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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:32Speaker 03

  In plain clothes, in Times Square, was the most fun I've ever had, being a cop. You know, that time working as a cop in New York City was like being in a fucking war zone. Man with a gun, robbery in progress, shots fired, somebody got stabbed, somebody got raped, somebody threw somebody off a building, somebody pushed somebody on their train, all day long. And I don't care if it was a day tour, an afternoon tour, or a midnight tour. And it was the best fucking job I ever had.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  It was a Friday night. I got a call from the mayor. About 11 o'clock at night.

• 2:13Shawn Ryan?

  You get a lot of calls from the mayor.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I get a lot of calls from the mayor, but you'll notice they're always at fucking midnight. This guy does not sleep, you know? And he said, "Tomorrow morning, I want you to be at City Call at 9 o'clock. And you're gonna take over the NYPD as the city's 40th Police Commissioner." 9 o'clock tomorrow morning. You get all my guys. All my friends. All our friends. These are cops I was involved in gun battles with. Really battle-tested cops. They had fucking medals up to their ears, right? They all showed up. And the fucking cops loved me. Why? Because I was a cop. I think I was a cop more than I was a police commissioner.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  All right, person transmitting to Mayday. Where are you, Katie?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  I just told you! If you look at the World Trade Center, there's a North Passage Bridge. I think it collapsed when the Port of Brooklyn just collapsed.

• 3:15Shawn Ryan?

  You led the greatest rescue mission in American history.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  I could hear the aviation pilots yelling on the radios that a second aircraft had just hit Tower 2.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  It was at that minute that I realized we were under attack. In my mind, I was trying to think of other targets that there may be. I was also thinking, at the time, did they have ground attacks planned? The mayor got to me about 3 minutes after Tower 2 was hit. Met me at Barclay and West Broadway. He's watching all this debris come off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, he realized that it wasn't debris. And he was like, "Oh my God."

• 4:09Speaker 07

  Get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents, and you can see the two towers. A huge explosion now raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Nobody thought the buildings would come down. We missed that by fifteen to twenty minutes. Damn. Had we stayed fifteen to twenty minutes, we would have died also. We got probably over a million, million and a half people out of southern Manhattan over about a four, five-hour period without incident.

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, it is September 11th, 2021. Welcome to this special edition of The Sean Ryan Show. I want to start by saying thank you to the massive influx of patrons that have subscribed to our Patreon from the last couple of episodes. It's people like you who make this show and this entire production possible. Also, thank you to everybody who left us a review on iTunes. If you have not left us a review on iTunes, please click the link below, go to iTunes, and leave us a review, even if it's just one word.

• 5:36Shawn Ryan?

  With that being said, let's get on with our next guest. On September 11th, 2001, twenty years ago today, the entire world witnessed the deadliest attack ever to happen on American soil. It changed our country, and it changed the entire world from that day forward.

• 6:07Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, for the 20th anniversary of when the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center, went down, we've brought you a very special, exclusive guest.

• 6:23Shawn Ryan?

  If you take anything from this episode, look at the ones you love tonight and hold them tight.

• 6:32Shawn Ryan?

  You never know what tomorrow will bring. Please welcome, Mr. Bernie Kerik, the New York City Police Commissioner,

• 6:44Shawn Ryan?

  who was active on that day.

• 6:57Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. Bernie Kerik, it's truly an honor to be able to interview you for the 20th anniversary of September 11th.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 7:09Shawn Ryan?

  So just for the audience, you were the Acting Police Commissioner when September 11th, 2001, happened, which triggered the longest war in American history. And you led the greatest rescue mission in American history. And truly, I mean, it's it's a real honor to be able to sit across from you here and get the opportunity to be able to interview you.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  Before I go on,

• 7:42Shawn Ryan?

  I just want to ask you, do you believe in fate or destiny or things happen for a reason?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I do. Um, you know, it's something I've thought about a lot. You know, in my career, I've had some crazy times, right? You know, 9/11 happened. I can remember walking into the conference room to our first press conference. It was about 2:00 in the afternoon. And I, you know, I was used to the press and media, but there were two hundred reporters in the room, international press going crazy. And I remember turning, turning around, looking at the clock, and it was like ten after two or something like that. And I thought to myself, this is one of those days, sort of like a day in infamy, right, that's gonna

• 8:37Speaker 03

  last forever. Um, I've had a couple of those in my life, you know, when I, when I was appointed by George Bush and sent to Iraq as the Minister of Interior, my first press conference, I had to go up into the, into the conference center, where probably four weeks before that Saddam was there, and he had a big throne that was in the middle of the conference center. It was leopard skin or tiger skin or something like that. And my press information officer says, Commissioner, you're gonna go up, you're gonna sit in that chair, and that's where you're gonna do your press conference. And I looked at

• 9:16Speaker 03

  him, I said, dude, I gotta sit in the throne? Really? You know, so it's, it's times like those that I've thought, what am I doing here? You know, how'd I get here? Uh, you know, I've had some positives, really, really great positives. I had, I had negatives, where, you know, I thought, what the hell am I doing here? So, uh, but I think, I think your destiny, I think, I think where you go and how you get there is, um, you know, for me, it's been, it's been hard work. It's been being in the right place at the right time. It's been a little luck. Um, sometimes it's a little stupidity.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  But I wouldn't change anything for me. I wouldn't change anything. I'm extremely proud of my career, what I've done, what I've accomplished. And I've had the honor to oversee and manage some of the greatest men and women in this country, in the NYPD. You know, I had the opportunity to run the largest police department in the nation. I had the opportunity to run the largest jail system in the nation. So, you know, two enormous jobs. But I had great people working for me. And people look at me and they say, you know, you did a phenomenal job. You're a hero and all that stuff. You know what? The people that work for me were heroes.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  I led them. But at the bottom, at the end of the day, so to speak, they were the real heroes that carried the city.

• 11:02Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you demand a tremendous amount of respect and I think those people respected you and we're gonna do whatever you ask of them because you commanded so much respect. And we're gonna revisit that question a little bit later in the interview. But when I first asked for you to come on, I thought we were just gonna talk about kind of your timeline and actions on Objective when September 11th happened and the towers came down. But after researching you, I've realized how much more there is to your story, both before and after the tragic event. And so

• 11:48Shawn Ryan?

  I kinda wanna start with your childhood and what happened when you were three years old.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  I, you know, I came from pretty humble beginnings, right?

• 12:02Speaker 03

  My father

• 12:06Speaker 03

  was pretty much a severe alcoholic. A good man, taught me a lot, a great man. But he had his own He had his own problems that ultimately later on in my life, they were resolved. He stopped drinking, we became extremely good friends, loved him to death. And he was sort of a hero for me. And, and I say that from a, um, from a very serious perspective because when I was three, my mother, my biological mother abandoned me, uh, left me, um, with a, a family out

• 12:49Speaker 03

  in Ohio and, uh, and took off. And she was later, um, she was found beaten to death, murdered, uh, when I was about nine years old. I didn't know this until I was about seventeen, eighteen, when I went in the service. And one of my, uh, one of my uncles, one of her brothers called me and said, you know, he was very proud of me. I went in the military. We got into this conversation and, um, he told me my mother was dead. He didn't say how she died. He didn't say when she died, um, but I knew she was dead. Later on, many, many years later on, um, in, uh, in the year two thousand, I was writing

• 13:33Speaker 03

  my autobiography about my life, my career. And I started to do some research on my mother and basically wanted to find out where she was, uh, you know, when she died. I didn't even think of, you know, how she died. I knew she had passed away. Um, had one of my best friends, an investigator from the NYPD, go out to Ohio. And he came back, um, when he came back, he said, look, I found her, um, but I've got some bad news. Um, and he hands me a file folder.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And in the file folder, it had, uh, a, a series of, of documents, one of which was her arrest record. She had been arrested numerous times for prostitution and, and other illegal activities. Um, she, uh, she ran, you know, uh, she had four or five aliases.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  And uh, and then we got into her death records. And um, as it turned out, she had been beaten to death and murdered. Um, probably by her pimp. Um, it was one of three men. Uh, I was involved in a, now I was involved in a twenty-seven-year-old cold case investigation with the state of Ohio. And uh, we determined that the three men that were surrounding her at the time, um, were dead, the last one of which had died about six months before I got involved. So uh, I never knew her, uh, I didn't know much about her, other than what I got from the family.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Um, but my father pulled me out of that, pulled me out of that life, pulled me out of that home with that woman that she had left me with. And uh, and eventually I moved to New Jersey with my father. He got remarried and my stepmother, um, is the one that took care of me. Um, you know, until I left home at eighteen to go in the service.

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  You went uh, to an inner-city school, which is uh, somewhat famous.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I um, I went to Eastside High in Patterson, New Jersey, you know, there's a, there's a uh, a movie called Lean on Me. Morgan Freeman uh, played in the movie as, as the principal of that school, his name was Joe Clark. Joe Clark came to Eastside High to clean it up. It was one of the worst schools, worst high schools in America. Um, well, I often tell people, I went to Eastside before Joe Clark ever got there and cleaned it up. I was there about uh, seven or eight years before Joe Clark showed up. It was predominantly a black high school. Um, Patterson, New Jersey was a- You know, was a rough town.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  I was probably one of, I don't know, twenty-five or thirty white kids that went to the school.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about survival. Got involved in the martial arts at thirteen. Got my black belt at sixteen, and this is when, this is back in nineteen seventy-two, before anybody really knew what karate was or what the martial arts were. You know, it's, I think the, the only thing they knew about the martial arts at the time was Bruce Lee, you know, he had a, he had a weekly show. That's what people thought martial arts was. But, uh, yeah, I went to East Side High. I dropped out. Uh, I quit high school in the eleventh grade. For the next year, year and a half, I humped furniture for a, for a moving company.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Up and down the east coast of the US, so I'd go, uh, I'd go from New Jersey to Florida every week. Every Monday morning, I'd leave out of Patterson, New Jersey, go to Florida, drop the load, come back home, get home by Friday, Thursday, Friday. Monday I'd leave, start all over again. Well, I did that for about a year and a half. And I realized humping furniture was not a long-term job. You know, it's a difficult job. Being on the road is hard. I, I give, uh, the American truck drivers that basically, you know, move everything under the sun around this country. I, for one, give them a lot of credit because I don't think a lot of people realize how difficult the job is.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  But I'd learned. And then, uh, then in nineteen seventy-four, I, uh, I joined the army.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  You know, I had a bunch of friends that were becoming cops that I knew from my younger years. Uh, I wanted to be a cop at the time. I didn't have a high school diploma. So I figured I'd go in the service, get my high school diploma, get some experience, and, uh, and take it from there. And that's kind of what I did.

• 18:41Shawn Ryan?

  One of the reasons I wanted to bring up your childhood is in today, in today's world, we hear nothing but excuses on why people can't seem to find success. And it sounds like.

• 18:56Shawn Ryan?

  You're one step above growing up on the streets. You grew up in an inner-city school. You didn't have the greatest home life. And yet, you're probably maybe the most accomplished person that I've ever met. And come from that background, it should show everybody that if you want something, you can fucking go get it.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  You, you know what, Sean, that, that's, that's a great question and it, and it's a point that I don't think, and I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about, you know, every day around this country, people make excuses. People want to be victims.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  For me, and, and people like me, you know, I'm not the only one that's done what I've done, but it sickens me. And it sickens me because I know better, you know? There were young black kids that I went to school with. They went to college. They had good careers. Not many, not many, because a lot of the, a lot of the kids I went to school with, they wound up in prison, they wound up dead.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  But there were, there were, you know, it really depended on the person. You know, if you have drive, if you have self-determination, if you know what you want, if you think you know what you want, and you set your mind to going and getting it, you can get it done. And, and I had, I don't know, I, you know, when I went in the service, and, and I think, I think a lot of guys that go in the military, I think this happens to them as well. You, you may not know what you're looking for, you may not know where you're going. But then you get there and you find a niche, right? You find something you enjoy doing, you find something that you can do well.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  You know, when I went in, I joined to be an MP, military police officer.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  And that was my thing, right? That's what I wanted to do. And the military gave me the opportunity to do that. You know, my uniforms were sharp. I was impeccable. I was, you know, I, I did the job. I did it really well.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  And then you, you move, you move ahead, you grow up.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  But your point, I, I only wish that people today in America could take a step back and take a bunch of examples, people like me and others, that, that moved ahead against all odds, against all odds. And, and you know, I remember in the aftermath of September 11th, I went back to Patterson. I was, I forget, I think it may have been Fox News was doing a, a special on me in the aftermath of nine 11 or for my book, went back to Patterson, walked the streets where I grew up, ran into people that were still on the streets. I ran into them and they come up to me and they, you know, and they basically said, who

• 22:02Speaker 03

  would have thought? Who would have thought? You know, it's unbelievable where you've come from and where you've gone. You know what? There's a lot of people out there to do it. I just wish that, that the general public, especially, especially these, you know, the people that, you know, they, they, they call everybody victims. So they, you know, or they, or they basically say, nobody has the opportunity. That's bullshit. Everybody has the opportunity. Everybody has the opportunity. It all depends on your mindset, your focus, your drive, maybe a little luck, maybe some of the people around you. But you know what?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Whether you're, whether you grow up in, in a inner, inner city community, a ghetto, or you know, some, you know, Wall Street arena, it doesn't make any difference. You know, good and bad, right from wrong, and it's up to you. Just do the right thing. Focus on what you want to do and, you know, and you can do it. That's the good thing about the United States. Anybody can do anything they want if they put their mind to it and they try and try hard.

• 23:21Shawn Ryan?

  100% in agreement with you on that. And I wanted to cover that because I think it's important. And, and you know, last night at dinner, we kind of covered that. But, um.

• 23:32Shawn Ryan?

  So moving on, you joined the army, you became military police. And you went to Korea?

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Well, I went to Korea. Uh, I was in Korea for 13, 14 months, came back. Um, was at Fort Bragg, my last, um. My last year and a half in the service year, I guess, a little over a year. Um, finished up my time at Fort Bragg, I was an MP. In Korea, I was a dog handler, was an MP dog handler. Um, when I come back to Bragg, I was a garrison MP. Um, in the 118th Airborne Corps. And, um, I was actually, I was actually going to reenlist. In, uh, in 1977. Delta had just been put together, I think 76, right?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Um, it was just starting up. It was the talk of Fort Bragg. I thought, you know what? I'm going to reenlist. Um, and I'm going to apply. And then I found out, no, you can't reenlist because I was. I was involved with a thing where I broke a kid's finger one time and got an Article 15 out of it. And back then, if you had an Article 15, if you were at any discipline in the military, uh, you couldn't apply for any of the special operations teams. Um, and ironically, for me, it was, uh, you know, it was a disappointment because at the time,

• 25:03Speaker 03

  I was an MP, uh, in the 118th Airborne Corps, but I was teaching at the John F. Kennedy Center, at the Unconventional Warfare Center. I was teaching self-defense, knife fighting, stick fighting. Um, I was, I was teaching there with a bunch of guys. So I basically wanted to stay in the community. But, uh, I couldn't do it because of this stupid Article 15 and I got out.

• 25:28Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:31Shawn Ryan?

  There it goes. Maybe everything does happen for a reason.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 25:37Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 25:39Shawn Ryan?

  Then you started contracting, correct?

• 25:42Speaker 03

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

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I've got a job in, uh, Nicaragua. If, uh, if you're interested, uh, we can go down, you can go down with us. And, um, probably within a month or so after I got the call, um, I got a call back saying that wasn't gonna work out. But there's a new assignment, there's a new job in Saudi Arabia. I didn't even know where fucking Saudi Arabia was. I mean, like, no, this is, this is like 1978, right? Nobody, 77, no, nobody, nobody knew anything about Saudi Arabia. And me, I'm like, yeah, whatever, I'm, I'm good, I'll go, you know? It was, uh, probably four or five times the money I was making

• 27:09Speaker 03

  working for this task force. So I said, okay, I'll, uh, I'll go to Saudi. And I remember, I lived in, I lived in Fayetteville, right outside of Fort Bragg. And I, I came up to Jersey and I told my father, I says, I'm, I just took a job, I'm going to Saudi Arabia. My father's sitting at the dining room table and he looks at me, goes, Arabia? He goes, you know, I heard of that place. He said, there's a, there's a movie, Lawrence of Arabia or something like, he said, I think it's hot there. It was fucking hot, all right. But I, uh, yeah, I jumped on this job. Went to Saudi. But in that time, the, uh, the Saudi government was building the King Khalid Military City.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Up about thirty-five miles south of Kuwait. Uh, right outside of Hafr al-Batin. And, uh, I went, I was supposed to do an eighteen-month gig. And I wound up staying about two and a half years, just over two and a half years. Was it because they needed you to stay or because you wanted to stay? Money was good, dude. Okay. Money was good. You know, it's, uh, listen, it was, and I was a young, I was, you know, I just got out of service. I was, I was twenty-two years old. Um, you know, I'm, I'm working in Saudi Arabia. I'm making three or four times what anybody was making in the States.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  I came home at, at twenty-four years old, I think, twenty-five years old. I built a house. I had a brand-new Corvette. Uh, like, I was living large, right? It was, uh, it was okay. And, um, so I stayed in North Carolina for about a year, year and a half after that. And it was, you know, I, I joined the police department, but it was slow. It was, you know, it wasn't, wasn't what I was looking for. And, uh, and I left and I moved back to New Jersey. Uh, went to work for the Sheriff's Department in Patterson, where I grew up. So, you know, I, I actually worked in the Passaic County Jail, so it was pretty comical.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  I would go to work every day and run into, you know, all the inmates, most of the inmates in the county jail were like, they were from my time. And I would, I knew all these guys from school. I knew every, every inmate, you know, that was in the jail, I knew them or I knew their kids. You knew all of them? Oh, it was insane. I'd be walking down, I'd be walking down a car and somebody go, hey, B, what's up, man? What's happening? I'm like, and my guys, you know, I eventually, I became the warden of that jail. And all the guys that worked for me would be like, ah, how do you know, how do you know these guys? Like, how do they all know you? I said, it's a long story, I said, but I actually, I actually lived here. And, uh, and I know a lot of them.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  So, uh, so I stayed, I, I started in the county jail. I was there about ten months. And a friend of mine called. He said, uh, you know, I just went down to, um. I forget where it was. I want to think it was in Nashville or it was somewhere down in Tennessee. Went down for an interview for a job. Um, at the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh. And he called me up. He said, they're looking for a director of investigations. They want somebody to take over the investigations group at the King Faisal Hospital. And, um, they were asking about you. You know, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's sort of like the contracting business now, right?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  You, you and the guys, all the guys we know, right? They go overseas, they work in a, they work in a certain area, certain job. You know, they may, they may take off, go home for a while. And then all of a sudden, a buddy calls up and says, hey, there's a new gig over here. And, um, you know, somebody was asking if you were looking. And, uh, this guy called me up, asked me, and I said, I don't know, I'm not sure. Till he told me the money. So I went to the sheriff of Passaic County. I told him I wanted to leave of absence for a year. And, uh, and I took off, I took off and I went back again. I went to Riyadh. I was there for about, uh, for about a year and then I extended another six months.

• 31:27Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of work were you, I mean, what do you investigate at a hospital?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  So at the, at the King, the King Faisal Hospital is the royal facility. It's the, where basically all the royalty is, right? So all of the VIPs would come into that hospital. Everything from the king, the crown prince on down. You know, it's ironic today, you know, the king of Saudi Arabia today. Uh, at that time in nineteen, from eighty-two to eighty-four, was actually the governor of Riyadh. Um, his older brothers, Fahad, Khalid, I worked for them when I was, when I was there. Um, he was the governor of Riyadh. He would be at the hospital all the time. Um, so when you had my job, you basically, you, you insured.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  That the doctors, the nurses, the staff, especially the American staff, they were abiding by the law and by the policies of the hospital. Because there's a lot of corruption that goes on. There's a lot of prostitution that goes on. There's a lot of, a lot of things that goes on in those areas. You know, people come over and they go to work there and they get in a lot of fucking trouble. And, uh, and it was our job to make sure we kept them out of trouble. Make sure that the hospital didn't get embarrassed, uh, things like that. It was an interesting time. It, uh, I made some good money. I stayed about a year and a half and then I went back home.

• 33:00Shawn Ryan?

  In another interview you had mentioned, I think, uh, towards twenty-two beheadings.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I've seen tons, yeah.

• 33:08Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Um, for the most part, um, all homicides or rape. Homicides or rape. Um, uh, I think I've seen, I used to know the numbers. I think it's twenty-two, I think twenty-two beheadings. I've seen, um, a bunch of dismemberments. You know, they take a guy's hand off. I saw one stoning, uh, where they stoned a, a young girl to death, uh, that had a baby out of wedlock with her cousin or something. Um, she was, she was stoned. The boyfriend or the father of the kid, um, he was, he was beheaded.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Um, and that's the way it's done.

• 33:57Shawn Ryan?

  And you were friends with the executioner, correct?

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Well, I wasn't.

• 34:02Shawn Ryan?

  As a coworker?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  No, he, well, he worked, you know, the king today, Solomon, um, he was the governor. Well, the, the executioner was his senior bodyguard, right? One of his, his detail guys. So I, I knew him from the hospital, um.

• 34:21Speaker 03

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

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Were any of those executions that you witnessed, were those, were any of those a result of your investigations?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 34:58Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  No. No, they, um, no, mostly there were homicides that happened in Riyadh or around. Um, I, I remember and I can't, I think this was the first go around. Um, because I was there. I was actually in Saudi Arabia in nineteen seventy-nine when they took the, uh, the embassy in Iran. And when they seized Mecca in Saudi. And, uh, and I remember that. I, I don't think I witnessed, but I know it went on in, in Daharan a lot.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  They took all of the, all of the, uh, the intruders that went into Mecca, um, that were involved in that seizure. They took all of them. They split them up all over the country and they killed them all in one day.

• 35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Um, you know, there were a bunch of them. They put them in cities all over the, all over the country.

• 35:58Shawn Ryan?

  It's pretty, pretty routine over there at that time.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Well, listen, you know, you know, people say, you know, uh, you know, the death sentence doesn't, um, you know, it, it has no impact on crime. I don't know. I don't know. You know, you witnessed some of this stuff that goes on over there?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  You don't have an impact.

• 36:21Shawn Ryan?

  Is that? Do they do that in, uh, is it like a public?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, it's, it's, listen, you, you go to the main mosque in Riyadh. On a Friday afternoon, everybody goes in to pray. Everybody comes out. And you know, when you come out of the mosque, if they have the square roped off, there's gonna be an execution. And it's right after you come out of the mosque. So if you have a thousand people in the mosque and they all come out, they basically form a circle in that square. They have a black, you know, one of these, I used to call it a black marais, it was a, a black minivan will pull up into the square. Um, a couple officers takes the dude out.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Stands him in the middle of the square, puts him on his knees. The executioner comes out. They have a cop car there that reads over that loudspeaker in the car would read the decree, whatever this guy did. And then they do him. That was it. And you know, it's, it's weird. We've all, you know, cops, people in the military, you, you know, there's times you see death and you, you know, you see the aftermath of death.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  The first time I ever saw a beheading, the first one,

• 37:41Speaker 03

  I actually, you're watching this and when it happens, in your head, you're going, all right, dude, that's, that's fucked up. Like,

• 37:52Speaker 03

  is that, you know, is that real? Like, your head can't comprehend, like,

• 37:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  you know? And you're looking at it thinking, shit, that's crazy, you know? And, uh, after a while, it just, you know, I used, this is, this is nuts. I, I used to get new guys that came into the kingdom. And on Fridays, you know, Thursday and Fridays was a holiday, right? It was like our Saturday and Sunday. So on Sunday, we would all go out, on, on, well, it was Friday, but we would all go out to the intercon or we'd go somewhere for brunch every Friday. Well, I'd get these new guys and they'd go out, we'd have them go out and grab something to eat and then we'd leave right around the time they would do the execution. And these guys had no idea where we're going.

• 38:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  So we would take them to the mosque, put them right up front. They'd puke their, they'd watch this, they'd get sick as a dog. But um, it was uh, it was crazy. It was a different life.

• 38:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Would you say that's probably maybe the most traumatic thing you've seen up to that point? In your life?

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Up to that point, yeah.

• 39:01Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen, have you seen a lot working in the prison or being a, a?

• 39:05Speaker 03

  No, I mean, you see, you see violence, you see things as a cop. You know, you, you see stuff like that. Not, not like that though.

• 39:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Right? Normally you see the aftermath unless you're involved in an incident, right? You're involved in, you're shooting or stabbing. You know, I, I was stabbed in the line of duty. I've been shot at in the line of duty. Things like that. Um, but you don't see that. This is the intentional execution of someone.

• 39:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Um, it's different. You know, it's different.

• 39:40Shawn Ryan?

  So you wrapped up your Saudi contract and came home?

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Wrapped up my Saudi contract, uh, nineteen eighty-four. I um, came back. I applied for a job with the NYPD. And um, I was working in Jersey. Became nineteen eighty-five, I became the warden of the Passaic County Jail. So I was, I, I was twenty, I was thirty years old. I was thirty years old. I was the chief of the department. I had three hundred people working for me. I uh, you know, ironically, it was the actual jail. You know, the Passaic County Jail in Patterson is one of the biggest county jails in the state of New Jersey.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  And that's where I grew up. So I knew the area. I knew the people. I knew the inmates. I knew a bunch of the staff. Um, and I was in charge.

• 40:35Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to? Be put in charge.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Um, I started there, uh, when I came up, let's say in nineteen eighty-one. December of eighty-one, I was there for a year and a half, went to Saudi. Came back from Saudi, worked another two years, and I was appointed warden.

• 40:58Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, I've never met anybody that excels at that pace with everything.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  I did, uh, yeah, you know, it's kind of ironic if you look at my career. You know, I always started on the bottom and I wound up on top and I get there pretty quickly.

• 41:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Um, and, and I'll, I'll talk about that in a minute in the P D, but, um. Uh, yeah, I, I became the, uh, the warden of the county jail. I was running the jail, I was having a great time, but I didn't like correction. Um, number one, and number two, I didn't like county politics. I worked for a sheriff. Sheriff is elected, um, in the state of New Jersey. Uh, I didn't like the internal politics of, of what was going on. I wanted to get out. And I had applied for the NYPD. Because ever since I was, I joined the military, I wanted to be a New York City cop. But I was never around long enough. Take the test, take the physical, take the medical, take the psych.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  I, I just wasn't around. Well, now I'm home. I came home from Saudi in nineteen eighty-four. I, uh, I applied for the NYPD. I take the test, take the physical, take the medical, take the psych. And, um, you know, in July of early Ju- late June or early July of, uh, of nineteen eighty-six. My applicant investigator from New York City calls and says, all right, dude, so here's the deal. With your military time, which was three years. Um, the, the, the maximum date, uh, maximum age for the NYPD at the time was twenty-nine.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  With your military time, you've moved that up to thirty-two. You're thirty-one. This will be the last class you can get into. So if you don't take this class, you don't go in the NYPD this class, you're never going. Oh shit. Now with that, he says, now this was a, this was a, you know, old time detective in the NYPD. He goes, now, now that I said that, he said personally, I think you're fucking crazy. For you to leave that job you're at. He goes, you're wearing a white shirt, stars, a gold shield, you got a car sitting outside. You're fucking nuts.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  If you take this job, he goes, you do realize you're gonna be walking a fucking foot post somewhere in the city. Like you have no idea where you're going, no idea where you're gonna work. I said, all right, let me think about it. And I thought about it, I called him up, I said, dude, I'm taking the job. And he said, are you sure? You sure you wanna do this? And this, you know what, Sean, this goes back to your, your, your question of, of destiny. It's something I always wanted to do. You know, a lot of people, you know, we were talking about this last night. People that leave, leave the military, right? You're walking a fine line. Do I stay for retirement?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Or even when you, even when you make retirement, when you make that date and you could leave, you know, there's this apprehension. Do I take that step? Do I go? Or do I not go? It's easier to stay. You know, if I take that step, it's the unknown. What I've learned? Take the step. You'll figure it out as you go, but take the step. If it's something you really want, take the step. If it's something you, you, you know, you've dreamt about, you think you, you wanna do. Don't let that apprehension hold you down. You know, that's the one thing I've never done. Never. And I think that was the biggest example.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Here I am, the chief of the department. I've got three hundred people under me. And like I said, white shirt, dress uniform, office, car, county car, gold shield. People saluting you all day long. Nice job, clean, no fighting with inmates, no gun battles, none of that shit. And, uh, that's not what I wanted.

• 45:20Shawn Ryan?

  Sitting real comfortable.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Right, really comfortable. And I said, you know what? I've always wanted to be a city cop. And this is my last opportunity. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it. Or I'm never gonna do it. So I called the dude up and I said, listen, man, I'm going.

• 45:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, and that, that was a fifty percent pay cut as well.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I actually went bankrupt.

• 45:43Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Like legally bankrupt. Cause I had no fucking money. I use, I was in the middle of a divorce. I was getting divorced and I was like, you know, taking, taking that job. Cut my salary in half, you know, more than half because you, you know, I had to buy my uniforms. I had to buy my guns. I had to, all the new shit you have to do as a recruit in the academy. You pay for most of that yourself. So it's like, not only did I take the pay cut, but I have all these expenditures I have to put out. And, um, and I did it. And I have to tell you, and I, I've, I've said this many times.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Went to the academy, the, the academy was a pain in the ass. I think it was probably the third police academy I'd been to when it was getting annoying.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  But the day I graduated and I got sent to Brooklyn. I think my, my first actual day in the street, I wanna believe was like Christmas Eve in nineteen eighty-six. I think that was my first day on patrol, walking a foot post in fucking Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which was a, a shithole. I was, I couldn't have been more happy. No shit. Could not, could not have been more happy. I, you know, it was an after, I think it was an afternoon tour. Went out, walked a foot post. You know, in New York City, keep in mind, this is nineteen eighty six. This is the height of the, the crack epidemic.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  This is the height of crime in the city. We were doing over two, two thousand murders a year in New York. We had more murders a year in nineteen eighty six through nineteen ninety three than the cities today of LA, Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis combined.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  That's what New York City was like then. I remember going to, um,

• 47:45Speaker 03

  I remember going to my first roll call. I was in the, I was assigned to the seven, seven precinct in Bed-Stuy. And I remember going to the roll call, walking into the roll call and guys had, walked in, guys had a vest on. They had their revolver on. They had a small backup in their gut. And like there's two guys standing in line. They've got a, a side piece, a backup and another backup in their back pocket, like a five-shot thirty-eight. And I thought, where the fuck are we being at? What, what kind of, what, what kind of place is this? And it didn't, I didn't realize it till we, we hit the streets. It was the crime haven of America.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  You know, that time working as a cop in New York City was like being in a fucking war zone all day long. So that was my, that was my training command. I was there for about six months. Then I got transferred to Midtown.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  I got transferred to what they call Midtown South, Midtown South Precinct. It's actually the precinct that covers Times Square. And, um, and my first assignments, um, my primary assignment in Midtown South was a walk-in foot post on West Forty Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, one block.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  There were ten cops on that foot post.

• 49:14Shawn Ryan?

  On one block?

• 49:15Speaker 03

  On one block, ten cops. You had four cops on one side and a sergeant, four cops on the other side and a sergeant. And all you did for eight hours a day was run from one end of the block to the other.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Man with a gun, robbery in progress, shots fired, somebody got stabbed, somebody got raped, somebody threw somebody off a building, somebody pushed somebody on their train, all day long. And I don't care if it was a day tour, an afternoon tour, or a midnight tour.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Times Square, from twelve at night to eight in the morning, you couldn't tell the difference between then and a day tour. Same amount of people, the city was always lit, always awake. Thugs were everywhere, and thugs and guns, that's all you did.

• 50:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  And that's, and it was the best fucking job I ever had. It was, if you like that kind of work, um, I was on uniform patrol for about, uh, a year, just over a year, and I got, I got transferred to plainclothes. And plainclothes in Times Square was the most fun I've ever had, being a cop. Rode around in a yellow cab, you know, three people in a, in a car, right? You have a driver, you have two passengers in the backseat, they're all cops. Yellow cabs, everybody sees yellow cabs all over Manhattan. But many of those yellow cabs, they're cops, they're plainclothes, anti-crime cops.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  And your job as an anti-crime officer is to respond to everything in progress. All the hot jobs, so it's, you know, man with a gun, robbery in progress, burglary in progress, shots fired, those kinds of jobs, that's what you do all day long, that's all you do.

• 51:09Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of area were you covering it, as a foot cop, it was one block?

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:15Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of area were you covering when you went into plainclothes?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  You're, you're within the precinct boundary, so midtown south, the precinct was from Twenty-Ninth to Forty-Fifth Street. So it's, you know, it's fifteen blocks um from Tenth Avenue to Lexington Avenue.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  You know, it's it's a fifteen block square radius, so to speak. But keep this in mind, fifteen block square radius. During a day tour, you probably had eight million people within that area.

• 51:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Coming and going, people that live there, work there, went to school there, visited there, tourists. In a day tour, you could have eight million people in that, you know, that fifteen, twenty block square area. So it was fuck. There's a big sign in the Midtown South Precinct. I don't know if it's still there today. But there was a sign above the desk, you know, it's it looked like a typical NYPD police station, right? Had the you walk in and on your left, you had this big ass desk. And you had the sergeant lieutenant behind the desk. They're about, you know, five feet above you, right? But there's a sign that hangs over that desk and that sign said, this is the Midtown South Precinct.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  It is the busiest police station in the world.

• 52:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  So that's where I went. I uh I went there as a patrolman, went to plain clothes. And about two years after I was there, I got transferred to Narcotics as an undercover.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  And and I went from from Midtown South where, you know, you had the best food in the world. You had all the girls you could look at. You had the the most fun you could have being a cop. And I got fucking transferred to Manhattan North Narcotics, which was Harlem, Spanish Harlem and Washington Heights. The gun capital of New York City. And that's where I did my Narcotics time.

• 53:23Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like a beautiful area.

• 53:26Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get into narcotics and undercover stuff, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and hit it.

• 54:31Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so we'll pick up where we left off. You're undercover now and you're working Harlem scene.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  So I get transferred to narcotics as an undercover. There's two ways you can get your detective shield in the NYPD. You can go to investigative route, which means you're in a precinct. You go to anti-crime, plainclothes. Then you go to a precinct detective squad and you work in an investigative capacity for two, three, could be four years. And then you get your detective shield. And then you go to a detective bureau. You may go to narcotics. But in the investigative track, usually it's another investigative command. Or you can become an undercover

• 55:18Speaker 03

  and you can get your narcotics, your detective shield in about 18 to 27 months. It's expedited. But it's expedited because you have a completely insane job. And that job is to go out and buy drugs every day. That's all you do. As an undercover, there is no enforcement. You don't do any enforcement. As an undercover, you don't make arrests. You only make arrests in extreme circumstances. Um, you know, if there's, if there's a shooting, if there's something happens during the course of your undercover buy,

• 55:58Speaker 03

  well, then you make an arrest and then you're, you're sort of back, you know, in, in your normal capacity as a cop. But as a UC, as an undercover, all you do is buy drugs. So I get transferred to, uh, to Manhattan North and, uh, my buy areas was Harlem, Spanish Harlem and Washington Heights. And I can remember getting up, uh, my first command was in the two, three precinct. It was, uh, Spanish Harlem. And I can remember standing in front of the fucking precinct, listening to gunshots like down the street, like on this, you know, two blocks from where we're at.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Gunfire going off and a cop standing outside going, which, which direction is it? This down here? No, it's that corner. Yeah, I know where it is. And I'm like, nobody's fucking, like this place is crazy. It's like a, it's like a war zone, right?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  So our job every day, um, we would suit up. The investigators would load up in a van, a couple of cars. You would put a tracking device on you and you would go out and do buys. So there were two types of buys. You would do outside buys. You know, walk up on a street corner and say, yo, hook me up, give me, give me two, give me five, give me, you know, give me an eight ball, give me whatever.

• 57:28Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have a specific drug you were targeting or just?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on the location. Depends on the locations, you know, if you, you know, 110th street and Lexington Avenue was a big heroin spot, you know, we knew that. So you'd walk down the block, walk on the set, you know, give me a dime, give me a 20, give me, you know, whatever. And you'd buy heroin. There were spots, this was big in the crack time, you know, you'd buy vials of crack or you'd buy hard cocaine or whatever.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  I can remember my first buy. Now, keep in mind, my entire career, I've been a cop, correction officer. I'm in uniform, everybody knows who I am. My first undercover buy was up in Manhattan North. They sent me into a park. They sent me into a park. It said, "See the guy in the middle of the park? He's standing in the middle of the park. It's fucking cold outside, he's got a coat on. People keep walking up to him, talking to him. You're gonna go up, you're gonna say, "Give me five." He's gonna hand you five vials, you're gonna hand him 25 bucks, and you're gonna walk off. Okay, that's it? Yep, that's it. Give me five, hand him the money, and take off. Okay, got it.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  So, I'm dressed down, I dress like a bum, I walk down the street. I walk up to him. It's a weird feeling, because, you know, you're always used to being in charge. Now you're not in charge. Now you're worried whether the guy's gonna make you, whether he's got a gun. You may not have a gun on you. You know, you don't wanna get searched and have a piece on you. So, I'm walking down the street. I walk up to the dude, I'm like, "Give me five." He hands it to me. I get back, I get in the car, I'm all excited and shit. I got this. All right, confirmed buy. Sergeant goes, "All right, give me the script." Huh? What do you look like? Uh...

• 59:32Speaker 03

  I don't know, I'll get right back to you. I had to run to the fucking corner, I was so focused on getting the five vials, I forgot what the fucking guy looked like. I had to go back to the corner, look in the yard, get the script, come back to the car and go, "Okay, he's got a green jacket, he's got blue jeans, got this, got that." Um... Outside buys are easy. Outside buys are in the middle of the street. The worst part of being an undercover in the NYPD is one day a week you have inside buys. And basically what that means is, you know, people, you know, they'll call 911 and they'll say, "The guy next door to me is buying, is selling drugs. The guy next door to me is selling this, is doing this, is doing that."

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Nobody can find you. So I used to, you know, I used to, you know, a Sharpie, right? You know where Sharpies are? I used to take a fucking red Sharpie, and I'd have it in my pocket, the big, thick ones. I had my, that red Sharpie in my pocket. So when I had to do an inside buy, I'd go in the building, and I'd take that fucking Sharpie, and I'd run along the wall. I'd just, right on the wall, right along the wall. And when I got to where I was going, right outside the door I was going, I put big letters. B K. Like a graffiti artist, right? Well, I graffitied the fucking location I was going to. Because I was always worried if I get inside,

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  and something goes bad, at least, when they come looking for me, they're gonna be able to find where I'm at. You know, if they take my transmitter, if the transmitter doesn't work. If I get into a gunfight inside, and I'm down. There's nobody to call. You're not calling. You're not calling for help. Had you developed a cover story by this point? Oh, yeah. I was from Jersey. I had Jersey plates on my car. When I rolled up on a set, I had Jersey plates. In Washington Heights, this was the heart of. This was the heart of crack and cocaine for all of Manhattan, right? It was a heavy Dominican population. Just insane, insane drugs at the time.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  We had a bunch of cops that were killed there. I came into that unit in nineteen eighty nine, early eighty nine. In October, on October eighteenth of nineteen eighty eight, we had two cops in separate incidents killed on the same night up in the Heights. Michael Busek was shot and killed around nine o'clock at night, shot in the chest. And then Chris Hoben was shot in an undercover buy, just like I was doing. Went into an apartment with another kid. They're in the middle of doing a buy and a fucking dude walks in behind him and says, yo, you know these guys? And they're like, no, we saw him outside. They're looking, they're looking to buy.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  And they're like, well, there's a fucking shitload of cops about four blocks from here. Check them. And they started to search him. And, and I, I think Mike Jermaine had a, a gun down in the belly band in, in his lower abdomen. They found it. They touched it. Then they got in a gunfight in the fucking apartment and Chris got killed. Yeah. So it was that kind of stuff, you know, that's the kind of stuff you're worried about.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  So I was an undercover for about a year and a half. No, almost two years. Got my shield, my detective shield, got transferred to major case. Started doing some major drug investigations. And we, we had a big major case of drug thing. Guy was doing heroin and cocaine, Dominican. Took him down on, during the course of, of one of the takedowns of one of his salesmen. Got in a gun battle. He shot my partner. I, I shot him. And then right after that, I got transferred to DEA, to the DEA task force. How long did that gunfight last? It was, it was sort of a run and gun battle.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  So we, we watched this guy, we were doing a surveillance. We were up on a wiretap on a phone. And the guy called, he was from Massachusetts. He said, I'm coming down to pick up five. So five kilos. So we see him go into an apartment, comes out of the apartment, follow the car. He's, he's in a livery cab, uh, which we thought for us was good, right? Livery cab drivers, they wanna, they don't want nothing to do with nothing. They just, you know. So, uh, but evidently he knew this guy. We figured that out later because when we tried to stop him, he took off. And, um, we stopped the car, had a uniformed car stop him.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  And as they tried to take the passenger out of the car, the fucking car takes off. So we get in a, a chase through Upper Manhattan.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Finally get him pulled over in front of these apartments on Dykman Street. And he comes out and fires three rounds into the car immediately behind him. First round, uh, as my partner's in that car, puts up his hand like this. And the round goes through his arm, comes out of the car, falls out of the car. The second round goes right through the fucking head, the headrest.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  And then I'm in the car next to him, so I open fire. That distracts him. And then we get into this run and gun battle up into the apartment complex. And, uh, he finally goes down. He's hit like six or eight times.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Lives, he's paralyzed, but he lives. He's still in state prison. But I, I, you know, I thought it was funny, you know? He got shot literally like six or eight times. We'll have a cop standing at a door doing a search warrant. The guy will fire through the door. It'll hit the cop in the side where the vest isn't. It'll hit the cop's liver, lungs, heart, you know? The cop would be dead in 10 seconds. This fucking guy gets shot six times and he's still alive, still living today. But, um, we, we took him down. And, uh, and then right after that, uh, actually right after that shooting, I got transferred. And I went to the DEA task force.

• 1:06:42Shawn Ryan?

  You got a medal for that, correct?

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got the Medal of Valor for that one.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Went to the DEA task force. So the task force in New York, the DEA task force in New York is one of the biggest ones in the country. And these task forces consist of federal agents, local cops, and state troopers. And, you know, it's a great job. Because you have federal authority, you're sworn in as a federal agent.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  And you work some of the biggest cases going. And I was lucky enough to be in a group where my partner and I, we oversaw one of the most substantial investigations, drug investigations in New York at the time, where we posed as importers and exporters, a company that was based out of the World Trade Center. And we were introduced to some Colombians who got us started. And basically how it worked is, these guys had 400 keys they wanted to sell. So we went to them and said, "Look, we're..." No, it was reversed. We told them we had 400 keys. So we went to them and said, "You know, we have these 400 keys, we'll show it to you."

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  We did a flash dump where we, you know, the 400 keys was in a base of a truck. Showed it to them in a warehouse, told them to call us back in the morning, let us know if they're interested. They called us back in the morning and said they're interested, and we said, "Dude, too late." Somebody, one of the guys we were talking to, they took it last night. "But if we get anything else, we'll call you. If you get anything else, you call us." Boom. "Okay." Well, we now had their phones, we had their pagers, we had everything, and we were up on their stuff. So one thing led to another, and they would call and they'd say, "You know, we have 800 kilos in, you know, Bogota. We're trying to get into the States."

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  We'd say, "Okay."

• 1:08:46Shawn Ryan?

  That's like a ton of coke. Like, that's almost 2,000 pounds.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Dude, that's nothing.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  What's... Don't listen. We're gonna give you agreed coordinates in fucking Guatemala. You're gonna fly that shit from Bogota over to Guatemala. You're gonna drop it and then we'll get it to New York. Okay. Well, we did loads out of Guatemala, loads out of Costa Rica, out of Brazil, out of Guayaquil, Ecuador. We did a... We did a boat. We did fourteen hundred keys that was buried in the keel of a fucking boat that was in Guayaquil, Ecuador. And this is the kind of stuff that, you know, this is the kind of shit you see in movies, right? We're doing a surveillance.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  We're up on a guy's phone, these Colombians out of Jackson Heights, Queens. And they're gonna meet some guy at the Hilton in Manhattan. And they page him with where they're gonna meet him in Hilton, and they give him a room, a room number. So, we get to the Hilton, go up to the floor. We get the room across from the fucking room the guy's in. We put a... We exchanged the peephole camera with the peephole in the door. We take that out, we put a fucking camera there. And out of the room walks this old dude. He looks like he's Grizzly Adams or some shit. He's got fucking overalls, a plaid shirt, beard.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  He's right out of a Grizzly Adams movie, right? Like, he looks like he belongs in the fucking mountains of Vermont or something. So, we call the team and say, "Guys, I think we fucked this up. This can't be... This can't be the guy." So, they say, "Well, stay on him until we figure it out." He goes out for a walk. My guys call me and they go, "Guess what? He just met our targets. They handed him a brown paper bag. He's back in the apartment, back in the hotel." So, I, "Fuck it, let's go." Knock, knock. Guy opens the door. "DEA, how you doing? Listen, we know about the bag. We know about Caliche. That was the main guy we were looking at. We know about the team you just talked to."

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  And he said, "You know everything?" He said, "Yeah." He said, "You know about the boat?" "Yeah, we know about the boat." Says, you know about the load we did in Alaska?

• 1:11:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. In Alaska?

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we didn't know shit. We knew nothing. But he was, he was talking up a storm. We, we basically said, look, how much is in the bag? Hundred fifty thousand. What's it for? It's to hire a crew on the boat in Guayaquil to bring it to Galveston, Texas. Said, okay. So here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna work with us. We're gonna let you go. You're gonna walk out of here right now. You're gonna facilitate everything we need. You'll go about your business. We'll take the Colombians. And lo and behold, it worked. And he went about his business. And we sent a team down to, to Guayaquil, Ecuador.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  We put a sat track on the monitor on the top of the boat, on the after the boat. Tracked it from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Galveston. When the boat arrived in Galveston, we basically had to rip up the floor. Like saw through the concrete, saw through the floor, the wood. What they do is they pack the dope in the keel of the boat and then they completely fucking rebuild the boat around it. So, open it up. Fourteen hundred keys. Four, fourteen ninety-four, almost fifteen hundred keys. So, it's a quarter of a billion dollars street value of cocaine. And, and we took it.

• 1:12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  And then when we took it, the, the guy that sent it was a guy named Felipe Diaz. He was in Colombia. We had the old man call him and say, we wanted to celebrate the load, but we're gonna meet him in, in Geneva. He showed up in Geneva, Switzerland. And we fucking snatched him. And then about, you know, he fought extradition, but about six months later, we fucking threw him on a plane, a Swiss Air jet, brought him back to the States.

• 1:13:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. So you guys were just going everywhere.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  No, it was great. It was great. We had, we had a, you know. Listen, i- if you're doing that kind of work, that's the kind of shit you wanna be doing. You just have to be creative so you don't get caught. And you, you know, you're creative because you, you know, you're, you have a target, right? Like, you're the guy we're looking at. But we don't touch you. We don't touch anybody you're talking to on the phone. But the guys that are talking to you on the phone, we're looking at everybody they're talking to. So we're tagging every one of those teams that's doing them. It's never touching you. It doesn't touch your guys around you. So you're never suspect to me. See what I'm saying?

• 1:14:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  That's how you do it. And, uh, and it works.

• 1:14:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  How many, how many different countries were you going to and, uh, you were after?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  We did in, uh, in two and a half years, we did ten and a half tons

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  and about sixty million in cash.

• 1:14:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Ten and a half tons?

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  We had three, we had three thousand keys in, uh, in Houston. In Houston, just on, just on a whim. Just doing what I said, we're, we're, we're not talking to you, we're not talking to your guys, but catching the third-party, fourth-party guys, getting up on their phones, you know? L A D E A calls up and says, dude, you guys know this guy A B C? Yeah, he's our guy, we're, we're looking at him. Well, guess what? He just met somebody, they're dropping three thousand keys in Houston. Where? Boom. Hit the place. And, but eventually, eventually, you know, it all starts to unravel. And when those guys and those lawyers start talking, because in that case,

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  that was a case where, you know, where, where the, the guys were coming back going. You know that guy in New York, Jerry Bartone, I don't know something. He knew these guys and he knew the other guys and he knew these guys. You know, so they start to put it together. And at that point, you figure, fuck it, okay. We're good, let's take them all. And you start grabbing everybody.

• 1:15:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. And you were after the Ochoa brothers?

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  They were, they were the primaries in that case. Felipe Diaz was connected to them. All the guys, all the main loads we were doing. Gilberto Ochoa, the brother, I forget his name. They were the primaries.

• 1:15:58Shawn Ryan?

  They were in charge of the Cali cartel, correct? Which was actually supposedly more powerful than the Medellin cartel that Escobar was running.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  They were the real kingpins.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:16:08Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever happened to them?

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Prison, dead.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  It's, that's what happens.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  That's what happens. You play the game, you know, it's sometime, you know, it comes the end of, end of the rope for you. But it was, it was a great time. I mean, I had, I had a lot of fun. Like I said, if you like that type of work, you couldn't ask for a better job. You know?

• 1:16:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well, why did you leave?

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Ironically, I didn't want to leave. In, you know, I was in the DEA task force from, I think, 90 to 90, 91 to 94. But in 1992, I met somebody that was running for mayor. His name was Rudy Giuliani. And the first time I ever met him, I had, I had hair down to the middle of my back. I had seven diamond earrings. I had six diamond earrings and a gold loop on the bottom. I had a big goatee. I looked like fucking Charles Manson, right? First time I ever met Giuliani, I had to speak at a, an event, and that's kind of what I looked like.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  And got to talking to him about New York City. About, you know, drugs in New York City, what it was like. How, how the city was diminishing under the prior mayor, David Dinkins. And, and over time, over the next year, two years, I started helping him with his campaign. And, and lo and behold, in 1994, Rudy Giuliani runs for mayor and he wins. 1993. So on January 20th, I think, January 1st, January 20th in 94, he becomes the mayor of New York City. I was still working at the DEA task force.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  I was having a blast, but ironically, I knew the mayor, right? And the new mayor, which in New York City, that's, that's, you know, it's like knowing the fucking president, right? So. How did that, how exactly did that connection happen? So, I was, I was a member of what they call the Honor Legion. The Honor Legion is a fraternal group of cops in New York City that the only way into the Honor Legion is you have a certain medal for heroism or above. So if you have a commendation, you know, for a gunfight or a shooting or, you know, whatever, something, you know, a violent act, you get that medal or higher.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  I had five commendations. I had an exceptional merit. I had the medal for valor. So you get inducted into the Honor Legion. Well Giuliani came to the Honor Legion. And he was actually coming to speak at an event for that cop that was killed in 1988, Michael Busek that I told you about. He was coming to that and I was there and I was gonna introduce him. And I introduced him and we had a side conversation about, you know, thanking him for coming and about what was going on in the city. And about a week later, I get a call from his office and his assistant says,

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Mr. Giuliani's going out to the Hamptons for the weekend. And he wanted to know if you could drive him out to the Hamptons and hang out with him for the weekend. He'd like to talk to you about the city.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  I'm like, dude, I'm a fucking detective, like, but I've never been to the Hampton, so fuck it, I'm going. I'll take him out to the Hamptons, I'll hang out with him for the weekend. And this is a true story. We wind up pulling into this some fucking mansion on the ocean. This big mansion on the ocean, and it's Susan Lucci's house. And she comes walking out to the car, takes us inside, shows me my quarters, where I'm gonna live for the weekend. I had never seen no shit like that before, right? I'm like, damn. So, hung out with him for the weekend, and that's how I started to get to know him.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  And then, you know, as he was running for mayor, I was helping put together a security detail for him. I had a bunch of volunteers. Until, until he's actually the candidate and he's running in a primary, you don't get protection from the Intelligence Division in NYPD. So I took a bunch of volunteer cops to put them assigned to him in their volunteer time to make sure that he was okay when he was campaigning. And, and that went on for about a year and a half, almost two years. And then he fucking won. Then he was, he won and he was the mayor. So, I was in DEA, I was great, everything was good.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  And I get a call one day from his, his personal counsel, who said the mayor wants, you know, the mayor was asking for you, like, where are you? Like, all the guys that had worked with him during the campaign, they all got transferred to the Intelligence Division. So they were working on his campaign. And, and then they got assigned by the Intel Division, assigned to the mayor, to his protective detail. And I said, I'm, I'm not going, I don't wanna go to Intel. I like what I'm doing. I wanna stay right here in DEA, and I figured I got, I got the best of both worlds. I know the mayor personally, that's great, but I'm, I had a great job, like, I'm having a good time.

• 1:21:56Speaker 03

  We had just, we had just extradited Diaz back to the country. Just brought him back, I like, think, January of 1994. And... So I stayed in DEA. And I think it was like somewhere around the middle of April. My lieutenant walks back to my cubicle in my office at DEA. And he goes, dude, congratulations. I said, what's the matter, what's up? He said, you guys, you just got transferred. I said, transferred to where? He goes to intel. I said, no. He said, yeah. He said, we just got a telephone message. You got transferred to intel, you're going to the mayor's detail.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  And I called up his counsel. His name was Danny Young. I said, Danny. I don't wanna go. I don't wanna do this. He goes, too late. He said, the mayor, the mayor wants you. The mayor keeps asking, where you at? Why, why come you're not down here? I said, fuck it, alright. So. I get transferred to intel. I go down to city hall. I get assigned as, you know, I didn't wanna be one of the bodyguards, you know, the, the number one and number two or, you know. So I said, they said, what do you wanna do? I said, I don't know, I'll do the advance stuff. I'll be in advance, that way it gives me a little freedom to do what I want.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  And, you know, you're not stuck around the mayor all the time, right? So I said, I'll, I'll do the advance. So. I started doing the advance and I wasn't, it wasn't like. I don't know, a month. I get a phone call, go down and see him. So I go down to city hall. And I walk in and he said, listen, I have a problem. He goes, yesterday I had a riot at Rikers Island. He goes, and I went to the hospital, he said, it's a mess. So I'm hiring a new correction commissioner. And that correction commissioner is gonna take over. I wanted to clean up Rikers.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  He goes, they're averaging about a hundred and fifty stabbings and slashings a month. He said, I wanted to, I want that to stop. He's gotta clean it up and I want you to go help him. He said, you, you ran a jail in New Jersey. I know how you work. I said, no, no, hold on. I ran like a jail, like one jail. I had eleven hundred inmates. I said, that's not Rikers. There's sixteen jails in the New York City correction system. A hundred and thirty thousand admissions per year. A hundred and fifty stabbings and slashings per month. It's the most violent criminal jail system in the country.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  That's not where I was. It's not the same. He said, "That's okay. You're gonna do it anyway. You're gonna go with the commissioner. You're gonna be his executive assistant and you're gonna help him get through this." I said, "All right, I'll do it for six months. Six months." Done, done. I said, "For sure, six months? Done." "Okay, six months." Well, just about on my six-month anniversary, I get a midnight call to go to Gracie Mansion to see the mayor. I walk in. He sits me in this, sits me in this room, sitting across from me. He said, "Listen, um, tomorrow, I'm firing the commissioner.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  I'm not happy with what he's doing. I'm bringing in a new commissioner. And I want you to focus on the unions. And I want you to, you know, to help clean that place up." And I said, "Okay." I said, "Look, I'll do it." I said, "But some of the stuff you're telling me you want me to do, that's really, I can't step on a commissioner's toes." And he goes, "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, I forgot to tell you. You're gonna be the first deputy." I said, "What?" He said, "You're gonna be the first deputy, which is number two in charge. You have the commissioner, the first deputy commissioner." He said, "So you're not gonna have an issue with, um, authority?"

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  I says, "Mr. Mayor, there is a first deputy commissioner." He goes, "Yeah, I know. Fire him. Do whatever you're gonna do." He said, "He's not doing his job anyway. Get rid of him. I want a whole new team. You pick the team." Boom. Next morning, next afternoon, one o'clock, I think, in the afternoon, he makes the announcement. And over the next two and a half years, I was the first deputy commissioner of the largest jail system in the nation. And in that two and a half year period... We reduced inmate on inmate violence probably by sixty percent.

• 1:26:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  At the end of that two and a half years, the commissioner that I was working with retired. I became the commissioner, taking over the department in full. And by August of two thousand, we had reduced the stabbings and slashings by ninety-three percent. We reduced overtime spending by close to forty. We reduced staff sick abuse by fifty. We reduced assaults on staff by sixty.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  Completely revamped the department. Took it from being the most, you know, violent, filthy, dirty, mismanaged jail system in the nation and turned it into an international model for efficiency, accountability, and security. And that was over a five and a half year period.

• 1:27:49Shawn Ryan?

  And it sounds like you did that by, I'm not trying to simplify it, but it sounds like the main thing you did is hold people accountable.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  You know what, Sean, it's, that's the primary, the primary result is holding people accountable, right? As, as an executive, as a chief executive of one of these agencies, or as a military commander, your job is to basically look at the mission statement for what we're supposed to be doing.

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  Establishing goals and objectives for how you're going to hit that mission statement. And then, holding people accountable to ensure that they hit the goals and objectives.

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  And that is exactly, I mean, it sounds super simplistic. But that's exactly what we did. That's what I did. Here's the mission statement. Here's the goals and objectives to hit the mission statement. And now, we're gonna hold everybody accountable. We're gonna hold the staff accountable to do their jobs. We're gonna hold managers accountable to ensure that they're supervising. We're gonna hold the executives accountable to make sure that their oversight is responsible, efficient. And then, we're gonna hold the fucking inmates accountable. That was probably equally as important as anything else.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  Because the inmates, up to that point, you know, they didn't like you, you went to sleep. They put fucking tissues in between your toes and the fingers and lit them all on fire so you would wake up in the middle of a fireball. They would, you know, they didn't like you. They'd stand there, shit in their hand and throw it at you. You know, piss in a cup, throw it at you. That's the kind of things that went on. And, and they were notorious for slashings and stabbings. You know, we had guys that would take a piece of dental floss, take razor blade, chips of razor blade, tie it to the dental floss, five or six pieces,

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  and fucking swallow it and tie it to the tooth. So they'd have, they'd have five or six razor blades that they would swallow. And they'd have it tied to the tooth so they could pull it up anytime. So you could search them all fucking day long. You could strip search them. You could do everything, anything you wanted, you'd never find them. You put them in a cell with another guy for ten minutes, and the guy'd get all cut up. And you couldn't figure out how they were doing it. So I bought a shitload of new equipment. I bought these things called the boss chair, the body orifice scanner. So if they sat in it, it could tell you if they stuck something up their ass.

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  You had a thing that they could put their neck on and it would tell you if they had anything ingested. So you would identify that stuff. And then I put them in a cell that had traps inside the sink in the toilet. So if they went in the cell and they knew they were gonna get searched, they would dump this stuff and they'd flush it down the toilet. The trap would catch it. Now, once the trap caught it, I would lock them up. Shit. I would charge them with criminal possession of a weapon. That began the difference. Historically, nobody got charged with a crime.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  The first major event that I had as the first deputy, I remember these two Spanish kids held a black kid down on the ground and they carved L.K. into his back with a fucking chicken bone, right? A sharpened chicken bone. Probably gave him a hundred stitches, right? Latin Kings, L.K. They put it in the middle of his back, carved him, right? So I said to my guys, I said, "What are you doing with this guy? What do you do?" They said, "Well, they're in punitive segregation, solitary." I said, "I know, but what are we doing with him? You know, what are you gonna do with him? What do we charge him with?" "Well, we don't really charge him. It's up to the Bronx D.A." "We don't charge him because the Bronx D.A. looks at this stuff as,

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  'This is jail, this is prison, that's what happens.'" I said, "Fuck that." Because if I walked outside the building, if I went outside the building right now and I cut you, if I slashed you across the face with a razor blade chip and it gave you thirty stitches, I'd be charged with criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a deadly weapon. They'd have five charges to charge me with. But because it happened behind a prison wall, no, we don't charge them. I said, "That's bullshit." Effective immediately, they get charged. Wow. And that's what we started doing. So I started charging the inmates. You know, if they lit something on fire, they get charged with arson.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  If they were involved in gang activity, I called in the feds. You know, gang activity, put ten of them together, it's a RICO case. So that's what happened. At the end of my five and a half years in command, between commissioner and first deputy, we went from, you know, a hundred and fifty stabbings and slashings per month. On the month that I became police commissioner, we had one. We had one incident. And I was pissed about that one. Right? I was pissed.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  I wanted a clean slate. But we reduced violence to levels that they had not seen in thirty, forty years.

• 1:33:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. How, how quick, which sounds like it was extremely quick, but how fast did you start to begin to see results by holding people accountable? And then facing the consequences for their actions, both on, in the inmate side and the, and the correction side?

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  Three months.

• 1:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  Three months?

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  Three months. You, you start seeing it immediately, within three months. You know, it, it's like today. It's like today, in, in, in the US today, where they have these defund the police movements.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  You know, defund the police. Defunds of police means you're reducing police capacity, staffing, right? Resources. You're reducing training.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  And then they make these decisions. And what happens? Within a month, you see substantial increases in violent crime, shootings and murders. And then they're sitting around in a fucking circle jerk in Washington going, can't understand what's happening. Why is crime going up? Why is crime going up? You morons are doing it, you're doing it to yourself. But that's what was happening in correction. And the notorious thing, and I know you've seen this or heard this in the military. You know, somebody new comes in, they take a look at it and they go, alright guys, this is really fucked up, we gotta change it for this reason. And somebody looks at you and goes,

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  yeah, but that's, that's the way we've always done it. Right, I know. It doesn't work.

• 1:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  And you guys continue to fucking do it the same way you've always done it? It didn't work then, it's not working now. It doesn't work. And, and that's how you make change.

• 1:36:15Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I was gonna wait till the end to bring this up, but we have a, we have a Patreon subscription account that is full of NYPD police officers. And we asked them, when we told them you were coming on the show, we asked them if they had any questions and we probably got 500 questions. But one particular question that really sticks out is a, is from a woman. And she's been with the PD for, I don't know, several years. And has made a career out of it. And she wanted to ask you, what is it gonna take to get the NYPD back to what it was when you were commissioner?

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  You know what it's gonna take?

• 1:37:02Shawn Ryan?

  Accountability.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  It's gonna take a new mayor. It's gonna take a new mayor. And I'd say a new commissioner. You know, whether you liked Giuliani, whether you like him today, you don't like him. Giuliani was, in my eyes, the best commissioner, the best mayor in the history of New York City for this reason.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  When it came to the NYPD and Rikers, he took, under his command, under his tenure as mayor, Rikers saw the most substantial reduction in violence in its history, right? Turned a jail system, the largest jail system in the country, into an international model that people replicated or tried all over the nation.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  In the city, he had the most substantial reductions in crime in the history of the city. A sixty-five percent, during his eight years, a sixty-five percent reduction in violence, a seventy percent reduction in murder. And in the black community, in the inner communities, the communities of color, where the violence was the highest, where all the shootings and murders, most of them were happening, the murder rate there dropped almost eighty percent. Why? Because he let the cops do their jobs. When I was the correction commissioner and I said, you know, I've got forty guys in emergency service.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  Forty, for a thirteen thousand man department. I've got forty guys in ESU. I need a hundred and twenty.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  Mayor said, "A hundred and twenty, see, seems like a lot." I said, "Well, it seems like a lot if you go from forty to a hundred and twenty." I said, "But here's, here's my, here's my idea, and here's why I want that enhancement."

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Every tour on Rikers Island, I want a thirty man response team on every tour. So if there's a problem, that thirty man team responds. But more so, when they're not responding, I want them searching facilities. I want them looking for weapons. I want them to take the, the prior reports from the day before, where they may have had a spike in violence, or they've had gang activity, or...

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  Say the warden of a jail sees that there's a spike in inmates going to religious services. Now, nobody would think anything of that, right? When there's a spike of inmates going to religious services, that means they're getting together to communicate. The gangs, they're split, they're spread all over a facility, right? How do they get together to go to religious service? When you see a spike at religious service, you know there's something going on. When you see a spike in commissary, when fucking inmates start loading up food in their commissary, you know there's gonna be a riot.

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  Nobody thought outside the box like that until I came along. And I said, you know what? We see those spikes, we see those commissary things going on, you're gonna fucking hit those housing areas. You're gonna go after the gang members. You're gonna go through their stuff and make sure that there aren't weapons. Make sure they know what they should be doing. Watch every move they make. Well, that's what that ESU system was for. That's what they were for. The mayor gave it to me. The end result, I had a, I had the most substantial reduction in inmate violence than anybody's ever had in this country, okay? In the NYPD, same thing. No matter what I asked for in the PD, mayor gave it to me.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  If I thought we needed more cops and narcotics, we got them. If I thought we needed, you know, more equipment, we got it. The result was increase, increases in efficiency, accountability, management, and decreases in violent crime shootings and murder. Simple stuff.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  If they wanna change what's going on today, right now, you have a fucking mayor that's a Marxist. He's an admitted Marxist. Bill de Blasio, whose real name is fucking Wilhelm, right? Bill de Blasio, in 1986, was running around supporting the Sandinistas. He is an admitted Marxist. He despises this country, right? He believes in all this fucking leftist Marxist socialist communism shit. He believes that. That guy got elected to be the mayor of New York City. He's done everything in his power to diminish the police and victimize the thugs, villainize the cops,

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  take resources away from them. He actually called for the defunding of a billion dollars out of their six billion dollar budget. He authorized removing 600 plainclothes anti-crime cops off the streets of New York City, which is the most ludicrous preposterous thing that you can do in an area like New York. What happens? And if you go back and look at a year and a half when he did this, two years ago when he did it, you know, reporters called me and they said, "What do you think?" I said, "What do I think?" "You're gonna see an immediate spike in shootings and murder."

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  It's common sense. You either take the guns off the streets or you leave the guns. You take the anti-crime cops off the streets, you're gonna leave the guns.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  that are attacking public safety and law and order.

• 1:43:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's a, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't sound like anybody's ever gonna be held accountable for what's happening, but there is definitely a consequence.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  But I'm gonna tell you something, Sean, and this is brand new, right? This, this happened within the last few days. There's an attorney by the name of Rosemarie Arnold out of New Jersey that actually, within the last two or three days, filed a lawsuit against the city of Austin, Texas. And she filed that lawsuit because the city of Austin voted to defund their police. And during the course of that defunding, in the aftermath of that, that defunding, there was a young man that was murdered in Austin. And basically, what the family of this young man said, if you didn't defund the police,

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  and you didn't remove and diminish the amount of police you have in the streets, that homicide wouldn't have happened. So keep this in mind, you know, mayors, governors, city council members, they have sovereign immunity, you know, when they're in positions like that, because, you know, there may, things may happen that are negligent, but they weren't directly responsible for, right? So they get this blanket of sovereign immunity. But if you intentionally change the policy, intentionally, for political gain, you don't

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  get that sovereign immunity. And I honestly think, I think this lawsuit that was just pushed in Austin, I think this is gonna be a movement, a bunch, against a bunch of these mayors, and governors, and city council members, to basically hold them accountable for doing what they're doing, because there's nothing positive about defunding the police.

• 1:45:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  There's nothing positive that comes out of that.

• 1:45:59Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think it's been the same result in every major city that's done that.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  Every, every major city that has defunded, which started in Minneapolis, they defunded, they eliminated cops, they, they forced cops into resignations, forced cops into retirement, all of that has been...

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  Redone, they're refunding, they're rehiring. And the problem with this now is guys with the long-term experience, guys that could be training officers, guys that know the job, know the area, know the people, know the places, they're all gone, they left. So now you gotta fucking hire a bunch of new guys, right? That have to come in and get trained up. And over time, they'll get that experience, but at the end of the day, you're defunding, destroyed the morale, destroyed the department, destroyed community relations. That's what you do when you defund.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Not to mention, reduce manpower, resources, training. Stupid.

• 1:47:09Shawn Ryan?

  If the system does happen to clean itself up, do you think any of the experience will come back?

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  I do, uh, you know, look, the people that are in this line of work, it's like, it's like the teams, right? The people that's in that line of work, they love their job. They love their job. Nobody goes out and puts their fucking life on the line, you know, on a daily basis, because they don't like to do it. You know, call it what you want. I loved my job. I loved doing what I did. I loved it. I, I, I didn't wanna do any other job. Didn't wanna do anything else. I know guys in special operations, whether it's the army or navy, they love their job. They leave the job because of politics. They leave the job because of a lack of leadership.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  That's why they leave the job. They don't leave the job because they love it. They leave for other reasons. If you get the right leadership in place, you got, you get people that's gonna inspire, that's gonna motivate, it's gonna enhance morale. You have leaders like that, fucking people will flock back. You know, it's, you, you said something earlier about, you know, uh, you know, leadership and, and people following. When I took over the NYPD, keep in mind, when I became police commissioner, um...

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  I had been in correction for almost six years, but I left the NYPD as a detective. And I came back as the commissioner. When I came back as the commissioner, the chiefs, the deputy commissioners, they didn't like it. And there was, we, we had some issues like this where, you know, I had, I had a two-star chief that basically made a statement in front of a bunch of other chiefs. He said, "I'm not working for some fucking detective. That ain't happening. He'll be gone, I'll still be here." Well, that didn't work out so well because he was gone about two days later. That being said, by the end of my term,

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

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

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  Mayor Giuliani was gonna support you. That's what you need. So to get back to your question is, people will come. Guys will come back to the job. The experience will come back. Trainers will come back. But they're not coming back to work for Marxists.

• 1:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, it's a, let's think about that on the way in today. And a nation that does not back its warfighters and law enforcement, that's dangerous.

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  But it could get more dangerous because a nation where the warfighters and law enforcement turn their backs on the nation because they don't get the support, that becomes even more dangerous. And I think that we're teetering on those lines right now.

• 1:50:57Speaker 03

  We're right on the edge.

• 1:50:59Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but let's move on to when you left Rikers.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  So, uh, August, uh, I guess it was August 18th. It was a Friday. I think it was the 18th, um, 2000. It was a Friday night. I got a call from the mayor. Um, about 11 o'clock at night.

• 1:51:26Shawn Ryan?

  You get a lot of calls from the mayor.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  called me every morning at 6:05. I would step into my car at six o'clock. I'd look at the comstat reports of all the things that happened in the city last night. And just about the time I got done, my phone would ring in the car and it would be him. He's already read all the newspapers. He's already listened to the news. He knows everything that happened in the city the night before. And he was fucking full of questions at 6:05. He lives on three to four hours sleep a day. That's all he gets. He was like that back in the nineties. In the 2000s, and he's just like that today, he's no different.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  But that being said, I got a call from the mayor about 11 o'clock on that Friday night. And, you know, the police commissioner had resigned, retired about 11 days prior to this. So it was up in the air. Who's gonna be the new police commissioner? And there were reports in all the New York tabloids, the New York Post, the Daily News, the New York Times, Newsday, every day there was a different story. It's gonna be Bernie Kerik, the mayor likes ABC. No, the next day it's gonna be Joe Dunn, he was the chief of the NYPD. Next day it's back to Bernie Kerik, then it's Joe Dunn, then it's Bernie Kerik, then it's Joe Dunn.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Well, on that Friday night, 11 days after the police commissioner retired, he calls me and he says, "Bern, listen, I just hung up with Joe Dunn." And he hesitated. And I remember thinking in my head, it seemed like an hour, it was probably only 10 seconds, but it seemed like a fucking hour, and I'm thinking in my head, who do you call first? The loser or the winner? You know? And he says, "I talked to Joe and I've asked Joe to, you know, to take a step up from chief and become the first deputy police commissioner." And as he's saying that, I'm trying to, trying to grasp in my head where we're going, right? What's, what's?

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  And he said, "Tomorrow morning I want you to be at City Call at 9 o'clock, and you're gonna take over the NYPD as the city's 40th police commissioner."

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Big day. Big day, emotions, emotional.

• 1:54:41Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of people don't know, the first New York City Police Commissioner was Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  You know, who later became the Governor of New York, later became the President of the United States. And, uh, and his shield, his badge, was actually made, um, by Tiffany's, by a jeweler. And that's eighteen karat gold, uh, five platinum stars. And that shield is the shield that you get, um, when you take over the NYPD, which in the United States is the biggest police department in the, in the country, right? So, uh, under my command, uh, as of that Saturday morning, I had fifty-five thousand

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  men and women, uh, that worked for me, forty-one thousand uniformed, fourteen thousand civilians.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  I had a three and a half billion dollar budget at the time. And, uh, and you're responsible not only for the men and women of the NYPD, but you're also responsible for the twelve million people that visit, live, work, go to school in New York City. So it's a pretty big job.

• 1:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Shawn Ryan?

  I'd say so.

• 1:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  What did that, I mean, what, what was going through your head when then, when he announced that, and that's it?

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  You know, I, it was, uh, it was a cra- it was, I don't know, it's, you know, like I said earlier, it's one of those things, you know, you're, you're sitting there, you know, just like when I, on September eleventh, when I'm, you know, I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking, wow, you know, this is, this is gonna be a day in history for me. You know, that all started on the morning of the nineteenth of, uh, August in two thousand, when I was basically sitting up on a stage and the mayor's introducing Joe Dunn as the new first deputy and introduces me as the new New York City Police Commissioner. And Howard Safer hands me that shield, um, and gives it to me.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, it was a crazy, crazy day, you know, the feelings, the emotions. And for me, it was, um-

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  There was something going on that maybe others, you know, other PCs didn't feel, or they didn't have the same, same feelings. And the reason was, in the audience, between the time the mayor called me, he called me about 11 o'clock that night. And nobody, nobody knows this story, this is pretty slick. The mayor told me, he said, listen, this is embargoed until 3 a.m. I don't want you to tell anybody until after 3 because the Daily News and the New York Post can get it on the front page up until 2, right? I don't want nobody to know this is gonna happen. I don't want nobody to know who it's gonna be. We're gonna call a press conference in the morning and it will be announced.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  I said, okay. So about 1 o'clock, now, I'm still not asleep. I can't sleep, I'm fucking wide awake. But at 1 o'clock, one of my best friends, my former partners, the kid that got shot in that gun battle with Carlos Carrion, I mentioned earlier, the guy put his hand up, got shot. Well, he was, he was a bodyguard for a New York State Supreme Court judge. He was assigned to the Intelligence Division. At 1 o'clock in the morning, that morning, he called me. And I answered my phone, and he said, hey, Kamish, how you doing? I said, I'm good. He said, uh, let me ask something, you heard anything?

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  No, I can't, I don't wanna tell him, right? Mayor said, don't tell him, don't tell nobody. I said, um, well, I said, I don't know, we'll talk about it tomorrow. I said, why, what's up? He said, I heard something. I said, you heard something? So what'd you hear? He said, well, you know so-and-so that was, you know, he was the head of the detail for Howard Safer, the former police commissioner? I said, yeah. He said, he just called me, and he said that Howard Safer told him that you're the man. I said, really? He said that? I said, he said, yeah. I said, well, listen. I don't want to talk about it right now.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  I said, here's what we're gonna do. Nine o'clock tomorrow morning. You get all my guys. All my friends. All our friends. I said, and make sure. They're at City Hall in the Blue Room at nine AM. He goes, yes, sir. And he hung up. Now, the guys he brought with him. These were all battle-tested cops. These are cops I was involved in gun battles with. These are cops that, you know, they were. Other guys that were involved in gun battles. Their partners were shot, killed. Really battle-tested cops. They had fucking medals up to their ears, right? They all showed up.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  They all came in the Blue Room. So when I became. The Police Commissioner, right? It wasn't about the chiefs. It wasn't about the commissioners, the deputy commissioners. It was about them. And that's what they knew. That's, you know. People, you know, they knew me as. As one of them. Not as some executive. That's gonna make a fucking policy or a decision. You know, not having any fucking clue what he's talking about. He's gonna make a decision. Cause he's really done this job. You know? And there were times when I was Police Commissioner that I did things. I'll tell you this one story, so. In August of two thousand one.

• 2:00:50Speaker 03

  About a month, month and a half before. The World Trade Center attack.

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  I was promoting. A cop by the name of Joe Vigiano. He was an emergency service cop. Super highly decorated.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  Had been involved in two different gun battles. One in eighty-nine and one in ninety-four, I think. Had been shot seven times. Shot in the chest, both times, I think. Shot in the leg, shot in the shoulders, all fucked up. But he stayed on the job. And he went to ESU. So he was like in the NYPD SWAT team, right? We had about four hundred, four hundred and fifty guys in ESU. Well, that's where he wanted to go and that's where he was. That's where he was assigned. Well, I was promoting him to second-grade detective. And he came down to my office. And I knew him, he was a big muscle-bound kid. And I congratulated him. And he was walking out of my office and he looked over in the wall and he saw photos of me when I was young, rappelling out of a helicopter.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  You know, when I was in Passaic County, New Jersey, I started their SWAT team. So he was, he's looking at these photos and he says, Commissioner, is that you? I said, yeah. He goes, and that's you in this? I said, yeah. He goes, yeah. He said, listen, every Saturday, we go down to the, the base of City Hall. He said, and we walk up on the Brooklyn Bridge. He said, we go up to do some training, have breakfast. He said, you should come. I said, I should come where? He said, come up on the bridge with us. I said, come up on the bridge? He said, yeah, yeah, we walk the tunnel with a pole. I said, you want me to come walk on the pole? I said, for what? He said, well, we go training, we're gonna have breakfast up there.

• 2:02:36Speaker 03

  I said, that's okay. I said, I've done that shit. See those photos? I've done that shit already. He goes, come on. So he's walking out the door and as he gets to the door, he turns around, he said, you know, we've asked the last four or five police commissioners, they never have the balls to go up there. I said, you motherfucker. All right. I said, okay, all right. So I called, I called my team. I said, listen, Saturday morning, 10 o'clock, we're going, we're going to go down to the bridge. And naturally, and by then, that cop that made that call to me, that cop that got shot in the arm, he was my number one, my protective detail. So I called him, I said, listen, Saturday, we're going up on the bridge. He goes, Commissioner, really, dude? Really?

• 2:03:21Speaker 03

  He goes, like, I'm your number one Saturday. I said, imagine? You're gonna go on the bridge? And we walked up on the fucking bridge. So I walked on the bridge. What, you know, and anybody that knows any of this stuff, it's but the only way to get up there is you have to walk on these it's a round pole, it's a, it's like this tube, right? You walk up that tube, you hold on to these two wire cables and you fucking walk all the way to the top of the bridge, takes about thirty minutes to get up there. And it's pretty crazy, right? You go up, and the crazier thing is you gotta fucking walk down, when you're going up, you're looking up, you don't see nothing.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  When you're coming down, you're looking at cars that are about this big. Oh shit. Right? So, and it's all about walking on that pole and holding on to the cables. So, uh, I went up, and here's the most ironic part of that day. I remember him telling me, we go up to have breakfast. So we, I walk up with them, there's about twenty guys. They go up, and the reason they go up is because every day in New York City, you know, a lot of people don't know this. There are jumpers that wanna fucking jump off the George Washington Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Varizano Bridge, you know, the, there's all, all kinda craziness. That ESU has to respond to, right?

• 2:04:46Speaker 03

  They gotta go up and get these, get these knuckleheads off the bridge. So that's why they go up, they go up, they practice, you know, their ropes, their, you know, the, all their technical equipment, everything they need. But when we were going up on the bridge, he said, we go up for breakfast.

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  Why climb up the fucking bridge? It was like a restaurant. On the top, they had like, orange juice, coffee, bagels, lox. They had like all this stuff up there to have breakfast. And I started laughing, I said, where, how'd you get all this fucking food up here? They said, well, two guys flip a coin, and the guys that lose, they have to put all that shit on their back, and they gotta bring that shit up there, and we have breakfast. And lo and behold, I went up, I hung out with all these ESU guys, had breakfast for the morning, came down and took off. That's the, the good part of the story.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  The bad part of the story is Joe Vigiano died on September eleventh. This was a guy that, you know, was a heroic cop. He was a dedicated cop. He was a cop, like I said, involved in two different gun battles over a four-year period. Shot five or six, seven times and still chose, still chose to stay on the job, be assigned to emergency service. And the first time I ever met him, when I heard about him getting shot and I heard about all this stuff, I asked him, we were in a group of, a group of cops that had been injured in the line of duty. I asked him, I said, Joe, why are you still here? Like, why aren't you retired?

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  Like a line of duty retirement, you know? You actually make more money being off the job than you do on the job. He goes, Commissioner, I'm not leaving this job. I love this fucking job. He said, I love this job. He died on September 11th. So, you know, it's, and today, it's kind of weird for me because he has three sons. He had two young sons, very young, and actually, his wife had a baby right around the time he died. Today, his two older sons, one is in the 75 precinct that wears his shield.

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  Another one is in the Marine Corps. The cop that's in the 75, he's in the Marine Corps Reserves, and the other one's in the Coast Guard. So his three boys, his three boys that he pretty much barely got to know, that barely got to know him, they were, they were probably seven or eight at the time, eight or nine, maybe. Right down to the baby, today, they're serving the city and this country. So it talks a lot about that family.

• 2:07:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:07:51Shawn Ryan?

  When you took, when you accepted the position and they made the announcement, when Giuliani announced you were New York City Police Commissioner, how confident were you that you could lead, was it 55,000 police officers?

• 2:08:14Speaker 03

  Um, I was 1,000% confident. You know, it's, it's like we talked about earlier, about taking that step. I'm not, I'm not one of these guys that's gonna say no. You know, when, when he actually, when he wanted to make me the first deputy, I kinda balked. And I said, "Look, it's not the same, you don't understand." And the mayor said, "Just do what you do. All it is, it's a bigger job, but do what you do. You enhance morale, you, you motivate people, you, you hold people accountable. Do what you do. It'll work, I promise you it'll work." He was right.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  He saw, he saw something in me, I guess, that I didn't see at the time, I didn't understand. Over time, I get it, I got it, right? Over time, I, I understood it. Today, I understand it better than probably anybody, because I've been through it more times than you can count.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  But when I became Police Commissioner, I knew. I had a three-pronged job at the time.

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  Continue crime reduction, enhance the morale of the men and women in the NYPD, and enhance community relations. That was my three focal points. And I thought, "There's no fucking way anybody could do this better than I can." And I took off. And over the next 18 months before the attack,

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  I had already reduced violent crime by almost fifteen percent. More than what had happened already, which the mayor thought was impossible. I remember the mayor telling me, he said, whatever happens, the crime can't go up. Even if it's a two percent reduction, that's fine. But, you know, we've done a lot, but crime can't go up. I dropped it by fifteen percent by the following year. I had the best community relations, you know, interactions with the black community, with Hispanic community than anybody, and the fucking cops loved me. Why? Because I was a cop. I think I was a cop more than I was a police commissioner.

• 2:10:32Speaker 03

  Police commissioner, you put together the right team, you get the right people under you, the right leadership. I had a phenomenal chief of department that I brought in. This is a guy that had a combat cross, had a medal for valor, been involved in a number of gun battles, highly respected by the men and women in the field. That's who my chief of department was. My chief of patrol, who runs the patrol division for the NYPD. This is a guy that was a cop up in Harlem in uniform, and as a chief of patrol would go out in the middle of the night. You know, it's ironic, I used to do these runs in the middle of the night as police commissioner.

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  I would go out and stop by a precinct at two thirty in the morning, walk in, or, you know, switch my, had the bodyguard switch my frequencies to local precincts. So cops get a radio run, you know, shots fired, you know, a man with a gun or whatever. I'd roll up on the scene as the police commissioner. And these cops would be like, what the fuck? Like, this is crazy. Like, they'd never seen, the only time they see the police commissioner in New York City is on TV, or if there's a promotion ceremony, where they get in a lot of fucking trouble. That's it, that's the only time you see him. I was constantly in the field.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  He'd lead by the front, not in the fucking rear. Lead by the front. If you lead by example... And these men and women, the men and women that work for you know that you're gonna support them, that you're gonna be there for them. And the other thing is, I'm not asking them, I would never ask them to do anything I wouldn't do. Whether it was walking up on that fucking bridge, doing an undercover buy-ins Harlem or Spanish Harlem, or getting out on patrol in the middle of Bed-Stuy. I did it. I did it. So, don't tell me it can't be done. You know, don't tell me, you know, you know, you're doing something that I don't understand.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  No, I understand. I get it. I understand it. And you know what? The men and women that did it and did it well, I took care of. You know, in New York City, and for the New York City cops that watch this, they'll understand this really well. There's a lot of politics in NYPD, right? When I took over and we were going through the promotional reviews for detective, for example. Who's gonna make detective? Who's gonna make grade in detective? In other words, there's three grades in detectives. You start as a third grade, there's a second, there's a first. A first grade detective makes the same equivalent pay

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  as it's between a lieutenant and a captain. It's a shitload of money for a cop, right? So, when I did those reviews, I started looking at the reviews for detectives and I'd see a bunch of fucking names, you know. This detective works for the chief of administration. He's like the fucking guy that gets a coffee in the morning. You know, he picks up the newspapers, he drives the chief of administration. No, no. He's already got a really good job and he's getting paid well for what he does. He doesn't need to be promoted to a second grade detective.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Now, give me a guy that had, you know, three gun battles. Give me, give me a guy that's never called out sick. Give me the guy, give me the guy that has, you know, 60 medals. I had, and this is a true story. I, in 1991, I got the Medal of Valor when Hector got shot. And, and we were involved in that gun battle. At that, at that, um, it was nineteen ninety-three, I think. When, uh, when I got the medal, there was a kid that was getting his third Combat Cross at that medal ceremony. Well, here we are, you know, eight years later. I'm the New York City Police Commissioner. I'm having a ceremony.

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  They call, you know, for the Medal of Valor recipients. And that fucking dude comes up. He's got, literally, he had two hundred medals. Two hundred. Like, three Combat Crosses, two medals for valor, and a hundred and eighty-five other medals, right? The most, I, I believe he's the most substantially decorated cop in the history of the NYPD. He was from the six, seven precinct. And when they introduced him, Detective Third Grade, I forget his name. Detective Third Grade. That fucking dude was a Detective Third Grade when he was getting the Combat Cross the last time,

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  when I saw him. So immediately after we left that ceremony, I called in my Chief of Staff and I said, "Dude, Detective Third Grade, really?" I said, "How can that be? How has that guy not been promoted since I saw him last time? He's gotta be one of the workingest cops in the NYPD." I sent him downstairs, comes back, he goes, "All right, you're not gonna like this answer." He goes, "But the chief of the borough, the Chief of Detectives in the borough doesn't like him." He said, "Doesn't like him? Doesn't like him, why? 'Cause he embarrasses the other cops? Doesn't like him, why?" He said, "I don't know."

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  He said, "He just doesn't like him. He won't put him in." I was like, "All right." I said, "Go downstairs to the Chief of Detectives. This is citywide detectives, Bill Ali." I said, "Go tell Chief Ali, if that guy is not on the next round of promotions, tell the Chief of the borough, put in his retirement papers." I don't give a fuck if he likes him or he don't like him. I don't care what it is. Whatever, I don't, I don't know what it is, don't care. That kid better be in the next set of promotions, or that chief is gone. And he got promoted.

• 2:16:59Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think there's a cop in the country that would not want to work under your command.

• 2:17:05Speaker 03

  That's the way I managed, that's the way I worked, and, and all these guys knew it.

• 2:17:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think yours and Giuliani's leadership styles were parallel?

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yep. Giuliani, first of all, he came from a family of, you know, New York City cops. His uncle, Uncle Rudy, was actually in emergency service. Was a New York City emergency service cop, you know, 20 years before I came on the job. You know, so, number one, he knew the job, he knew, you know, he knew all about the NYPD. Then he became the US Attorney. First, an Assistant US Attorney. Then, the Assistant, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And then, he became the Associate Attorney General, the number three, in the Justice Department under President Reagan.

• 2:18:02Speaker 03

  So, nobody knows this field, this, you know, the law enforcement community better than he does. He knows it, he gets it, he understands it.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  And he was extremely supportive by the men and women around him. And, and I'll tell you something, in the correction arena, normally, correction officers are like the black sheep of criminal justice, right? Nobody gives a fuck about what happens to inmates once those doors close, right? Therefore, nobody pays attention. Like, you don't want to talk about that, you don't want to hear that, you don't want to see that. Jails and prisons are like something that nobody really, they don't want to know about. When I came along and went to Giuliani, and, and I, I pretty much said that to him. I said, you know, the New York City Correction Department, it's got 13,000 staff members.

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  You've got 130,000 inmate admissions a year. It's a big fucking agency. But it can't be treated like the black sheep. Because guess what? The cops that are out there making the arrests, if we don't have a place to hold them, and the place we do hold them isn't safe, and the morale is shit, well, you know, it makes the job worse. It makes the city worse. If I can change the morale in the Department of Corrections, if you can get the prosecutors to do their job,

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  we could have the best of both worlds, and that's kind of what we did. So, the city on the outside got cleaned up, and the jail system got cleaned up, unlike anything that had ever happened before in New York.

• 2:19:50Shawn Ryan?

  That's a hell of an accomplishment.

• 2:19:54Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll start to get into the attack.

• 2:20:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:20:23Shawn Ryan?

  On September 11th, at 8:45 a.m., the American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. It not only changed our country, and New York, but it also changed the entire world forever.

• 2:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  2,996 people were killed in the Trade Center attack. 343 firefighters and medics, 23 police officers, 37 port authority officials. 189 people were killed at the Pentagon in Flight 77. Pennsylvania Flight 93, 44 people died. In 2018, there were an estimated 10,000 people who have been diagnosed with 9/11 cancer. There's been over 7,000 troops that died fighting for America's freedom from this event.

• 2:21:23Shawn Ryan?

  Not to mention all the veterans that have died and police and firefighters from PTSD and suicides, overdoses, all from, triggered from this event. It's sent us into the longest war in American history. You led the greatest rescue mission of all time in American history. The reason I asked you about fate at the beginning and if things happen for a reason is because we received a ton of questions on how you managed the stress and how you

• 2:22:08Shawn Ryan?

  made your decisions. And I think that the only answer is, is fate. Everything that you saw from childhood, from your mother being murdered, to the beheadings in Saudi Arabia, to the shit you dealt with as a cop, that was all stress and it was forging you into who you became when September 11th happened and led that rescue mission. I don't think there's anybody in the world that could have done a better fucking job than you did that day.

• 2:22:45Shawn Ryan?

  And so that's why I asked you that, if you believe in fate.

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  You know what, Sean? I was there, I was in command, and I just, I tried to tell people that I did the best I could under the circumstances.

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

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

• 2:23:52Speaker 03

  And I realized that wasn't what I thought it was. So I walked out of my office, into my primary office, through there, into my conference room. I pulled back the drapes and I could see the building. The building was only about a quarter of a mile from police headquarters. The top of the building, I had to look up in the air at the top of the building. And I could see the damage to the top of the building. And I knew that wasn't no small aircraft. So I went back in to my desk. I picked up the phone to call the mayor. And the mayor was actually on the line. Said he was on the way downtown. He would meet me at Seven World Trade.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  Seven World Trade was directly across the street from Tower One. That's where the city's emergency command center was. It was on the 23rd floor of that building. So we were gonna meet there. And that's where the mayor would oversee the response to the accident, what we thought was an accident. I was downtown at Seven World Trade at Tower One, probably within seven or eight minutes. I threw on my clothes. The bodyguards got the cars revved up. Took some of my staff with me. And we took off and we came down West Broadway.

• 2:25:22Speaker 03

  Got to the corner of Vesey where the the towers were really. And as we tried to turn onto the block to get to Tower Seven, there were a bunch of cops there. They stopped the motorcade. Didn't know I was in it. Told the guys in the car, you can't turn onto the block. And they wouldn't let us through and my guys were getting annoyed. They were gonna push their way through.

• 2:25:48Speaker 03

  I rolled down the window, the cop, it was a sergeant. He saw me, he stood at attention, saluted me, he said, Commissioner, you can't pull onto the, onto the street, they're jumping.

• 2:26:01Speaker 03

  And I didn't know, I didn't know what, he said it quick, you know, he said, you can't get on the block, they're jumping. I didn't know what that meant, what's he talking about? And I got out of the car, walked around the cars, got to the corner, and saw this debris coming down off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, I realized it wasn't debris, it was people. And they were jumping, you know, one, two, three at a time. Over the next four or five minutes, I guess I watched a couple dozen people jump from the building to the ground. They were hitting the ground on Vesey, the two, the courtyard between one and two.

• 2:26:48Speaker 03

  When they hit the ground, they had basically evaporated.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

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

• 2:27:39Speaker 03

  So, we backed our vehicles up, was at the corner of Barkley and West Broadway. I was in the middle of calling for a temporary command bus, and all of a sudden, there was this enormous explosion above us. And when I looked up, straight up in the air, now keep in mind, I'm standing directly in front of Tower 2. I'm about three blocks north of the building, but the top of the building is straight up in the air. I look up, and there's that big orange fireball that you see if you watched it on TV. When you see that big orange fireball blow out the north side of the tower, Tower 2,

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  I'm standing in front of it, underneath it. And I look up, I see it, I didn't see the second plane. The second plane came around the southern end of Manhattan and hit the north, the south side of the tower, blowing out the north side of the tower on top of us.

• 2:28:43Speaker 03

  Um, we ran up behind Tower 7 and behind the post office, got behind those buildings until the majority of the debris came down to the ground. As we were running, one of the detectives got hit in the back of the leg with a shaft, a shaft piece of the wheel of the plane. Um, that's how close we were to the stuff that was coming down. Um, I could hear the aviation pilots yelling on the radios that a second aircraft had just hit Tower 2.

• 2:29:18Speaker 03

  It was at that minute that I realized we were under attack. Prior to that, it was an accident. Prior to that, the response for the city would have been measured. There were policies in place, you know, from nineteen ninety six on Giuliani created the Office of Emergency Management. So there were policies and protocols in place for major responses, major crises, anywhere in the city, all over the city. But this was different. This was going to be very different because it was, this was an attack and we had to respond differently.

• 2:29:59Speaker 03

  And at that point, the response changed. Instead of, instead of the protocols and policies we had in place for a much smaller crisis, we now had other things to worry about. Were there other planes in the air? What would the other targets be? Evacuation points, who's going to get evacuated? I called for the evacuation of police headquarters, City Hall, the UN, the Empire State Building. In my mind, I was trying to think of other targets that there may be.

• 2:30:41Speaker 03

  I was also thinking at the time, did they have ground attacks planned? Somebody, whoever did this, and keep, keep in mind, this is, this is going on as it's happening, right? You know, we were a police department and this is, um, this is, it's, it's comical to think back now in a way of, of what happened, what was said and how it happened. But my, my chief of staff was with me at the base of the towers when all this was going on and, um,

• 2:31:20Speaker 03

  About two weeks after the attack, I was sitting in the command center up at the pier with the mayor, and my chief of staff was sitting across from me, sort of where you are. And he was talking to some other guys, and they were looking at me, and they were smiling and laughing and joking. And I looked over and I said, "What are you guys laughing at?" He said, "Nothing." I said, "What is it?" I said, "What are you laughing at?" He said, "Commissioner, we're just talking about, you know, that day, the day of the attack." And I said, "What are you laughing at?" He said, "Do you remember what you said to me?" He said, "What, you were yelling?" I said, "Not really. What?" He said, "After the second plane hit Tower Two, he said, 'You were in the middle of calling for the command center.'

• 2:32:06Speaker 03

  He goes, 'You snatched the radio away from me, and you yelled at me. You said, "Get me some air support and close the fucking airspace." He goes, and I remem-- he said, "And you turned around to say something to somebody." And I remember looking to the other guys going, "Give me some air-- like, is there a fucking 1-800 number for an F-16? Like, who am I calling? Like, who you call? Who do I call to, like, shut down the airspace and get us air support? We're a police department." It was comical when he said it.

• 2:32:42Speaker 03

  But think of the reality. We were now mixed into a basic war zone.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50Speaker 03

  We weren't-- this wasn't a military unit. This is a police department. You know? We were prepared for just about anything under the sun you could imagine. Right? Any kind of crisis. We had manpower like no other police department in the country. We had resources like no other police department in the country. But nobody imagined that you would have two jet-sized missiles flown into those towers. So we had to do everything in our power to secure that area, worry about the rest of the city, worry about the mass transit system. You know, if you dropped sarin gas

• 2:33:34Speaker 03

  in Grand Central Station at 5 o'clock in the afternoon-- You can kill a half a million people. Did these guys have something like that planned? Were there other things like that that was gonna happen? We didn't know. So we had to do the best we could under the circumstances. The, uh, the protocol at that point was to, to basically activate Operation Omega. That's what the, that was the title of the response for us. And that basically was every precinct in the city with every active cop would respond to include the fire department and every city agency. So we had the correctional staff.

• 2:34:19Speaker 03

  We had the fire department. We had the NYPD. We had the Port Authority Police. Everybody was going.

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  And when you talk about the magnitude of the rescue.

• 2:34:35Speaker 03

  This was nine o'clock in the morning, right? Eight forty-five when the first plane hit, nine oh two when the second plane hit. And at the end of the day, there were twenty to twenty-five thousand people in and around the towers at that point. If it was, if it was later in the day, it would have been much worse. But it was early in the morning. So we evacuated twenty to twenty-five thousand people out of the immediate area and the buildings. Anybody that was below the impact zones got out, right? Anybody that was above the impact zone died. There was no getting out. Then

• 2:35:15Speaker 03

  we evacuated close to a million people out of New York City, out of Manhattan, out of the southern portion of Manhattan, into the other boroughs. So you had them going into Queens in the Bronx. You had them going to Staten Island by ferry. You had them going to Jersey. Just, just the boat, the evacuation by boats into New Jersey was enormous, right? You had the state police, the New York City Harbor Division. You had civilians in civilian boats pulling up right near the financial center downtown, grabbing people,

• 2:36:01Speaker 03

  throwing them in the boats and running to the other side of the Hudson River.

• 2:36:08Speaker 03

  This, this evacuation and, and the rescue, the initial rescue operation went on all day. Went on all day. You can see, you know, if you go back to footage from that day on the Brooklyn Bridge, there are shots of people walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. There has to be a hundred, 200,000 people on the bridge that's walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn, going over the Brooklyn Bridge. That went on all day. The mayor arrived, the mayor got to me

• 2:36:47Speaker 03

  about three minutes after Tower Two was hit. He rolled up, got out, met me at Barclay and West Broadway. And I remember when he came up to the, he got to me, he was standing right next to me and he's watching all this debris come off the building. And as that debris got closer to the ground, he realized that it wasn't debris. And he was, he was like, oh my God. He put his hands in his, put his head in his hands and he was yelling. I go, oh my God. You know, it's funny. You, you mentioned earlier that, you know, whether it was fate or my experience or, you know, my, the past, you know, what I had done in

• 2:37:30Speaker 03

  the past. I've seen a lot of this stuff, a lot, a lot of death in my life, right? The mayor, he, he's never dealt with anything like this. This was something to him that, you know, although being a US Attorney or being the mayor or being, you know, the Associate Attorney General, this was not, you know, what he's ever dealt with. And those, those first images for him, I think, were more than stunning.

• 2:38:04Speaker 03

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

• 2:38:49Speaker 03

  This was an attack by radical Muslims who despised this country, who we had, we had known about for years. This wasn't the first attack on the US. First attack on US soil, but not on the US, by no means. You know, you look at the USS Cole, the year two before, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Al Khorar Towers, the embassy in Beirut in eighty-three. This stuff had gone on for years. Nobody ever focused on it, nobody ever looked at it, nobody was ever concerned with it as much as they were

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  in the aftermath of the attack on the towers. So, the mayor and I, after he got there, he wanted to see the damage to the other side of Tower One. So we actually walked down to West Street, went to West Street, went to a command center, a temporary command center there, where there was the First Deputy Commissioner of the Fire Department, Chief of Operations for the Fire Department, Chief of Department, and Father Michael Judge, who was the chaplain, he was the chief chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. They were all at that command center. And we spoke to them.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  Some of those guys had worked on the Oklahoma bombings, the courthouse bombing in the Federal Building in Oklahoma. They told us, they said, the chief of department, yes, he said, "Look, we're gonna lose everything above the impact zone, the possibilities of rescues and evacuations from above the impact zone. We're not gonna be able to do it, it's not gonna work. Can't get nobody off the top of that building. We're gonna lose those people, and we're gonna lose the tops of the building." But that was it. Nobody thought the buildings would come down.

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  And the mayor said, "Okay." At that point, the mayor wanted to call the White House. He wanted to speak to the president, he wanted to make sure that we had federal resources at our disposal, and he also wanted to make sure that we had air support and that the airspace would be closed down. So if there was something else coming, somebody would be on it, right? So my guys had secured a Merrill Lynch office on that corner of Barclay and West Broadway where we started. So I told the mayor, "We're gonna go back to where we were. We have an office there, we set up a temporary command post, you're gonna go in there, you can call the president from there." So we walked back up, and as we were walking away,

• 2:41:45Speaker 03

  Father Judge from the fire department, he grabbed the mayor's hand, he put his hand on his head, he crossed him, and he blessed us. He said, "God bless you guys, be careful." And we walked away. We went back to the office at Barclay and West Broadway. We went inside. They secured a phone line. Tony Carbonetti, who was the mayor's chief of staff, got the White House on the phone, and the mayor was on the phone looking for the president. They said, "The president's not in the building. The vice president is gonna come to the phone in a minute." And about a minute later, Chris Hennig, who was a special assistant to the president, Chris Hennig came on the phone and he told the mayor,

• 2:42:29Speaker 03

  "Mr. Mayor, we have to go. They're evacuating the White House. We think the Pentagon just got hit." Giuliani hung up the phone and he was sitting, he was sitting about where you are to me and I was standing here. I was standing in this doorway and he was sitting at a desk. And he looked at me, he put down the phone and he said, "Shit, that's not good." And I said, "What is it? What'd he say?" He said, "They think the Pentagon just got hit." And before he got to say that they were evacuating the White House, the building we were in started to shake, like a freight train was coming through the side of it.

• 2:43:12Speaker 03

  It just started to shake, the entire building. And all of a sudden, the door flew open and it was my chief of department, Joe Esposito, the chief of the NYPD, kicked open the door, ran inside and he said, "It's coming down, everybody get down." I didn't know if he meant the building we were in or what he meant. I didn't know what was going on. But the building we were in started to shake more and more and more. And, you know, there were people jumping under these little desks and all this shit and I thought, "This fucking desk ain't gonna help nobody." I basically stood in the doorway. I braced myself in the doorway and just stood there.

• 2:43:54Speaker 03

  And I'm like, "If this building's coming down, a fucking desk ain't gonna help you." And it went on for about 10 seconds, enormously loud, and then all of a sudden, there was this gush of smoke and gas and soot. All the windows on the outside of the building we were in blew out. And there was this flush of white dust inside the building. And as the door, they opened the door, I could see that hallway, all the windows blew out. There was dust and there was paper and there was stuff in the wind, stuff in the air.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  And as we got over there, I realized there was no getting back out the way we came in. Tower two was, you know, two blocks south of us. Tower two had imploded. That's what was coming down. Tower two imploded. And to give you an idea of how much damage there was two blocks north, my first deputy commissioner was in a Dodge minivan. That Dodge minivan was about thirteen inches high, right outside where we were. So basically, we were stuck in this small office. And I could, I could remember thinking like, all the shit I've been through in my life,

• 2:45:23Speaker 03

  gun battles, stabbed, craziness, right? My whole career, I'm gonna fucking die in this office because I can't breathe. I mean, I could not breathe. Nobody, you know, everybody's holding their, trying to hold their clothes up around their mouth. You couldn't see, there was all this shit in your eyes. And we're trying to figure out a way out, and I was gonna get my guys, basically, at some point, you know, we knew there was a series of doors that went in the opposite direction to Church Street. I was basically gonna tell the guys, start shooting the hinges off the doors that were locked.

• 2:45:59Shawn Ryan?

  Could you see?

• 2:46:00Speaker 03

  You could barely see. Inside, you could see a lot better than you could see outside. Outside, you couldn't see nothing. It was clear white. Inside, you were just, you know, you were having a difficult time seeing because of the shit that was in your eyes. You know, some guys had stuff in there, their eyes were bleeding, they were getting all red. But we were doing a lot better off inside than people outside.

• 2:46:23Shawn Ryan?

  There was electricity or flashlights?

• 2:46:27Speaker 03

  Uh, no, there was electricity in our building. There was electricity, it was still lit. So we're looking at these doors, and I'm thinking, I'm gonna tell my guys, basically, shoot the hinges off the doors, and we'll just take the doors and head toward Church, see if we can get to Church. And all of a sudden, this fucking door opens, like, one of these doors opened, and there's these two short, little Spanish guys, that were maintenance guys, in maintenance uniforms. They had a shitload of keys on them. And they were about surprised, they were about as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Imagine, they come, they come, you know, walking, they don't know what happened, they don't know what's going on outside, they just know,

• 2:47:10Speaker 03

  you know, it's like the fucking world's coming to an end. They open the door and there's the mayor, the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, we're all in one area. And I said to this guy, I said, "You have keys to these doors?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Open this door, where's it go?" "Goes down this hallway." "You have a key to that door?" "Yeah, open that door." So we started going through the building, through this maze of hallways, and we finally came out on Church Street, which was about two blocks to the west, two blocks east of where we were. And we came out into that building, and I know that building well, 100 Church Street is where the general counsel for the city was, corporation counsel, right?

• 2:47:55Speaker 03

  We came into that corridor, into that, the hallway of that building, the massive hallway. And I remember looking at the windows thinking, "What's outside?" Because I've been in that lobby a hundred times. I knew the lobby well, they had floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows around that lobby. I couldn't see anything on the other side of the windows, it was solid white. It was like somebody took a fucking white sheet and laid it up on the window.

• 2:48:27Speaker 03

  And I'm thinking, I mean, I remember at some point, and I don't know if it was then or a little later, thinking, "Was this a, was this a nuclear blast? Like, what is this? What is all this white sheet?" Because I can't, you can't see anything out those windows.

• 2:48:43Speaker 03

  So there was a rotating door on that side of the building to get outside. And that door spun, and as that spun, somebody was coming in, and it was my deputy commissioner for administration, who was actually outside when the building came down. He came in, his name was Tibor Korekis. He came in to the building, and he had fucking blood dripping down the front of his face, out of his eyes. He was covered in white soot, white dust, and he could barely see. And we had, we had some guys lay him down, they were pouring water into his eyes, trying to get rid of all the shit that was in his eyes. And I walked over, and I walked out that vestibule door that he came in.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  I walked outside, and now, keep in mind, we're five blocks from Tower Two, maybe, maybe a little more. I walked outside, and on the ground, there was this much dust, at least, on everything. Five blocks away, there was this solid white dust, and there was no fucking sound. There was no sound. It's like, if I just, if I put you in a soundproof booth right now, that's what it was like. There was no sound. There was no birds, no sirens, no fucking movement, no nothing.

• 2:50:10Speaker 03

  It was like, somebody took something and put it on your head and eliminated all the sound. That was one of the eeriest feelings of that day for me. Because, you know how much, how much material had to come down to muffle every bit of sound out there? Right? In the city of New York? No sound, none. So I got the mayor, we couldn't go back to City Hall. His guys wanted to go to City Hall, they wanted to go earlier, so he could call the White House. I didn't want him to go back to City Hall. I figured if we went back to City Hall and there was something else planned, we wouldn't be prepared for it.

• 2:50:54Speaker 03

  Luckily, we didn't go to City Hall, because had we, we would have been walking behind Tower Two when it came down. So by getting him out of the danger zone, getting him back to Barkley... That part was safe. Now I'm thinking, where are we, where are we going? City Hall's closed, police headquarters is evacuated. What are we gonna do? I didn't want anybody to know where he was. You know, it was my job at that point. More than anything else, secure the mayor. You need a leader to lead. He's not doing us any fucking good. If he, if he gets, if he dies, you know, if something else happens.

• 2:51:37Speaker 03

  So, I decided, we're gonna, we're gonna walk up Church Street. We're gonna go to the Soho Grand Hotel. I sent my guys to the Soho Grand. And I said, "Take over the hotel. Take over the, the inside of the hotel. We'll use that as a temporary command center until we can figure out what else is happening." Because, in my mind, if they hit the Pentagon, they hit both of the biggest financial buildings in the country. What else is there? Right? I didn't know about ninety-three at the time.

• 2:52:14Speaker 03

  So, we, we walk up to the Soho Grand. We walk in one door, we're walking in, the advance team's up there, they're trying to get a bunch of funds in place. I walk in, I look around, the whole fucking base of that hotel was glass.

• 2:52:33Speaker 03

  I looked around, I took one look around, I looked at the mayor, he looked at me, I said, "We ain't staying here, gotta go." Walked through the lobby, in one door, out the other door, and started walking, continued down Church Street. Until we got to Houston, there was a fire, a fire station in Houston Street. It was completely locked, there was nobody in it. Everybody from that station had gone to the Trade Center. We broke, broke into the fire station. The mayor used the phone inside, and at that point, I decided, you know what? I gotta get him out of the danger zone. I gotta get him in a place where it's gonna be secure, nobody's gonna know.

• 2:53:17Speaker 03

  I pulled up the cars, I told my guys, "Throw him in the car, we're going to the New York City Police Academy." New York City Police Academy was in Gramercy Park, so to speak, on Twentieth Street. Twentieth Street between Second and Third Avenue. That's where the academy was. We're going to the academy. So it's my administration, my deputies, the people that are with me, his immediate staff. We all jumped in the car. We took off a series of cars and we went to the police academy. We set up a temporary command post there. I called all the press. There was a press pool.

• 2:54:00Speaker 03

  There was a number of reporters that were with us. I had them meet me outside. I got them all in one group. I said, so listen up. Here's the deal. This is going to be our temporary command post. This area and everything around it and by it is embargoed. I don't want no photos. I don't want no pictures. I don't want no locations given over the networks. I want nothing. If you do it, I will arrest you. I'll lock you to fuck up. Nothing. I don't want nobody to know the mayor's here. I don't want nobody to know where we're at. Clear? Yeah. Okay, good. Boom, went back inside.

• 2:54:42Speaker 03

  And then basically that's where, that was our, the beginning of our operational day. Mayor was talking to, by then the mayor talked to the president. Because the president was in Florida. Mayor talked to the president, talked to some of the other city leaders, talked to the governor. The governor was on the way to see us. That was the beginning of our day.

• 2:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  How much time had passed from the time you were trapped in there?

• 2:55:16Speaker 03

  Till the time we got the mayor in the command center? Probably an hour, hour and a half.

• 2:55:24Shawn Ryan?

  What was the drive like? I mean, were the streets?

• 2:55:28Speaker 03

  Streets were pretty much clear at that time. Everybody was, you know. Keeping in mind, this is the World Trade Center. So you could see the World Trade Center all the way uptown, right? If you're looking down Seventh Avenue, you could see it. It was gone. Trade Center was gone. As we were walking up Church Street, going to that firehouse, Tower One imploded.

• 2:55:50Speaker 03

  We heard it implode, we heard it come down. Um, you know, people around us, people were screaming, uh, yelling, uh, you know, every time one of the buildings came down, there was this mad push of this, you know, the debris and the dust and the papers and the, all that stuff, you know, that stuff pushed for blocks and blocks. So all of Southern Manhattan was saturated. During the course of calling for the rescue and the response teams, um, we shut Manhattan down from 14th Street all the way south. That was, you know, that was, uh, 30 blocks north of Tower One and Two.

• 2:56:34Speaker 03

  But we closed all of Southern Manhattan down. The only people allowed to, this is another thing that I think was historic at the time. It was probably the first time in the history of the city, New York City was closed. There are signs, if you go back, you'll see, I called for the closing of the city. New York City closed, there's big signs at the tunnels, at the bridges. Nobody was allowed to come into the city unless you were a first responder. The only people allowed to come in were first responders, that's it.

• 2:57:10Shawn Ryan?

  How fast were you able to make that decision to evacuate the city? Was that immediate?

• 2:57:19Speaker 03

  It was one, one, you know, one thing after another.

• 2:57:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:23Speaker 03

  Um, you know, the evacuation, um, was all part of, you know, the, the other thing about the evacuation that I think people don't realize, we, we got probably over a million, million and a half people out of Southern Manhattan over about a four, five hour period without incident, without incident.

• 2:57:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:45Speaker 03

  No headaches, everything was smooth, cops were doing their job, people were uniting, people were doing their job, that, um, you know, we had a lot of volunteers, a lot of people were coming to help, um, you know.

• 2:58:01Speaker 03

  You'd be surprised at how a country can come together when they have to. Regardless of the color of your skin, your religion, your, you know, your political party, didn't make any difference. There's a, there's a story, this is a true story, but there's only a couple of people that can tell it. And one of them is me, one of them is the mayor. We were actually there. You know, President Bush came to Ground Zero on September 15th. Came down to, came to Ground Zero, looked around.

• 2:58:43Speaker 03

  So when he got up on the big pile with the bullhorn, and he said, you know, the people that did this, they're gonna be held accountable. They're gonna hear us. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna do to them what we need, need to do. All that, you know, he'd like motivating, inspiring. Well, when he was done, he wanted to go see the, the families of the people that were missing. You know, all that list you had, right? Twenty-three cops, twenty-three of my guys, thirty-seven Port Authority cops and, and their executives they lost. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters. The families of their, those missing, they were in the Javits Center up on Thirty-Fourth Street. So the president wanted to go see them.

• 2:59:27Speaker 03

  And so the president says, come on, let's go, get in my car. Well, he was in a Suburban. The president's Suburban has four fucking seats in it, right? With the six of us. So it's me, the mayor, Governor Pataki's like six-seven, right? Richie Shear, the OEM guy and the fire commissioner, we're pretty big boys. So the president goes, get in, get in the Suburban. And I, I said, Mr. President, I said, we'll have to get in another car, cause, you know, it's too many of us. He said, get in, everybody get in. So literally, we get in the suburban, and we're like this. Like, my leg's over the president's leg, like this, you know. Everybody's in the suburban.

• 3:00:12Speaker 03

  And we drive from ground zero, we go up the West Side Highway. And going up the West Side Highway to 34th Street, there's thousands of people. And they're in the streets with these big fucking signs, you know, "God Bless America", "Go get him, Mr. President", "George Bush with big fucking hearts", and all this, all this shit, right? And the president, as we're going up the West Side Highway, Bush is looking out the window, and he says, "Look at this", he says to Giuliani, he said, "Look at this", he said, "I can't believe the unity", he said, "I love these people", "These are God-loving people", "These are, they love this country". And the mayor looked at the president, and he said, "Mr. President",

• 3:00:57Speaker 03

  he says, "Um, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but we are on the west side of Manhattan. Not one of those people voted for you". And everybody burst out laughing, right? Governor Pataki was laughing the loudest. And the mayor looked at him, he said, "Governor, I don't know what you're laughing at, none of them voted for you either", "'cause this is the west side of Manhattan, super liberal, right? But here's, here's what bothers me. Yeah, this super liberal, was the west side of Manhattan. Those people fucking hated George Bush before that day. But on that day,

• 3:01:41Speaker 03

  and in the days after, and on the time during the attack, they love this country, they love that flag, they love George Bush. This was, this was hallowed ground. This was the first battleground in this 20-year war against global terrorism.

• 3:02:10Speaker 03

  Where are those fucking people today?

• 3:02:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:15Speaker 03

  Where are all those people today? Where are those people that were fucking scattered like mice? That were scared to death?

• 3:02:25Speaker 03

  You know? You know where they're at? They're attacking cops. They're calling for a socialist society.

• 3:02:34Speaker 03

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

• 3:03:20Speaker 03

  You know?

• 3:03:22Speaker 03

  Up until five years ago, if you asked me, what is the greatest threat against this country? I would have said radical Islam. I would have said the same people that attacked us on September 11th. They're still out there. They have the same mindset, it hasn't changed. It's not going anywhere. But today, that's not my greatest fear. Today, my greatest fear is the infusion of socialism in this country. My greatest fear is that we have fucking congressmen. We have people in the House of Representatives that are Marxist, that are far-left wing radicals, that despise this country.

• 3:04:08Speaker 03

  We have leftists in the House of Representatives that think it's okay to be of Venezuela or Cuba or China or Iran.

• 3:04:20Speaker 03

  We have members in the House of Representatives that despise Israel and what it stands for. To me, that's insane. That's insane. But what's more insane than them being there is we have fucking Americans devoted those people into office. I don't get that. I just don't get it. So, I don't know, I'm rambling, I'm talking too much, but...

• 3:04:48Shawn Ryan?

  I don't get it either. I never will.

• 3:04:53Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 3:04:56Shawn Ryan?

  How long was New York City's shutdown for?

• 3:05:01Speaker 03

  Um, well, look, the, the, the initial rescue attempts, and, and I say attempts because there were no rescues. Really, nobody was rescued. If you were in the building above the impact zone, or in and around the base of the building, when the buildings come down, you died. That was it. Every one of those guys that we met at that command center, the fire department priest, father judge, that blessed us and told us to go and be careful, he died. The chief of the fire department died. The chief of operations for the fire department died.

• 3:05:43Speaker 03

  The first deputy commissioner for the fire department died. They were all at that command center. We missed that by fifteen to twenty minutes.

• 3:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:05:54Speaker 03

  Had we stayed fifteen to twenty minutes at that, longer, where they were, we would have died also.

• 3:06:05Speaker 03

  So, the initial rescue attempts, that stuff went on for two weeks, three weeks. Then it turned into a recovery mission. And the recovery lasted pretty much right up into the time that the last piece of debris was pulled out of ground zero. And that was almost six months to the day of the attack.

• 3:06:34Speaker 03

  And keep in mind, that debris was moved. That rotation of removing debris from ground zero, getting this stuff out of there. That six months was 24 hours a day. They had construction and trucking teams working on that debris 24 hours a day for six months. Around the clock. Everything that was at ground zero was taken to Fishkill in Staten Island. And basically, that turned into the biggest crime scene and evidence collection site in US history. Because everything that was at ground zero

• 3:07:17Speaker 03

  was transferred to Fishkill. And we went through it there. And so think of this. You had two of the biggest buildings in the US, 110 stories tall. The metal beams that were, that the buildings were built out of, made out of, they were 1,700 pounds per linear foot. All of that material was taken to Staten Island. And then it was sifted through, right down to the point that we found earrings. We found wedding bands. We found, you know, driver's licenses. Every bit of material,

• 3:08:02Speaker 03

  physical material, from ground zero, eventually, went through a sifting mechanism where we could find, you know, evidence, personal belongings and things like that. That went on for almost another year.

• 3:08:20Shawn Ryan?

  How were you able to identify remains and notify families, get an accurate count?

• 3:08:26Speaker 03

  You know, initially, if you go back to those times, you know, we lost, you know, just over 2,000 people that day. But the numbers that were coming in of anticipated losses.

• 3:08:40Speaker 03

  We were up like sixteen thousand, twenty thousand, twenty-two thousand. People were calling from all over the world saying, you know, my son was in the building. My son was supposed to be there. I think my daughter was there, whatever the case may be. That went on for quite a few weeks until we finally got the numbers down. Um, where we had a, a pretty good idea of what the losses were, but still. I think one of the untold stories, um, about nine eleven was the DNA process. Um, and, and here's why. So picture if you had a family member, if you lived in Scotland somewhere. And you had a family member that was in the building, you thought that was in the building that day.

• 3:09:25Speaker 03

  Or you knew they were. And you file a report that they were in the building and they're probably lost as a result. Well, we would have to get DNA, right? Um, to prove that in our collection process. So in Scotland, you'd have to send a local constable to the residence. The local constable would get a hair sample, would get a, a brush, a toothbrush. Uh, you know, whatever, wherever you would collect DNA from, they would do the packaging there. They would take it from that local's constable to Glasgow. Glasgow would send it to Interpol. Interpol would send it to London. London would send it to the Bureau.

• 3:10:09Speaker 03

  And the Bureau in New York would send it to us. And we would then transfer it to the morgue. That DNA came from all over the world.

• 3:10:17Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:10:18Speaker 03

  Nobody has any idea like that that kind of stuff was going on. We had DNA coming from all over the world. And it, there was a process to finally get it to, get it to the morgue, right? Because keep, keep this in mind. Um, and this is, you know, it's, it's a, it's a bit morbid. Um, I lost twenty-three people that day. Twenty-three New York cops that worked for me, right?

• 3:10:57Speaker 03

  If this was a cup,

• 3:11:00Speaker 03

  I could give back most of them to their families in less of a cup than this.

• 3:11:07Speaker 03

  Because they vaporized. They're disintegrated. Much of what we found were not human remains. Much of what we found were not human bodies. Most of what we found were pieces of meat. We'd find a shirt with some blotches of

• 3:11:28Speaker 03

  human remain on it. We'd find, you know, you'd find a finger. You'd find a foot. Or a piece of body. You found more body pieces than you found bodies. And that's something we had to deal with as well.

• 3:11:50Speaker 03

  That in some, in a lot of instances, there was just nothing left. The first two cops that we found,

• 3:12:01Speaker 03

  I'm almost positive it was Delara and Langone.

• 3:12:06Speaker 03

  I got notified that they had found these two cops that worked for us. I went down to Ground Zero and, you know, to be there when they brought them out. And they basically came out with two orange Home Depot buckets. And when I looked in the Home Depot buckets, it was a Glock with the metal portion of the Glock intact. It was a spring from the Glock. It was a handcuff key. It was a pair of handcuffs. There was a shield pin from one of the guy's badges from his shield. It was a metal buckle.

• 3:12:48Speaker 03

  But think of this. There was no body. There was no vest.

• 3:12:54Speaker 03

  No pants, no shirt. No nothing.

• 3:12:58Speaker 03

  Two guns and all that material that they had on, every piece of metal they had on was side by side. But there was nothing else. That's the kind of stuff, you know, it was like that that we had to deal with.

• 3:13:14Speaker 03

  Some you found more, much money you found less.

• 3:13:25Speaker 03

  How were you notifying the families?

• 3:13:30Speaker 03

  Initially, the first notification was that afternoon on the 11th, around 5:00, 5:30. I had been out with the mayor, I had been to the temporary command post. The mayor and I went back to ground zero a couple of times. I think we were in sort of denial, we kept going back to, you know, just to see what was going on. We drove by the hospitals going downtown. I can remember driving down 7th Avenue and, you know, passing St. Vincent's thinking it's gonna be loaded with people, you know, survivors. And there was nobody, all the doctors were sitting on the sidewalks, just sitting on the sidewalks, sitting next to gurneys.

• 3:14:15Speaker 03

  All these gurneys lined up. Nobody, nobody came. They were all just sitting out there, waiting, hoping that there were survivors.

• 3:14:28Speaker 03

  And I can, I remember getting back to headquarters. That afternoon, my first deputy, Joe Dunn, came in to me and he said, Commissioner, we have, we have the missing, we have the families. They have brought them in, they brought them in by helicopter from wherever they were. Many of them out on Long Island. Picked them up, brought them to headquarters. And they're all in the auditorium downstairs. So around 5:30 that night, 6 o'clock that night, I walked into the auditorium and met with the 23 families, my 23 that were missing.

• 3:15:07Speaker 03

  Walked in and basically told them, look, you know, right now, we're trying to be as optimistic as we can. We hope that there are survivors. You know, the reality was, for me and Giuliani and the fire commissioner, anybody that was down there, if you were down there and you got to see what we saw, you pretty much knew the chances of survival were... Really slim. But there were pockets of, you know, especially under, you know, where Tower Two and Tower One were underground. There were, there were a whole, you know, it was like a whole community under there, right?

• 3:15:51Speaker 03

  Three, four floors, five floors. There were shops and stores and, you know, walkways and corridors and all this stuff. So you're, you know, in our mind, you're hoping

• 3:16:03Speaker 03

  maybe somewhere down there, there's a void, right? Maybe somebody, you know, somebody, you know, they're in that void. They're, they're down there in an area where they were saved.

• 3:16:16Speaker 03

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

• 3:17:01Speaker 03

  So every family had a sort of a designated team of people around them from that command that were, that was with that family.

• 3:17:14Speaker 03

  Pretty much until they were buried.

• 3:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  After everything had happened and the city was kind of returning back to normal, how, how much longer did you have as commissioner?

• 3:17:29Speaker 03

  Three and a half months.

• 3:17:31Shawn Ryan?

  What was the morale of the city when you left?

• 3:17:38Speaker 03

  I honestly think the morale was okay. Look, we had been attacked. We had suffered the most substantial terror attack in world history. It hurt us, and it hurt us bad. But the one thing that came out of that attack in the aftermath was the resilience of the American people, the resilience of the people of New York. You know, I remember the first Yankee game after the attack. You know, President Bush going out onto the field to throw the ball, the first ball out. You know, that kind of stuff

• 3:18:22Speaker 03

  was amazing for the morale of the city. You've never heard a president cheered like they cheered for President Bush walking out in the Yankee Stadium that day. I don't give a damn if you liked, you could be the biggest Democrat, the biggest liberal, the biggest left-wing lunatic going, you were still screaming and yelling George Bush's name. I think the unity that came out as a result of the attack was something that's been unparalleled in this country. You know, I've heard about it, and I'm sure you have too,

• 3:19:05Speaker 03

  in the aftermath of World War I and World War II, where, you know, the country came together. But I gotta tell you something. I don't know if there's anything more substantial than what we witnessed in the aftermath of September 11th. I had fucking school kids, like, every grade you can imagine in classrooms all over the country sent bags of mail, cards to the NYPD. I mean, they came in in bags, like, you know, it reminded me of that, you know, the show, you know, the Christmas show, where they walk into the courtroom with the bags of mail for Santa Claus. That's what it was like. Those kind of bags were coming into the NYPD.

• 3:19:50Speaker 03

  They didn't know who they were writing to. They didn't know why they were writing. They were just sending notes of support and love and compassion. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. And like I said, I often wondered today, where the fuck are those people today? Like, what happened? What happened between then and now?

• 3:20:13Speaker 03

  You know, we should be stronger today than we were. We should have learned from that. You know, and I think, look, I think a lot of it is, you know, the millennial generation

• 3:20:28Speaker 03

  is just not educated on history. I think, you know, our teachers in schools today, grammar schools, high schools, colleges, they're not teaching history. You know, I have, I have two daughters, 21 and 18 years old. Both of them, both of them know more about the attack on the World Trade Center than most grown adults I know, but they didn't learn a damn thing in school. They didn't learn it from school. They learned it from me, they learned it from friends and colleagues and people that I worked with. That's how they learned.

• 3:21:04Speaker 03

  One of them wasn't even born. My 18-year-old wasn't even born then. She knows more about that attack prior to and after than most adults, most teachers, because the fucking teachers don't teach. You know, they're too busy indoctrinating our kids today, you know, with socialist ideas and all this leftist woke bullshit. That's, that's the problems we have today.

• 3:21:35Shawn Ryan?

  I remember how united we were. I was, I'd just gotten out of boot camp. I was going to SEAL training and I don't remember when

• 3:21:47Shawn Ryan?

  I started to see the country

• 3:21:51Shawn Ryan?

  divide again, probably because I was fucking fighting and I didn't have time to look at that shit, but.

• 3:22:01Shawn Ryan?

  At the beginning of this whole thing, I asked, "Do you think things happen for a reason? And do you believe in fate?" And you said, "Yes." And then we brought it up again

• 3:22:16Shawn Ryan?

  when you took Commissioner

• 3:22:19Shawn Ryan?

  about how that molded you into what you needed to be to handle that situation and what happened that day.

• 3:22:27Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think, maybe, we're at where we are right now as a country, going through what we're going through?

• 3:22:38Shawn Ryan?

  You think we're gonna come out some way? Or you think we're going through this for a reason and we're gonna come out stronger than we were before?

• 3:22:47Speaker 03

  I wanna think, I wanna believe that, right? I wanna believe that this is a learning curve for the United States, right? I wanna believe that, you know, there are far more many people out there that love the country, that love our flag,

• 3:23:03Speaker 03

  than, than not, right? I wanna believe that. But I also, you know, I'm not a genius, but I've followed history.

• 3:23:14Speaker 03

  And I've looked at countries where they have infused and turned to socialism, you know, whether it's Cuba, whether it's Venezuela or others.

• 3:23:24Speaker 03

  How that happened. You know, when it started, how it started.

• 3:23:31Speaker 03

  And when you look at that,

• 3:23:36Speaker 03

  I see the same thing here. I see it. I feel it. Talk to somebody, talk to somebody in this country today that lived in the Soviet Union and got out, got out and escaped to the United States. Talk to them about why they did, what they were experiencing, what they were seeing, what they were living through. And then ask them today, what are you afraid of? Because they'll tell you, right now, they're scared to death. Because they're seeing the same fucking things that they went through back in the seventies and sixties in the Soviet Union.

• 3:24:19Speaker 03

  Like, they can't believe their eyes. Like, I can't believe what I'm going through right now. I left a country to get away from that shit. And this country is reverting to it. I hear it constantly, constantly. That's what scares me. And, and I think, you know, I think we need leadership in the White House that's gonna put this country first, our flag first. I think we have to stop electing people. And I'm not talking about just Democrats. I'm talking about Republicans as well. Stop electing people that don't think of this country first.

• 3:25:04Speaker 03

  They think of their own fucking careers first. You know, they're, they're really a part of the political swamp. Stop electing those people. Start focusing on local elections. I don't give a fuck if it's your PTA, your city council, your county freeholder, your, your, you know, your borough, uh, whatever. Start looking at your local elections because that's where these people come from. These people that wind up in the House of Representatives or in the US Senate, well, they started somewhere. They started in those fucking positions I just talked about.

• 3:25:47Speaker 03

  Stop electing people that are, that are socialist.

• 3:25:52Shawn Ryan?

  I think what you're saying too is, stop looking, stop, stop looking and electing the party and look at the fucking person.

• 3:26:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:26:03Shawn Ryan?

  That you're electing, not the party, look at the person.

• 3:26:07Speaker 03

  That's right. I mean, I, I just, I, I have to tell you, you know.

• 3:26:14Speaker 03

  I've known, I've known all the political players, right, since, uh, since Bush, right? I know, uh, you know, I was nominated for Homeland Security by President Bush. I worked for him in Iraq. I got to know him through 9/11. Um, you know, then there was, you know, then there was Obama. Um, I didn't know him personally, but I know everybody around him. I knew Hillary. You know, she was a US Senator in New York. Um, I've worked with Giuliani. I've known Donald Trump since 1995. Um, I knew him long before he ran for president. Um, you know, I've known Joe Biden for fucking 25 years, right?

• 3:26:59Speaker 03

  Ever, ever since I worked for Giuliani, uh, I knew Biden.

• 3:27:06Speaker 03

  Here's the bottom line.

• 3:27:10Speaker 03

  I think, I think the political parties kill us. I think they kill us. I think our military commanders, they're way too political today. I think cops, I think police executives today are too fucking political. You know, we live by a constitution. We swear to that constitution, whether it's the military or law enforcement. You raise your right hand and you take an oath to protect and serve this country? Doesn't talk anything about your fucking political party in there.

• 3:27:50Speaker 03

  You have a job to abide by and, and enforce the rules and the laws of that, that constitution. But people don't do it. They, they're, they're following the party line. Um, and it's wrong. It's destroying this country. You know, we've got to stop indoctrinating kids in grammar school and high school and college. Teach them history. Nothing will, will do more for them to teach them real history. Because you can't fix something that you don't know is broken. You have to teach them. You know, it's sort of the way I govern, right? It's sort of the way I manage.

• 3:28:35Speaker 03

  You can't fix something if you don't know it's broken. You can't, you don't know how bad something is unless you actually measure it. What gets measured gets done, right? Teach them history. If they learn history, they'll learn the difference between good and bad, and, and, and good and evil. They'll learn what's right and wrong. They'll learn all those bad things that happened in World War II and World War I, you know, and, and, and the, the result of, of 9/11. How did we get there? What was going on before that? The fucking kids today don't know. They don't know because nobody's teaching them.

• 3:29:19Speaker 03

  I just think it's, it's devastating to the future of this country if we don't fix that.

• 3:29:27Speaker 03

  If we don't fix it, and you know who's gonna fix it? The parents. Because the parents, you know, you see now, only now, only recently, with this super-left-wing, woke mentality, you see parents now standing up, so, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Critical race theory. No, we're not gonna do that. We're not, I'm not gonna tell my kid that he's substandard to another, or I don't wanna tell my kid he's better than another. You know, we've, we've spent a lifetime telling everybody they're equal, they should be equal, and now we're doing everything in our fucking power to tell them, no, you're not equal, this one's better, that one's substandard, this one's better. No, what are you doing? What are you doing?

• 3:30:12Speaker 03

  You're contradicting everything we have tried to do in the last 200 years.

• 3:30:22Speaker 03

  And it's only happened in the last, in the last 20 maybe, in the last 15. Barack Obama.

• 3:30:32Speaker 03

  began this movement. He is the one I blame. I blame him. Because. And I blame him for one personal reason. This is personal to me. I spent. My whole life with my kids. For my kids, from the day they were born. I've taught them. Everybody's the same. I don't care what color they are. I don't care what religion they are. Where they come from. No different. Nobody's different. They may be good and bad. They may be different types of people. But they're all equal. Everybody's equal. And it wasn't until Barack Obama. Barack Obama stood in the fucking White House

• 3:31:17Speaker 03

  and told my kids that they're different. That was wrong. He started this movement. And I fucking hate him for it.

• 3:31:30Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're going through something. There's an old saying, a lot of people say it. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. And weak men. Create hard times. And right now. We're at the weak man.

• 3:31:53Speaker 03

  We're in that circle, right. That's right. I believe it. I believe it.

• 3:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  Hard times created you.

• 3:32:03Speaker 03

  Well. Hopefully, we fulfill the circle.

• 3:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  I hope you're right. I hope we do too. But. Well Bernie, I just want to say again. Truly. It was an honor to have you here today. And to relive that. And I think it's extremely important. It's the 20th anniversary and. Hopefully, we educate. A lot of America's youth on what happened that day. And.

• 3:32:39Speaker 03

  Sean, let me say this before you close.

• 3:32:44Speaker 03

  Living through nine eleven taught me a lot.

• 3:32:50Speaker 03

  As, as we talked about, you know, I, I've had the honor and the privilege to lead a group of men and women that, that without doubt affected one of the greatest rescue missions in this country's history.

• 3:33:08Speaker 03

  But the job didn't stop there. That was the beginning, that was only the beginning of something that had to be done. And what had to be done is we had to search out and, and eliminate the enemy that hit us on that day and had hit us many times prior. And it was, you know,

• 3:33:39Speaker 03

  it was nine eleven that put that in motion. And as a result,

• 3:33:46Speaker 03

  we basically ramped up our military. People like you, people like Eddie Gallagher, people like the guys that took out Osama bin Laden,

• 3:34:00Speaker 03

  the men and women on our special operations community, the men and women in our military that, that sit in, you know, intel bunkers and, you know, locate these, you know, these, these terrorists all over the world.

• 3:34:19Speaker 03

  It was really an honor for me in the aftermath of nine eleven to get to meet people like you and, and others that basically went to defend us, to, you know, fight the fight that had to be fought. When George Bush stood up on that mound and said, "The people that did this is gonna hear from us."

• 3:34:46Speaker 03

  Well, if anybody had any doubts, they didn't have any doubts after those first special operations teams went into Afghanistan on horseback. They didn't have any doubts when we went into Fallujah, Mosul, or, you know, after the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, all over this world.

• 3:35:12Speaker 03

  So, you know,

• 3:35:15Speaker 03

  for me to be here today to talk to you about the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is one thing, but it also gives me an opportunity to say thank you to you and to the men and women like you that have served this country,

• 3:35:33Speaker 03

  selflessly, almost, served this country. And in the name of, you know, the United States of America to come to our defense and really fight back for the losses that we took on that day. So, thank you.

• 3:35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. I have one question left.

• 3:36:00Shawn Ryan?

  Is there anything you would have changed

• 3:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  about your leadership that day for the NYPD and the people in New York?

• 3:36:11Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I don't think so. You know, I've, you know, it's weird, you know, a day like that, there's, I'm sure there's certain times in your career, there's one or two times in your career where you, you know, it's something you think of constantly. I think of 9/11 every day, every single day. Whether I think of it on my own,

• 3:36:37Speaker 03

  whether somebody walks up to me in the streets and thanks me for my service.

• 3:36:42Speaker 03

  Whether it's, you know, I'm walking down the street and I see an aircraft flying super low that I think is super low, it takes me back to that day. I think about it pretty much every day. And I look at it this way. I'm not perfect. I'm not an angel. But I did the best I could on that day and in the aftermath of that day. And I had the privilege and honor to serve some very heroic and dedicated men and women that did a job that most people, especially the critics of today, would never have the balls to do in the first place.

• 3:37:26Speaker 03

  I don't think I could ask to change anything. I think we did what we could under the circumstances. And I'm proud of what the men and women in the NYPD, the fire department, and the Port Authority police, I couldn't be more proud of what they've done.

• 3:37:44Shawn Ryan?

  I think the majority of the country is extremely proud as well, and I am too. And God bless you.

• 3:37:55Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:37:56Shawn Ryan?

  And God bless America.

• 3:37:57Speaker 03

  God bless America. Thank you.