9-11 Podcast 2

After 9/11, security measures in New York City were drastically changed. There were regular meetings with various law enforcement agencies to share information and address potential threats. New security measures, such as radiation detection machines, were implemented to prevent dirty bombs. The NYPD hired individuals with CIA background to bypass communication issues. The most important thing for law enforcement to prevent another attack is to share information and be vigilant. Sharing information is crucial as it helps identify potential threats and prevent attacks. However, sometimes ego or desire for credit hinders information sharing. People tend to become less vigilant over time and take things for granted. It is important to stay informed and not forget about potential threats. How did 9-11 impact the security measures in New York City? Oh, wow. It changed everything. Security measures. But what happened was, we took everything for granted. Like I said, you had suicide bombers over in Europe and the Middle East. But we really didn't have it here. I know we had the Oklahoma bombing, which caught people off guard. But that was one guy that was radicalized. But security here, they were worried now with anybody flying. So if you wanted to go fly, the whole security at the airport was changed. Security that you looked at, everything was changed. We had meetings all the time on different security. Every Tuesday, we used to call it, if not a joke, but we called it Terror Tuesday. And what it was, was it was a meeting. And we had a meeting with our office. So it was our police department. You had Suffolk County Police Department, which is the next one on the island. I live on the island, and you had Nassau County and Suffolk County. They take up the whole island. Then you have the state police. You had the FBI. You had the ATF. You had the federal marshals. So everybody would come to the meetings, and everybody would share their information. Say, okay, look, I'm looking for this guy. Or I had to go knock on doors. We would get the lead sheet. A cop on the street would say, hey, something doesn't look right here. And one of the things we learned was you look at a house, and if the house had four, five, six satellite dishes, well, then that house, we wanted to see who was living there. Because in experience, look and see, all right, you have maybe six, seven, or eight males from the Middle East living there. Well, what are they doing now? So a lot of them, they say, oh, we're students or whatever. And you look at them, listen, some of them are doctors or whatever, not a problem. But when you go in and you talk to them, some of them, you know, they say, well, we're doctors or we're going to school for doctors. But they say, well, we dropped out. We haven't done it for a while. And you look and you see manuals to planes, photographs of different bridges, photographs of tunnels. Well, there's no reason for that, you know. So then what we do, we pass it on to the FBI, and the FBI would do a deeper search. And we'd, the city was always at the meetings. We'd go to the city for meetings. And the city, they would stop. The city put up these different, I don't know the nicknames. You can drive in a city with any kind of, like, radiation. Because we were worried about dirty bombs then. Because there was rumors about they were going to set off dirty bombs, which were a bomb with nuclear or radiation in it. And they have these machines that if you go past them, the machine goes off. So we would have, I would wear a little, it looked like a beeper. I don't know if you've ever seen these beepers. But it's like a square box. Small, almost like the size of a cell phone. And I would wear that on my belt when I'd go and talk to somebody. And I would always have it on vibrate. I wouldn't have it on noise. It was always silent, but on vibrate. So when I'd go into a house, if this thing started vibrating, well, I know there's some radiation in the house. That happened a few times. So now we've got to, why is there radiation in the house? Well, sometimes, you know, some people went for tests. It's a nuclear stress test for your heart. Well, you have radiation in you. So that can kick it off. I remember I went for a nuclear stress test one time before I had to go to one of these meetings. And there's about 30 people at the meeting. And everybody has one of these rad machines. And I'm walking down a hall. I didn't even get to the office yet. I'm walking down a hall, and I hear everybody's beeper going off. That's how sensitive it was. So you'd have people come out of the room, and they'd look, and I'm walking down, and they'd go, well, did you have a stress test? I said, yeah. I said, now you're stressing me. So, you know, but so you'd have that. I've had several times where I had cases with that. So everything you looked at now wasn't, you weren't looking at it as, well, could this happen? You're saying, well, yeah, this could happen. You know, and you treated things different. You looked at stuff different. And it changed it. It changed the way you looked at normal crimes. There was no such thing as normal crimes anymore. It was the undertone of, well, could it be terrorists? Could it be terrorism? So that's what we looked at. Yeah. Do they still have those meetings now? Oh, yes. And more of a larger scale, too. Of course, what happens is not my job, not Nassau County or Suffolk County, but New York City. New York City is probably, I would say, the best police department in the world. What they do is they have units. They have a big unit that oversees all the terrorism. And each precinct looks at certain things, and they have other specialists that do certain things with terrorism. But what happens is New York City has police officers all over the world. So if you're a police officer in New York City, and let's say you're in this veneer unit with Intel, they have guys that are police officers in England, Ireland, they have them in Germany, France, all over the world. And they have them in the Middle East. And what they do is they live over there, and all they do is they have meetings with the different agencies there. And they go to work every day just like I would go here, but they're all looking at terrorism. Because now if a bomb goes off, let's say, over in Pakistan, well, that affects us over here. Because now people have protests over here or whatever. So he'll get a call, and they give information to New York City first. What New York City did, which I thought was pretty intense, they get around certain things. The FBI operates in the United States. The CIA operates outside the United States. Back on 9-11, the CIA and the FBI were not communicating. They weren't talking to each other. I don't know, but they didn't share information, which is why this happened. Because the CIA, I think, had information about something might happen, but they never passed it on. And vice versa. I'm not sure which one it was. So what happens now is the NYPD hires, I believe he became like an assistant commissioner or something like that, who used to be CIA, but he was still CIA. So he's got two jobs. He works for the CIA and the city police. Well, because he's CIA, I mean, because he's the city police, he can operate. He's got people all over the place. We have police officers also in Oklahoma. We have police officers in L.A. We have police officers all over the United States from New York City, and they reported back to him. Well, he's getting information that he can give now to the CIA. So it was almost like bypassing the rules of CIA not allowed to work in the United States. But they were looking at terrorism that way. What do you think would be the most important thing that law enforcement should be doing to prevent another attack similar to 9-11? Sharing information. You have to be, you know, you have to be vigilant, but it's training. You have to do training. You have to train these guys what to look for. Because it changes both sides. I had several cases. One case I had that they were over in other countries. They were doing car bombs, and we got a car bomb in New York City that somebody stopped. I forget how he sounds, but we defused it. Another one was I had a case that got information that they were going to blow up a building using hot dog vending stands. And in New York City, you have every corner, they have all these, like, vending stands. And they're mobile. And what they were doing, they have these hot dog stands that they were going to take and put a propane bomb in the hot dog stand. And these guys, most of these guys lived in one building. So what happens is if you've got a suspicious person that we looked at, you look at a person and you know, okay, where does he live? What friends does he have? All of a sudden, you look at, well, this other guy lived in there. There's another guy that lives in there. They're all hot dog vendors. They're all, they all used to go to this, they all went to the same mosque. So they have a connection. So they would take it, and they were going to take it and fill up the hot dog stands with a bunch of propane bottles, and everybody was going to meet at a specific time and put it in front of the building and blow the building up. So you need to share the information. Unfortunately, a lot of times, whether it's ego or people like, well, I want to get the credit, they don't pass the information on. They want to try to do it themselves. And that's how we get hurt. Me, I don't care who has the information as long as it gets done. So that's got to be checked out. What happens is you have, this happened on 9-11. It happened, and it was long ago. So people forget. People aren't as vigilant as they were. People not, they take, go back to taking things for granted again, because it hasn't affected us. People look at, well, today's problem, you know, right now the problem is that everybody's talking about the Israelis and Palestinians fighting. That's, you know, that's affecting us big time over here, you know. And, you know, what did they forget about? And, you know, what did they forget about? They forgot about that the Palestinians came in, Hamas. It wasn't the Palestinians, it was Hamas, who was a terrorist organization. They came in, they invaded Israel, and they killed all these people. I mean, they took and they were raping the women, beating them. Now they still have hostages. In my opinion, a lot of those hostages are already dead. They're not telling them how many people are alive. And the people that, if there are hostages that are still alive, and if any of them are female, they're not going to be killed before they return, got returned, because they're being raped. And what happens, Hamas doesn't want the world to know what kind of torture and stuff they've done to them. So they'll be killed. They're not going to be returned. So people forget about other things. You know, see, you drop your guard, and you can't drop your guard. You can never drop your guard. It's, uh, um, it's, it's, it's, well, the flavor of the day is, okay, today we're going to do this, today we're going to do that. Well, then you forget about other stuff. And you can't. You've got to keep grounding the pavement and keep doing the same thing. Yeah.