9-11 Podcast 1

The speaker is a retired detective from Nassau County, New York, with 32 years of experience in law enforcement. They specialized in gangs and later joined a special unit called Special Investigation Squad to work on motorcycle gangs. They were off duty during the 9/11 attacks but knew right away it was terrorism when they saw the second plane hit. They were out on injury at the time but eventually returned to duty and helped with the aftermath, including identifying bodies at the Jacob Javits Center and the landfill. The experience changed their perspective and added counterterrorism to their job responsibilities. Tell me a bit about yourself. I'm a retired detective from Nassau County, New York. I've been in law enforcement for 32 years. I'm retired now. What did you do in your job? That was a wide variety. I did street. I worked the streets as a regular patrol officer. Then I worked plainclothes. Then I became a detective. I specialize in gangs. I've been working gangs since 1987. I worked all types of gangs from the streets. Then I specialized in motorcycle gangs in 2002. I was in a shootout with the Hells Angels and the Pagans. At the time, no one on our job was doing motorcycle gangs. We had a group that was doing street gangs like MS-13, Bloods, Crips. The chief of detectives called me up and asked me if I'd like to come over to a special unit called Special Investigation Squad. I'd work motorcycle gangs and get my detective shield out of it. In 2002, I went over to that unit and I was in Special Investigations basically my whole career. Do you know how many people responded in your station to 9-11? I couldn't give you a correct answer on that. What happened was when 9-11 happened, I was off that day. I remember my mom woke me up. She called me and woke me up. She said to turn on the news. Prior to this, when I was doing gangs, I was at conferences that we did counter-terrorism. I had a little background on counter-terrorism. When my mom called, she was all upset. She said a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. What I did was I said, look, I'll be right over. She only lived a couple of blocks away. We went over. Not we, I went over. I sat with my mom and just looking at the video, I knew something was wrong. In New York City, you're not flying planes that low. There's actually certain no-fly zones that they have. Then when the second plane hit, I knew it was terrorism right away. I called up our job. They said, look, we're going to put you on hold. We'll figure out if we're pulling you in or not. I didn't go in that day. I was actually off for a couple of days because I had a shoulder surgery. I was out on injury at the time. I was in an auto accident that ripped up my shoulder. I had to get pins put in and reattach my bicep to my shoulder. What I did was I called a doctor up then. I said, I need an appointment. I got to get in. I need you to sign me off so I can go back to work. It took me about a week to get that done. As this was going on, they were sending officers from our precinct. We have eight precincts, plus we have special units. New Hampshire County was sending any available men to go down there. I know my brother, who's also a police officer, he took it and he went down that night. He's a police officer in a village where I live. He went down that night because what happens is they were going. where you can pick up nurses, doctors, anybody like first responders, and you can drive them in. What the problem was was when this happened, they shut everything down in the city. The bridges were closed. There was no more traffic. Nothing was moving. Nobody could move. Everybody walked out of New York City, walked over the bridges. It was actually an amazing sight to see because it was organized chaos, if that makes any sense. Then I went down and did it. I went down after I got signed back onto duty. Yeah, I think it did. I think it changed. That's a hard question. Did it change my job? Yes. To one degree, it changed my job because everything you did affected you now. Before then, we weren't worried about getting terrorism. You heard about terrorism all over the world, but never here. We had internal things in the United States, but nothing at this kind of scale. When I went over to that unit, we were doing special investigations. They used to do GACs. They always did GACs. Now, since 9-11, they had to do counterterrorism, too. We did gangs and counterterrorism. When I was put over to that unit, I was still working in my precinct during 9-11. When you had any availability, you were going over down into Manhattan to 9-11. Our precinct would take and bring us in by bus, or if you had your day off and you weren't working, then you'd go in and volunteer. Did it change? It changed a lot of things, what I looked at, how I saw things. Then, when I switched over and went to the Special Investigation Squad, our job then was you didn't do much gangs at the time. What you were doing was you were running people's names. You were running names for either possible terrorism or people that were dead. The unit, we worked at the Jacob Javits Center. That's where they were putting bodies there. They had the landfill, so we had guys at the landfill. There was bodies there if a body was recovered or parts of the body were recovered. I worked there. I worked the morgue. I worked the pile. When I say the pile, that was when the towers came down. You still had a lot of people in the towers. They were basically all dead. There was some that came out alive, but that was very far between. You wanted to get the bodies out so they can be identified. Whether you got the whole body out or parts of the body out, at least you got something that you can say, okay, I have this person. I had a friend of mine that died in there, and all they got was a piece of his jaw. We got it through DNA. To the family, it's closure. It changes the way you looked at things, I think.