A Decade of Hope

Ray Kelly is the only official to hold the office of police commissioner of the city of New York under two mayors—David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg—separated by eight years. He is a man who was molded by the caring and the personal motivations found within a close-knit Irish Catholic family. He is perhaps the most educated police commissioner who has ever served a major police department (a group that includes President Theodore Roosevelt). A former U.S. Marine, he brings to his leadership style the values of integrity, strength, and courage that were taught in his training and refined on the battlefields of Vietnam. He is known as a creator of innovative and important programs and policies designed to keep the public protected from the social hazards of crime and safe in the midst of New York City’s greatest challenge to the security of the homeland.

I was the youngest of five—three brothers and one sister—and my parents were loving, hardworking people. I always remember my mother working—she had a part-time job as a checker at Macy’s. My father was basically a milkman for a significant period of time, until there was a change in the law, brought about by [Mayor Fiorello] LaGuardia. LaGuardia was not a hero in our household. To the best of my knowledge, the milk regulations were changed so that you could now buy it in supermarkets, and so the price was lowered. As a result, the route deliverers basically went out of business. My father then worked on the docks, and then in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the war was over, he was out of work. I remember him shaping up in the New York Times, and then he got a great job as a clerk in the Treasury Department in the IRS. In his fifties he would go to work wearing a suit and tie, something I had never seen previously.

When I was born we lived at Ninety-first Street and Columbus Avenue, in a five-story tenement that has since been torn down. I went to St. Gregory’s School, which is still on Ninetieth between Amsterdam and Columbus, and when the neighborhood became bad we moved to Queens, where I attended eighth grade at St. Theresa’s in Sunnyside. I then went to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, which was moved to Queens and, though it had existed for over one hundred years, its name was changed to Archbishop Molloy. It’s still a good school today.

In college I majored in economics, within the School of Business at Manhattan College. In those days you had to have 144 credits to graduate, and so I took many diverse courses—Spanish and history, accounting, psychology—and found them to be interesting and insightful. But it was the School of Business, so statistics and those sorts of courses were in the core of the curriculum. And I also had a big dose of theology.

I was also working in Macy’s part time. My mother had gotten me a job as a stock boy, but I saw an advertisement looking for college students to do part-time work in a path to become a police officer. Adam Walinsky in the Lindsay administration helped create the police cadet program, which was the first effort on the part of municipal police agencies to bring college graduates into police departments. I had no relatives in the police department, but this advertisement seemed to be a window into this mysterious organization—and I didn’t particularly want to continue as a stock boy. I was in the first class of police cadets, and we were looked at somewhat strangely by the uniformed members of the department, because we were all so young. We went to work in a variety of administrative units. I worked in the lost property section, and then in the communication division, where I would man the switchboard. And I worked alongside other college students doing that. And that’s how I took the test to be a police officer. You had to take the test, and pass it, to remain in the cadet program.

About a month after I graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant, I went on active duty in the marines. I had three older brothers, all of them in the Corps, so I sort of felt compelled to go into the marines as well. They would bring home Marine Corps paraphernalia and that sort of thing when I was young, so I was fascinated by it. While family environment was very important to me, and obviously, Catholic school provided a sound educational foundation, I think it’s fair to say that my experiences in the marines have also been important. Marine Corps values mean a lot to me, because those core values—honesty, determination, fairness, and courage—stay with you your whole life. You don’t realize it, and don’t consciously think about it every day, but they really do impact on how you approach life, approach problems, deal with people.

When I left the Marine Corps in late 1966–early 1967 I came back to the NYPD training school. Now I had just come from Vietnam, so chaotic situations were not unusual for me, but we were taken to the range, fired fifty rounds of ammunition, given blue uniforms and guns, and within three days put right out on the street on patrol with a more experienced uniformed officer. This was a highly unusual occurrence, and we would never do it today. I went to Brooklyn, where there were disturbances in East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant—garbage cans being thrown off the roof and that sort of thing. So we were in the thick of it before we really had any training.

I started going to St. John’s law school at night, got promoted to sergeant, [and] began working in East Harlem, where I worked a lot of midnight tours on patrol. It was a very busy time, and a violent time. When we look at crime statistics today, they pale in comparison to those days. The job was a lot more dangerous back then, and a lot more uncertain in terms of what we might encounter. In 1971 or ’72, twelve police officers were killed. It was definitely dangerous work, but it was exciting too, and I loved it.

At the same time, we had police corruption, which was exposed by the Knapp Commission. Its findings were a major surprise to the average police officer—and might come as a surprise to many people today—as they were not aware of corruption in specialized units, like narcotics. The idea that police would be taking money from drug dealers was something that was considered by members of the department to be total anathema. It was a very hostile environment.

I became first deputy police commissioner under Commissioner Lee P. Brown in February of 1990. Because he was the president of the IACP [International Association of Chiefs of Police], he often had to speak at events in other parts of the country, so as acting commissioner, I gained much experience.

At that period of time we weren’t prepared for the development of organized terrorism. Should we have been? Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but the answer is yes. To the extent that there was some hum or buzz about terrorism, it was thought to be a federal problem, and the federal government was addressing that. We were not aware on a municipal level, where we were taking care of the traditional things that police agencies are supposed to. In those days we had a significant amount of crime, and obviously our focus was on suppressing it.

On February 26, 1993, we had the first World Trade Center attack. I remember going there and seeing the magnitude of the event. Of course, what happened on September 11 dwarfs what took place then, but at the time it was a major, major incident. We were involved in rescue and recovery efforts, and then we had specialized units like the bomb squad assist in the investigation. But the assumption was that the federal government would be actively engaged, and we did not see ourselves in those days as having a kind of equal partnership with the FBI. It should have been a wake-up call for the city, and it also should have been a call for us to look behind the federal curtain and see what was going on. When you look back you see that relatively little was going on.

To a certain extent, one of the problems that emerged as a result of the first World Trade Center attack is that it supposedly was solved very quickly, and the individuals were seen as being somewhat inept. A detective in our auto crime division found the differential of the truck that was used and brought it to our police lab. It had a hidden VIN [vehicle identification number], which was traced very quickly to a rental facility in New Jersey. A few days after the attack the bombers came back to get their deposit, claiming that the truck had been stolen. The bombing took place on a Friday, and the following Thursday the arrests were made. When you think about it, the fact that they came back for their deposit wasn’t all that illogical, if they were taking the position that they didn’t know what happened to the truck, since it had been stolen, but instead they were painted as buffoons. As a result of that I think the attention of the investigative agencies was lowered, or shifted. And as far as the public was concerned, these people were in jail.

But not too long afterward there was another plot in which Jim Fox, who ran the New York office of the FBI, learned from an informant of plans to blow up 26 Federal Plaza, the UN, the Holland Tunnel, and other familiar sights throughout New York City. Suspects were arrested and were again considered to be some sort of buffoons, because they were so sloppy. So while there was a sense that there was a threat out there, it wasn’t well organized. Sheikh Rahman was discovered to be in the middle of it, and was ultimately taken into custody, and that was that. Life went on. I left city government then at the end of ninety-three, early ninety-four, and the police department didn’t particularly focus on the issue of terrorism.

At that point I went to NYU [New York University] for a short time on the teaching faculty, and then joined a consulting company, for which I went to Haiti for six months to take charge of the international responders. So I was out of municipal police business and doing work for the federal government, now in a totally different sphere. I, too, certainly wasn’t focused at all on the terrorist threat.

I do remember, though, sitting in the lobby of the World Trade Center on February 26 with an engineer who had been trapped in the elevator, and who had just cut himself out to safety. He said that they could never take those buildings down. The bomb crater went from the B1 to the B5 level, but they were supported by huge beams. There was some consideration that their plan may have been to take this tower down, perhaps even with the aim of one building falling into the other. But the engineer’s insistence that they could never take the building down struck me.

In 1996 I was working for a litigation support company when Bob Rubin, who was then the secretary of the treasury, called and asked for some advice, and then asked if I would be interested in going to the federal government as undersecretary of the Department of the Treasury in enforcement. At that time about 40 percent of all federal law enforcement was in the Treasury Department, including the Secret Service, the ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives], and U.S. Customs, and was responsible for all federal law enforcement training, with the exceptions of the FBI and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. So he asked me to go and become undersecretary for treasury, and I did, in 1996. I was sworn in and had U.S. Customs reporting to me. The customs commissioner left, and I interviewed a lot of people and made some recommendations to Secretary Rubin, who was not happy with them. Finally, I said, what about me for that job? To demote oneself is a fairly un-Washington thing to do, but in 1998 I became the customs commissioner and remained in that position until the end of the Clinton administration. Then, in early 2001, I went to Bear Stearns as head of global security.

So, on September 11, 2001, I was physically in the Bear Stearns building at 345 Park Avenue when the first plane struck. Initially it was said to be a small plane, but then, fifteen minutes later, the second plane hit, and of course it was obviously an intentional act involving terrorism of some sort. We were in the process of building the new Bear Stearns headquarters a block and a half away, and I was told there was panic there. I went to the building and tried to calm people down.

My wife, Veronica, was out of the country, but I was concerned about my son Gregory, who was a reporter for New York 1. I didn’t know where he was, and I couldn’t contact him. Nor could I contact my other son, James, who was downtown as well. I was also concerned about my home, and I knew, by all indications, that I couldn’t get back there, because I lived literally one block away from the World Trade Center, in Battery Park. I didn’t know what the vulnerability of my apartment building was. There was a fair amount of—I wouldn’t say chaos, but people were very uncertain and didn’t know what to do. Some wanted to go home; others wanted to stay. There were problems with transportation. The most memorable thing that day was to witness the first building fall, because you could see part of the South Tower from our building. I thought back to that conversation I had had in the lobby of that very tower on February 26, 1993, about its never coming down. But the building went down. Like so many other people, I was just dumbstruck.

Ultimately the feeling that kicked in was a desire to help in some way, to bring my experience to bear on the issue of arresting and bringing into custody whoever had done this—and preventing something like it from ever happening again. It was a common belief for the next months that another attack was imminent: Something else was going to happen; it was just a matter of time.

The magnitude of the event so far exceeded anything that we had ever experienced. I had been around and had known police officers who were killed in the line of duty, but when I saw the breadth and scope of the impact of losing twenty-three police officers in one hour—that was horrific. Most of the twenty-three police officers killed that day were from the ESU [Emergency Service Unit], which I had served with. I knew Sergeant Michael Curtin, who was also in the Marine Corps Reserve, and who was killed that day.

And then the impact on the Fire Department, losing of 343 men—that was very hard to believe, to internalize. If it had happened in the Police Department it would have been, percentagewise, the equivalent of twelve hundred officers. Initially the estimates of the overall death toll were much higher than three thousand; some people were predicting as many as ten thousand. The true number was just unknown, and it took days to sort that out.

I was asked by Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta to come to Washington to join a committee that had been formed to get planes back in the air, as all commercial flying schedules in the Northeast had been greatly impacted by the events. I met with people at the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and was involved for a few days, eager to help. There were other conferences, and it was interesting to both the power of the airline industry and the federal regulatory agencies.

Shortly after the attack, in October, I was asked and agreed to endorse Michael Bloomberg for mayor, who was seen as a tremendous long shot after September 11. The day after he was elected he called me. I had my own thoughts about what the city should do in the wake of this attack, but I was not really preparing to come back to the job of New York City police commissioner.

When I took the position my primary thought was that business had to be done differently in terms of protecting our city. Here we had had two major attacks, both at the same site. New York had to do more as an entity to protect itself. We could not rely solely on the federal government. You can offer all sorts of rationales, but the federal government had failed.

The NYPD is an organization of fifty thousand people. That is formidable in size, and we needed to configure the agency in such a way that it would be an integral and important player in protecting the city from a terrorist event. So I started thinking about it, and put up a long sheet of butcher-block paper on which I wrote out the changes in the structure of the department, which is what we have today.

I knew the counterterrorism bureau had to be moved up in importance in the department—there were only seventeen investigators on the terrorism task force at the time of September 11. I knew we needed to have a strong relationship with the FBI. I knew that our intelligence division had to be more formed, and we needed people outside of policing to be a part of it. The police department, not unlike the fire department, is tradition bound, and the question was, Who could I bring in from the outside to head the counterterrorism bureau? Who would be accepted? I decided that, given my background, I wanted a former Marine Corps general to come in and head it. I also knew we needed a medical and scientific component with the ability to assess the threat from chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and to learn how to protect ourselves—that meant a doctor and medical staff. In our intelligence division I wanted to get someone from outside the agency with relevant credentials. And I wanted to build up our language skills, so I looked to have someone come in from the CIA. I wanted to bring in people from federal agencies who were involved in fighting terrorism. All of these guiding principles were written out on the butcher-block paper.

I reached out to Frank Libutti, a lieutenant general who had just retired from the Marine Corps and had tremendous credentials. And he came onboard in January of 2002. I reached out to David Cohen, whom I knew from his time as the CIA head of station in New York. We drafted several retired FBI agents. We were able to hone our own internal language skills while at the same time broadening our recruitment to obtain people with sensitive language capabilities that we thought we needed for our own internal intelligence investigations.

This is a “can do” organization, and by January of 2002 we had our counterterrorism headquarters set up in Brooklyn. You have to consider that people in the first months of any life-changing event are usually trying to find the light switches, so this was quite a remarkable achievement. And we continued to bring in people from other parts of the department.

We thought about going to other countries. When I was customs commissioner we had legats [legal attachés] overseas. One of our concerns was that there might be investigations going forward that involved New York, investigations that we knew nothing about. And I knew a cop-to-cop relationship could work in other countries, as there’s a sort of recognition in the international law enforcement community that cooperation works pretty well. I took the experience of having customs legats and tailored it to our needs. The concept was to have what we call trip wires, or listening posts, people in other parts of the world who could give us any sort of heads-up, any information that would better protect New York.

The first location where we put this in place was Tel Aviv, Israel, where we had Detective First Grade Mordecai Dzikansky. We knew that the Israelis would be very supportive of this concept. We sought to identify someone in the NYPD who had strong roots in Israel, and even may have gone to school there. Mordecai—Morty—had gone to Hebrew University for a couple of years, and was now a detective. He was received extremely well. At that time there were lots of suicide bombings in Israel, so we thought we could learn something about what we call tradecraft going on, because we believed that it was going to come here.

To get Morty to the site of a bombing within thirty or forty-five minutes, he was given an office with the national police, and he was soon sending back detailed information that we would never have been able to get anywhere else—there’s no vehicle for that sort of data to come to municipal police agencies.

In March of 2004, bombings took place as trains were coming into the station in Madrid, Spain, but the bombs themselves had been assembled in pickup vans in the vicinity of outlying stations. Obviously we’ve been very sensitive to such incidents because of our own train system. We sent Morty to Madrid, as well as a team from our transit bureau that had been involved in helping the MTA design their cars. We found out very quickly from Morty—the Spaniards had good camera surveillance—that some vans had been used to put the bombs together. One of the bombs, which they were using cell phones to activate, had not been detonated, so we had really detailed information on the device. We saw that the bags themselves that carried the bombs were pretty big and weighed about twenty-two pounds. So we got that information out quickly to the patrol force working around our subway stations, and we felt our patrols started to increase the comfort level of the riding public.

On July 7, 2005, bombs went off in London at eight o’clock in the morning. Our guy in London was actually on the subway going to work when it happened, and when he got to headquarters he was able to give us real-time information. We didn’t know if this was part of a worldwide event or if it was isolated in London, so we buttressed our uniformed patrols. I called a meeting that day and said that I wanted to have knapsacks and bags checked in the subways but to make sure it passed muster as far as Supreme Court decisions regarding stops and searches went. We put that in place within a couple of hours and are still doing it today. Obviously some of this we do for effect. We want to advertise the effort, and at least get people thinking about the fact that we are aware.

In January of 2011 we sent a top guy, a former member of the Israeli defense force, to Moscow, and he told us some unsettling things. This was just after the Domodedovo Airport bombing, in which 35 people were killed and 168 people were injured, and he looked at the security they had in place there and said it was very lax: Guards who were supposed to be checking the machines were on cell phones; the machines were going off, and people were just allowed to go through. Our guy tested the system with keys in his pockets, and they simply let him go. Mumbai is another example of where we got granular information because of the trip-wire protocol.

We have the right people in place because of our department’s size. We have Arabic speakers in Dubai. We’ve got NYC police officers who were born in Spain, in Madrid. We have people who were born in Israel. We’ve got Canadian-raised officers in Montreal.

We are still trying to get our arms around the radicalization process. I think you see Peter King [see page 82] taking this issue on, and he’ll be doing a lot more of that. In 2007 we published a report by Mitch Silber and Arvia Bhatt, who are part of our intel house. We sent them all over the world. They went to Australia and to the Netherlands and tried to get some understanding of the phenomenon of what they call unremarkable people deciding to kill innocent people in their own country. Their report talks about the four stages of radicalization, and it really is seen as the template for our law enforcement and intelligence community. We’re working on the second version of that now to refine it.

We know a fair amount about the radicalization process, where people start, how their ideas change, and when they decide to commit jihad. We are learning more and more about it, but it’s no easy task, because we have also seen people who have just radicalized themselves. There are others who have been radicalized by a “sanctioner.” If you look at the case of eighteen young men in Toronto, their sanctioner was in essence a custodian in a mosque. Do we see it as a problem in the United States? Yes. But we don’t know what we don’t know.

When you search for the indicators to identify someone who is going to decide to kill other people, they don’t jump out at you. Whom do we watch? What are the tipping points where people will decide to inflict violence ? They’re not easy to see. We have thousands of people who come here on a student visa. It is probably a good thing overall for this country to have student exchange, but how do you vet them? There are thirty thousand students from Saudi Arabia going to school in Western countries, most of them here.

It is very, very hard to predict where we will be in the future, and no really thoughtful people have come out with anything definitive. A lot is based on economics. People want jobs, but there are no jobs at the end of jihad. If they change their government, that doesn’t translate into jobs. So what does that mean? It means more frustration, more uncertainty. Is that an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups like that to come in and take over? Perhaps. We don’t know.

One thing we have not seen in all the Middle East turmoil is American flags and Israeli flags being burned. So if you had to pick out one reason for upheavals in the Middle East and in Africa, it is that people want to advance economically. But there’s no real structure in place to do this. The only country with the resources to make a difference in other Arab countries is Saudi Arabia, and they haven’t really shown the propensity to do that sort of thing so far. Nobody knows the direction these countries will take. Look at Iran in 1979. They got rid of the shah, supposedly for all the right purposes, but the effort was subverted and was captured by radical Islamists. Could that happen today? Yes, it could happen. What do we do about it? It’s going to take generations to change this jihadist thinking. My sense is, they are looking for the goods they see everywhere, but these are poor countries, and they are not able to change overnight. If a high-tech economy comes to them, it’s going to be well down the road.

Let’s assume democracy breaks out. It’s a pretty messy process. The reality is that having somebody like Mubarak sit on the top of the Middle East and provide stability was a good thing for us. It’s nice to espouse the virtues of democracy, but there are a lot of countries that aren’t ready. George Will asked recently, “Would you want to see democracy in Pakistan?” If there’s some semblance of democracy that breaks out in certain countries, it doesn’t necessarily bode well for us at all. Why? Because the strongman model has worked reasonably well for stability in the Middle East. It’s worked reasonably well for the United States. It’s worked reasonably well for Israel. Getting away from that is just uncharted water; nobody knows what the result could be. And could these democratic efforts be subverted and negatively change the direction of a country? Absolutely. If it’s going to change inevitably, what do we do? We can’t necessarily change the tide of history.

I’m not saying everything depends on our military strength, but it’s kind of the big guy you need standing behind you. Talk softly and carry a big stick. Our military is the big stick that we’ve depended on in the past. I think the world might sense the reluctance on our part to use justified, legitimate force, based on the reaction of the American people. The polls show that a majority want us out of Afghanistan, and there’s no discernible benefit so far with what’s happened in Iraq. Yes, there’s some form of democracy, but who knows what that all means down the road? Do we have the will? It may have been undermined by what turned out to be the longest war in our history.