God, I hate this day every year.
Early every Tuesday
and Thursday morning, I would walk around the corner from my apartment to the
Equinox gym to meet my trainer. Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was no
different. Even early in the morning, it was very warm for September.
While on the elliptical machine I watched the morning news shows on the
bank of televisions. I was watching Good Day New York, the
local Fox morning show. Jim Ryan announced that something had struck
the World Trade Center. They quickly had a camera on the Tower. It
was believed to have been a small plane and they were guessing a pilot
had gone off course.
I was interested but not fascinated and kept on peddling. I finished my workout and headed home to shower and get dressed. Rocky, my driver, was already in front of my house. He waved me over and told me to call Luke. From the car I called Luke and he told me not to come to work. The way things looked it appeared that the building was going to evacuate at some point. I went upstairs and told Rocky to come with me. We watched TV. Luke and I spoke several times about the situation at HDC and with the building. 110 William Street is just a few blocks from the WTC. Not being a city agency, HDC was not governed by the City's residency requirements. Many of our employees lived in New Jersey, Long Island and the northern suburbs. On days I had closed the office early (e.g. Christmas Eve, New Years Eve, etc.) we had a system in place for letting the most distant commuters leave first. I told Luke to start initiating that plan. I had a feeling, knowing Rudy, that it was going to be difficult to get out of the city if this was to become as bad as it looked. As the morning wore on I had a feeling Rudy might shut down Manhattan. Luke set up a large screen TV in the boardroom for the employees to watch the news. Luke and our General Counsel, David Boccio, took charge and were superb; calm, organized and reassuring. I told Luke early on that if people couldn't get home to tell them they were all welcome to come to my house. I would get air mattresses at the nearby Bed, Bath & Beyond if needed.
Months earlier we had developed and enacted a disaster recovery plan for HDC. T.J. Mignone and Luke had been pushing this for some time. Early in 2001 I accepted their proposal and HDC signed a contract with Sunguard, one of the largest disaster recovery companies in the country. What that entailed was a mirror site at their offices across the river in NJ. In addition, copies of our computer tapes - with all our financial, investment, mortgage and investment data - were picked up nightly from HDC and stored at their facility. In the event we activated the service, HDC would have guaranteed office space, using our same equipment, as well as all of our records no more than 12 hours old. HDC would be up and running within a few hours should we need the service in the event of a crisis. The deterrent to activating the site was that once you pulled the trigger it was very expensive.
At first, the management at 110 insisted no one leave. I told Luke to ignore them and start sending people home. The management was scarred of a panic that would have everyone in the building racing for the exits. Fair enough, but I wasn't buying into it. As the Towers started coming down I asked Luke where he was going. He told me he was headed to Chinatown to find Dennis, his boyfriend, who taught at an elementary school there. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was resolute. Rocky meanwhile was growing very alarmed about Sylvia. Sylvia Santiago was an HDC Vice President and Rocky's girlfriend. He had not heard from her in awhile and could not get her on his Nextel. Finally, she bleeped to say that she was in trouble.
Sylvia had somehow sought refuge at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza near our offices. But once she got into the building they wouldn't let her leave. Moreover, security there was forcibly herding anyone left in the building into some basement bunker. She was scarred. Sylvia had a young son at school in the Bronx and she wanted to get back home as soon as possible. I took the phone, told her to get the head of security and put him on the line. With my most official and officious sounding voice I told the guard who I was. I told him that Sylvia was a senior member of my staff and needed to be released immediately. Further, I told him that his instructions were all wrong. The directive was for people to leave their buildings and head east towards the river and the FDR Drive. The air was better the further east you went and the FDR Drive was now closed to traffic and opened only for pedestrians to walk north. The guard apologized and said he had only been following his orders. He released Sylvia along with everyone else. I told Sylvia to head to my house.
Rocky and I continued to watch the carnage and the misinformation. The State Dept was hit, the Capitol was next. My father called asking if I had heard from or about my brother. My brother was a Deputy Mayor and had been with Rudy. My father sounded very worried, unusual for him. I told Ray I would get Carbonetti and have him track down Bob. I could not raise Tony on my Nextel and my pages went unanswered. All sorts of crazy thoughts and scenarios started popping in and out of my head.
My apartment's windows all looked out onto Third Ave. It was like a scene from Dawn of the Dead. All these weary, dusty people, in the street, walking north. The buses were crammed and apparently had stopped charging fares. At some point Sylvia arrived looking the worse for wear. She had walked from the financial district to the E. 60's. I found some of my thin clothes and gave them to her. Her shoes were ruined. My mother had left a pair of her sneakers at my apartment and I gave those to her as well. After she showered and dressed we went out to lunch. This is when it really started hitting me. Even though everything was open, the wait times were hours because staff hadn't been able to come to work. We went to Jackson Hole for burgers and Sylvia recounted her trek north. When I got home Tony called and told me that he was fine. He also asked that I call Ray and tell him that Bob was safe. I will not recount here the harrowing tale that morning of Rudy, Tony, Bob, et al. because it is now part of history.
I told Rocky and Sylvia they were welcome to stay but Sylvia wanted to get to her son. Rocky was a single father of two, but his mother had arranged to pick up his kids in Brooklyn. I told Rocky to take the car and use whatever lights and sirens were necessary to get through the barricades now closing off Manhattan from the rest of the city and the outside world.
I spent the rest of the day with Seabe. Even a dog knew something wasn't right that day. Eventually his dogwalker showed up. I don't know how Ralph got into Manhattan from Brooklyn. I went with them and we surveyed the neighborhood.
That night it became clear that in this technologically dependent age, all that has to happen is for a substation to blow up and we we're all back to basics. None of our beepers or cell phones worked. Only our Blackberrys still functioned (much would be made of this fact later on and was a major reason why all members of congress were issued them shortly thereafter). I spoke to Luke and told him to get his staff going on accounting for all our employees. Also, I wanted instructions given for everyone to leave a contact number and to check in daily. I had no idea what condition our office was in or if we were going back.
The prosecutor in my case made much of the fact that she possessed a sexual chat I had on the evening of Sept 11th. I of course don't recall it, but I also don't doubt it. Everyone in my neighborhood - and most of the city, in fact - were either getting drunk, smoking pot or taking tranquilizers that night. I escaped by chatting. It had been an unreal day and I am sure I just wanted to forget it. Earlier that evening Seabe and I had gone for a walk. Make-shift memorials started to go up on phone kiosks and just on the ground. At first, my natural NY cynicism kicked in and I thought how hokey and Midwestern this was. But as we walked, it all started to overwhelm me. That night the odor began. Starting that evening and every day thereafter for many weeks, the smell of the pit at ground zero wafted north. You wouldn't smell anything in the morning hours but every afternoon the wind would shift and the odor came north. It was a sensory reminder like no other. Truly the smell of death, disaster, misery, suffering and loss.
The next morning I awoke as i would for many days thereafter. Convinced this had all been a dream and that the Twin Towers were still there. I would immediately put on the TV to see if this were real. Like many, if not most New Yorkers, I didn't particularly care for the Twin Towers. It wasn't very good architecture, had been roundly panned by critics for years, and as anyone who had gone there, was a pain in the ass to get around in. But instantly after they were gone I think we all realized how much they had grown on us and how they had become a genuinely iconic part of NYC. As much as the deaths, their disappearance was deeply upsetting to me in those early days.
As for the running of HDC, we had no office and there were bank codes that hadn't been taken when the office was evacuated. HDC gets most of its income from fees charged to developers and its own investments. Without the bank codes it was difficult to continue our overnight investments. Moreover, Bank of New York, which cleared our transactions, mindblowingly had absolutely no disaster recovery plan in place and they were totally out of commission (after the crisis was over we reached agreement with Bank of New York to compensate us for the millions we lost - HDC was held financially harmless by their neglect).
We had to go back to the office to get those codes. So on Thursday, September 13, 2001, I along with about 4 other members of my staff, made our way to the office. Rocky, who had my car, picked me up at home. Without my official car there was no way we were getting into that area, it was completely sealed off with armored personal carriers.
It was as close to a nuclear winter as anyone will ever see without actual nuclear weapons being detonated. Everything downtown was covered in soot and ash. There was no movement on the street and everything was just frozen in time. To say it was eerie would be a massive understatement. Our office building had no electricity and no phone service. One of the staff sat in a desk chair in the doorway guarding the building; I think he was packing heat. Luke had called ahead and they knew we were coming. They were not happy about it though. We had to climb up ten flights of stairs in the dark.
And climb we did. We had flashlights and made our way up. The offices were all locked magnetically with key cards and therefore all our doors were unlocked. Entering the offices freaked me out. Either intentionally or by happenstance all the windows had been closed in the office. There had been reports on the news that many offices had been destroyed downtown not by the blast but by the soot and debris that had entered nearby offices through open windows. I was very concerned what we would find. HDC was pristine. Not a spec of dirt or a file out of place. I was relieved and shocked at how placid the interior of this building was compared to the lobby and the street outside. We gathered what we needed and headed back down. We had promised the management we would be no more than 10 minutes. They explained to Luke that the building had not been structurally cleared for reoccupancy. Now that we had what we needed we had to find some place to sit and sort out the documents. We need a space. I thought of maybe renting a hotel room but it seemed a waste for only 20 minutes. I'm not sure why but the backroom of a favorite bar came to mind. We all piled into my car and headed to McManus's on 7th Ave. You've all heard stories of how people came together and gave of themselves during those days. This is not one of them. We got to McManus and I showed the bartender my badge and explained the situation. I asked if we could use his backroom for twenty minutes. The bar was nearly empty. He said no. Finally I said we'd order a lot of beer and food while we were there. He relented.
So we ate and drank and sorted through the material that would keep us going. Making the situation worse was that the person in charge of our overnight investments was on vacation in Florida and could not get home. She did, however, manage the accounts and her staff from there. I said goodbye to those who had come and told them I didn't know when we would be together next.
I had been thinking about the space problem. Whether to activate the disaster recovery site in NJ at great expense or rent space. We had no way of knowing how long this would last. On Friday Luke called and said that the Commissioner of HPD, the ex-officio Chair of HDC, was having a meeting with her staff that weekend and we were invited. Luke and I went to 100 Gold St. near our offices. At the meeting Jerrilyn offered us the use of her conference room until we were up and running. I accepted and had the executive staff of HDC meet there on Sunday. We ended up using that space only until Wednesday. We were informed that 110 William had power but no phones. I had Luke & TJ work out a plan to utilize everyone's cell phone for office use. On our last day at HPD, Jerrilyn took me aside and told me that many of the HPD employees were in bad shape and needed counseling. Did I know of anyone who could do it. More importantly, would HDC pay for it. I said as a matter of fact one of the management consultants we used had a specialty in exactly this type of grief counseling. And yes, I would pay for it. HDC's grief counseling was done in-house and by our insurance company.
Leslie, the consultant, was retained and sent over to HPD. It turned out to be a much bigger job than she or I expected and she asked for the OK to hire staff to help her. I agreed. This went on for weeks and the eventual bill came to over $100,000. {The prosecutor and judge in my case chose to ignore this fact but there was as much official HDC nexus to HPD as there would be to IBM, Pfizer or any other entity. Meaning there was none. They chose to ignore that $100K expenditure because it would have embarrassed the City and Bloomberg who kept Jerrilyn on as HPD Commissioner. It was as much of an unauthorized expenditure of HDC funds as anything else I was charged with. You can say it was compassionate but it didn't legally excuse it if the prosecutor's absolute 'give no ground' standard of my other expenses was taken into consideration. If you overlooked that cost as well as the thousands spent for the plaque outside HPD commemorating their efforts during 9/11 that we also payed for, not to mention the additional thousands to renovate the Commissioner's conference room, then you had no rational consistent basis for many of the things I was charged with. It was wholly inconsistent. HDC had absolutely no official or legal relationship to the City or it's housing agency, HPD. As such, my having authorized those expenditures should have been equally criminal. But it was covered up. Initially by the City's Department of Investigation, then by the US Attorney and finally Judge Kaplan who scoffed at my mention of it in my elocution at sentencing. At some point in a criminal case facts have to matter and things have to be consistent if you're sending someone to prison. That didn't occur in my case. And I imagine in many others.}
A few days later, Tony asked me to meet him for a late dinner at an Italian restaurant near his house. It was 11:30 and Rudy was on Saturday Night Live. There was a TV above us in the restaurant and we watched. Maybe you saw that show. At the end of dinner Tony asked me if I wanted to go to ground zero. I had been back in the area for a few days now but nowhere near the site itself. You could not get close to it if you worked down there. Rudy had issued new IDs out of the temporary Office of Emergency Management site at Pier 57. As you know, OEM was located at 7 World Trade center and disappeared early on 9/11. You needed these new IDs to get anywhere near the site.
I had thought about that question: did I want to go there, did I want to stare down into that pit? I was of two minds. Part of me wanted to see it as a matter of history. But the other part thought it ghoulish and voyeuristic. This wasn't a tourist attraction it was an open grave. But I said yes. We left the restaurant and headed downtown in Tony's City car, Eddie, his driver, behind the wheel.
We were stopped a number of times along the way to check IDs. Tony and Eddie had theirs. Tony being Chief of Staff and vouching for me got me through. Once we got through the last checkpoint you were free to walk around anywhere. Masks were required at all times. It was as unreal as anything you could imagine. I kept thinking if a Schwarzenegger movie about the end of the world was filmed this is what it would look like. The Amex building at the Winter Garden had a huge chunk missing out of the building's corner like Godzilla had just bitten it off. You could see right into the offices and computers were just hanging over the side. The thing that disturbed me most was standing in the middle of this and having no ability to get my bearings. I couldn't remember where things had been. We forget that without landmarks on a terrain its all just empty ground. And now the landmarks were gone and I felt like such an idiot that I couldn't remember where many of the buildings and streets had been in an area I had traversed regularly.
Then we walked up to the smoldering, smoking pit and I stared down. I am not wordsmith enough to tell you how I felt looking down into that hole while all around me rescue teams were digging away. I bowed my head, said a prayer and walked away.
The other major impression I came away from ground zero with was a new found awe and respect for Rudy. There were times during those eight years when many of us - Giuliani acolytes - would think to ourselves or ponder to each other, what this city would be like had he not been mayor. Here we were mere days after that catastrophic event and Rudy, Tony, Joe Lhota, Ritchie Schirer, Bernie Kerik and Tom Von Essen had created this mini city. There were streets created through this mountain of debris, huge wash stations for all vehicles leaving the site, and the whole thing was totally organized and meticulously planned - just days after 9/11. Can you imagine what Rudy and his team would have done with New Orleans after Katrina? Can you contemplate what a disheveled, unplanned mess that site would have remained been for weeks, months and years had Mike Bllomberg been in office? This was leadership writ large and Rudy's finest moment.
Tony had told me that he sat in on Rudy's meetings with elected officials days after the event. He told me that he and Rudy were most impressed with Hillary. They were most unimpressed and annoyed with Sen. Schumer. Tony said that Hillary came without staff, listened intently, asked thoughtful questions and offered unqualified support. Schumer on the other hand came with staff, spent all the briefing on the phone and immediately held press conferences at the conclusion of each briefing.
I hate this anniversary more than I can explain. For four of them I was in prison and grateful to be there. I could avoid TV and newspapers; just stay in bed. I don't know why it effects me so much. It's not just the memory of all the death and smoke and funerals that I attended. That of course is part of it. It's also not the memory of Terry Hatton, Beth Petrone's husband and a New York City firefighter who died that day. I think of Terry more than just on 9/11. He was a great guy. No, it's not all that. I believe I feel terrible guilt for not having been there that day. Not for a second do I believe my presence would have mattered. Luke and David Boccio did a tremendous job and I wouldn't change a decsion they made. I certainly do not miss not having had to walk miles and miles in wingtips from the office back to my home. But in a leadership position showing up is 50% of the work. I wasn't there and I should have been. Also, after the Tuesday I know my leadership did matter. Getting HDC back up and running, holding the staff together, working to stabalize our finances and those of the projects we oversaw, it mattered that I was President. I guess you could say I also miss making a difference.
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