FOR THE TERRORISTS, the World Trade Center was always an obsession.
The day after the 1993 attack, 25-year-old Nidal Ayyad, a Rutgers graduate, American citizen, and $35,000-a-year chemist at a major New Jersey company, began buying chemicals for another bomb. Ayyad was the first of the small, fanatical circle of WTC bombers to move toward serial killer status. The mastermind of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, was on a plane for Pakistan; several others had tickets for Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq. But Ayyad was already focused on the next mission.
His DNA was all over the letter he’d typed at his Allied Signal office and sent to the New York Times within hours of the bombing. The letter, resurrected later by the FBI from Ayyad’s hard drive, was written on behalf of “the fifth battalion in the LIBERATION ARMY” and claimed responsibility “for the operation conducted against the WTC.” Ayyad warned: “All our functional groups in the army will continue to execute our missions against military and civilian targets in and out of the U.S.” As frightening as this letter was, the FBI found a second, unsent, letter in his computer: “We are the Liberation fifth battalion, again. Unfortunately, our calculations were not very accurate this time. However, we promise you the next time it will be very precise and WTC will continue to be one of our targets.” It was a threat that federal prosecutors took seriously for years. Henry DePippo, who assisted in the prosecution of Ayyad, echoed him at a Senate hearing in 1998: “They warned that they would be more precise in the future and would continue to target the WTC.”
When Ramzi Yousef was finally captured in Pakistan two years later, he agreed to talk to two federal agents on the plane ride to New York. After landing at Stewart Airport outside the city, he was flown by helicopter to the Metropolitan Correction Center, just blocks from his greatest triumph. As they passed the towers, an agent pointed at them: “See,” he said. “You didn’t get them after all.” Yousef is said to have replied, “Not yet.” One of the agents on the helicopter with Yousef, Lewis Schiliro, who subsequently became the head of the FBI’s New York office, said, “I remember all of us discussing Yousef’s return and Yousef’s comment that ‘Next time, we’ll take the towers down.’”
Dietrich Snell, who prosecuted Yousef, says now that “it was obvious to anyone” that the World Trade Center was still a preoccupation for terrorists. His boss, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, added that “all of us involved in these investigations and prosecutions definitely thought the trade center was a continuing target and a very attractive one.” White’s views aren’t post-9/11 hindsight. In a speech she delivered at the Middle East Forum a year before the attack, she mentioned the Yousef comments twice, calling them “chilling.”
In fact, the FBI learned about a concrete plan to attack the World Trade Center again as early as 1995. After Abdul Murad, Yousef’s partner in a plethora of lethal schemes, was captured in the Yousef bomb factory in Manila, he told Philippine investigators that the towers were among six American targets he and Yousef were preparing to attack. Yousef narrowly escaped capture himself in Manila, and the feds took his Manila plans so seriously that he was prosecuted on charges related to his and Murad’s plot to blow up a dozen U.S. jumbo jets before he was tried on the ’93 bombing charges. Murad, who was trained as a pilot at American flight schools, admitted to casing the WTC and providing a “structural analysis” of it to Yousef.
While only part of the Murad evidence was disclosed during Yousef’s 1996 trial on the Manila counts, Murad’s FBI briefings were part of the record available to Snell, White, and the rest of the Southern District counterterrorism team. It was also available to a former colleague of Giuliani’s who did periodically brief him on terrorism, FBI director Louis Freeh.1 A federal judge when the ’93 bombing occurred, Freeh rushed out of his Foley Square courtroom and headed directly for the trade center. From that day on, the FBI was “obsessed” with terrorism, says Freeh, who became director that September.
Freeh’s counterterrorism chief in New York, John O’Neill, who died on 9/11, also briefed Giuliani on occasion. New York Post reporter Murray Weiss, whose biography of O’Neill is entitled The Man Who Warned America, said he “reiterated since 1995 to any official in Washington who would listen” that he was sure of another homeland attack and expected the target to be “the Twin Towers again.” O’Neill ran the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which included up to 17 NYPD detectives, who regularly briefed their superiors. He left the FBI shortly before 9/11 and became security director at the trade center. Yet O’Neill’s fears about the trade center, and Freeh’s grasp of al Qaeda, never seemed to register at City Hall. Giuliani conceded that he began to broaden his knowledge of al Qaeda only after 9/11, when he got Yossef Bodansky’s 1999 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America and “covered it in highlighter and notes.” It warned of “spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York,” and laid out bin Laden’s ties to Yousef.
Even some in Giuliani’s inner circle saw the Twin Towers as a terrorist quarry. Lou Anemone, the chief of the department at the NYPD for most of Giuliani’s mayoralty, says he “knew about Yousef’s comments” and “knew the World Trade Center was a real continuing target,” relying on O’Neill, the detectives assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and other intelligence. Starting in 1997, Anemone created a citywide security plan that ranked 1,500 buildings, transportation hubs, and shopping areas as targets. The “vulnerability list” rated the WTC as a “critical” target, the highest on Anemone’s scale, as was the New York Stock Exchange, 1 Police Plaza, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, and others. “It was very much near the top of that list, certainly in the top 20,” he says.
A regular at Giuliani’s weekly Wednesday 4 P.M. public safety sessions, Anemone announced his findings at a 1998 meeting. “There were very few questions. We had people in the field for six months filling out cards. When I was done briefing them on it, Rudy glazed over,” said Anemone. The top uniformed officer in the department for almost six years, and a veteran of the ’93 bombing himself, Anemone added, “We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center. We never even had a drill or exercise there.
“The threat of Islamic fundamentalism tortured me for years,” the retired chief says. “I had a detective working directly for me who stayed abreast of all terrorist information. I tried to monitor it. But I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle. There was just a lack of recognition of the problem at City Hall.” John Miller, a top aide for years to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, agreed: “There were certainly no discussions regarding the possibility of a terrorist attack on the WTC at the commissioner level. I don’t think anybody knew what the bombing in 1993 meant in 1994. The question of terrorism never came up.”
Miller says that Bratton and City Hall “would only have discussions about specific threats or events,” like the March 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting by a Lebanese immigrant of a school bus carrying Hasidic Jewish students. “When we learned in the middle of the night of a threat to the Israeli consulate or the Stock Exchange, he was told,” Miller recalled. “We would tell him everything the FBI told us and then he’d pick up the phone and talk to Louie Freeh.” But Miller does not recall any discussions “about the broader picture of what was happening with terrorism itself.” There was, he concedes, “no recognition” of the need for strategic public safety assessments. Giuliani’s kind of leadership—ferocious, single-minded—worked only in the here and now. To the degree he thought about planning to thwart any unspecified threats, his security upgrades were limited to the two-story buildings he lived and worked in: Gracie Mansion and City Hall.
Asked if Giuliani was accurate when he depicted himself as someone who understood the terrorist threat prior to 9/11, Miller declared, “Hello, history. Get me rewrite.” The Miller/Anemone views were echoed by a host of other Giuliani insiders, from emergency management czar Jerry Hauer to Giuliani’s point man on the Port Authority, Deputy Mayor John Dyson. None of a dozen former Giuliani aides, including Deputy Mayor Fran Reiter and Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Ralph Balzano, could remember a single example of any expression of interest in the security of the World Trade Center on Giuliani’s part. Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall said that “specifically on terrorist attacks, there was no sense of awareness” at the highest levels of the administration and “no discussion of the WTC.” Asked if the ’93 bombing ever came up, Weinshall, who later became transportation commissioner, said, “No. Isn’t that odd?”
WHAT MADE IT even odder was that a civil suit brought by the victims of the 1993 bombing, proceeding slowly in state courts throughout the Giuliani years, unearthed a mountain of evidence pinpointing the towers as a target. The suit quoted two FBI officials who’d warned that the trade center was a “likely” target even before it was bombed. It cited a 1984 Port Authority report that warned: “The World Trade Center should be considered a prime target for domestic and international terrorists.” The Port Authority’s executive director at the time, Peter Goldmark, was so concerned that he established a counterterrorism unit, traveled to Scotland Yard, and went to the Reagan State Department to meet with counterterrorism chief Robert Oakley.
Indeed, Manhattan Supreme Court judge Stanley Sklar ultimately ruled that the plaintiffs in this suit—both families of the 1993 dead and the living wounded—had “presented proof that the Port Authority had foreseen the risk, or that the risk was foreseeable.” On the basis of the authority’s “actual notice of this kind of terrorist activity” prior to 1993, Sklar ordered that the case go to trial, which it did, resulting in a jury verdict in 2005 that could result in damages of up to $1.8 billion.
Ironically, the U.S. attorney throughout the ’80s—when Goldmark and an assortment of consultants identified the World Trade Center as a prime target—was Giuliani. In fact, one Port Authority report at the time listed 25 downtown bombing incidents, almost all of which occurred while Giuliani was federal prosecutor, headquartered half a mile from the WTC. It cited this geographic pattern as evidence of the threat to the towers 8 years before the first attack and 16 years before the second, yet Giuliani didn’t appear to understand the danger, even after 1993.
Governor Cuomo and the Port Authority certainly recognized that the trade center remained a target after the bombing. Executive director Stan Brezenoff hired a top security firm, Kroll’s, and it developed a series of security recommendations for the towers. The 9/11 Commission would find that the Port Authority “spent an initial $100 million to make physical, structural, and technological improvements to the WTC, as well as to enhance its fire safety plan and reorganize and bolster its fire safety and security staffs.” The commission cited a coterie of improvements: “state-of-the-art fire command posts” in each lobby, a “sophisticated, computerized fire alarm system,” and “substantial enhancements” to stairwell lighting. A full-time fire safety director position was created, with supervision over a team of deputies on duty 24 hours a day. The WTC began holding fire drills twice a year. Fluorescent markings were added to lead people to the stairwells in the dark.
The changes, which came over a period of several years, would turn out to be both prescient and far short of what was needed. Vital fireproofing improvements were delayed. Recommendations that remote emergency power be installed were ignored, leaving the towers without a working public address system when terrorists struck again. Nothing was done to reinforce stairway shafts or improve exit access to the street, as ’93 bombing studies urged. City Council leaders demanded emergency overrides on electronic door locks in ’93, but the Port Authority moved in the opposite direction on rooftop, elevator, and other locks. None of the drills over the years involved anyone beyond fire officials, and tenants never left their own floors. The authority assigned certified fire safety directors to the sky lobbies in 1993, and quietly removed them four years later, well before the 78th-floor sky lobbies became particular scenes of chaos crying out for direction on 9/11.
Cuomo, Brezenoff, and PA deputy director Tony Shorris said that neither the new mayor nor anyone in his office ever asked about the WTC security improvements. It’s hardly surprising that a mayor who never discussed the trade center’s vulnerability, the ’93 bombing, or terrorism with his own key staff failed to raise the subject with state or authority officials. But it was not just a matter of hidebound indifference. Giuliani had no interest in WTC safety issues because he decided, at the very outset of his administration, to go to war with the authority that owned it. Faced with a multi-billion-dollar deficit he inherited from David Dinkins, Giuliani was looking everywhere for gap-closing cash. He quickly focused on the minuscule rents the city was collecting from the Port Authority for the two airports it had built on land leased from the city, LaGuardia and Kennedy. He’d begun fulminating about the leases as a candidate and, as soon as he took office, he resolved that he’d either dramatically push the rents up or take over the airports.
As Chief Anemone put it, “Rudy never talked about the trade center. It was the airports he was after.” In fact, Anemone contends, Giuliani’s eight-year, relentlessly hostile attempt to seize and privatize the airports “poisoned the well” with the authority, creating tensions so contentious that City Hall and the authority “couldn’t even work together well enough” to orchestrate a “full-scale drill.” The Police Department and the office of Emergency Management never participated in a single emergency exercise there between ’93 and 9/11; even the Fire Department had only one major simulated event at the site of its biggest fire ever.
GIULIANI WAS HARDLY the first New York City official to notice that it was getting the short end of the stick from the bi-state authority. New Jersey commuters enjoyed cheap, heavily subsidized transportation that city subway riders and New York suburbanites could only envy. LaGuardia and JFK looked positively neglected compared to what the Port Authority had done for Newark Airport. Anyone could see, even without the spreadsheets Giuliani was collecting from his advisers, how much more money the city could get in rent and taxes if a private manager ran the airports and a private developer owned the World Trade Center. And it was certainly understandable that the mayor who unified the city’s transit and regular police was ruffled by an independent Port Authority Police Department that paid its cops better than he could pay his.
The problem with Giuliani’s feud with the authority was not that he didn’t have a case. It was that all he had was a case. Beyond this indictment, there was no working agenda, nor any concern about the awkward timing of his all-out assault, coming on the heels of a real, and terribly damaging, act of war.
Giuliani would virtually admit as much years later—in his April 20, 2004, private testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Asked to describe his “relationship” with the authority, he confided, “I had friction with the Port Authority re the quality of the airports, which I thought [were] substandard. Also, there was friction because the FDNY and NYPD didn’t have jurisdiction in incidents at airports.” As telling a summary of his eight-year war with the authority as that comment was, Giuliani also told the commission investigators: “Keep in mind, the World Trade Center was not in the City of New York.” Since the Twin Towers were such an integral part of the city that they literally cast a shadow over City Hall, Giuliani was apparently referring to the fact that the authority was an island unto itself, eschewing city police and other services. But the comment inadvertently conveyed the policies of distance and dispute that were the hallmarks of his Port Authority policies, with Giuliani even briefly cutting off garbage pickup to the World Trade Center and other authority properties in 1996.
The mayor had absolutely no ability to compartmentalize, to fight with another governmental entity about one matter while working normally with it on another. As hard as it may be to believe, no one in a city administration that took office 10 scant months after the bombing ever asked any top Port Authority official how it was recovering from a terrorist hit unparalleled in U.S. history.2 Instead, the new administration was silent about the trade center’s sudden red ink, new security needs, and future financial prospects. It was as if the complex was its own city-state, rather than a vertical slice of New York with more daytime dwellers than most neighborhoods. Of course, the administration couldn’t ask about the trade center if it was barely talking to the authority, and Giuliani never spoke to Robert Boyle, the Port Authority executive director during the four years preceding 9/11, and he spoke just on public occasions with George Marlin and Brezenoff, the two prior directors.
Giuliani’s only public comments about the trade center between ’93 and 9/11 were occasional attempts to extract larger payments in lieu of taxes from the Port Authority for the property-tax-exempt towers. When that failed and the new governor, George Pataki, made it clear that he wanted to privatize the complex, Giuliani insisted that if the World Trade Center were sold, the new owner would have to pay full city taxes. His position complicated any possible transfer and helped delay it until July 2001. With the WTC transaction on a back burner, Giuliani accelerated his pursuit of the airports—the undisputed number one profit-making division of the authority. The bizarre juxtaposition of Giuliani pushing for the privatization of public airports while erecting barriers to a public authority getting out of the real estate business passed unnoticed, though it was the reverse of reality everywhere in America.
If it was a budgetary imperative that started Rudy’s war with the Port Authority, it was strange that the airport obsession only grew darker as the city’s deficit turned into the largest surplus in history. If it was a preference for private-sector airport management, Giuliani certainly appeared to abandon the privatization cause when he reneged on a campaign pledge to sell the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation, a patronage plum he’d branded “the only bookie in the world that lost money.” But even as these early rationales waned, Giuliani got louder, turning the bombed and embattled authority into the white whale of his administration.
THE BATTLE FOR the airports started with Candidate Giuliani. Danica Gallagher, a policy adviser to Giuliani in the 1993 campaign, says a “briefing paper” was prepared on the additional revenue the city could get from a fair airport rent or sale, helping it close a budget gap without new taxes. Gallagher met with Ron Lauder, the son of cosmetics scion Estée Lauder who’d run against Giuliani in 1989 in the GOP primary, and Steve Savas, a privatization academic tied to the conservative and avidly pro-Giuliani Manhattan Institute think tank. They were pushing a city airport takeover and a long-term deal with private operators. And just as Giuliani bought the institute’s tough-love welfare policies, he was intrigued by its privatization agenda. Savas and Lauder had also already approached Dinkins deputy Norman Steisel in a 1992 City Hall meeting, pushing the same agenda. But Dinkins wasn’t keen on privatization or wars with powerful state authorities, so the initiative went nowhere. When Giuliani won in 1993, however, Savas was named to his transition team and retained as City Hall’s privatization consultant.
In the weeks before Giuliani took office, Steisel and Brezenoff, old buddies who’d served at the top of the Koch administration together, just about reached an agreement on a renewal of the airport leases, which were scheduled to expire in 2015. But in the end-of-term confusion of the defeated mayor’s last days, the renewal fell off the table. When Deputy Mayor John Dyson replaced Steisel as Brezenoff’s city counterpart, the Port Authority remained quite willing to dramatically increase the rent, with Brezenoff offering $55 million annually and a $200 million up-front back-rent payment. But Dyson, a multimillionaire with as voracious an appetite for conflict as his mayor, was already preparing for war. He publicly demanded $100 million a year, astronomically more than the $3 million the Port Authority had paid in 1993 and considerably more than the $76 million that the Aviation Division earned altogether, including Newark Airport. Paying that rent, to say nothing of the $73 million a year that Dyson also said he wanted in additional payments in lieu of taxes for the trade center, was a fiscal impossibility.
The administration’s priorities were on stark display in its reaction to two features the Daily News ran in early 1994. When the paper produced a two-page commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the bombing, banner-headlined IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN, no one in City Hall had a word to say. Mixing scenes of the rebuilt World Trade Center with ominous warnings about “another spectacular event,” the story relied on former police commissioner Ray Kelly, who observed, “It’s human nature for people to let their guard drop.” Three weeks later, in another News cover story called RUNAWAY ROBBERY, Dyson branded the Port Authority the “absolute worst” airport manager in the country and painted an ugly picture of how the authority favored New Jersey. With a banner headline spurred by City Hall, the public war was on.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for the authority. The World Trade Center suffered a $32.5 million loss in 1993, though accounting adjustments turned the “extraordinary loss” into a technical gain on the final books. It wasn’t until 1994, when adjustments weren’t possible, that the Port Authority sank to its lowest bottom line in history. WTC profits alone plummeted from $51 million in 1992 to $8 million in 1994.3
The trade center was also facing $535 million in reconstruction and related improvements and a sharp projected decline in revenues. The hotel that was part of the complex, the Vista, did not reopen until November 1994, costing the authority $80 million in revenue. The top-of-the-tower extravaganza, Windows on the World, one of the highest-grossing restaurants anywhere, shut down for more than three years after the bombing, and the operators walked away. The multi-million-dollar public parking garage in the basement never reopened. office occupancy declined, too, with high-end tenants whose leases were about to expire exploiting the uncertainty caused by the attack to drive their rents down. Other tenants simply left, paying $11 million in 1993 to buy out their leases early. A Deloitte Touche study commissioned by the Port Authority revealed that WTC security costs per square foot were over four times the average for comparable properties. Insurance costs tripled, forcing Deloitte to conclude that “the huge increase” was a consequence of the bombing.
The WTC decline made the Port Authority more dependent on the airports’ revenue than ever before. Aviation was the only one of five PA divisions still producing a substantial profit. “WTC’s ability to generate net income to support other businesses will be hampered by the lingering effects of the bombing,” concluded a 1994 Port Authority budget office study. “Aviation’s ability to generate net income sufficient to offset losses from the PA’s deficit businesses is expected to become increasingly important.” The same internal report listed the “outcome of rent negotiations with the City of New York” as the number one challenge for Aviation and a “critical issue” facing each of the Authority’s major divisions. That’s how connected the city’s airport rent war and trade center improvements were.
A suddenly slimming-down Port Authority cut $100 million in 1995, including 600 staff positions and $10 million in WTC costs. Charles Maikish, the WTC director, was even cutting security services, claiming in a July 1995 memo that he’d reduced the cost of civilian guards from $20 million to $11 million while “holding the line” on proposed cuts of the uniformed Port Authority Police. He promised, just two years after the bombing, “to further scale back security costs” without inviting “unacceptable risks.”
None of this duress had any impact on city policy. In fact, the $100 million rent demand that Dyson announced in early 1994 looked like a smoke screen by the end of the year. In December, Dyson suspended all lease negotiations, making it clear that the real goal was to force a fire sale to the city, which would then lease the airports to a private operator. The Lauder/Savas line had apparently prevailed. Then, in late 1995, the city took the lease dispute to arbitration. When it lost one of the key contested issues, the city’s lawyers decided to just let the case sit in limbo. Giuliani’s official negotiating position—which did not change for the rest of his term in office—was that the city would not discuss a lease extension on any terms, only termination and land surrender. It would not even pursue its own arbitration case.
The Giuliani hard line was a prescription for paralysis. The authority viewed the strategy of stonewalling the lease until the city got the airports as a threat to its viability that transcended Dyson’s extraordinary rent demands. Resisting this challenge to its stellar moneymaker was, to the Port Authority, a matter of institutional life or death.
IT WASN’T JUST the lease talks that wound up frozen. For nearly eight years, there was no relationship between the city and the most powerful public authority in the region. Stan Brezenoff, who was in charge of the Port Authority for the first 13 months of Giuliani, George Marlin, who ran it until January 1997, and Robert Boyle, executive director until early 2001, describe the palpable tension that continued right up to 9/11. It is unclear whether Neil Levin, who was the director for four months prior to 9/11 and who died in the World Trade Center that day, was also kept at arm’s length. Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission that he “normally would have spoken” to Levin after the attack, but when he couldn’t, “I didn’t speak to anyone from the Port Authority.” Incredibly, though Giuliani was on his feet for 18 hours on 9/11, he never talked to anyone at the agency that owned the towers, even about its own substantial casualties. His antipathy to the authority was so well known that when he attended a memorial service for 9/11 Port Authority employees, he got a cool reception.4
Brezenoff, a liberal Democrat who’d been Ed Koch’s first deputy mayor, said he “tried to talk to Rudy” about the airports, but when his $55 million-a-year offer got no response, he knew “we weren’t getting a new deal of any type.” Pataki appointee Marlin, the Conservative Party candidate for mayor in 1993, recalls a momentary thawing of the cold war when TWA Flight 800 went down off Long Island in 1996. He, Giuliani, and Pataki spent most of a week at Kennedy Airport meeting with victim families, doing press conferences, and even hosting a memorial. Though the Port Authority and the city worked well together in crisis mode then, Marlin said, the good feelings had no carryover. “They soon resumed the war,” he recalled. “Every day, every week, it was just a constant pounding.”
Boyle, a construction executive and longtime Pataki friend, says that, despite his many requests to meet, “Giuliani never spoke to me.” Boyle did get an appointment with Dyson that he thought might open the door to a new city relationship. But he was disappointed: “He took me on a tour of the renovations at City Hall and sent me on my way.” Boyle insisted that the Port Authority was “never at war with the city” and “only wanted to sue for peace.” But, doing “nothing aggressive,” said Boyle, “got us nowhere.”
Intransigence was high virtue in Rudy Giuliani’s City Hall, and top aides like Dyson, who’d helped jump-start the war, were licensed to accuse the Port Authority of “plundering” the city and to brand it “the fattest sacred cow in America.” In an interview years later, Dyson called bullying the authority a “sport” and said he “had a good time” playing it. He blamed the breakdown in the lease negotiations on Brezenoff’s unwillingness to give the city an escalator clause in the airport lease that would allow rents to increase with revenues. But Brezenoff contends that Dyson was unwilling to accept a clause that permitted rents also to drop with revenues. Obviously, these are the kind of differences routinely worked out between reasonable parties who wish to resolve them. In any event, Dyson does not dispute that the Giuliani goal quickly became to take over and privatize the airports, which, of course, foreclosed any compromise on lease terms.
No one at City Hall seemed to care about the one unmistakable by-product of this uncompromising antipathy: namely, that there were, as Brezenoff put it, “never any discussions about security concerns” or safety improvements at the towers. Marlin and Boyle had the same experience. The city’s demands even threatened the financing for the security improvements planned in response to Kroll’s and other studies. “Taking $150 million a year or more out would have been a heavy hit,” says Boyle. “In 1994, 1995, 1996, the era Giuliani was first talking about doing it, we absolutely couldn’t afford it. Even in 1997, it was still pretty tight. We couldn’t have done both that and the security upgrades. Something would have had to suffer.” Giuliani was forcing the Port Authority to choose between a pricey peace with him or safeguarding its terror-targeted assets.
What really enraged Brezenoff, Marlin, and Boyle, however, was the impact that Giuliani’s lease assault had on the Port Authority’s ability to raise money for capital construction projects. Whenever the authority needed financing, it had traditionally sold 35-year consolidated bonds, which were repaid from net revenues. But, the suspension of lease negotiations threatened its capacity to float airport project bonds that matured beyond the 2015 life of the leases. At the same time that Giuliani was demeaning the Port Authority’s management of the airports, he was consciously making it more difficult for them to finance airport upgrades.
When Dyson suspended the negotiations in 1994, his top aide, Clay Lifflander, publicly warned that the Port Authority “could face trouble selling long-term bonds if would-be bondholders fear the profitable airports will not be there to pay off the debt.” Lifflander urged bondholders and rating agencies to “look” at the authority’s cash flow with the new understanding that its airports were “not greater than 20-year assets.” At the same time, Dyson freely predicted in news accounts that the authority would come to its senses and give up the airports. Brezenoff was so upset when he read the Lifflander/Dyson comments while on vacation that he called Peter Powers, the first deputy mayor, to complain about the damage to PA bond sales. He was met with icy indifference.
Then, just to tighten the squeeze, when Dyson noticed a year later that the Port Authority was claiming, in a bond solicitation document, that negotiations with the city had only been “temporarily suspended,” he wrote a letter requiring the authority to “cease describing the termination of discussions as temporary.” The city, he declared, “has permanently closed any discussion of a simple lease extension and is willing to negotiate only a transfer of the airports” back to it.
While Giuliani’s strategy primarily affected airport-specific bonds, it was also designed to weaken the authority’s overall financing capacity. If bond buyers feared the Port Authority might lose its most lucrative holdings, that would make it tougher to sell bonds for any project. In fact, the authority’s outside consultant, Deloitte, found in a 1995 study that it had been “slow in implementing” the WTC security improvements because of its money crunch. A 1996 Giuliani press release pointed out that the authority was even borrowing to “cover cash flow deficits”—to the tune of $262 million in 1995 alone.
To get around the city’s refusal to sign off on 35-year bonds, Marlin says, the Port Authority “began holding the term of our new bonds to 20, and then 15, years.” Since the new bonds no longer exceeded the 2015 expiration date of the lease, Marlin said, they also “no longer needed a signoff from Dyson.” But the problem was not just with the issuance of new bonds. The authority also had nearly a billion dollars in outstanding bonds whose expiration date exceeded the life of the lease. It had to purchase or refund the bonds, which it started doing in 1994. This restructuring, prompted solely by Giuliani’s bombast, added $41 million a year to the Port Authority’s debt service. This extraordinary “Giuliani tax,” as authority officials branded it, undercut operations across the board, including at the World Trade Center.
The strategy still thrilled Dyson years later: “When we started, there was 20 years to go on the lease, so they could issue 20 year bonds, then 15. The interest rates went up. Well, you can’t really issue 10-year bonds, so it was getting harder and harder for them to operate. I kept thinking of Peter Pan, where the crocodile swallows the clock and the closer he gets to Captain Hook, the louder the clock ticked. It was getting harder and harder for them to finance themselves and we were getting closer and closer to taking the airports.”
The crocodile, of course, eventually consumed Captain Hook.
OTHER THAN GIULIANI hardball, there was one other constant in the war for the airports: a company called BAA USA Inc. When British prime minister Margaret Thatcher tried to get the government out of the airport business in 1987, the British Airport Authority became BAA Inc. The company ran Heathrow and several other British airports, and then began branching out all over the world. Since at least 1991, the number one target of its American subsidiary, BAA USA Inc., was the airport business of the Port Authority.
Ron Lauder and Steve Savas actually brought BAA officials with them when they met with Dinkins’s deputy mayor Steisel in 1992 to discuss Kennedy and LaGuardia.5 Savas had just edited a report that included two chapters that focused glowingly on the BAA experience. The report was published by the New York State Senate’s Advisory Commission on Privatization, which Lauder chaired as an appointee of the senate Republican leadership. The same thing happened in 1995, when George Marlin took over the Port Authority. Lauder asked Marlin to come to his office to discuss airport privatization. Waiting at Lauder’s office were several BAA USA Inc. executives, who tried to convince him to sell the airports. Well-connected and aggressive, the company soon won a contract to manage airport facilities in Indianapolis, whose new Republican mayor was a working ally of Rudy Giuliani’s.
BAA quietly became one of the driving forces behind the mayor’s airport war, attaching itself to an array of Giuliani insiders. Though Giuliani was America’s most recognizable mayor before 9/11, little was known outside the city about his governing style beyond his crime-busting reputation. Elected as a good-government reformer, he was widely seen by those who observed his government closely as personally incorruptible, yet quite comfortable with the lobbyists, wire-pullers, and deal makers who financed his campaigns and mined his City Hall.
For example, Randy Mastro, the deputy mayor who led the fight to drive mob companies out of the private carting business, left the administration and became the attorney for the large waste companies that replaced them. Randy Levine, another deputy mayor who went on to become president of the Yankees, was on Major League Baseball’s payroll for $800,000 while he was at City Hall aiding projects for both the Mets and the Yankees owners. The wife of Rudy’s chief of staff formed her own lobbying firm, and her husband helped set up appointments for her with commissioners. Giuliani’s boa constrictor campaign finance committee squeezed contributions from so many people doing business with his government that he violated the city’s $7,700-per-person ceiling 150 times and paid $242,930 in fines, close to a record. While the rhetoric of Jersey bias and privatization had jump-started Giuliani’s airport campaign, one factor driving it over time was the myriad Giuliani ties to BAA, the special interest with the most to gain, the one that ultimately wound up as Giuliani’s selection to manage the airports.
The first sign of that intertwine came in July 1995, when the city issued a request for proposals seeking a consulting firm to do “a strategic assessment” of the airports, with a focus on “the continuing role of the Port Authority.” Given the mayor’s already well-publicized attitude about the issues, the report’s inevitable conclusions could have been quickly scratched on the back of an envelope. Instead, in January 1996, the city awarded the $600,000 contract to Wilbur Ross, the senior managing partner of Rothschild Inc., though Rothschild had acted as the financial adviser on the British privatization of BAA in the ’80s. In fact, Rothschild was involved with a BAA stock deal as late as the mid-’90s.
Ross’s real connection to City Hall was Dyson, a friend for 30 years. The two aging millionaires were so close that the deputy mayor was one of Ross’s groomsmen at his ill-fated marriage to New York’s mercurial lieutenant governor, Betsy McCaughey. Dyson acknowledged later that he “knew Ross had been the adviser to BAA” on its initial privatization, but claims he “didn’t know the company would be interested” in the New York airports. If so, Dyson, who concedes he first met with BAA in 1994 or 1995, was one of the few people involved in the airport battles who was confused about its interests. BAA had all but announced in pro-privatization books and journals that it regarded JFK and LaGuardia as the linchpins of a potentially vast U.S. business.
In an interview, Ross at first said privatization “was one of the two sectors” of Rothschild he “was responsible for,” listing companies and countries where he did major privatization deals, even specifying British Airways and his work for Margaret Thatcher. But when pressed about BAA’s privatization, he suddenly drew a blank, neither denying he had anything to do with it nor affirming it. He said he didn’t recall if Rothschild was marketing BAA stock as late as the mid-’90s, precisely when he was doing his airport work for the city, though he conceded that it was “logical” that his company might have been.
By the time Ross’s selection to do the strategic assessment was announced in January 1996, the scope of work had changed. City Hall’s press release said Ross would “attempt to create a picture of what the city would look like without the Port Authority.” It was as if he had been hired to write a declaration of war. His brief May report did not disappoint. In addition to the predictable bashing of the authority’s airport management, Ross offered the only assessment of the impact of the ’93 bombing in the long archival paper trail of the Giuliani years.6 “The World Trade Center would be considered a premium property if it were not so old, and if there had not been the 1993 bombing,” he wrote. Citing vacancy rates and expenses, he put a measly $400 million price tag on the complex, an indication of just how financially damaged the Giuliani team believed it was. Instead of citing this terrorist-deflated WTC value as a cause for concern, Ross, Dyson, and Giuliani seemed to see it as a sign of weakness—evidence that this was the best time to go for the airport jugular. Ross said years later, “I don’t remember any discussions about the 1993 attack” at City Hall. “But that wasn’t my concern,” he added.
The biggest surprise was how unabashedly the report sang the praises of a single airport management firm, BAA. It cited the Indianapolis and Pittsburgh “recent experiences,” both BAA’s, as the only examples that “confirm the benefits achieved internationally from public/private partnerships,” even though the Indianapolis project had barely begun. “BAA’s total airport operations are larger than those of the Port Authority,” observed Ross in language unusual for a policy study. “In fact its revenues are as great as Port Authority’s from all PA activities.”
Once the Ross report was done, it took three more years for Giuliani to come up with a plan to force the issue, hamstrung no doubt by the reality that the Port Authority had a lease that wouldn’t expire until 2015. Finally, in October 1999, convinced at last that the bond squeeze and other strategies would not force the authority to divest, the city put out to bid a contract unlike any it had ever awarded. It sought an airport management firm that would audit and monitor the airports until the city gained control of them. When the authority gave up the lease or 2015 arrived—whichever came first—the contractor would then automatically become the long-term operator.
While certainly not the first mayor to deliver a lucrative city asset over to a private vendor for a term that ran on for decades, he was the first to try to do it with an asset the city would not control for another 15 years. Dyson put together a selection panel to pick the winning bid and, despite Rothschild’s ties to BAA, Ross was named special adviser to the panel. Ross promptly went to London and spent a day, as he described it later, “touring Heathrow and meeting with a whole group of BAA executives.”
On May 4, 2000, Giuliani announced that BAA had won the bid. The timing was a measure of how important it was to him. The announcement came a couple of days after he revealed his relationship with Judy Nathan and a couple of days before he disclosed on TV, without forewarning his wife, that he wanted a divorce. Those events were bracketed by the late-April revelation that he had prostate cancer and the mid-May declaration that he would not run against Hillary Clinton. Much of the rest of Giuliani’s government came to a standstill while he was considering his medical, marital, and political options. But not BAA.
The insider appearances engulfing the deal were as evident as its extraordinary terms. The company had retained Peter Powers, Giuliani’s former first deputy mayor whose relationship with Giuliani, dating back to high school, had won him the unofficial City Hall title of “First Friend.” Before leaving the government in 1996, Powers had both arranged and participated in Ross’s sessions with the mayor about what to do with the airports and the Port Authority. Powers’s nascent company, Powers Global Strategies, never registered as a lobbyist, but instead gave “strategic advice” to clients, several of whom did city business. Seth Kaye, who produced scorching anti–Port Authority memos as a mayoral adviser and participated on the five-member panel that picked BAA, was so close to Powers that years later he joined Powers’s firm.
Powers, who later became a member of the board of Ross’s company, was supposed to simply advise clients like BAA, not lobby. But he reached out to the Port Authority’s Boyle to set up a meeting for the company and to Marty McLaughlin, the lobbyist closest to then City Council speaker Peter Vallone. At Powers’s urging, BAA retained McLaughlin to try to secure Vallone’s support for the deal.7 BAA also hired public relations powerhouse and lobbyist Howard Rubenstein, who rented office space to Powers and frequently shared clients with him.
Finally, the company retained Fischbein, Badillo, Wagner and Harding, a lobbying firm that had become the juiciest scandal of the Giuliani years. Ray Harding, the chain-smoking, ironfisted boss of the New York State Liberal Party, was a member of the firm and the undisputed heavyweight of influence peddling in the Giuliani years. Harding had given Giuliani his party’s endorsement in 1989 and 1993, and it eventually provided his margin of victory. Saddled with a quarter-million-dollar tax lien when Giuliani took office, Harding joined the Fischbein firm, became an instant millionaire, insinuated both of his sons at the highest levels of the administration, and watched his firm’s client list climb to a new stratosphere of perceived clout.
One of Harding’s sons, Russell, ran the city’s Housing Development Corporation—a position that allowed him to loot the city for $400,000. Russell later went to jail on fraud and Internet child porn charges. He was recorded on a Web chat room at the time of the BAA deal as telling a friend, “The mayor is always helping my dad…. He had my dad go over some contracts a while back about a company taking over the airports here…so not only in the long run will the mayor profit from it…but my dad already has with the contract…. They both have a wash each other’s back thing going.” When his chat room partner expressed confusion, Harding replied, “It makes perfect sense for the line of work my dad is in…as well as my job…. We all help the mayor and he helps us.”8
Dyson was closely attached to Harding, having virtually single-handedly bankrolled the Liberal Party in the ’80s, when he ran on its line for the U.S. Senate. Fran Reiter, another Liberal leader who was deputy mayor in Giuliani’s first term, says that “Ray was Dyson’s rabbi” and helped him get his City Hall title. “Yes, BAA had Ray for a while,” Dyson acknowledged. “Ray’s entitled.” Harding also gave his ballot line for governor in 1998 to Ross’s wife. Completing this incestuous circle, Rick Fischbein, the managing partner of Harding’s firm, was also a business partner of Ross’s, and Rubenstein represented Dyson’s upstate family winery. The Fischbein firm, the Dyson family, Powers, and Rubenstein combined to raise and contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars for Giuliani campaigns over the years, with Dyson and family dumping $20,000 into Giuliani’s federal political action committee as late as 2004.
BAA and the city signed a letter of intent in December 2000 and hammered out what Dyson said was an “inch thick contract” in 2001. While the terms were never fully disclosed, one sweetener did become public: an estimated $200 to $300 million breakup penalty that any future mayor would have to pay BAA if he tried to cancel the deal. Dyson said, “Rudy and BAA’s chairman met personally several times,” which, of course, was several times more than he met with the head of the public agency that actually ran the airports. BAA brass flew from London to meet Rudy and “we went over there several times,” Dyson recalled.
In the midst of this invisible intrigue, Giuliani climbed atop the shrillest soapbox he’d ever been on in all the years of Port Authority wars. When a major snowstorm hit the city on December 30, 2000—after the letter of intent with BAA was signed but before it was announced—the mayor went on a helicopter ride over Kennedy Airport and took some photos himself. “Not a plow in sight,” he charged at a January press conference. The authority responded that it had 440 people and 77 pieces of equipment cleaning up the foot of snow. “This is like, you know, what was that Soviet news agency, Tass, right?” Giuliani replied. Feigning a Russian accent, he said, “Da airport ees clear. Der ees no snow on da airport.” A Newsday editorial observed that the city was witnessing “a four-alarm outbreak of Rudyrage.”
The editorials didn’t slow him down. Giuliani claimed he was going to sue to retake the airports, using the snowed-in runways as his rationale. He said his photos showed that the Port Authority was using only two of its four runways because of the snow, unaware that if it used all four, the planes would collide. Then, on the heels of a week of abuse, he announced BAA’s letter of intent. But the Giuliani onslaught came to a public halt when Vallone insisted that the BAA deal had to go through the long-winded community review processes that had been the death of many far more worthy initiatives. Nonetheless, Giuliani reluctantly began it. Whatever was driving this deal, the only force strong enough to stop it was September 11.
When the planes hit the Twin Towers, John Dyson was seen rushing out of City Hall with Rudy’s massive Rolodex in his arms, trying to find the mayor.9 “If there was no 9/11,” he insists, “we would have worked out a compromise with BAA. That’s what I thought and that’s what BAA thought.” But 9/11 did happen, and Giuliani never raised the question of BAA again.
On the final tally sheet of the costs of this chronic conflict, Rudy managed not only to cumulatively impose hundreds of millions of dollars in damaging new bond expenses on the Port Authority, he also deprived his city of hundreds of millions in remarkably higher rents. For example, in 1994 and 1995, when the city was still gripped by daunting deficits, it got a combined $24 million in airport rent, $86 million less than the Brezenoff offer. In Mike Bloomberg’s first State of the City speech in 2002, he announced a “revitalized relationship” with the Port Authority, eventually renewing the airport lease until 2050.
GIULIANI HAD ALSO missed countless opportunities to make the largest buildings in the city safer. Dyson, for example, says he has “no idea what happened” to State Senator Roy Goodman’s bill, which sought to place the trade center under city building and fire code jurisdiction. Brezenoff, Marlin, and Boyle say that no one from the Giuliani administration ever raised the issue with them, even though Goodman kept introducing his bill every year until 9/11, joined eventually by the Democratic assemblywoman who represented much of downtown. Dyson could hardly claim ignorance—his aide penning the most acrid airport memos was Seth Kaye, the former Goodman assistant who’d first brought the exemption bill to the attention of the Giuliani campaign.
Even without the Goodman bill, the city still had the leverage of the 1993 memos of understanding that Brezenoff signed with the Dinkins buildings and fire departments right after the bombing. The memos did not grant the city the enforcement power it had over the rest of the city’s skyscraper stock. But the agreement with the Department of Buildings did guarantee that the Port Authority would adhere to the city code and “resolve expeditiously” any disagreements the department might have with its conformance. It also required the authority to maintain a code compliance file “for any project” at the World Trade Center. City officials “may at any time request a copy of any Project file,” the agreement provided.
The memo of understanding was signed the day after Giuliani was elected in November 1993, granting new powers to a new administration. Yet a review of thousands of pages of Department of Buildings documents related to the towers did not uncover a single department request to review a project file over the nearly eight Giuliani years.10 Not only did the department do nothing to use this agreement to tackle the safety vulnerabilities of the complex, it actually agreed in 1995 to water it down. A supplement signed by Giuliani’s buildings commissioner, Joel Miele, eliminated the requirement that the authority “thoroughly review and examine all plans” to determine whether tenant improvements conformed to the code. Instead, it allowed the tenants to retain an architect to certify compliance.
Giuliani fire commissioner Howard Safir signed a similar 1995 amendment to the Fire Department agreement with the authority. But since the Fire Department’s original memo of understanding went further than the building department’s—requiring the Port Authority to submit fire safety system changes for “review and approval”—Safir’s amendment actually gutted the 1993 agreement. It eliminated any requirement that the drawings and specifications be submitted to the Bureau of Fire Prevention and surrendered the bureau’s right to approve them. Instead, architects retained by either the authority or a tenant could simply certify compliance. Like the Department of Buildings, the Fire Department could view the authority’s project file whenever it wanted, and it, too, never did.11
What was particularly shocking about the watering down of the memos of understanding was that the Port Authority never asked for any of the changes. The preamble to the February 1995 amendment flatly states that “the FDNY has requested, and the Port Authority is agreeable” to eliminating the fire safety requirements. Signing the amendment days before the second anniversary of the bombing, Safir volunteered to surrender oversight powers that the Dinkins administration had fought to secure.
The Department of Buildings amendment also seemed to be the city’s idea. Under Miele, the department had begun a deregulation plan that allowed architects retained by private builders to self-certify their projects. Deregulation was a City Hall initiative, favored by the real estate and construction lobbies, and the modification of the memo of understanding extended it to the Port Authority. While Giuliani ally Goodman declared during his postbombing hearings in 1993 that public safety matters at the World Trade Center “can’t be a matter of self-policing,” that’s precisely what Giuliani’s administration made it. The overall Giuliani self-certification program wound up, over the years, denounced by district attorneys as ripe for abuse and criticized in independent audits. When the National Institute of Standards and Technology looked at it as part of its 9/11 probe, it urged an end to any form of “self-approval for code enforcement.”
Yet the Giuliani administration rushed in 1995 to extend this laissez-faire approach to an authority the mayor routinely denounced, sacrificing powers that were granted only because the 1993 bombing revealed how necessary they were. In fact, under the terms of the Department of Buildings amendment, the authority had more self-certification latitude than deregulated private developers. From 15 to 25 percent of the private, self-certified plans were spot-checked by city inspectors to determine whether they met code. But because of this amendment, none of the Port Authority plans would be checked. And the deregulation program barred architects who designed private projects from also certifying a project’s code compliance, while architects on authority projects could do so.
In the spirit of these self-circumscribed powers, Giuliani’s administration rolled over on two of the most important safety issues at the WTC—fireproofing and stairwells.
Within the Port Authority, alarms had been going off for years before 9/11 about the WTC’s puny half-inch fireproofing. A 2000 PA study determined that it was useless to try to patch missing areas of it because the gaps were so large it was “more effective to replace it.” A review ten years earlier found sections where the insulation was “very sparse to a quarter inch” and trusses “adjacent to the outside walls” that were altogether “devoid of fireproofing.” After the ’93 bombing, the authority had begun taking measurements of the thickness of the insulation on North Tower floors. It determined that it needed to triple the fireproofing to an inch and a half so that the two-hour protection requirement of the code “can be achieved.” The fact that the towers weren’t in compliance with city standards was echoed in 1997 by a consultant, Rolf Jensen & Associates, that studied WTC life safety systems for the Port Authority and conceded that “the towers’ structural steel fireproofing fall somewhat short of the required” two-hour standard.
A third internal report in 1999 included an assessment of the fireproofing in a comprehensive review of all trade center code issues. That memo emphasized the three categories of “non-conforming code items” at the World Trade Center first identified by the safety consultant. The Port Authority would do nothing about Category A items, said the memo, while Category B deficiencies such as fireproofing were being “remedied,” and plans to correct Category C shortcomings would be developed “in the near future.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that “these reports were available for review by the city,” though it did not indicate that anyone ever asked to see them. Department of Buildings records do not contain any assessment or objections it submitted to the authority about any of these categories of violations, even those that the PA planned to do nothing to correct.
The Port Authority started to slowly retrofit the floors in 1995, but waited until 1999 to adopt a formal policy requiring that all vacated floors be reinsulated before a new tenant could move in. By 9/11, only 31 of the 220 floors had been upgraded. The authority’s upgrade peaked in 1998, when 11 floors were retrofitted, and slowed to a crawl by 2000, when only one was.12 This multi-million-dollar code compliance project was precisely what the Department of Buildings and the Fire Department were supposed to oversee under the 1993 memos of understanding. But there is no record in either department’s files that it ever bothered to review any of the 31 floor upgrades, much less object to the authority’s snail-paced effort to do anything about its disturbing noncompliance.
Under the terms of the Fire Department’s original memo of understanding, the retrofitting was, at least arguably, a fire safety system project that would have required approval before it was begun. Had that agreement still been in place, the department could have insisted that it had the power to review the studies and object to the timetable, since fireproofing directly related to the length of time that it had to extinguish a fire in the towers. But Safir had relinquished the department’s fire safety review rights, and the authority just proceeded with its foot-dragging upgrade.
Regardless of the effect all this had on 9/11, the fireproofing chronology reveals how negligent City Hall was for years about protecting WTC occupants. While the post-9/11 investigative record is unclear, there are indications that the refireproofing delays may have had deadly consequences that day. The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that “the fireproofing played a key role in the structural response to the fires” and the collapse of the towers. It found that the North Tower fire floors were reinsulated and stood for just under two hours, almost precisely the protection an inch and a half was supposed to provide. But only one of the six impact floors in the South Tower was upgraded, with the rest still insulated by the half-inch fireproofing installed during construction. Tests have determined that a half inch provides three-quarters of an hour of protection, and the South Tower stood for 56 minutes.
Nevertheless, NIST concluded in 2005 that the effect was not significant because the impact of the planes “dislodged” whatever fireproofing was there. This appeared to conflict with its June 2004 report, which attributed the insulation breakdown to both causes—the planes that dislodged the fireproofing and the public agencies that failed to ensure that adequate initial or upgraded protection was installed.
A NIST engineer, Dr. Kuldeep Prasad, compared the thickness and dislodging factors at a 2004 session, and clearly saw both as causes of the collapse. He conceded that the South Tower floor trusses “heated more quickly” than the North Tower trusses, a conclusion ostensibly tied to the South Tower’s relatively puny insulation. But he then contended that “the removal of the fireproofing during impact was more important than the differences in the initial thickness of the fireproofing.” While NIST may rate dislodging ahead of thickness as factors in the collapse, this conclusion still makes the scant fireproofing on the South Tower floors, which the city and authority took no action to correct for six years, a cause of the tower’s relatively rapid demise. There are also indications that if the South Tower had been upgraded, less of its minimal fireproofing might have been dislodged by impact. The primer paint used in the original fireproofing reduced its adhesive strength by a third to a half, making the South Tower floors more vulnerable to dislodging impact than the unprimed, retrofitted floors.
Of course, fireproofing buys time, even if no one can determine whether an upgrade of the South Tower might have extended its life for 10, 15, or 30 minutes. A sizable number of above-impact South Tower occupants had apparently discovered the passable Stairway A and may have been minutes away from safety when the tower collapsed. Fire chief Orio Palmer, marshal Ron Bucca, and other firefighters were in the impact area, rescuing 18 people stuck in an elevator, when the crash came. Palmer had dispatched other firefighters to help several injured people he’d found on the 70th floor, and indicated in his last radio messages that he would soon get above the fire. One 9/11 family group, the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, has wondered out loud whether upgraded fireproofing in the South Tower might have added precious minutes and saved dozens of lives—questions that have no definitive answer.
In addition to the city’s negligence in forcing quicker code compliance on the fireproofing, its war with the authority may have contributed to the delays in the improvements that were happening. As much as it has been praised for the safety improvements it made after the 1993 bombing, the Port Authority took forever to do many of them. The stairwell emergency lighting and illuminated exit signs, for example, weren’t finished until 2000, despite all the outrage about the dark descent during the ’93 evacuation. And the fireproofing, of course, never was completed. It’s hard to judge how many of the delays were due to the WTC post-1993 budget crunch, and how many were simply the result of its well-known bureaucratic lethargy. But Boyle says that if the authority ever agreed to the city’s financial demands, it would have delayed these already plodding programs even more, perhaps leaving the North Tower floors as unprotected as the South Tower ones were that day.
The Giuliani administration also abetted the authority’s resistance to stairway improvements. There were too few stairways—three instead of the code-required four in each tower. Most of them emptied into the mezzanine instead of the code-required street access. The stairways were also too close together and protected only by partition walls—invitations to destruction that were nonetheless possibly code compliant. “Had there been a minimum structural integrity requirement to satisfy normal building and fire safety considerations” in the building core, the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that “the damage to the stairways, especially at the floors of impact, may have been less extensive.” Had there been a fourth stairwell per tower, NIST found that it “could have remained passable, allowing evacuation by an unknown number of additional occupants from above the floors of impact.”
Instead of examining these stairway issues after the ’93 bombing, when the passageways out of the towers emerged as a crucial public concern, Giuliani’s Department of Buildings (DOB) actively participated in the authority’s disregard of the code and other evacuation concerns. When new management began the refurbishing of Windows on the World in 1994, the question of a fourth stairway, for example, rose to the fore. A fourth exit is required under code when a “public assembly area” designed for over a thousand people is operating in a building, and the two-story restaurant in the North Tower, as well as the Observation Deck in the South Tower, met that standard. In December 1994, with the original memo of understanding still in effect, the authority met with the top brass of the buildings department to try to seek approval of the restaurant plan, which provided for so-called “areas of refuge” on the restaurant floors rather than a fourth stairway. But records of the meeting indicate that, to the authority’s surprise, the DOB officials didn’t even bother to raise the issue of the fourth stairway. Instead, they quickly agreed to misinterpret an exception to the code, which gives a pass to dining facilities that only serve building occupants. The exemption exists because employee cafeterias don’t result in an increase in the building population, while restaurants and observation decks do.13
The buildings department did much the same on the mezzanine exits. The 1997 safety consultant report and 1999 internal authority memo listed the failure of the exit stairs to discharge to a street as a code violation. In 1993 and again on 9/11, the police and fire departments had to establish circuitous routes out of the buildings because the stairs dumped occupants in the mezzanines. The Department of Buildings had looked the other way in 1975 when the towers opened, but the 1993 evacuation experience, the memo of understanding, and the new code conformance policies put the issue on the table again. The PA position was a joke. It equated the plaza outside the towers and the concourse underneath them with streets. And the buildings department permitted this unambiguous violation. When the 1999 memo listed the mezzanine exits as a Category A nonconforming item it would not correct, the Giuliani administration did nothing.
There were 188 people in Windows on the World on September 11 and a few more in the Observation Deck area. Under the city’s own code, neither should have been allowed to reopen after 1993 without a fourth stairway, which, NIST found, could have saved lives. Of course, shutting down Windows, where Giuliani hosted his second inaugural breakfast in January 1998, was always unlikely, as was forcing a redesign of the mezzanine exits. But these two code violations, as well as the questionable lack of stairway separation, would have given a vigilant Department of Buildings the leverage to force the Port Authority to at least reinforce the living room–like walls that protected the shafts. Contemplating the too-few stairways too close together and out-of-code exits, the city could have pressed the authority to do what was most achievable—strengthen the integrity of the walls protecting them.
But that would have required will and imagination, both of which were in short supply at the buildings department. Like the Fire Department, the Department of Buildings was just another patronage backwater in the Giuliani era. The first Giuliani commissioner resigned in a month, shoved out by revelations that his asbestos removal company was under federal indictment in Boston. The politically wired Miele ran a small Queens engineering firm whose clients included associates of mob boss John Gotti. A partner in the Ray Harding law firm championed the appointment of another acting commissioner close to him. The Republican City Council leader was involved in Department of Buildings scandals that led to the prosecution of a onetime department official close to him. The mayor was so uninterested in independent professional judgment at the department that he dumped another commissioner who suggested that Yankee Stadium didn’t have to be replaced.
In fact, Giuliani was so uncomfortable with tougher code requirements that he introduced only one significant amendment during his eight years—in sharp contrast with his predecessors. That change, extending sprinkler requirements to residential buildings, occurred only after seven people, including three firefighters, died in two fires within a matter of days. He had actually opposed a City Council sprinkler bill a year earlier, and squashed a similar Fire Department proposal in 1994. The Department of Buildings’ acquiescence to the Port Authority was symptomatic of this Giuliani indifference.
So was a report Miele and Fire Commissioner Safir issued in 1995. Rudolph Rinaldi and Carlos Rivera, the buildings and fire commissioners under Dinkins, had started the study, naming a 40-member World Trade Center Task Force that included the Port Authority, the real estate industry, architects, engineers, and top city officials. The two commissioners had issued their own report a month after the 1993 bombing, calling for legislation to bring the World Trade Center under the city’s code jurisdiction. They bemoaned the fact that “code compliance at the WTC has been dealt with by every fire commissioner and Chief of the Department over the last 25 years,” with fire officials reduced to relying “on persuasion to gain compliance.”
The task force they created was charged with reviewing “all fire safety areas of the code” to determine whether there were “advances that would make buildings safer,” as well as to try to adapt the code “to take terrorist actions into consideration.” At a minimum, Rivera and Rinaldi said the study would explore new requirements “to prevent a local explosion from incapacitating entire buildings,” such as mandating “remote locations for emergency generators.”
The group continued working under Giuliani’s commissioners, but in the end, the Miele/Safir report did not recommend a single material code change. The task force said it “could not reach unanimity” on the emergency power issues that Rinaldi and Rivera said it would deal with “at a minimum.” Acknowledging that the failure of the emergency public address system led to injuries during the 1993 evacuation, it nonetheless found that the code requirements for communications systems were “beneficial and adequate.” It considered a host of issues that mattered on 9/11 and did nothing about any of them—the evacuation of the disabled, mandatory full-time fire safety directors, restrictions on locking devices to exit and roof access doors, and a reinforced fire tower stairwell.
The report did urge the new office of Emergency Management that Giuliani was in the process of creating to develop an “emergency commercial broadcast protocol to provide emergency communication to occupants in high-rise office buildings.” But when the OEM started a few months later, it was never even given a copy of the report.
In the immediate aftermath of the ’93 bombing, everyone from Mayor Dinkins to the fire and buildings commissioners to Senator Goodman to the leadership of the City Council was calling for an overhaul of the code and jurisdictional control over the Port Authority. No one in the Giuliani administration heard that call. Instead of fighting the good fight to protect the tens of thousands of New Yorkers and others who worked in or visited the targeted World Trade Center every day, Rudy Giuliani dedicated his two terms to a seedy airport power grab masquerading as civic virtue.
THE PORT AUTHORITY Police, a particular foil for Giuliani, offered the best evidence on 9/11 of just how intertwined the authority’s far-flung airport, trade center, and other assets were. Three Port Authority cops assigned to the airports rushed in to help at the towers and died; only four of the 37 who died that day actually worked at the World Trade Center. The others, including Police Superintendent Fred Morrone, sped there from bus terminals, tunnels, bridges, headquarters, and the emergency services unit. The mother of one dead Kennedy Airport cop, 16-year officer George Howard, made international news when she approached President Bush on September 15, 2001, at a Javits Center gathering and handed him her son’s police shield. Howard had dashed to the WTC from the airport without anyone ordering him to.
In the middle of a tsunami of Giuliani charges against the authority just eight months before 9/11, Bernie Kerik got into a spit fight with Morrone and Port Authority Inspector Anthony Infante, who supervised the Kennedy Airport police and, like Morrone, died on 9/11. Kerik challenged the comparative competence of its force. Giuliani himself contended that if the city policed the airports, “you’d have significantly less organized crime influence,” accusing the Port Authority cops of not cleaning it up. None of this was forgotten among the authority rank and file, or its institutional leaders, when history came full circle on 9/11.
On that day, Rudy Giuliani was still in court against the authority, as well as pushing his BAA takeover, after years of ignoring the many ways he could have helped make its World Trade Center safer. He’d held his press conference, mocking the Port Authority as an American politburo just a few months earlier. Only when he saw its prize towers in ruins did Giuliani pull back. In sorrow and in anger, the long-besieged and hardly faultless Port Authority, with 84 of its employees and contractors dead, was finally, on September 12, at peace with the city it served.