9/11
In the dark and terrible days after 9/11, the city and the world cried like never before for the New York City fire department. Nearly 3,000 innocents were killed when terrorist-hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and into a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Among the dead were 343 members of the FDNY, who perished amid the rubble of the collapsing Twin Towers.
Grief was a numbing pall that shut down almost everything related to fire department business save for two things: responding to the immediate needs of the city, and retrieving the remains of the fallen 343, all those who died trying to save others, and the bodies of the victims themselves. The city’s Equal Employment Practices Commission (EEPC) shelved its questions about FDNY diversity and recruitment. The Vulcans set everything they were doing to one side. Among the lost Bravest were 12 of their members—including Keith Maynard, the Vulcan whose brother missed getting into the FDNY by one point. His twin Kevin Maynard, working at Continental Airlines in Houston, Texas, spent frantic hours looking for news of his younger sibling. He wept into the phone when he finally got through to his twin’s firehouse, Engine 33, around 1 a.m. on September 12. Keith Maynard was missing and presumed dead, along with several other members of his company. In Brooklyn, Paul Washington steeled himself to pick up the phone and call Ruth Powell, whose son Shawn Powell ran into the towers with Engine 207 and never returned. Washington had helped him get on the job. Ruth Powell recognized his name right away when he called.
“You recruited my son,” she said to Washington. To his relief, it was just a gentle statement of fact, not an accusation. Losing someone he’d brought in to be a firefighter had always been one of his worst fears. He talked to the grieving mother for a few minutes, and hung up with a promise to visit. There really was nothing anyone could say to any of the 9/11 families to alleviate the despair.
Amid the raw anguish, Fire Commissioner Tommy Von Essen found himself fighting to keep the fire department functioning. In one day, the FDNY saw its troops seriously depleted and a significant number of its senior men—beloved and seasoned leaders—wiped out. Those who survived labored at Ground Zero, and dedicated every other spare minute to the families of their fallen brothers. Von Essen and the department were running on fumes. In the chaos, Von Essen stopped for one second to do a favor for a friend. Ten days after the attacks, he wrote a memo to the FDNY’s Department of Personnel: “As per Commissioner Von Essen please appoint this candidate in the next class. List No. 933. Name: Loscuito, Anthony S.” Loscuito was the son of Von Essen’s driver, who’d asked for help getting his son into the FDNY. As he had with black firefighter Damon Alston, Von Essen used his clout to move the connected candidate ahead—but the differences ended there. Loscuito, who was rushed into the October 2001 class, had serious drug charges in his past. He was arrested in 1998 and pleaded guilty to charges of possessing meth and marijuana. He should have at least been subjected to heavier scrutiny from the FDNY investigators. But armed with Von Essen’s waiver, he waltzed through unchallenged.
At any other time, the Vulcans would have seized upon that detail, if the information had gotten back to them—as it probably would have in the gossip-driven FDNY. But like all the fraternal organizations and the department at large, they were overwhelmed. The heavy loss Washington felt over the death of Maynard, a close friend, as well as all the others who died on 9/11, didn’t ease. Three months before the tragedy, he and Tabitha welcomed their first child, a boy named Julius. When he cradled his young son, brushing his face against the newborn’s downy skin, Washington seriously questioned whether he would want his children to be firefighters. It no longer seemed worth the risk. His firehouse tasks became mundane and meaningless. The bleak feelings only began to lighten incrementally a few weeks after 9/11, when he responded to a fire in the second-story apartment of a Queens building on Jamaica Avenue. Washington pounded up the stairs and through the black smoke with two other firefighters, his inside team. Dropping to their knees, the trio crawled through the apartment, feeling their way into the rear bedroom as they went. Washington tried to peer through the new thermal imaging camera the FDNY just started issuing Ladder company officers. But he was unfamiliar with the heat-seeking technology, and he impatiently cast it aside. He resumed the old-fashioned method of searching with an outstretched hand. As he neared a window, he heard a frightened cough. Stretching further, he felt the soft contour of a body. Tiny hands came out of nowhere and grabbed his neck. He got to his feet, hoisting the slight weight of a small child. The terrified boy wrapped himself around Washington and clung hard, burying his face in the firefighter’s scratchy black coat. When Washington felt the boy’s small arms twine around his neck and the skinny legs squeeze his waist, a glimmer of his former joy in the job came back. It felt so right to make a rescue. He carried the boy down the stairs while the other firefighter followed with the child’s mother. Washington held tight to that small flicker of passion over the heartbreaking months of almost endless memorial services and funerals. In the firehouses, the atmosphere remained highly charged. The littlest thing could set off a gush of emotion, as the Vulcans discovered when they sent out flyers for their annual memorial service. It was a smaller version of the fire department’s own ritual of commemorating its dead with a private, secular ceremony every October.
“What about the white guys????” someone scrawled across one of the leaflets which bore the names of the 12 black Bravest who died on 9/11. The defaced flyer was posted on a wall in a Brooklyn firehouse, where a Vulcan firefighter saw it.
“Lick me,” said another scribble, and “Please, no white guys.”
Underneath the name of the guest of honor—former mayor David Dinkins—other names were inserted. The Jackson Five, Gary Coleman, Buckwheat and Al Sharpton were a few. As soon as he heard about it, Washington went down to the firehouse with Ronnie Greene, a Vulcan and retired firefighter, and spoke to the officer in charge, a battalion chief. The chief investigated and discovered who did at least part of the defacing. The person was punished and Washington saw no need to make his complaint official. The FDNY was still in mourning; the Vulcans let the matter drop.
FDNY Captain Paul Washington, from Engine 234 in Brooklyn, former Vulcan Society president, September 2014. Photo credit: Mariela Lombard.
The FDNY didn’t even begin to emerge from its shell-shocked state until the New Year, and by then a new mayor was in charge: billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg. His improbable run—so unlikely just months ago—got a huge boost from the endorsement of Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani. The tough-on-crime mayor’s many leadership excesses while in office were shoved aside in the days after 9/11, and he emerged as a major national figure. It also didn’t hurt that Bloomberg bankrolled his own $74 million campaign, and that the last-minute voter-turnout push from Democratic candidate Mark Green got scuttled by nasty infighting with former rival Fernando Ferrer.
Von Essen, undone by the toll of 9/11, communicated to Bloomberg that he wasn’t looking to stay in his job. The FDNY was in tatters emotionally, devastated physically and drained of resources, yet he felt no qualms about stepping down. There would be any number of people eager to fill a post that now carried immense, worldwide prestige. But Von Essen was as surprised as anyone by Bloomberg’s pick: Nicholas Scoppetta, a 70-year-old lawyer whose government career dated back to Mayor John Lindsay in the 1950s. He was undeniably experienced in many things, but Scoppetta had never fought a fire in his life.
Avuncular and soft-spoken, Scoppetta overcame a poverty-stricken childhood that included nearly a decade in foster care, after his Italian immigrant parents had to give him and his two brothers up. His personal experience made him a natural fit when Mayor Giuliani needed a reformer to take over the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. ACS was a perpetually struggling agency, charged with the difficult task of monitoring child safety in the gargantuan city. Although Scoppetta was a fixture in city government off and on for many years and was a high-profile member of Giuliani’s staff, he never crossed paths with Bloomberg. After the billionaire announced his mayoral ambitions, Scoppetta was surprised by a phone call from a former Giuliani staffer who’d taken a well-paid gig on Bloomberg’s long-shot campaign.
“Mike Bloomberg would like to talk to you about something,” the staffer said.
“Oh?” Scoppetta replied. He searched his brain but couldn’t recall a single meeting with the billionaire.
“He wants to talk to you about putting together a fusion ticket. You could run for city comptroller. Would you like to run for comptroller?” the staffer said, almost coaxingly. “He can’t give you the money, but he could raise the money and help you raise money so you wouldn’t have to worry about funding it,” the staffer added.
Scoppetta had never entertained any aspiration to be the city comptroller, but he couldn’t help being curious about the offer. The plan was to forge a fusion ticket between Bloomberg, himself as comptroller, and a third well-known official who would round out the ballot by running with them as public advocate.
The phone calls continued for over a week, and Scoppetta’s interest grew. But his wife, Susan, was already telling him, “Don’t you dare.” Plus, he had lined up some teaching work at Fordham University. He was planning to give classes at both its law school and social work school, two topics that were close to his heart. Scoppetta had zero belief that Bloomberg’s fusion ticket would win. But he’d never run for elected office and he thought it might be fun, especially if he didn’t have to do much fund-raising. It certainly would heighten his profile as his tenure with the Giuliani administration wound down. On the other hand, it might not heighten his profile in the ways that he wanted if he became known as the guy who ran on Bloomberg’s failed platform. Scoppetta decided there was only one way to make up his mind, and that was to meet the man himself. He put in a request for a sit-down with the staffer who’d been his only point of contact with Bloomberg so far. A few days later, on a sunny, early summer Saturday afternoon, Scoppetta was happily engrossed in his favorite hobby, gardening outside his Long Island home, when Susan urged him inside. He had a phone call.
“This is Mike Bloomberg. I understand you want to get together?”
“Well, don’t you think we should?” Scoppetta replied.
“I agree. How about dinner tonight?” Bloomberg offered. Scoppetta looked down at his grass-stained knees and the fine layer of dirt that stuck to his grubby hands and forearms.
“I’m out in Amagansett. I have to get cleaned up and drive into the city, so it’s going to take me a few hours,” he said.
“No, no. Stay where you are,” Bloomberg instructed. “We’ll come to you. We’ll be out in 45 minutes or so. Give me a restaurant I can’t possibly miss.”
By the time Scoppetta and his wife made themselves presentable and pulled up to the Palm restaurant in East Hampton, Bloomberg had arrived in his private helicopter. He was seated at a table and flanked by a bevy of advisers that included political heavyweight consultants David Garth and Bill Cunningham. It was still early and the airy restaurant was empty, but the group was tucked into a discreet table cornered far away from the windows. The men made no concession to the beachy Hamptons atmosphere; all of them wore dark-colored suits. When everyone was seated, Bloomberg jumped right to the point.
“What’s the hesitation? We’ll raise the money and all,” he said to Scoppetta. “I promise you that every single piece of campaign literature I put out will have your name on it. If you’re interested in running for office, this is as comfortable an offer as you could possibly get,” Bloomberg added, as the discussions went round and round.
“What do you think?” he finally said to Susan, who had been silently taking it all in as the meal progressed.
“Truth?” she said. Bloomberg nodded.
“Not much,” she said, matching his bluntness perfectly.
“Well then,” Bloomberg said, a small smile on his face, “how would you like to take a trip around the world until primary day?”
The joke lightened the mood at the table and the talks ended with laughter. A week later, Scoppetta called and declined the offer, but wished Bloomberg the best of luck.
When Bloomberg emerged in the weeks after 9/11 as the winning candidate, Scoppetta turned to his wife. “How do you like that? And I said no,” he laughed.
“Yes, but you would have had to be comptroller for four years,” Susan shrugged.
Scoppetta soon learned that Bloomberg was not done with him yet. The mayor-elect was moving decisively to pick his new staff, and he wanted Scoppetta’s experience somewhere on his roster. Not long after his election, political insider Nat Leventhal, who’d been around since the Ed Koch days and was handling Bloomberg’s transition, started calling Scoppetta with offers. He sounded out Scoppetta’s interest in heading a number of city agencies. The fire department was not among them.
Scoppetta, for his part, had his eye on a position that seemed a perfect fit for his love of gardening: head of the Parks Department. Leventhal signaled that his chances were good. But late in the game, another idea came to Bloomberg. On the Friday before his January 1, 2002, inauguration, the mayor-elect called Scoppetta at his ACS office.
“Can you come up to campaign headquarters? I want to talk to you about another job,” the almost-mayor told him.
When Scoppetta arrived, the two sat down inside a quiet office for a conversation. Bloomberg remembered that Scoppetta planned to go into teaching when he left public service, and he used that to frame his offer. “I need you to help me out here,” said Bloomberg. “Come run the fire department, and after a year, if you don’t like it or I don’t like you, you can go teach.”
“You know I have a lot of experience in law enforcement with police and prosecution, but nothing in the fire department,” Scoppetta said.
“I don’t consider that a handicap,” came the reply. Bloomberg gave him the weekend to decide, and Scoppetta went home. The next morning Scoppetta had breakfast with Von Essen, who encouraged him to take the spot. Scoppetta needed little urging. As soon as Bloomberg made the offer, he felt a tug of response. Firefighters always joked that theirs was the last noble profession, and in the months after 9/11, their love and dedication to each other was there for the world to share. Scoppetta saw honor and privilege in the chance to lead the department out of its decimated state. He decided that he couldn’t say no.
He was sworn in as fire commissioner on Tuesday, the same day Bloomberg was inaugurated as mayor. After the short, businesslike ceremony, he and Susan went to a nearby firehouse. Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, whose firefighter brother Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer had worked and died with Keith Maynard in Engine 33, lent them his tiny office to change out of their formal clothes. Then they were taken on a tour of Ground Zero that included a stop at the famous 10 House, home to Engine 10 and Ladder 10. It miraculously survived the destruction even though it stood right in the shadow of the Twin Towers. It was being used as a pit stop for crews still searching for firefighter remains. Scoppetta exchanged words with some fathers, a few of them retired smoke eaters, who came daily to look for their missing sons. It was a slow and sorrowful beginning to what would be a tumultuous eight years in office.
Racial politics came roaring back to the FDNY two weeks after Scoppetta’s swearing in, and the flashpoint was an iconic 9/11 photo of three white firefighters raising an American flag. Taken by photojournalist Thomas Franklin, it caught dust-covered Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Billy Eisengrein in a poignant and patriotic moment against the somber backdrop of twisted metal. When it appeared in the Record, a Bergen, New Jersey, newspaper on September 12, it flashed around the world and gained instant international acclaim. Not long after, a wealthy New York developer who wanted to create a 9/11 memorial statue decided to use the all-American image as a template. Bruce Ratner, who owned the buildings in downtown Brooklyn that housed the FDNY’s administrative center, commissioned the artwork with the idea of placing it right at the entrance of 9 MetroTech. It would be a daily visual paean to the lost Bravest, right in the fire department’s nerve center. Ratner’s vision called for a 19-foot-tall bronze statue of three men raising the American flag. Unlike the original image, which captured three white firefighters, the trio in Ratner’s statue would be black, white and Hispanic. It was meant to be an homage to the varied backgrounds of all the Bravest who made the ultimate sacrifice. But as word trickled out about Ratner’s plan, it was met with widespread disdain inside city firehouses. Firefighters accused the developer of sacrificing historical accuracy on the altar of political correctness. The ruckus reached the ears of outgoing Mayor Giuliani and his replacement Bloomberg, but neither made a move to dissuade the developer.
In early January, not long after Scoppetta’s swearing in, a feisty firefighter named Steve Cassidy from Engine 236 in Brooklyn showed up at a union meeting called to discuss the statue. The slow-acting Uniformed Firefighters Association wasn’t doing enough to derail the project in the eyes of the unhappy membership. Cassidy, as the UFA’s Brooklyn delegate, was part of the leadership team. But even he had to shake his head in disgust at the union’s limp response. Its members were passionately opposed to altering the photo in any way, yet even in the face of their emotional pleas, the UFA leaders just grumbled that nothing could be done. When the meeting ended and the men from Engine 236 assembled again back at the firehouse, Cassidy spoke up.
“If we could get a reporter to write up this story, that we’re gonna do something about this statue . . .” he mused.
“What are you gonna do, Steve?” asked one of the other men hopefully.
“How about we start an online petition?” said Cassidy. “Let’s call up a reporter and say that we’re going to start a firehouse petition against the statue.”
Within days, Cassidy and a tech-savvy firefighter hooked up an online form that could be downloaded, filled out and faxed back to either Engine 236 or to FDNY headquarters. Cassidy made a quick phone call to reporter Michelle McPhee, who covered cops and firefighters for the NY Daily News. The next day, January 15, McPhee wrote about the firefighters’ effort to sink the statue.
“We have no problem with our African-American and Latino brothers being represented, just not with that image,” Captain Kevin McCabe of Engine 236 said in the article. “That image is sentimental, and to change it is to tamper with a part of the Fire Department’s history.”1
The online petition also had an open letter to Mayor Bloomberg, written by Cassidy. It included his suggestion that a larger memorial be built that included firefighters of all races and genders toiling at Ground Zero. Within a few days, more than a million signatures had been collected, with participants from all around the country. Completed petitions were coming in with such speed that Cassidy feared Engine 236’s antiquated fax machine would catch fire. Soon the Today show called and asked him to appear on a live debate with Elinor Tatum, publisher and editor of the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s oldest black newspaper. The two faced off, with Cassidy invoking the spirit of the famous marine picture of the battle of Iwo Jima as an example of historical accuracy, while Tatum argued in favor of creating a more inclusive public memorial.
By January 17, a second article appeared in the NY Daily News, and to Cassidy, it signaled the FDNY’s surrender. Developer Ratner was quoted as saying he’d follow the fire department’s wishes, and—contrary to its stance of just a few days ago—what the FDNY now wanted was for all discussion about this statue to just quietly fade away. Plans were scrapped, the idea was dropped and nobody within the FDNY ever mentioned it again. Cassidy, a torrent of twitchy energy packed into a wiry, five-foot-ten frame, filed the experience away. It was a valuable lesson on the power of the media, something he didn’t think the current union leadership tried to exploit enough for its members. He was already mulling over a run for the UFA presidency, and the statue experience sealed it for him. He’d spent the last few months watching firefighters toil in the grim sludge of Ground Zero, some already taxed by a nasty, spewing cough. He was convinced that before long firefighters were going to need someone at the union helm who wasn’t afraid to speak up for them, no matter how controversial the topic.
Nicholas Scoppetta, sitting in his new office on the eighth floor at 9 MetroTech, spent the last few days feeling slightly at sea. He was two weeks into his first term as fire commissioner, and the volcanic media scrum and the intensity of the blowback seemed to him all out of proportion for what was a well-meaning and thoughtful proposal for a memorial statue. Moreover, he was reluctant to abandon the idea just because some firefighters were grandstanding in the press. But if he dug in his heels the fight would continue, and the last thing he wanted was to spend his first month trading grenades with the UFA, especially on a topic as dicey as departmental diversity. As it was, Scoppetta winced every time someone repeated that the FDNY was just 3 percent black—a factoid the Vulcans emphasized at every opportunity and that the press corps seemed to regurgitate in an endless loop. When in doubt, like most lawyers, Scoppetta fell back on expert counsel, in part because he believed in the value of gathering different opinions. Through a staffer named Liz Squires, Scoppetta hit on the perfect person: Maya Lin. If anyone could offer insights on navigating the rocky emotional landscape of post-9/11 New York, it was the sculptor whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial had been dubbed the “Black Gash of Shame” and the “Degrading Ditch” by detractors when it went up in the 1980s.
The artist agreed to meet Scoppetta at a popular spot in the West Village, a cozy, romantic French boîte called Provence. The fire commissioner enjoyed it so much he later set up a lunch meeting there with Bloomberg’s new police commissioner, Ray Kelly. When Kelly’s wife found out, she couldn’t resist teasing her ex-marine husband about joining the fire commissioner in the dimly lit, atmospheric restaurant. “You met Scoppetta at Provence? How about one of these days you take me to Provence?” she said to him, looking at his afternoon schedule. Scoppetta laughed heartily when the police commissioner shared the joke with him. Soon after, the two moved their meetings to the manlier and more private Harvard Club.
When Scoppetta sat down with Lin and Squires inside the hushed, flower-filled restaurant, they engaged in a deep discussion that left him with profound misgivings about the statue.
“Don’t do it,” the artist warned him. The controversy would never really go away, and instead of creating a public memorial to honor the brave 343 who made the ultimate sacrifice, he’d build a permanent reminder of the very dispute he was trying to bury.
Scoppetta knew enough to realize that the firefighters’ opposition wasn’t something to take lightly—he could easily imagine them lining up to picket the statue’s unveiling, its dedication ceremony and so on. And then there was the Vulcan Society to consider, as well as the Hispanic Society. The Hispanic Society was keeping clear so far, but Washington went on both CNN and NY1 to argue in favor of including black and brown faces. And at a later panel discussion, he expressed his frank opinion that if the Semitic figure of Jesus could be remade into a blond man with blue eyes, it couldn’t be that historically inaccurate to include a representation of the firefighters of color who died on 9/11. Scoppetta didn’t need the controversy to get any louder—and it would if those groups really dug in. It wasn’t worth the potential embarrassment and pain. The new administration had much bigger things to worry about.
One of those things was replenishing its diminishing ranks. The FDNY was facing an exodus of historic proportion, and the root cause was money. Many firefighters saw their six-figure salaries—and by extension their retirement pensions—boosted to dizzying heights by the round-the-clock overtime right after 9/11. For those eligible to retire, now was the time, because they’d never match those earnings again. Within the span of a year, several hundred Bravest of all ranks, each with at least 20 years’ experience and wisdom, were going to be checking out. In their place, the FDNY was going to have to hire fresh young firefighters, many of whom applied in a swell of patriotic fever. If 9/11 ripped the guts from the fire department, the mass exits that followed were an institutional lobotomy.
The hiring process started in February 2002, when the FDNY’s assistant commissioner for human resources, Sherry Ann Kavaler, wrote to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to request that it post a notice for an upcoming firefighter exam, likely in late September or early October. The FDNY had already set up a recruitment drive, with the theme “Heroes Wanted.” There was only one potential fly in the ointment: the loaded question of how well DCAS had vetted its entrance exam—if it had at all. The FDNY, legally prohibited from getting involved in any process of the exam creation and rollout, did the best it could to find out.
“Who will determine the validity of the written exam? We understand some questions have been raised about its fairness/bias,” Kavaler asked in her memo.2
The same concern was also raised by the Vulcan Society, which was quietly angling for a sit-down with Scoppetta and Bloomberg. The rapid rate of FDNY hiring was cause for alarm. They wanted a meeting, and fast. They caught a break through Charles Billups of the Grand Council of Guardians, who had a tight relationship with the new mayor. Billups, a black man whose group had many black members, was a strong believer in the Vulcans’ cause. His organization, an umbrella group that encompassed several large law enforcement unions in the city and state, had been one of the earliest uniformed agencies to endorse Bloomberg. Billups had paved the way for him at black churches and with black community leaders ahead of the general election. Bloomberg remained grateful for Billups’s early support, and when the Guardians’ president called City Hall to speak to the mayor, he got put straight through. Billups raised the issue of fire department diversity to Bloomberg not long after his first month in office, and the mayor was eager to learn more. “I’d love to have a meeting with the Vulcans,” he told Billups. “Let’s set one up.”
In the month that passed before the new mayor and the Vulcans found time to meet, the FDNY had to absorb a few more broadsides from the city’s EEPC. Even accounting for 9/11-related delays, the agency was fed up with the fire department’s indifferent attitude. The department continued to ignore several key EEPC recommendations on ways to improve its diversity. As far as the FDNY was concerned, all test questions needed to be directed to DCAS, including validation issues. The EEPC, in a sharp memo, tartly reminded the FDNY that it was responsible for its own compliance, regardless of which agency designed its tests. The back-and-forth between the FDNY and DCAS had the EEPC feeling slightly crazed.
“The Department should conduct an adverse impact study to determine if the new educational requirement disproportionally screens out members of historically under-represented groups. If the study reveals such disparate impact, the Department should conduct a validation study,” the EEPC wrote to FDNY Deputy Commissioner Doug White in a stern memo on March 14. “The Department should retain a consultant to develop the tutorial for the next written firefighter’s examination.”3
The FDNY had also fallen behind on its monthly reports on diversity recruitment compliance—even after it was given two months’ grace because of 9/11. The FDNY under Von Essen had also promised in meetings to undertake the adverse impact studies, and yet as far as the EEPC could see, nothing had been done.
“No such reports were submitted,” the EEPC said accusingly to White.
As the debate raged on, Washington and Michael Marshall, unaware of the bureaucratic backlog, walked up the steps of city hall on April 29, 2002, for a 3 p.m. meeting with Mayor Bloomberg. They were accompanied by two other Vulcans, Fred Taylor and Larry Brown. The mayor’s infamous bull-pen arrangement—the circle of desks where his eager young staff beetled away—was not quite fully formed yet. The Vulcans were escorted past the beehive of cubicles until they reached a large round table in a corner of the busy room. Bloomberg and Ed Skyler, one of the mayor’s most trusted aides, greeted them genially.
“Can I get you some coffee, tea? Would you like something to eat? We have some chips here,” Bloomberg offered, standing and gesturing to a sideboard as if he meant to serve his guests himself. Fire Commissioner Nick Scoppetta, who arrived 15 minutes earlier to brief the mayor on the FDNY’s history with the Vulcan Society, shook their hands. Washington had come in with an agenda of things he hoped to get the mayor to commit to, but it soon became clear there would be no negotiating.
“We’d really like to change the written test to a pass/fail score and put more emphasis on the physical exam instead,” Washington said.
“I’m not sure that can be worked out with DCAS,” Bloomberg said mildly.
“It would also help if you would beef up recruitment,” Washington said. The mayor nodded in a noncommittal response. Whatever his thoughts were on the topic of diversity, he was keeping them to himself.
The four Vulcan men were silent as they walked out of City Hall into the bright summer sunshine 40 minutes later.
“Well, we got absolutely nothing out of that meeting,” Fred Taylor said, when they reached the bottom of the wide marble steps. Washington had to nod in agreement. He wasn’t optimistic in general about the state of race relations in the FDNY, or in the larger world, for that matter, but talking to Bloomberg brought his usual pessimism to a new low. In his experience and from what he knew of history, even the smallest change took a lot of fighting, and what he and the Vulcans wanted was no small thing. It was going to take more than a polite conference room chat to convince a new mayor to attack the root of the FDNY’s diversity problem—especially since the department was now practically enshrined in the eyes of the public.
Over the next few months, Bloomberg settled into office, and the city and the FDNY pressed ahead with exam 2043 over the EEPC’s objections. For the Vulcans, the meeting with Bloomberg accomplished one thing: Scoppetta approached Washington and asked him to head the FDNY’s recruitment program. It was an offer Washington found hard to refuse. He would have loved to take things over and do it all his way. He also got a friendly call from prominent black businessman Earl Graves, advising him to take it. But he didn’t trust the FDNY’s motives, and he was leery of stepping into an underfunded program that was already halfway completed. What the FDNY defined as a success to him was laughable.
The more he saw of the effort, the more he was convinced the FDNY wanted to set him up for failure and muzzle him at the same time. Once he took the job, it would effectively stifle his ability to criticize the department. He called Scoppetta and declined, news the fire commissioner received with a tinge of resentment. Scoppetta felt the department was making every good faith effort to get along. Washington’s rejection stung.
Not long after, the Vulcans got word that Steve Cassidy, the fast-talking firefighter from Engine 236, was the newly crowned president of the UFA. The Brooklyn-born son of a firefighter, Cassidy had first worked on Wall Street before deciding to follow in his dad’s footsteps in 1988. His decisive pushback on the 9/11 memorial statue gave him something of a profile, and he rode it to the presidency. It was fairly unprecedented for a borough delegate to make the leap to union leader. Cassidy had done it against three other candidates, although it took a runoff election. The day after his victory was announced, Cassidy called Washington to request a private sit-down.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Washington said. He had a couple of things he was eager to say to the new union head. The meeting happened in Vulcan Hall a few days later, and the two men sized each other up over the large table in the old building’s first floor. Washington got right to the point he wanted to make.
“You know you used race to get attention in your election, whether you believed what you said about historical accuracy or not,” he said bluntly. The union leader wasn’t fazed by his direct approach.
“I did what I thought was right,” Cassidy responded.
“If you don’t help us do this,” Washington said of the Vulcans’ diversity effort, “we’re going to one day wind up in front of a judge and then the union and the fire department are going to regret it.”
The short meeting broke up with an invitation to Cassidy to return to Brooklyn for a Vulcan Society meeting. Washington thought it would be good to clear the air with the black firefighters, since rank-and-file Vulcans were part of the UFA too.
The night Cassidy appeared, he strode to the front of the room and gave a short speech on what he thought were the department’s biggest challenges, including diversity. For him, the issue was pretty straightforward: between the two tests, he thought the physical exam was far more vital in picking the best people for the job. So if the Vulcans wanted change in the name of diversity, let it be on the written exam. In the back of the room, firefighter Regina Wilson, one of just a few black women—or women, period—on the job in 2001, listened intently. She and John Coombs had been in the same 1999 probie class at Randall’s Island, although not in the same rotation. While Coombs’s group was doing physical training, Wilson’s was in the classroom. At midday, the groups switched. The two met often after the end of classes to compare notes, and neither was surprised when it emerged that some instructors were going extra hard on Wilson. Exercises that Coombs and his all-male class would only have to do for a few minutes—like going into the smoky, claustrophobic simulator that mimicked a real fire—she would have to do for much longer. He urged her to file a protest, but she didn’t want to complain. They often passed each other during the day, as one group jogged off the training field and the other came on. Coombs would raise a fist to his chin, a silent salute of encouragement. She’d send the same signal back. Wilson, like all the women, knew not to look for much institutional support, and that included keeping a wary distance from the firefighters’ union. None of them had forgotten the terrifying incident that befell Ella McNair, one of the first black female firefighters hired in the 1980s. McNair only had a few years on the job in 1986 when she entered her firehouse, Engine 207 at Tillary and Gold Streets in Brooklyn, on June 7 and found a derogatory article about women firefighters pinned to the wall. Annoyed, she reached up to pull it off—and discovered it was glued in place. McNair marched into the kitchen for a knife, then returned to the clipping and started scraping it down. A male colleague, who was drunk at the time, tried to stop her. He grabbed the knife to yank it away and sliced her fingers. McNair filed charges against him, and a city judge found firefighter Greg McFarland guilty of harassing her. The judge recommended his immediate dismissal, both for the assault and for being intoxicated while on duty—but the FDNY instead fined him $15,000 and suspended him without pay for six months. But McFarland didn’t suffer. The union, which rallied behind him to fight what most saw as an unduly harsh punishment, took up a collection on his behalf. In no time, the UFA gathered more than enough to cover his $15,000 fine. McNair, however, was left mostly on her own. Her experience still resonated with Wilson. Given the UFA’s questionable history on gender equality, she had a keen interest in what Cassidy had to say.
“The most important thing is a competitive physical exam,” the new labor leader declared. “My view is that there’s going to be change sometime, so which test do you want to compromise on? I believe you couldn’t compromise on the physical component, so I maintain that if you score well on a high pass/fail on the written, that’s good enough. I want athletes that are smart. I don’t want mediocre athletes that are really, really smart,” Cassidy said.
As welcome as his position on the written test was to Washington and Marshall, it put them in an awkward spot with Wilson and other women firefighters. The women on average scored really well on the written exam. Any proposals that downplayed its importance while stressing a tougher physical wouldn’t make them happy.
“What about the sisters?” he asked Cassidy.
“What about them?” Cassidy responded. “If the department can recruit and target women from the right places, go to the athletic directors of high schools and colleges, go to the gyms and look for female athletes, they’ll find women who can do it. But make no mistake about it, just handing out applications to the average woman walking down the street is not going to generate a high success rate of finding ones who can do this job. It’s just not gonna happen.”
The meeting wrapped up not long after. Washington and Marshall had no expectation that the UFA was going to get in the Vulcans’ corner, but they were happy to have at least established some common ground on the written test. Their tentative accord, however, was viewed with deep suspicion by the women firefighters.
With a month to go before the end of the summer, Washington got a call from the Center for Constitutional Rights. The Vulcans’ federal discrimination claim against the FDNY was ready, his lawyer said. One humid day in August, he presented himself at CCR’s offices near SoHo. He flipped through the eight-page affidavit that would go to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the first step of many in pursuing a possible civil rights claim. The complaint was nothing more than a legal, cut-and-dried summary of everything he and the Vulcans had been saying for decades, but he still had to take a minute when he reached the last page. Staring at the small space reserved for his signature, Washington felt a squeeze of loneliness. The enormity of his next step tightened his chest. It was no minor matter to file a civil rights charge against the FDNY. His mind flashed to his father, who had passed away in the summer of 1999. Cornelius Washington never talked much about what being a Bravest meant to him, but he’d worn his firefighter’s uniform with distinction and pride.
“The best type of job you could do is a job where you help people,” he’d said once to his youngest son, and it had stuck in Washington’s head. His father’s voice echoed in him again—along with the defiant reverberations of his spirited mother. He gripped the pen and, in his spiky handwriting, spelled out his name.