New York City
2005–2007
January 23, 2005, dawned gray and frozen. An early morning call in the Bronx rousted firefighters in the Morris Heights neighborhood out of bed and into the frigid morning. The sun was just breaking through the winter sky as fire trucks, lights and sirens blaring, tore through the empty streets to an apartment building at 236 East 178th Street. A fast-moving fire was gobbling it up, bursting from the confines of the third floor and threatening to consume the rest of the building. Four firefighters from Ladder 27 and two others from Rescue 3 were sent to the fourth floor with orders to search for victims. The rest of the firefighters battled the core of the conflagration a floor below. On the ground outside, engine crews cursed the numbing cold as they raced to get pumpers connected to fire hydrants and bring their heavy water hoses to life. The icy water hissed and popped as it hit the searing flames.
The six firefighters told to trek up to the fourth floor entered a baffling maze of small, cramped apartments. The scant description they had on the building showed a fourth floor filled with airy, spacious units—not this warren of single rooms, blocked off by cheap partitions. They carefully navigated through the hazards, blind men feeling their way in the black, disorienting smoke. Out of nowhere, a volcano of fire erupted, a flashover that blocked the only exit, the fire escape behind an illegal wall. The six men moved backward, to the fourth-floor windows. Above them, on the roof, firefighters from the ladder companies cut holes with saws to vent the smoke and heat. All six men below gathered near the glass panes. At any moment they expected to hear the steamy sound of water hitting the flames that licked at their backs. But the welcome sound never came. The life-saving water flow had been interrupted, probably by a kink in the hose or a burst hose length. Cornered by a wall of fire, Lieutenant Curtis Meyran, 46, a married father of three, ordered his crew to exit the only way they could. Frantic shouts from both the roof and the ground rang out as one by one, the six smoke eaters took calculated leaps. Only one carried a rope, which broke as he tried to descend. Another clung to the small shred that remained, fighting to do anything to lessen his fall. Meyran and another senior firefighter, also married with a family, died at the scene. The rest survived, three with multiple critical injuries. The fourth—a probie just out of the academy—walked away with a punctured lung and messed-up ankle.
The trauma of the day was not over yet. Six hours later, firefighter Richard Sclafani died while battling a routine basement fire in East New York. The 37-year-old from Bayside, Queens, was following his senior officer up the stairs, but when the officer got outside, Sclafani couldn’t be found. He’d gotten tangled somewhere in the debris-filled staircase and run out of air. By the time distraught firefighters found him, he’d succumbed to the smoke.
January 23, 2005, known as Black Sunday, was the biggest loss of life in one day that the FDNY had suffered since 9/11. The crushing grief, never far from the surface, came flooding back. On assignment in a Brooklyn firehouse, Paul Washington felt a familiar sick sensation as each of the line-of-duty deaths came over the radio. He’d worked alongside Curt Meyran earlier in his career. Washington knew that all the men fought like hell to try to stay with their families; every firefighter caught in a crisis did. He pulled out his phone. He had something big planned for the Vulcans for Tuesday, but that was going to have to wait now.
“Yeah, the press conference we had scheduled, we’re gonna have to cancel that,” he said to the firefighter who answered. “We’ll reschedule it, it is gonna happen, I just don’t know when yet. But now is not the time to bring this out.”
The two talked a few minutes more, with Washington explaining the sad circumstances. Then he called the few Vulcans who knew about his secret.
“It’s still important to keep the details quiet. I don’t want anything to leak out,” he told Michael Marshall and the others he confided in. “We’ll just have to hold off on this for a while.”
What Washington had up his sleeve was sure to infuriate the fire commissioner and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But it was too inflammatory to reveal now as the fire department once more plunged into mourning. It involved a black firefighter and close friend of his, Lanaird Granger. The two had a long history together.
Granger joined the job off the 1992 exam, and was a staunch Vulcan member and recruiter up until 9/11. Although he was permanently assigned to Ladder 102 in Brooklyn, at that time he was detailed to a firehouse at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was off duty that terrible day, but when he heard the news he drove his car straight across the graceful span to join firefighters in Manhattan, staring in wordless horror at the belching smoke and flames from the Twin Towers. The lung damage and other injuries Granger sustained kept him on medical leave for nearly a year. When he finally returned to his permanent home in Ladder 102, a problem arose almost immediately. Granger, a practicing Muslim, called Washington to say he’d gotten into a tense situation with two firefighters who accused him of stealing some boots. The firefighters cornered him in the booth known as the house watch and harangued him over the supposed theft. Granger wound up calling FDNY headquarters to alert them. He also told the firehouse captain that he wanted to file a complaint with the fire department’s equal employment opportunity office. The officer, against FDNY protocol, didn’t follow through. When Granger told Washington what happened, the Vulcan president paid a visit to the firehouse that night. The captain got defensive, until Washington whipped off his jacket to show the other man that he was a captain too. Realizing he was talking to an officer of his own rank, the captain calmed down enough to listen. He agreed to make the complaint on Granger’s behalf.
But Washington suspected that wouldn’t end Granger’s difficulties—and he was right. The black smoke eater was bounced to another firehouse and then moved again—against his wishes—to Engine 238 in the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint in 2004. Granger butted heads with some firefighters there when he overhead one of them telling another that if he’d been involved in the Amadou Diallo confrontation, there’d be no media circus because he would have made the kill in two shots. Granger, who’d protested the FDNY’s hiring of McMellon in 2001, had been equally opposed to its subsequent hiring of another one of the Street Crime cops who shot Diallo. When he heard the firefighter in Engine 238 talk about two shots, Granger told him flat out he was wrong to say it. A thunderous argument followed, with tense shouting and yelling. Another time, after the Vulcans had a press conference on the steps of city hall, someone in Granger’s house photocopied a picture and article that ran in a newspaper and drew an arrow to one of the black firefighters in it. It was left on the kitchen table for Granger to find. When he saw it, he stared quizzically. It wasn’t actually him in the picture, but he realized the firefighters thought it was.
Tensions in Engine 238 came to an ugly head in early 2005, and on January 20—three days before Black Sunday—Granger sought Washington out at a City Council hearing on FDNY diversity.
“Hey man, how you doing? You all right?” Washington asked. He kept his voice low so as not to disturb people around them. Granger nodded, then opened the small bag he carried with him. He tilted it slightly so Washington could look at its contents. Washington peered down and saw a length of black rope coiled around itself to fashion a sinister loop.
“It’s a noose,” he said, staring at Granger in confusion. He didn’t know why Granger had it, but he was disgusted just looking at it.
“Yeah. I found it by my gear a few days ago. Someone put it there,” Granger said. Whispering so that they didn’t disrupt the hearing, he told Washington the details. He’d been in Engine 238 going about his business, and he walked over to his gear to get ready for a fire run. He saw something draped partially over his boots, and when he stepped closer to examine it, he realized it was an 18-inch rope, placed alongside and atop his equipment. It took him several long seconds to process what he was seeing. It was a noose. He was too shocked to move. Finally he grabbed his gear and got on the fire truck. He didn’t touch the noose at all. He just left it where it was. When he got back to the firehouse with the rest of his company a little later, it remained there. He still didn’t touch it. Even though it was in the open, where everyone left their gear, nobody spoke about it. After a few hours, Granger said, he picked the noose up and put it in his car. That’s where it stayed until he brought it to show Washington.
Washington knew right away what he wanted to do with the hateful symbol—but it all depended on what Granger was feeling. Washington had been searching for a way to get the fire department to take the Vulcans’ claims more seriously, and this was the chance he’d been waiting for. Even after he filed his federal discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in August 2002, the FDNY seemed inclined to ignore the Vulcans. City lawyers were cooperating—albeit slowly and in a piecemeal fashion—by producing documents requested by Electra Yourke, the chief investigator for the EEOC. But Bloomberg’s people adamantly refused to sit down for conciliation talks. There was a way to resolve the problems easily, Washington felt. They weren’t asking for much—maybe a recruitment van. But the Bloomberg administration refused to come to the table.
And the pressure wasn’t just coming from the feds—the city’s own Equal Employment Practices Commission had once again written a warning to the fire commissioner that his agency was at risk for a lawsuit. On December 10, 2002, the EEPC sent a letter to Nick Scoppetta telling him that an adverse impact study had to be done. It was ignored. Four days after it was sent, the city pushed ahead with firefighter exam 2043—with the usual bad results for blacks. Roughly 1,400 blacks took the test, about 200 fewer than applied in 1999. Eighty-four percent of the black test takers in 2002 surpassed the cutoff mark of 70 set by the city, but they were grouped on average 974 ranking places lower than whites. The city eventually hired 2,100 candidates from that list, but only 80 were black, approximately 3.7 percent.1 Many black candidates who scored above a 70 were never called, among them 22-year-old Malcolm Flythe. He scored well, but his number never came up. Others, like Rich Santos, an ambitious 25-year-old from Queens, got knocked out partway through the process. Santos earned high marks on both tests, but was rejected because he was a few college credits shy of the minimum 30 required.
Mayor Bloomberg was put on notice too. The EEPC wrote him directly in April 2003 to tell him the FDNY’s written exams posed a serious legal risk to the city. The agency urged him to compel Fire Commissioner Scoppetta to conduct adverse impact studies and get the written firefighter test assessed by an outside expert to make sure it really measured job-related skills. Bloomberg took his time answering.
“I am satisfied that the Fire Department has adequately addressed the points raised in the EEPC’s report,” he finally wrote back in October 2003. In reality, the FDNY addressed none of the points raised by the EEPC. It was relying on the same type of exam that raised the EEPC’s concerns back in 1994, when the agency wrote its first warning to then Commissioner Howard Safir.
Bloomberg and his current commissioner, Scoppetta, weren’t interested in paying for expensive studies that would tell them what they already knew. The FDNY was racially skewed, terribly unbalanced, and something had to be done to rectify it. Scoppetta admitted as much from his earliest days in office, even testifying to it in front of the City Council. But the administration’s approach differed significantly from the Vulcans’ solutions. The Vulcans were determined to get better recruitment, more attention on the five residency points and lessen the number of background disqualifications. But they realized the main point of attack was the written test. It was the city’s Achilles’ heel, and practically assured the black firefighters a legal victory if Bloomberg truly wanted to take this to the courts. The FDNY could recruit 24/7, but until an entry-level written test was devised that didn’t have an adverse impact on minorities, too many would continue to get washed out by that first, critical step. The FDNY disagreed. Their department could control the amount of resources and effort poured into recruitment. But, according to its top officials, the fire department was helpless to change the written exam.
“That’s a DCAS issue,” the agency insisted. The agency gave the same answer whether talking to reporters, the Vulcans or even answering questions before the City Council. The Vulcans heard that excuse through multiple mayoral administrations, and they were thoroughly sick of it. Both the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and the FDNY were equally obliged to follow city, state and federal employment laws. What was missing was someone in charge who would force them to do it.
Washington and Marshall had let City Hall know they were willing to meet. But they’d gotten no love from Bloomberg over the past three years. Even their powerful connection Charles Billups, of the Grand Council of Guardians, struck out when trying to get the mayor to make time for them again. The mayor was miffed by Washington’s refusal to run the FDNY’s most recent recruitment drive, and he was angered in general by their constant hammering at him in the press. Billups had spoken with the mayor about the Vulcans a few months after his first meeting with Washington and Marshall. Bloomberg had made his opinion quite clear even back then, and it wasn’t a flattering one.
“The Vulcans are being asses,” Bloomberg said in his candid conversation with Billups. The two men were having a private talk in a side room at Gracie Mansion ahead of a community event. “The Vulcan Society doesn’t want to listen to anyone.”
“Maybe you should try to listen to them,” Billups said. “You’re the new mayor here, you have an opportunity to make a real difference, to do something that will bring about real change.”
Bloomberg shook his head. Billups could tell the talk was annoying him and he recognized the mayor’s attitude. Bloomberg was in charge, after all. He felt the Vulcans should be trying to get along with him. “Listen, Charles, fuck that,” the mayor said, with just a touch of heat. The two men let the subject drop.
Washington and Marshall didn’t need Billups to spell the situation out for them. It was clear the mayor wasn’t motivated then or now to really dig into DCAS’s test prep—or lack thereof. He remained unfazed by the federal probe into DCAS’s written tests, but he was bothered by the political pressure the Vulcans brought through the City Council and other black politicians. Commissioner Scoppetta, however, could read the proverbial handwriting on the wall. He saw the lawsuit coming, and tried to use it to goose his reluctant staff.
“Do you want to end up like we did with Sifton?” he asked. The mere mention of Charles Sifton, the federal judge who imposed a court mandate in the 1980s to bring more women on the job, sent an unpleasant ripple through the mostly male ranks at FDNY headquarters. Granger’s noose, as awful as it was, fell into Washington’s lap at just the right time. In early 2005 Bloomberg was preparing to run for a second term in office—and no politician is as pliable as one facing an election. The Vulcans needed to get themselves and their cause back on his radar. As soon as Washington heard Granger’s story, he saw his chance.
“Listen, I want to hold a press conference about this noose. I want you to appear at it and we’ll show everyone what you found. But I don’t want to let the fire department know what we’re doing, or tell them about the noose in advance. We’ll file an official complaint after the press conference,” he said.
Washington knew he was asking a lot. It was never easy to go public with a racial complaint in a firehouse—and Washington planned to do it in a big way. For one thing, it broke the omertà-like code of silence within the brotherhood. Granger would be in for a tough time even if he just quietly took his complaint to the FDNY personnel officials—but a press conference guaranteed a pissed-off rank and file. Not many firefighters had the courage to willingly make themselves the firehouse goat. But in the end, after thinking it over, Granger agreed. A happy Washington decided to call a select few of his Vulcan board members to fill them in. Some of them disagreed with his approach.
“We should take this to the fire commissioner, you know, a one-on-one meeting. Show him that we’re reasonable people, and we want to work with him,” said one dissenter.
That was the exact opposite of what Washington wanted. He swore everyone to secrecy and they kept their silence, even after the tragedy of Black Sunday interrupted their timetable. Washington delayed things into the first week of February. He was just two days away from his big reveal when he got a surprise phone call. It was Bloomberg’s office. The mayor wanted to talk.
For a few seconds Washington was sure news of the noose had leaked out, but it soon became clear the mayor only had his reelection on his mind. Charles Billups had been working on him behind the scenes, and—perhaps remembering how important the black vote had been to him the first time around—Bloomberg suddenly found it desirable that he and the Vulcans talk.
“I know I haven’t been really good on this issue,” Bloomberg said to Washington in their brief phone conversation. Washington knew the mayor was also peeved by the constant criticism the Vulcan leader fed to the media. Shortly after he took over as Vulcan president, Washington decided to make it a practice to attend every FDNY graduation and hold a press conference to highlight the pitiful number of blacks in each class. Every time the department tried to grandstand to the press about its diversity efforts, Washington popped up like a bad penny to undercut the FDNY’s message. It pissed off the top brass to no end, to Washington’s delight. But it was a little too aggressive for some in the Vulcan Society. “You’re making it too hot for our guys in the firehouses,” some Vulcans grumbled. “It’s not making us look good.” However, the core membership, including Marshall, had no quarrel with it. Washington’s press conference blitz was effective, and it got them and their cause in front of the cameras. A little extra irritation in the firehouses was just the price they had to pay. When Bloomberg finally did call, he invited the Vulcans back to City Hall and said his scheduler would be in touch in the next day or two. Washington hung up the phone with a deep surge of contentment. He knew that meeting would never take place—not after the mayor got hit by his surprise press conference—but he was willing to sacrifice their one-on-one to make a larger point.
Firefighter Lanaird Granger holds a noose he says he found on his gear in his Brooklyn firehouse, at a press conference held at the Center for Constitutional Rights in Lower Manhattan, February 10, 2005. Photo Credit: NY Daily News.
The press conference, when it happened, was everything he’d hoped for and more. Granger showed up with the noose, backed by a row of stern-faced black firefighters. Teased and coiffed network reporters jostled for space against their less telegenic print and radio colleagues. The conference room inside the swanky downtown law office that the Center for Constitutional Rights borrowed for the event was standing room only. The rapid whir of cameras almost drowned out Granger’s soft words when he held the black rope aloft. News soon trickled down to the Vulcans that the top brass was apoplectic that they hadn’t been given a heads up.
“Good,” Washington said, when he and the other Vulcans got the news that they were in serious hot water with the chiefs. “That’s exactly what we were aiming for.” He wanted to ring the mayor’s bell, and ring it hard, like Muhammad Ali, his personal hero, tagging George Foreman.
“The next time we have something to say, they’re going to listen,” Washington vowed. But as he suspected, he never heard from Mayor Bloomberg’s scheduler. The offer to visit City Hall had apparently been rescinded. The subtle feelers the FDNY put out about him running their upcoming recruitment drive were also retracted.
There was more bad news yet to come for the FDNY. Black Sunday and Granger’s noose revelation were soon swallowed by a lurid sex scandal so tawdry that it coated the entire department in shame. Not three weeks after the Vulcans’ press conference, the city’s Department of Investigation released a 30-page report on the notorious “Animal House” incident. Three FDNY firefighters were accused of having sex while on duty with a mentally ill Staten Island woman with a fetish for smoke eaters. The sickening sexual liaisons occurred inside what one newspaper dubbed the FDNY’s “icky sex grotto,” the basement of Engine 75 in the Bronx, otherwise known as the Animal House.2
An abashed fire department put on a brave face as city newspapers gleefully chewed over the sleazy, vulgar details of the Staten Island woman’s early morning trip to the Bronx firehouse—after calling 311 for directions when she lost her way. She was smuggled through a side door under the sleeping officer’s nose, and down into the basement where three firefighters took turns performing a variety of sexual hijinks. The woman, who later claimed she had a mental breakdown after 9/11 and was bipolar, liked to sleep with firefighters because she felt sorry for them, she told investigators. Yet when she left the Animal House early that morning after multiple trysts, she called 911 and claimed she was raped. The DOI’s 30-page report, which came out a few months after the incident, was devastatingly detailed and laid bare the frat-like atmosphere of the firehouse, including a picture of a naked woman in a cage that was posted on a wall.
Among the many crude and damning specifics, one fact in particular stood out: one of the firefighters caught up in the ignominy was Anthony Loscuito, the young man Tommy Von Essen had personally championed for the job. The new wrinkle added a fresh round of newspaper critiques of the FDNY, especially after it was revealed that Loscuito already had a criminal history when Von Essen gave him a waiver in 2001. Loscuito had even been arrested again in 2003 for marijuana possession, but still held on to his job. The FDNY put him on a 90-day suspension and a two-year probation with frequent, random drug testing.
The exposure of Loscuito’s privileged path into the FDNY embarrassed the department but didn’t come as much of a shock to the Vulcans—although it did make good fodder for their ongoing dialogue with sympathetic City Council members and federal discrimination investigators at the EEOC. The Vulcans argued for years that the FDNY’s background checks favored white candidates over blacks, especially when it came to the shadowy, all-powerful Personnel Review Board that made the final cut in hiring, subject only to an override by the commissioner himself. Made up of FDNY top chiefs, a few human resources people and—when a tie-breaker was needed—the fire commissioner, the PRB got final say on which questionable candidates had a shot at the job and which were turned away. In the parlance of the fire department, some on-the-fence candidates would get stipulations, allowing them on the job if they promised to stay problem-free. Others would be “considered but not selected,” which meant they were cut loose with no further explanation as to why.
The Vulcans had long suspected more blacks and Latinos got dropped by the PRB than whites, but they had no evidence beyond the anecdotal claims from minority candidates who came to them for help. The PRB was completely self-determined. It had no department guidelines to follow, there were no specific procedures for it to consider in making decisions and no minutes or memos were taken of its meetings—in fact, almost no paper trail existed. The only people who knew what went on inside its meetings were its high-ranking members—and they were tight-lipped.
The Vulcans got another chance to take a whack at the secretive PRB process in 2005, when a firefighter with a history of cocaine abuse tested positive in a routine drug check. But that wasn’t all—his retired firefighter father, a union official, got arrested for trying to bribe the laboratory that took the career-ending samples.
Firefighter Christopher De Parma was hired by the FDNY in 2003 despite two misdemeanor convictions, including one in 1996 for possession of drug paraphernalia. He got a stip that said he agreed to periodic drug testing for 36 months. He came back clean on 15 such tests, but in May 2005 he tested positive for cocaine. He was suspended without pay and faced dismissal—but quit in midsummer. His story came to light in September after the arrest of his dad, who was charged with offering thousands of dollars in bribes to get employees at a Brooklyn medical lab to destroy his son’s tainted urine samples.3
A weary fire department was forced once again to defend its use of stips, while admitting that in the past three years it issued 50 percent more such exceptions to new hires than in the past. Stipulations were approved by the PRB, in a process that was fair and above board, the department said. Still, Commissioner Scoppetta was willing to look at the procedures to see if “there is room for improvements,” a fire department spokesman told the New York Times.4
Scoppetta, steeped as he was in the more courtly ways of white-collar management, was deeply offended by the rash of fire department excesses he’d been forced to defend over the past few years. Aside from the sex scandals and drug busts, there was an incident in which one firefighter smashed another in the face with a chair in a Staten Island firehouse. Scoppetta didn’t know if the FDNY’s bad streak was a product of the heightened emotions still spilling over from 9/11 or the massive brain drain caused by the multitude of retiring senior officers, but he wasn’t one to overlook such reprehensible actions. His zero-tolerance stance on drug abuse outraged firefighters, who felt it broke the brotherhood code to air dirty laundry. They preferred the old-school way of solving those problems, which allowed a firefighter to seek treatment on his own while being mentored and monitored by senior officers. Scoppetta was done with that. Any firefighter who came forward voluntarily to admit to a substance abuse problem got full benefits and salary and a free stint in rehab. Any who got caught through random drug testing or other monitoring methods was out of a job, no questions asked.
It was a no-nonsense approach that won him few fans. The Vulcans could only wish he were as willing to flout tradition when it came to their diversity claims. Here was one more example of how the FDNY could change traditions when it really suited the department. In response to Granger’s noose allegation, Scoppetta ordered a full investigation, wrote a department-wide letter reminding the troops that such acts were not to be tolerated and mandated that all firefighters watch a video on diversity awareness. The FDNY’s equal employment opportunity office (EEO)—criticized by all firefighters for its toothless and interminable investigations—hauled 12 firefighters to MetroTech for interviews within two months of Granger’s claim. There was enough witness evidence to substantiate Granger’s story, the EEO said. But investigators couldn’t pinpoint the guilty party.
“Nobody would come forward, and none of the firefighters who knew anything would talk,” Scoppetta would say later of the incident. “It would have been a tremendous thing if one of them had.”
The Vulcans saw the investigation as a total cop-out. The FDNY knew something occurred, but wasn’t willing to dig deep enough to nail it all down.
“They could have called them all in, said ‘Put your badges on the table, and anyone who doesn’t cooperate has to go,’” Washington said to a fellow Vulcan when the nebulous results were released. A lawsuit and union blowback would have been sure to follow, but it would have sent a message, like Mayor Rudy Giuliani did with the shameful Broad Channel blackface float. Giuliani had been willing to take the First Amendment hit, and the Vulcans felt Scoppetta should have done the same over the noose.
Scoppetta also let the Giuliani- and Von Essen–era Fire Cadet program lapse, over the objections of the Vulcans and City Council members like Yvette Clarke, who as chair of the Fire and Criminal Justice Committee took an active role in probing FDNY diversity. The Vulcans lobbied hard to keep it, but Scoppetta had made up his mind. At a City Council hearing over the summer, the fire commissioner was asked if he would resume the program if the council allocated an extra $2.8 million for it.
“No,” said Scoppetta. It was costly and an unnecessary duplication of FDNY efforts to bring in more minorities. His response prompted a rather loud outburst from Washington, who was listening from the audience benches. Washington shouted that Scoppetta wouldn’t be happy until the FDNY was 99 percent white. A security guard came over and told the visibly agitated Vulcan to leave.
“My advice to Paul is that he become a part of the solution and not continue to be a part of the problem,” Scoppetta told reporters after the hearing, noting again how the Vulcan head had rejected his offer to run FDNY recruitment.5
As 2005 came to an end, Scoppetta was focused on the prestages of the next FDNY exam, which would be given in 2006 or early 2007. He wanted to pull together a recruitment effort that would really make some inroads. Although DCAS, the mayor’s office and even the city’s law department seemed inclined to ignore the rumblings from the Department of Justice, Scoppetta, as a lawyer, wasn’t unaware of the danger his department was in.
The EEOC in 2004 found probable cause for the Vulcans’ claims regarding test 7029 and probable cause in November 2005 for test 2043. It cited significant adverse impact in the city’s written exams in its determination. Moreover, its D.C. testing expert found that DCAS’s in-house validation study was inadequate and incomplete. Three individual black candidates who took exam 2043 but were never hired also filed EEOC complaints mirroring the allegations of the Vulcans. Those were now being bundled together to go to the Department of Justice and its civil rights unit. Scoppetta knew enough about disparate impact to grasp that the FDNY hiring numbers spelled disaster. But given the Bloomberg administration’s refusal to consider any of the Vulcans’ recommendations, that’s where everything seemed headed. Scoppetta could see only one way out of trouble: dedicate every spare resource to a knockout recruitment drive. To do that, he had to mend some fences, starting with the Vulcans.
In August 2006, Scoppetta called up Washington and invited him to a Brooklyn firehouse. The FDNY was holding a press conference to announce its latest recruitment drive for upcoming exam 6019, and Scoppetta was eager to show the world what was coming. Washington—for once—was on his best behavior. He and the FDNY had their differences, but it was always boots on the ground during recruitment time. Besides, he had some fence-mending in mind himself. He wanted to get hold of Mayor Bloomberg. They hadn’t spoken since Washington sucker punched him with the noose incident. He was hoping the mayor’s temper had cooled enough that they could have their second meeting. Washington dutifully played his supporting role at the firehouse press conference, and when the mayor got in his proximity, Washington signaled he wanted a tête-à-tête. The mayor nodded and directed the Vulcan to his ever-present aide Ed Skyler to set something up.
A month later, Washington and Marshall found themselves back at City Hall, looking across a wide table into the no-nonsense stare of the mayor. With them this time was firefighter Duery Smith, a longtime Vulcan nearing the end of his active-duty career. His family had twice nearly died in house fires when he was a little boy growing up in Brooklyn. Even now, decades later, Smith could close his eyes and relive the sweet sensation of firefighters, all but invisible in the darkness, reaching out and grabbing him. The minute he felt their hands, he knew he was safe. When he got older, like many working-class kids in 1960s New York, Smith took every civil service exam the city had—including the test for the FDNY. But his first offer came from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. By the early 1970s, Smith was a city bus driver, assigned to the route transit workers facetiously called the “Ho Chi Minh” line. It ran through parts of Brooklyn that were so drug-addled and crime-ridden the bus drivers joked it was as dangerous as being in Vietnam. When the FDNY contacted him two years later, Smith was more than ready to go.
“Running into fires has to be safer than what I’m doing,” he cracked to his transit buddies. And for most of his career it was, until his luck ran out in 2003. A call came in for a commercial fire that quickly became a four-alarm conflagration in a Queens apartment building. Smith’s Ladder 136 was among several units that raced to the blaze. It was one of those calls where everything that could go wrong did. Before Smith and his men knew it, they were on a rooftop staring at five-foot flames that shot into the sky.
Hurried orders started coming over the radio from officers. The engine company straining to spray water miscalculated the length of the building. It was far larger than they realized—stretching a whole block. The source of the flames wasn’t 25 feet inside the cavernous space, as they incorrectly surmised. It was more like 100 feet back. The conditions were too dangerous to stay inside. Firefighters could easily get disoriented in the dark, windowless unknown of a massive commercial building. The officers pulled the company out so the firefighters could attack from the exterior. That left Smith and his men, on the rooftop of the adjacent building, at the mercy of the spiraling flames. The fire spread from the commercial building through the small crawl space that ran underneath the roof and the top floor. As the firefighters on the ground floor of the commercial building drew their quenching water hoses back, unchecked flames shot upward, causing the center of the roof to collapse. Heat and smoke exploded in all directions, blowing over Smith and his company on the roof next door, which was also on fire. Smith did a hasty head count. Too many firefighters were on the roof with only one exit ladder. He needed to get a secondary means of escape set up in case they had to bail in a hurry. Shouts and yells reached his ears from the chaos below as he carefully stepped through the smoke to the roof’s edge. In one heartbeat to the next, he went from walking to falling. He stepped right into the 4-foot-wide air shaft that ran between apartments. In the chaos, nobody saw it. Smith plunged several stories and hit the ground. Fortunately, he landed on his feet. Unfortunately, his heel bones shattered. He crumpled upon impact.
When his head cleared, he took stock of his situation. He was in a brick box with no visible exit, smothering smoke curling around him, and he was splintered and tattered from the ankles down. Above him, he could make out a window in one of the residential building’s apartments that faced the light shaft. That would be his way out. Smith managed to get an arm hooked on the ledge and hauled himself halfway up. With the other hand, he pulled off his air mask and banged at the glass. He swung as hard as he could, several times, until finally shards went flying. But the whole window fell out. It smashed over him and ripped the air mask from his hand.
I can’t believe this, Smith thought as he rolled around on the broken glass, feeling desperately for his mask. I survived this damn fall and now I’m going to die from the smoke.
He likely would have, if another firefighter on the roof hadn’t been looking in his direction in the split second Smith dropped out of sight, too startled to even shout. The firefighter sent out a mayday, and the crew succeeded in breaking into the ground-floor apartment and pulling Smith through the window before smoke overtook him. He wound up in Elmhurst Hospital with 11 rods in his left foot and 10 in his right. His injuries earned him a hospital visit from Mayor Bloomberg, who always found time for wounded cops and firefighters.
Sitting across from the mayor in City Hall two years later, a memory from that visit came back to Smith. The mayor had asked if there was anything he could do for the injured firefighter, and Smith, smiling in his hospital bed, made a reference to the somewhat acrimonious contract talks going on with the Uniformed Firefighters Association at the time.
“Just give the guys a good raise,” he said, and the mayor laughed.
Smith didn’t expect that the mayor would remember their hospital chat, but to his surprise Bloomberg did. The two spoke for a few minutes about Smith’s recovery until the real talk began.
Bloomberg, direct as always, got straight to the point. He knew there was a problem with FDNY diversity, he told the men. He just truly didn’t know what the best solution was.
“We’ve got solutions for you,” Marshall said. The Vulcans spent the next 20 minutes walking him through all their ideas for better recruitment and ways they thought the FDNY could lower the attrition rate for black candidates. It wasn’t just a one-step fix, they told the mayor, but a series of things that could be tweaked to keep more blacks in the running.
But the key, as always, was doing something about that written test. It remained one of the biggest blockades to blacks getting on the job. Washington presented a letter that Congressman Charles Rangel—an ardent Vulcan supporter—sent to the mayor. It advocated changing the written to a pass/fail grading system, and increasing the importance of the physical exam.
“UFA president Steve Cassidy has agreed to this proposal,” Washington noted. Cassidy had proven to be a tough and wily union president who often went toe-to-toe with the mayor, but Washington knew he had a decent relationship with Bloomberg underneath the bluster.
“Ask around among the FDNY chiefs and even they will say that the test doesn’t tell you who is going to be a good firefighter, that’s the kind of thing you start to figure out when you get the recruits into the training academy,” Marshall added. “It’s not fair to hire off a test that ranks people in order of a score when there’s absolutely no proof that those who score higher make better firefighters. I scored an 86 on my test and I think I’m a really good firefighter.”
Smith also chimed in. He’d done well on his test, but even his score had been considered potentially too low to get him on the job. “I scored a 92 on my test and I think that I’m a pretty good firefighter,” he offered.
Bloomberg, who listened quietly to what the men said, turned to Smith. “You fell through a roof,” the mayor deadpanned. “How good a firefighter could you be?”
The men couldn’t help but laugh at Bloomberg’s lighthearted teasing, as Smith joked back that he’d bring in all his medals to show Hizzoner. As the meeting ended, Bloomberg told the Vulcans that he would meet with DCAS to discuss some of the changes they proposed. He also informed them that the city had hired consultants to revise the written exam before DCAS administered 6019. Someone would get back to them about the issues they raised, the mayor said.
A few months later, the Vulcans were called in for a sit-down with Martha Hirst, the head of DCAS, the administrative agency that actually wrote and developed all the city’s civil service exams. Washington and Marshall walked into the gathering to find Commissioner Scoppetta, Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler and another high-ranking Bloomberg official present. Washington and Marshall didn’t expect to get everything they discussed with the mayor implemented in that one hiring cycle, but they did nurse hopes that at least some of their issues would be addressed. Instead, the opposite happened. Commissioner Hirst informed them that the physical tests were going to be changed from a ranked score to a pass/fail exam. Anyone who finished all the elements in the allotted times would be given a passing score. That meant a candidate’s written score was more important than ever in determining who would get the job. That grade alone would determine an applicant’s spot on the hiring list. An outside expert had revised the types of questions the written firefighter test posed to candidates. The passing grade was the usual 70. Only candidates who passed the written and the physical would be eligible to apply for the five-point residency bonus points. It was everything the Vulcans had not wanted, and more.