Episode 375: The E-Men: Inside The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit: Carl Russo (Volume 53)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're listening to the Mike Did You Even? Podcast hosted
by media personality and consultant Mike Glow.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Oh yeah, we got a.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
You're listening to the people inside the nypds an Emergency
Service Unit. Well, if the New York Yankees, New York Giants,
or New York Jets disappointed you this weekend, and like you,
I am one of those people who was disappointed this weekend,
you can forget about that now and enjoy a nice
evening of the Mike the New Aven Podcast, And welcome,
ladies and gentlemen to this three seventy five episode three

(01:22):
hundred and seventy five of the Mike the New Aven Podcast,
as we are now firmly on the March to four hundred.
And it's been a while, Well, I did one recently,
but it's been a while since I've spoken to someone
who was in the NYPD Emergency Service Unit for this
mini series the Men Inside the NYPD's Emergency Service Unit,
which hits volume fifty three. When I did the show
with Mike Grant in a few weeks back, he was

(01:44):
in a version of it, of course EMRU on the
transit side, but he never quite worked in the NYPD
emergency service side of things, which is fine. It's still
made for a great show. But with a nice guest
who a lot of you were very excited that I
was going to have on, as I was telling him
off the air before we came on. We get it
to someone who someone's career who was firmly embedded in
the unit for sixteen years as a matter of fact,
nineteen eighty five until he retired in two thousand and one.

(02:07):
All of that in six truck in Brooklyn, as we
will talk about tonight, one of the three trucks the
su has operating in that bureau or borough, I should say,
not bureau if you haven't checked out the previous episode. That,
of course was a lot of fun. Bob Martinez, who
was in charge of fleet services for the New York
City Police Department and had a big hand and making
sure that police officers got to the emergencies in the

(02:29):
first place. Just as critical to their work, of course,
as any tool they may carry, is making sure they
can very much get there in the first place. And
Bob had a big cannon that retired as Deputy Commissioner
of Fleet Services a few years ago twenty twenty three
to be exact, fun conversation at an aspect of the
police department that not a lot of people, at least
in the public eye necessarily think about. So fun to

(02:49):
get a look at everything that he did, So I
won't keep tonight's guest waiting too long. We'll run a
couple of ads, as you know by now, and of
course we will introduce some momentarily. But first things first,
he's working hard on his own show in addition to
this show, and that's producer Victor in the chop Seed podcast.
Baseball fans, if you bleed Braves, Country, red, and Blue,
this one's for you. Check out the chop Seed podcast,

(03:09):
hosted by Victor Mignetti's. Every week, Victor dives deep into
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(03:30):
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Subscribe to The chop Seat today on Spotify, Apple podcast, YouTube,
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There's always room at the chop Seat. Game three tomorrow
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personally be the Yankees' last game of the season, especially

(03:51):
if they keep pitching the way they're pitching. But again,
like I always say, well, they may let you down
on the PI side of things. You know who never
lets you down, really right and Mike than you have
Postdcast is proudly sponsored and supported by the Ryan Investigative Group.
If you need an elite PI, look no further than
the elite Ryan Investigative Group, which is run by retired
NYP Detective Bill Ryan, a twenty year veteran of the

(04:12):
Department who served the majority of his career in the
detective Bureau, most notably in the Arson explosion squad. So
if you need a PI to handle anything from fraud,
legal services, and anything else that you might require, contact
Bill at three four seven four one seven sixteen ten
again three four seven four one seven sixteen ten. Reach
him at his website or the email that you see here. Again,

(04:32):
if you need a PI, look no further than Bill
Ryan and the Ryan Investigative Group, a proud supporter and
sponsor of the Mike Den Newhaven Podcast. Bill, of course,
also the executive producer and co creator of our other
mini series. In this program, one of the first that
I launched, Tales from the Boom Room, profiles from the
NYPD's Arsenal Explosion and Bomb Squad. But from that, like
I mentioned, also stems this which is volume fifty three

(04:55):
to Night in the EMAI Inside the NYPD's Emergency Service
Unit with my next guest, who's a Brooklyn cop who
worked his way from patrol, one of the city's busier precincts,
of course, of the elite ranks of the NYPD Emergency
Service Unit. Along the way, he not only became a
first responder, but also a teacher, passing down those life
saving skills needed for any e cop to the next
generation at the STS school. And with the background that

(05:17):
is as unique as his story is, from safe cracking
in the private sector to teaching ropes, locks and tools
inside the Emergency Service Unit. His journey reflects the grit, adaptability,
and heart that defines a unit that is like no other,
not just in New York City, but anywhere in the country,
anywhere in the world. And that for this volume fifty
three of the Event inside the NYPD's Emergency Service Unit
retire out of six tructed sixteen years in the su

(05:40):
Carl Russo, Carl, welcome, How are you.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
I'm good, How are you tonight?

Speaker 1 (05:44):
Good? Thanks for doing this. I appreciate you coming on.
This is something we've talked about for a while, so
nice to see it come to fruition. As you guys
know in the chat by now, and I know a
lot of you who worked with Carl should be in
the chat tonight. If you've got a question, fire away
and the chat will highlight it at the appropriate time.
Hello to Pete Pranzoll, retired NYPD Lieutenant John Joe Maliga.
Appreciate you guys always being here. So born and raised
in Brooklyn, but raised in part by Missus Simms. Tell

(06:07):
us who she was and what part of the borough
that you grew up in.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
I grew up in Brooklyn and bed Star Bedford styles
On on Franklin Avenue, and Missus Simms lived on the corner
and she was an elderly black woman elderly in my opinion.
I mean I was eight or nine years old, so
she could have been fifty years old for all I know,
you know, but she was a grey haired lady. And
my mother would work during the day. My father would

(06:31):
work during the day, and Missus Simms would pick me
up from school take me back to her house, and
her grandson and I were the best friends, you know,
and Missus Simms was always there for me.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
And she still a lot of character, and as I'm
sure your parents did early on in you, that would
shape your path. Now. You know, guys of certain age
often point to emergency at the television show back then,
which is popular. It's their inspiration to go into the
civil service field. And maybe they had family on the job.
Did you know what she wanted to do from an
early age or did that come to you a.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
Late Well, I'll tell you what happened. My mother and
I were walking, I think we were on Washington Avenue
and some guy had fallen down on the floor and
he maybe had a heart attack or whatever, and this
huge crowd gathered around him. And I'm a little guy
at this point in time, and I'm trying to peek
into the crowd and I really can't see what's going on,
and then all of a sudden, I guess the police

(07:21):
car pulls up at the current. I'm not aware of
where these two guys came from, but these two huge
Irish police officers show up and they the crowd parts
like it's the Red Sea, and these guys walk right in.
And I said to myself, these guys are something, you know,
And I think it was at that point in time
where I said, you know what, I think, I want
to be a police officer. And when all the kids

(07:42):
wanted to be a cowboy and a fireman and police officer,
I always wanted to be a police officer.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
And that was a path that would ultimately lead you
to nineteen eighty one, which you'll get to at the moment.
But attending school in the city as you did, you
went to East New York High School, but you also
part took in the FA aviation program. You wanted to
be a police officer. Was there any inclination to wanting
to go into the aircraft industry at some point too?

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Well, it's just that I don't consider myself a real
spot guy, to be honest with you. But but my
hands are good, you know what I mean. And I
know that working with my hands, being an aircraft mechanic
or being a mechanic in general was you know, if
all else failed, I would have a way through life
and you know, be where I want to be, you.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Know, And you got to the police academy later, I
was telling you off the air the guy that shared
that in common with you, our late friend Rich Team's
lawk is Rich the academy in eighty two, was thirty
two years old. He worked in the aircraft industry for
a while. He'd been a marine and before he took
on the job as a New York City police officer.
So let's go through the timeline here and you can
highlight each of it as you go. Plumber's helper for

(08:47):
a year after high school. Then you worked for the
Safe Company, which is when their safe cracking skills came
into effect. So tell us about just learning those skills
and how that shaped you for what would come later
while you waited to get on the job.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Well, I'll tell you a funny story about being the plumber.
The plumber's helper, and I remember exactly where I was.
There was a bar on Fourth Avenue, in Brooklyn. I
guess it was sixty six sixty seventh Street, which ultimately
I wind up at the sixth eight Priests and in
the truck six, which is three blocks away. But anyway,
there was a bar there and I was sent in
to clean a urinal. The urinal was broken, it was drained,

(09:22):
it was clogged, so as I unscrewed the drain plug,
urine runs down my arm and I said to myself,
I says, there's gotta be a better way. Gotta be
a better way than That's that's when I decided to
make my move from plumbers helper to look around and
see if I could get something else that might work
for me.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
And that's where a safe cracking.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
That's when I applied to I went to Mosler Safe
and I said, you know, I'm willing to learn, if
you know, And I went. I took a couple of
tests with them, and this, that and the other thing,
and before you know it, a friend of mine put
a good word in for me. I had a rabbi
there and that was working for Mosla. They sent me
to Hamilton, Ohio for safe cracking. They sent me there

(10:06):
for alarms for remote transaction systems drive up windows. So
I went to all the schools that they had. Anytime
there's a school available, I try to take it so
that I can just increase the knowledge that I have.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
That's a good approach to have, you know, I will
ask you because this is unfamiliar to me, So this
is where you can help me along.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
Carl.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Was it akin to kind of being a Brinks armored
car guard and the sense that you are you carrying
a gun for this type of job or not really?

Speaker 3 (10:30):
For Mosler? Yeah, oh no, no, no, I was just
a mechanic, you know, and I had I had a
suitcase filled with tools that had castors on the bottom.
And I worked in Manhattan. I mean I would probably
do eight ten miles a day walking from place to place.
You know. There was all the banks and facilities in
Manhattan that have you know, safes and all sorts of

(10:53):
securities devices. You know, I would take care of all
that stuff. No, I was bonded for over a million dollars.
Mosla had me bonded, you know, because I worked in
the gold depository. I was all over the place, you know.
Of course, I'm sorry, no city, yeah, of course, Yeah,
any place there was a lock or a safe a
time lock. You know, that's why I was.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
A good place to be. Good Cardio too, walking eight
to ten miles.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
I'm telling you it was easy, you know. I would
I would take I would if I had the time.
Like if there was a job on fifty ninth Street
and then there was a job on fourteenth Street, I
would just walk down to fourteenth Street. Not a big deal.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, Listen, if you can't, you can't, especially if I mean,
even whether good or bad. Listen, Work your legs keeps
you around longer, you know.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Listen.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I did the walk myself. I was down in the
city for nine to eleven. I thought to myself, you know,
the day's nice, so I walked all the way from
the World Trade Center to Grand Central hour and a half.
It was worth it, you know, A good leg day
right there. Talking to Carl Russo is the volume fifty
three of the e Men Inside the NYPD's Emergency Serviceman.
Hello to John Latanzio in the chat, I see you
popping up my friend alumni. Of course, a five truck

(11:56):
first and three truck was also a housing rescue guy
back when they had for a brief time their own
emergency Service unit, a version of emergency service emergency rescue
was called. So finally that call comes, right or at
least that letter comes that you're going to the police academy.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Take me through your.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Emotions when finally you know this call or this letter
that you've been waiting for your whole life, it seems
because you mentioned wanted to be a police officer.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Okay, So I take the test in eighty one there,
and I guess it's an eighty because eighty one. I
get a and I get a phone call Friday night
and it's my investigator, and he says, if you want
to go to transit, I can put you in right now,
he says. And I thought about it for a second.
I said, no, I don't think I want to go

(12:37):
to transit. I says. I want to be a real
police officer. I want to be a city cop. No
offense to any transit cops out there goes you guys
worked hard. It's just it's not what I wanted to do.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
You know.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
I wanted to be out on the street and see
the people and stuff like that. I enjoyed being with people.
So he says, okay, and he hangs up on me.
Saturday morning, I get another call. He says, you're in
the next class. I says what class. He says, a
regular police bub So I think they were trying to
suck me into transit. But when I turned that down,
they put me into the regular class. So eighty one. Yeah,

(13:08):
I'm excited, you know. And and Uh, as a lot
of guys. You start out, they put you in the
auditorium and they give you a million papers to sign
in front of you. You're picking out your your person,
who's if you're gonna die, who's gonna get your money?
And then you're picking out things that that are going
to mean down the road. You know, all this information

(13:29):
that you know what you're gonna do, you retirement up
when you're looking twenty twenty years and it all happened
so fast, you know. And the next day you're out
getting your T shirts with your name on the back
and your shorts and everything else, and you're running in
the gym.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
And that was a six month academy.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Academy.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, you had a lot of life experience, but even that,
it's not easy, you know. The academy is very much
a mind game. Doesn't matter. And I said, this a
million times in the program before. You know, Rather, if
it's a police academy or fire academy, it's not necessarily
how strong you are physically, although that certainly does help
and goes a long way if you are, but how
strong you are mentally, because especially back then, instructors they
pulled no punches. They didn't throw anything at you that

(14:10):
you know, they weren't trying to see, Okay, who's going
to crack, who can handle it, who can't. So just
tell me about those six months getting through it and
finally getting graduation.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
You talk about the police Academy and everything. You know,
Vic Palati and myself we were in the same academy class,
not the same company, but the academy class. He was
there in eighty one. And I marveled at Vic because
as I was stressing and straining and trying to get
to the police Academy, he was studying to be a
doctor at the same time, you know, and and and

(14:40):
to him became easy. So Vic is a smart guy,
and and he's somebody had to look to look up at.
You know, it's just but in the academy, you know,
I have one recollection of the academy. I took it seriously,
maybe more seriously than I should have. And I boxed
when I boxed, because we still were boxing then. I
don't know if they box anymore, don't think so. When

(15:01):
I boxed, I boxed hard, you know. And one day
they put me up against this other kid. His name
was Pon Ciglione, that was his last name. Him and
I were the too hottest, and he hit me so
hard in the face and he knocked my mouthpiece out,
and everybody in the in the gym and ooh. So
I went over, I picked up my mouthpiece, I washed

(15:22):
it off in the sink, I put it back in
and I went out back on the floor and I fought,
and you know, and after that, I think the instructors
looked at me differently.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Oh yeah, that's something that they have, of course, some
variation of PT now. But the boxing thing that's I
know for a fact, that's definitely gone away. And it's
tough because they listen, I get it. You don't want
to hurt recruits per se. You don't want to get
him too banged up in the academy because then they
can't go out in the street. But in the job
it hasn't changed much. Especially now you're gonna fight. There's
gonna come a point in time where de escalation is

(15:52):
not gonna work because you're gonna have somebody so belligerent.
You're gonna have to fight.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
No, I'm gonna tell you something, something that I believe.
You know. I've seen a lot of people shot and
wounds that you would think would be life threatening or
that would have killed them. They survived through. And yet
sometime there'll be a person who gets shot and just
the shock of it kills them, you know what I mean.
I've seen I've seen people get shot in the head

(16:17):
where the bullet traveled into it the front went across
the head, all right, that didn't go through their skull
when like between the skin and the and the and
then came out the other side. And you know, you
say to yourself, how's that possible? But it happens. You know,
some people, some people are built like that. I think
that before you walk into the police academy, they should
smack you in the face and then see how if

(16:38):
you cry, if you don't cry, if you walk away happy,
you know, and see how you handle just that slap
in the face, just that that one when you get
punched and you don't know that you it's that you're
gonna get it, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (16:49):
Right? Well, Mike Tyson's what what is his line? You know, listen,
everybody's got a plan until the get hit in the face.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
That's what Tyson used to say all the time. Dave
Norman I mentioned him, I mentioned him off the air.
Of course I said he'd be watching. Sure enough he is.
I see him in the chat. Hi, Dave, give me
a call, Dave, come on the show, Dave. You know,
hopefully I can get Dave because I know he's got
great stories from his years in One Truck. So if
I annoy him enough, Carl, if I just keep being
annoying to Dave, eventually he'll be sitting across from you.

(17:16):
Gets to Greece exactly, exactly. Good to see you, my friend,
and good to see you too. Eric Freeze to via LinkedIn,
retired in YPD detective, former guests of this show a
while ago as well. He told some great stories when
he came on n SU sixteen. In Queens. You covered
a variety of precincts, so you were in there for
I think, was it six months to a year back then?

Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah? Six months? Yeah, we got out and in January. Yeah,
January is six months Nsu. Yeah, and I Nsu A
lot of good memories in Nsu. I'll tell you one
quick story. I'm walking up Dittmar's Boulevard and I walk
in front of a cafe. There. At that point in

(17:53):
time was still a lot of Greeks, and I guess
it's still Greek up there. I haven't been there lately,
so I don't know. But I walk in from his
Greek cafe and there's a car sitting on a hydrant.
Now you know, I'm brand new, and I'm gonna do
my job. I'm gonna take my summons book out and
I'm gonna write a summons. So I pulled a summons
book out of my pocket and I start to write

(18:13):
the summons and the owner of the restaurant comes running out.
He says, stop, stop, He says, it's the lieutenant's car.
It's the lieutenant's car. I said, oh, okay, Well with that,
I'm standing there and who walks out of the restaurant,
But Telly savalis Lieutenant Kojak so I said I, and
he says to me, he says, oh, I'm sorry, Office,

(18:33):
I says, I'm sorry, and I'm standing there in awe.
I said, no, there's no problem, you know, and any an,
he drives away. But you know, the lieutenant's car. I'm
thinking that somebody from the one fourteen or whatever and
what it is, But no, it was Telly Savalis.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
When he did a great job. He did a great
job or training. That character still iconic portrayal to this great,
great show. The reruns are available. So you got Scooter
qualified around this time. It's skilled that would help you
later on. How'd that happen?

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Well, here's what happens. So a couple of things happened.
I walk in on a bank robbery and it's my
very first collar, a bank robbery. So now I'm getting
a pat on the back from my NSU sergeant. A
couple of days later, we're on a strike post. I
don't know if it was ron Zoni or if it

(19:20):
was Arrow Staples. I forget which one it was, but
we're on a strike post. And what I used to
do is all the cars that had any kind of
interaction with the strike post people, the people who were
on the strike. You know, I would take their plate
number down. You know, guys who were delivering food to them,
Guys that would just come over and give them water,
Guys that were sympathetic to the strike people. I took

(19:42):
their plate number and I put it in my book,
and I didn't think anything about it. So one night
I go to a meal, I come back and there
was a fire. What happened was is that some guy
drove by in his car and threw a Molotov cocktail
out started a fire on the side of the building.
Only thing was is that he had taken his plate

(20:02):
off the car drove by. There was no plate, nobody
had nothing. They had a description of the car, but
they had no real information on it. So they tell me.
They says it was a white Mustang with a black fender.
I said, well, I got that guy's plate number. He said,
what a You got that guy's plate number? So I says,
he was parked here the other day. I says it
was one of the cars that I took his plate number.
So with that they made a call for ARSON. So

(20:25):
with my bank robbery and my arson, my NSU Sergeant
Sergeant Forster, John Forster he says to me, he says,
you know, he says, you're doing a good job. I
want to do something for you, you know. Okay, So
you know, like I said, I'll take any school you
want to give me. He says, I can send you
either to scooter school, he says, or I can send

(20:45):
you to auto crime school. I says, I'd like to
go to scooter school. He says, okay, I mean that's
unheard of, you know a NSU, because they don't really
do that. So he sends me to scooter school and
I get my scooter license, which laid down the road
ode becomes very important to me during my career.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
And why was that?

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Well, what happens is this is that I go to
the eight three precinct. All right, let's finish up NSU
for a while. We go to the eight three precinct
and I'm the only person scooter qualified there. So what
happens is is that the CEO calls me in one
day inspect the parini. He says to me, he says,
you're the only one scooter qualified. He says, I need

(21:25):
you to. Uh, there's gonna be a parade. He says,
I want you in the front of the parade. He says,
I want your partner in the back with the R
and P. He says, but he says, you're gonna have
to do it to a change. He says, I can't
give you all the time. I can't bump up on.
I said, no problem. He says, I'll do whatever you
need to do. You know. With that, I was, like
I said, the only scooter cop in the A three.

(21:46):
And at that point in time, I would go up
and down Nikoboka Avenue, moving the new moving the double
park is. I did this, and and Parini liked me
because you know, I did what he needed me to
do at that point in time. That we'll leave the
eight three for a few minutes. I go to the
summer detail. I go to summer detail and we're all

(22:07):
mustering up and the some ofer detailed sergeant says, is
anybody scooter qualifying? So I'm looking around the room. Nobody
raises their hand. Again, I'm the only person scooter qualifying.
He says, Okay, you're gonna be the six amusement scooter
for the summer. That was the entire summer that we
were there. I was on scooter. Well, everybody else was
standing on a foot post. I was out doing whatever

(22:30):
I wanted to do. But at the same time I
was making arrest. I was writing summons as I was
doing my job, because I liked it there. Now. Like
I said, they have a saying in the six to
so that once the sand gets in your shoes, you
don't want to leave the place. And the sand got
in my shoes. We used to have parties on the beach.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
You know.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
It was just a great time. I knew all the
people in the amusement area. There was a guy who
retired cop who ran the bumper cars. He treated me
like gold. I would bring my son there and and
he would give my some rolls of quarters and just
let him play the machine. Cause it didn't cost him anything.
He was getting the quarters back in his pocket. You know,
it's not a big deal. And it was just a
great time in Coney Island at that point in time.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
So safe to say the only unit you would have
left Coney Island for was emergency.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Oh there's probably yeah, There's no doubt about it. Because
once I was in Coney Island, like I said, I
was making as many collars as a summons man, and
out on the scooters as they were an anti crime
you know, I was, you know, that's what they said.
You know, we need his numbers. So they took me
and they put me in an anti crime. Here's a
picture of this. This is a fellow by the name
of Bonsley Nimens. Can you see that.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yeah, just elevated a little bit, just raise it a
little bit. There we go.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
Okay, So that's Bonsley Nimmens and him and his girlfriend.
They they were stealing persons. So one day I drive
up to his girlfriend. His her name is Cynthia Levy.
I said, Cynthia, I said, what do you do with
all those persons that you steal? So she says, oh,
you want them? She says, I got them for you.
So she goes in and gets them for me. So

(23:58):
with that, Bonsley comes out and him and I on
Brighton Beach Avenue and we're in we're in wrestling, and
we're in the wrestling mode and we're fighting back and
forth and I have to call him. But the strange
thing or the interesting thing about this too, Bonsley and Cynthia,
they Bonsley would get her pregnant and then they'd sell
the baby.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Oh god.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah. So yeah, so that they were. There were pillows
of the community.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Evidently, right, you know, listen, here's a maybe a baby
for you, baby for you. Everybody gets yeah, it's okay, alrighty, well.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
So you know what, there's desperate people out there who
can't have a child, and and you know, but to
do something to roll the dice like that, because you
just don't know what you're gonna get. Cynthia was a
drug addict, Bonsley was whatever he was, and you know,
it's just the way it was.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, that's a that's a classic only in New York
City type of story. It happen anywhere else, but something
like that usually the chances are, for whatever reason, it's
the higher volume of that happening in the city of
eight million people. I've always said in the program eight
million People, eight Stories, volume fifty three, the men inside
the NYPD's emergency servicing her. I guess tonight's Carl Russo
so anti crime and rip. I mean again, like I

(25:06):
talked about with guys who worked playing close before, different ballgame,
different dynamic, especially with anti crime, because unless it's a
ten thirteen, you're not chasing jobs on the radio. You know,
you're listening to the radio, but it's more so observing,
you know, so what you enjoy about anti crime and
just kind of taking on a different style of police,
especially back then.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Well, i'll tell you what happened. We had a bad
robbery situation on the West end of Coney Island, and
they dressed me up as an old man because all
the old men were getting mugged and everything. They dressed
me up as an old man. So my wife, who
worked in a six to zero at that point in time,
she walked in and I was standing right next to
and she didn't know it was me. So I'm hitting

(25:45):
her on the leg with my cane, like hey, sweetie,
you know, and she's looking at me and like brushing
me off, not realizing it's me. And then finally I said, Dolores,
it's me, you know, and then she's It was hard
to believe because I looked so good. But we were
able to We were able to go to get that
group because of like you say, good police, good police work,
good investigatory work, you know, looking for what we got

(26:07):
to look and we busted these guys. They they were
really bad. They used to knock over old ladies, you know,
And then just read that person. They really didn't care
about anybody.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, if you get a target such a vulnerable group,
it goes right rulers of the community, right Carl, that's it,
that's it. Yeah, well, good job and bringing those guys down.
I feel like anti crime and ripped tie together because
it's a lot of the same guys. You're after a
lot of the same collars. You're making. Usually anti crime,
you're getting guns off the street, robberies are stopping them
before they happen. Rip it's more the same thing. I mean,

(26:42):
identifying a pattern, yes, and then going after the same
guys that you would if you were an anti crime right.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Well, that's that's exactly right. That's why the rip unit
was made up of all the anti crime guys. You know,
the better guy or I'm not going to say better,
but the guys who probably more productive. They took them
and put them in the RIP. And you know, with
the Rip unit, we used to have photo albums because
each time we locked somebody up, we took a polaroid
and we put it in the album. So when a
person would get robbed, we'd bring him in and let

(27:08):
him flip through our photo albums of all the local bums,
you know what I mean, and pick those guys out,
you know, and it worked very well. I mean I
think it was his seven to three rip that had
Mike Tyson's picture in it, because that's why Mike originally
went upstate, because he was knocking over old ladies and
stuff like that. So you know, he custom Otto found

(27:29):
him upstate and the thing there with the boys.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
And saved his life at the time being. Of course
he did Mike get in trouble later, but he's often said,
you know, the thing that kind of changed him is
when custom Oto died.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yeah, yeah, well you know what, once he left Cuss
and he went with that other guy, you know what
I mean, it was the whole world of sin, you know,
and then he married the girl and the whole thing
went sour on him.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah. Well, good thing. He's doing a lot better these days.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
He's excellent. And you know, you know his daughter had died.
You know about that story he had that really flipped them,
you know that that really flipped the switch on them.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, as it would anybody who goes through such an
awful experience. So that that brings us and we can
spend just the entire show talking about your pre ESU career,
because you did a lot in those four years, but
that brings us into eighty five whend finally you get
the call to emergency. Now, it helped that you had
all these skills prior scooter qualified of course working with safes.
So it takes about at least unless you have a
good hook five years or close to it. You had

(28:24):
four to get into emergency. Did you have a hook
or was it just a straightforward application to get into ESU?

Speaker 3 (28:29):
I had. I gone to my wife's father kind of,
I think was my hook. He was a captain on
the job, and I think he knew people, and I
think that's how I kind of weaseled my way in there.
I know for sure if it was nowadays, because the
guys down at STS now they really bust their ass.
I mean it's I think that a lot of guys
I know is probably including myself, probably wouldn't be able

(28:50):
to make it to it as STS. You know that
I'm not a swimmer, to be honest with you. You know,
so right off the bat they'd have to kick me out.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, And back then it was I mean, now it's
nine months. The guys that are going through it now.
I remember Ray Ruize telling me this. I don't know
if this I mean, I'm sure it's true in your
case too, or but correct me if I'm wrong. Was it
six weeks for you back then?

Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty s thinking the six
weeks yeah yeah yeah. And you know, we crammed every day.
There was something going on. You know that these guys
did everything they ropes and tools and then you know
they there was no fooling around. It was a legitimate
school as best we could make, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Right right, And that's It's so much to learn in
a short period of time, but you learned, and of
course you learned even more once you got to your
respective trucks upon graduation. Billy Kennedy says in the chat
Carl Russo a great cop. Even better e man, love
your brother, so he send his regards. And as I mentioned,
Kenny Bowen, he's in the chat as well. Yeah, both
great guys, both were cops and sergeants and respectively. So

(29:49):
get in the six truck, which is in the sixth
eighth precinct. If I remember correctly, that's correct, talking about
the guys that you learned from early on the e
man that shaped you.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Well. I'll tell you a funny story. I'm there one
of two days and Billy DeSantis, who ultimately becomes my
probably my long term partner, he wants to take me
that he says. He says, come on, he says, I'll
take you downstairs and show you how to start the
tools and stuff like that, you know. And I was
pretty well versed in all this stuff like that, but

(30:17):
I didn't say to him, look, I know what I'm doing.
I know, you know, there's no reason to go downstairs.
I let him go downstairs. We went downstairs, you know,
show me what you know this way. Maybe there's something
that I don't know. I'm not so smart that you're
gonna tell me that. I know. You know, I know everything.
You know what I mean, I'm gonna work with you.
And he went down and showed me a few things,
and things that I didn't know are things that you know.

(30:39):
And he showed me, and he took me under his wing,
you know. But there was a lot of guys, Eddie Crean,
you know a lot of guys that were there and
people who have passed, you know, Jack Murphy, you know
Eddie Crean, Louis Marsacano, guys like that that were in
emergency for years. You know some of these guys were
in that. Did you know about that robbery unit where

(30:59):
the guys used to come out and just uh you
ever hear about that?

Speaker 1 (31:03):
No, go ahead, tell.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
Me they were back back in the seventies. I guess
it was, and it was a very successful unit. It
was a robbery unit. Let's say there was a well
I can tell you for a fact because I was
working in the bagel place. I used to make bagels
in the in the seventies, and uh, we used to
get robbed all the time. I mean they would come
in and just rob us. So what happened was is
that they put us down as a like a chronic

(31:25):
location and there was a robbery squad. These guys would
stay in the back of the location with the shotgun
and if the robber would come in, they would kill them.
And what happened was is that they were so six
there was no they would let the robbery go down.
They'd come out the back door and as the guy
was coming through the door, they'd kill him. And a
lot of guys it was so successful that they had

(31:49):
to take it down and and do away with it.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
Can you imagine that today?

Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah? No, the robbery squad. I'm sure there's still guys
out there that that that that'll that'll talk about some
of the older guys.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, that would never fly today and today.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Oh no, I'm telling you. And they they with the
bare minim. They'd come out with a cap on or
and police don't move. And I don't even know if
they yell police don't move. I know that the primary
weapon was a shotgun. And most of those guys were
from es U.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, I mean, listen, if you don't want it to happen,
you shouldn't be stealing, you know. Yeah, love averages, love
averages where they say Murphy's Law and Murphy's an irishman.
So yeah, you catch up with them. So I mean,
at least in the early years, tell me, because I
mean I remember somebody telling me this years ago. I
think it was Glenn Kleine when he was on the
show where he mentioned it takes about a good five
years to really finally feel like an email and finally

(32:41):
feel comfortable in the unit. So from those early years
in es U, talking about the jobs, either tactical or
rescue wise at stick out or afterwards, you were like, man,
that was something.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
Well, let's do a couple of animal jobs. Sure, let's
do a couple of animal jobs. So we're in the
press and we get the job to respond that there's
a baby in the sewer, all right, So we go
to the location, trying to remember more prec I six
it was in a six six persons. We go, We
go to the location and you listen at the sewer

(33:12):
and it sounds like a baby crying, but you can't
really figure out where it's coming from because it's in
the sewer, all right, and it hadn't rained a couple
of days, so it could have been a block away
one way or the other wherever it was it was.
So we start to narrow it down. We go to
one sewer, to another sewer, to another sewer, to another sewer.
Finally we narrow it down and we go and we

(33:32):
find out that someone had thrown a pregnant cat down
the base and down into the sewer, and the cat
had kittens, okay, And that's what people were thinking, was
the baby's crying, That it was the cat crying. So
that was one of our jobs. It was me, was
Patty Murphy, Jimmy Cole. You know, these guys have passed

(33:53):
from the nine to eleven stuff like that. But that
was that was a big one. Actually, Uh we made
them was taper on that one there.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, I can see the picture there there because earlier
the light I was kind of interfering with him and
see it clearly now.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
You know, I'm going to shut the light off over
my head. Give me one second. I'm just gonna get up.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
That's fun talking about Carl Roaster here in the Mike
the NWAVEN Podcast, Volume fifty three of the e Men
inside the NYPD's Emergency Service Unit. Uh, it's funny. You
know you mentioned Patty Murphy. You didn't have to do that.
I appreciate it though.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
You mentioned Patty Murphy and it's at the episode of
Cops and he said that's one of the jobs. He
responds to two of them. Actually one was of course
the rat in the bathroom and the other one was
it was it bat in somebody's apartment. So yeah, yeah,
he using two trucks for a while. He was also
in five truck for a while as well. Uh, and
he ended up having a great career in emergency and
he died back in twenty fourteen Savages nine to eleven.

(34:44):
Canter he was way too young.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah, there's no doubt about it.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
So besides the pregnant cop, pregnant cop, Yeah, there you go,
pregnant cop, pregnic catch rather over the other animal jobs.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
So it's one of my favorites. So we're sitting in quarters.
It's it's meal. We're all in. I think Kenny Richardson
is cooking for us. We're gonna have a nice lunch,
and all of a sudden, the doorbell rings. I go
downstairs and the guy says to me, he says, you
got to come to Uh. He says, you gotta come
to my apartment. You gotta come to my apartment. I says,
what's going on? I said, well, he says, they sent

(35:15):
me next door. From next door, they sent me here.
You gotta come to my apartment. I said, what's going on?
He said, my friend's snakes has has gone crazy. I said,
your friend's snake has gone crazy? I said, well, what
kind of nonsense is that? So we get into the truck,
we get in, we drive all it's not far. It's
on fourth day and you're maybe seventieth Street or something
like that. We go into the building. I opened the

(35:37):
door and it looks like there's been a homicide. There's
blood on the walls, there's blood on the ceil, and
there's blood on the furniture. And there's a guy in
the corner. He's tucked in the corner with a steak knife,
and there's a Burmese python up on its back like this,
and it's trying to get him, and he's hacking at
the snake. And each time he hacks at the snake,

(35:59):
a little bit more blood sports around and he hacks
at the snake and a little bit. But this snake
wants this guy, all right. We don't know why, but
this snake wants this guy. So now Kenny Richardson and
his partners with me. Kenny's partner, he's gonna be angry
with me. But anyway, so we got the dog noose

(36:21):
and they grab one hand. Kenny grabs the head and
Chris Ryan Chris grabs the tail. And the snake is
fifteen feet long. The snake is as long as a car.
They both got the end and all of a sudden,
the snake like contracts its body and pulls them both

(36:41):
together with him contracting his body. Now he starts to
wrap himself around Chris's leg. I said, this has got
to stop, so I said to the guy. I said, look,
I said, you know, we gotta do something about this.
So the guy says, do what you gotta do. So
I take an axe and I take the snake's head
off as you. So I said to the guy, I says,

(37:03):
how did this happen? I says, how did this happen?
He says, well, he says. I went to the pet store,
he says, and I buy a rabbit to feed to
the animal. He says. I put my arm in the
cage with the animal with the snake, he says, and
I hold the rabbit in the other hand. The snake
now travels up my arm around my neck and it

(37:25):
eats the animal. It eats this the rabbit. So, I says,
you do that all the time. He says, yeah, he says,
but I think what happened this time? He says. When
I went to the pet store, I leaned on the cage,
and I must have had a smell on me, he said,
because when the rabbit the snake came up my arm,
it stopped right at my face. It looked at me,
he said. Then it bit me in the face. He said,

(37:47):
it went into my face and got me. He says,
after that it was on. He said, the snake was
practically chasing me around the apartment. Jeez. So I'm telling
you that once we killed the snake, we then had
to go and we got two garbage pails. It took
two garbage pails to put this snake in.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
That's how big it was.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
That's how I'm telling you. It was as big as
a car. And once he coiled it up, it was.
It was as long as a car. It was. It
had to be fifteen feet long a snake. And this
is a snake that the guy had in his house.
He didn't want he was in a co op. He
didn't want them to be aware of it. But they
knew he had it, and they were trying to get
him out all along, which ultimately you know, he got out. Yeah,

(38:26):
he his face was torn up. The play, I'm telling you,
it looked like a homicide. Looked like something out of
a horror movie.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
When you walk into a scene like that. Yeah, that's
not even go ahead.

Speaker 3 (38:38):
You no, no, I'm just saying you didn't. You know,
the guy says, you know, when you think about a snake,
you think about a snake. You don't think about a
snake that's as big as a car.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
Right, you know, You're thinking about like a garden snake.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
Yeah, a little snake. You know, I don't know what
it is. Maybe you know that's it.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Well you found out that night, and that's just the
start of it too. A lot of tactical jobs back then,
you know, listen, as I said four and the old
saying is what when when a cop needs when somebody
needs help, when civilian needs help, they call the police,
or the police need healthy, call the emergency service. If
a detective squad or even a patrol cops saying, hey,
we got a guy in there, he's violet, we got
him on a warrant, he's wanted on two hobbic sides.

(39:14):
You gotta go in there and get him, or anything
like that. Man with the gun, barricaded hassa situation. I
feel like, especially back then in the wild wild westays
in the city, a lot of that was happening pretty frequently,
which you get a lot of tactical jobs like that
in six truck Yeah, there was.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
A lot of tactical jobs at six truck. Yeah, there
was a lot of work we had. We had, uh,
where's my thing? Here? A sad family fight? Yeah, this
is this one happens up on uh I think he's
on new U Trek. And what happens is that the
guy has a family fight, winds up killing two of
his uh his family members, and then kills himself. You know,

(39:50):
I I think he wasted his time. He should have
just killed himself to begin with. Then not who what what?
You know did anything to his family? Sure it was
tactical jobs, but you know, may give you another animal job.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Sure, wherever you want to give.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
Okay. So the call comes over that there's a cat
down the sewer, down the drain pipe. What happens is
that this lady had just got a kitten and she
put it on her roof to let it walk around
her roof. She had a window that was the same
height as the roof. What happens is the cat walks
over to the rain gutter, it walks down the rain gutter,

(40:29):
and it goes down the drain pipe into the sewer
system of the house. So now they call us. There's
only one way to get this cat out really is
to break the concrete, dig down to the sewer, break
open the sewer, and take the cat out. So I
go down the basement, me and Billy DeSantis, and I'm

(40:51):
looking around and I'm looking around. I says, you know
what we're gonna do. I said, we're gonna blow this
cat out. He said, what are you talking about now?
The Scott Bottles pressurizer forty five hundred pounds, four five
hundred pounds.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
I look around and I find myself a piece of
garden hose, and we cut it up and we fit
it to a scot bottle. We take it up nice.
I take off the house side of the trap in
the in the in the building and we stick the
hose down there. And I tell Billy, and then I
go outside and pull the drain pipe out of the
four inch cast iron so that the cat has had

(41:26):
a clear path out. And I tell the priest cop.
I says, go on direct with me. I says, and
tell me if the cat comes out. So what Billy
does is Billy opens the bottle. He cracks it. These
I said, Billy opened the bottley, he cracks it real quick.
Like that. I said, no, Billy, I says, open that
bottle up. He says, open it up. I say, open
that bottle up. So he opens the bottle all the

(41:46):
way up. Forty five hundred pounds of pressure now go
into the sewer system of that building. It blows the
cat out up in the sewer. The cop on the
other side, the priest, and cop now says to me,
you hear him on the radar. He says, it came out. Says,
can you say it was like a rocket ship. He says,
it came flying out of the sewer. He says, So
we were able to save the cat, and whatever. My

(42:08):
only thing. And I think back upon I think back
a lot, a lot. I'm sure that the people in
that building, every toilet ball must have went boom, like,
blew the water out, and they must have walked into
the tarrat toilet and said, where do all this water
come from? But we but we blew the cat out
of the sewer.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
I'm just picturing that visual, you know, all of a sudden,
couch on the roof, just here you go. You know,
we got them out of there. And that's that's the
thing that you know, highlighting these jobs. It speaks to
the creativity and ingenuity of the su You're thinking outside
the box all the time. You're picking up Carl, Who
would think of that?

Speaker 3 (42:43):
You know, That's that's how we did it. You know,
it's it's it's we got the cat out and that
was what was important. You know, another an animal job.
If I want to do, I brought I brought broken
down into like. I got animal jobs. I got assisting
members of the service. I got stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
But whatever you want to tell.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeah, So there was a McDonald's on Flappishy Avenue and
I think Nostre not the junction Flappish and Nostrin. And
they had a squirrel in the ballpit when McDonald's used
to have ballpits. So somehow the squirrel ran in got
into the ballpit. So we go in there and I'm
coffing and I'm sneezing and I'm cofughing, I'm sneezing, and

(43:21):
I says to Billy, I said, Billy, I said, what's
going on here? He says, he says, well, didn't you
hear them? He said, they maced the squirrel. I said,
what do you mean they maced the squirrel? He said, yeah,
he says, they thought that the squirrel would like I
don't know what they thought, but the cops maced the
squirrel while he was in the ballpit. I said. The
bottom line is, we can't do anything. Let's get out
of here. And they had to clean all the balls.

(43:43):
You know, they had to have the whoever cleans the
McDonald's balls had to come in and clean the McDonald's balls.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
First, squirrel, First, I missed those ballpits. And you said,
the Burger King used to have him too, used to
play them all the time when I was smaller. So
YEAHGGI unlocked the childhood memory there. The nostalgia just come
back of that.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
I'm with Bobby Kevin and it's it's it's Christmas time,
it's it's the winter with Bobby Kevin, and we go
to a job. A squirrel again, a squirrel in the
Christmas tree. The lady lives in one of the projects
and the window is close enough to a tree where
the squirrel can jump from the tree into the apartment.
So he jumps from the tree into the apartment, goes

(44:25):
into a Christmas tree. So now we got a squirrel
in a Christmas tree. So now Bobby Kevin, who's an
old timer, good guy. He says. He says, well, dart it,
and he says it'll come out of the tree. I said, okay,
no problem. So I'm new at this point in time,
I'm relatively new. I'm just going by Bobby's lead. I said, okay,
no problem. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen

(44:46):
the size of the dart that we use the dart animals.
It's probably as big as a forty five caliber round,
you know. So Bobby shoots the squirrel and instead of
being tranquilized, the dart goes right through the animal and
kills it dead. So now the lady's got her Christmas
packages underneath the tree, and there's blood dripping from the

(45:06):
squirrel onto the packages, and she says, well, what happened?
I says, I says, I think we hit him in
the noses. I may have a nose believe or something
like that. So the bottom line was we had to
clean her packages off, get the dead squirrel out of there,
and move on to our next job. But that's just
the way it is, you know, Like you said, you
don't know what's going to happen at any point in time.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
No, never, You never know what call is, type of
call is going to come in. So you got the
animal jobs. I know you kind of divide it into sections.
Tell me about some of the rescues.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Okay, a rescue. How about we're on the top of
a bridge. It's Christmas Eve, all right? The call comes over.
It's Christmas Eve and it's cold and it's snowy, and
we're on the Brooklyn Bridge and the guy is up
there and I'm trying to talk him down, trying to
talk him down, and he's not really cooperating. And I

(45:58):
said to him, then I got an idea. I s
let me ask you a question. I said, you have
any children? He said, I got. He said, I got
a boy and a girl. I says, why are you
up here? To be honest? He says, well, he says,
you know, my wife was cheating on me. I said, okay,
I said, that happens a lot. I said, but are
you going to kill yourself because your wife is cheating
on you? I says end. I said, do you want

(46:18):
your children to remember every Christmas Eve or every Christmas
Day that this is the day their father killed himself.
The guy starts crying he starts crying and he falls
towards me, just like to grab me, and he falls
towards me. That guy called me up every Christmas Eve
for the next five years, or until I left the job.

(46:39):
Every Christmas Eve he got me a call and he
would say to me, he says, is this you. I says, well,
is it you. That's how we would not identify each other.
I didn't even know his name at that point in time.
He says, is this you? I says yes. I says,
is this you? He says yes. He says I'm doing well.
I says that that's the way it's I said, that's
what's important. I said that you're doing well. You know.

(46:59):
I also had a guy on the top of the
Brooklyn Bridge one time. I says, look cold and rainy.
Another cold. It seems like these guys pick the cold
and rainy nights. I don't know if it's because if
they get depressed or whatever it is. I don't know
what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said to him.
I says, I says, you know, it's really cold up here.
I says it's rainy. I says, you know what, I says,
listen to me, you want to jump. I says, you

(47:19):
either jump now. I says, oh, come back tomorrow when
the weather is nice, and then you could jump.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Then.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
I says, you can jump whenever you want. I said,
this is not something that has to be decided right now.
I said, we can decide this on our own. So
he looks at me. I says, it's cold out here.
I said, come on, we'll leave. And the guy left.
He said, you know, I says, come on, we'll leave.
I says, this is not the night to kill yourself
in the cold and the rain. I said, you can
pick any other night. I said, why tonight.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
Whatever works though, to get him down.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
That's Oh, that's it, that's what. Whatever works is right.
You know, you got to play to them. You got
to talk to them and keep them talking. As long
as those people are talking, you've got a chance. It's
when they stop talking that's when the problems begin. You know.
Now they're drawing themselves up into a cocoon. They's shutting
themselves down. They don't want to know nothing from nothing.
But at the same time, it's very important to keep

(48:10):
the conversation going, keep the dialogue going, because as long
as you have the dialogue going with them. You have
a connection. The minute you lose that connection, and sometime
you try to find something that's in common. You know,
you do whatever you gotta do, you know, yeah, how
do you like to peanut butter? You know, something stupid
that you don't even know what's gonna happen, and it
just spurs a thing, you know, it just gets them

(48:32):
where they got to go exactly.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
As long as that somewhere is down and not via jumping,
you know, down safely than Hey, whatever, you gotta do,
whatever common ground you can find, because that's some of
the things that you got to realize too, is I've
highlighted the past in this mini series. Which is cool.
As part of the SUS training is that, in addition
to being trained as emergency medical technicians, some guys come
into the unit already EMTs in some cases paramedics too.

(48:55):
It's also and I catching out this is very cool
emergency psychological technician. I got to know how to talk
to people on the fly.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
In those spots APT. Yeah, and you know you're leaving
out again. Vic Vic came in as a doctor. Doctor,
you know there it is. You know, you're talking about
a well rounded unit where everybody was something. You know,
it's just the way it was.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, you know, guys have their strengths, tactical strengths, medical strengths,
rescue strengths. Some guys are jack of ball trades.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
Listen, there's really no weaknesses. There's no room for weaknesses
in the unit. Like, yes, everybody helps each other out
in that regard. A couple of comments from LinkedIn, Carl
Duenzel has been on the show before. It has taught
me everything but how to spell my name correctly. Looking
for good to seeing my friend hope All's well with you,
Carl and Billy Devsy's watching too, He says, Hello, Carl,
Hopeball is well. Great guy to have on the show, Mike,

(49:43):
I certainly agree, Billy, you'd be a great guy to
have on the show too. So I'd love to have
you on some time, Billy, if you're willing, So listen,
you got, like I said, whatever list you got whatever
stories you want to tell. By all means, I don't
know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
I'm gonna I'm gonna jump around a little bit. I'm
gonna jump back a little bit, like well, I'm early
in the job. Emergency Service brand new emergency service, and
we go to a job where the guy has got
he's fallen in his house. He's broken his leg, but
he can't get to the door. So now, like I said,
they want to rabbit tool the door. They want to
try to break the door open. And I tell the

(50:16):
officer in charge you, I says, look, I said, I
can pick that lock open. I says, it will save
the lock. I says, well, you know, there will be
able security apartment and everything be good. So once I
pick it open, he says to me, he says, can
you teach that to other people? I said, sure I can.
So that's how I wind up down at STS, you know,
That's how I wind up being in training school. And
while I'm there, they making me a pel master. We

(50:38):
tare tools. We did a lot of excellent stuff down there,
with like the class that we had, and the course
was very, very popular. I would bring in people from
like the six to zero and people, well not only
six oh, but guys that wanted to learn it just
as a skill, you know, and they would give them
permission to be there. So I'm sitting in there in

(51:00):
the room one day and I'm getting ready for the
class to come in and I look up and the
CEO is there. The CEO of emergency Service is sitting
in the room, and I said, you know what's up?
He says, I got to see what all the hype
is about. He says, I got to see what all
the hoop is about. He said, I'm going to sit
through your class. I said, okay. So he sits through
the class, he goes home. He calls me up the

(51:21):
next day at six truck and he says to me,
he says, you know what. He says, you cost me
a lot of money. I said, what do you mean,
I cost you a lot of money? He says. I
went home and I picked every lock in my house.
My wife said, I have to change all the locks.
He says, if you could do it, anybody could do it.
She says me, so I cost he says, got to
pick change all the locks. So she made him change

(51:42):
all the locks on the doors because he picked the
doors open.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
And that's the thing. I'm glad you brought that up too.
That's another really valuable skill set that emergency service has,
where if you think about it, and this is not
anybody who watches this show and knows how much. I
love the Fire Department. This is by no means knock
in the Fire Department, no means making fun of the FDA.
While love those guys, but when they come in and
take a door, and this is not any fault of theirs,
they're trained to do this. They destroy the door. That's

(52:07):
what's what they're trained to do. They take the door down,
you guys, I mean, can think about it now. Cop
has to sit there watching them door for eight hours.
You guys come in, finesse the lock, get the lock open,
get the door open, get what you gotta get, whatever
it may be, and that cop doesn't have to stand
there for eight hours.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Listen, there was a time and it's probably still the same.
I don't know for sure, but I remember Radio City
Musical would not allow the Fire Department to come in
and work on their elevators because those art deco doors
are priceless and they didn't want them throwing a hearse
tool or a crowbar or a Halligan tool into the

(52:41):
doors and prying the doors open. You know, Emergency service
would go in and again we'd slip the locks.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
You know.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
We spend time down at the school, you know, teaching
guys we had a door set up with and how
to open the doors, drop keys and slip the bolts
and stuff like that, all different ways to get in,
you know. But I remember specifically that they weren't allowed
to go into the building because you know they would
they would probably maybe they did it once or twice
and then they said, wait, you know, we can't do

(53:07):
this again. You know, the doors are priceless.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Right right, and listen. It sounds bougie, but it's true.
A lot of these buildings, especially in that part of Manhattan.
You know, I'm not saying it's right, but I can
understand the philosophy because it is going to cost them
a lot of money too. So if there's a safer
way to do it, a more pragmatic way to do it, well,
then that's where you guys come in. Kitlyn Lang going
Tommy Langohn's daughters in the chat. She's been on the
show before, and she say, love of the talk, Carl,
this is Kitlyn Langu and just wanted to ask you

(53:30):
if you ever got the chance to teach my dad, Tommy.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
Tommy Langoh, And of course I did. Sure, yeah, Oh Tommy,
Tommy was a nice guy. I think I went to uh, uh,
where'd we go together? We went to Puerto Rico together,
I think Tommy and I Tommy me.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
For the hurricane.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
No, we went. We went as a I'll tell you
what happened. Emergency Service bought the the Stanley tool. Now
I know if you're familar with the Stanley tool. It's
a hydraulic unit. And what it is is that there's
a hydraulic base. It's a motor with a hydraulic pump
that role that it runs a myriad of tools. It

(54:11):
runs sores, it runs drills, it runs hammers and breakers,
all sorts of all sorts of tools by just plugging
into this one unit. So when we got that tool
into Emergency Service, I made myself know everything about it.
I probably knew more about that tool than the salesman
who sold it to Emergency Service by the time I
was done. And with that knowledge, I was able to

(54:34):
go to Puerto Rico to teach the Puerto Rican Rescue
team how to operate that tool. And Tommy Langgon and
I Tommy was was one of the guys that set
that whole thing up and uh and we went together.
Matter of fact, Tommy's asked asked the little what's the
name of the girls Girlitan Caitlyn as Caitlin or Caitlin

(54:55):
was uh your aunt or somebody in a stewardess in
the in the airlines. Because what happened is Tommy somehow
upgraded us from where we were flying the first class.
I think it was he had got your aunt or
something to that or somebody or maybe it wasn't your aunt,
but maybe we should have been your aunt. I don't know,
but we got upgraded from from regular to first class

(55:19):
and we flew to Puerto Rico by first class.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Oh well, I'll wait for her to put that in
the chap but get to see a kg, she says.
I love these stories. Thanks for sharing. It means the
world to me. And of course her dad. We did
a tribute show to her father.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
Wild Yeah, well her father was. I remember a lot
of things her father taught me things. We were talking
about building construction one time, and you know how parking
lots they go up there the precast construction. When they
build parking lots, they'll come in with these large concrete
pre stress pre and they build them and everything. And

(55:49):
Tommy once said, we were standing there looking at something
and he says to me. He says, you know, he says,
what goes up in pieces comes down in pieces, he said,
And it all made sense to me when he said that. No,
I knew me very well, the good guy, real good guy.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Absolutely And she said, yeah, as all fourteen of them.
Where We'll talk about that a little bit later. She says,
his father in law, Tommy's father in law was a
flight engineer for American Airlines. Her grandpa was a flight
engineer for American Airlines. So that may have been how
they got the upgrade.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
That was it.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
That tracks, that tracks, So go ahead.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
No, no, I was going to say I when I
came back. We flew back the same way we came
back from his class, and I was drinking champagne, and
the stewardess every time my cup was empty, well she
was giving She had to give me a glass. Every
time the glass was empty, she poured more champagne in.
And by the time I got I landed in New York,

(56:40):
I was boxed. I was drunk. Takes the glass out
of my hand, but she gives me a paper cup.
She says, you can't land the class, but you can
land with a paper cup, and she fills up the
paper cup again.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Now there you go. That was a classic, good, classic, classic, indeed,
and it brings up an interesting thing I wanted to
ask you about too, because well, Tommy working in the
tent truck for the majority of it of his years
in ESU. He got there in ninety one.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
You know.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
The nice thing back then, and I'm sure it's still
in effect now, is if a truck is shorthanded, you fly,
so you really get the chance to not only learn
your own truck, which for you was six, but all
the other trucks in the city. So tell me about
besides seven and eight. Seven and A are right in
your borough, of course, besides Brooklyn, what were the other
trucks that you really like flying to let me.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
Tell you something. You talk about flying and you say
limited to Brooklyn or Queens, that's nonsense. We would come
in and on days. Because what happened was when I
got into a six truck, we had a pin job program,
all right. We were in competition with the fire department,
and each time you went on a pin job there

(57:41):
was a sheet you had to make and your response
time and stuff like that. So initially they overloaded six
truck with a lot of guys. So you're able to
put a lot of cars on the street and you'd
always have somebody out there. But what happened was is
that after the six truck got so crowded, guys were
flying all over the place. It wouldn't be uncommon for
me to fly to three truck or four truck in

(58:03):
the Bronx on a daily basis. It would take you
in the morning, it would take you almost two hours.
You'd get there. At lunchtime, you'd go one of two jobs,
you'd hang out, and then you'd start on your way
back to get home at three o'clock. But that's the
way it was, you know. Yeah, we flew all over.
Johnny Bousch, he was a sergeant over a nine truck,
and he said to me, he says, he says, you know,
he says, if you want to come, because when I

(58:25):
used to go to six truck from where I live
here on Long Island, I would pass nine truck, seven truck,
eight truck. You know, I would pass all those trucks
on my way to six truck, you know, and I'd
say to myself, one, am I crazy? You know? I
could go I could bicycle every day to nine truck
from my house. But I think that close, Oh yeah, sure, yeah,
it was probably six miles to eight miles something like that.

(58:47):
I was thirty miles. I was thirty miles from six truck.
And you sit on the Bell Parkway, you know that
that thirty miles doesn't turn into thirty minutes. You're looking
at an hour and a half two hours sometime, depending
upon what time you got home.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
So but then again, it's the love of the truck
and obviously the guys you work.

Speaker 3 (59:04):
That's it. And another benefit to being in six truck
was the fact that I still was able to go
to the six to zero because my wife worked there,
you know, and a lot of times my wife and
I I would come to work. I would let's say
I was doing a four to twelve, my wife would
do a day tour. Whatever tour she did was a
special tour for her because she was a clerical person
for the most part. But you know, she was a

(59:25):
captain's secretary, but she was still a police officer. So
what would happen is is that I would be home
with my son in the morning, and then on my
way into work, I'd meet my wife at Rockaway Parkway
and then we'd switch my son in the cost seat,
put him in the car seat, I continue on the work,
and then she'd come home. So it was beneficial for

(59:48):
me to do that. Otherwise we couldn't do that. You know.
That's the way it was.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
See you fast forward a little bit, and it's an
interesting time, you know, because now you get to ninety four,
ninety five, and now you got about ten years and
ye and it's flying by because you came in as
a new guy in eighty five and now you're in
a position a decade into it where you're comfortable in
what you're doing. You're comfortable in the fact that you
could teach others. You could do the same thing guys
did for you when you first came in and passed
that down. So besides things like lock lock picking, safe picking,

(01:00:15):
which the son obviously you were very good as you
talked about, tell me about some of the other skills
that you're really any new each email or woman that
was coming into Truck six. Some of the things that
you really enjoyed teaching them, besides the us stuff that
we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
Well, you know, it's very important. I'm going to get
down to basics here. But it's very important to know
the difference between a mixed fuel, you know, and straight gas,
because that that you put a mixed fuel into all
your two stroke machines, and you put gasoline into your
four cycle machines. So it's very important to teach people
that right off the bat. You know, as trivial as

(01:00:49):
it sounds, it was very important because and you had
to mix the gas properly. Otherwise we use to steal
the steel chainsaws. You know, you didn't buy junk. They
were three four hundred dollars chainsaws at that point in time,
maybe more than that. And you know, you put a
straight gas mix into that saw, you wiped it out.

(01:01:09):
It's done. You know, you burn up the piston, you
burn up the sleeve, you take the saw out of service.
So a lot of times I would I would stress
the engines on the kids and the new people, and
you know, we'd go down and go over the pumps,
whatever had a motor on it, you know what I mean,
go over the pumps, go over the saws. You know,
we had the d M fifties, we had the big

(01:01:30):
circular source. My complaint was that is that we used
an abrasive disc you know, we used the same It
looked the same, the abrasive discs. I don't know if
they've changed it or not, you know, because you could
have used the concrete blade with diamonds onto the carbide
for the most part, but we had the We had
the abrasive metal and the embrasive concrete and sometime if

(01:01:50):
you got to mix up, they wouldn't cut properly. So
that was important to tell people. You know. There was
a lot of stuff that little things that made things
more important.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Of course, and I think that was critical around that
time because ninety four ninety five is an interesting period,
as I covered before, where I've often said ninety five
to two thousand is perhaps deep. This is no offense
to the other eras this is no offense to the
guys who are in emergency service right now. But if
I could pick a sweet spot in the history of
emergency service, it's probably nineteen ninety five to two thousand,
because you get all the guys over when the merger
happened from transit rescue and also from housing rescue, which

(01:02:22):
you guys had absorbed earlier prior to ninety five. But
became official in nineteen ninety five. So getting those guys
was interesting because guys who worked Housing rescued knew the
projects very well. Any subway jobs he had the transit
rescue guys, and they knew that like the back of
their hand. So just tell me about teaching, I mean,
and then again and again. Even though they're squared away,
there's still some things that you have to show them
in terms of how NYPD Emergency Service does it. So

(01:02:44):
I don't know if you got any of the guys
in six truck off that merger, but if you did,
tell me about teaching them, not as much as you
would a brand new guy, per se, but nevertheless getting
them up to speed on the NYPD way.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
Well, the guys that came in were pretty well squared away,
you know, and when it came to came to raising trains,
they knew what to do, you know. They knew the
deal about picking up a train, and it was important,
believe it or not. You know, when you go to
pick up a train, there's there's there's one type of train.
I mean, I would recognize it if I saw it.
I can't remember it's R eighty six ninety six or
whatever it was. But you would have to slip a

(01:03:16):
two by four block of wood between the spring and
the carrier of the train, all right, to take up
the distance that you needed. Otherwise you would just jack
up the suspension. It was little things like that that
these guys already knew that they imparted upon us. We learned,
as far as I'm concerned, we learned some stuff from
them as much as they learned from us. I don't

(01:03:38):
I don't think that I ever had a chance to, like,
let's let's go down this route and say, but they were.
They were pretty well squared away. Even even the girls
that came in were pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Oh yeah, listen, you had a ni Rosado there. Ye
had to have the Zukovich there. You know, listen to
those girls. They didn't need much help with much they were.
I don't think I laughed as hard as when any
came on. The stories that she was telling me. She
literally had me doubled over. I was laughing so hard
on this show a couple of years ago. So shout
out to her, she's down in Florida now as they
take a swig of water. Volume fifty three of the

(01:04:10):
email inside the NYPD's Emergency Service Center. I guess his
car Ruso. Now it's interesting because I mean, I don't
know if you were there for any of these jobs,
but around ninety three, of course, when the terrorism threat
begins to really become a parent in New York City.
Not that there hadn't been incidents before. In the seventies,
there was a lot of domestic bombings, but the Trade
Center in ninety three changed everything as well. And I'll
never forget what Sam Katz wrote in the book he

(01:04:31):
did on Emergency in nineteen ninety seven where he said
after that and this is before nine to eleven, after
that bombing, the guys in ESU were never able to
look at the World Trade Center the same again, which
is eerie considering what would happen, of course, four years
after he wrote that book. So I don't know how
much terrorism training you guys were doing after the ninety
three job, but if so on the city wide level,

(01:04:54):
tell me about some of that stuff that was going on,
if at all back then after that job.

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
Well, you know that the the ninety three was, uh,
they screwed up pretty good on that one. And you know,
knowing what I know now about the what was going on.
You knew that there was gonna be another hit, you know,
you just didn't know when it was gonna happen. That
they wanted to knock those buildings down, and going by

(01:05:20):
the taking it out at the foundation just wasn't gonna
work for them. But things did change. Things changed all
over the world.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
I think that nine to eleven is one of those
pivotal moments. Nine to eleven or not even that, the
first trade center, those are pivotal moments that people know
where they were, you know, like like when it's unforgettable.
You know, it's it's hard to believe that people would
do that to other people. It's just I marvel at that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Yeah, you and I both, You and I both and E.
S U was about as ready as you could be
back then.

Speaker 3 (01:05:52):
But I don't know, there's no doubt about it. You
know what I always say, and I've said this before
and hopefully nobody's listening because I don't want to give
them any ideas, but they screwed up by hitting the
trade centers. What they should have done, if they wanted to,
is they should have hit the trade center, and they
should have hit the Empire State building. Then they would
have broke up. They would have made mess, chaos because

(01:06:14):
they We were able to concentrate all of our forces
in one spot, all of our utilities and everything we
had at one spot, But if we had to be divided,
that would have been more of them.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
An inconvenience, right, you know. But then again, all the
damage that was done.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
That day, damage that was done that day, is still
the damage that's happening now even you know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
Yeah, absolutely, As we were talking about off the air,
just to scale it back a second too, because as
guys get more time on they get trained on this
driving the truck, which I'm sure you did because you
were ridden the unit for such a long time. I
mean the raps. Okay, it's a little bit smaller, of course,
you still got to be careful. The streets of New
York City with pedestrians and the other cars are a predictable.
But that big truck. Anybody that had to drive a
fire truck or any of the large E SU rescue trucks,

(01:06:57):
I hats off to you, guys man, Because, like I
often joke in the program, if there was ever an
Olympic sport there you go, that should be added to
the games. It's driving an emergency vehicle of that size
on the streets of New York. So tell me about
the training to be a chauffeur and of course again
your tricks and your tactics to being an effective one
on the streets.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
Well, this is this is the sixth truck that was
there when I came in. This was brand new when
I showed up at the door and they had just
got this truck from Salisbury. Yeah, that was brand new,
and it is. It is something, you know, I'll tell
you a funny story. We're going to a pin job

(01:07:37):
on the goanas and now the truck is a truck.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
I can go as fast as the truck can go,
you know. And with that some guy he passes me,
he does. He's doing a buck He's doing one hundred
miles an hour, like he wants to get away from me.
He doesn't realize that there's an accident up ahead that
he's going to run into. All right, He runs in,
he sees the accident, jams on his break, spins the

(01:08:01):
car around, hits the guardrail. I get out of my
truck and I says, are you all right? And he says,
I think I'm all right. I says, what were you thinking?
I says, where were you going? I says, you know,
his car was total, you know, because he was trying
to race past the truck. You know what I mean.
It's just what it is like you're saying, driving this

(01:08:21):
truck through traffic. This was not that. I'll tell you
another funny story. Thirty ninth Street. I'm going down at
thirty ninth Street. There's a job out on the pier
and it was really cold out and there was a
sheet of ice. I couldn't see it, black ice, sheet
of ice. I turned the corner and I stepped lightly
on the pedal. Now the truck just continues going forward,

(01:08:44):
going forward, but it's going forward slower. There's a fire
truck up the corner. It's a ladder truck, and his
ladder is sticking out. He must see that I can't
stop this truck. He pulls away at the very last second,
and my truck goes into the spot where he was
two seconds before. Otherwise it was going to be a
horrible accident. Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
Yeah, it forced on his part, man. Yeah, that fire
wherever he is.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
Yeah, he must have saw the truck coming and knew
that I was sliding. And another story, I turned the
corner on Sick. I come off a fourth Avenue on
to sixty fifth Street, and I'm going down sixty fifth Street.
All of a sudden, I feel a little bump. I
was like, it's just a little bump in my backside.
Something doesn't feel right. I look in the rear view
mirror and my truck is crabbing down the street. The

(01:09:29):
front wheels are here, the back wheels are here, and
I'm crabbing down the street. I said, what happened? So
I stopped the truck right where I was. What happened
was the shackle had broken on the rear end and
the rear end had come loose on the truck. What
could have happened if we were going to any kind
of speed and that axle had broken down, we would
have flipped that truck over.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
And that's the things that you gotta know too. I
mean again, getting your CDL helps too, if you have
that prior to coming on the job. But the training
that goes into it's not just getting to the job,
which is the first thing, right, getting there safely, it's
also and you knew this, having a knowledge of where
everything was in the truck is Sometimes the chauffeur has
to stay with the truck. Guys coming out, grab me this,
grab me that. You can't be like, uh, you know,
you gotta know off and off the right, off the rip. Okay,

(01:10:10):
this is here, this is there, that's there. So you know,
it's not only sudden you know that you knew for yourself,
but also training other guys who were trying to learn
how to drive and get qualified there, that's one of
the most important things you could run through with them.
Just knowing where everything is.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Hurts, no doubt about it. And for the most part,
for the most part, most of the trucks one truck,
two truck, three truck, most of the trucks tried to
put this stuff in the same place. So if you
went someplace, you would go and and pretty much I'll
tell you what when when it came from my test,
you know, for chaufa the h I forget who it was,

(01:10:42):
might have been Sergeant Crowley. He says to me, go
get me the magnet, you know, like it's an obscure
kind of thing. He says, get me the magnet. And
I knew where the magnet was that was easy enough
to get. He said, okay, you're qualifying. That was it,
you know what I mean. I didn't have to go
everything else to try and kind of self explanatory. We
had we had modified truck to carry the Stanley tool,

(01:11:03):
and that in itself was a thing. I put a
wench in it. I put a small electric wench with
a cable that would come down and lift it up
and then we'd push it into place. And we were
probably the only truck that carried the Stanley tool.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
And that was the end. Go ahead. Sorry, no, no, no,
that's an Again, that was a critical tool considering the
vast emergencies you can encounter, because it's not just the
NBA's it's not just the potential water jobs where a
tool like that may or may not factor in. Back
then building collapse because the faulty construction were pretty common,
you never know what a tool like that's going to
have to come into effect.

Speaker 3 (01:11:36):
Well, like you say, that tool was designed to operate underwater.
It's a hydraulic tool. And if you needed like if
a car one in the water, we'll say, and you
had to do a door job or do something, you
could easily take that tool and just run the hose
out and do what you had to do. Same thing
with the the Hurst jaws. That was a hydraulic operated tool,
you know, I see that they used an electric tools

(01:11:56):
now that are not as heavy. I mean the Hurst
tool weay the almost say pounds you know that you
need sometime. I watched the firemen do it. They used
it as a two man tool, you know, but we
never did that. It was we operated as a one
man tool, you know. But yeah, yeah, well you know
that you had to get lucky, you know. I'm going

(01:12:19):
to talk about some of the times that we've we've
worked with outside agencies. Okay, So like the DEA called
this one time, and what they had was drums of
sodium hydroxide that come in from wherever they came on,
from South American country someplace, and in the sodium hydroxide

(01:12:42):
they had hidden cocaine and it turned out that I
think it was about five tons of cocaine. When we
were done, what happened was is that we had to
go in there. We had to put on hazmat suits.
We went to level B suits, and then we would
cut the top of the drums out, retrieved the drugs.
From the sodium hydroxide and then you know, dispose of

(01:13:06):
the sodium hydroxide and take the drums. By the time
we were done, I think there was five tons of
cocaine that we had salvaged. The interesting thing was is
that most of the tools that we used had to
be replaced because some of the tools were air powered,
and when they were using the air or whatever, they
were sucking in the cocaine, not the cocaine, the sodium hydroxide,

(01:13:32):
which is lie and they were eating up the seals
and stuff like that. But the guys too were taking
a beaten. We went by the book religiously, but they
told you to put the level be suit on, stay
dry and stuff like that. But once you put the
level be suit on, you sweat. And what we were
doing was we were taking the gloves from this the

(01:13:52):
level B suit, and we was duct taping the rubber
gloves to the hand to the suit, and then rubber
ubb duct taping the rubber boots to the bottom of
their legs. But because of the concentration of sodium hydroxide
in this place, it was able to get underneath and
a lot of the guys were getting burns from the

(01:14:14):
lie on their arms, on their legs and stuff like that.
But the bottom line was is that by the time
we were done, we salvaged I think it was five
tons of cocaine.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Wow, Jesus. Again, they're clever and how they hide it sometimes.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
If you want to talk about you want to talk
about clever hiding. Now we called this, We called this
the Wheel of Fortune. I don't know if you can see.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
The picture up a little bit. If you can't, just
move it up there we go. Okay, okay, we.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
Called it the wheel of Fortune. It came in from
South America, and what it was was a giant cylinder.
It was about twelve feet long, about eight or ten
feet high. It was a giant cylinder, double walled just
about this wall. It was a usually designed as a
press to make paper. It was a steam press to

(01:15:04):
make paper. But what they did was they built this
thing and in the opening between the inner and the
outer lip. Now this thing is ten or twelve feet
long and it's about eight or ten feet high, they
slid cocaine. They packaged it up swaarly, neatly, like little
bricks of cocaine. The entire wheel. We called it the

(01:15:26):
Wheel of fortune. The entire wheel was filled with cocaine.
It took us days. It took us days and days
to cut through this. We used we used every tool
that you can imagine to trying to get into this thing.
We used grinders, we used this the hearst tool, we
used air bags, whatever we could try to do to
peel this thing off. They built it like it was

(01:15:47):
made to last. But what happened was is the DEEA
they were tracking this thing all the way from South America.
They dropped it off in a warehouse in Long Island
City and there was a guy in there with all
this grinder and they got bored with waiting for him
to do something with his disk grinder. That's when they
let us know that. So this was a whole joint

(01:16:08):
effort on the part of the DEA and us. You
can really see I don't know if you can see
the scope of this yet. You really have to see this.
It rode on a big axis, It had steam. Supposedly
it had steam that would go into it. But it
was a massive, massive, and you say to yourself, and
beautifully packed. I mean, these guys think that you know,

(01:16:30):
each piece, each brick was wrapped in plastic and then
in foil, and then completely formed perfectly so it would
slide into the wheel. And if you would compromise a
little piece of the wheel, after you would break a
little piece of the wheel away, you'd be able to
slide this thing out. You know, it's amazing how much
cocaine we pulled out of this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
Well, like I've said before, if these guys, if it
was a legal thing, Not that I'm advocating for it
to be, you shouldn't be. But if it was a
legal thing, this would be a fortune five hundred company.
With the way that they run it. They run it
like a business. Business involves a lot of bloodshed.

Speaker 3 (01:17:02):
There's no doubt about it. There's no doubt about it.
A lot of times, bad guys spend more time. Uh
what's the word I'm looking for? They could they could
buy free half the price. You know, they just steal,
they they you know, they I don't know, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
I don't know. I mean a lot of these guys
are not dumb guys. They're just making dumb choices.

Speaker 3 (01:17:22):
Yeah. Yeah, here's a job, this one here, this is
the knockoffs in the city. This was an FBI thing. Uh,
trademark counterfeiting. Uh they they was, and you know it's
still going on. There's watches, there's watches, there's pocketbooks and
stuff like that. So they called me in. There was

(01:17:42):
a safe and the guy who they were locking up
refused to open the safe. You know why because it
was loaded with Rolex or fole X if you will,
you know, fole X watches and it was rolled, you know.
So they called me in and they said, you know,
can you open it up? I said, I don't know
if I can open up. I always played that game,
you know, and I made sure there was no safe

(01:18:05):
that I would walk in and say, oh, yeah, this
is a box, this is a cracker box. I'm going
to get in here in two seconds. There's no problem
with this one, you know. No, No, I would always say, look,
I can't promise anything. I'll give it a shot, you
know what I mean. So I was able to dial
this safe open and then when we opened it up,
like I say, it was filled with millions dollars of
counterfeit stuff. So that was a big one that that

(01:18:28):
was this is a cop smash luxury counterfeit ring.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
And what was this this?

Speaker 3 (01:18:35):
When was it I'll tell you when it was hold
on a sec only let me get.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
They just go to Chinatown.

Speaker 3 (01:18:42):
There's yeah, well, yeah, go to Chinatown. This was uh oh,
May May ten, two thousand and.

Speaker 1 (01:18:51):
Two, Okay, twenty three years ago. But then again, it's
still justice preval and the thing is, and I remember
having this conversation with Billy Riot. Newsbatch shows me, I
guess in the show several times where unfortunately people they
know they're getting duped, that's a thing, but they don't
care because they're not gonna pay the full price. You know,
they're never gonna pay the thousand bucks or sometimes more

(01:19:12):
than that for the watch or for the you know,
the nice purse if you're trying to get it for
your girlfriend or whatever. You know. Even jerseys. Now, I
have a series of throwback jerseys that I own, and
there's a place I get him from. It's it's a
totally legal site. But I know it's not off jerseys.
You know, listen, because why the full ones cost? Their
actual ones costs like two hundred and three hundred dollars,
And even if you have that kind of money, why
fork it over. I'm not advocating for knockoffs, but you

(01:19:33):
can see why they still exist.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
Oh yeah, Well, my son. My son is a watch collector.
He's got a couple of Rolex watches. He's got some uh,
some of the other high end watches. And if you
were to give him a fake Rolex, he'd be insulted,
you know. He says, it's not the quality. It's not this,
it's not that, but it's it's it's sometimes it's hard
for UH experts to tell the difference, but he knows.

(01:19:58):
My son knows.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
I gotta ask you this too. On a slightly unrelated note,
and but in terms of emergency service, there's a lot
of cool details you get to do too rather be
dignatary protection. Some of them can be a little bit stressful.
Unca's always stressful because there's a lot that goes into it.
But dignitary protection or any of the parades of the
team wins the championship, and back then the Yankees were
keeping you busy. The Rangers had you busy in nineteen
ninety four as well. So just tell me about any

(01:20:21):
of the cool details you get the chance to be
a part of it.

Speaker 3 (01:20:22):
Well, I'll tell you a story about a funny detail.
You know, one that pops out as long as you
say that. Yeah, I think it was like one of
the first gay Pride parades. I think that's what went on.
And what happened was I had spoken to the commanding
officer and I says, you know why you got emergency service.

(01:20:45):
He I says, you know what if this was an
overtime thing, he says, I'm going to tell you why
I have emergency service. He says, you guys have seen everything.
He says, I don't know what's going to go on
here today. He says, I don't want to have any rests.
He says, if it's consent between two people, he says,
let them have at it. He says. He says, don't
get involved unless somebody's getting hurt, or somebody's screaming, or

(01:21:08):
someone asks for your help. He says, do what you
have to do. He says, that's why I have emergency
service here. He says, because I can trust you guys
not to overreact. I said, all right, that sounds right
with that. With that, now we all break up. You
gotta post over here on the west side. You gotta
post bang bang boom. Okay, I'm on West Street and

(01:21:29):
I'm walking down West Street and there's this huge crowd
in the middle of the street, and I kind of like,
let me see what's going on here. I go into
the center of the crowd and there are two people
and they're in a compromising position, if you will, and
they're in the middle of the street, and the people

(01:21:49):
are just watching, you know, and I had to turn
around and walk away. So now I walk into a
pizza place about a block away, and then there is
a gentleman with his son and he says to me, officer.
I said, yeah. He said, did you see what's going
on out in the street. I said, yes, I did.
He says, well, can't you do anything about it? I said, sir,

(01:22:10):
I said, my hands are tied. I says, if these
people are consensual, I said, my orders to let anything happen.
He said, well, it's not right. I said yeah. I says,
I agree with you. It's not right. But that's what's happening.
So yeah, that was like the beginning of the end.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):
I think, yeah, And because that's the thing, I mean, listen,
if that's going to happen, can you get a room.

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
Get a room. I'll tell you tell you another funny story.
It's what is the Labor Day Parade on Eastern Parkway,
you know, the West Indian Day Parade. And I'm working
with Patty Murphy and Jimmy Cole. Both were excellent cops,
good guys. You know. I can't say enough about him. Actually,

(01:22:53):
Patty Jimmy Cole was my my wife's cousin, so he's
a family member, if you will. Somehow there was a
job that we responded to, but somehow we wound up
in the middle of the parade as a parade float
going down Eastern Parkway with truck six and where people
are applauding and we're in the parade. I had no

(01:23:14):
idea how it happened because I was riding in the
back and the next thing I know, we're on Eastern
Parkway and we're part of the parade. So you never
know where you're gonna wind up.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
Happy accident, you.

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
Know what, Nobody got hurt, nobody got nothing. I think
that was the year that there was a fellow who
had fallen off a float and then got run over
by the float.

Speaker 1 (01:23:33):
Yeah, somebody told me that story a few weeks ago.
I'm trying to remember. I think it might have been
my grand Yeah, it was one of those years that yeah,
somebody did. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stories with
that particular detail. It's not an easy detail to work.
The boy boy.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
You can guarantee it's gonna be shot fired somewhere on
that one. Yeah, and yet they allow it to happen
each year, you know, which is incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
It's the best thing. And don't get mad at me
for saying this, folks, I'm not trying to be insulting
or crass and I say it, but it's essentially a
very very ghetto version of Marty Gross. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is what Yeah,
that's an excellent point. And you know the Crown Heights riots,
I don't know if you remember that, and that was that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
After Kiko Garcia got shot or the Jewish guy ran
over the Black kids.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
That's the Jewish guy running over the Washington Heights with
the other one. Yeah, the hot solo, the hot Sola,
And what happened was is that that one sour really quickly. Also,
you know, my wife worked a lot of on that,
the details and stuff like that. But that was another
horror story. You know, it was a terrible accident and
you know, it was taken away out of proportion, but

(01:24:41):
that's what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:24:43):
Yeah, that is and again you never know what you're
going to be thrust into because that went on for
a few days. And I think because Washington Heights after
the Garcia shooting was ninety one, Crown Heights was ninety two,
And of course there was the controversial with ninety one
let them vent by Mary Dinkins chief ahnomone put a
stop to real quick. Yeah, So ninety two guys had

(01:25:04):
learned their lesson and they were ready. Even though it
was unfortunate, they were ready, and things died down a
hell of a lot quicker in ninety two than they
did the previous year at least.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
Yeah, well ninety two, Like you say, you know, was
it ninety two? Let me see eighty nine, let me
see ninety one, ninety one? It was ninety one. Let's
let's go to the fourteenth Street train wreck. Are you
familiar with that at all?

Speaker 1 (01:25:27):
That was the derailment, right with Rob Brandon Trunk Conductory
I did.

Speaker 3 (01:25:30):
That's exactly right, a derailment. And you know the bottom
line was is that this guy was drunk to begin with,
and he should have never been running a train, you know,
there was there was two hundred and sixteen people on
that train. Five people died that night, you know he
was doing. Now, what happened was is that we were
on another detail. We were out at all right. We

(01:25:56):
were in Manhattan already down at the park, Tompkins Square Park.

Speaker 1 (01:25:59):
And Square Park that was a conflagration of its own exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:26:03):
And again they put us out there. I don't know why,
because it was more of a patrol kind of thing.
You know, we were securing in the premise. But we
were there, and we were there twenty four hours. They
had us there on overtime and stuff. But we were
finishing up a tour. It was, uh, we were finished.
It was we were on our way home. We've done.
We were face to face and we were leaving. But

(01:26:27):
about twelve ten, twelve fifteen, maybe a little earlier whatever,
I don't remember the exact time, the call comes in
that there's a train wreck on fourteenth Street, you know,
a train derailment on fourteenth Street. What happened was is
that this guy was drunk. And if you go to
the Wikipedia and read up about it, he admits. He
says that he blacked out at twenty eighth Street. He says,

(01:26:48):
at twenty eighth Street, that's the last thing he remembers.
And the train was doing about fifty to fifty five
miles an hour at that point in time, much too
fast to come into fourteenth Street because at fourteenth Street,
just above fourteenth or below fourteenth Street, they were doing
some work. So at fourteenth Street he was supposed to
switch from one lane to the other lane, one track

(01:27:08):
to the other track, and because he was going so
fast when he went to do that switch, he wasn't
able to do it. The train is going too fast,
and the locks that come down to slow a train down,
he was going too fast that he knocked them down,
and the train just did whatever it wanted to do.
So now we leave Tompkins Square Park. We're probably the
first people there. We were probably the first people there,

(01:27:29):
because you know Tompkin Square Park in relationship to where
the fourteenth Street was. We're fourteenth Street and Lexington Avenue.
So now I go down the subway. I look at
the first train, the first train, where the motorman should be.
The train is now wrapped around a steel column end
to end. The roof has been ripped off. And I

(01:27:51):
can't tell where one train begins, one car begins, and
one car ends. It's a mess. The only thing I
do notice is that the first train, the motiveman is missing.
I don't know where the motivemate is. So now I
said the guys the ass is, let's see if we
can find this. If this guy's been ejected or where
it was. Little did we know that he was sitting

(01:28:14):
across the street watching the thing the whole time because
he was still drunk, and he had two beers after
he had he got out to try and calm his
nerves down. I think if you look at the Wikipedia,
he blew a crazy number when he was drunk, but
he should never have been running the train. So now

(01:28:34):
I'm down there with Tommy Obanski, nice guy, Tommy Bansky.
Tommy and I go way back. So we're searching the
train for bodies or whoever's alive, whoever we can help,
we find this one guy. Now, I don't know what
magic happens or how this happens, but I've been on

(01:28:55):
two separate jobs where a person has been knocked out
of their clothing. Don't know how that happens, but people
have been knocked out of their clothing. I don't know
if they're trying to get out. This guy is pinned
in the train car, but he's naked all right. So now,
but but the funny part is is there's a dead
body on top of him, so he can't get out.

(01:29:16):
The dead bodies on top of him. The Tommy and
I now we're there to help this guy out. So
we take the dead body, We grab the body, We
take the body out of there, and we put it
up on the roof of the train. Now we're trying
to get this guy out, but he's been in the train.
It becomes it's one hundred and forty degrees down in
that tunnel. It becomes one hundred and forty degrees down

(01:29:38):
there with everybody down there, we're trying to run tools.
You know, you're using your tools for extrication and stuff
like that to spread things apart, but you're creating a
hazardous environment. You got hazardous gases, you got carbon monoxide,
you got whatever you want is bad. It's down there
at this point in time, and it's like I say,
one hundred and forty degrees down there. Interesting point. Just

(01:29:59):
let me go back one second. While we're searching around,
I find a broken water pipe, and with this water pipe,
it becomes my oasis. Every time I start to feel
a little drowsyer I found, I feel a little bed
or feel something, you know, oozy. I go back to
the water pipe and I take a shower. The water
is shirting like crazy, so I'm soaking wet, I'm drinking water,

(01:30:20):
I'm hydrating. I'm in pretty good condition for one hundred
and forty degrees. Back to me and Tommy with the
dead body. We've taken the top. We've taken the body
off the top, and we've put it on top of
the train cart. Now we're trying to get this guy.
He's got no clothes on, Like I say, don't know
why he's got no clothes on, but he's naked. He's
got blasted out of his clothes somehow. So we reach down.

(01:30:40):
Tommy's trying to grab him, trying to grab him. So
Tommy says, I can't get him. He he's slippery. I says,
grab onto something. So Tommy says I can't. I said,
grab on shnanky. So the guy says, you guys got
to stop falling around. He says, and get me out.
Of here, he says, get me out of here. So
ultimately we're able to get him out. We free him
and we get him out there. Ps A week go by,

(01:31:01):
and well, Major Maya Dinkins has showed up at the
location and and he had a press conference right from there.
He says that we're looking for here. We are here.
There's a picture of U. There's a picture of me
and my sister in law.

Speaker 1 (01:31:18):
Yeah, we can see that pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:31:19):
Yeah, me and my sister in law. That's my wife's sister.
And and we're at the train wreck. And uh So
about a week later, Maya Dinkins he uh, he has
a party at Gracy Mansion for the all of the
uh the rescue work is all the first responders to

(01:31:40):
the to the train wreck. So Tommy and I are
sitting on the steps of Gracie Mansion. We're just sitting there,
and I've got a bottle of beer in my hand,
and Tommy's got a bottle of beer in his hand.
But unbeknownst to us, we don't realize that at this
point in time, everybody else who's been drinking beer has
lined up all the bottles and the back of us.
So it looked like we had like six or eight

(01:32:02):
cases of beer, you know, at least. So somebody walks
in one of these. One of the officials walk in,
I don't know, Deputy mayor or something, and he looks
at all the bottles in the back of us, and
he looks at us drinking the beer and he said, boys,
you guys drink a lot of beer. So Tommy turns
around and he looks and then he says, he says, oh,
he says, that's nothing. He said, you should see what

(01:32:23):
we do at the firehouse. He says, so the so
that was that was a but that was a nice thing.

Speaker 1 (01:32:32):
Absolutely in the atrobat is such a change?

Speaker 3 (01:32:34):
Yeah, yeah, may and Dinkins did he did. I don't.
I don't remember ever going to Gracy Mansion for for
a party for the for first responders. I'll tell you
a story about Gracy Mansion. One night, Jerry Daniello and
myself were on a sniper post on the roof and
it's cold. It's cold, and it's damp. It's cold, and
we're on the roof. So I said to Jerry, I said,

(01:32:55):
you know, I said, Jerry, I said, they're having a
party downstairs. I said, they're eating, they're drinking. Their said,
they're having a good time. I says, I'm going downstairs.
I said, I want to see if I can get
us maybe some hot chocolate for me. I says, a
cup of coffee for you. I says, I'm done. I
says this. This is you know, nobody's going to shoot
these people. I said, they're in the building. I said,
we're on the post. I says, and we're freezing. So

(01:33:16):
with that, I leave the roof. I come down to
fly the stairs, and as I'm coming down the stairs,
some guy in the suit says to me. He says,
can I help you, officer. So I said to myself,
I could play this two ways. I says, I could
be nice and tell them what I need. I said,
I can say no, you can't help me, you know, So,
I says to him, I says, yeah, I said, maybe

(01:33:36):
you can't help me. I said. My partner and I
are on the roof. I sayid, we're freezing. I says,
I would like to see if I can get some
hot chocolate for myself, maybe some coffee for my friend Tommy,
for my friend Dan Jerry. He says all right. He
says go upstairs. He says, I'll see what I can
do for you. I says, okay. So about five or
ten minutes go by, and this first grade detective comes upstairs.

(01:34:00):
He's got a platter in his hand, a silver platter.
He's got a coup of he's got a pot. He's
got a pot of hot chocolate in one side, a
pot of cough in the other, and all sorts of
pastry in the middle of the plate, all sorts of
Danish and pastry and fancy stuff. And he says to me,
he says, which one of you's yelled at the chief?
He says, he says, which one of youse guys yelled

(01:34:20):
at the Chief? I said, I didn't yell at him,
I said, but that would be me, he says. He
sends him up with his compliments. I said, we'll tell him.
I said, thank you very much. So, you know, you
turn something bad into something good, awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:34:31):
Awesome, And there's a lot of great stories like that
from that era. And you know, let's you never forget
executives like that to take care of the men. And
that was the chief who certainly in that moment did so.
Perhaps with that chief wherever he may be.

Speaker 3 (01:34:41):
I'll tell you a funny story. When I was in
the Rip unit, there used to be a place at
headquarters called Catch and it was another It was just
another place with more photographs and everything. And we had
this high visibility robbery that had gone down and the
guy had taken a beatn and this and that and everything.
So my boss tell me, He says, take him down

(01:35:02):
to the Catch unit and let him look to some
pictures of you know, let's see if we can narrow
it down to what we're looking for. I says, okay.
So I take him down to the Cat unit and
I park in front of police headquarters and it says
no parking for press only. For press only, it says,
So I parked there. I says, who's going to give
me a summons? So I come out. I come out

(01:35:26):
and there's a captain there, and I says. He says
to me, is this your car? I says yeah. He says,
they sent me out here to stick one up your backside.
He says, I said, what do you mean? He says,
you're not allowed to park here. I says, cap I said,
let me explain something to you. This guy was robbed.
I says, take a look at him. The guy is
bandaged up, he's bandages, got Bracy's walking with a crutch herself.

(01:35:49):
I says, I was requested to take him to the
catch unit. I says, I'd had no place to park.
I said, this is as close as I could park him.
I was able to talk myself out of that one.
You know what I mean, because he says, I'm the
They sent me a stick one down your back. I says,
why because the press has got no place to park,
and and the police car was here. You know. He said, well,
he says, you can't do it again. I said, well,

(01:36:09):
thank you very much, and he.

Speaker 1 (01:36:10):
Let me go on that one reasonable reasonable you know, listen,
that's that's all you need. John Valenti, Yeah, exactly. John
Valenti's in the jet by the way. He's watching via LinkedIn.
He says it was an honor working with Carl and
ESU Truck six. If you didn't know something, Carl always
took a time to teach you a true email. Thank
you John for the comment. John, I'm trying to get
you on the show too, you know, so give me
a call.

Speaker 3 (01:36:31):
He's a good kid too.

Speaker 1 (01:36:32):
Yeah, I'd love to get John on the show sometime
and do some conversation with him if he's willing. So, John,
you got my number. It should be on LinkedIn contact SEC.
Should give me a call when you are so inclimb,
my friend. Good to see you. So you're having a blast,
you know. And then we get to two thousand and one,
and you know, at the end of those twenty years
you decided to leave. So what made you say, you
know what, I had a lot of fun doing this

(01:36:53):
sixteen of the twenty years, so that you were on
the job, we're in emergency. What made you go?

Speaker 3 (01:36:57):
Well, what made me go, and probably I would have
not gone, is that my son goes into school at
that point in time, he goes into kindergarten, and now
we need to have somebody here full time. You know,
somebody's got to retire. I'm in the right position to retire,
and I do say I stay home and become a
stay home dad, you know what I mean. My wife

(01:37:19):
is finishing up her time on the job, and my
son is he's in school, and I'm taking him to
school every day and spending the summer vacation with him.
You know, when he's on summer vacation we called the
camp Call because my son's name is Carl, and we
would go every place. We'd go to the museums, we
go to the arcade, we go to Coney Island, like
I said, you know, and we do everything together. And

(01:37:40):
that's the way it was. So that's why I had
to leave more and more than anything, you know, it's
not something I wanted to do. You know, I'll tell
you a funny story. And it still goes on. You know,
you go to a wedding or you go someplace. And
earlier on when I first retired, people would say, oh,
do you miss it? And I'd say, every day, you know,
And my wife said, what do you tell that that?

(01:38:01):
Because I do? I miss it every day every day
this you know, I missed doing what I did. I
miss being with the people more than anything else.

Speaker 2 (01:38:08):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:38:10):
We were in Manhattan one night. It was Billy DeSantis
and myself. We're in Manhattan and and a couple comes
out of a liquor store and they got a bottle
of wine in their hand, and they're gonna go and
walk to Central Park and they're gonna sit down and
drink the bottle of wine. But the guy doesn't have
a cork screw or a bottle opener, and I hear

(01:38:31):
him talking to the girl. He says, I don't know
how we're gonna open this. Now. You know, realistically, I
thought about that, because I know liquor stores they'll sell
you a cheap dollar corkscrew something to pop it open.
But he, you know, he just didn't think about it.
So he says to the girl, he says, I don't
know how we're gonna open this. She says I We'll
figure it out. And they're walking away. But I hear
over here the entire conversation. So I called the guy.

(01:38:52):
I said, come over here. He says what I said,
come over here for a second. I said, where are
you going? He said, oh, we're going to Central Park.
We're gonna sit down up ba, I said, a bottle
of wine. He looks at me like, like, what's the
guy gonna do? Take my wine from me? I said,
give me a bottle the wine. I carried a Swiss
army knife like everybody else did, with my corkscrew on it.
I pulled the cork out from and I put it
back in a little bit. I said, have a good

(01:39:13):
time this saysn't be good, and he said. He looked
at me like like he was amazed. He says, he says,
you're gonna let me go. I said, yah, I said,
I said, you know, there's different types of people. You know,
you're not gonna be raped. You know, you're gonna be
riding around and making noise. I said, you're gonna sit
down with your girlfriend, You're gonna have a glass of wine.
You're gonna have a good time. That's what's up that
there's a huge difference. I says, enjoy yourself and the guy.

Speaker 2 (01:39:35):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:39:36):
Another positive interaction with a police officer. You know, for
the most part, you know, when a fireman comes to
your house, he's doing the right thing. He's putting the
fire out, he's trying to help you out. Sometime you've
got some sort of problematically or something. When a cop
comes to somebody's door, usually it's bad news. Hello, somebody
has dyed, you know, somebody's in an accident. They're not

(01:39:59):
there to to spread niceties. Usually they're there to bring it.
So any small thing that you could do as a
cop to help people be happy about it, you.

Speaker 1 (01:40:11):
Do it exactly. And there's so many stories like that,
And there's so many times with emergency service specifically, it
has had a role that you come upon a lot
of ugly situations, but there's plenty of uplifting situations too,
and esus a big part of that. The job tell
you stories.

Speaker 3 (01:40:27):
It's about about two o'clock in the afternoon and the
job comes over. It's on sixty fifth Street and I
think maybe second Avenue, third Avenue, I forget where exactly was.
And it's a kid locked in a safe. Now, if
there was ever a job that had my name on it,
that's the job. That's the job. So we roll on that.

(01:40:48):
We pull up and what happened was is that the
two kids who play and hide and seek, his brother
hides in his father's safe and closes the door, locks
the and spins the dial on the kid. Say to
say the kid is locked in the safe. There's bad
news here. So I show up and I said to

(01:41:11):
the father, I says, do you have any combination on
this thing? He says, well, I got one of two numbers.
He says, I don't remember the numbers all that Well,
this and that. Because there's there's a codicile, there's an
addendum to this. There's a background to this. What happens
later on, I'll tell you. I said, well, give me
the numbers he got. So he gives me two numbers,
and I start to fool around with the two numbers
he gives me, and I'm filling around, falling around. All right,

(01:41:34):
the fire department is there. But luckily the fire chief
who shows up with them was a friend of mine
who worked in the six to so with me, who
went from the police department to the fire department. Okay,
Ricky Flood and then his brother Jimmy still worked in
the six to so.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
So.

Speaker 3 (01:41:48):
Ricky stands back. He takes a backside because these guys
are ready to throw a d M fifty or a
hearse tool into the door and try to pop this
safe open with the kid. I said, give me a
few minutes. I said, let me see what I could
do here. So back and forth, back and forth. I
opened the safe up, take the kid out. The reason
the father didn't want to give us the numbers, didn't

(01:42:08):
want to give us whatever, was because he was a
drug dealer. The safe was filled with his son and drugs.
So we had to take the kid out, and then
we had to lock the father up for the drugs.

Speaker 1 (01:42:20):
So again only in New York. Only in New York.

Speaker 3 (01:42:27):
You say to yourself, you know I did that.

Speaker 1 (01:42:30):
You know I lived that, and you sure did in
those twenty years. And well, this conversation is flowed by.
It's been very enjoyable. Billy Kennedy, you are right in
the chat. My friend Carl, you bring it back so
many great memories, he says, great interview. Indeed it was.
Kevin Coochler also says, hello, of course he works in truck.
Want Grady Man better man. Good to see if my
friend he was a guest in this show, like Billy
was a while ago. So that brings us now into

(01:42:51):
the rapid fire. It's been a hell of a conversation.
I've really enjoyed this. Five hit run questions for me,
five hit and run answers from you. Hopefully we'll have
a sponsor for this pretty soon. Us to vict your
fire up to music if you're so inclined for this segment.
And besides the Stanley tool, here's the first question the
rabbit fire. Favorite tool that you like to carry on
the truck?

Speaker 3 (01:43:12):
Carry with me?

Speaker 1 (01:43:13):
Yeah, favorite tool on the truck. I mean that the
truck carried.

Speaker 3 (01:43:16):
Just something that was on the truck.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:19):
I thought the rabbit tool was a very versatile tool.
The rabbit tool, you know, I used to use it.
Are you familiar with the rabbit too at all?

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
Yeah, I've heard of guys to have talked about on
the show.

Speaker 3 (01:43:27):
Okay. It's a small handheld hydraulic unit with a piston
and two flat jaws that interlock into each other and
when you pump it up, they separate so you can
get it into a crack. Maybe a quarter inch maybe
maybe three eighths three hs is big. Quarter inch is
something you could get in there and you would pump it,
and when you pumped it, it would actually lift itself up,

(01:43:49):
so you could blow a door open. And I used
a rabbit tool a lot the entries on doors that were,
you know, we need to get into windows sometime when
you had a person you'd go into a fire escape
and the person was down on the well. I thought
the rabbit tool is a pretty versattle tool, you know.
But you can't knock a Halligan tool, and you can't
knock a sledgehammer, you know what I mean. Those things
got you true absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:44:10):
Second question of the rapid fire. Most uplifting job you
had in Truck.

Speaker 3 (01:44:13):
Six the upliftings, y'all. I had had to be the
fellow on Christmas Eve, all right when the guy uh
and I said to him, I said, you don't want
your children to remember this every Christmas Eve, every Christmas
day that you you know, killed yourself on this day, because,
like I say, for years afterwards, that guy would call
me up on a Christmas Eve or whenever I was in,

(01:44:34):
because he would call up usually I was there, and
I don't know if he would call and say, you know,
when's this guy coming in? And somebody would tell him
why I'm coming in, But I always picked up the
phone and he would say because I'd say six truck
police off Cerusso can I help you? You know? And
he say, is that you? And I say, yeah, it's me.
Is that you? You know? And you know the guy
got along well.

Speaker 1 (01:44:53):
Absolutely, and again it's good to see that he was
doing a heck of a lot better. Third question of
rapid fire from your time teaching STS, what was the
most in enjoyable but hardest class to teach? You know what?

Speaker 3 (01:45:04):
As the ropes are very hard for some people. I
don't know, why, Well, I know why because it was
hard for some people. Some people couldn't make a clove hitch,
you know, some people couldn't make a square knot and
and the most and the most not that they couldn't
seem to make the most was you would make an
eight at the end of the line, you know, just
like to just drop it almost like the eight was

(01:45:25):
the hardest line to make, you know. Or when you
were going to secure the tail end, you would tie
it up and then you'd secure the end so it
wouldn't dangle and everything. People seem to have a problem
with that, you know, tying shoes is uh, I guess
the limit. But but a lot of guys excelled in that.
Kenny Kenny was very good. Kenny Richardson was a very
good knock guy. Matter of fact, he's the only guy

(01:45:46):
that I ever knew that can make a monkey fist
monkey ball. You ever see the monkey fist ball. It's
it's it's woven into itself and it becomes a ball.
They use it on old wooden ships to throw the
line between each ship. They would put the ball on
the the line and then they would throw the ball.
It was called the monkey fist.

Speaker 1 (01:46:04):
I've seen it after learn how to do it. I'm
trying to get out to fire down here at Connecticut,
so Clovid is something I've been doing a lot of lately.
Especially when you got those extension ladders. You gotta know
how to tie it off the clothing.

Speaker 3 (01:46:14):
I had a guy one time, you know, not to
I know you're on a roll. You want to end it,
that's fine. Again, when I was the repel master, I
had the guy hooked up. The only thing that wasn't
hooked up to him I had. He didn't have his
eight ring attached to the caribina. He wasn't ready to
go right. So I said to him. I says you ready,

(01:46:34):
He says yeah. I says you ready? He says yeah.
And then I lean over and I attached the caribina
to his eight ring and he looks at me like,
you know, he realized he wasn't ready. He was ready
to go out the door, yeah, but he wasn't ready.
I says, you ready, he says yeah. I says are
you ready? He says yeah? And I grabbed the freaking

(01:46:55):
thing and I hook it up and I says, now
you're ready.

Speaker 1 (01:46:57):
He saved his life. Yeah, listen, he was gonna go
out the door, all right, but not in the way.

Speaker 3 (01:47:03):
And you know, you got It's it's a huge responsibility.
You know. You gotta look at these guys up and down.
You got to make sure that the roper's right should be,
you know, between the legs and whatever side you're going down,
you know, left handed, right hand or whatever you're doing,
it's important to be squared away with that. That that's
there's no error for margin, uh a margift error.

Speaker 1 (01:47:22):
In that one.

Speaker 3 (01:47:23):
You know. It's We had a guy one time in
uh a nursing home and the two doors came together.
The bathroom door was here and the opening door was here,
so you couldn't open the you couldn't get in because
the bathroom door. It was a bad design in the building.
It was a terrible design. So what happened was is
that they were going to come over the roof and

(01:47:45):
come to the window. And when I went up to
look to see what they hooked on too, I said,
this is no good for you. I said, you find
something else to hook on to. They had hooked onto
the cast iron vent that came out of the out
of the roof. You know, it looks secure, but it's
only hell. Then lead it whatever I says. Look, I said,
this is no good. I said, find another place to
secure this rope. I said, before you do what you're

(01:48:05):
going to do, it's playing your rope. You know, even
if you had to go to the other side of
the building and tie you off on something.

Speaker 1 (01:48:11):
And here's the thing too, it's as I've heard a
thousand times over, doesn't matter if you're in a special
operations you don like, you know, emergency service on the
police side or the fire department side. It's a perishable skill.
You got to stay up on it.

Speaker 3 (01:48:22):
You don't say no doubt about it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:23):
You're going to lose that skill.

Speaker 3 (01:48:24):
There's no doubt about it. I I've forgotten many things
that I you know, I would have to go back
to school and be retrained somehow. You know. There's there's
no doubt about it. There's a lot of things that
I've forgotten.

Speaker 1 (01:48:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:48:35):
And I tell my son, I says, you know everything
I know, but not everything I know. You know what
I mean. It's it's that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah,
I knew. You know, I've forgotten a lot of stuff, you.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
Know, right, Listen, and the guys that are in that
were in the chat tonight that were an emergency. You
guys can to test the same thing. It's important to
stay up on it. Missus Sims is the fourth question
of the viabid fire. But Sims taught you a lot.
What's one lesson she taught you, either directly or just
by the way she carried just herself rather that stuck
with you.

Speaker 3 (01:48:59):
Yeah, I tell you about Missus Simms. I called them
miss Simmons, you know what I mean. Miss Simms is
you know, but she was a missus, you know, and
she had a family of her own. Like I say
her her grandson's name was Booboo. I know that I'm
gonna hear that later on from somebody. But her grandson's
name was Booble, and him and I were best friends.
You know what, back then, you didn't have to think
about teaching anybody anything because everybody was natural. Everybody was

(01:49:23):
It didn't matter if she was black, I was white.
It didn't exist back then for some reason. You know,
everybody was treated the same way. At least in my
neighborhood on Franklin Avenue, you know, across the street was
Frank's boot black.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36):
It was.

Speaker 3 (01:49:36):
It was a place where they used to go and
get their shoes polished. Up the block was Call's Chicken Shack.
You know, if the neighborhood was in transition. But nobody
cand nobody, nobody panicked, nobody did anything.

Speaker 1 (01:49:47):
It was.

Speaker 3 (01:49:47):
It was just the way it was. You know, you
accepted it, and you accepted these people as friends. What
I learned from her, I don't know. She was always
on time. I mean, I tell you that to be
honest with you. You know, she'd pick me up at
school and take me back to the house, and I
told you about it. She'd make this yellow cake with
this pink frosting, you know, every so often. I knew
that as I was walking up the steps, because she

(01:50:08):
lived up on the third floor, I would smell the cake.
I knew she was baked, had baked, and there was
cake in the oven there.

Speaker 1 (01:50:16):
That's one of the best smells. Yeah, that's where you
think the Lord for the sense of smell, because man,
I don't like a good cake. I can agree with
you on that one final question of the rapid fire.
And I'm sure there's a lot to unpack here, but
if you had to pick one thing if you could
define it in a sentence, rather, what's the thing you
missed most about working in ESU.

Speaker 3 (01:50:33):
I just think that you know what working in NSU
and NSU ESU. I'm sorry ESU. Yeah, working in ESU,
it's the camaraderie. You know. We spent Christmases together, you know,
we spent Thanksgivings together, We spent you know, it was
almost like your second family. You know, the guys there,

(01:50:55):
they were there for you most of the time. You know,
if there was an issue. You know, we had one
guy I'm not going to mention any names to besmirch anybody,
but we had one guy that was you know, he
had problems, girl problems, and you know, we put him
on suicide watch, you know, because we were worried about
the guy. You know, we just had to on our own.
Nobody rided the guy out. We try to take care

(01:51:15):
of him. We did whatever we had to do. And
you know, it's just the way it was, you know,
it was it was my extended family. And I most
missed most of all is my interaction with the people
on the street. You know a lot of people didn't
know who emergency service was. We were in central Park
one time and the ABC News van got stuck in

(01:51:37):
the grass. Somehow they had rained and the news van
has got generators and all sorts of nonsense, and they
got stuck in the rain. So I was at one
truck that night, so we went out with one truck.
We go over there to help him out. And the
guy who's driving the van, he says, who are you guys?
You know what what the parping you? Because you know
we're wearing baseball caps. You don't really know who you

(01:51:59):
know who you guys? He says, Well, I said, we're
emergency service and you know where. I said, we're the
guys that are gonna get your van stuck out of
unstuck in the mud. I said, that's who we are.
So we we took the cable, we double whipped it,
you know, we sent it out. We came back, so
we get the double strength out of the cable. We
put it out. He says. The tow truck tried, he
pulled me out before he couldn't get me out. I says,
we'll get you out, and we pulled him out with

(01:52:19):
the s.

Speaker 1 (01:52:20):
U truck and that's sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead.
That was one of the things. That's one of the
reasons why the uniform flipped for the unit in ninety
four ninety five, and that was where it said NYPD
Emergency Service Unit in the back and the clear lettering
on the front. And they still wear it to this day.

Speaker 3 (01:52:34):
At I'm gonna tell you something. I know that you
got your rapid fire thing.

Speaker 1 (01:52:39):
That's fine, I don't care, this is great. Keep going on.

Speaker 5 (01:52:41):
I'm gonna show you something because that uniform, that uniform
was designed by me, Lieutenant Green.

Speaker 1 (01:52:53):
Rich Green, Yeah, Richie Green.

Speaker 3 (01:52:55):
What happened was is that it was what you said
that because in ninety three, what happened was when the
World Trade said it gets hit for the first time.
The chief is standing on the edge of the of

(01:53:15):
the edge of the hole where the building got struck
and everything, and he says, who's emergency service? Which guy's
are emergency service? And it was hard to tell who
was emergency service. So here's me and Lieutenant Green. Can
you see that? Yeah, So me and Lieutenant Green, they

(01:53:39):
formed the Uniform Committee, and on the uniform Committee, we
do research and we are I'm pretty much responsible for
what the uniform looks like today. Ritchie Green and I
Jack Cambria was on the uniform committee and we we
pretty much put that uniform together. I'll tell you another thing,

(01:54:00):
the longevity bar. You know that white bar that everybody
wears with the years they've been on Yep. I made
that very first longevity bar that on the uniform committee.
I made the first one on my table, and then
it was reproduced and used as a department, so that
it was it was adapted by the department after I
made it. It has meaning that the white bar mean

(01:54:22):
was a pure kind of thing, and the gold trim
around that meant five golden years, ten golden years. And
I did it in Roman numerals if you look at
the Roman numerals, or it should be unless they change it,
so that it was like a historical thing, a longevity
kind of thing, and it all, the whole white bar
has a meaning to it. It was made on my
kitchen table. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:54:43):
And again that that uniform one of the key aspects
of it. And I'm gonna share something momentarily from that
I got from Google at the search for that's one
of the key things. And I talked about what my core,
of my core was not a while ago. Is just
that that it's it was key in making sure that
the public knew who you guys are. I know it's
a smaller picture, but you could see in the template

(01:55:03):
of the uniform to this day NYPD Police Emergency Service
unit on the front along with the last name of
the officer their batch number underneath the cap. And then
of course you go to the back of it and
it says NYPD Police Emergency Service. Because I think there
were some jobs you guys were getting confused with firemen,
you know, so that was one of the main things
from nineteen ninety four to this day. I didn't know
that I knew Mike Core had something to do with
the two, but I talked to one of the guys tonight.

(01:55:24):
There you go, I've something.

Speaker 3 (01:55:25):
Yeah, I know Richie Green, Jack Cambria, and myself, a
couple other people. We went through a lot of things.
There was a lot of different things, you know. Jack
was like the post the boy. There's a I think
it was called Parks the uniform down on Third Avenue,
I think that's what. I think that was the name
of it, and they had Jack's picture in there of
like the very first uniform. Jack's a good looking guy.

(01:55:46):
Eloquent in the speech and stuff like that, you know
what I mean. And I think that he always dressed
to the nines.

Speaker 2 (01:55:51):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:55:52):
You could be on a pin job of something, or
you could be under a train and everybody'd come out filthy,
and Jack would come out mint like he just came
out of the shower. But we were on a We
were on a train job one time and I came out.
My shoes were a mess, My feet were in the mud,
my shoes in the mud. And the commanding officer walks
over to me and he looks at it, my shoes

(01:56:13):
and he says, he says, rouber Hershey, bar on those.
He says, do something about those shoes. You know, I said, Chief,
I said, I just came out from the train, you know,
give me a break.

Speaker 1 (01:56:22):
So Rick Bartinez is in the chat, by the way,
he's just hey, great time. Rick's been on the show.
He was He was on the show twice for his
own episode, and then of course when I did the
show on the ninety one UH Union Squared the Rail.
And Jack Cambri has been on the show before too
for my Hostel Negotiation mini series. So it's great talking
with him. UH and yeah, this is great, man. I
have really times flown by. I don't even know what

(01:56:43):
to say. This was a heck of a conversation, my friend,
Thank you. Before I say goodbye to the audience, to
stick around. We'll talk off there. Any shoutouts that you
have by all means, fire away, whatever shoutouts you want
to get.

Speaker 3 (01:56:53):
You know, I was going to prepare something because what
I want to do is six has taken a hit.
A lot of our guys have died, you know, and
not only from world trades and illnesses, but just because
you know, like I, like I say, there was Jack Murphy,
Louis Marsicano, Eddie Crean, Bobby Gordello, Steven Petrullo, Jimmy Cole,

(01:57:18):
Patty Murphy. It's almost like and I can go on
and on and on. It's like thirty guys who have
passed away. It's like almost the whole squad is gone.
And I feel blessed that myself and it's still a
few of my friends are around, you know. To think
that here we are, I mean I retired what twenty
twenty two years ago, whatever it is, you know, and
I'm still here. I feel blessed for that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:40):
As you should, and again thanks for coming on the way.
We connected as you reached out via my website Mike
clonemedia dot com. And like I said to you off
there before we came on, I'm like, I got to
call this guy, which was busy at the time with
other stuff, so called you up. And I'm glad I
did because, just like I said, this was a heck
of a conversation. So thank you very much. We will
talk off there, don't go anywhere. And thanks to everybody
who tuned in tonight. I appreciate all you. Uh you

(01:58:02):
did a great job as always in the audience YouTube
LinkedIn Facebook.

Speaker 3 (01:58:06):
Let me let me just tell you. I know, I
know they were almost done, but there was one job
I wanted to tell you about that that that I forget.
It was Bradhurst avingue in the Bronx. Okay, it was
the middle of January. What happened was we're helping the
DEA again. What happened was is that they're trying to
convict a bunch of guys for for drug trafficking and murder.

(01:58:31):
And what happened is is that they had shot one
woman and thrown her into this abandoned building. The building
was it had collapsed on inside of itself. It was
a five story brick building where all of the floors
inside had pancaked. So what happened was is that that
John mccardal was running the job and he said to me, Oh,

(01:58:52):
and I gotta tell you the other job too. John
mccadal is running the job, and he says to me,
he says, what do you think we need? I said, well,
we're gonna need crane. And he looked at me like,
I said, you know, the FBI, I'll pay for it.
We have aid, he says, and what else we're gonna need?
So I was with Danny mullane. Danny's another good guy.
Danny says, we're gonna need this because what we had
to do before we went down into this building that

(01:59:14):
had collapsed in on itself, we had to shore the
walls up.

Speaker 1 (01:59:18):
We had to put a roof on it.

Speaker 3 (01:59:19):
We had to fix the place so that we could
go in and make it safe. Otherwise you were running
the risk of all these walls falling down on everybody
in the pit. So we built it. We built shoring up,
we built the walls. You probably could have lived in
this house by the time we were done, and the
bottom line was we found the dead girl. We found
one shot to the head. We found her under all

(01:59:40):
the debris, and they were able to convict eight guys
and move right along with that. One more job, the
more job, and that'llbeit College Point. I get called by
by Paul Hargrove. I'm at the truck. He says, I
need you to come to this address. And so I said, okay,
what is it got? I gotta give you one more

(02:00:01):
job and you'll love this when I'm sorry, I sorry, Okay,
one more So. Paul Hargrove was in the College Point
and he says to me, he says, look, he says,
we've locked this guy up. He was a soldier of
fortune in Vietnam. He was this He was that the
dog has sat on his safe. In other words, the

(02:00:21):
dog is indicated that there's something in his safe. But
the guy won't give us the combination. We don't want
to go traditional way of ripping it open and stuff
like that. He says. What we want to do, he says, is, uh,
we want to open it with finesse. I said, okay,
So what happens is this? I uh, I go to

(02:00:47):
college point, dial open the safe. And what we do though,
I dial the safe open, but I don't open the door.
We use the R and I we used a robot.
I leave the bill and we used a robot to
open the door.

Speaker 1 (02:01:04):
John Delia's favorite tool.

Speaker 3 (02:01:07):
John John skeletor Yeah. You know, John was missed in
New York at one point in time.

Speaker 1 (02:01:13):
He was Yeah, I heard, I heard they used to
call him Skeletor. A friend of mine for the Bob
Squad told me they would call him skeletor Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:01:20):
So so I opened up the safe, I dialed open,
and I leave the room. And then what happens is
is that we send the RM I in to open
the door, and we opened up and the gun. The
safe was loaded with guns and ammunation and stuff like that,
trying to find something else because.

Speaker 1 (02:01:42):
He had how the which I appreciate you. All the
news came clippings tonight too. Made my job easy. I
could just let you go like he's you had a list,
like you know how organized you gotta be. You're one
of the most organized guests I've ever had.

Speaker 3 (02:01:55):
You know, we had a guy on time. I can't remember.
There was something I wanted to tell you about that.
I just, oh, I know, anyway, maybe the next time
I'll talk about it, if there's the next time.

Speaker 1 (02:02:07):
But oh, I know.

Speaker 3 (02:02:08):
When we were deployed to Dominican Republic with the Fire Department.

Speaker 1 (02:02:14):
This was what I was talking about earlier in nineteen
ninety eight. George.

Speaker 3 (02:02:17):
Yes, we go to the go, we go to the
fire department. We go there with the the fire department,
and you know what, at first, we're we're a separate unit.
At first, we're not really talking to each other, and
you know, it is what it is. But as time
goes by, we start to be become a cohesive unit,
a working unit, you know what I mean, And and

(02:02:37):
everybody's with each other. So what happens is that they
land us in the middle of the night and they
send us to what's called the Olympic Village. And evidently
there was an Olympics in the Dominican Republic at one
point in time. I had no idea about it. So
what happens now is that it's middle of the night.

(02:03:00):
There's no light, there's no electricity, there's no water, there's
no nothing. So again with the Stanley tool, at daybreak,
I go down and I find a cistern and it's
filled with water. But there's no way to get this
water into the building. So what I do is I
take the pump out of the Stanley unit and I
hook it up into the building and I start to
pump water into the building from the cistern which is

(02:03:22):
filled with water. And now we can take showers and
stuff like that. So what happens later on is that
now there's no electricity. So the guy says, one of
the guys in the fire department says, I did the math.
He says, he says, you can't light those light bulbs
with that generator. I said, what makes you say that?
He said, well, he says, did the generator is fifteen

(02:03:43):
hundred watts and this and Bapa bah I said that,
you know, I said, you get into technical. I said,
let's just I said, let's just give it a shot.
I says, let's see what happens. I was able to
light up two buildings with two generators, you know, and
we ran the pump almost twenty four hours a day
so the guys would have water. They called us the
pump house boys. What happened is when I first got off,
when we first got off the plane. That night, I

(02:04:06):
went out foraging. I found the tractor trailer with all
its hoses on it, but it had been in a wreck.
So I took all the hoses, all the clamps. I
used that to hook up everything so that I would
be able to get the water to the building. With
all the stuff that we had, there was no ice.
There was nothing to drink there. But we made friends
with just because don't take this out of you know.

(02:04:29):
It was a had a den of iniquity, a house
of ville repute across the street from where we were staying,
and they were the only ones with ice, and the
lady would sell us ice, so we were able to
get ice out of that. That was another good job.
And I'll tell you a funny story. It's it's daytime
and we're in the middle of the jungle. We're in

(02:04:50):
Dominican Republic, in the middle of jungle, and there was
a tower and a tree. So I climbed the tower
and I climbed the tree and I look off in
the distance. I said, hey, I said, there's a big
city over there, I says, Santa Domingo. I said, what
city is that? I said, But the hell are we?
They said, that's Santa Domingo. I said, why are we
staying in the city. I says, why are we staying
in the jungle?

Speaker 1 (02:05:10):
I said, Bild's character, Build's character and a lot of
the So I didn't know you were a FEMA guy.

Speaker 3 (02:05:17):
Oh yeah, I was one of the first female. I
was on the first FEMA deployment. Wow, the first of guys.

Speaker 1 (02:05:22):
Because he had ninety five Oklahoma City. A lot of
the ESU I didn't go to.

Speaker 3 (02:05:25):
I didn't go to Oklahoma. Mike Hanson went to Oklahoma.
He was the guy from six Truck and went to Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 (02:05:29):
Tommy Langon, Mike Curtain went, I think Commlin went down
there too, and then ninety eight I Paul Paracne went
down there. This before he went to the Bop Squad.

Speaker 3 (02:05:38):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (02:05:38):
Yeah, A few of the guys went down there. Quite
a few of the guys from FTOY Rescue that three
years later gave their lives at the Trade Center. So yeah,
we covered a lot tonight. This was a lot of
fun my friends. So like I said, stick around, we'll
talk off there. NEANXT to everybody who tuned in, and
I again, this was a hell of a show one
of my favorites that I've done, coming up next to
the Mike Canwavin podcast. Former FD and Y commissioner was

(02:05:59):
head of the union for thirty ten years. Then when
Howard Safer left the FD and Wyey go be the
police commissioner, he made a recommendation Mayor Juliani on who
he thought the next fire commissioner should be, and that
man was Tom von Essen, who was commission from nineteen
ninety six until the end of the Juliani administration in
two thousand and one. And that man will be joining
me this Friday for the Milestone volume seventy five of
the Best of the Bravest interviews with the FD and

(02:06:20):
wi's elite, and next Monday from my hometown currently the
chief of Operations for the New Haven Fire Department here
in Connecticut, Dan Coughlin, for another volume of what will
be the Best the Bravest nationwide edition that's next Monday
at six pm Eastern Standard Time. For those of you
listening on the audio side from their nineteen ninety six
album Load Metallica coming your Way with King Nothing. In

(02:06:40):
the meantime, behalf of producer Victor of the Ones and
twos backstage and Carl Russo Mike Clone. This has been
volume fifty three of the men inside the NYPD's Emergency
Service Unit. We'll see you next time. To all the
E comps work, it's a night's stay safe and as
the E man like to say, anytime, maybe can take
care of your.

Speaker 4 (02:06:55):
Nineteen siss s s ss.

Speaker 2 (02:08:00):
With something bad with somebody happen. I wish today.

Speaker 4 (02:08:05):
Are your that is bad hour?

Speaker 2 (02:08:08):
Think gold, think the bad you think to make your dad?
Are you find it bad? All the wants you, with
all the things you say, man, I don't cross it
down and you break your crown and you put y'all

(02:08:31):
braid up, up the snow on around just one ball.

Speaker 1 (02:08:35):
To day, don't play okay, I'm put the cat got
scroll bow man, your dad put your to day?

Speaker 2 (02:08:43):
Where's your clown? Take up bed? Where's your crown? Heart
is cold? By the soul, our heart is hard. It's cold.

(02:09:06):
Stay y'all you side. It's fine with somebody with some maid.
You with it knock away, yaw, you pass it by.
All the wants you, all the things you se, man

(02:09:28):
I don't crap this down when you break y'all crown.
Then you put y'all's baby up or just no water around?
Just want bob thing, take the baby up, Try put
the cattle scroll bowl and your left but jumped up dirt.
Where's your clown past down? Dump it? Oh where is

(02:09:54):
your crown? Oh we shall faith, Oh we shall birds

(02:10:44):
of this witch should wish to bad all that style
all it? Now? I own it all and I don't
care how.

Speaker 5 (02:10:58):
Care food watch you.

Speaker 2 (02:11:02):
Therefore what you say? Careful what you wish you very great?
And cambo, but you wish you jus shot, suspend it
all process to let you break Joe Brass, Let you
put John's baby up? But then no one just one

(02:11:24):
ball thing, don't you by n cattles crumb bullding you them?
But that day where the crown tapping you to nothing,

(02:11:49):
where'd you cry? Take You're just nothing? That s

Speaker 3 (02:12:03):
How to look through

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Episode 375: The E-Men: Inside The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit: Carl Russo (Volume 53)

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