New York City
2007
Test takers for firefighter exam 6019 began lining up hours before the 9 a.m. kickoff for the morning session on January 20, 2007. The freezing temperatures hadn’t eased by the time the afternoon candidates showed up for the four o’clock exam. Shivering firefighter hopefuls queued for hours in lines that snaked around the block. Several of the high schools where the tests were administered suffered inexplicable delays in opening the doors. Some didn’t open until 10:30 a.m., and even then testing didn’t start for another hour or so. The same problems happened at the 4 p.m. sessions. Some who showed up never received the official admissions card the Department of Citywide Administration Services was supposed to mail applicants ahead of the exam. The first step in the official hiring process to become a member of the Bravest was under way, and it was a disaster.
As shell-shocked candidates stumbled out after their tests, they began to compare notes. Many told of delayed openings, confused proctors who gave misleading or incorrect instructions and talked throughout the proceedings, test takers who were allowed to bring in cell phones and use them during the exams. Others reported widespread cheating, with test takers copying off each other, taking extra time under the eyes of inattentive proctors or flipping ahead to start on new portions of the exam before each timed segment began. Most disconcerting of all, the questions weren’t the type the students had been told to expect by the FDNY tutorial sessions. Instead of traditional, logic-based, cognitive-style queries with multiple-choice answers, the test takers found hypothetical scenarios. In each situation, test takers were asked to imagine a series of events and choose how they would respond from a range of possible reactions. It was a bizarre, counterintuitive approach to those who expected the usual format of the firefighter exams used in the past. The applicants were furious—and worried. Many of them grew up fantasizing about the day they would become one of New York’s Bravest; others had left promising careers after 9/11 to become a firefighter, which had become an even higher-than-usual calling. For many of them, the events of January 20 were a dream-ending curveball—and all because of a single standardized test that was supposed to be too easy to fail.
It didn’t take long for some of the more outspoken candidates to organize themselves into a protest group: Fighting 6019. It was a small representation of the total test takers—about 490 people out of 22,000 who sat for the exam. But they were well connected and vocal. One of their leaders was the son of a high-ranking FDNY chief. Several members had family on the job. The protest group also had plenty of ammunition in some of the test’s more ridiculous-sounding questions, which they leaked to the media.
“Fire Department Hopefuls Burned by Easy Test,” blared a New York Post headline. “FDNY Exam Has ’em Fuming,” screamed the NY Daily News. The papers had a field day with the wacky questions, which included one about the desirability of a senior officer calling firefighters “lazy couch potatoes” if they wanted to buy a TV for the firehouse instead of a workout bench. Then there was the most infamous question of all—what to do about spilled chili.
“As a rookie firefighter you are responsible for cleaning the kitchen. You arrive for the beginning of your shift to find the kitchen area is a mess. And there is a bowl of chili spilled on the floor from the firefighters from the previous shift. The reason the kitchen is such a mess is due to the previous crew having gone out on a call to a fire during their dinner, and they are still actively fighting the fire . . . What should you do with the following circumstances?”1
Candidates were told to use a range of “highly desirable” to “highly undesirable” to rate possible reactions to the chili mess. They were given five possible outcomes, like “Clean the mess up, but complain to anyone who will listen,” or “Wait for everyone from the previous shift to return, yell at them that they should have cleaned up the mess.” On the face of it, the question seemed ridiculous to those expecting the traditional approach.
DCAS rushed to defend its actions as the Fighting 6019 group called for a protest rally in Union Square. They wanted DCAS to toss out all the results and give them a do-over. The FDNY’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief of Department Salvatore Cassano, spoke out in defense of the test.
“That question is a legitimate firefighting question. You could substitute a thousand things for the chili. The question isn’t about chili, it’s about discipline and Fire Department procedures. Any probie that went through our training would know what to do,” Cassano told the NY Daily News.2
The FDNY and DCAS put on a united front for the press and for Fighting 6019, but inside the marble halls of FDNY MetroTech, reactions ranged from anger and disgust to displeased frustration. A top FDNY official who’d been involved in parts of preparing for 6019 wrote a blistering memo to Deputy Commissioner Doug White about DCAS’s disastrous bungling. The inept agency was so overwhelmed, it couldn’t even get training questions over to the FDNY until after the department started giving its tutorial classes, the official said. “Inadequate sample questions in an extremely inadequate time frame. We were emailed sample questions on 12/4 and 12/21. The tutorial program started 11/27. We did not receive sample questions for all new categories and we obviously were not made aware the degree to which situational judgment questions would dominate the exam. We received 2 sample questions on situational judgment. Situational judgment questions accounted for roughly 50% of the exam. We could have saved ourselves a lot of grief if we had a better sense of what to cover in the Tutorial Sessions,” the memo complained.3
And it didn’t stop there. The problems carried over to the actual exam day itself, the memo said. Roughly 23 percent of registered test takers who never showed up told the FDNY it was because they never got the necessary admission card from DCAS that was required to enter test sites. Complaints of cheating, bad proctoring, delayed starts and locked schools were “consistent for sites in all boroughs.” The FDNY was flooded with calls from “angry fathers” complaining about the test, the memo said. It concluded with a devastating assessment of DCAS’s failings:
I could go on and on about what went wrong on test day. I think it is imperative that Martha [Hirst, DCAS commissioner] hear these concerns . . . I am pretty sure her response will be that this happens in every test, every time. Nevertheless, with all the $$ spent on this effort and all the attention focused on it (the Feds, City Hall, etc.) makes no sense for them to drop the ball like this on test day.
We directed a lot of complaints to DCAS . . . If they respond that they “investigated” and responded to every complaint, just know that several test-takers called me and read me their letters. They were maddening. They basically put all the blame back on the applicant . . . As we have said before, from beginning to end, DCAS was a disaster on this test. I know you can’t tell Martha that.
I know I am crazy to think that the City should set a higher bar for themselves on this. And I do know that on some level, this does happen every exam. No kidding—that is unacceptable. It will continue to happen until someone in a position of power decides it will no longer happen and actually makes change to ensure that. It can be done.
And that is not even taking into account the actual, miserable exam.
For Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, the botched rollout was devastating. The FDNY had hired a new head of recruitment, a skilled and effective woman with grassroots organizing and voter-drive experience. Thanks to a $1.2 million boost secured by city comptroller Bill Thompson, the FDNY doubled its recruitment budget to $2 million; did a targeted media outreach with radio, print and TV ads; assigned full-time recruiters to go to nearly 3,000 events; and paid overtime for others. Washington, hearing about the changes via the FDNY grapevine, was happy. At last the department was making a real effort. Scoppetta personally went to black churches and to the sprawling New York City Housing Authority projects to make his pitch. This time, instead of relying on the emotional pull of 9/11, he tailored his speeches to the incredible benefits offered by the FDNY, especially the handsome salaries and flexible schedules. He recorded robocalls to urge candidates to fill out their paperwork and show up. That effort paid off—to a degree anyway. Of the 22,000 test takers for 6019, more than 34 percent of the top 4,000 scorers were minorities—a huge leap from prior years. Blacks accounted for 11 percent, Latinos for 21 percent and Asians for 1.6 percent.4
To see all that progress get mired in what many perceived as DCAS’s incompetency was maddening. Scoppetta, reading the newspapers’ coverage, decided to take a look at test 6019 for himself. He was staggered when DCAS told him he couldn’t have a copy.
“That’s ridiculous, why not? I just want to see what some of the questions were,” he protested. “Do you mean to tell me that the fire commissioner can’t even see his own department’s test? Look, I’ll give you my home address, just mail it to me there. Nobody in MetroTech will even know I have it.”
But DCAS officials were unmoved. There was supposed to be an unbreakable wall between the FDNY and DCAS regarding the test—a holdover from the days when Fiorello LaGuardia and others tried to move civil service out of Tammany Hall’s corrupt reach. The development of the test was DCAS’s purview, and it wasn’t about to cede any territory to the fire commissioner. It was a ridiculous attitude, especially in the face of an incoming lawsuit. DCAS didn’t even like the intrusion of Scoppetta’s questions about the validity of its exams.
“The test is fine,” he was told, whenever he inquired. In fact it was not, far from it, but both agencies let the matter drop. As the city’s Equal Employment Practices Commission had said nearly a decade earlier, the incomplete validation process used by DCAS was by itself enough to leave the city legally exposed. But nobody stepped up to fix the problems.
The Vulcans were upset about 6019 too. They invested a lot in that exam and got bang-up results from their tutoring classes. As soon as they heard in 2006 that the city was adopting a new format, Paul Washington called up a testing expert who for years had been sending his flyers to Vulcan Hall. The city had a list of 17 qualities it was hoping to measure with 6019’s new format, but none of it made sense to the Vulcans. How could qualities like teamwork, resilience, spatial and interpersonal relationships, and situational judgment be vetted through a written exam? Washington was skeptical about the expert soliciting them but willing to give him a try. His name was Brent Collins, a fire chief in Ohio. He ran a successful side business advising firefighter candidates across the country how to score well on different types of entrance exams. Washington doubted a working firefighter had the academic chops to demystify DCAS’s format, but Collins proved him wrong. Within minutes of their first phone conversation, he sent Washington several examples of the types of questions he thought would likely appear on the FDNY test. For $10,000 he designed a tutorial booklet and study guide based on a mix of the traditional and new. The Vulcans had gotten the money from the City Council, which earmarked $1.2 million in its recent budget for the FDNY to use for its diversity efforts. The FDNY—likely the only agency to ever turn down money—declined it, saying it wasn’t needed. So the council carved out a chunk for the Vulcans. They put $10,000 toward hiring Collins, and he was worth every cent. The 6019 candidates who sat in the Vulcans’ tutorial classes got a good long look at the new format, with its subjective questions and range of answers. Those who only took the FDNY’s tutorial classes—still based on the traditional multiple-choice set up—did not.
If he had still been the Vulcans’ president, Washington would have shared the success with reporters. But he was term-limited out at the start of 2007. In his place, the Vulcans elected John Coombs, the hard-nosed firefighter from Brooklyn who worked in Engine 250. Coombs had asked Michael Marshall to stay on as his number two. Together with Washington and Duery Smith, the group was known as the Committed Four. By then, the Vulcans’ lawsuit was already five years in the making. The city had refused—at every juncture—to sit down and talk. It wouldn’t meet with the Vulcans, it wouldn’t meet with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it wouldn’t settle with the Department of Justice (DOJ). There was no end in sight.
FDNY firefighter John Coombs, recently retired Vulcan Society president, September 2014. Photo credit: Michel Friang.
The EEOC in 2002 took up Washington’s original complaint and tried and failed many times to entice the city to the bargaining table. The Vulcans submitted charges to the EEOC as a group, but later three new black test takers stepped up to add their names as individuals. The EEOC’s final determination for both the Vulcans’ discrimination claim and the three add-ons came in late 2005.
When the city’s law department refused yet again that November to meet with the EEOC, the case was turned over to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. During its subsequent, two-year investigation into the FDNY, there was at least one hush-hush exploratory meeting between federal lawyers and one female Bravest. The DOJ wanted to know if there was a case for gender discrimination too. But the women, as a group, didn’t fit the Vulcans’ disparate impact pattern, mainly because they didn’t have a problem with the written test. However, DOJ experts did spot a pattern of disparate impact for Latino candidates that fell in line with what blacks were reporting. Latinos were folded into the DOJ probe, over the protests of the FDNY’s Hispanic Society. The group’s president didn’t want anything to do with the Vulcans or their lawsuit. The United Women Firefighters Association had also declined to stand alongside the Vulcans at press conferences. The women had a tough enough time in the firehouses already, the group’s president told Washington.
The city’s law department also had some discussions with the DOJ. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wasn’t willing to settle, but some city lawyers, stuck with a hard-to-win case, hoped to find a way out of the weeds. They agreed to some concessions with the DOJ—without running it past Bloomberg. When the time came to confess, law department head Michael Cardozo called a private meeting with Scoppetta, Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler to tell them he had promised to drop the FDNY’s 30-college-credit requirement. Bloomberg was aghast and strongly objected. Both the mayor and Scoppetta felt the FDNY should require more education, not less. But it was too late. A deal had been struck. To compensate, a reluctant Bloomberg and Scoppetta lengthened the Fire Academy training period from 13 to 23 weeks—the better to make sure no real slackers sneaked through.
That was as far as Bloomberg was willing to go in terms of concessions. It was indisputable that the FDNY was racially imbalanced, but it wasn’t because the department tried to make it that way, as far as the mayor could tell. His attitude was closer to that of the majority of white firefighters: there was a civil service test, everyone took the same test and the best scoring candidates were hired. That’s about as fair a shot in life as anyone got. It was a fine philosophy, but it didn’t change the fact that the city wasn’t complying with federal civil rights law.
The top chiefs inside the FDNY were also in deep denial about the seriousness of the legal challenge confronting them. Anytime the possibility of a lawsuit came up in a meeting, it was brushed away. “There is no way the Department of Justice is going to sue the New York City Fire Department while George Bush is president,” was the rationale heard again and again among the white shirts in FDNY MetroTech as the federal investigation continued. To the fire chiefs who flourished inside the good-old-boy network of the FDNY, there was no doubt that President Bush—the biggest good-old-boy there was—would take care of them. Bush came to Ground Zero three days after 9/11 and, in an iconic moment, took a bullhorn to give an impromptu, patriotic speech while hugging a tearstained firefighter. He heaped honor on the wounded department and took swift vengeance against America’s enemies, and if he didn’t exactly use pinpoint precision in how he identified them, his War on Terror nonetheless won the loyalty of many Bravest. When he ran for reelection in 2004, he did so with the FDNY’s biggest union at his side. Steve Cassidy and Uniformed Firefighters Association members stumped for him in Ohio.
“We’ve got nothing to worry about. Bush will take care of it,” was the common refrain among Scoppetta’s chiefs. They were about to find out how very wrong they were. In May, just a few months into the tumult over test 6019, the DOJ dropped the legal bombshell the Vulcans and the Center for Constitutional Rights were waiting for: a discrimination lawsuit based on the violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The city and the FDNY gave written exams in 1999 and 2002 that were rigged against minorities, the suit claimed. Candidates of color passed both tests at lower rates than whites, but the exams “do not accurately determine whether an applicant will be able to perform the job of firefighter,” the DOJ wrote.5
Predictably, the lawsuit set off Mayor Bloomberg’s notoriously short fuse.
“The Justice Department is wrong, and we’ll see ’em in court,” Bloomberg told the press.6 He was so livid when he got the news he reached out personally to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the head of the DOJ, to complain about the case.
Shayana Kadidal at CCR was stunned as well when he heard that the DOJ lost patience with the FDNY. He and the other lawyers hadn’t given any credence to the possibility that President Bush would intervene on behalf of the fire department. But they had worried about rumors among civil rights attorneys that the Title VII cases the DOJ usually pursued were related to religious freedom, not race discrimination. Also, Kadidal and original CCR attorney Barbara Olshansky hadn’t done much to endear themselves to anyone in the pro-Bush camp. In 2006 Olshansky coauthored “The Case for Impeachment,” a legal guide on how to remove Bush from office. And when the DOJ finally announced its lawsuit, Kadidal was on the verge of handing off the Vulcan case to a new CCR lawyer so he could dedicate all his time to the Guantanamo Global Justice Division. Kadidal was on the West Coast in late December 2006 when CCR first got word that the DOJ was ready to sue. He called Washington in Brooklyn to tell him two very strange things were happening: it was raining in Los Angeles, the land of perpetual sunshine, and the Bush DOJ was going to sue the FDNY. It wasn’t quite hell freezing over, but pretty damn close.
By the time the DOJ made its formal announcement in May 2007, Kadidal was transitioning the Vulcans’ case over to Darius Charney, a San Francisco native who’d been a special needs teacher in New Orleans before moving to law. Kadidal was confident that Charney had the skills and the patience to take over the case. Now they just needed some money.
From the very earliest days of the Vulcans’ complaint, CCR had estimated it would cost about $250,000 in up-front cash to pay for the testing experts who would analyze the city’s development process and also its finished exam results. It wasn’t an amount CCR was able to front, and Kadidal expended considerable time and energy meeting with other law firms he hoped would partner with them. Many were interested. But even after the DOJ’s blockbuster announcement that it was going to sue the FDNY, none wanted to commit. Some of them legitimately had a conflict of interest because they did other business with the city. In others, Kadidal could tell the partners didn’t have the stomach to sue the city’s hometown heroes. Their best shot was a partnership with Levy Ratner, a firm with a long history of civil rights and union-related legal work. CCR’s main point of contact, Richard Levy, was an experienced litigator who’d handled race discrimination lawsuits before, and he was connected to one of the city’s most socially progressive and powerful unions, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199. The two law firms had been in talks since November 2004, but even as the DOJ was filing its suit three years later, CCR and Levy Ratner were still lining up the necessary financing.
For the Vulcans, the main concern was blowback in the firehouses. The imminent lawsuit frayed tempers already stretched to the flashpoint. Lanaird Granger’s noose incident continued to be a sore topic. There were those who accused Granger of planting the black rope himself—an accusation that flourished in part because the FDNY’s inconclusive investigation was easily dismissed.
One of the noose naysayers was Paul Mannix, then a battalion chief and the future founder of Merit Matters. Mannix, lightly freckled with rusty brown hair and vivid blue eyes, had a sharp wit and an appetite for inflammatory dialogue. He delighted in putting both on display with lengthy, voluminous letters to the editor that were published in the Chief-Leader. The 100-year-old broadsheet—dedicated to covering City Hall, public-employee unions and the civil service system—was widely read among city workers. Mannix’s fusillades—directed mostly at the department’s diversity efforts—were popular among the rank and file. He went back and forth in the Chief’s pages with many of his detractors. Washington chose to ignore Mannix’s missives—even though most called him out by name. He viewed the battalion chief as an ineffective nuisance. Plenty of others traded barbs with Mannix though. He filled the Chief’s pages at least once a month, and dissecting Granger’s noose story was a recurring theme.
“Granger has stated he returned from a routine run and the noose was lying on his firefighting gear. This has me confused, because in the Fire Department I’m employed by, we usually bring our firefighting gear with us on runs in case we have to, say, fight a fire,” Mannix observed in one tart letter in April 2006, titled “FDNY Noose Mystery.”7
He unloaded several more sarcastic observations about Granger’s “changing” story, before taking aim at the FDNY’s equal employment opportunity (EEO) office and Assistant Commissioner Paulette Lundy, who investigated the noose complaint.
“Although no one has been disciplined and there has been no one identified as being directly involved in this matter, Ms. Lundy’s report claims that Granger’s complaint has been substantiated and, further, the noose was placed in retaliation for Granger’s association with the Vulcan Society. That’s quite a trick—Ms. Lundy has detected the motives of a person who doesn’t exist,” Mannix mocked.8 In many firehouses around the city, Mannix’s writings were cut out and posted on walls.
While Mannix fanned the flames of firehouse unrest, Washington was called upon to show up at many of the hot spots. One of those included a Brooklyn firehouse that had a Confederate flag on the wall. A black firefighter detailed there had seen it. Washington went to the firehouse with a fellow Vulcan to have a word with the commanding officer. The captain told Washington the flag had been stuck on a back wall, partially obscured, for many years, with nobody paying it any mind. Washington, satisfied with the response, let the incident die there once the flag was removed.
He was not as content with the reaction in another house in Brooklyn, where a young black firefighter was summoned to the kitchen one night to see a fellow Bravest in uniform, with a white KKK hood on his head. The firefighters said they were teasing the young man because he’d gotten angry earlier when a retired white firefighter called the firehouse and greeted him over the phone with a friendly salutation that included the n-word. Washington got wind of it through his older brother, Kevin Washington, who was an officer in the house. Kevin had taken the story to FDNY personnel. The FDNY deemed it a prank gone too far and mandated sensitivity training for the house. No further discipline was required, the department said. Paul Washington wanted the kid to go public with the story, but the younger black firefighter didn’t want to lodge a formal complaint. Privately, many inside the FDNY accused the Vulcan leader of trying to arm-twist the younger man for his own agenda. Mannix went so far as to hint at it publicly.
Responding to a black firefighter who wrote to the Chief to criticize the FDNY’s reaction to the Klan hood, Mannix argued that it hadn’t been the young black firefighter who was offended by the sight of a racist symbol in his firehouse kitchen. “The black firefighter understood this as an attempt to help him and did not object; in fact, he did not want the incident reported and did not cooperate with the investigation,” the battalion chief wrote. “Hard-edged humor, yes, but humor nonetheless and designed to help a brother firefighter.”9
Mannix went on about the “over-reaction” to the KKK hood and suggested it was still an unhappy topic between the young firefighter and the officer who insisted on reporting it. Then he swung back to the FDNY EEO office, one of his favorite targets to lambast. He had no confidence in it or its investigations, Mannix wrote. But he had some “Constructive Suggestions” for those minorities—including women—wishing to join the FDNY. “Study for the written test, train for the physical test, take advantage of the equal opportunity afforded you by the Civil Service system and take personal responsibility for the results of your efforts, good or bad. Not everyone can become a firefighter (or a lawyer, baseball player, etc.), and standards must be upheld regardless of your race or gender,” his letter concluded. It too was a fan favorite among his many FDNY followers.
Mannix’s loud voice was just one of many clamoring against the Vulcans as the anger and heartbreak from test 6019 continued to simmer—even after the DOJ announced its intention to sue. John Coombs, finding his way into his new role as the Vulcan Society president, attended a Union Square rally in support of the 6019 protest group’s demand for a do-over. So did Mannix, who took advantage of the chance meeting to introduce himself. The two shook hands and exchanged a few casual remarks. Coombs knew of Mannix through his stir-the-pot letters. Now that they’d met, Coombs could see he was the same in person as he was on the page: blunt, assertive and smart enough to argue around any holes in his facts.
The Vulcans also remained enemy number one to many of the firefighting families who’d seen their hopes for the next generation die with test 6019. Plenty of other families who wanted their kids to get a good middle-class job felt the same way. Rumors swirled that the test was “dumbed down” in the name of diversity, and whispers surfaced that the Vulcans cheated. Critics insisted they must have been given a copy of the exam in advance. Nobody was willing to consider the Vulcans simply did what the DCAS and the FDNY should have long ago: brought in an outside expert.
The FDNY met quietly with DCAS officials to go over the distressing occurrences around 6019. But despite all its acknowledged problems, the test results were certified and accepted. For all those who took the test expecting to score well and wound up below the 95th percentile—or out of the 90s entirely—it was a devastating blow. Many would be too old—over the cutoff age of 29—by the time the next firefighter exam rolled around.
As the year drew to a close, the Vulcans made some important decisions of their own. The Committed Four spent a long summer with lawyers Darius Charney of CCR and Richard Levy and Dana Lossia of Levy Ratner. The firefighters spent hours explaining how the FDNY hiring system worked and the various steps along the way where blacks got wiped out. The adverse impact case on the written exam was a slam dunk, but the Vulcans were thinking about going for more.
“How are we going to protect our guys in the firehouse when things start to get really hot? You know the department doesn’t investigate a lot of complaints even now,” said Coombs. “Why settle for the easy victory? Let’s make them put it all on the table.”
Coombs had worked many times inside MetroTech as part of the recruitment team. He knew a lot of the department’s internal vulnerabilities and he wanted to go after them. Staffed with officials fond of repeating the agency’s unofficial mantra—“200 years of tradition, unspoiled by change”—the FDNY never put much stock in managerial training or techniques. In fact, most upper staff were smoke eaters who climbed the civil service promotional ladder. Scoppetta, a perennial manager, was horrified when he took office and realized that most of his operational top staff worked two 24-hour days and then went home for the rest of the week. “But who’s managing here if you’re all coming and going?” he said at the time.
On the lower level, things weren’t much better. The FDNY used what it called light-duty firefighters—those recovering from a minor injury—to handle most day-to-day clerical affairs. The bored smoke eaters, untrained and uninterested in handling paperwork, shuffled documents in almost all parts of MetroTech.
“We’re already going after the department’s recruitment effort. Let’s go after its handling of complaints, and the personnel department that decides about firefighters’ background, let’s make them prove everything that they’re doing,” Coombs urged. “This is all stuff they’ve systematically let build up and it hurts us in a lot of ways.”
The DOJ lawyers didn’t see any reason to add more charges to their case or muddy their chances of an easy disparate impact victory. They let the trio of Vulcan lawyers know they wouldn’t support any additional claims. Richard Levy and Lossia weren’t 100 percent convinced themselves, but as they sifted through and absorbed the information, it all started to make sense.
“Trust me. It’s there,” Coombs insisted. Before long, they were all in. Over the DOJ’s strenuous objections, the Vulcans filed a separate and additional claim of intentional discrimination against the city, the FDNY, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta.