“CITY READYING GIULIANI’S high-tech B’klyn bunker” announced the New York Post on March 13, 1995. It was four years before the mayor’s new, state-of-the-art command center would actually be built, and when it happened it would not be in Brooklyn after all. But from then on, every tabloid story would brand the planned new command center “Rudy’s bunker.” The name “Giuliani” and the word “bunker” just seemed to go together. And the story, as it played out, would almost be operatic: dubbed a “safe haven,” the bunker was ultimately built inside a notoriously targeted complex. Extended into the clouds, it defied the underground habitat of everyone’s expectation. A supposed arsenal of celebrated preparedness, it had to be evacuated at the moment of gravest danger to the city. A stunning technological achievement, its misplaced fuel system may have brought down the 47-story tower it called home. And in a final epic twist of destiny, the bunker’s demise triggered the redemption of its inventor.
The timing of the Post headline was striking, since Giuliani had yet to say anything publicly about the possibility of the new mayor’s office of Emergency Management, which would, of course, wind up building and running the bunker. The interviews for an OEM director had just begun, without any press notice. Yet even at this early stage, top city officials were willing to talk to the Post about the concept and possible location of a command center.
The Post’s prime source of information was Ralph Balzano, the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. His agency was about to move into a new five-story, $55 million technology center in Brooklyn—built to order for the city by a private developer. Balzano told the Post that, in addition to his agency, the city planned to put a “nerve center, control center, very much like NORAD” in the tech center, which was part of a sprawling complex of office towers near the Manhattan Bridge called Metrotech. The first deputy mayor, Peter Powers, was also quoted. “This is an advanced technology building that has incredible security,” he said.
Balzano actually used the B word. “The mayor and his staff can operate from a bunker-like situation,” he said. “God forbid, our power plant gets hit, or there’s some kind of catastrophe like the twin towers, the mayor will be able to direct out of that building public health, public safety, all EMS services, sanitation.” The Post said the building, with backup generators for two days and its own water supply, was “designed to withstand fire, flood, and a terrorist bombing on the scale of the World Trade Center disaster.” Balzano told the paper that Giuliani would be able to videoconference with Washington, address the city on live TV feeds, and rely on duplicate phone lines and compartmentalized power in the facility, which also housed the Police Department’s 9-1-1 system.
Although it hadn’t been announced yet, the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services had also decided to build their own new headquarters at Metrotech—another reason the site was seen by some as perfect for emergency coordination. The new $62 million, eight-story Fire Department headquarters would become home to 1,100 employees by 1997. The plan was for the city’s computer and communications network, 9-1-1, emergency medical system, Fire Department, and command center to occupy a protected enclave together.
As suddenly as the idea hit the press, it vanished. Yet it remained in planning discussions. On February 14, 1996, when the city had finally found a director for the mayor’s new office of Emergency Management, and Jerry Hauer was in his third week on the job, he wrote a detailed memo to Powers entitled “Location of Emergency Management Command Center.” The only site Hauer examined was Metrotech, which he decided “could meet our needs.”
The advantages were striking—particularly when compared with where the command center actually wound up, at 7 WTC. Hauer said the Metrotech center “could be available within six months.” (It took three plus years to build at 7 WTC.) The renovation funding was left over in the budget for Metrotech, and no rent would be charged, since it was space the city had already leased. (The bill for 7 WTC’s rent and renovations tallied over $61 million.) Hauer said the Metrotech building was secure and, prophetically, “not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan.” He also said the building had “all the backup and redundancy necessary in the event of utility failure,” a requirement never fully achieved at 7 WTC despite expensive and dangerous efforts to do it. With 9-1-1 and fire/EMS communications scheduled to move there, he concluded that it would serve “as a focal point for public safety activity.”
Hauer also presented the cons, and most of them involved the mayor himself. The first one was that “traveling to Metrotech will consume more of the Mayor’s time.” While Giuliani could fly there by helicopter or take a Police Department harbor unit, Hauer noted that, during a blizzard or hurricane, “flying would be difficult” or “wave heights” might prevent a boat launch. “Subway access would be possible, but the mayor would have to be willing to do this,” Hauer observed. “Ground transport” to the new facility, which was at the foot of the bridge, was also feasible, said Hauer. In the most extraordinary circumstances, the mayor could communicate with the facility by videoconferencing from City Hall. Last, Hauer said the building was vulnerable to a truck bomb, but that police cars and strategic street barriers could protect it. “I believe the cons are not insurmountable,” the memo concluded. “The real issue is whether or not the mayor wants to go across the river to manage an incident. If he is willing to do this, Metrotech is a good alternative.”
Hauer continued to raise the question of a Metrotech siting—at an August 16, 1996, meeting with Powers and an August 26 meeting with Giuliani. Balzano did the same: “Metrotech was a hardened site,” he said years later. “It was created to be a disaster center. We had a top of the line command center. I had conversations with Peter about putting the center there. Peter was supportive. There would be no disruption in service during disasters.” But the conversations ended in ’96. Recalling his conversations with Giuliani counsel Denny Young, Hauer said he discovered the problem: “Denny said it had to be within walking distance of City Hall. I talked about an underground facility in Van Courtland Park in the Bronx. I talked about available facilities in midtown. I talked about Governor’s Island. We could do something at Metrotech or in Queens, I said. Denny made it very clear to me that the mayor didn’t want to get on a boat. He didn’t want the mayor walking across the bridge. The mayor wants to be able to walk to this facility quickly. That’s it. I said to the mayor, based on your requirement of walking distance, here’s the area we can do it, all within a narrow range of City Hall. He said fine.”
Within those parameters, Hauer began working with the city’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which handled all contracting and leasing for city agencies1. Hauer and agency representatives looked at city-owned space in the Municipal Building and a building right next to police headquarters (he’d already visited many other sites on his own). But the decision to put it near City Hall created a new problem: most of Lower Manhattan is under the floodplain, with hundred-year-old water mains. That’s why the Police Department had rejected Lower Manhattan as a site for what it once hoped would be its own new command center, insisting that it had to be “out of flood-prone areas.” Hauer didn’t have that choice. Since the mayor had decided that the center had to be near City Hall, Hauer was convinced it couldn’t be underground—for fear of flooding the facility or its backup power. Given the two new priorities of walking distance and floodplain standards, the search was inevitably being pushed toward the sky.
One other factor framed the City Hall hunt for a site, especially from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services’ point of view. Everyone understood that this was a special project. DCAS routinely found and renovated space for city agencies, usually servicing an obscure assistant commissioner from the Department of Human Resources or Health whose job it was to count cubicles and obsess about lighting. One administrator who oversaw this project, however, testified in a subsequent civil suit involving the collapse of 7 WTC that the command center was a far different case. Asked if anything distinguished this rental from “other situations over the years,” Glenn Pymento said, “The only difference, if there was a difference, is that there were very senior city officials that were involved in this project.” Pressed as to whether this meant the mayor in particular, Pymento fumbled, “Among others, among others.” It was, he said, “called high priority, high profile.”2
DCAS was determined to do it up big, and no one was more determined than Commissioner Bill Diamond. The millionaire son of an East Side real estate titan, Diamond was a financier and player in the Manhattan Republican Party. He had spent much of his life in patronage positions. For virtually the entire 12 years of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Diamond had held the politically pivotal position of regional administrator for the General Services Administration. That put him in charge of contracting and leasing in the Northeast, operating out of New York City. His agency’s award of a $241 million construction contract for a new federal courthouse in Manhattan to a partnership of Bechtel and Park Tower Development, both major Republican bastions, got the attention of newspapers and investigators. So did multi-million-dollar dealings with a Pennsylvania-based company called Linpro—especially a $276 million contract for a federal office building that was tied to the courthouse project. Shortly after Giuliani named Diamond to head DCAS, Newsday reported that he’d destroyed his records the day he left his old job. “They were just ripped to pieces and thrown out,” said Barbara Gerwin, the regional General Services counsel. U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum wrote the Justice Department calling for a probe and specifically citing Diamond’s “destruction of official records,” but the controversy soon came to an unexplained end.
In 1989, Diamond started contributing to Giuliani’s campaign committees, hitting contribution limits more than once. He and his two wives combined over the years, continuing right up to 2005, to give $36,000 to every political committee Giuliani has ever formed. Marylin Diamond, his first wife, was elected to the Civil Court from Manhattan’s East Side in 1990 on the Republican, Conservative, and Liberal Party lines. The couple had already split, apparently amicably, because Bill was at her swearing-in. Diamond himself had run for public office in the 1970s, but became just one more frustrated Manhattan Republican. Giuliani presided at Gracie Mansion for Diamond’s second wedding in November 1996—to former fashion designer Regine Traulsen, the daughter of a Morocco food exporter, who traveled between her homes in New York, Paris, and Southhampton and was described in press clips as a Republican fund-raiser. In the summer of 1995, the New York Times described a $1,000-a-plate dinner Diamond and Traulsen threw in their Hamptons home for Governor Pataki, noting that the couple then left for a nearby party for the mayor.
The broker Diamond’s agency assigned to find space for the command center was at a national shop with a tiny New York presence, CB Real Estate Group. On its board of directors were three Republican giants, including the former counsel to the Reagan/Bush campaign, Stanton Anderson, who’d gotten to know Giuliani when he worked for the Reagan administration in Washington in the early ’80s. Anderson’s law firm also did work for the company. Fred Malek, the campaign manager for Bush’s reelection campaign in 1992, was also a longtime director. James Didion, CEO of the company at the time, says now, “I am aware of relationships that occurred with city agencies and there was a relationship with City Hall. But I don’t know what kind, and I don’t know who was involved.”
Hauer remembers that it was “a young, blond-headed kid” from CB Real Estate Group that first brought him to look at 7 WTC in 1996. He also recalls that Diamond himself was quite enthusiastic about 7 WTC, which splendidly fit the bill of a high-profile building for a high-profile project. “Diamond said he knew the building,” said Hauer, who toured it with Diamond. “He did everything he could to facilitate it.”
Diamond sure did know the building. In a bizarre turn of fate, Giuliani had once emptied the building and Bill Diamond had filled it up again.
Like everything else at the trade center complex, the Port Authority owned the land underneath 7 WTC. But in the early ’80s, the authority had given developer Larry Silverstein a 99-year lease to build a tower on it. Silverstein’s prize tenant was slated to be Drexel Burnham, the investment firm that was one of the giants of the Wall Street. But when Rudy Giuliani was Manhattan U.S. attorney in the 1980s, he had turned his prosecutorial sights on Drexel, and by the time Giuliani was done, the indicted company was on the ropes. Dying with it was its agreement to lease a new headquarters at 7 WTC. Silverstein’s biggest project began to look like his biggest blunder. He did get another investment house to take some of the space before the building opened in 1988, but gobs of the rest went begging. But happily for Silverstein, during Diamond’s tenure at the General Services Administration, nine federal agencies took space in the building, agreeing to pay rents that were often an overpriced embarrassment. Cornelius Lynch, who handled rentals for Silverstein at 7 WTC for six years, recalls, “GSA pushed prospective tenants to us. They liked 7 WTC.”
The lure of 7 WTC for Diamond was never clear, but the General Accounting office, Internal Revenue Service, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Home Loan Bank, Defense Department, Treasury Department, CIA, and Secret Service became tenants, some consuming more than two floors. Despite a dramatic downturn in the real estate market, Diamond’s agency was paying $56 and $59 a square foot at the same time that city officials were quoted in news stories saying that they were getting nearby office space for $17.50. But as much Silverstein space as GSA was consuming, no one ever rented the 23rd floor of the building. Erected with high ceilings as a trading floor for Drexel, it was vacant for a decade. Instead of Giuliani-target Michael Milken reigning supreme on Drexel’s trading floor, Giuliani himself would reign as the commander-in-chief of a state-of-the-art command center.
Hauer liked the space and went to the mayor. “We were very nervous about it at first,” Hauer testified in the suit, “because the property was Port Authority property, and I knew how Rudy felt about everything and anything having to do with the Authority. There was a big battle going on.” Hauer was also uncertain how the mayor felt about Silverstein, a power broker on the city’s real estate and political scene. “When I brought up Silverstein’s name, Rudy called him a son-of-a-bitch,” said Hauer. “I asked are we okay in doing this? He said go ahead. Work with Diamond.”
Silverstein had been a substantial supporter of Ed Koch in the 1989 mayoral race, even making a $25,000 loan to him that had to be returned because it violated city finance rules. In 1993, Giuliani went to Silverstein’s apartment for breakfast, seeking his support, recalled Silverstein executive Cornelius Lynch. But, he said, Silverstein, whose daughter is gay, was “offended” by Giuliani’s positions on gay issues, which had taken a turn to the right, especially over gays marching in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade3. Even after the breakfast courtship, Silverstein stayed out of the election, giving nary a dime to either candidate. Giuliani’s son-of-a-bitch tag might well have been prompted by the lingering memory of that breakfast.
The relationship, however, was undergoing a sea change. In October 1994, Silverstein began donating to the Giuliani committee, at first just a meager $500. Three months later, he kicked in a thousand. By November 1996, he and his wife, Klara, and Silverstein Properties had contributed $17,500—$4,800 more than the legal limit when a newspaper noticed it, the excess was returned). To make his allegiance crystal lear, Silverstein also stopped giving to Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough President to whom he’d contributed regularly for years. The Democratic nominee against Giuliani in 1997, Messinger was stunned. “We both have gay daughters and we’d talked bout that over the years,” she said. “We got along well.” Suddenly, even though most of his holdings were in her borough, she couldn’t get him on the phone. The Giuliani camp was notorious for punishing those who gave to his opponents.
Silverstein hosted a $1,000-a-couple fund-raiser for Giuliani aboard his 130-foot yacht, the Silver Shalis, docked at the Chelsea Piers in June 1996, collecting another $36,100 from his invited friends. When Giuliani decided in 1997 to field a Republican candidate against incumbent Public Advocate Mark Green, who was a prohibitive favorite to win reelection, Silverstein kicked $1,000 into the kitty of Giuliani’s designated loser, a sure sign of just how wired into the Giuliani camp he was. When Giuliani, unable to run for reelection and uncertain of his future, formed an exploratory federal committee in 1998, Silverstein and an executive of his company gave another $3,000.
Just as suddenly, the developer started giving to Bill Diamond’s lifelong favorite charity, the Manhattan Republican Party, donating $1,000 in February 1998, just as the city and Silverstein were working out the final terms of the command center lease signed in March. (Diamond has acknowledged knowing Silverstein, but minimizes the relationship.) By then, though, Diamond’s principal vehicle for political upward mobility was no longer the local Republican Party; it was Giuliani himself. Diamond’s daughter got a job in the administration as counsel to the Department of Cultural Affairs. Maury Satin, who was Diamond’s chief of staff and wound up marrying his daughter, was named to run the Off-Track Betting Corporation, a prime patronage plum. He later joined Giuliani’s consulting firm.
Silverstein’s contribution to Giuliani’s exploratory committee in 1998 was made at a party at Howard Rubenstein’s 5th Avenue home. Silverstein had long been one of the power-broker public relations czar’s top clients, and Rubenstein had begun talking publicly as early as 1996 about the relationship between the developer and the mayor, confirming a private breakfast Silverstein, Giuliani, and two others had had at Gracie Mansion. In addition to Silverstein, two top executives of the construction company he was using to build the command center, Jay Koven and Jack Shafran, gave $4,000 at the party, bringing the Silverstein-connected total to at least $7,000. Shafran remembered going. “Attendance was obligatory,” he said. “The invitation meant we were expected to give a contribution. I remember everybody having their picture taken with Giuliani.” The timing couldn’t have been queasier. Two weeks before the event, Silverstein had signed the lease for the command center. The day before, the budget office had rushed through approvals for $12.6 million, the initial renovation cost. The budget office’s okay—granted, even though Silverstein had yet to supply the legally required scope of work—allowed Koven’s company to register its contract with the city.
Shortly after the party, Rubenstein began sharing office space with Peter Powers, the Giuliani First Friend who’d stepped down as deputy mayor in 1996. Powers soon launched his own “strategic consulting business,” frequently advising clients such as BAA, who did business with City Hall, and Rubenstein recalls that “Silverstein was one of Peter’s first clients.” Rubenstein acknowledges referring clients to Powers, but can’t recall if Silverstein was one. A law firm with close ties to the mayor—Proskauer Rose—was also representing Silverstein, says John Gross, a partner there, who personally began working with the developer on insurance issues after 9/11. Gross, who has been the treasurer of every Giuliani campaign committee and has known him since the 1970s, declined to say how long his firm had represented Silverstein or on what matters.
In July 1999, just a month after the command center was opened, Silverstein hosted another boat fund-raiser for Giuliani, raising $100,000 for his prospective Senate race against Hillary Clinton. Jay Koven, whose firm had just finished the command center, contributed another $1,000, as his father had at the 1996 Silver Shalis event. The 1999 gala remained a secret until late August, when reporters learned that Silverstein was hosting a similar event for Clinton and wrote about the dueling dinners. One reason for the secrecy was that WNBC reporter Ti-Hua Chang had aired a two-part series in June, raising questions about the possible link between Silverstein’s campaign support for Giuliani and the command center deal. Giuliani told Chang on camera that Silverstein “donates money to everyone”—something Ruth Messinger would have been surprised to hear. The mayor also said, “I had no knowledge that the bidding process even included him.” Chang reported that there was no bidding process. But Chang did not know that Hauer had told Giuliani about Silverstein’s involvement before any negotiations for the lease even began, belying the Giuliani denial. The administration was so upset by Chang’s reporting that it barred him from the media opening of the command center. The mayor’s friends certainly wouldn’t have wanted Chang and his camera crew to show up at Silverstein’s second Chelsea Piers fund-raiser.
When the city honed in on Silverstein’s long-vacant floor at 7 WTC, he was a developer struggling through hard times. He had not put a shovel in the ground since he started building 7 WTC in the ’80s. His lenders took over his Times Square Embassy Suites development and his office building at 120 Broadway in the early ’90s. He was forced out of a mall he was redeveloping on West 33rd Street. An apartment complex of his at 42nd Street had been stalled for a decade. One of the reasons Silverstein did not donate to anyone in the 1989 and 1993 general elections may well have been that he didn’t expect to do much business with the winner, whoever it was. By 1996, however, he was making a comeback, and a relationship with the man likely to be mayor for five more years was sound business strategy. The command center and the contributions launched that relationship and, by 1999, Silverstein’s 42nd Street project was getting city subsidies.
Meanwhile, the invisible combination of Bill Diamond’s history with 7 WTC, and Larry Silverstein’s intricate new relationship with the Giuliani administration, had resulted in a decision to locate the city’s command center high above the one spot on American soil that had been the target of terrorist attack. And when the city had to respond to its deadliest threat, the reason there was no operational center was rooted in Silverstein’s seduction, Diamond’s predilections, dubious walking-distance and floodplain requirements, and high-profile expectations.
WHEN HAUER WROTE his Metrotech memo in 1996, he estimated that all the office of Emergency Management needed was 15,000 to 17,000 square feet for a command center, including a private office for the mayor, a pressroom, 10 other small offices, and room for up to 40 agencies in the center itself. A year later, when the first meetings about the renovation of 7 WTC began, the city’s plan called for 46,000 square feet, eventually hitting over 50,000. That’s what they rented because that’s what Larry Silverstein had to rent—the size of the 23rd floor, with 4,000 square feet added for the backup power system and roof antennas. A tripling of OEM’s square footage was just one measure of how the scale and scope of the project expanded to fit the space rather than the needs determining the site.
Under normal circumstances, when an agency wants to rent space, its representatives will work with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to produce what’s called a “program”—which describes in detail the desired features of the prospective space. They then go out and look for a rental that meets the program requirements. Things worked a little differently with the command center, Hauer said in his court testimony, “Once we found the space, they developed the document.”
The program was actually developed by an outside firm called Jefferson Inc., which was selected either by Silverstein or by CB Real Estate Group, according to city officials. Richard Ramos, DCAS’s executive director of space design, was asked if any program, Jefferson’s or the city’s, was used in the site selection for the command center. He replied, “I don’t believe so.” Asked if he, the initial project director, was involved in the original site selection, Ramos said, “I don’t believe so,” adding that they had “fast-forwarded to WTC 7.”4 It was as if the city picked the winner, then drafted the bid. In fact, the bid, or program, was an after-the-fact concoction of a consultant picked by the winner, Silverstein, or the broker, CB, whose fees were paid by the winner.
What was even stranger about this program was that it was dated July 15, 1997, though 7 WTC had been selected as the site several months before that. Instead of launching a search for space, as a program is supposed to do, this one was dated the same day that Silverstein actually signed and filed a lease with the city. That made the release of the “bid” and the submission of the contract absolutely simultaneous—about as unusual a confluence of events as had ever happened in the coincidence-packed history of city contracting. In fact, on July 14, CB Real Estate Group submitted drafts of all the legal letters and resolutions necessary for the city to approve the lease. The documents had the City of New York letterhead on the top and CB’s letterhead on the bottom. That juxtaposition of events made it clear that the Jefferson program was merely one more document prepared at Silverstein’s behest to meet a requirement for city approval of the lease. Indeed, DCAS said in a note to the budget office that accompanied the Jefferson analysis that it was developed “to expedite this fast-track project.”
The collection of submissions began a review process that would include budget, city planning, and neighborhood approvals, and take until an anticipated October 15 for approval, but the rushed project immediately hit a snag. The budget office questioned the lease because it was unaccompanied by any of the required construction estimates. City Hall, in the throes of Giuliani’s reelection, pulled back, perhaps wary of igniting the media firestorm that the whole deal eventually provoked.
The administration waited until November 5, the day after Giuliani’s reelection, to start the formal approval process again. Giuliani himself was taking a victory lap around the city, coatless in an open-air bus, starting his morning on Today and finishing on Letterman. That morning, DCAS quietly sent the City Planning Commission a notice of intent to acquire office space for the office of Emergency Management. The notice conceded that the submission was not “indicated in a Citywide Statement of Needs,” as is routine, because the requirements for the facility “were only recently determined,” an assertion contradicted by Jerry Hauer’s nearly two-year search. It did accurately reveal that “the proposed site was selected due to its proximity to City Hall.”
The next day, for the first time, Giuliani allowed the press to attend his early morning staff meeting, with 16 aides gathered around a table discussing such items as the takeover of the airports from the Port Authority. “We’ll be more open,” the reelected mayor smiled. “This is our first day of real business again. I thought it would be interesting for you to see it and get a sense of how government operates.” But later the same day, when Giuliani met with the office of Emergency Management to examine the tentative plans for the command center, mum was still very much the word. Memos prepared by Swanke Hayden, the architect drafting plans for Silverstein, indicate that they had delivered two “scenarios” for the facility to the office of Emergency Management at 9 A.M. and that OEM submitted the alternatives to Giuliani in the afternoon.
The scheme that came out of the discussions that day focused in part on the mayor’s needs. He was to get an 1,100-square-foot suite with a pullout sofa bed, private pantry, private toilet and shower, and conference/lounge-type room for his security and assistants. Access to his suite was to be sealed. His conference room required a projection screen, chart rails, marker board, and pinup-type wall panels. The minutes of the meeting also revealed a major quibble with the layout of the pressroom. The eight-inch-high platform in the back of the press area, allowing better views for the cameras, drew expressions of “concern that the Mayor would be standing at an elevation lower than the press” and that reporters would be looking down at Giuliani.
Officials on the local community board and the borough president’s office had no objection to the command center—possibly because the notice sent to them simply described it as “office space.” The planning commission approved the lease on December 3, after a pro forma public hearing. The whole project was slipping in under the radar. On March 25, the lease was formally executed. The escalating rent over 20 years, including the roof, tallied $37 million. The initial renovation work cost $14.2 million, with Silverstein contributing $1.6 million. But $2.5 million in payments to Silverstein for “excess work,” and millions more in technological upgrades, pushed the hard costs to $61.5 million by 2001—not the $13 million Giuliani always claimed. With staff and operational costs, the total rose to $70 million for the first five years.
Still operating in secrecy, the budget office inserted in an April 1998 report on the executive budget for the next fiscal year language that simply said: “Mayor’s office of Emergency Management. Design $1.5 million. Construction $15,150,000.” It did not describe the project, and since no City Council committee had yet taken responsibility for overseeing the new two-person OEM, the entry passed unnoticed in the council. By putting it in an April budget summary, the item became an “existing project” when the council focused on the budget for the next fiscal year, which started July 1. Council memos indicated that it only “looked at new funding,” not “supposedly existing projects,” and that it consequently missed the hard-to-find expenditure. “The manner in which the project was added,” a belated council memo concluded, “clearly indicates an intent to avoid scrutiny.” It was buried on page 995 of the June capital budget, as classified as the blind-ad search for OEM director had been years earlier.
One enemy of the project found out all about it, though: Howard Safir. A high-ranking city official who sat in on the command center discussions with the mayor recalled, “Safir was vehement. He called it a horrible place. He and Richie Sheirer even called it Ground Zero. They invoked the ’93 bombing. I remember the meeting vividly.”5 Hauer said, “Safir’s biggest argument at the meetings was that the terrorists might shoot a handheld missile at the building.”
In June 1998, with the budget under consideration and actual construction getting ready to start at 7 WTC, the New York Times finally noticed the command center. A June 13 story by Kit Roane sparked an instant controversy, most of it ridiculing the center as a bunker. “Having tamed squeegee men and cabbies, murderers and muggers,” wrote Roane, Giuliani was “now bracing for a whole other order of urban treachery” by building an emergency center “bulletproofed, hardened to withstand bombs and hurricanes, and equipped with food and beds for at least 30 members of his inner circle.” Hauer later testified that Safir “planted that story.” Roane was a young reporter on the police desk, and that fed City Hall suspicions. But the Times had been such a Safir critic, it would have been an unlikely beneficiary of a tip from him. Sources said years later that Roane got it from cops, and confirmed it with NYPD brass.
It’s hard to tell how much of Safir’s resistance had to do with reasoned concern about the location and how much was simply a continuation of the turf war with OEM. But he was hardly alone. Chief of Department Lou Anemone, too, was a fierce opponent. “Walking distance?” he asked years later. “Why? I’ve never seen in my life walking distance as some kind of a standard for crisis management. I did a couple of memos against that site, citing the closeness to an intended target, the 23rd floor dangers and hazards. It was a joke.” Anemone actually recommended that the command center be located in another borough—like Brooklyn’s Metrotech—to make sure government would continue to function should Manhattan be convulsed by an attack. “You don’t want to confuse Giuliani with the facts and his ‘yes men’ would agree with him,” Anemone recalled. “In terms of targets, the World Trade Center was number one. I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place.” Even John O’Neill, the FBI’s top counterterrorist chief, quietly opposed the siting, according to his biographer, Murray Weiss. Council Speaker Peter Vallone, ordinarily a close working partner of the mayor’s, said at the time, “Look, we have no problems with anything that makes the emergency preparedness system in the city better. We just have a problem with the location.”
The Giuliani defense for picking the site despite the obvious security concerns was that the Secret Service was in the building (after 9/11, it was revealed that the CIA was there, too). But the Secret Service and CIA had offices there, not command centers charged with managing the city’s response to a deadly attack. And they were in the complex before the ’93 bombing; they didn’t choose it afterward. Indeed, it was ironic that the federal propensity to consume floors of Silverstein space while Bill Diamond was running the General Services Administration became the rationale for the city to take more when Diamond was running DCAS.
The press coverage was devastating. News columnist Michael Daley compared Rudy’s bunker with Saddam’s, whose $65 million, 11-room, German-built underground facility rested on shock-absorbing springs encased in rubber. One radio show spent four hours lampooning the project and running a name-that-shelter contest, with winners like “The Nut Shell.” Even the staid Vallone came up with a zinger: “If he wants to build a bunker for only the people he trusts, all he needs is a phone booth.” Elizabeth Kolbert, a Times columnist, explained why the story had hit such a chord. “The trouble is that the project seems to speak so clearly to the mayor’s fears, and, worse still, his hopes. He has always governed as if from a bunker. On some deep level—well, maybe not so deep—one senses that nothing would please him more than having any antagonist truly worthy of his energies instead of just a ragtag bunch of disgruntled taxi drivers, street artists and unemployed strippers.”
All the derision did nothing to slow the project. Construction started in July. Silverstein’s handpicked contractor, Ambassador Construction, whose principals were regular Giuliani campaign donors, were paid by Silverstein, who was reimbursed by the city. That meant Ambassador didn’t have to go through the city’s regular vetting processes. If the contract had required city approval, the mayor’s contract office or the comptroller might have been forced to reject it because of a criminal probe involving the company that began in 1996. (Ambassador was named in Times stories in 1998 and 1999 as the subject of an investigation by District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office. In 1999, a design executive pled guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison for taking $1 million in bribes from Ambassador and another firm, but no one from Ambassador was indicted.) Hauer said he wouldn’t have hired Ambassador if he had known anything about their criminal problems. In the civil case, he testified that “we let Ambassador do the construction so that we didn’t have to bid it out,” ceding it to Silverstein.
Giuliani gave Hauer a January 1, 1999, deadline to finish the project, and Hauer technically met it, moving in on December 28, 1998, though the facility was far from ready. In fact, in one more extraordinary breach of city policy, the office of Emergency Management’s masters-of-the-universe command center had no certificate of occupancy or any other equivalent until April 2001, almost two and a half years after it moved in. Because it was on Port Authority land, what was formally required was a letter of completion from the authority. But the authority refused, citing shortcomings, many related to the fuel system. So DCAS executed a new agreement with Silverstein in March 1999 “deleting the requirement” in the lease that Silverstein deliver the “Port Authority sign-offs.”
Had the command center been located anywhere other than exempt property like the Port Authority’s, the city could not have legally occupied the space without certification by its own Department of Buildings. But, as the city’s attorneys pointed out in a post-9/11 brief, “the Port Authority’s ownership of the land is a key fact, because its ownership meant that 7 WTC was not subject to the requirements of the New York City Building Code.” Instead of following through on the recommendations after the 1993 bombing to put Port Authority property under city codes—embodied in the bill introduced annually by Senator Roy Goodman—Giuliani took advantage of that loophole. Freed from the yoke of its own building code, however, the city then blew off the objections of the authority whose exemption was their escape hatch. It was full-speed-ahead Giuliani at its worst. The agreement with Silverstein even specified that the city “acknowledged that the Port Authority sign-offs may not occur for approximately six to 12 months.” In fact, it took twice as long. All that time, the city remained in a highly sensitive facility without any form of construction certification.
The grand opening press releases in June advertised the center’s capabilities: weather monitoring, national radar, slosh overland maps with evacuation routes, hospital power grids, fiber-optic cables for media, and geographic information systems. It boasted of the 11,000-gallon backup potable water supply, hurricane wall that could withstand winds of 160 miles per hour, traffic camera feeds from stoplights, 45-seat pressroom, and 6,000-gallon backup fuel tank. Giuliani’s office had a humidor for cigars, city monogrammed towels in the bathroom, and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats, and fire hats. He had his own elevator. His suite was bulletproofed but not his conference room. DCAS memos to Silverstein’s office raised issues such as: “Shouldn’t the mayor’s elevator lobby have a better rubber floor? Maybe a pattern?” and “Mayor’s office should have the best furniture in this project.”
“Rudy came up to the command center regularly on weekends when he was in the area,” Hauer recalled. “He was there for the West Nile virus, the heat, the Northern Manhattan blackout as well. He could watch the harbor, pull up the Coast Guard cameras. Sometimes he’d come by just to have a cigar.”
The line of critics who have blasted the siting of the center is so long that it includes some of the mayor’s closest associates—people like Sheirer whom he took to work with him at Giuliani Partners. Yet Sunny Mindel, once the spokeswoman for the city and now the spokeswoman for Giuliani Partners, suggests it’s all hindsight. “At the time, given the type of emergencies that could beset a modern urban center, it seemed absolutely appropriate,” she said of the location decision in 2002. “No one could have predicted the events of September 11.” In fact, Silverstein’s property risk assessment report identified the scenario of an aircraft striking a tower as one of the “maximum foreseeable losses” just months before 9/11. A congressional inquiry after 9/11 cited numerous indicators that such attacks were a possible terrorist tactic, including one specific aircraft threat involving the World Trade Center.
But it’s the contention that no one could have predicted a terrorist return to the World Trade Center—regardless of the form it took—that is particularly clueless. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White says, “I didn’t think it made any sense to put the command center at 7 WTC, where it was in the zone of likely attack.” Two-time police commissioner and onetime security consultant to the Port Authority Ray Kelly adds, “If Giuliani had any sense of the threat, he would have gotten out of the City Hall area. He put it right next to a target. It was just unwise.”
WHEN 7 WTC BECAME the only modern American skyscraper ever to collapse due to a fire, it was a surprise to many to learn that the building was actually a blowtorch. It had 16 emergency generators in it, more than in any but a handful of new telecom/Internet towers in New York, and they sat above a Con Ed substation with 109,000 gallons of oil in it. That’s apparently why the building had such a disastrous fate on 9/11. Debris rained down on 7 WTC from the towers that morning, as it did on countless neighbors, and none of the others toppled. The Fire Department let the fire burn, understandably unable to lift a hose, but it did the same thing with all the nearby towers, the rest of which burned out and still stood. While no definitive conclusion has been reached in the court cases or various studies, the prevailing view is that Silverstein’s tower became its own inferno, consumed by its five diesel fuel systems that ran frightfully close to the core steel trusses. The size and danger of the system was obviously known to the city when it added its own generators and fuel tanks to an already combustible mix.
Citigroup alone had nine generators on the fifth floor for its computerized trading operation. The system had the capacity to pump fuel at a rate of 75 gallons per minute, though the generators consumed only 9 gallons a minute when all were turned on. A minimum of another 18 gallons of fuel was circulating through its pipes, even if none of the rest of the 48-gallon capacity was in use, at a pressure of 50 pounds per square inch. This fuel distribution system was, at points, within feet of the structural trusses that supported the entire 47-story tower. Con Ed attorneys claimed that Citigroup had “created a fuel distribution apparatus which became, in essence, either a 160 megawatt blowtorch pointed at, or a lake of fire beneath, those structural trusses.” That was all aboard the welcome wagon at 7 WTC when Rudy Giuliani, mesmerized by the threat of a hurried walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, shook hands with Larry Silverstein.
Citigroup had two 6,000-gallon fuel tanks. Silverstein himself had 24,000 gallons in backup tanks. The office of Emergency Management was coming in with its own 6,000-gallon reservoir, and unlike the others, it would actually hang 15 feet above ground, a suspended dare to fire safety. Silverstein, his contractor Ambassador, American Express, and the city also had smaller day tanks on upper floors, plus all the fuel in the pipes, leading to the determination that there was a total of 43,284 gallons in the building that day. Had 7 WTC not been exempt from the city code, this complex system might well have become a magnet for building department inspectors who approve fuel tank installations. But as excessive as this fuel load already was, it was the fuel system for the command center that really set off alarm bells. From the moment the final plans were turned over to the Port Authority in early 1998, its engineers had a problem with the placement of the fuel tank—hanging from a mezzanine area far above the first floor. Installing tanks underground protects them from falling debris, and, as the Times later put it in a story about 7 WTC, “impedes leaks or tank fires from spreading throughout the building.”
The city did not want an underground tank, so Silverstein’s engineers came up with the mezzanine compromise. The Port Authority balked, more concerned about the apparent violation of the city building code than the city was. The code permits only tanks of 275 gallons or less to be installed above the lowest story, and it is so wary about even these small tanks that it bars any more than one per floor. In fact, the code provides that tanks with a capacity greater than 275 gallons have to be “buried” inside a building so that the top of the tank is at least two feet below ground level. All of 7 WTC’s other tanks that exceeded 275 gallons were buried and met city standards.
The Giuliani administration was determined to put its tank above the floodplain, even though Citgroup, Silverstein, American Express, and Ambassador all thought their concrete-protected underground tanks were secure. Giuliani and Hauer had made the floodplain threat a crucial issue when they argued that the office of Emergency Management should be taken out of 1 Police Plaza, where the Police Department’s backup fuel was stored in the basement. Now they were actually hoisted on their own petard. So the city continued to push for an elevated 6,000-gallon tank. OEM’s press release at its 1999 command center opening bragged about this feature, even though, by any fair reasoning, the city was exceeding its own code by 5,725 gallons.
The issue became so politically sensitive that Hauer and Giuliani turned to a deputy mayor who otherwise had nothing to do with the project—Randy Levine, another former prosecutor who ran the city’s economic development programs. Levine was chosen because he was the only Giuliani aide with friendly ties to the New York State Republican Party and the Pataki administration. Levine had stayed clear of the war with the Port Authority and had a talking relationship with its executive director, Bob Boyle. “We wanted to insure action,” Hauer recalled. “Rudy thought it would be helpful for Randy to break the logjam. Randy felt he could get Bob to do something.”
On April 6, 1998, Levine wrote Boyle an extraordinary letter, carefully describing the proposed installation as “near the first floor,” and contending that “conservative fire codes” related to the “structure enclosing the tank” were exceeded. Even though Levine acknowledged that the port’s engineers “feared” that the placement of the tank on a mechanical platform used by building personnel “would provide a point of fire ignition,” he asked Boyle to intercede. Boyle sent the letter back with a handwritten Post-it: “Randy, took care of this. Should be reflected in meeting they are having on 4/15/98.” After the Levine letter, Hauer said, “There was some sense of movement.” A Port Authority engineering memo noted that it received a “review request on April 14,” and concluded that the planned installation was “acceptable in concept,” with conditions that could be resolved at a meeting. The tank wound up on the mezzanine, thanks to pressures from the highest levels of the city to violate its own code.
The issue might have ended there except for the fire chief who ran the battalion that would have to fight a fire at 7 WTC. The department had no enforcement power on Port Authority property, but it did have that memo of understanding, which gave it advisory power. Shortly after the office of Emergency Management moved in, Battalion Commander William Blaich took his own tour of the command center fuel system and didn’t like what he saw. His report, filed on March 14, 1999, was entitled “Dangerous Conditions at 7 WTC.” He listed three significant code violations, centered around the fact that the 6,000-gallon tank was “installed on steel beams at a height of 15 feet above the floor,” and that “the maximum allowable tank size above the lowest floor is 275 gallons.” He also cited several reasons to fear leaks from the tank, and noted that “in the event of a leak, fuel oil would fill the elevator shaft” nearby. Anticipating a fire that “would be a disaster,” he said the conditions could “severely endanger” firefighters attempting to contain it. On March 25, he added a fourth violation about the piping.
Blaich’s 1999 inspection was actually a follow-up to two earlier visits by his command in October 1998 that identified some of the same problems. Hauer testified that he never saw any of the Fire Department reports. But the Port Authority did see them, and that was one of the reasons it had refused to grant a letter of completion. In fact, the authority sent a seven-item list of objections about the tank to OEM in May, and an angry Hauer forwarded it to Bill Diamond. Hauer’s letter referred to “serious fire code violations,” blamed them on Silverstein’s architect, and said he would be asking city attorneys to sue to recoup fees and prevent the architect from being used by the city again. No such suit was ever filed, and Hauer couldn’t recall ever getting a response from Diamond. The standoff with the Port Authority continued for another year and, even when the authority finally did sign a letter in 2001, long after Hauer was gone, no one could explain why.
In Con Ed’s lawsuit against the city, it argued that nothing was ever done to address the fire violations Blaich had listed, and the city’s response in court was simply that the “safety concerns were considered,” not even contending that they were meaningfully addressed. U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein grilled city attorneys about the fire violations in a 2005 hearing, asking whether the department was “ultimately content with the placement of the tanks.” The city lawyer said, “I believe so, your Honor. But there’s no final entry that says we’ve signed off.” Hellerstein observed, “The fire department clearly was concerned about the placement of these tanks. The bottom line, let’s assume the department did not very much like the idea of these diesel fuel tanks being situated where they were; and OEM, by delegated authority, says, we hear your advice, but we’re not following it.”
But the city’s disdain for fire safety requirements went much further than Hellerstein ever knew. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the city’s “original request” was to locate the 6,000-gallon tank on the seventh floor—a plan that was blocked by the Fire Department. If 15 feet above ground was a code violation, seven stories was a code obscenity. So the city put its 275-gallon day tank on the seventh floor. NIST’s interim reports on the 7 WTC collapse repeatedly mentioned that floor as a possible trigger for the collapse, noting that fires were visibly recorded there all afternoon and that critical transfer trusses were also located there. The only tank on the seventh floor was the city’s. The reports also focused on the fifth floor, where a Silverstein tank and the Citigroup’s tankless, pressurized system coexisted with vital trusses and columns. NIST concluded: “This region of the building”—floors 5 and 7—“played a key role in destabilizing the remaining core columns.” The presumption is that fire brought the building down, and that the fires undermined the columns and trusses on these floors. So what caused fires on floors 5 and 7 fierce enough to destroy columns and trusses? NIST lists “unusual fuel loads” as a “possible contributing factor.”
The findings are consistent with FEMA’s preliminary hypothesis, issued way back in 2002. FEMA said that “the structural elements most likely to have initiated the observed collapse are the transfer trusses between floors 5 and 7” and that “the loss of structural integrity was the likely result of the weakening caused by fires” on the same floors. FEMA also reported that up to 12,000 gallons from the underground tanks were “lost” that day and could have “spilled into the debris pile.” It could not determine definitely which underground tanks were depleted, nor was there any data on the “post-collapse condition of the OEM 6000-gallon tank,” which was fed by an underground tank. “Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy,” FEMA concluded, “the best hypothesis”—meaning the distribution system—“has only a low probability of occurrence.”
Irwin Cantor, who was the structural engineer for the original construction and for the command center, told the New York Times that “diesel-related failure of transfer trusses was a reasonable explanation for the collapse.” The only planning commission member who abstained on the command center vote, Cantor said he knew that none of the tanks were envisioned in the original design of the building.
Judge Hellerstein dismissed the key Con Ed case against the city for reasons having nothing to do with the substance of the collapse issue. (Hellerstein decided in January 2006 that the city was performing a civil defense function when it built the center and thus wasn’t liable for its own possible negligence.) But the opening paragraph of Hellerstein’s decision cited two reasons for the collapse of 7 WTC—fires “unquenched by water” all day that were “fueled by diesel fuel stored in tanks located in 7 WTC,” certainly suggesting that either the city’s, Citigroup’s, or Silverstein’s tanks were a likely culprit. Hellerstein allowed the suit against the Port Authority, Silverstein, and Citigroup to continue.
Before the federal courts took charge of all the 9/11 cases, one state supreme court judge in Manhattan, Michael Stallman, did get to issue a couple of decisions on preliminary issues. “It is not for this Court to inquire into the City’s decision to store such substances in this location,” he ruled. “However, it cannot be disputed that, whatever the rationale, the City caused and created the condition. The City had exclusive knowledge of the circumstances of its secret storage of a large quantity of flammable fuel in an office building open to the public.” Citing “the unique circumstances of this case,” Judge Stallman found that “the City stored the fuel and knew that the ignition of it by WTC debris had a role in the destruction of 7 WTC.”
A couple of months after Stallman’s decision, Giuliani Partners announced it was forming a “strategic partnership” with CB Richard Ellis, the successor of CB Real Estate Group and Richard Ellis, which merged just as CB was collecting its fee on the command center in 1998. The press announcement said that Giuliani Partners would be using “its proven crisis management expertise to advise current and future CB Richard Ellis clients on complex issues related to emergency preparedness,” including “location and site assessment” as well as fire safety. Rudy Giuliani was quoted as saying that businesses were now looking “to anticipate problems before they occur” and that they want “to do a comprehensive assessment before they move to a different location.”
A year later, CB Richard Ellis became the exclusive leasing agent for Larry Silverstein’s sparkling new and vacant 7 World Trade Center.