Mike Bloomberg didn’t announce my appointment for a week. But the morning after I’d accepted his offer to become police commissioner again, I was standing beside a metal easel in a brightly lit conference room at Bear Stearns headquarters on Park Avenue. A large flip pad was on the easel. I had a red Sharpie in my left hand.
It was still six weeks before the Bloomberg administration would take city hall, six weeks before I would return to my old fourteenth-floor office with Teddy Roosevelt’s desk at 1 Police Plaza and the job I’d left with mixed feelings eight years earlier. There’d been three police commissioners since then: Bill Bratton (for twenty-six months), Howard Safir (four years, four months) and Bernard Kerik (sixteen months). My own previous term as police commissioner had ended after sixteen months, when Rudy Giuliani defeated David Dinkins for mayor in 1993.
Soon the responsibility would be mine again—but it wouldn’t be the same job at all. The city was different now. The department would have to be different too. The crime drop we had set in motion with Safe Streets, Safe City had continued through the Giuliani years. September 11 changed nearly everything. There was no time to bask in my appointment. New York was still grieving. The city wasn’t anywhere close to being back on its feet. The recovery had barely begun. Plenty of slogans were floating around: “Never forget.” “Homeland security.” “Rebuild better than ever.” “Let’s roll.” But there was no overall plan for rebuilding public confidence and no comprehensive strategy—not at the police department, not anywhere—for reducing the chance that the city would be attacked by terrorists again. Devising that strategy, I knew, was our first and highest priority.
To be certain, this would entail more than small changes at the margins. It would require a fundamental rethinking of the role of the police in New York City, a thorough reordering of the department’s priorities, and some genuine cultural change. We’d still have to fight street crime. That challenge would never go away. But moving forward, a large part of our responsibility—maybe the largest—would be protecting the city against another terror attack. No local police department had ever taken on that responsibility. But no local police department had ever been in the position the NYPD was in as 2001 came to a close. We had to think creatively. We had to start—now. And I certainly couldn’t do it alone.
Four men in shirtsleeves and ties were with me that day in the Bear Stearns conference room, sitting at a long glass table, looking up at the easel and at me. I began by drawing a sketch of the police department’s organizational chart.
“Commissioner’s here,” I said, drawing a small rectangle at the top of the pad.
“Right below that, the first dep and chief of department,” I continued, putting two boxes below the one for commissioner, connected to it with short vertical red lines.
Next I drew a row of boxes for all the deputy commissioners and chiefs. “Besides the existing deputies and chiefs, two things I want to add,” I said.
The men in front of me nodded as I drew two additional rectangles on the pad.
“I want a counterterrorism bureau, and I want an expanded intelligence division. I want a deputy commissioner in charge of each of them, and I want them both reporting to me.”
The NYPD had never had a counterterrorism bureau, and the Intelligence Division had been overseen by a deputy chief, not a deputy commissioner. To someone outside law enforcement or the military, that might sound like a technical or trivial distinction. Inside a large police department, those differences can speak volumes—about power, resources, access, and priority.
I continued. “Let’s significantly increase the NYPD component of the JTTF, and put that under the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism.”
The Joint Terrorism Task Force had been created in New York City in 1980 amid a rash of political bombs by black nationalists, Puerto Rican separatists, and other radical groups, then replicated in dozens of other cities around the United States. The task force included personnel from various state and local law enforcement agencies, including the NYPD. But it had always been dominated and controlled by the FBI. I had learned from our experience at the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Since New York was the terrorists’ prime target, I wanted to make sure the NYPD didn’t get lost inside the task force.
“We need a much stronger role there,” I said.
The men in the room nodded.
“And I want to do something about medical too,” I continued. I didn’t mean yearly physicals for department employees. I was thinking about the anthrax attack that had occurred in the weeks after 9/11, when letters containing the deadly spores were mailed to the Manhattan offices of NBC News and the New York Post and the Washington offices of Democratic senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting seventeen others.
“With the anthrax attack,” I said, “we need an infectious-disease component in the counterterrorism bureau. It should be separate from the medical unit that is in personnel. That’s for regular medical concerns. Chemical and biological weapons are part of the terror arsenal now.” As an organization, we needed to learn more about that and be prepared for it. It’s about protecting the public and protecting our officers. I didn’t want people running into a scene of a chemical attack with no idea what they’re facing.
As I spoke, I kept drawing new lines, making new connections, moving some boxes up and others down. One Sharpie mark at a time, I was reimagining the flow of power and information inside the New York City Police Department.
I was doing almost all the talking. The four other men in the room were my initial sounding board. I had history with all of them—and, more important, they had my trust. I wanted their reactions. There was Paul Browne, who’d been with me at the NYPD, the Customs Service, the Treasury Department, and with the police monitors in Haiti. He’d been my media spokesman and a whole lot more. I called him my wartime consigliere, not like Tom Hagen in The Godfather. There was Joe Wuensch, who had held one of the most important and least appreciated jobs in the NYPD, deputy commissioner of management and budget, until Bernie Kerik inexplicably asked him to leave. There was Mike Farrell, who started as a numbers whiz at the Department of Justice. He had been a top crime analyst, policy adviser, planner, and quality-control guy at the NYPD and then became deputy director of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. Finally, there was George Grasso, who’d gone to law school as a police officer and then rose to deputy commissioner for legal matters at the NYPD. He was always a steady hand in the crisis of the moment.
These were intelligent, forward-looking people who knew the department intimately. They were all pros, not remotely political. They were able to make tough decisions when they had to. All four of them would play major roles in the department in the years to come.
As I laid out my vision, I could tell that all four of them liked what they were hearing, a sweeping overhaul of the department’s mission reflecting the new generation of threats the city now faced. But there was also some concern in the air. Paul Browne addressed it most directly.
“I love the way this sounds,” he said. “But some of it is going to be a heavy lift internally. How do we get people to buy into such a big change?”
It was an excellent question. Paul was right. This would be a heavy lift, and it would never be achieved without solid internal support.
“We’ll need help,” I said. “We will have to bring some people in whose credibility is so strong, who have such gravitas, who so obviously know what they’re talking about that no one will be able to question them. We need some people whose competence is totally beyond doubt. This won’t be a job for pretty-good people. Who do you know?”
* * *
Word of my return leaked first in Newsday. Citing unnamed sources, the paper reported on November 11 that Mayor-Elect Bloomberg had asked and I had agreed to come back as police commissioner. That day, Bloomberg’s people refused to confirm, and so did I. But the mayor-to-be was asked about the report the following morning on NBC’s Meet the Press. He didn’t quite confirm it, but he left little doubt. “Well,” he said, “I did read that in the papers yesterday. Stay tuned.”
I’d like to think that the formal announcement, when it came two days later, calmed some nerves in the city. The message was, You don’t have to worry about the police department. It will be in experienced, competent hands. This was important for Mike Bloomberg. No one doubted his expertise when it came to economic development. He knew Wall Street. He’d been a hugely successful businessman. He could certainly handle budgets, tax policy, bond ratings, and the whole money side of city government. He also seemed fairly conversant with health and education issues, two passions of his even before he began eying city hall. But he had never demonstrated any particular interest in public safety and law enforcement. Frankly, I’m not sure if he’d ever gotten a traffic ticket. After the terror attacks, he recognized that protecting New York was the greatest challenge facing the city. Clearly the police wouldn’t just be fighting traditional street crime. The city’s very survival had been threatened by terrorists. If people didn’t feel safe living in, working in, investing in, or visiting the city, nothing else the mayor might achieve in office would be worth very much.
At the same time, some huge internal challenges awaited us. The Giuliani administration had made decisions that were sure to cause some difficulty for whoever came next. They’d spent massive overtime dollars beating the crime numbers down, levels of spending that were unsustainable. Then 9/11 came and police costs shot up even higher. For the first time ever, captains and above were paid cash for overtime. All those inflated paychecks had the additional effect of sweetening the pensions of veteran officers, giving them large financial incentives to retire within the year. To add to the pressure, low starting salaries were squeezing recruiting efforts. And right after the election, Bloomberg mentioned the possibility of a 10 percent budget cut for the police department.
Department insiders were abuzz about all this.
* * *
The truth was, we needed help. A lot of help. From top people both inside and outside the department. I saw no reason that a police department ought to be satisfied with anything less than the best. Organizations can’t always do everything with the talent they have, especially when the most urgent issue at hand is something entirely different from what the organization is accustomed to doing. Hadn’t they taught me that at Harvard? Wasn’t that one of the lessons of Haiti? I was committed to bringing in a caliber of talent that had never before worked in a local police department—the kind of people who had probably never even considered police work before. Real world-class experts in their fields who could help me take the NYPD to a whole new level.
I was convinced that intelligence gathering and counterterrorism were going to become key features of the New York police mission. Those weren’t skills we had in great abundance in the field or at headquarters. They weren’t what the police academy specialized in teaching. You didn’t learn that sort of thing running a Bronx robbery squad or supervising Brooklyn South narcotics. But I also understood something else: If we were going to bring in outside people and put them in charge of New York police officers, those outsiders had better arrive with unquestioned qualifications. Otherwise they’d never get beyond morning roll call. They would have to be so talented, so credentialed, so experienced that no police officer could possibly question their authority.
But who?
Actually, I had the profiles before I had the names. I wanted a top official from the CIA to run the Intelligence Division and a Marine Corps general in charge of counterterrorism. No one knew intelligence gathering like the CIA, and after thirty years of active and reserve duty in the Marine Corps, having retired as a colonel, I’d seen how impressive some of the generals could be. Tough. Focused. Driven. Fully grasping the importance of mission and refusing to accept any result short of success. Those were the kinds of people we needed to help create the post-9/11 NYPD.
There wasn’t any precedent for this, bringing a former CIA espionage chief, a retired Marine Corps general, or similarly high-powered outsiders into the upper echelon of a city police department. I knew from the start it would make some people uncomfortable, in and out of the department. Civil libertarians might object that an ex-spy, an ex-general, or their ilk might not fully grasp the Constitutional limits of urban policing. I knew that entrenched police officials would not be pleased when outsiders arrived with high rank.
The NYPD is a very hierarchical place. Insiders rarely express their unhappiness directly to the boss. Complaints are usually muffled or shared in close circles. I picked up on the usual grumbling secondhand, but none of it changed what I knew we had to do. September 11 gave me some extra leeway. It really was a case of “Don’t let a crisis go to waste.”
I approached a couple of generals I knew, and they said no. One of them, Martin Steele, who was working at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, said he couldn’t do it, but “Why not ask Libutti?” That would be Marine Corps Lieutenant General Frank Libutti. Libutti was born in Huntington, Long Island. So he knew New York. Among many other stops, he had commanded FMF/Pac—Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, a force of ninety thousand marines. Now retired, he had just started as special assistant for homeland security at the Department of Defense. This was before there was a Department of Homeland Security up and running. Frank sounded like a man who knew counterterrorism from the battlefield and from Washington.
I called and asked if he might be interested. “Sure, I’m interested,” he told me immediately. We met at the Roosevelt Hotel.
Frank was great to talk to—totally direct, a hard charger, a Silver Star awardee who’d been wounded in Vietnam. The man had presence. He’d done all these things I admired. I laid out a very abbreviated version of my counterterror vision. I asked if he’d like to join me. He said, “Yes, sir,” and I had my new deputy commissioner to run the Counter-Terrorism Bureau.
Unlike Libutti, David Cohen was someone I knew. During his thirty-five-year career at the CIA, he’d done a tour as station chief in New York, which is a much more public position than you would imagine. He actually had sit-down meetings, an administrative assistant, and a business card. Cohen had retired from the CIA and was in the private sector now.
He seemed to me like an ideal candidate to run the NYPD Intelligence Division, which my Sharpie and I had just elevated in the organization. I called him in December. He was working at AIG, the international insurance conglomerate run by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. Cohen knew I was at Bear Stearns, whose chairman, coincidentally, was Alan “Ace” Greenberg.
“Congratulations on the new—” he began when I got him on the phone.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, cutting him off. “Let’s cut to the chase. I’m looking to make some changes in the police department in this post-9/11 world. I’m looking for a deputy. Are you interested?”
“Definitely sounds interesting,” he said. “But I’m working for Hank Greenberg now. Mr. Greenberg has been very kind to me and very generous. I am very loyal to him.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, laughing. “You have your Greenberg problem, I have mine.”
We talked a little more about the job, what a unique moment it was in New York, and why I thought we needed a first-string intelligence professional near the top of the NYPD.
He said he wanted to speak with his wife and he’d call me back in a day or two. An hour later, he was on the phone again, saying yes.
“If I had said no to you,” Cohen told me, “it would not have been possible for me, with my DNA, to continue living in New York. I would have had to leave. If I had refused to do this and stayed in New York, I would have felt like a traitor. I couldn’t do that.”
When I heard that, I knew Cohen and I would get along just fine.
* * *
Those were the two major components, intelligence and counterterrorism. In the weeks and months to come, I intended a dramatic expansion of the resources devoted to these areas, including staffing and expertise. I knew that if we were going to fight this new enemy, we couldn’t rely entirely on old policing techniques. What might be effective against burglars in Riverdale or chain snatchers in Crown Heights was unlikely to provide much protection against a truck bomb, an improvised explosive device, or an airplane turned into a missile. I also knew that the battle against terrorists couldn’t begin in front of some high-profile New York target. It had to start far earlier than that. If we were going to protect this city against terrorists, we had to know who the terrorists were—their methods, their ideologies, their funding, and their associates. We had to know everything. And at this point, at least, the New York City Police Department knew hardly anything at all.
Cohen and Libutti weren’t the only outside powerhouses we would bring in. Over time, those two would be joined by dozens and dozens of others who arrived with knowledge and relationships the department had never been able to access before. Counterterrorism pros like Michael Sheehan, Richard Daddario, Rebecca Weiner, and Richard Falkenrath. Defense-intelligence specialist John Decker. Top intelligence analysts like Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt. Active CIA officer Larry Sanchez. Former FBI agents like Sid Caspersen and Ed Curran. Top-flight legal minds like Douglass Maynard, Stephen Hammerman, Andrew Schaffer, Katherine Lemire, David M. Cohen, Jessica Tisch, and jack-of-all-trades Rob Lewis.
Working in concert with the talent we already had inside the department, these new leaders would go on to achieve things almost unimaginable in any other local police department—or even in this one at an earlier time. People with their experience and backgrounds simply don’t work in local law enforcement. And yet they did. Asked to join a crucial mission at a make-or-break time, every one of them signed on readily and then performed extraordinary services to New York and America. We truly could not have achieved so much without them. And it all started with the yeses I got from Cohen and Libutti before I was even sworn in.
* * *
I was able to give some hints of my plans at my formal swearing-in as New York’s forty-first police commissioner. That took place on Friday, January 4, at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, which Bloomberg made clear he wouldn’t be living in. (I was really sworn in at 12:01 a.m. on January 1.) For the first time, I laid out the three Cs that would guide my time as police commissioner—Counterterrorism, Crime Fighting, and Community Relations. But it was not even four months since the World Trade Center attack, so counterterrorism was the one on most people’s minds.
“We will ensure that a strong relationship exists with federal authorities in our mutual desire to thwart terrorism,” I told those present at my swearing-in, including former mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, former police commissioners Howard Safir and Bill Bratton, and the district attorneys of Manhattan and Queens, Robert Morgenthau and Richard Brown. Of course, Veronica and our sons Jim and Greg were there too, along with many of my relatives.
One of my first initiatives, I said, would be to create a high-level position to oversee New York’s response to terrorism, a threat we would not be leaving solely to state and federal agencies anymore.
I explained that Veronica and I had only just gotten back into our apartment building in Battery Park City, across West Street from Ground Zero. “When we returned and looked from the roof down onto the devastation,” I told those assembled, “a part of our hearts were ripped away.”
* * *
A week before my tenure officially began, I visited my old office, which I hadn’t seen for eight years. I met with Joseph Dunne, the first deputy commissioner for the outgoing administration, a real pro who a lot of people thought would himself make a fine police commissioner. And I set about trying to change the culture of the NYPD into something better suited to the post-9/11 New York.
“It’s a big change,” I conceded when we announced Cohen’s and Libutti’s appointments in late January, “but our whole world has changed as a result of September 11.” I said I understood that counterterrorism had previously been left essentially in the hands of federal agencies. We wouldn’t be doing that anymore, not when New York was “very high on the target list of terrorists.”
I had no antagonism toward the FBI, the CIA, or other federal agencies, except when they behaved imperiously. They had good people. They had great equipment. They did fine forensic work. But for years, they had been dominating local law enforcement, and in our case, at least, that wasn’t going to happen anymore.
I wasn’t intimidated by these people. I knew them. I had spent nearly five years working in federal law enforcement at the Customs Service and the Treasury Department, where I oversaw the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Customs Service, and other agencies. I understood the language they spoke, and I wasn’t in awe of anyone.
And the NYPD brought a lot to the table.
We were bigger than the FBI. We certainly had a lot more diversity. We had sources on the street in New York and in immigrant communities, contacts the feds could only dream of. We had people who could work undercover with potential terrorists. The FBI had very few agents who could do that.
I knew some people would interpret this as a slap at the FBI or the CIA. But it wasn’t. “Our intention is to work more closely with the federal government,” I said. “To do that, we had to put in place a structure to train our officers and find people from outside the police culture to do it.” These personnel were just the beginning of it, I emphasized. We also needed to get started immediately gathering our own intelligence—and analyzing it. The days of waiting for federal assistance and guidance were over. “We already have an Intelligence Division that is substantial,” I said. “We need to do a better job in the interpretation of the intelligence that comes in.”
Mike Bloomberg approved of the idea. He understood the advantages of recruiting outside expertise. That’s routine in the business world. The mayor sounded proud. “This makes us the only police department, I believe, in the United States with somebody of this stature focusing on intelligence,” he told reporters, singling out Cohen’s arrival.
It was interesting to watch Libutti and Cohen navigate a roomful of New York reporters. Clearly media coverage wasn’t something either man had ever sought. Quite the opposite in Cohen’s case. He’d spent thirty-five years not just staying under the radar, but refusing to acknowledge that the radar waves even existed.
He wouldn’t confirm even the most basic biographical details about himself. Asked his age, he said that he was between twenty-eight and seventy. Asked if he had ever worked in the CIA office at the World Trade Center, he answered, “You’re going to have to ask CIA where their offices were.”
Ever the spy.
Neither of those facts was an actual secret, of course. The CIA office was listed in the Manhattan phone book, and Cohen certainly had a driver’s license, a public record that any reporter could have researched, though it might have been a challenge pinning down which David Cohen he was. I think he was just setting a fresh tone—things will be different now—and enjoying his man-of-mystery persona. As the reporters were packing up to leave, the spymaster had a big smile on his face. “It’s the first press conference I’ve ever been to,” he allowed. “It was sort of like my bar mitzvah.”
Wait, did he just acknowledge he was male and Jewish? I’m not sure he ever spoke with a reporter again.