like, holy shit, they ran to that building
Speaker 8: and they and they couldn't get out in time. And
Speaker 8: so that to me, being a spokesperson, you know, and
Speaker 8: to spread that word, that message all around the world,
Speaker 8: and I'd love to travel too, it.
Speaker 1: Was like a win win, you know.
Speaker 5: And I mean you just got out of that. I mean,
Speaker 5: you what I've seen videos of you and you know
Speaker 5: in in the lobby. I mean it must have been
Speaker 5: by the you know, skinny your teeth that you know,
Speaker 5: just wasn't your time, right, Obviously.
Speaker 8: I felt so good that nobody I was in the
Speaker 8: lobby got killed. Nobody, you know, Chief Callen Hayden.
Speaker 1: They were old.
Speaker 8: They were trying to get everybody out, Get him out,
Speaker 8: get him out. Julianna was calling me. He was paying
Speaker 8: the ass. He always wanted his commissioner to be with him,
Speaker 8: you know. And I was there and I missed him
Speaker 8: on West Street and I could open them up on
Speaker 8: West Broadway, and uh, I left, and but all of
Speaker 8: those guys got out of the lobby, you know, and
Speaker 8: went across the street. And then uh, you know, the
Speaker 8: South Tower fell and then the North tewl fell first, Yes,
Speaker 8: north Town fell, No, South TELI fell then, yeah, and
Speaker 8: then Pete moved everybody north and Pete and uh Fian
Speaker 8: stayed and then uh, they got killed when Northel fell.
Speaker 8: So yeah, but all those people that I was with,
Speaker 8: I didn't. I never had that level of the next
Speaker 8: level of guilty guilt survive with a bunch of guys
Speaker 8: and you're the only one that survived, Like I saw that,
Speaker 8: but one of the fireman. That's just horrible to to
Speaker 8: live with that, you know, because you're always second guessing yourself.
Speaker 1: And I never had that.
Speaker 8: I never had those feelings of anything that I did
Speaker 8: was you know, hurt, you know anyway, you know, I
Speaker 8: got you the ship Sandwich.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that sums it up and just never gets twenty
Speaker 5: something years, it's still is not easy. Somebody worked the
Speaker 5: mutual for me.
Speaker 1: It took my overtime actually, and he died on an
Speaker 1: to eleven, so I dealt with that for a while.
Speaker 1: So I know what that ship sandwich. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's this time of year every year.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it just doesn't anybody.
Speaker 8: You know, you seem you know, you're you seem tense.
Speaker 8: You see this and they say, oh jees it's August first,
Speaker 8: you know. You know, it just comes every year.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: I go to the ceremony every year, and I stand
Speaker 8: there and watch these phony politicians and I wish I
Speaker 8: could get a bag over their heads and choke.
Speaker 4: Them and hold back hold.
Speaker 5: Really, I don't get it.
Speaker 8: I love it, but I mean, you know, some of them,
Speaker 8: uh it's an They respect the guys, so they come.
Speaker 8: So that's a good thing. You know. See the President
Speaker 8: of the United States say, that's that's a big deal.
Speaker 8: That's to honor the families, you know, so that's important,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so you know what you tell you, brother,
Speaker 1: he's wrong for telling you not to come on this
Speaker 1: show to today.
Speaker 5: I thought you were going to have a good time.
Speaker 8: Someone you know, he'll be He's probably plastered by now
Speaker 8: not for him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he was waiting.
Speaker 5: I app I'll give you one more listen. As as
Speaker 5: I told you, I appreciate you. I know it wasn't
Speaker 5: going to be easy for you. And you know you
Speaker 5: were answered every question that uh we we brought up
Speaker 5: to you, so uh you know, good and bad, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean. So I appreciate that. That's I
Speaker 5: know as well.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you coming on and just you know, there's.
Speaker 5: No easy answers to some stuff, but nobody's gonna go
Speaker 5: with you.
Speaker 1: That's what That's why we wanted to spelled a lot
Speaker 1: of myths out there, all be from the brothers to
Speaker 1: get Let the facts get yeah.
Speaker 4: Man, just the facts man.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, everybody happy. I just appreciate it. I enjoyed
Speaker 1: the show. I appreciate the end.
Speaker 5: That's what we wanted you to do, is to come on,
Speaker 5: tell your side of the story. Listen to your your
Speaker 5: life story. You had a great career and uh, like
Speaker 5: you said, you look like Walter Cronkite. Man, that's really crazy.
Speaker 4: Well, Louie Bunker was the other name that was.
Speaker 8: Get me. I appreciate your positive comments with the other guy.
Speaker 8: He's obvious conflicts of interest. I would expect.
Speaker 5: You might be getting another call tomorrow morning, right out loud.
Speaker 5: I listened. I also, I also appreciate it putting up
Speaker 5: with the shaky phone like he's been probably like yeah,
Speaker 5: in front of it. So it's my fault. He had
Speaker 5: a hot time with the computer.
Speaker 8: I'm a dinosaur technology.
Speaker 4: But you did find it.
Speaker 1: No great, he looks smart. With all those books in
Speaker 1: the back.
Speaker 8: I got to find out whose books they are?
Speaker 4: Whose office are you using this?
Speaker 1: Somebody old Juliani's books on it.
Speaker 8: There was a joke with Juliani when they said that
Speaker 8: a book that he did not sign would be more valuable.
Speaker 1: Because yes, now you got to make me out get
Speaker 1: your book. I gotta read your book.
Speaker 8: Loud, you guys, if you guys could push one book,
Speaker 8: I'm telling you this book.
Speaker 1: Where the hell is that one?
Speaker 4: Is it the chief book?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: No, I don't like ade.
Speaker 8: I got my phone on top of it. I got, oh, yeah,
Speaker 8: that's hash Hagens that that book is the best.
Speaker 1: That is not Paul Hashagen's book.
Speaker 8: Yes, well his book. I mean there's a great story
Speaker 8: with that. When you guys are old enough back in
Speaker 8: a long time ago in the union hired a company
Speaker 8: to do a yearbook. Right, So they go around and
Speaker 8: they start trying to take pictures at the firehouses, and
Speaker 8: they went broke because it's impossible to get the guy.
Speaker 8: You know, you tell the guys in too eighty eight,
Speaker 8: you know, come to the you know, the firehouse on
Speaker 8: Thursday at two o'clock, going to take pictures. So now
Speaker 8: the guy sends a photographer there. Half the guys show
Speaker 8: up at two, Half the guys show up.
Speaker 1: At four to see the stupid pictures I have of
Speaker 1: guys before that picture was taken, of what was of
Speaker 1: what was going on.
Speaker 10: Yes, it was probably a great day. They turned it
Speaker 10: into probably a great day. Absolutely make good decisions, okay,
Speaker 10: so good choices. So the union, the union, the company
Speaker 10: goes out of business.
Speaker 8: A lot of guys had given like I forget the number,
Speaker 8: maybe it was a seven dollars depositive. Well, for years
Speaker 8: in the union, the guys at every union meaning somebody
Speaker 8: would say, that's seven dollars. I never got my seven
Speaker 8: dollars back. The guys would be bitching about that seven
Speaker 8: dollars for years and years and years. So now I'm
Speaker 8: in the union, I said, I'm going to do the yearbook.
Speaker 8: So I start the process, right, I'm gonna loan money
Speaker 8: from the union that we did to put out the money,
Speaker 8: so then they get to be commissioner. So I said
Speaker 8: to the guys in the union, you want to do this?
Speaker 8: You know, every one of them said, I'm not doing this.
Speaker 8: So then I did it as commissioner. This book is
Speaker 8: the best I'm talking. It has a picture of thousands
Speaker 8: of guys, and most of the guys showed.
Speaker 1: Up, you know whoever showed up anyway, Yes, yes, most
Speaker 1: of the guys showed up.
Speaker 8: And that said a lot about it, and Paul did
Speaker 8: a history of it. It just loaded usself. Just a great,
Speaker 8: great book. I don't think it's in print anymore, but
Speaker 8: it's really a terrific and it talks about all of
Speaker 8: everything that we did for the department and all the
Speaker 8: accomplishments and and what people before us did, the O'Hagan's
Speaker 8: of the world. It's a really great hit. Paul did
Speaker 8: a great job.
Speaker 5: Hey, Tom, I gotta ask you a quick question because
Speaker 5: one of the guys just texted me and I was
Speaker 5: in two ninety one oh three for a while and
Speaker 5: they were saying that there there was a scenario I
Speaker 5: guess with Timmy Stackpole his first tour back or something
Speaker 5: like that, and the guys were like, yeah, we almost
Speaker 5: killed him. I don't know what happened. The rig was
Speaker 5: pulling out and something happened. Do you remember that? Do
Speaker 5: you remember?
Speaker 8: First of all, I mean, I can talk about Stackpole
Speaker 8: for another hour. So he finally comes back to work,
Speaker 8: which after September eleventh, I regretted him coming back to work,
Speaker 8: but Tara says, I couldn't have stopped him and everything.
Speaker 8: They had a special boot made for him and everything.
Speaker 8: So I think it's a Sunday in July or June.
Speaker 8: So I go out there and I'm riding the rig right,
Speaker 8: I'm in like the seat behind you, officer. So they're
Speaker 8: going through red lights on a run. I said to
Speaker 8: them like, I'm having commissioner, I'm sitting in the rig.
Speaker 8: You guys don't even think you should go by the rules,
Speaker 8: even with the commissioner on the truck. And they just
Speaker 8: looked at me like I was from another planet. I'll
Speaker 8: never forget it. And then and after they they had
Speaker 8: we had that horrible fire. Uh, what the hell was
Speaker 8: the one where they they two ninety was using uh
Speaker 8: INChO three quarters, Yeah, Vandalia. So now carothers wanted to
Speaker 8: fire all and I'm using inch and three quarters. And
Speaker 8: I said to him, these are the guys. They've been
Speaker 8: using inch and three quarters since I came on the job.
Speaker 8: I always heard about them violating all the rules using
Speaker 8: into three borders. I said, none of the chiefs noticed
Speaker 8: they've been using into three quarters the last twenty years,
Speaker 8: you know. So that was the stuff they used.
Speaker 1: To drive me crazy.
Speaker 8: And I wanted to lifting the chiefs, not the guys,
Speaker 8: not the I thought. I thought the fire fighters in
Speaker 8: two ninety one or three were crazy, but good they were.
Speaker 8: They were my kind of crazy. I loved the guys
Speaker 8: that were crazy, but I mean, you gotta you gotta
Speaker 8: temper it with safety.
Speaker 4: Too, you know about the guys that didn't do bi
Speaker 4: you like, get anything for those guys.
Speaker 5: I always did commission I.
Speaker 8: Always, I mean, I was one of them as a firefighter.
Speaker 8: But then when you be commissioner, you've got to try
Speaker 8: to fix it. You know, There's that there's that difference.
Speaker 8: You know, remember sitting you know, instead of we we'd
Speaker 8: been sitting in our district. The worst buildings would the
Speaker 8: the city owned. So it wasn't really a lot of.
Speaker 5: Right, and you can never write them anyway, right, you
Speaker 5: never ordered anything anyone.
Speaker 8: Talk about inspection. How about the Father's Day fire? Those
Speaker 8: guys died that day because that was a hardware supply.
Speaker 8: That wasn't a hardware store. The people who are inspecting
Speaker 8: that building and doing building inspection didn't notice that that
Speaker 8: was a hardware supply. That's why I exploded like that.
Speaker 8: You know what that guess heater went or whatever?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 8: So these are the things that we joke about. Fire
Speaker 8: prevention and inspection and stuff like that. When you're the boss,
Speaker 8: you know, it's like being a parent. You're trying to
Speaker 8: keep everybody alive. You can't keep everybody alive. If everybody
Speaker 8: thinks it's okay for for me firefighter Tom von Essen
Speaker 8: to be laughing about building inspect it's not okay for
Speaker 8: laughing about it.
Speaker 1: Right, Hey, I got a question for you, a guy
Speaker 1: who's fucking busting my balls and thinks we didn't ask
Speaker 1: any tough questions. How did Building seven burned down? Was
Speaker 1: it the OEM office?
Speaker 5: I don't even know what the funk that means, why
Speaker 5: do you even answer that question?
Speaker 1: Well? Irritating me?
Speaker 8: Wait wait, wait no, So there was a story to
Speaker 8: that one. So it wasn't the OEM office. From what
Speaker 8: they said later on, there was uh Secret Service or
Speaker 8: FBI if somebody had auxiliary tanks there and that they
Speaker 8: they caused the building to explode and burn down or whatever.
Speaker 8: But the decision, right, the right decision I think was
Speaker 8: made that day that building. I came out and I
Speaker 8: went in involved, right, involved, Yeah, and they decided, the
Speaker 8: chiefs decided everybody was out. The super that building made
Speaker 8: a decision early on to evacuate that building. I give
Speaker 8: him a lot of credit. He had the courage to
Speaker 8: OEM was in there. We couldn't even get in there,
Speaker 8: to the OEM office. He made the right decision. Whoever
Speaker 8: made it to evacuate that it's a conspiracy theory this thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this guy's asking ask a tough question.
Speaker 5: That's the question question.
Speaker 1: That's the one he asked.
Speaker 4: What's the matter with you?
Speaker 5: Did I tell you to stop reading the chat?
Speaker 1: I should stop, right, I should stop.
Speaker 5: I want to choke the ship out of this guy.
Speaker 8: That's not that's Tom.
Speaker 5: I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you answer questions.
Speaker 4: In the world, stop reading the chat, get me your
Speaker 4: health and safety tips.
Speaker 1: All right? Well, wait, we gotta do with health and safety.
Speaker 1: We picked out.
Speaker 2: The First Responder Center for Excellence is a not for
Speaker 2: profit organization dedicated to protecting the lives and livelihoods of
Speaker 2: first responders. Their education and research initiatives aim to bring
Speaker 2: greater away aareness and understanding the challenges to help safety
Speaker 2: and well being of firefighters, EMS personnel, and other first
Speaker 2: responders too. They are an affiliate of the National Fallen
Speaker 2: Firefighter Foundation.
Speaker 1: All Right, tonight's health and safety tip is never store
Speaker 1: your bunkie gear inside of your car or at home.
Speaker 1: When bunky gear must be transported, use a gearbag or
Speaker 1: a clear path plastic bag. I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: many guys I see going on details just throwing their
Speaker 1: ship in the car man, and then they got their
Speaker 1: kids freaking cost seat right next to it. BROB, don't
Speaker 1: be silly, don't be putting no contaminated ship. You call
Speaker 1: where your kids are, Don't be bringing it home to
Speaker 1: your kids. You know what I'm saying to thank you
Speaker 1: very much again, we appreciate it, all right?
Speaker 8: I'm gonna go have a scotch.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, you know what, you can.
Speaker 1: Tell you brother he's wrong.
Speaker 4: What's your brother's David?
Speaker 1: Yet? I forget We're just said, Roddy, Roddy, Roddy, do
Speaker 1: me a favor? Fuck it? Oh, look it up.
Speaker 5: Oh you're gonna be getting a call tomorrow.
Speaker 8: Well yeah, what was it about that thing?
Speaker 5: You know you'll be like, yeah, we'll see.
Speaker 1: Dis for coming on. What do we got next Thursday?
Speaker 5: Roof You know, I don't even know.
Speaker 1: I don't even care this, but who cares? Whatever? Nobody
Speaker 1: to stop it? Then disould tell us your side of
Speaker 1: the story.
Speaker 4: Next Thursday is Chief Downy from Miami.
Speaker 1: Deed, he signed off already, he signed off.
Speaker 5: Have a scotch?
Speaker 1: Is all right? Guys, We will see you next Thursday.
Speaker 1: Until then, stay long ago and Tuesday, look out for
Speaker 1: a cup of joy with Fago.
Speaker 5: You know what you gotta remember. We'll see it the
Speaker 5: big one, everybody.
Speaker 4: That was a good show, guys, that was a good show.
Speaker 4: Great show. All right, guys, have a great night. Real
Speaker 4: heavy