Episode 381: The Best of The Bravest: Craig Monahan (Volume 76)

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

(01:01):
the best of the Bravest Interviews with the FD and
WYS a week. Good to be with you on this
Friday evening. It's been a busy week for the program,
busy week overall. But welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to
what is episode three hundred and eighty one here on
this last, well last Friday of October. As this year

(01:24):
winds down, year is flown by, that's for sure, and
this will be volume seventy six of the Best the
Bravest Interviews with the FT and Wives Elite. If you
have yet to check out the previous episode, it's a
fun one to do. And that was with Alix Slee,
formerly of WPIX, CBS as well as ABC seven, talking
about her journey through media respectively before departing and the
reasons why so. Someone that's watched her for a number

(01:46):
of years, especially when she was at CBS and later
on of course PIX two, it was fun to really
kind of get the insight into how she got to
where she did, and of course the backstory ultimately as
to why she left. So it's an episode definitely worth
your time. If you have yet to see it, get
to see all you in the channel already. And of course,
as you guys know by now, if you have any questions,
feel free to throw them in the chat. So we'll

(02:08):
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You'll hear from Billy Ryan a bit later before the
rapid fire. My next guest is a public servant whose
career reflects the true grit and versatility of first responders
in the city of New York. He began in the
subways as a New York City transit police officer. Pre
merged with the NYPD in nineteen ninety five, and this
was during one of the city's challenging era's crime was
definitely high in the late eighties and early nineties, and
he later made the jump from blue to bunker gear

(05:07):
when he laddered over to the fd and Y in
nineteen ninety three and served in Lower Manhattan primarily all
of those years. As a matter of fact, with latter
five so he pounded the pavement at Columbus Circle. He
rode the rig at Latter five and that for this
volume seventy six of the best, the bravest interviews with
the FDN wives Elite. It's mister Craig Monahan. Craig welcome,
how are.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
You, how you doing? Everybody good to be here.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
Thank you, hav good to have you. Thanks for making
the time and looking forward to this one. So before
we get into anything with your career, tell me where
did you grow up and any family involved in any
former civil service or were you first generation.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
First generation cop and fireman. My dad was in the Navy,
and he told us well about being independent and taking
care of what needed to be done. Doing the right thing.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
The right thing you certainly did so. I mean as
you get older, especially once you hit the teenage years,
you have a lot of people telling you your parents,
for example, or anybody else in the neighborhood, Hey, take
the city test. It's a good job, good pension, and
so on and so forth. Was that your case taking
all the test?

Speaker 2 (06:06):
That was it. But there was some people I looked
up to in the neighborhood that were doing real good
guys like Timmy post on the Fight Apartment. When I
was a little kid, he built a fort in the
backyard and Princess Bay of his like in the woods
behind his yard that we all played in, and I
was just amazed by the construction. As a little kid,

(06:27):
I always wanted to build, and I ended up learning
how to frame and it was helpful going towards the
Fight Apartment. And there were other guys that were cops
that you know, you respected the way they handled themselves.
They changed once they went into the academy. They really
grew up, and it was something that was impressive and

(06:47):
kind of made you proud of being their friends, you know.
So it was easy to go in that direction that
they went.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Absolutely so you got called before I get into getting
called by transit first, was that the only test you took?
Or did you take the fire test too?

Speaker 2 (07:04):
I took both.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yea, you took both. And did you have a preference
as to what you wanted to do or at that
time at least it didn't matter.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I felt the calling from the fire department. I
have seen some jobs as a kid, helped the firemen
put out fires as the kids, you know, and I
really respected what they did and that calling, you know,
that comes from above. So it was I wanted to
be a fireman. I took the cop test also just

(07:31):
to kind of if I didn't get called for the fireman,
I'd get in the pension system. And it's also a
good way to do the right thing and do good deeds.
And I tell you, if every kid in America did
one year on the cops, we would have peace in
this catry. Everybody would understand and have a little more
respect for each other. I believe it. But with the

(07:54):
Fight Apartment test, somebody died taking the physical that I
got one hundred on. Back then, the test was really hard.
You couldn't go in there if you were out drinking,
the night before. I worked out for years with forty
pounds vest I ran the train station from one end
of the platform to the other, up the stairs, across

(08:14):
the overpass to the other platform, down those stairs at
Richmond Valley and up the other side. And it only
was about three minutes of real work. But I did
it in the same format as the test and made
it easy. Even though I wanted to throw up every
day that I did this work. The test was easy.

(08:36):
Had twenty seconds to spare, and Uncle John was there,
Captain Trending was there, and I was ready to do
the next thing. He said, that's it, craigy boy, you
got it. You got twenty seconds left over, so it
was good. It was one of the guys I looked
up to as a fireman, was Captain Drenning.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Absolutely, and we'll talk about him tonight. Of course, a
little bit later on the same thing. Now across the
boy for fireman trying to get on the job, Sea
patache it's called and in space it's spread out across
ten minutes and twenty seconds, and it's a lot of
stations you have to do, I think like eight in total,
where you're wearing a vest. The whole time. So you know,
it's definitely a matter of endurance, and it's a mental
game too. If you can survive that, well it's your

(09:14):
ticket to get onto the best job on earth. So
when you got called, I mean, like I said, we
were kind of talking about it off fair back then.
Of course, as we've been over a million times in
this program, you guys in the audience know by now
three different police departments back then, so they were all
under the umbrella of the New York City Police Academy.
But as they were going along, they would take sections
of the class and let them know, Hey, you're going

(09:35):
to what was referred to as city at the time,
which was the NYPD. You're going to Housing of course,
the Housing Police. You're going to Transit. You mentioned doing
workouts at the subway stations, not like you weren't unfamiliar. Nevertheless,
getting called to Transit, which is really kind of a
one man gang of a police department. Given the beat
your work and like we were talking about and how
tough it was back then, what was your reaction upon

(09:58):
graduating the academy and then still now it over on
Columbus Circle.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, first of all, they said, you're in transit and
me and Tony the guy walked in with you guys
are transit. We were like, what's transit? You know, we
didn't you know what that was. But really transit was
the Marines. Back then. It was like the Marines of
policing in America. I mean it was respected. The guys
that were on patrol in District One when I got there,

(10:25):
they didn't carry the night stick. They carried an axe
handle as a respect That's what they got when they
when when kind of like uh, nefarious gentlemen saw them,
they were they were respectful and they went away. When
they saw the NYPD back then, they kind of laughed,

(10:45):
you know, like but the transit guys deserved and earned respect.
It was single man patrol and most of the times
the radio don't work, so you have to take command
of the subway. And that's what they taught me in
District One. Great place to start, great place to learn
the job.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
I feel like policing in Manhattan it's different from burrough
to borough. Of course, with policing in Manhattan, it's a
whole new ball game because each borough has its own
specific thing that you see a lot of Manhattan is
where I feel like all that gets rolled into one
ball of different scenarios to encounter, especially for a busy,
busy subway station like that. One's one of the busiest
ones in the city of New York, of course, so

(11:22):
he talked about it. Of course, I think a transit cop,
especially back then, his greatest weapon wasn't necessarily whatever was
on their tool belt. It was their mouth and it
was their mind. You learned how to deal with people.
We were talking about a little bit off the air.
We'll talk about it now on the earth. You learned
how to manage different personalities and give people their dignities.
So early on, what were just besides the jobs you

(11:42):
can mention those two, what was just the general encounters
that stuck out just day to day that really shaped
the way that you carried yourself as a police officer
and carried you through other aspects of not only your
public safety career, but your life too well.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Tremendous lessons I learned from the old time is they
were respected me because I was ready to put my
hands on people. I was ready to stop what had
to be stopped with the minimal force necessary. So they
respected me. They saw me in action and they started
teaching me these little tidbits and really their life lessons.
For example, Brad Spitzbar taught me. You know, when you

(12:19):
go to the station, say you have west Forth Street today,
You go there and you find everybody. You people watch,
you learn who's who. You know who the guys are
that are doing the crimes. Usually they start off with
soft crimes, violations, misdemeanors. But you realize who these guys
are and you approach them and you make friends with them.

(12:42):
You find out their name, use their name, you look
them in the eye. You give them back dignity because
a lot of these guys are homeless and people, millions
of people walk by them all day and looked at them,
and they looked at them like they garbage, you know,
and people think they're better than them. But we're not bad.
It's just this guy is having a hard time and
maybe we could help him out, you know, And instead

(13:04):
of doing the criminal act, they'll they'll jump in on
a fight with me, like they did on fourteenth and six.
Once upon a time, a kid named True I think
his name was true Maine Johnson. But I caught him.
He had a stolen key because I would watch from
a distance. I knew what he was up to, and
I got snuck up on him. He had a key
in a slot inside the tile work of the wall,

(13:28):
and he was letting people in and out of the
subway gate that was closed. And I came walking over
to him and I went right to the key, and
he looked at rent my badge and he couldn't read
too well. It's you know, he tried to say. He said, Mohannan.
He said, also mohannan. He said, you know what time
it is. And you know what, I got to be

(13:49):
friends with the kid. You know, he's doing a misdemeanor.
I don't have to arrest him for that, you know.
Like we try to use on discretion and try to
kind of turn him in the right direction, you know.
And when you shake the hand, you look him in
his eye. You give him back his humanity, you give
him back his dignity that all these people walking by

(14:12):
deprived them up with a look like a dirty look
of shame, you know. So it was an effective tool.
I mean, the one thing I do admit though, every
time I shook the hands, I immediately went and found
them a sink and washed my hands. It's very Another
lessons I learned, like from Johnny Dunn. You know, if

(14:32):
you just picked up the phone, the payphone to call
in for your ring, you would have to call the
command to say here, I'm at was fourteenth or whatever,
Harry war is my boot. Because we didn't really have
radio communications. You would call my phone, you would get
it and they'd be like goo all over the phone.
So he taught me, look at the phone, wipe it
off before you use it. You had to. You had

(14:55):
to look before you sat on the subway because they
could be urine or bugs. You know, well, things that
you took for granted growing up in East Cupcake, Staten Island,
Princess Patty, you know, like we didn't have these issues.
But simple things like that were good to learn. And
I appreciated those guys teaching me, you know, like that
was good. But giving a man his dignity that was important,

(15:18):
and like you said, that's life long. That goes with everybody.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
Absolutely. We're talking about Craig Manahan, formerly in the New Yor
City Transit Police and also the New York City Fire Department.
Now I'll get to Coney Island in a little bit,
but just to jump ahead because we were talking about
it and I'm curious about the story nineteen ninety two.
You know, it came back in a good way. It
didn't come back to bite you at all. It came
back to help you rather, because there was a fight
you got into while you were on the job, and

(15:44):
those very people that you had helped earlier by showing
them just simple respect came to your aid. So what
now that we're on the air, what was the story?

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Well, it was fourteen, fourteenth and sixth, and I had
been awarded overtime four hours before the four to twelve
because I made friends with the low They told me
when these kids were coming in from Brooklyn. You know,
they had this thing back then, Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn
takes it. The kids would come in and take the
money from the hard work and Brooklyn, you know, the
people who worked and got the money him in head.

(16:13):
And this crew was coming in fourteenth and sixth every
every I think it was a Saturday or Sunday, and
I went down there and I was hiding, and sure
enough it happened, and these kids I ended up fighting,
and true came in to help them. You know, I
mean one of them had a log and he was

(16:35):
swinging it at my head, and I really had the
decision to make. I could have used my weapon, I
could have find my weapon.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Because it was totied.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
I would have been justified. But I had been working
out like crazy on the heavy bag at the time,
preparing for these kinds of things, and no cop wants
to take a life, No cop wants to fire that weapon.
So I was able to duck the log and come
up with the right hip and then another right hocket,
you know, work to our advantage. We got the guy,

(17:04):
and True was there to help out, you know, like
it was good. It was a show of force, you know,
and it paid off treating people with dignity.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Absolutely, And I'm sure that's a story wherever True Mane is,
hopefully he's doing well and he's living life the right way.
And I'm sure he remembers that story too many many
years later. He weren't in Coney Island too long. But
it's worth noting it was a rough time for the
Transit police out in Brooklyn because the last two line
of duty deaths they had pre merger were both in Brooklyn.
Irmazata gets killed chasing the Purp, you know, she gets

(17:39):
cornered and gets gunned down. And then a few years
later Bobby Venable is confronting a couple of heavily armed
guys and he gets shot and killed. So that was
both if both of those incidents were in Brooklyn night
and day from Manhattan. Like we said, different boroughs, different
styles of policing, different styles of firefighting. As we'll talk
about a little bit later on that year though in
Coney Island, how did it from what you did in Manhattan,

(18:02):
both on fifty ninth and Columbus and later on Canal Street.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Well, in District one, I was taught to show my
presence in a menacing way to anybody that's criminal. It
makes the people at armed criminals feel safer. They know
the way that you hold yourself, that you don't take
any poop. You know, you don't, you do what's got
to be done. And it was kind of a threatening

(18:27):
thing to the band guys. But then going to District
thirty four and Coney Island, I was the same way,
and they weren't really hunting as much as I was
and we were, so it was kind of like they
were looking at me like I was a buff because
I was making all these collars, but I didn't care.
I was hitting it hard at Lieutenant Harrington gave a

(18:49):
nice speech to me when I got there, not to
me about me to the roll call, and you guys
should be more like Monahan. He brought it a rape collar,
he got a robbery khalin. You know. I mean I was,
I was hunting, and I was really trying to make
a difference to help the people that we're getting robbed. Yeah,

(19:09):
get all the bad things that happened to them.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
And it was a different ballgame back then, because you know,
especially it changed a lot when Bradon came in as
transit chief and later on as Police commission for New
York City, where the name of the game wasn't so much,
you know, prevention. It was just responding after the fact.
I mean it was and this was the case for
all three police departments, unfortunately, just because a sign of
the times they were reactive, they weren't proactive. So back

(19:34):
then you were outside of the grain if you were
proactive because the fact that cops were afraid of getting
jammed up. This is after a series of corruption scandals
in the seventies. It's not too far after the NAP
Commission and CIRPROCO and all that. So to see a
cop get out there and get after it, you know.
I mean from the stories I've heard, cops back then
were kind of like, huh because it sounds funny, but
it really was a foreign concept given what the laws

(19:56):
were and just given the context of the time.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
Oh yeah, oh man, you were a lot of guys
were so afraid of going to jail, not worried about
getting shot, you know. But I really they say that
we don't have empathy, but I felt the pain of
the victims, and I really feel like the victims deserve

(20:19):
more respect than they're getting today, even that they were
getting back then. And every time I encountered a victim
that hurt me. So it was kind of made me
more aggressive to catch more of the bad guys, and
it was helpful. But you can't do twenty years that way,
not even in that day, because it makes you a

(20:41):
target for internal affans. This guy's got all these arrests,
this guy's being put on TV. They think that you're
doing something wrong. All you're doing is the right thing.
You're trying to help people, and they look at you
like you're the criminal, and they try to turn it
that way, and it's not that way. These guys need
to be able to put their hands on criminals, and

(21:04):
there has to be a respect for the law. It's said,
it said, it is.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
I mean, you don't want if it doesn't have to
get there, it doesn't have to get there. But if
it's got to get there, you gotta know. Okay, he
should be able to not even think twice about it.
All right, you want to get violent, you want to
take a swing at me, all right, let's go. It's on.
And there should be that fear. It's not there right now.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
It's not. But if you said Bill Bratton, you mentioned
Bill Bratton, and that guy came to my aid he
ran down. I am running. I mean I charged as
a cop. I charged. I came down. If you called
for backup, I came down hard. The whole station knew it.
The way I came down the stairs. I mean, you
could project yourself in a way like you're a linebacker

(21:48):
going to make a tackle on Earl Campbell, and people
see it. The good people are grateful, the bad people
want to leave. And when you get there, and now
you're running down West Ford stre subway platform, the eight platform,
and the commissioner is running alongside of me, trying to
catch up to me in his suit with his shiny shoes,

(22:09):
and I was like, man, I love this guy. If
we could only talk him into being our maya now,
it would change this city. It would change the city.
If not they a governor and one day president, that
guy would make He was a tremendous leader. And he
came into the command at District two when I was
in District two, spoke to our roccal, He went to

(22:31):
all the commands, spoke to roll call, and he said,
put your hands on them broken windows policy. We're going
to get him for little things and test the fingerprints.
And you know what, we got robberies, we got murders.
I got a guy who escaped federal prison for murder
by playing the token gate at thirty second feet sixth Avenue.

(22:54):
He came through and grabbed him. He had just done
a robbery upstairs, which I got him. But when we
ran the prince he escaped federal prison, they didn't prosecute him.
And when the and when those marshals came to take
him back to the prison in the cell, he was like,
they were like, we got you now, kid, and he
was like, oh it was feair.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
He didn't want to go back right, you know, and back.
It was a deterrent and that was the thing. I mean,
crime dropped twenty seven percent during those two years that
Bratton and Maple were together coming up with those things.
Of course, I'm talking about the Jack Jack.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
It was a maniac. He was funny. I met him
in District thirty four. He used to wear a zoot suit. Yeah,
he was like that wide shoulder, like he was a gangster, you.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Know, like started the decoy unit.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
He was decoyed those guys, and those were guys that
I picked their brains. And again, those guys respected the
way I did it, because, like you said, there were
a lot of pals like a pail of poop, that's
what we used to call guys that didn't do anything,
you know, the hide They had a key to every
room that they would sit in while somebody's getting raped.
You know, like those of us that experienced those victims,

(24:09):
we hunted. We became the steel beam, you know, the
still beam three four and seven. I was the steal beam.
In the four hours before the four to twelve and
right in front of me, the guy did a robbery
with a knife, you know that one that you chopped
the garlic with Yep, right in front of me, in
front of the token booth and like one o'clock in

(24:30):
the afternoon, in front of all the people. But I
was hiding in the beam. He didn't see me, and
I was following him. You know, I was basically using
my spidery senses kind of to like, I noticed the
body language. So it made me just kind of say,
you know, maybe I should watch this guy. And that
was probably a criminal act by me. That was probably

(24:54):
some kind of profiling, but it was effective policing because
we got I got the I had to chase them
halfway to eighth Avenue, but got the guy in the street,
got the knife, the woman the robbery, who's a robbery one.
It was a good callar and just because of the victims,
the victims are being forgotten. I saw the victims. It

(25:18):
hurt me. I felt that pain and I want to
give I wanted to give that pain back to the
next guy that I caught, which was not exactly healthy,
but it made for very good arrest record. I made
pretty good amount of rests.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
You were an active cop. You were an active cop.
I feel like I could do a whole show on
your police stories alone, but I have your fire department
career to get to. And that was the original calling
that you felt. And by the way, like I said,
you know, working in Brooklyn for a year, you worked
on Canal Street, which was a lot of fun. It
kind of comes full circle because you would kind of
spend your fire department career in that same area for
the most part when you got onto the job. So

(25:58):
feeling that calling and getting that call finally from the
FG andi, hey you're in the next class. Even though
it's what you wanted, I imagine, it was very bittersweet
to leave the Transit Police because you made a lot
of good memories there and obviously you were having a
lot of fun doing what you were doing.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
It was painful because the guys and the girls that
I met there tremendous human beings. We still get together
and I let them there when you leave, When you leave,
you leave them, you leave them behind. They don't have
you charging down the platform anymore like you've left them,

(26:35):
you know. Like I always felt sad sadness in that way,
and it was painful too, because I could still help them,
but the way I policed, I was gonna go to
jail if I stayed up doing that, If I kept
doing that for twenty years. You just can't take command
like that anymore. You're there's half of this country you

(26:59):
mentioned the call. They don't even believe in God, they're godless,
But we feel the calling, and God does. He puts
us in places. He put me in the police, and
that was a good thing. And I learned a lot
there about being a better person and to teach my

(27:19):
children how to be better person people and to spread it,
you know. And that was one of the gifts that
God sent me to the police to learn that lesson.
But I feel like He really needed me in the
fight apartment because that was so brutal physical. That's what
they needed in the in the fight apartment. They needed

(27:42):
maniacs and run through a burning wall. And we did.
And we'll do it again. Even with the replacements and
all these ages and these injuries and pain and the
lack of sleep from all the years. It takes this
hole on your body, you know, and you gotta find

(28:03):
a way to make another day a better day. You know,
a lot of guys when they retire, they kind of
give up on life because the fire department was their
only thing. Well, the police department was their only identity.
But you have to have a purpose when you move
forward after the job.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Absolutely, having different interest goes a long way. And there
was something you said earlier I wanted to touch on
because a lot of people that get into a police
academy or a fire academy, now you know, and I'm
not knocking them, it's just the way it is, that
oftentimes is their first real job in life. So how
do you feel those six years of being a cop,
if you could expand on a little bit, prepared you

(28:41):
for what was certainly not an easy New York City
fire academy.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
Yeah, well there was when you're when you're in a
police academy, they tell you look around at everybody, and
I know this is one of the points. Later they say,
look around, not everybody's gonna survive twenty years. Guys are
gonna in the line of duty. And they did. But
and then again you go to the fire department. And
when the fire department said that, they said the same

(29:08):
thing in the academy, and I looked around like, you know,
they're just trying to motivate us to do the right thing.
But it was true. It turned out the fire department
they did all die. I mean, so many guys died.
So it was the It was definitely good learning from
the transit police because we learned all the what was coming.

(29:31):
We knew nine to eleven was coming. Police knew it,
We practiced. We knew that the tunnels were gonna get
blown up, or the trade center was gonna get all.
We knew of all the threats. I had pictures hanging
in my locker of Obama Osama bin Laden, but Lotten
was my lot because he was one of the ten
most wanted. Meanwhile, the botch on his locker. This guy

(29:56):
was an old timer and he was a legend. He
had pictures of like, uh, sexual conquests.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, I got you.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
I'm like trying to study, all right, what if this
guy comes through the gate today. I'm trying to study
their faces so I could get them, you know. So
it did teach to be a lot more suspicious of everyone.
Being a cop taught you to keep you back to
the wall when you were sitting in a restaurant or
anywhere and to be more aware than anything could happen

(30:28):
at any moment. And it was definitely helpful on the
fire department and going through the fire Academy and Chief
sac Romano. He would yell at us, I'll step on you,
and I won't say the S word, but he would
say that, you know, and it was very very it
rhymes with rock. Yes, he was a classic gentleman. And

(30:52):
the funny part is, my my son Craig is dating
his niece right now. That's funny. How everything comes.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
This is reason for everything, right. Absolutely, I'm a big
believer in that myself. So getting through and making it
into ladder five, it's interesting because you know so many
other places you go to. Certainly it's the case here
in Connecticut. You don't bigger city departments. You get to
sign to an engine right away. You don't get a
sign to a truck. You have to know why differs
from that where you can go to a truck right away.
And it's kind of in reverse. Truck work is not

(31:20):
easy work. When it's time to do truck work, it's
time to do truck work. Truck work in New York City,
especially man that it's a whole different ballgame. So just
besides Captain Drenna, who will touch on in a little
bit when you first got there to Ladder five, who
were the guys that really helped you learn the truck
And what are the early jobs pre Watch Street that
really stick out as man that really taught me something?

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Oh boy, well, John Santos. I had already known John
Santo because whenever the Giants would play and I was
working as a cop, my whatever firehouse was closest to
my station, I would go to the station. I would
put my thing down, I would say hello to everybody
that needed to be spoken to and say listen, I

(32:05):
got Cortland Street today, go to wreck the Street. And
then would give me a chance to take a personal
break and go take a peek in the firehouse and
see a bit of the Giants game within running distance back.
So I got to meet John Santour and Santo was
a mentor to me. He was to tremendous fire. Oh

(32:28):
my god, he came out. We were in the b
Altman building and he shows up out of nowhere with
our jackab We have to break through a parapet wall
on the roof. That's about sixteen inches thick of brick
and mortar. But there was a little pipe that I
found that was pushing. There was no way to vent it.
There were no windows because it was a fur volt,

(32:50):
and we just started wailing on the bricks. Santor shows
up with that jackhambin that he spied on the way up,
you know, like he would find tools on the and
I learned that from him, the awareness of as you
are you never run going to a fire, but as
you're moving quickly to a fire, you luck and see
what can help you, you know, like to get up

(33:12):
to the next level of whatever you got to get to.
So Santo was one great one. And when teaching about
driving Mattilla, Craig Holteman was beautiful and explaining it. Driving Littilla,
you have to kind of turn the wheel the opposite
way is the front is driving is. But when these

(33:32):
and also John Catapano was great at it. But Bobby
Davis was the best. Bobby Davis. Everybody in the fire
house wanted to be like Bobby Davis. He was the
senior man. You always did the right thing, and you
tried to emulate Bobby Davis absolutely.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
And there's guys like that across the board in the
fire department, who you look up to and still mold
you even in retirement, you know, to look back on
those guys fondly as guys that really shaped you. You know,
it's it's an amazing thing. It's a testament to how
they carry them and what's interesting. And Danny Potter has
been on the show, and I know you know Danny
because he was also a Lot of Five guy for
a long time. You know, is those streets are very
narrow in Manhattan, narrow really across the border in New

(34:10):
York City, but especially in Manhattan, so those tillers are
needed and knowing how to drive them as key to
get around those tight corners. And working in the West Village.
A lot of interesting places to be first to Doe too.
Just then neighborhood alone, I think it was really I mean, listen,
the jackpot's the jackpot. You made it onto the job.
That's the main prize in it of itself. As far
as a place to be assigned to, I don't think

(34:32):
you could pick a better assignment and a more beautiful
neighborhood than the West Village.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Oh boy, we had a run. It was a late
night run. Mike Watzkola was the lieutenant, and we go.
It was down about Watt Street and Broom Street, and
the fire building was on second from the corner. I
was over, so I had to get to the back
of that building. So I went around the corner and
I saw a taxpayer on the first floor. It was

(34:59):
a bar, but they had the gates down to about
a foot off the ground. All the pins were pulled,
so I was I knew there was something going on,
and they sounded like a party. So I lifted up
the gate just about waist high and I come in
there and it made a racket, and there was all
these beautiful women and they were wasted. And they see me.

(35:21):
They see me, and they hear me because the noise
they made to come in and start running at me.
They started pulling my clothes off, my hat, my helmet.
They thought I was a stripper. So I stopped and
I said, whoaa, hold on, let me go check the
back first. So I got my stuff, I ran through
the back and I gave the report. It turned out
to be a false alarm. And now I came back

(35:42):
and all these strippers and taken my hat that it
was a beautiful thing. I have to say, it's something
they should use to recruit guys, you know, because this
could happen any day in Manhattan. It was a beautiful day,
the single young buck in the fire department in letter five.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Many stories like it. There's many reasons why they say
it's the best job on earth, and that's certainly one
of them for sure.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Well after that run, I started a thing and everybody
started using this. I said, you know, this job sucks.
Everybody use that now to this day. You know, when
you have something beautiful happen, that's kind of one of
the things we say. You know, you could be digging

(36:29):
all day.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
And of course there's a lot of that to be encountered,
because it's not just the fires, and there's plenty of those,
and we'll talk about those. It's everything else in between two.
And of course you're working in the middle of a
melting pot that people from all over the world, different
walks of life, are going to especially in neighborhood like that,
you never know what's going to happen. As far as
in a couple of things I want to touch on here,
because you share the house with Engine twenty four in

(36:53):
Battalion two, and I'll mention some of the guys that
worked on the other side of things too in a moment.
But as far as the area, the types of fires
you guys would get, tell me about how many fires
you guys would get, and just what you would mean
in terms of building construction, what you would be first
do to We talking tenements. We talk about private dwellings.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Oh yeah, everything, okay, tenements, rear tenements, We had brownstones.
You can go to anything. You go to a high rise,
that village or our response area and our surrounding response area.
You had everything. I mean from whatever you say, we
got them. Trust trust roofs. We got them. So you

(37:32):
really have to kind of put the time in on
bi to learn. We really put a lot of time
in doing the walking through the neighborhoods and going through
archways on the side of a tenement that leads to
the back where there's an old carriage house of like
Alexander Hamilton or something, and you think you're in colonial Williamsburg.

(37:55):
It's a whole different animal for the fire like they
have to stretch different lines, so there's a lot to
it and it's a great learning ground.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Right absolutely. Sorry, go ahead, I mean to cut you off.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, no, that's all right, that's good, that's good.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
It's a good place to be, absolutely, And you know,
I was gonna say, you had a battalion too with you.
I don't know how long they were there for, but
William McGovern was a chief there for a little bit.
Richard Brunty was the chief there for a little bit.
So just having guys like that in quarters who've done
a lot, seen a lot, multiple different parts of the city.
I don't know how often you get a chance to
break bread with them and talk with them. But what

(38:31):
was it like to just pick their brains if you
did well?

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Prunty I think he respected the way I was attacking
it also, and he showed me how to get a
person out of window down a ladder by yourself. And
we drilled on it at the firehouse and you created
the arm. You know, you got the body in the arms.
Because the body is like a big ball of yellow.
It could fall and slip, but you could pit it

(38:55):
on the ladder and get it down. Prunty was great
because he was rescued. Billy McGovern was great too, and
he taught me a lot. But the front. The That
was the one that I'll never forget the uh and
I never got to use it. I never did this,
but it still may happen one day because all of
us retired guys, we're broken down and we're washed up,

(39:18):
but we'll find the way when they need us again,
we'll be there again.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Absolutely. And that was certainly the case with something you
did in retirement, which we'll talk about too, especially after
the events of nine to eleven. You mentioned Captain Dreddon
and I love what you called him earlier, Uncle John,
and that spoke, that alone spoke volumes of what you
thought about him. Now here's the guy again, like prunty,
like McGovern seen a lot, done a lot nearly thirty
years in the fire department, twenty five years time in

(39:44):
nineteen ninety four. To have a guy like that in
the firehouse that he struck me, and especially with the
way Veena described described him, gentle giant. Really, here's the
guy in seeing him in the in the home videos
footage on Dayline, big guy, big, classic Irish guy, but
less someone who seemed very soft spoken and someone who
you know was a hard charger but had a quiet

(40:06):
way of getting his point across to have him as
a mentor early on getting to ladder five. Just tell
me about what it was like working tours with him,
and just again, much like he did with Chief Front
in Chief MC government, picking his brain till oh Man.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
First of all, he found out I was going to
the academy and I wasn't gonna. I knew he was
a big shot and could help me get I wasn't
trying to ask for famous. But he came to me.
He said, you're going, You're going a lot of fire.
He asked me, where are you going? I said one
eleven one O three, one thirty two, and he laughed
at He laughed in my face because those were like

(40:39):
at that time, top three busy fire duty that year.
I had a lot of friends that were already on
the jump, and Captain Drennon laughed at me. He said,
he says, you're going a lot of five. So he
took me in under his wing, and my god, he
taught me. Oh Man, I learned so much from him.
The night of the Wah Street fire, just before the fire,

(41:01):
this was gonna be I was a probe. This was
gonna be my first night taking the roof. Now He
knew I was a framer, he knew I was good
with the tools. He knew I was also a cop,
and I was kind of savvy, and he trusted me.
But we sat in that office and we talked, and
we talked about Browns. We talked about everything, and the

(41:22):
Brownstones and getting oh my god, getting to the roof.
And now we are going to the run, and ladder
eight stops us and they're gonna make a switch. I'm
gonna take the roof on latter eight. Jimmy run, Jimmy.

(41:45):
Jimmy was gonna take the irons over for me. And
we went to the job. You know, I switched. I
got the roof. But as I'm running down the street
towards the fire, moving quickly, I could hear Dreddin's words
exactly look for the exposure, and I could see the

(42:07):
exposure was door was open, light was on. I could
see up the stairs. It was the easiest way to
get to the roof. And Drennan's words were in my
head while I was doing it. It was like perfect training.
He was a perfect teacher. He made it really easy
to understand and really easy to remember. He did all

(42:30):
kinds of memory drills, you know, and they were effective
and I used them on my children today. He also
taught his children by making tests that I also do
with my children. And Connor's got a ninety eight average.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
He's looking at it.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
He's looking at a possible scholarship. Regiusness say, and I
don't know, but Drennen was a great teacher. And you
have to also include when you say John Drennan, he's
He's Drennan is the guy who made Ladder five. He's
the he built Ladder five, absolutely created what it is.

(43:09):
He made it better. He brought in the horses and
he taught them how to run, and he ran. And
they're still doing a great job there in latter five.
I'm so proud of those guys that are doing it now.
You know, we're all washed up, but we go in,
we go into all of these fatalities and all the memories,

(43:30):
and you know, we go to the masses and just
in case one of the family members shows up, if
you were at that job, you're there, you better be there.
And we do that to this day, all those years ago,
we still do it. And even though Vena doesn't really
want us to do that. Watt Street mass anymore. We're

(43:51):
doing it for the captain, We're doing it for Jimmy Young,
We're doing it for Chris Siedenburg. We go in and
their spirits. That's what the band pipes are about. When
those when you hear those bagpipes, the spirits are the
fall in or among us, the standard shoulder to shoulder
with us, and they got the hand on your shoulder.

(44:12):
It whispered in your ears to do the right thing
the next time too, and to teach the next guy
to do the right thing.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
It's a heavy thing. And you know the FD and
Y every day with Memorial Day does a great job
with it. It's a heavy, heavy thing because as I
said before in the program, any line of duty death,
police side, fireside, ems side, if there's going to be
any sort of positive to come out of it, it's
that what you just said, which is let's do the
right thing the next time so we don't have something

(44:42):
like this happened again. So we avoid somebody not even
just dying, but getting seriously hurt and never being the same,
maybe not even being able to continue in their career
and having to retire early. Let's avoid that. And you
know that night sometimes you can do everything right, things
can still go wrong. It's the nature of the job.
You know. One of my favorite videos on YouTube that
I stumbled across because I liked again, as we talked

(45:04):
about off the year, I like to see how these
guys were before and just how they were day to day.
You mentioned Chris Edenbrook. He's going through his nineteen eighty
nine MAC at the firehouse and explaining as appropriate everything
he knew that engine.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Well, yes he did, he knew it. He was great.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
He was very squared away.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, he knew his stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
Man, Sorry, go ahead, Yeah he was.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
He was well well taught, you know what I mean.
And he really he was EMS first. He wanted this
job so bad. And you know that when he was
when he was burned, he said to the EMS guy,
this is still the greatest job.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah he did.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
He really on his death, that kid was amazing and
he's such a tremendous inspiration to all of us, as
they all are, all of the fallen. You know, we're
the guys that survived, and we're making sure that we
get every bit of life out of this place because
it was taken from them. Raise your kids to be warriors,

(46:09):
Teach them how to learn for themselves, teach them the
right things, keep me in the right direction, and so
far with us, it's going good.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
That's good to hear.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
If you just you know.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
And again, I'll get back to Captain Jennon in the moment.
But just a note on Jimmy Young too. There was
a guy who was also very squared away with an
incredibly bright future when you look back on working with him,
imagine much like Siedenburgh, right, another guy that was really
squared away. What are your fondest memories of working with Jimmy?

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Jimmy he owned the VCR company. You know they are
one of these They used to rent VCRs you can
watch a movie. He was a movie buff. He would
bring in all these movies and you would be like,
what the heck is this nineteen fifty? It would be tremendous.
I mean, he was a brilliant cinema He was like
aficionado and he was kind of like opening our eyes

(46:59):
to all the different parts of the different movies and
it'll be more open to watch different things. He was
a good fireman too, and I tell you what he
when we made that switch right before the fire, he
handed me the radio and I said, you're the man,
and that's it. He had the irons and I went

(47:20):
up on the roof and he did. He knew his job, man,
he knew the stuff, same like Chris. Like you said,
you saw the video of Chris Well. As soon as
I got to the fire house, he was also one
of the guys showed me the engine ring and all
the different things that you had to know on that.
So he was an asset to the firehouse, no question

(47:40):
about it. But he was hysterical. And you love those guys.
I mean, so many guys like Joey Graphic DdO. When
you worked with Joey GRAPHICDDO, you know you're gonna laugh
your butt off twenty four hours. Oh man. He did
the Shakira thing. He did so many things. We had
a good time and you had to because you know,

(48:02):
sometimes it was horror, you know it was, but you
had to face it and get through it and make
something good out of it and laugh. You really had
to laugh. And we ended up learning, and we learned
from the wat Street fire because they made us go

(48:23):
to psychiatrists and stuff and they said we were all crazy.
But I think everybody's a little crazy, you know.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Yeah, well, if you're gonna do a job like that,
think about it. You know, you want to run into
burning buildings for a living. You got to be a
little nuts to do a job like that. You had
in a good way.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Your your brain is telling you don't go in there,
but your body.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
You gotta do, gotta go in there.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
So you got it and it's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah, absolutely, And I will say just you kind of
touched on it earlier, but I want to dig deeper
into it. As far as he talked about Hawaii talked
you about life, which is just as important, if not
more important. But tactically speaking, she has you grew in
your career. What's one lesson you look back on? The
Captain Drennon taught you about firefighting specifically that you felt
really aided you over the course of your career, and

(49:09):
you passed on to other guys as you got more time,
became more senior.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
At latter five, Well, you know, he said, expect it
when you least expect it, because there are times when
I come in I've came in on my career and
I might have been tired of something, the baby was
up all night or whatever. And it's a day where
you think, oh man, I hope we don't have a rug.
You know you're going to a second a law that day.

(49:33):
So you get in, you get yourself ready, you work out,
you get your muscle stratching ready, and you've got to
prepare like it's coming right now. Expect it when you
least expected. That was probably the most clever that I
did use. I used it every single day I walked
in there.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
It's imperative because you just never know and you always want.
It's not that you're on guard in your tense, but
you just have to be prepared. Preparedness is the name again,
you talked about it. What did you say earlier when
you were talking about your time with the transit police?
You were the bean. You know, it's kind of the
same thing here in terms of preparedness, in terms of
intensity and just not getting complacent, you know. And I'll
never forget that. I don't know who came up with

(50:16):
the phrase, but it's something I've heard a lot of
as it pertains to the fire service, which is you
could never learn enough about a job that can kill you.
You know, you don't know when that next run may
be your last. And that's something you of course know
all too well with what happened in nineteen ninety four.
And it's something that a lot of guys, especially if
you work in the bigger cities, not that it can't
happen in small towns, but bigger cities are just you know,

(50:37):
bigger problems. Of course, you carry it with you. I
wanted to go back to a second, to a second
four second, rather to just latter five's first two area,
because it's not just you know, okay, you're down over
on Houston and Green, you're also.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
You know, in Houston in sixth.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Housed in six I apologies on Houston and Green, but
you know, you're involved in responses besides the West Village.
Potentially you can go to Soho, you can go to
Greenwich Village. There's other aspects of your second do too
that are just as appealing and enticing in terms of
being able to do work once you became trusted. You
were already trusted enough, as you said, but to be
the roof guy and expanding your duties. What are some
of the jobs we're in terms of just truck work

(51:14):
alone that stuck out, as you know, you found yourself
saying after everything went well and everyone went home, man,
that was a really really good box a lot.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Yeah. Ah, there was one on fourteenth Street. We were
cutting up a meat packing plant that was burning, and
we had a lot of operating to do. We had
a lot of cutting and opening up floors and things,
not as the roofman know, this was as the audience man.

(51:44):
And we spent a lot of time cutting up that
building while it was burning, and it was tough to
put out because the cork was two inches thick and
it was burning behind about a three quarter of an
inch masonry skim coat. And we had a similar problem
where I was the roof man, and that was the

(52:05):
one at the b olpen job up by the Empire
State Building, and that was the one that we had
to break ventilate the roof by just chopping the brick.
We just took turns all the guys up there. You
would swing as hard as you can until your arms
kind of got rubber. Try to do at least three minutes.
We trained a lot of boxing, which three minute rounds.

(52:28):
To take a minute off so that you would go
and then as soon as you are arms were rubber
and you weren't making that impact. You would get out
of the way and the next guy would go until
his arms were rubber. And getting through a brick parapet
wall wasn't easy, but you know, you got to do
and we had to get invented. We in that job.

(52:49):
We got relieved on that roof and it was still
going and JJ wanted to take the exterior elevator because
the building was being working on it had like construction elevator.
Jaj was the boss and Santo. That's the job with
Santo came out of no way with a jackhammer, but
we were not able to get it going because we
didn't have all the everything we needed for it. But

(53:12):
on the way down, Santo was like, yeah, yeah, man,
and let's go through. And we went through the interior
where we had tools of ours that we were going
to pick up and collect on the way down. And
on the way down we found a chief passed out
and we dragged him out. We got him. It was ABC.
He was the captain of the ladder two and he

(53:33):
was ABC. And it was a tough job because we
operated inside there for a while also, and that was
the job I took the most smoke out of and
it was like a movie because we get the chief
out and now it's mayday, so everybody's down on the
floor below and the next chief was asking for volunteers

(53:56):
to go back in because guys were wiped. I mean,
everybody was doubt like we had an arm and I
was chopping all the room. I said, I'm going are
you crazy, It's like a movie. I'm going in, you know.
And I went back in and all he wanted me
to do is follow the line to the end and
make sure there's no other guys. So what did I do.
I get to the end, and I mean it was

(54:17):
fourteen foot ceilings of a fur ball and the fire
was beautiful rolling over my head and I was like
those edge guys hate when I shoot their line. I
pick it up and I start hitting it, and oh man,
it blue back at me steam because I was searching
and I was hanging a mask. It blew back hit
me steam. Oh man, what a valuable lesson that if

(54:40):
you're gonna hit fire like that, you better have your
mask on. But it was a great, most physical other
than nine to eleven, you know, for a job that
was that beelopment building, that would be the one.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
And the thing is, you know, I've always had it
a siation for truck work, and that appreciation is grown
in recent times when you see how intense it is.
Kind of like what we were discussing earlier. It's an
art form. I think that's the best way to describe it,
because it's not so much in what you do, and
you know this from the fourteen years you spent there,
especially as you've got more time on it's when you
do it, I feel like, especially in that aspect of firefighting.

(55:20):
And it's not the dismissed engine operations. Those are just
as intense. I'm not putting that down at all, but
the context of when you're you know what you're doing
during the operation, when to cut, when not to cut,
Timing is everything and never is attention to detail for me,
at least more prevalent than when you're doing truck work.

(55:41):
And it's just you know, it comes with time, knowing
the state of the fire, knowing where operations are, and
if guys in the ground are ready for it, if
guys inside are ready for it. It really is one
of those jobs, if not the defining job in the
fire service, where you got to be a jack of
all trades.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Yeah, well, understanding canduction is key and a lot of
things that we used to do to prepare for these jobs.
We'd go around on spare time with the rig and
we'd go and check buildings that are under construction and
we'd do the demolition for the people as a benefit

(56:18):
to us. It was a good way to learn how
to use the saw and how to use your halligan
against the beam to pull up the floorboards or the
same thing on the roof. We would they were they
were going to renovate it, so they would allow us
to cut holes in it. And we'd find places like
this to hone our skills. And they're still doing it
to this day. I know the firehouse a lot of

(56:40):
five engine two four and most firehouses operate that way.
But it's a great way to practice, you know. Like
with Santo driving as the chauffeur, he would he would
pull over any time we saw a dumpster. He was
like a pack rat his his house. He saved everything.
He would take things sold and save everything. But what

(57:00):
I would do if there was a log, I'd bring
that log back to the firehouse. And if there was
a guy that never chopped couldn't really swing the axe
too good. There was one time there was a guy
that really didn't he didn't eat meat, you know, and
he didn't he didn't have that aggressive attack and what

(57:21):
he was working. I would make sure that he chopped
that log in half before he gets You would go
out in the backyard and I would show him how
to chop, and that he would chop. But it takes practice,
you know. So I would kind of make those guys
like that that weren't really good with the with the tools,
I'd put in the work back in the yard swinging

(57:44):
that axe until they were good at it.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
That's something that's key, I mean, if you know especially
and again it applies to the police force two but
also the fire service if there's a deficiency. And this
is something that as I seek to get on the
job myself, this is something I'm trying to put in
my mind. Now, don't run from the deficiency. And I
get it. It's it's not fun to admit, yeah, I'm
not so good at this. It's not natural, right. We

(58:07):
want to be good at everything. It's not possible what
we want to. But don't run from the deficiency, because
you know, if you confront it for what it is,
which is just that a weakness. It doesn't mean it
has to define you. It doesn't mean it has to
stick with you. You can turn it into a strength
by doing what you just said. Take them out back,
and what were they doing. They were working on it,
and eventually, God willing, it became a strength. They were

(58:29):
able to utilize it to their advantage. Whereas maybe it
was something they struggled with before all that training. For
as much as they may have hated it in the moment,
for as strenuous as it was, must have paid dividends
the next fire.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Yeah, we had to be that way. It still have
to be that way because there's five guys that get
all out of five and for everybody, and this is
one of D. Dreddon's analogies as well. If all the
guys do the right thing what they're supposed to do,
the ov the roof, the irons kid, the shoulf that
were a fist, and we get the job done. But
if one guy's it was his old day, we could
break your figures swinging that fist.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
That's true, and it's true, you do.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
You have to make sure that everybody's ready because we
rely at each other.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Yeah, it's a machine. You take a cog, even how
small the cog may be, you take it out of
the machine, the machine may not function as well, the
machine may stop working all together. It's all part of
a grander plan and approach to fighting fires. And that's,
you know, again, one of the key things that you're
going to be doing a lot of in Manhattan too.
And now I will say, and you mentioned bi earlier

(59:34):
late nineties, it's still continuing today, but late nineties. It's
a sweet spot because as the city's progressing, in the city,
the pendulum swinging right. Think about the city that you
inherit it as a transit cop in nineteen eighty seven,
fast forward ten years to what it was at latter
five in nineteen ninety seven, different city. A lot of
building construction, especially in Manhattan, and to this day it's continuing.
Buildings are going up left and right. What were the

(59:56):
buildings in newer construction that you felt especially not iffy about,
but like, we already got to be prepared enough for
these type of buildings that were already having at first year,
but these ones, these ones might be a problem. We
really got to stay on top of these.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Whenever we found those trusses or the sea joists. They
were structurally I mean, it was good engineering. But what's
going to happen in twenty years when that piece of
plywood on that I trust starts to detererior rate, you know,
like we started all these These were the ones that

(01:00:32):
got me the most. You know, these little construction things
like that, like a sea joys or trust construction. They
were lightweight, they were saving money for the builder. But
when we built our house, we didn't use any joists,
I mean sea joys or trusses. We used two by twelves.

(01:00:52):
Even though it called for two by ten, we doubled
them up. So yeah, any kind of building that was
go it up. And we saw that lightweight construction, that's dangerous,
that's stagerous.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
I wasn't at a fire, but I heard of a
fire where they had private dwelling, and I built a
lot of these where the carpet was what was holding
the floor up. Because just a small amount of fire
underneath burned through one trust two by four and the

(01:01:27):
entire floor, the entire trust is completely compromised. So yeah,
I think they were trustes. It was dangerous I didn't
like him. I didn't recommend using them. You know, the
people that I knew that were going to build their
own house. But it gives you a flat, straight floor,
it's easier for the tile guy. There's a lot of
reasons to use him, but they collapse easy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
And from a fire safety standpoint, that's where my mind
is running too, because where I live. I live in
New Haven, Connecticut, city of one hundred and thirty thousand.
We're having a lot of buildings go up in the
downtown area. And listen, I'm not hating on it. From
the standpoint of growth. Growth is good, more people coming
into the city, more apartment buildings, they're upscale, gonna get
a lot of revenue. All that's fine and dandy. But

(01:02:12):
with hybrid construction now I feel where everything is being
jumbled together. Even if it's within building code. It looks
pretty on the outside, but from a structural standpoint, it's
it's not. It's it's as as ugly as it gets
because if it hits the fan, that's gonna be one
of the first things to go. And then what aesthetics
are nice, Safety is better, and I wonder if we're

(01:02:33):
getting that with hybrid construction these days.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Right, would you add heat to the equation? It does
it mix?

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
Yeah? Yeah, And we see that and it plays out
in the worst possible scenarios and it gives Listen. I
don't I don't envy an officer nowadays, from a lieutenant
all the way to a chief because they have a
lot to think about and sweat as It is not
that they don't trust their men, but just making sure
their men and women are safe nowadays. Oh my god,
if I was a chiefer, if I was even just
so much as lieutenant, give me nightmares thinking about it.

(01:03:01):
It's a lot to keep track of. It's so much
to keep track of, you know. I will say there's
also again, and we'll touch on September eleventh briefly in
a moment. But there's a lot of fun days. You
mentioned the story with the females earlier. Just working in
Manhattan in general, people love firefighters. People always want to
stop it. Even when you're out in the neighborhood. People
just like coming up to you, guys, what were some

(01:03:22):
And sometimes you can get some fun details too. You
get the ticker tape parade cutting through Manhattan, maybe not
through your neighborhood. But it's cutting through whenever team's win
a championship, which the Yankees back when the Yankees actually
knew how to win things, doing a lot of in
the late nineties. So just tell me about those fun
details and just the fun you would have in the
neighborhood that obviously loved you guys so much and still
do well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
I don't think there was anything more fun than Halloween parade.
It used to come right on Firehouse on sixth Avenue.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Oh really, I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
And all of us guys that had pickup trucks would
come in like the night before or early that day,
and we'd those our pickup trucks into the curb and
basically we would have one our entire block corned off
and that was just for any of our guests in
case we had to run during the parade, we'd have
to be able to get out of there, so we

(01:04:11):
would have our It was like it was like a platform.
We'd all a pickup truck. We'd all be in the
pickup trucks and we'd be having a good old time
because we were off duty. And that Braine goes by
and the most beautiful lesbians in the world were naked,
practically naked, and they loved us, and they were beautiful,

(01:04:32):
And sometimes I feel like I'm a lesbian trapped in
a man's body. I respect tremendously. They're so beautiful and
they're so sweet. They used to come up to us
and hug us and kiss us. All man, it was
a great time to be single.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
Well, there's there's a line of the show right there,
who of the year of a lot of all the
episodes that I've done of this program him for twenty
twenty five. I think that one might take the cake there, Craig,
that one might take the cake. Listen, we'll douger Greg
Monahan's volume seventy six, so the best of the bravest
interviews with the Ft and Wives Elite. We're having a
great time, of course. Craig was a formerly in New

(01:05:13):
York City transit police officer, laddled over to the FK
and Wife You're just joining us in nineteen ninety three,
and spent the entirety of his fire service career in
Manhattan serving and ladder five. You know, I feel you
never get over it, but you know, with time, losing
Captain Drennan and Chris and Jimmy that night in nineteen
ninety four became a little bit easier to manage, especially

(01:05:38):
you know when you look at the courageous way in
which Captain Drennan fought for those forty days, which for
those of you that need to see that Dateline special,
it's on YouTube. You have to watch it, especially when
you hear being to talk about what she was writing
during that time frame in her journal. Very beautifully done
my NBC at the time. And I feel like right
as the company was beginning to kind of come to

(01:05:58):
terms with what had happened that night in ninety four
is when exactly Heal perfectly said, is when nine to
eleven happens. And again it couldn't have happened. The terrorists
couldn't have unfortunately, picked any better time and do what
they did, because this was that shift change. You know,
guys are going home from the night to whe guys
are coming in from the day tour. Firemen and cops

(01:06:19):
aren't the type of cut and run, especially in a
moment like that, and nobody was gonna cut and run
that day. So latter five and Engine twenty four for
that man Aye battalion too. We're riding heavy that day,
as were a lot of other firehouses in the city.
You know, we know what the guys did that day.
We know they got down there and we know how
they performed. Just tell me about where you were when
you heard and you know again, I have the picture

(01:06:41):
of the pickup truck and I'll show it as you
tell your story when you were able to finally get
down to the site.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
I was in Staten Island in Pleasant Plains and was
helping Joe Ray. Hey, you live next door to Steve Altini,
two guys from the engine you know, on fire house
and they needed help as I'm a framer, so I
was able to help them put an extension on the house.

(01:07:09):
And you know, we kind of help each other out.
They will help each other and do different things so
that they At that moment, we were snapping lines waiting
for the lumber delivery and Steve Altini's wife came out
crying saying that a plane hit the building. And we
know we're going because it's the trade set. We're first
through on the second alarm. We know we're going, so

(01:07:32):
we just want to get a heads up, so we
run in the house and take a look on the
TV and we see twenty floors of fire, and I said,
we're at war. I knew what my police experiences that
this was bin Laden. I knew that we were at war,
and I was afraid that we would vote been lotted
in twenty years later as our president. But we didn't

(01:07:55):
exactly get him, but that was what we kind of
were prepared for. So we sized it up and we
took off. We got to the building in nineteen minutes.
Joe Ray was he's a very vocal person. And while
we're driving, we're sizing it up, we're coming up with
our play. We're figuring that we're gonna have twenty three
hours and it's gonna collapse. And Joe Ray is out

(01:08:19):
the window with my placket and he's doing the sat
He's no, but we were kind of getting ready, getting
jacked up to go to war. And Uh, on the
way there, the cars were just all parked on the highway,
but we didn't slow down. We took the grass and
Joe Ray's screaming at the window and uh, Sadly, Steve

(01:08:44):
Altini came with us because he, you know, he had
children and he survived, but you know, it was a
different decision. If you had children, maybe you shouldn't go
as as hard as we were going because we weren't
gonna listen to the chiefs. We weren't gonna stand behind
some fence two blocks away. We got to the Verzana,
it was closed. Those cops we weren't. I could have said, oh,

(01:09:08):
they wouldn't let me go. Those cops got out of
our way, and they were happy to stay at the
bridge and do their detail. But I felt like they
kind of wished they were able to come with us.
They had obeyed orders, you know, and I wasn't listening
to the orders. This was a war. We would not
fire him in anymore. In my opinion, we were the
militia and we were gonna go find the enemy. If

(01:09:31):
we found them, we were gonna kill him. We were
gonna kill him with extreme prejudice. But we didn't face them.
We got to the buildings and look it up. I
was gonna get closer to where the rig was. I
figured I back it up and parked it right in
front of the ninety West, the Marquee of ninety West,

(01:09:52):
because I figured if the building hit ninety would glade
and come onto the highway, which is exactly what happened.
The ambulance that ended up being parked in front of
my pickup truck was crushed and it was considerated and
there must have been somebody who put that fire out
because it saved my pickup truck. And then we were

(01:10:14):
able to use it. Even though the windows were blown out,
it was burned and it was melted, we were able
to use it as our rig. It was no longer property.
I kind of just accepted it as this is our rig.
It's not my truck anymore. This is the fire. It
was the spirit of the Phoenix from Latter five rising

(01:10:37):
from the ashes. And later in the day when I
went back to get that rig, there was a guy
with a wrecker that was just taking all the vehicles
on the highway and making a big pile down by
the battery, and I had him move some things and
I was able to drive that thing out of there.
Laid in the day and as I'm driving out of
the hole, there's hundreds of firemen behind that fan that

(01:11:00):
I was never gonna stay behind. You know that this
was hours after I was operating, and those guys are
waiting there and I'm driving out and Mandor Donnie, who
was one of the guys waiting there, he listens to
the bosses, you know, he he wasn't going renegade like me,
like us, and he says, Mono, and I've reached out.

(01:11:23):
I pound on the window. I said it's a Chevy.
And all those guys were like it was It was
like a it was like a win for the war.
To me, this was World War three and that they
finally got us and that we had to fight them back.
So that rig ended up the next day. Bobby Davis,
Freddy Perugia, Danny Edwards, these are all retired guys. They

(01:11:48):
showed up at the firehouse and they went right to
the rig that was crushed, and they took that five
symbol off the bumper, and they took that phoenix latter
five sign that Damn Potter made that was crushed on
the ladder and brought it back to the firehouse. And
we all came up with this idea because some guys

(01:12:08):
were in the whole job. Guys were talking out loud.
They shouldn't have been. They were talking. They think they
should retire. They think that maybe other guys are thinking,
maybe they will quit, guys. No, our guys are buried.
This is no time to quit or to retire. We
gotta get that no matter what. So it was a

(01:12:29):
motivational factor to turn get everybody's hands drilling that truck
Marty Moriarity rates made in the USA on it. We
put the screwed bolts right into it. You know, obviously
it was no longer any value other than what God
was making it to be, the war wagon, and that

(01:12:50):
we were gonna punch these animals in the face. This
was our punch. This was our attack on that satanic
cult that they we were attacking back. And when we
drove every morning down to the pit in the back
of everybody in that truck with the American flag nailed
off the back of it, the people in that neighborhood

(01:13:14):
were cheering. There was hope, there was a possibility that
we could get the bad guys, not just get our
guys out. We wanted to kill the enemy, and we
carried in that truck pork rins because of the lesson
we learned from General Jack Pershing. Back in the turn

(01:13:36):
of the century, around the time when Teddy Roosevelt was around,
there was an uprising in the Philippines and that same
satanic cult was killing people and going wild, and General
Pershing took them to the soccer stadium they were watching.
You know, they knew who was doing what. They caught them.

(01:13:58):
They brought him to the stadium and they killed them,
and they put pigs, pieces of like pigs on their heads,
and they let one guy go and said go back
to your people and let them know what's gonna happen.
This is how we're gonna treat you if you're gonna
keep doing this. It stopped the uprising, so it's an
effective tool against pigan worshipers.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
It's still raw to this day. And thank you very
much for telling that story. I mean, it's gonna be
twenty five years next year. But just seeing the passion
that you were shown because you knew these guys, these
guys weren't just friends. Ah yeah, I know that guy.
They're your brothers. They're your brothers. And they charged into
harm's way that day and they didn't come back. And
it's personal. You know, it was already personal as it was.
Even if Latter five didn't lose a single guy that day,

(01:14:42):
it's still personal because you had plenty of other friends
and plenty of other companies that died that day and responded.
But how important in turn was it for the newer
guys coming in in the classes and the academy that
followed that got to sign a ladder five for you
to pull them to the side and say, hey, remember
these guys. If you can be half forget that quarter

(01:15:03):
of what they were as firefighters, you'll have a very
very good career. How important was that for you to
say hey, and with that same passion you just showed
me in the story you told remember these guys, Remember
the history of this place, Remember what they did.

Speaker 2 (01:15:16):
That was so important? And I just want to say,
they were eighty two of my brothers, they're my close
personal They killed my eighty two close personal friends. Ye
three hundred and forty three of my brotherhood, and I
knew a lot more than eighty two of the guys
that died, but guys that would have been at my wedding. Yes,

(01:15:39):
it is important, and I feel like all of us
that survived that, and we all survived, anybody that was
alive that day could have been killed that day, because
that's how huge they are, the evil that's behind this
and it's so important that we remind people that this

(01:15:59):
is possibly the greatest threat to humanity. This could be
the greatest threat to humanity. And it's not going away,
because they're could have come back again. The constant are
still doing it. They still have their intel, and God
bless them for going and get them. God bless those
Ice guys for going and getting these bad people out

(01:16:21):
of here because they don't fit. They do not follow
the rules, and we need people that follow the rules.
This is civilization. So it was so important to me.
Every day in my life is bent on this that
I remind everybody. And I tried to kind of back
off because it could be a disability. It could be, oh,

(01:16:43):
this guy's crazy. He's talking about it too much. So
I try to back off a little. But I do
remind all the probies. I go to all of our
firehouse things. Whenever we have a mass or a dedication,
I go. The only time I missed the Watch Street
As was the twenty year anniversary because my son Craig

(01:17:03):
was playing the state championship. And your children have to
come first, and it is so important, and I do.
I'll keep going there as long as all of these
broken down bones to keep getting me there. And what
I'm trying to do is bring that truck to the
firehouse because the Hannifins, the Socitos, I mean, Tiana, SANTOI.

(01:17:31):
On the day that we have the Mass at the
old Saint Pat's Cathedral, we all go back to the
firehouse and those families come around that truck and I
provide in the truck a big cooler and the Hannifhans
get the Heinekens, the Socdos and the Santois go for
the Corona lights and we all talk to stories about

(01:17:54):
their falling a loved one and being that we're alive,
this is a way that we can still give them solace.

Speaker 1 (01:18:01):
It's something your connection, your a connection because you knew
them on a personal level. You spend so much time
with someone, and especially after keep in mind a lot
of these kids, they were so young when their fathers
got killed, and they don't have a lot of solid memories.
You know. It's one thing if you're seven, eight, nine
years old, you have some memories there. If you're two, three,

(01:18:23):
four or five maybe a little bit, if at all,
you don't have any memories. You're hearing everything. Second, So
any connection is valuable because you never heard their voice,
you know, and even if you did, it was for
such a brief time you don't remember what they sound like.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
Home videos is another big thing of course, too, but
just connections, like because you worked with them, you knew them,
you know, and it paints an incredible picture as to
again who they were, what they did, why they were
so valuable to the fire department, just to credit they
were to humanity to do what they did every single day,
you know. And it's not just the guys that were

(01:18:58):
lost on Watch Street. There's the guys that was lost
that never lost to seven years later at the Trade Center.
And like we talked about off air, take a guy,
not that I'm you know, singling him out as more
important than the other guys who gave their lives that day,
But think about Mike Wacola, as we were talking about
a guy who had done his time and was going
to retire that morning. It was his last tour. He
had done his night tour the day, you know, the

(01:19:19):
previous evening, September tenth. He was gonna go home and
that was it. He was gonna retire. After a nice
long run. The New York City Fire Department. It would
have been easy for him to look at that and say, well, guys,
I'm out here. You know this doesn't apply to me anymore.
I put my papers in, I'm out. Uh huh. He
hopped on that rig, and I'm pretty sure there may
have been a thought I may not come back. Hopped
on it anyway, went down and who was.

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
Definitely that Mike definitely knew that he was probably not
coming back. A lot of guys did.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
Yeah, And he and they had children, and.

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
That's a different it's a different decision when you have children.
When you were a young buck and you single, you
could run through a brick wall and it's okay because
you're not lett down your kids. You could take that
extra risk of your own life to save the others
and it's not going to hurt your child. But it

(01:20:09):
was a difference. He's truly a hero, I mean all
the fallen the heroes, but yeah, Mike Wacola. He was
a boxer and he used to have whatever we were doing,
had a job, but we had to do a lot
of flights. We would do ten flights and then we
would take a one minute break, just like a boxing ring.

(01:20:30):
You know, you do three minutes of killing it. Literally
you have to focus on every punch for that whole
three minutes because it's so draining, and then you rest
for one minute and then you get back. And it
was conditioning and that was a great thing that Mike
taught me. Whatever, even after nine to eleven, any kind

(01:20:51):
of extrenuous work, we would pace. We would do it
as hard as we could and take that break, give
the let the next guy his axe swing if it
was a brick wall that we were going through, and
Mike was, oh man, he saved Frushie's life that day.
Frushie was the proby. Did we tell you about that one? Well, no,

(01:21:14):
Frushie was on the rig, he was off duty. Frushie
and Mike knew that they weren't gonna make it, and
he said, Frushie, go to the command center or you're fired.
And the kid was, you know, like he's got to
listen to the boss, you know. But he made the
decision and he went to the command center and he lived.

(01:21:35):
Frushie's alive. And Frushie's dad is glad about that. I
know his mom's glad about it. I know that his
children are now and fru she's living his life the
way most of us have that we've given we've been
given a second chance, and to make the best out
of it. Put everything into your family unit and make
it everything around it great and better.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
Absolutely, and that kind of sek was perfect. Just getting
back to your career in a moment, Thank you again
so much for going into that. You know, you're a
guy that in this strikes me. Even in retirement, you're hungry,
you want more. From the standpoint that you're always looking
to learn, you're always looking to evolve. Fire service is
a great way to do that. You never stop learning.
If you feel like you do, it's probably time to go.
You know, nobody ever gets to the point where they

(01:22:19):
know everything, but they've spin around the block once or twice.
If you did, and if you didn't, it's fine. If
you did eventually go to show for school and start
driving ladder five, tell me about that process. I mean,
the tiller is one thing. Being up at the front
is another, because the officer's trusting you. You know, of
course the crew as a hole that's trusting you, and
just as important as doing your job once you get
to the call, whatever it is, an MBA technical rescue

(01:22:42):
or structure fire is you know, get again getting to
the call safely in the first place. So if you
did go to show for school, tell me about that
process and the fun of getting a chance to drive
a rig like that through the streets of Manhattan.

Speaker 2 (01:22:52):
Well, I did drive a few times when they needed
to drive up. I needed to show up, but it
was kind of like you had to go to show
for school. They wanted me to go to show for school,
but I felt like I was still physical enough where
I could do the job, you know that needed to
be done, the hard stuff, because chauffeur is kind of

(01:23:13):
when your go towards the end of your career. I
felt that it was you still have to do physical things.
But I felt like it was more important to continue
to be going in the window as the OV or
be in the audience man orbit interior. So I never

(01:23:34):
did go to show for school. I afford it. I
said I'll drive, and I would drive. I just didn't
want to be pigeonholed in as a chauffeur, and I
should have. I should have gone to show for school.
Looking back at.

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
It, I mean, listen, you did what you had to do.
And I get it. I get your perspective. I'll ask you,
much like an enja man's favorite piece on the rigs,
the nozle, what was your favorite piece in the truck
where you I mean you're happy, you were happy doing everything?
What were you happy on the truck?

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
The Haligan. Halligan is just masterpiece. I really got good.
And those guys John Drennan, all those old times that
taught me, Bobby Davis, I mean they taught me how
to swing that thing. And being a baseball player also,
that was very helpful. My favorite way of forcing an
outward opening door was the pike, because if you practiced enough,

(01:24:26):
you hit it perfectly and the whole thing just ripped open.
It was The halligan was my surgical instrument. I used
to call it the key to any door. But my
favorite was the halligan. I was good with the saw too,
I was good with the tools, but that Halligan it
struck a fire in my heart.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):
It's a good tool. It's a really really cool tool,
you know. And and Chris, Chris been put in the
chat irons equals the key to the city. And he's right.

Speaker 2 (01:24:56):
I don't get me wrong. I've broken the hooks I've
broken hooks. You know. I used the tools and I
used the tool just like a pickup truck. It's a tool.
I push it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:06):
I push it.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
Your hammer is a tool. Your sledge hammer is a tool.
I pushed them. We break them sometimes, and that Halligan.
I never broke it, Haligan, but I have one. I
do have one. Bobby gave me a four footer.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
It's a great piece of that. You know, again and
again it has an FT and Y le anything too,
because there was a Deputy chief from the FD and Y. H.
Halligan that helped create it. So you know, it really
did start in New York City, which makes it even
cooler for any FD and Y guys they get the
chance to operate it. In particular, before I get to
your retirement. I went to ask you this earlier, but
you were telling.

Speaker 2 (01:25:41):
Cut one thing, and I cut you off and one
more tool, which was back on the rigs go right ahead,
the scary ladder that they took you off the rig.
It was a valuable tool, valuable tool. And Dave Schleifer,
he was not the tallest guy, but he made the

(01:26:01):
rescue at the tip of the aeriel with the scary
ladder to climb up to the next level. Oh my god,
a beautiful rescue thanks to the scary ladder. And you
could scale the whole building with a scary ladder. You
can start from the bottom, crush it through a window,
climb up, go to the next one. But they took
it off the they took it off the ricks sadly,

(01:26:23):
so I don't want to give I have to give
pay the respects also to the scary ladder as an
infamous tool. I mean, I'll ask you too.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
Was it a safety thing as to why they took
it off. Was that the main reason or was it
just you know, again, kind of out growing it. Okay,
safety thing, I get it, it makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
Safety.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
I agree, I disagree, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
No, Yeah, especially.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Chiefs have a great job. They are brilliant minds. They
did the school work. But there's a reason that we
had to ignore them down there. There was and you know,
when I see them today, they thank me for that
because we had to go places that we had to go.
I don't care what you say, Tommy hannifit's family said
the firehouse, we're not coming back till we get them.

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
And we got them we got in my first week, right, No,
and there's any good officer, especially a chief, knows that
you know, and a lot of chiefs during that time
were very very good about that. No, you know, listen,
we gotta find our guys and find your guys. You did, now,
But I meant to ask you this earlier, and I'll
touch on you retiring in O seven in a moment.
But there's not just the fires, right, there's you mentioned

(01:27:35):
rescues too. There's I mean, granted you're not rescue one,
the more technical stuff they're going to be able to do.
But again, given the foot traffic in the area, and
given just what the first do encompasses a lot of
MBA's a lot of entrapment. You got the subways too.
What's a really good non fire related job that you
can recall from your time in five where again, much
like I asked you about the fires earlier, you came

(01:27:56):
out of it saying, all right, that really taught me something.

Speaker 2 (01:28:00):
Well, there's a funny one on Ladder five where we
went down to Christopher Street. And I mean it wasn't
really that funny, but when you hear what I said,
I think you might laugh. It wasn't funny because it
was suicide. The man was trying to commit suicide. He
was dressed like a woman and stuff and he had
to make up on and he was in the water

(01:28:23):
and me and Marty end up in the water and
this guy's fighting us. We had to fight this guy
to save him. And we got him up on the
ladder and we were fighting him and got him out
and the chief is like, we're right, you guys up
for metals, and Marty's like, absolutely not. We don't want

(01:28:44):
anybody to.

Speaker 1 (01:28:45):
Know about this, not the one that goes in the newspaper.

Speaker 2 (01:28:49):
We saved the guy. That's fine, you know, hopefully he's
straightened out his life, you know. But there was there
was another one on the Transit Police that was that
was that sticks out that I was on the southbound
train coming into the West fourth Street and the train

(01:29:09):
head of the station that had already left the station,
it was partially instill in the station had a man
under and I had to walk to the front of
the train, climb down on the roadbed of the train
that I was on, and walk all the way to
West fourth Street on the roadbed and climb under the train.
And this guy was a homeless guy, was a white man.

(01:29:31):
He was smelly, and he was wasted, and his head
was inches away from one of the shoes. And now
the shoe wasn't on the same side as the third rail,
but the other shoe was on the third rail on
the other side, so we're potentially looking at a live
six hundred and sixty vaults. His head was inches from

(01:29:54):
and I'm trying to get him out of there, and
now he starts fighting me. And I had to have
a fistfight with this guy the train to get him
out from under there. And then the EMS, the ESU
guys from NYPD showed up and they took the guy
out of the station. They all got medals. Why meals,

(01:30:16):
We don't care.

Speaker 1 (01:30:17):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me. It's funny you say
that because John Bushing, who was I know, you didn't
quite cross paths with him, but he was a transit
emr U cop using transit rescue. Went over to the
NYPD Emergency Service Unit with the merger. He said that
a guy told them when he was newer to the unit,
when he first got in there, don't underestimate the fact
that somebody who does something like that, who is suicidal

(01:30:38):
can become homicidal because remember, they don't want to be saved.
There's a reason why they're under there. Sometimes, yes, they
Sometimes somebody suffers a medical emergency and they fall by accident,
or unfortunately, somebody is pushed by someone else. Nine times
out of ten, someone unfortunately who was underneath that train
is under it because they want to be there, right right,

(01:30:58):
So yeah, you're saying that jogged that memory. Now what's
interesting for those of you that are outside the New
York City area, this is the context to tie this together.
If you do time in another city agency and then
you lateral to another city agency from whatever agency you
started with. And you commonly see this with people who start,

(01:31:19):
for example, as you did in the police department, and
then go to the fire department, or you know, somebody
starts in sanitation and they go to the police, they
go to the fire department. Whatever time you did in
the previous agency counts towards your pension. So of course,
with the merger of nineteen ninety five with the three
police departments, that's how that system was connected. So your
six years counted towards your pension. Already you had a

(01:31:40):
head start when you joined the fire department. So you're
fourteen years in the ft and I was really twenty.
You know, you had done a lot. You had seen
a lot between Watch Street of course, nine to eleven
and everything else in between. You know, you're big on
a family. That's something I've gotten from you and talking
with you off the air and now talking with you
tonight on the air. Was that the reason you walked

(01:32:01):
away from the FD and Y in two thousand and seven,
or were there other factors that made you say, even
though I'm sure that decision was tough as tough can be. Yeah,
time to go.

Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
No, there was just too many surgeries, too many screws
and things. You know, you're not allowed to do it.
You become a liability. I had no choice but to retire.
And you know what I felt like, I felt bad.
It makes you feel bad because you left them. You
left them, you know, like when Watt Street happened, a

(01:32:31):
lot of guys left the fire not a lot, but
some guys left the firehouse, you know, and the guys
that stayed we have such a close up bond, you know,
like we were all in it together and there no
matter what I mean, you could do all the things
right and guys die in the line of duty. We

(01:32:51):
did everything right, they still died. There's nobody nothing to change.
It can't be changed. It was just their fate. I
felt bad leaving, and when I walked out the door,
Joe Joey Graff was like, no, no, that's it, and
I was like, that's it and not let me you know,
I got There's only so many surgeries you could have.

(01:33:13):
And then if you someone gets hurt because your shoulder
gives out, or your foot gives out, or your hip
gives out, then the city's gonna get sued because they
catch you. They let me work, Well, you were hurt.
So it was tough. It was a tough thing. It
was tough to leave. It was tough to let the
guys down by retiring. You know, everybody wants to stay

(01:33:36):
till they're sixty five, but too many surgeries, you just
can't do it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:41):
You're gonna get banged up. Yeah, if you're if you're
not one of those guys to run and hide, if
you're out there actually doing the work, you're gonna get
banged up. Unfortunately, you were the work, the lugs.

Speaker 2 (01:33:53):
It's tough. You know, every time I would take it
a small feed, I'd get the bronchitis, you know, like this.
It was tough to not be able to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
Yeah, yeah, it's never easy to leave, especially when it's
something you love. And you obviously loved it. You love
you just you loved helping people. You love being a
police officer, you love being a firefighter. You got the
chance to enjoy the best of both worlds. So I'll
ask you, even though it's not easy to walk away,
you got to. And as I always say on the
show to guys that expressed sadness, you know, when they

(01:34:25):
had to leave the job, whatever it was PD or FD,
I always say, and the audience knows this by now.
You guys know probably I'm about to say a word
for word, you got to make the walk to the
pension section. There's so many guys that never got the
chance to do that. So in line with that, you know,
and you have a lot now to be grateful for.
And you've talked about your family tonight. When you look
back on those twenty years, merging your police time and

(01:34:47):
your firetime together, if you can define that in a
sentence or two, looking back what are you most grateful
and glad you got the chance to experience across those
amazing twenty years.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):
Well, it was great to be with all those men
and women that made both jobs so valuable and to
have been valuable to them. As they've said, they've said it,
you know, and they say it when we see each other.
And that's why I keep going back. I go back

(01:35:19):
and we get together when we have a lot of
functions to honor the fallen, and we get together and
all the new guys we teach them and we'll never
stop teaching them. And they are keeping that fire house strong,
those new guys who aren't so new anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:35:39):
But there you know again, the generations changed, but the
mission never does. You know, this has been fabulous. We're
not done yet. The hour and a half is flown by,
and we'll do the rapid fire momentarily. But this rapid
fire is brought to you by our friend Billy Ryan
and the Ryan Investigative Group. Play that at real quick
if we can in the background find it here stand

(01:36:01):
by the mike. The New Haven Podcast 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 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

(01:36:24):
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, if you
need a PI, look no further than Bill Ryan and
the Ryan Investigative Group, a proud supporter and sponsor of
the Mike the New Haven Podcast. Indeed, a little bit

(01:36:44):
of a glitch on mind, that's why the ad didn't
come up right away. Apologies to those of you in
the audience, But now time for the rapid fire five
hit run questions for me, five hit run answers from you.
They are fun when they're easy, though you can say
pass if you want to. First one, you know, we
talked about the similarities besides the obvious, which is you're
taking people to jail in one profession, not in the
other one unless you're a fire marshal. The biggest difference

(01:37:05):
between policing and firefighting.

Speaker 2 (01:37:08):
In policing, you don't get respect, you get hatred. In
fine apartment, you could be aggressive and they pat you
on the back and give you a beer.

Speaker 1 (01:37:19):
You can break things. You can literally break things in
their house. Yes, you know, hulk smash and and I
love you for it. This is true. This is true.
Most uplifting job you ever had, between either the police
or the fire department, the.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
Most uplifting job ever had. Wow, that could be. It
might have been. That might have been that one with
the ladies that will go into on that little box
where it was fuse alarm and all those women were.

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
There, little little inebriated. You know they they had had
a good time, you know, you know they they had
certainly had a good time. But you know, uplifting in
nature for a wide variety of reasons. And that's another
great story amongst many that you've told this evening. Third,
what was your favorite meal to have in the firehouse?

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
Steak and bake with some either sparagus or string beans.
If Red Bull was making the string beans, it would
be red bone string beans.

Speaker 1 (01:38:19):
Ribbi rare, pretty good. And in those rare days, this
is the fourth question of rapid fire, where there wasn't
a guy cooking a meal up in the firehouse. If
you had to order out, where it was your favorite
place to go?

Speaker 2 (01:38:30):
Oh, my goodness, have to be.

Speaker 1 (01:38:35):
Chumley's showed that at Chumblies.

Speaker 2 (01:38:39):
Was eighty six bedforit. Bedford and Barrow, Okay, yeah, it
was the old speakeasy way. They came up with eighty six.
At the cops, you know, they would have a door
on the other way. During prohibition, everybody would eighty six
go out the eighty six door. When the cops were
going to raid. The cops would call and say we're
coming to raid because they were all in there too.
Eighty six it out the back door. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:39:01):
So there's a good one. Another classic little piece of
New York City history. And the fifth and final question
the rabbid fire. Of course we talked about it earlier.
If you can give advice to anybody, or even just
the younger version of yourself, anybody coming on to any
form of civil service, the police department which you experienced,
the fire department which you experienced, what advice would you
give them as someone they did both.

Speaker 2 (01:39:23):
I would say, raise your suns. It's warriors.

Speaker 1 (01:39:29):
Gotta be for a job like this, right, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
Because it gets real sometimes, you know. They have to
be prepared just like we were. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
Absolutely, I like that. Simple to the point, but I
like that, Craig, this has been great. Stick around. We'll
talk off here. Don't sign off just yet before I
say goodbye to the audience. Is there any shoutouts to
anyone or anything you want to give?

Speaker 2 (01:39:52):
Oh? Yeah, the Breed Brothers Towing. They hooked us up
in games a half price discount this year when I
brought the old war waggon up to the firehouse for
nine to eleven. Thank you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:40:04):
Absolutely. Shout out to them, and shout out to everybody
else who tuned in the night for what was volume
seventy six of the Best of the Bravest Interviews with
the Ft and Wise Leader. Appreciate all year.

Speaker 2 (01:40:14):
Don't forget all the guys. A lot of five inches
two four. Everybody on the duty right now.

Speaker 1 (01:40:21):
Yeah, battalion too, right now. Yeah, shout out to them.
Stay safe. They're gonna have a busy night tonight. Something
tells me, because you know, the crazy has always come out,
especially on a night like this. The crazies are always
out getting in trouble. What's gonna happen in any big city,
So guys stay safe and be careful tonight. Indeed, shout
out to everybody that tuned in the Night again. Coming

(01:40:43):
up next on the Mike. They do haven podcast Miami
Dade Police Department for a number of years, and they'll
be here for another volume of the Beat Profiles of
Police Nationwide. He was in there during the eighties and
nineties too, during the cocaine Cowboys era. I'll talk all
about it. Burke Gonzales retired as a sergeant out of
Miami days looking forward to hear in his stories. Due
to his scheduling conflict, I don't have a show next Friday,

(01:41:05):
so just to heads up, there will not be an
episode next Friday, but you're gonna get one this Monday
for our first show of November with retired Miami Dade
sergeant Berkenzales for what will be Like I said, another
volume the Beat Profiles of Police Nationwide. In the meantime,
this was volume seventy six of the best and Bravest
interviews with the ft Wives Elite. Now for tonight's outro song,

(01:41:25):
it was exactly twenty eight years ago today to this
concert my favorite concert ever took place. And that for
Tonight's outro song is plucked from their set list as
they performed it live from the Hammerstein Ballroom in New
York City on October thirty first of nineteen ninety seven.
Again a favorite band of mine, they were returning once
again to the program Jane's Addiction, Laying us Out live

(01:41:47):
from the Hammerstein Ballroom on October thirty first, nineteen ninety seven,
with head just and admit it. In the meantime on
behalf of Craig Monahan and producer Victor In all of
you in the audience on Mike Colone, we will see
you next time. The breaking si.

Speaker 2 (01:43:26):
Mm hm m hm h.

Speaker 3 (01:43:32):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (01:43:36):
Mmm mmm w.

Speaker 4 (01:45:01):
Everybody never got any bugle, Everybody.

Speaker 5 (01:45:52):
Camera, pat them images, camera, pop them out things, show
me a reads, thank You, Meeking, Shops, Show Shown to

(01:47:27):
give you Shots, sat as.

Speaker 6 (01:47:53):
Sas as such, John Show News, That's Jest shows.

Speaker 5 (01:49:09):
Ss N boes six, It's Vose said, It's who said
years about Sis?

Speaker 3 (01:49:24):
It by said By said as by sex pass.

Speaker 6 (01:49:53):
I say that's other things other than it's a man.

(01:50:14):
Don't you see him? Step Sha

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