New York City
Fall 1998
Paul Washington walked into the loud clatter of a local diner in Brooklyn to find Michael Marshall waiting for him at a table by the window. He was glad that Marshall got there early; Washington was headed back into the firehouse to start a 24-hour shift, and he had something important to discuss with his fellow Vulcan.
Things had been good for the young lieutenant over the past decade, and headed into the final few months of 1998, he was on the brink of some life-altering changes. He’d begun dating a beautiful young Brooklynite named Tabitha. He had his eye on a three-story brownstone on a shady, tree-lined street in Bed-Stuy. The idea was to fill it with kids and family. He was on the list to make captain too. His personal life was right on track, but in terms of the goals and expectations he and Marshall set for themselves and their organization to bring in more blacks, the 1990s had been pretty brutal.
“How you been, man?” Marshall asked, as Washington slid into the empty booth bench across from him. They hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks. Washington had taken off on a solo trip on his motorbike. He spent some time at Virginia Beach by himself, just thinking. He went to Florida, too, to visit two retired Vulcans who’d done their time back in the 1960s and ’70s. Vincent Julius and Jim Lee had been in the thick of the Vulcans’ decision in 1972 to file a civil rights discrimination lawsuit against the city and FDNY. Washington wanted to talk to them about their choices, and what—if anything—they would do differently today. He listened carefully, and he thought a lot, and he made some decisions. It was time to tell Marshall about them.
“Good, I’m good. The trip was great,” Washington said. “Got some things to talk to you about.”
“I’m listening,” Marshall replied, leaning his elbow on the table and taking a sip of his tea. He waited patiently while Washington ordered his usual sandwich.
“I’m going to run for president,” Washington said, once the waitress disappeared. “I want the Vulcans to push harder on getting blacks on the job. The way we’re doing it isn’t making enough of a difference. We’re getting maybe 20, 30 guys on every four years. It’s just never gonna add up to any real kind of change. For every few we get on, some others retire.”
Marshall nodded.
“I made a plan while I was down in Virginia. It’s a three-part plan on how we can bring more pressure on the department to hire more blacks,” Washington said. “The first part is media. We need to do more press and speak out more. We gotta stand up more on our issues. Then we need to get some political support, you know, tap into the City Council and community leaders and get them to start talking to the fire department for us. Something really grassroots,” he said, pulling out the notes made in his Virginia Beach hotel room while staring across his balcony at the white-capped waves outside.
“And the third?” Marshall said, putting down his cup. Washington leaned forward a little bit. He already knew what Marshall’s response would be when he heard number three.
“The third is a lawsuit. We have to bring a lawsuit,” Washington said.
“Haven’t I been saying that all along?” Marshall chuckled. Then he made the offer—a touch reluctantly—that Washington had hoped for.
“Okay, if you’re going to run for president, I’ll stand with you,” Marshall said. “Count me in for vice president.”
Both men knew their decision was going to be controversial—and could potentially cause backlash for their organization. The Vulcan Society remained steadfast in its determination to bring in more blacks, but not everyone agreed on how to achieve that goal. Washington had been on the executive board since 1990 and he’d learned that among such a relatively small group of firefighters, there could be great diversity of thought in how to accomplish things. It didn’t bode for an easy presidency—especially since he was determined to shake up the status quo.
He and Marshall and other Vulcans poured tremendous energy and resources into the black recruits who took firefighter exam 0084, administered in 1992. Washington found a YWCA they could rent in downtown Brooklyn and—over the misgivings of the super—Marshall put his carpenter skills to use, pounding nails into floors and walls. With the help of Washington’s cousin Gary, they constructed a lifelike facsimile of the physical test given by the FDNY. It was rudimentary, but it got the job done. It took Marshall and Gary two hours to put it up every Tuesday night for the training classes, and 15 Vulcans came in to help students run through it. One of the obstacles required candidates to crawl on their hands and knees, wearing a blackout mask and an air tank, through a wooden tunnel that snaked across the floor. Another section taught candidates how to best use a sledgehammer. It wasn’t an exact replica of the FDNY test, but it gave everyone a good sense of what awaited them. The kids who showed up had already taken the FDNY’s written exam, and the Vulcans had tutored some of them for that too. Washington personally called all the high-scoring candidates to make sure they stayed on track. The hopeful candidates would ply the Vulcans with questions about their chances. For the old hands, it was an easy equation: anyone with a written score below a 95 was in doubt, and anyone below 90 was a longshot. The city set its passing grade at 70, but that was just a formality. Thousands passed the test with much higher scores and never got called. But the Vulcans encouraged everyone. Life was always a crapshoot, even with civil service exams. Many candidates, thousands actually, got washed out between the test and probie school by the lengthy background checks. The attrition rate was so high that FDNY investigators called in 1,000 candidates at a time, figuring roughly 300 would make it through. There was always an outside chance that the FDNY might reach someone with a score in the mid-80s on the hiring list—although it was pretty unlikely.
There were plenty of bright, standout guys training with the Vulcans in 1992, but everyone had especially high hopes for Keith and Kevin Maynard. Identical twin sons of an FDNY captain, the Maynard men scored exceptionally well on the written exam. Kevin, the older of the two, got a 97. His brother got a 98. Their father encouraged and helped them both through the process. A Vietnam vet who joined the FDNY after serving overseas, their dad never sugarcoated life inside the firehouse. He warned his sons that they’d have to keep to themselves sometimes, and be prepared to speak up in self-defense other times. He told them about his first day as a lieutenant, when he showed up at his new assignment in the Bronx. The FDNY sent him to one of its rowdiest, most rebellious crews and told him to prove how good an officer he was by taming them. When he arrived at the door and rang for entry, nobody would come down to let him in. Whether they deliberately locked him out or just glanced through the window and—assuming the black man there was a neighborhood scruff—decided not to open the door was unclear. He had to walk to a pay phone and call FDNY headquarters to get them to order someone to unlock the door. He told his twin boys it would be challenging and at times daunting, but rewarding in ways they could never imagine. A Vulcan himself, he kept tabs on how many of the training tutorials they attended in preparation for the test.
In 1992, the city had 8,682 firefighters. Three hundred thirty-five were black, around 3.87 percent. Forty thousand people applied to take that year’s firefighter exam. Following the usual pattern, white men made up 73 percent, roughly 30,000 of the applicants. Blacks were 8.4 percent, with 3,395 applicants. Latinos had slightly more, 9.3 percent, or 3,736 applicants. A decent number of women also applied: 1,260. It was a good start—but the Vulcans knew there would be a significant drop-off by the time test day actually came, especially among candidates of color. Too many just never showed up for the exam. This year was no different. Despite all the outreach and follow-up the Vulcans did, only 1,995 of the nearly 3,500 blacks they’d registered for the test actually showed up and took it. The same high attrition rate plagued Latinos and women, whose actual test takers dropped to 2,613 and 675 respectively. White men showed only a slight drop off. That still made them more than 75 percent of the total test takers.1
Kevin and Keith Maynard, who both got perfect 100s on the grueling physical, were about to find out what a difference a point could make on the highly competitive FDNY civil service exam. Keith, with his 98, was called to join. Kevin, who got a 97, was not. Within that one point were thousands of other applicants. Some might have scored lower than Kevin Maynard on the written test, but gotten extra points for military service that put them ahead. Others might have gotten his exact same score—which happened frequently on the cookie-cutter exams. The FDNY broke scoring ties by listing applicants according to the numerical value of their Social Security numbers. A random mathematical sequence might have dashed Kevin Maynard’s dreams of an FDNY career. Whatever the reason was, it wasn’t explained to him. His brother was selected and put into a training class in 1999.
The whole family, a tight-knit group from Montserrat, got up early on Keith’s first day of probie school to see him off from the kitchen. Kevin Maynard sat at the table watching his mother make sandwiches for his brother’s lunch, while his dad paced the floor, eager to see his youngest off to the academy. Kevin Maynard never heard from the FDNY again after his initial score came back. Nobody had the answer for why his list number didn’t come up. The FDNY may simply have stopped hiring before they reached it. Kevin’s bad luck was reflected in the overall results for blacks in FDNY hiring in the 1990s: out of the 31,000 people who took exam 0084, only 2,692 got a firefighting job. Out of the 1,995 blacks who actually took the FDNY exam, only 53 became firefighters—less than 2 percent.2
Even with the disappointment over Kevin Maynard and the bleak showing in general, the Vulcans made sure to congratulate the black candidates who did squeak through. Among the new recruits were John Coombs, then just a fast-talking, no-nonsense rookie not long out of college, and Regina Wilson, one of a few black women firefighters in the FDNY’s history. There were other things to be cautiously optimistic about as well. In 1994 the city began to put its own type of pressure on Fire Commissioner Howard Safir, an appointee of new mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Republican mayor took over the city from outgoing Democrat David Dinkins, and immediately got to work on his campaign pledge to crack down on crime and improve the quality of life for New Yorkers. With Police Commissioner Bill Bratton at the helm of the NYPD, the Giuliani administration implemented the “broken windows” theory of crime fighting. It was the first of several steps down a road that would eventually erase the derelict, gritty, graffiti-covered city of the 1980s, but not without creating some hostility and rage among heavily policed minority communities.
Mayor Giuliani had bigger concerns to tackle than the lack of diversity in the FDNY, which in any case was not cause for complaint within the fire department itself. The city’s Equal Employment Practices Commission, however, was concerned. In 1988, under Mayor Ed Koch, the city conducted a study on the underrepresentation of certain ethnic and gender groups in its workforce. To nobody’s surprise, the FDNY was the biggest offender: 94 percent white, in a city that was only 50 percent white. That was enough to send the EEPC—charged with keeping New York compliant with civil and human rights laws—poking around on its own.
In August 1994 the EEPC wrote to Commissioner Safir to alert him to the serious deficiencies of the FDNY’s minority recruiting effort. The recruiting division had only been in existence since 1988, cobbled together in the wake of Koch’s diversity study. The FDNY sent a few members to recruit minorities ahead of the 1992 exam—with abysmally low results. But that didn’t stop the FDNY from telling the EEPC that its recruitment effort was successful.3 The EEPC found it decidedly not so.
“It is the unanimous position of this Commission that the FDNY must develop and implement a more effective recruitment program to attract women and minorities,” the EEPC scolded Safir.4 The FDNY skimped on recruiters, signing up only four firefighters. It allotted only two vehicles and “both were in poor condition.” It did the bare minimum on flyers and banners, which did little to attract attention at job fairs, while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and NYPD came with flashing lights and elaborate displays. The budget for the entire recruitment program was $450,000, of which $300,000 went to a consultant to design the brochures. Most disturbingly, FDNY senior staff admitted to the deficiencies in interviews with EEPC, but then refused to follow up when asked to improve the program. The EEPC deemed the whole effort “grossly inadequate.”5 The end result was that minority participation in 1992 actually dropped from the test given four years earlier—down to 5,597 from the 7,788 minorities who took the firefighter exam in 1988.6 Given that, the EEPC wrote, it had appointed its own advisory committee and would be sending recommendations to Safir on how the next recruitment drive should be run. The EEPC followed up in October 1994 with another letter to Safir, informing him the advisory committee was ready with a list of recommendations.
Safir had already decided to add a residency credit to the next firefighting exam. It was designed to give a boost to any city resident applying for a city job. The Vulcans hoped it would help improve diversity too. But its guidelines were lax and enforcement of it loose. Moreover, the five bonus points for residency didn’t get applied until the very end of the process, when the FDNY was ready to start hiring. That didn’t make it very much help to the city kids competing to be among the top 5,000 scorers.
The Vulcans contributed to the EEPC’s list of recommendations along with several other FDNY fraternal groups—which included not only the United Women Firefighters Association, but also Polish, Norwegian, German, Irish, Catholic, Hispanic and Italian groups, plus the firefighters’ unions and a few other associations. With so many voices in the mix, the Vulcans soon grew unhappy with the glacial pace of Safir’s changes.
In April 1995, Vulcan president Delbert Coward, a battalion chief in Queens, wrote to the EEPC and advocated for continued hiring from the list established in 1992. If the FDNY hired one more class off that list, another woman and three more black men would be among those eligible for the job, Coward said. “We do not agree with the Fire Commissioner’s notion that the candidates at the top of the list are inherently better quality than those now being reached on the current list. We must all remember: the entrance exam only allows you to TRAIN as a firefighter. It is not a guarantee that you will ever be a firefighter. And, your position on the entrance list is not a gauge of how good or bad a firefighter you will be,” Coward wrote.7 In those few lines, he neatly summarized the heart of the Vulcans’ main argument: the civil service exam used to whittle down tens of thousands of applicants to the few thousand needed every few years was an incomplete indicator of a person’s job-related skills. It was a snapshot of how well someone performed on that test, on that day, not an accurate measure of firefighting aptitude. It was not a popular perspective inside FDNY headquarters, or inside the roughly 200 firehouses of the Bravest. The civil service system had been the litmus test for city hiring for nearly 100 years; nobody in the FDNY saw a reason to change it.
Commissioner Safir didn’t stay in the FDNY long enough to worry about the EEPC’s sudden and determined interest in his department’s diversity problem. In 1996, he was already moving on—but just a short distance, to the NYPD. The departure of Howard Safir was one of the worst-kept secrets in the FDNY; it was common knowledge he was taking Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s job. The real gossip centered on his replacement: tongues wagged in speculation about which chief or deputy commissioner Giuliani would pick. Little did the rumormongers know the choice had already been made—and it was the last person anybody expected.
The day Safir’s NYPD move was to go public, Tommy Von Essen jumped to answer his phone at 6:30 a.m. before it woke his sleeping wife. A former firefighter who’d worked as the “can man,” the smoke eater assigned to haul a bulky, heavy fire extinguisher into every blaze, he’d risen up the ranks to become president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association that represented the city’s 9,000 Bravest. He and Safir sat across the table from each other on union and management business for the past two years. When he recognized the voice of the fire commissioner, he groaned into the phone.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Von Essen accused. He’d heard the rumors. He was sorry to see Safir go. Traditionally, union heads and management were sworn enemies, but he and Safir got along. He started to offer congratulations, but Safir cut him short.
“Yes, I’m leaving, but there’s a second part to this. How would you feel about being fire commissioner?” Von Essen heard him say. The labor leader immediately shushed him.
“You’re crazy. You shouldn’t do that. I have an election coming up. Don’t put my name out there, that’ll be a problem,” the union head said.
“No, no, no, there’s nobody else. The mayor’s going to call you in half an hour and ask if you want the job. I just wanted to know if you are interested first,” Safir responded.
Von Essen croaked out an affirmative and ended the call. Just as Safir said, Mayor Giuliani called him about half an hour later.
“Come to City Hall this morning,” the mayor said in his peremptory way, after the usual pleasantries were dispensed with. Von Essen was vetted that same day by Giuliani’s team in the city hall basement. Later he found out that some tried to nix him, despite Safir’s recommendation.
“The best guy over there is the union guy,” Safir had said, when asked by the mayor who he would pick. Some key Giuliani aides immediately said no.
“We can’t do a union guy,” they protested.
“Great, let’s do the union guy,” Giuliani responded.
Von Essen inherited a department rife with problems, not the least of which was shoddy equipment, antiquated technology and—over time—a corrosive resentment of his appointment among high-ranking chiefs. Von Essen, formerly known as “Tommy the can man from the South Bronx,” had cut his teeth at Ladder 42 during the War Years. He was stationed in La Casa del Elefante, named for the five or six burly firefighters there who were so large they dwarfed his six-foot, heavyset frame. Von Essen proved himself a deft and dependable firefighter many times over, but after 20 years on the job, that’s all he was: a firefighter. He considered it the only title worth having. But the fact that a lowly smoke eater vaulted to the head of the department as fire commissioner rankled the FDNY’s top brass to no end. Among the firehouse troops, who’d gotten used to Von Essen as their union leader, his switch to management was cause for sad celebration. They didn’t like to see him go, but everyone got a kick out of having a labor leader take over as commissioner. At last, a fox in the henhouse, his union buddies crowed. But when he started butting heads with old friends, his defection turned into a deep wound. Tommy the can man, who’d battled his way out of countless blazes in the South Bronx, soon found himself in a real hot spot.
Amid all the tension around him, the last thing Von Essen needed was more emphasis on the nearly all-white makeup of the FDNY. It was a divisive issue no matter who raised it. In Von Essen’s Bronx company, there’d been a few black firefighters, including a beloved lieutenant who died just before he arrived. But he’d be a liar if he tried to pretend the racial prejudices and animosity found in the world at large didn’t also exist inside the brotherhood. He’d heard it and experienced it himself. Firehouse talk often fell outside the boundaries of the politically correct, and he was okay with what he called the “grab-ass” pranks that firefighters loved to play on each other. But he had a real problem with the officers in the firehouses who turned their backs and pretended not to hear racist slurs. These were the same officers, he found, that feigned ignorance about the 20-ounce plastic tumblers that held beer and not water at the dinner table and claimed not to know when someone put in for medical leave on a phony injury. Every battalion had a few of what firefighters called hairbags—those who were looking to game the system in some way. The real cheats usually got weeded out, but the ingrained firehouse culture of taking care of one’s own left plenty of wiggle room for mischief and, in some cases, even malfeasance.
Von Essen stepped into the FDNY at a time of great upheaval—and he only had a few short years before the city started gearing up for its next firefighter exam, number 7029, to be administered in 1999. The normal timing of FDNY hiring got bogged down when a group of suburban candidates from Long Island and Westchester, Putnam, Rockland and Orange counties threatened to sue over the five-point residency credit applied to exam 0084. Some 17,000 applicants applied for the credit, claiming they were or would be city residents by the time they were hired. But a group calling themselves Committee for Fairness for FDNY Test 0084 went to court to try and halt the program, claiming it put them at a disadvantage. At the same time, angry firefighter candidates from the earlier exam, number 7022, were furious the city wasn’t continuing to hire from their list. A group known as #7022 Eligibles Association began agitating to keep their list open. They peppered City Council members and the press with outraged letters, all in an effort to influence the new commissioner.8
Even as Von Essen grappled with a surfeit of problems, he was quick to make some fairly significant overhauls to the FDNY. Some were good and some were bad, depending on who you asked. Among them was a 30-college-credit requirement for all new firefighter hires. Von Essen hoped bringing in recruits with better education and exposure to different ideas would help break up the narrow, cliquish mentality that dominated most firehouses. Plus, the NYPD now required 60 college credits, and Von Essen was not about to let the FDNY fall behind the cops in any way. His only concession to the EEPC, which feared the college credits would be another deterrent to minorities, was to cap it at 30.
Mayor Giuliani had also annexed the city’s beleaguered 911 Emergency Medical Services corps and folded its operations into the FDNY in 1996. With that move, Von Essen was handed a workforce that was far more diverse than the fire department. The EMS rank and file was heavily populated with blacks, Latinos and women, and what the FDNY needed was a way to siphon off some of those numbers. Von Essen created a special promotional civil service exam just for EMS members that put them on a fast-track for firefighter positions. When hiring time came around, the candidates on the EMS promotional list would be called first. The promotional exam was meant to be a benefit to minority applicants—but it didn’t work out quite as intended.
Von Essen also came up with a supplemental plan to bring in more minorities—a Fire Cadet program to get young kids in school interested in joining EMS. The idea was to train minorities so they were ready to join EMS after completing school—and from there, hopefully, they’d eventually follow the promotional path into the FDNY. Both the fire unions—the UFA that Von Essen once led and the officers association—hated the idea. Von Essen ignored them. He brought in Sheldon Wright, a Vulcan, to coordinate. The black lieutenant had earned his firefighting bona fides holding his own in Brooklyn’s busy Ladder 111 before an injury took him out of active-duty rotation. As a general rule, Von Essen didn’t care much for the Vulcan Society. To him, the black firefighters seemed determined to bring another lawsuit, no matter what the FDNY did to appease them. But Von Essen trusted and respected Wright.
Wright had his own views on what the FDNY needed to do in terms of diversity recruitment, and it wasn’t always the same opinion espoused by the rest of the Vulcans. He’d been a young father of twins in the late 1970s, taking part-time college classes and working two jobs to earn $13,000—barely enough to keep his family together—when he’d been approached by a black firefighter on his Queens College campus. The firefighter had bent his ear for nearly half an hour about joining the FDNY, and in the end Wright agreed to file an application just to get him to stop talking. Wright was $5 short on the application fee, so the Vulcan offered to put up the money if Wright gave him his word he’d follow through. The young man reluctantly agreed, and when the time came he took the FDNY civil service test. Obligation completed, he moved on with his life. The FDNY packets that came to his grandmother’s house in Queens were dumped in the trash. Before long, he’d moved to a new Brooklyn apartment and the FDNY mail ceased. His firefighting career might never have gotten started if two years later, a black captain named Fred Fowler hadn’t shown up at his grandmother’s house one Sunday morning during a torrential rainstorm. The Vulcans had gotten a list from the FDNY of blacks on the 1977 test and were systematically tracking down all those who fell by the wayside. By the time Captain Fowler got hold of Wright, the young father was working the midnight shift in the psychiatric emergency room at Queens Hospital and weekends at a different guard job—and still unable to do much for his growing family. The firefighting career he’d thrown away now sounded like a pretty good deal. By 1982, Wright was riding the back of an engine and hanging tough through his inaugural year of firehouse hazing. He made $32,000 in his first 12 months, thanks to generous overtime.
Wright understood better than most the challenges facing young inner-city kids, who were the bulk of the Latinos and blacks the FDNY was targeting. The hiring cycle of the FDNY took forever; four years often passed before recruits were called, sometimes longer. Too many kids couldn’t wait around without a job. They needed something that would pay them immediately. And they barely knew anything about the benefits and joys of joining the FDNY—hardly any of them knew a firefighter or had one in their family. It was a real disadvantage, compared to the kids who grew up seeing dads and uncles with time to coach Little League, hold down a second job, and serve the public. Those kids had a real fire in the belly to join the FDNY. Wright’s aim was to invoke the same fervor in the minds of inner-city kids, in part by introducing them to the unique culture of the FDNY—a huge, dysfunctional family, to be sure, but one that always took care of its own. In a firehouse, crews shared the highs and the lows of life. If somebody’s father died, the company showed up at the funeral in their crisp dark blues. If someone got married or a child had a first communion or a bar mitzvah, everyone celebrated. Wright grasped just how much it could help the inner-city kids he knew to feel that they belonged to something larger than themselves and had a place in the world. After some trial and error, he devised a cadet program that gave members about $10 an hour and got them trained and prepped to take the state’s Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) exam. If the kids didn’t know how to drive—a requirement for the FDNY—Wright got them out to Fort Totten in Queens, where he set up a driving course. He targeted kids in two-year associate degree programs and community colleges, and memorized the 200-plus names of all his cadets. To get them in shape for the physical test, Von Essen’s new deputy commissioner, Lynn Tierney, requisitioned a training facility on Randall’s Island. It was modeled after the course used by the fire department in the actual physical exam. An ex-firefighter and football coach named Pudgy Walsh ran a similar course out on Long Island. Many firefighters paid to get their kids into his classes. His course would have been perfect, but it was too far away for Tierney and Wright to use. Tierney’s training facility had the funding it needed and the fire commissioner’s support—now the fire department’s unionized carpenters just had to get the thing up. The carpenters—probably taking their cues from the fire unions—did everything they could to stall, including questioning why it had to be built at all. The bellyaching dragged on until Tierney despaired of ever making progress.
Frustrated, she put in a call for help. Tierney had been around the fire department long enough to understand what was going on. She needed support from someone whose reputation in the field would transcend the union bickering and racial resentment. Among firefighters, grit on the job trumped just about everything.
“Lee, would you lend your reputation to this?” Tierney asked. She’d called Lee Ielpi, a highly decorated firefighter who’d worked out of Rescue 2, one of the most respected and sought-after units in the department. He’d amassed so many credentials and honors over the years that if he pinned them all on his jacket he’d be wearing close to ten pounds of metal. Ielpi knew right away what Tierney needed.
“No problem. I’ll be there,” he said. Ielpi showed up the next day, bringing Marty McTigue with him. If it was possible, McTigue was even more well-known throughout the department than Ielpi. A captain out of Rescue 4 in Woodside, Queens, the father of four nearly died in 1992 while responding to a Con Edison explosion on Manhattan’s East Side. A pipe burst inside the plant, releasing a massive gush of deadly, 500-degree steam. A Con Ed worker was instantly killed. McTigue, searching through the plant for survivors, got his air straps tangled in a stairwell. While four other firefighters fought to free him, the steam enveloped him, melting skin off bone and—as he inhaled—burning him internally. His survival was miraculous, and his rehabilitation long and painful. When he was as healed as he could be, McTigue went around to individual firehouses and told his story. It was a firehouse tradition to share knowledge, especially about mistakes made in the field. It might prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. When Ielpi showed up at Tierney’s barebones training course with McTigue at his side, ready to build, the union resistance evaporated.
Just as the city was prepping for the 1999 exam, and Washington and Marshall were busy building a foundation for their Vulcan campaign, the city erupted in racial angst again, as it had regularly in the latter half of Giuliani’s second term. An annual Labor Day parade in Broad Channel, Queens—a sequestered, mostly white waterfront community with a heavy concentration of city employees—caused a horrified sensation. A cop and two firefighters decked out in blackface were videotaped tossing watermelon slices to the crowd and bouncing basketballs on a parody float titled “Black to the Future.” At one point one of them pretended to be dragged along behind it—a grotesque satire of the death of a black Texas man, James Byrd, who was killed just that way a year before.
Giuliani, branding the float a “disgusting display of racism,” immediately called for the cop and firefighters to be fired.9 The initial fallout was worse for the NYPD. The Broad Channel incident came just a year after a vicious attack on Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant beaten by four officers and sodomized by one of them with a plunger’s wooden handle. The Broad Channel float added to the rancorous feelings.
But the FDNY didn’t escape censure either. Inside the department reactions were mixed. The float itself was widely panned as repugnant. But Giuliani’s call for summary dismissals raised hackles. The float was meant as a parody, after all, and the same men won first prize with similar floats in the past that mocked other minorities, including ones called “Gooks of Hazzard,” “Hasidic Park” and “Happy Gays.” Nobody had objected to those.
Von Essen once again found himself caught in the awkward overlap between his past and present. He deplored the stupidity and bigotry the men displayed in creating the float. Yet he’d met with both firefighters and their union lawyers, and he could tell they were good guys. It was the sort of stupid firehouse prank that sometimes went wrong, and they deserved to be punished. But was it a career-ending mistake? After meeting with them, Von Essen was inclined to say no. Giuliani was far less forgiving.
“Tommy, you have to fire these guys,” the mayor told him, when he called Von Essen to discuss the incident.
“Why? They’re just dopes,” Von Essen replied.
“Yeah, but it’s not about them being dopes. It’s about the image of the fire department, the image of the city of New York. We don’t condone that kind of behavior. We have to take strong action against it,” Giuliani responded. Von Essen stepped back to consider the mayor’s words. He’d been viewing the men’s actions through the firehouse prism, but as he reflected on it he realized he had to act as the fire commissioner. Giuliani was right. The city couldn’t keep employees who made it look like the FDNY didn’t care about minorities. The men were fired, and the union howled. The men filed a First Amendment lawsuit to get their jobs back.
The discord and fury continued into the New Year and cast a pall over the city’s last-ditch efforts to increase minority turnout for exam 7029, which was scheduled for February 1999. But it galvanized the Vulcans, which Washington and Marshall took control of that January in uncontested elections. Washington was ready to set a new tone inside the organization and push its views on the city at large. He knew that David Floyd, president of the Vulcan Society for part of the 1980s, had used the press to heighten the group’s profile. Floyd had also been president of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, and from them Washington learned about other black struggles around the country. He gained a new appreciation through the IABPFF for the support of a strong union. The Vulcans and the UFA were hardly bosom buddies, but New York City firefighters had a lot more freedom of expression because of their vocal union. Washington met other blacks through the IABPFF who were putting far more on the line when they spoke out.
He also modeled himself after an emergent NYC grassroots group, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, led by Eric Adams, Marquez Claxton and Noel Leader. The NYPD officers managed to operate as community activists while being cops—and were clever about getting the media to carry their message. As he prepared for the day he would give his own press conferences for the Vulcans, Washington studied what the cops wore, the locations they chose, even how they ordered the speakers. Realizing it would help to have a signature touch, something to help people recognize him, he decided to let his Afro grow. He liked that it would be distinctive and add a flare of 1960s and ’70s militancy. Plus, it was a nice way to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix. Washington was a fan.
A few weeks before the city gave firefighter exam 7029 to 17,151 applicants, a young African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four elite NYPD cops who were roving a broken-down section of the Bronx looking for an alleged rapist. Diallo, 23, from Guinea, was gunned down in a blaze of 41 bullets. The cops spotted the young man in front of his building around 12:40 a.m. and, identifying themselves as NYPD, yelled at him to stay there. Instead, a bewildered and frightened Diallo ran up the stoop, where he turned to face the cops and pulled out his wallet. Amid the darkness, the confusion and the adrenalin, the cops made a terrible mistake. “Gun,” one of them shouted, as the lead officer advancing on Diallo tripped and fell. Assuming he’d been hit by Diallo, the officers behind him opened fire, shooting wildly. Diallo was struck by 19 bullets out of the 41 shots fired before the cops finally stopped.
For two weeks after Diallo’s death, huge crowds of protestors appeared daily at 1 Police Plaza, usually led by the then plump and pugnacious Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist and leader of the National Action Network. Diallo was a detonator that set off years of pent-up fury and frustration among minority communities, who claimed the Giuliani administration’s tough-on-crime regime made targets out of young black and Latino men. Inside Vulcan Hall in Brooklyn, Washington and Marshall watched the daily news coverage with amazement. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers of all races were turning out daily, and it wasn’t just community leaders and committed activists speaking out. It almost seemed like the whole city was up in arms, one way or another. Diallo’s death had stirred up huge controversy about lack of diversity in the NYPD. As the Vulcans joined the various protests, they couldn’t help but wonder what the public would do if it realized the fire department was far more racially unbalanced than that of its brothers in blue.