Middle/bottom right photographs courtesy of Anthony.
One afternoon I had the opportunity and privilege to spend time with a retired New York Police Officer and a father of two beautiful girls, at his home in New York City. Our conversation ranged in everything from his recent achievement in earning his black belt in Jeet Kune Do, to his nearly twenty one year career on the police force, to his fondest moments of fatherhood.
What season are you in?
“I’m at a place where I would call it the ‘Me’ time in the sense that I’ve done my growing up, I’ve done my school, I’ve done my work, I’ve finished an entire career and moved on to other things at work and I found that I’ve done more things in the last ten years, not because I needed a promotion, or needed to get a job, but more for me because I wanted to do them. I don’t have to worry about anything but what I was looking to do, so I went back to school and studied what I wanted to study, which is history. I went back and got my Bachelor’s Degree.
After I retired I had the opportunity to do a lot of ‘Me’ things. I got a second chance with Gianna [youngest daughter] at having the experience of having your child grow up and you’re seeing all of it. I wasn’t with Angelica’s [eldest daughter of a previous marriage] mom, so I missed some of the day-to-day and I get that now. I’m here everyday, I help with homework, I pick her up from school everyday, take her to activities.”
Where did you grow up?
“I grew up in the Bronx, in New York City, I was actually born in Manhattan, and I got a Catholic school education. We had a local church that had a Catholic school, and my parents liked the education there better than a public school, so I went through the entire twelve years of Catholic school elementary and high school, and out of high school I started college. I took some bad guidance and being a bit naive, had an experience that there were other avenues that I could have explored that might have led me to have better results and have finished at the time, but that wasn’t the case. I had been preparing for what I was going to do for the rest of my life, taking civil service tests, and things like that, and got called by the Police Department, and left school before graduating in order to take the job at the Police Department. It led to a funny situation because I always said I was going to go back and finish, and I spent almost twenty-one years in the Police Department, and when I finally retired my sister gave me the application to go back to school, basically telling me that I didn’t have any more excuses.”
What attracted you to the Police Department?
“You know, it’s kind of funny because there are certain things I’ve come to see over time that people do almost in a sense of a legacy kind of thing, or go back to the old days where you had a family business and you did what your father did, or you did what someone else in the family did, and the Police Department was one of those things. I knew lots of people that were in the Police Department because their father was a cop, their grandfather was a cop, their uncles were all cops, and they become one too. That was not my case. I did it because I was taking a few tests, I was thinking about what I might want to do, whether I was gonna do something in Public Service or not, I had no idea, but they called me and I was like, ‘Yeah, what the hell. I’m gonna do this,’ but I went in with this idea that if I didn’t like it, I could quit. I knew I wasn’t going to be tied down to it, you know if I hated it I would have done something else, but I got there and realized right away that the training aspect of it was a game, and if you played by the rules, and you did what you had to do, they left you alone. If you were that sore thumb, you got paid attention to. I was lucky in the sense that I got to do a lot of the things I wanted to do, in terms of the Police Department experience. I wanted to go to a really busy place to really learn how to do it, and I did that. I worked for seven and a half years in what was probably, and arguably the busiest precinct within the city, block for block. That was in the West Bronx.
After that I was happy there, maybe even a little complacent, and somebody said to me, ‘You know, you been here for quite a while. Did you ever think about what other things you might want to try and do?’ and I said, ‘You know, you’re actually right, maybe there’s some other things in the department that I might be interested in.’ So I started to put in applications into specialized units, I mean places that I probably couldn’t get because I didn’t have what we call a ‘Hook,’ you know someone looking out for you that had some influence because they were high ranking, or they knew the right people to help you move to different places, I didn’t have that, but I put in applications to everything anyways. As chance would have it, they were starting a new unit and were noticing that I had made some inquiries into what other units I might be interested in. They asked me if I’d be interested in trying this unit [Homeless Outreach Unit], and again I was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ It’s an opportunity to do something different and I knew going in, it was going to be a citywide thing, so it gives me an opportunity to work in other places that I might not have had the chance to work in. We started up a new unit that worked with homeless people and the good and the bad of it was nobody really knew what to do because it had never been done, at least in terms of street patrol before. It gave us the opportunity to, I don’t want to say make your own rules because that’s not what it was, but the day-to-day we figured out on our own. The way things came to be, came from that first group of us who went out and got the first experience on how you meet people. How you talk to them, how you get them to accept whatever services we can guide them into, and of course on the enforcement side, we did not make any arrests on homeless people, but we would breakout encampments where you would have large numbers of people putting up tents and shacks, and things like that, those kind of things we would dismantle.
None of that had ever been done before, so we kind of laid the groundwork for how those things were done. Plus the fact that it was a citywide initiative, which gave us the opportunity to get a taste and a feel for what other parts of the city were like. New York is funny in the sense that every borough is different than another. They all have their unique things that are different, so policing at each one of those boroughs was as diverse and different as the boroughs themselves were, so you got to see what it was like to work in each one of those places.”
Is there a moment that you can remember that you felt proud to be a police officer?
“I think if you sat down with a hundred police officers, no matter where they were from, every one of them can give you a hundred stories on different things, but there are some things that stay with you for one reason or another, for good and for bad.
I think the most fulfilling thing was, in anything that you do, where you come across a lot of people, you never really get to know all of them, and you don’t necessarily remember a face or name, but having done the Homeless Outreach, which was the name of our unit, for a number of years I had someone come up to me one day in Battery Park.
He came over and shook my hand and said, ‘Do you remember me?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, but I actually don’t. I imagine we’ve met before.’ and he replied, ‘Yeah, we’ve met before. You don’t remember but you came and you spoke to me, and you asked if I needed anything, or if you can help me with anything, and you suggested job training and I decided to go with you.’ So apparently we took this person to a place where they had the appropriate social worker with connections to job training programs, and he said, ‘After doing that I took the job training, and got a job, an apartment, and I don’t live on the street anymore.’ It was a good thing and something I will never forget. People leave impressions and sometimes you don’t realize you leave impressions.”
What was your first week on the police force like?
“When you go out onto the street, everybody knows you’re the brand new guy because all your leather stuff is bright and shiny, everything is glittery and it’s kind of funny because when you work in a place that is very busy and has a lot of crime going on, the people out on the street, they know who the new guy is too. They look at you and you’re all bright and shiny and everybody else is kind of little bit disheveled, so they challenge you from time to time. They want to see what you’re made of, but that’s part of the game.
The first day I ever went out on patrol, it was raining, coming down in buckets and when you’re that brand new rookie they put you out with someone else. Eventually you do a foot post, a foot post is a solo post, so they had myself and another rookie, we happened to be on the same block, and Sergeant brings us in the van, drops us off over there and goes, ‘Okay, you have this side of the street, you have that side of the street. No standing together, I don’t want to see you talking. I’m gonna be coming around to check on you, I want you to be out here when I see you.’ So there was crazy rain and I was lucky that the side of the street that I was on, there was a funeral parlor, and I don’t know why but funeral parlors tend to have awning, so at least I had something to stand under and the guy on the other side of the street didn’t have that. Luck of the draw, I got the good side.”
What was one of the craziest calls you ever had?
“Near the end of my time on the police department, I did narcotics in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, but I had an injury previous to going there and I needed to have surgery so I was unable to stay in narcotics full time. They sent me back to my previous assignment, which was the Homeless Outreach Unit, so I went back there and the Police Commissioner decided to make a change and they combined our unit with a sister unit that was in the transit division to where we were now covering both street and transit.
So it is New Year’s Eve, 2003 going into 2004 and my partner and I come on duty and are working a 2:00p.m. to 10:00p.m. shift. So it’s like 2:15p.m. and the Lieutenant says to us, ‘I need you two guys to go out to 23rd Street and 8th Avenue, meet the District Captain there. He’s got a situation and he needs you guys to do a track walk.’ So we leave our office and drive down to 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. The 8th Avenue line is the A, C, and E trains, very, very busy lines. They run from Brooklyn, some of them run up into upper Manhattan, some of them into Queens, plus 23rd Street and 8th Avenue is just a busy intersection, it’s where you start to get into midtown Manhattan on the West side. We get there and the Captain says to us, ‘Okay, train crew say there’s a suspicious package.’ Now a suspicious package can be almost anything, but it’s something out of the ordinary. It could be a box, a bag, or something along those lines, and there’s something about it that leaves them to believe that there is some sort of suspicious aspect about it, so you have to go and check and see if it might be something dangerous. So my partner and I go walking out, we were told it was about a hundred and fifty feet out into the tunnel and it was along the catwalk. The catwalk is in certain areas in the subway in order to do maintenance and such. There is a platform that’s raised on the side of the tracks that you can walk along, it’s a safe area, and trains can go by you while you’re on the catwalk. So we go walking in and we find a yellow backpack. It looked as though if you had your bag and you take it and place it right down on the ground, and anything in the subway you come to learn quickly that things don’t end up looking like someone just placed them down. It’s something that falls off a train, something that someone throws on the tracks, so it’s not sitting perfectly. The other thing is because of the fact that you have metal wheels on metal tracks, you have breaks, you have different things, anything that is in the subway for any period of time becomes covered in this kind of dust that only exists only in the subway, and it’s a brand new, nice clean bag and it looked like someone has placed it down there.”
So what was going through your mind?
“Well, it was one of these things where we went back and explained this to the Captain there’s nothing to indicate that there’s a problem per se, but it is a nice, clean, brand new bag and it looks like somebody just placed it down there. Somebody could have an agenda, and this is 2003, so it’s post 9/11, it’s New Year’s Eve, so you have people leaving town, people coming into town for celebrations, so he says, ‘Okay. So what we’re gonna do is have Emergency Service come.’ New York Police Department is not like any other police department in the country. It’s bigger, we tend to have more resources than most other departments, and we use different terms for some similar things, but what’s unique to New York City Police Department is the unit that does special weapons also do a number of other things, including rescues. When you guys are home [Other regions of the U.S.] the police department have a S.W.A.T. team that handle situations that call for heavy weapons, but if there is a car accident, a rescue, the fire department does it. Here [New York City] our Emergency Service Unit is a fully dedicated unit that does all of that. Matter of fact, they do it better than the fire department does. You’re stuck in an elevator, you’re in a car crash, you need to get off of the side of a building, I can guarantee you you’ll want Emergency Service to come even more than you want the fire department to come. So anyways, they also have more training on these kind of items to see if there might be something suspicious. So what we do is we make the decision, after the discussion with the Captain, he decides to now bypass all local service to the 23rd Street stop, so there will only be trains on the inside, or express tracks, and nobody is stopping there. The E.S.U. [Emergency Service Unit] member responds and the Captain says, ‘Take him out and show him the bag,’ so my partner and I escort the E.S.U. member out to the bag to see what he thinks and he comes to the same conclusion as us, ‘There’s not necessarily anything dangerous, but in light of the whole situation, let’s not take any chances, we’ll call for the bomb squad to show up.’ So we put a call in for the bomb squad and in the meantime we showed up at this location at about 2:30 in the afternoon, by 3:30p.m. the E.S.U. is there and we’ve already shut off local service.
So now bomb squad comes, between ourselves and the Emergency Service people, we explain to them that it doesn’t necessarily look like it could be anything, no telltale signs or wires hanging out or anything, but we don’t want to take any chances. He [Bomb Squad Technician] says ‘Okay. In light of the whole situation,’ and in terms of being expedient now at this time, ‘we’ll destroy it right here.’ Now he tells the Captain we need to shut all service on the A, C, and E lines and now it’s around 4:30p.m., this is the middle of rush hour on New Year’s Eve, so we shut all train service. He [Bomb Squad Technician] goes out to his truck and he comes down in his bomb squad suit, carrying a little rectangular, what looked like a Tupperware, and there’s water in it, and inside there’s a little brick of C-4 explosive.
He says, ‘We’ll just destroy this right here. We’re gonna blow it up here.’ He goes off to the corner and takes his C-4 and builds a little bomb and before he can go out and do this [detonate bomb], when you’re in the subway there are grates and different openings that come out to the street level, so because he is going to set off an explosive device, you now cannot have anyone walking or driving in the area in case something may happen. So now we have to stop all vehicular and pedestrian traffic, North and South, East and West at 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. Now there’s nothing moving, people, cars, trains, nothing.
He goes walking out to where we told him it was and we’re all just kind of talking and laughing and you know, there’s a nervous energy, like ‘Wow, this guy’s gonna blow this thing up in the middle of the subway, like how cool is that? That shit you only see in the movies.’ So he goes out there and I don’t know, it’s ten minutes later and he comes walking back and he still got his little bomb, and he goes, ‘Where’s the bag?’ ‘What do you mean, where’s the bag? We told you where the bag was.’ There’s three of us now, myself, my partner, the E.S.U., we all went out there, we all saw it, nobody is crazy. There’s no bag there. The Captain goes, ‘You two. You’re gonna walk from here to 14th Street and find what happened to that fuckin’ bag.’ So I’m on the Uptown side and my partner is on the Downtown side of the tracks and we’re walking down trying to see if we can spot what happened to this bag. One of the features of the subway is you need to be able to get out in case of a situation [emergency]. All of a sudden I hear my partner going, ‘DROP THE BAG! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!’ So I go running across all four tracks to get to his side and I see him, gun drawn. ‘GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! DROP THAT BAG!’ I come running across and all I see from my vantage point are legs and a hand holding the bag. So we come up here and we got this guy at gunpoint, can’t really see that much, so we climb up onto the catwalk and now this guy is refusing to drop this bag. We finally get there and grab him, and we get the bag away from him. So the end result was a homeless guy that was staying down there and somebody gave him a new bag. For a homeless guy’s clothes we literally shut down subway service in part or in full from 2:30p.m. in the afternoon until well after five o’clock on one of the busiest train stations, three full subway lines on New Year’s Eve, when people are trying to get out of town and into town for the ceremony at Times Square.
You always have to in those situations, if you’re going to make the error, make the error on the side of caution.”
Do you remember the morning of 9/11? Where were you exactly?
“Well, for me I worked the afternoon shift at the time, so I was not working the morning of 9/11. My daughter was having trouble medically and so we needed to see a doctor, and we made an appointment to go that morning. I was already divorced from her mother, but we went together to see the doctor. When we got to the doctor’s office the news was on. It was the morning time and that happened like 8:40a.m., the first plane, so when we got there everyone was buzzing about it. ‘Yeah, the plane hit the World Trade Center.’ By the time we went in to see the doctor and came back out the second plane hit and then you started to see people upset because by the time we got out the first building fell. Once you knew that two planes hit, you know everyone knew what it was. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a terrorist act. By the time I got home, you know without even being told, every TV station, every radio station was ordering every police officer to respond to their work site, they mobilized everybody. The only people, if you were out sick, you didn’t go in and of course if you were on vacation you weren’t here, but other than that everybody’s gotta show up. It depends on where you are, really classically you’re suppose to go to the nearest police facility, so I did that at first. I went to the local precinct and they said ‘We have plenty of people here, so it’s not like we need you to be here. Where do you work?’ I explained where I was at, he goes, ‘Alright, just check in with your place and let them know you were here already so they give you credit for being here, and then see what your boss wants you to do.’”
Where were you at this point in time?
“I was in the Bronx and I was living by my mother’s house, and where the local precinct I went to, but our office was in Queens, so I needed to come over the bridge. That was surreal because I went to the Whitestone Bridge and by that time all the bridges were already closed. I just threw on a uniform shirt and the bridge and tunnel officers saw me in the car with the uniform shirt and just waved me right through and I went over the bridge and got to our office in Fort Totten.
From September 14th all the way into December, I was at Ground Zero everyday. Because we were part of Special Operations Division, I went everyday with one of the two Sergeants that were assigned with us, and we were assigned to Liberty Street. We were actually in the Fire Department facility there, Engine Truck 10, which is literally across the street of the World Trade Center. So we were assigned there everyday, well at first it was a tent that was there on the street, and then we eventually moved into the building. They had nobody in the building because the building had been damaged when the towers fell.
Our specific job was a liaison between the Fire Department and Police S.O.D. because then what we were doing was dispatching people. The Fire Department mobilized the same way the Police Department did, so when you do that you have many more people than your equipment needs to be operated. Even in a fire house, there are several shifts so you only need one crew to operate the truck, but you may have two or three crews in terms of the number of people that are there [Ground Zero]. So in order for them to get to Ground Zero, we were coordinating getting busses and escorts and things like that to get them directly down to Ground Zero because you couldn’t drive or go anywhere, and of course there were police check points.
It was a funny situation because the first couple of nights I was there they had built some temporary fencing around the area to allow only vehicles that were actually doing work in there to get anywhere even close to the site. You would have trucks come down and they would load debris, and steel, and things that needed to get out of there, but they would need to examine it. So it would need to go to a certain site, and I would be going out and telling inspectors, high ranking people, what they needed to do, or what we needed, so it was kinda funny.
We had this inspector the first night and we were bringing trucks in; I was kind of like the runner between where we were set up and coordinating these certain things, to where he was with his hundred, or hundred and fifty cops that were doing perimeter patrol, making sure no one came in, and patrolling the gate area for vehicles to come in and out.
You would never ever under normal circumstances be able to go to somebody at that rank [rank/title], for me a cop, and go ‘Listen, I got trucks coming in, they need to get in over here.’ There would be a Sergeant, Lieutenant, or Captain would go to him [Inspector] and say ‘We need this,’ but for me to be able to go right to him and he says to me ‘What do you need?’ ‘This is what we need to do. We’re gonna do this, this, and this.’ and he says ‘Okay.’ and verbatim, the same way I told him, he’s sending that same information out, so it was kind of strange in that sense.”
Is there something you will never forget about Ground Zero and the aftermath of the attacks? A sound, a smell, an image?
“There was a lot of different things like that. I think for me it would be two things: The first day I went down there —September 13th, 2011 — you couldn’t walk directly in like you have when the World Trade Center was there; everything is cut off, everything is closed, where they could put fencing up, they did, but even so, streets were blocked. So we had to go around a different way past Battery Park City, which is actually across the road from where the World Trade Center was, and in through some buildings to come out the other side. It was like almost going through this big circle. The Fire Department is just throwing water on this smoldering wreck so we were actually walking through like ankle deep water that was mixed with that powder that you’ve seen on everybody when you saw the news that first day or two, when everybody was coated in white. So now it’s like mud. You could look through parts of it [wreckage pile] and it was still red, like a barbecue when you look through the coals and see that red glow.
The other thing was, several of the days while we were working logistics out and doing different things, we went from Floyd Bennett Field to Ground Zero by helicopter and we would fly over it. You would see pretty much what those aerial shots you see sometimes on television or in some books, that’s exactly what you would see.”
What was your initial reaction when you arrived to Ground Zero the first time?
“It was more in awe than anything else because it was so different and not like anything else. From a visual perspective it was very surreal. You saw some pictures on the television or stuff like that because everywhere you went the news was on, but it was almost like the scene in the Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston is walking across the beach and he sees the top half of the Statue of Liberty, and it’s like buried in the sand, that’s kind of what it was like. Even though you saw the pictures, you get there and all you see is that skeleton, the outside girders that were on the building are all jagged and hanging out at odd angles and such, and that’s the first thing you see, plus the fact that everything is just in a pile.”
If you could go back in time and tell your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
“I think that I would advise that person to be a bit more serious about education and taking advantage of your youth, in terms of the kind of things you might want to do that you don’t necessarily get to do later in life once you settle in and you have other responsibilities. I can’t say that I have any regrets about what I did, you always have regrets about some things that you do it’s the way life is. You make a decision, it comes out wrong, you regret that decision, but overall I can’t complain. I’ve lived a good life, I’ve done a lot of things that most people will never do. Could I have done more? Yeah, absolutely. Could I have gone some different directions within the police department? Yeah, probably, you know I could have made a few changes there and that’s okay, but overall that was a positive experience and I think life in general has been a positive experience. I don’t have too many complaints about the way things have turned out and overall I’ve been blessed with the fact that I can live the kind of life that I want to live. I’ve also been lucky in the sense that I had a good job that I actually enjoyed doing, I’ve been blessed with good family.”
What do you want to do before you die?
“I always liked to travel, but I did not get to do it as much as I would have liked to do, so I’d like to see some places in Europe that I have not had the chance to see.” Specifically the south of Europe, Italy, Greece, etc.
Our conversation shifted from his time on the police force to his family and Anthony went on to recount the life altering experiences of the birth of both of his daughters. In both deliveries, he was blessed enough to be able to hold his daughters first before their mother due to the standard surgical procedures of a cesarean section. Anthony laughs as he recalls a funny moment when his youngest daughter peed on him while he was holding her for the first time shortly after her birth.
“We talked politics earlier today, there’s always these discussions that go on and people’s opinions and things like that, but there’s no doubt that these things [birth of a child] are a miracle. I mean look, it’s nature, but nature in itself is a miracle. That fact that we have a physical world around us that operates in a certain way and things happen, and things grow, and they die and come back, it’s all in it’s own way a miracle. It’s a beautiful world. Life is a wonderful thing.
If I could throw a word of advice out, and I tell people this every once and awhile, you get up in the morning it’s a good day, no matter what age you are, you understand this. You get up in the morning it’s a good day. Most of the time when you have a bad day, we do it to ourselves. Everyday has got the potential to be a good one, and look, I know sometimes things are beyond your control, and something happens and it makes it a lousy day, but even lousy things that happen your attitude, the way you deal with it, how you think about things goes a long way to whether that thing affects you, or it’s a challenge you gotta work through, but it doesn’t affect your mood, how you look at things, or what kind of life you want to lead. Some people let those things get to them. Circumstances you can’t control might turn out to be something bad, but you can still have a positive attitude about it, and if you have a bad attitude it makes it worse.”
Another notable quote and piece of advice I got from Anthony while entering a restaurant in Manhattan was: “Always sit facing the door so you can see who comes in.”
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