City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  Unable to work, Rogers filed a claim with the New York State Workers Compensation Board. The doctor who had examined him at Mount Sinai told the board that Rogers was disabled and suffered from a range of respiratory illnesses, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His own personal physician, Dr. Bertram Newman, whom Rogers had been seeing for 25 years, also reported to the compensation board that Rogers was unable to work. In January 2004, the board awarded him its highest payment, $400 a week, for the rest of his life. He also applied for compensation from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund for the injuries to his lungs, and he won an award. On June 12, 2004, two years after the cleanup at ground zero ended, Rogers, who was then 60, died at Community Medical Center in Dover Township, N.J. No autopsy was done. The official cause was listed as sudden cardiac death due to coronary artery disease, which the doctors at Mount Sinai later attributed to his exposure to the dust. Dr. Newman, his personal physician for more than a quarter-century, concluded “with reasonable medical certainty” that Rogers’s death was “directly attributed to his exposure to the toxic dust at Ground Zero.” He outlined the basis for his medical opinion in a letter he wrote for Kathleen Rogers when she filed for survivor’s benefits from the state workers’ compensation board. “Kevin was in good health prior to the exposure at the WTC site. Subsequently, he suffered severe pulmonary and respiratory symptoms which were getting progressively worse until his death.” In other words, Rogers had been healthy, had gone to ground zero, got sick, and died. What else could it have been but the dust?

  On the tough city streets and in the back alleys where middle-class people like him are not expected to go, Mike Valentin was known as the White Devil. He was one tough undercover detective, and his best stealth weapon was his fluency in Spanish, which he used to ferret out information from drug dealers, pimps, and other low-lifes who never suspected that the 40-something white guy at the end of the bar was actually a New York–born Puerto Rican cop.

  Valentin knew how to pull information out of the air. He had been taught some of the tricks of the street by his partner, Ernie Vallebuona, who had started on the job as a New York City undercover detective a few years before Valentin joined the force. Vallebuona had the heart of a poet, an intellectual bent that led him to study the scoundrels he was after. It also gave him the courage to walk into a bar full of Russian gangsters and observe drug deals going down until a back-up team burst through the door and arrested them. He knew that if he blew his cover, he’d be dead, but he was confident that he was smarter than most of the thugs around him and would always be able to beat them at their own game.

  Valentin and Vallebuona started working as a team in 1998. The more time they spent on all-night stakeouts and undercover investigations, the better they got to know each other and the street that was their office. They lived far apart, Valentin on Long Island and Vallebuona in suburban Staten Island. Before heading back to their precinct house after a stakeout, they’d sometimes try to squeeze in a few minutes for their real passion. They kept fishing poles in the trunk of their unmarked car, and they’d make their way to the nearest open water, whether up at Pelham Bay or over at the concrete banks of the East River if they had to, just to put a line in the water.

  On the morning of September 11, they completed a late tour and went home. Valentin had just dozed off when his wife, Joan, woke him. “Mike, you’ve got to get up. A plane just hit the towers.” On Staten Island, Vallebuona had made an early morning run to a local Home Depot with his son when he heard the news on the car radio. He turned right around and sped home. Amy, his wife, was waiting for him on the front steps, panic tugging at her face. “Work called. They want you to come in.”5 But she didn’t want him to go. It didn’t look safe, she said. But Vallebuona heard some other voice, an inner voice, telling him clearly, “You’re a detective in the New York City Police Department. You know what you have to do, what you’re trained to do.” Vallebuona called in and was ordered to a mobilization point on the West Side Highway, just north of Vesey Street, the northernmost perimeter of the trade center.

  Meanwhile, Valentin had put the flashing light on top of his car, picked up other detectives, and made his way in from Long Island, fighting against the frantic traffic scrambling to get away from Manhattan. They crossed the river into Manhattan’s crowded grid and stared at the utter chaos unfolding around them. A woman wandered by in a daze, covered in dust and bleeding from cuts on her face. A firefighter dropped to his knees, crying out loud. “I asked him what happened, and he said he had just lost his best friend,” Valentin remembered. He felt like he had walked into World War III. “What people write about wars and hell, that was it,” he said. “All at once, it was all there, and I was numb to it. We all were numb to it.”

  Valentin and Vallebuona met up near the West Side Highway piers, just north of the trade center site. “You couldn’t see for blocks because the cloud of dust was so dense,” Vallebuona said. “It seemed like we were walking for a couple of blocks and just weren’t getting any closer. It was such intense dust, we had to back out a few times. We were coughing—there was just too much dust to breathe in. We didn’t have any breathing apparatus. We each just had bandanas over our face.”

  The bandanas—big handkerchiefs printed with American flags that Joan Valentin had bought for them—weren’t nearly protection enough. After being on the scene for a few hours, the partners got word that 7 World was tottering. They watched it come down. “We were looking at this thing falling, and this plume of dust hits us, like a wave.”

  They spent the rest of that day and night transporting people out of the danger zone. Afterward, they were sent to search rooftops for body parts. They worked the bucket brigade for several days. They remained at ground zero, on and off, for nearly three months, retrieving body parts, helping people back into their apartments, and controlling onlookers at the edge of the pile. When the rescue turned into a recovery operation, and the recovery into a cleanup, their assignments changed. As the city got back on its feet, they got on with their work.

  It was Valentin who first realized something was wrong. Like so many others, he had developed a dry cough that he couldn’t get rid of. By 2003, he had lost a lot of his energy. He developed night sweats and put on weight. He told his regular doctor that he felt awful, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. Intent on not depriving his family of anything because he wasn’t at the top of his game, Valentin took everyone on a vacation to the Midwest in 2004. The native New Yorkers got a kick out of the Indiana State Fair, enjoying the people as much as the amusements. But while he was walking the fairgrounds, Valentin’s ankles turned purple, his chest tightened, and he had trouble breathing. They rushed home and got him to his doctor for a complete physical. That’s when he was told they had found a tumor in his chest between his aorta and his trachea that was causing his breathing problem. Surgeons removed the tumor—specifically, a mediastinal mass—but in a short time, it returned. Valentin was back on the operating table. Doctors believed a haywire lymph node was causing the trouble, but they didn’t know what to do about it. They ordered more tests. He continued to struggle with his breathing. Doctors said it was irritant-induced asthma. Valentin often sounded like he had run a marathon when, in fact, he had just climbed a few stairs.

  At around the same time, Vallebuona was dealing with his own problems. In summer 2004, he took his family to a street fair on 116th Street in East Harlem, an old Italian-American neighborhood of Manhattan that is now mostly Latino. He caught a glimpse of a Hispanic street vendor slicing fresh fruit and gave in to desire. A local treat, slices of cantaloupe and melon on a stick sprinkled with chili powder, looked delicious on a hot summer day. Vallebuona devoured it, but afterward he felt like he was going to die. He herded his family back into the car and broke out in a sweat, convinced that the street vendor’s knife must have been contaminated with bacteria that had infected his fruit stick. At that moment, it was the worst thing he could imagine happe
ning.

  Vallebuona made it back home and tried to recover. Nothing helped. He went to see a gastroenterologist the next day. As soon as the doctor examined his stomach, he felt a mass and ordered him to the hospital immediately. There doctors quickly did other tests and diagnosed B-cell lymphoma. The cancer was speckled throughout his body. He began treatment immediately. Vallebuona eventually had to undergo the rigorous challenge of a complete bone marrow transplant.

  Both partners were facing serious health challenges, but they didn’t know it. After 9/11, they had been reassigned to different precincts. Vallebuona had moved from Staten Island to Rockland County, just north of the New York–New Jersey state line. He heard from another detective that his old partner was sick. That’s when he broke with deeply rooted police tradition concerning sicknesses in the ranks and called. Valentin was surprised to hear from him. “A lot of guys don’t want to hear the bad news,” Valentin explained. “They kind of put you off to the side like they were saying ‘He’s a sick dog—let him die in peace, don’t bother him.’”

  At that time, Vallebuona was just finding out the bad news about his own health. As he prepared for the bone marrow transplant, he was put in strict isolation. Valentin wasn’t allowed to visit, so they talked on the telephone. Those conversations brought them even closer than they had been on the street. They became each other’s medical consultant, life coach, and psychiatrist. “There were days we cried on the phone because we didn’t know what to do,” Valentin recalled. “We didn’t know if we were going to live or die, and if we died, what would happen to our families.”

  If cops are a special breed, undercover detectives form an exclusive subspecies based on courage, smarts, and a taut sense of reserve. You need to have that kind of sangfroid if you are going to break up a drug deal or infiltrate a gang. You keep your cards close to the vest. You say what needs to be said and no more. And you never, never admit to anyone but your wife that you are scared. Even then, you never unveil the whole truth.

  The code is universally followed on the job, and when it comes to being sick, it is doubled. Valentin says complaining about an ailment or illness is bad mojo, upsetting the natural order of undercover cops. But because both were sick, these partners could express their fears to each other without crossing the code.

  Part of their emotional sensitivity grew out of the steroids they were taking at the time. The medication exaggerated their feelings, making them more expressive than undercover detectives liked to admit. “You have this machismo of being a cop, you know. We walk right over dead bodies,” Valentin said. But at times he and Vallebuona spent hours on the phone talking about their feelings. They found they could talk to each other about anything, even the one thing they couldn’t easily bring up with their spouses: what they feared most about dying. It wasn’t the dying itself. All those years on the street had made them accept that possibility. They had lived a fair amount and had escaped death many times already. The physical act of being extinguished was comprehensible. What bugged them was the thought of leaving their families unprotected when they were no longer there to take care of them.

  Both had applied for disability pensions from the police department, just as many firefighters who were sick had asked their department for help. But the police brass had much tougher standards of proof and were rejecting pension applications that lacked conclusive science linking a disease to the dust. Both men did receive partial disability payments, but it was based on a percentage of their regular salaries. As many other detectives did, they relied on overtime to pay their bills, and overtime did not play into the disability computations. Valentin eventually had to sell his house and move in with his father.

  Cops were treated differently than firefighters after 9/11, and the partners thought they knew why. Every member of the fire department had been anointed a hero. Their turnout coats had become symbols of courage for the wounded city. The police, however, received far less sympathy, despite their own losses and a general feeling of patriotism. “Everybody loves the firemen,” Valentin said. “But who loves the cops?”

  Eventually, New York State passed legislation recognizing that firefighters and police who had worked at ground zero and later got sick should be presumed to have developed their respiratory disease and other illnesses because of their work. (The legislation is modeled after an older law that considers active-duty heart attacks to be related to work.) After the ground zero presumption bill passed, both Valentin and Vallebuona were granted full line-of-duty pensions. As the years passed, their health fluctuated. Some days were definitely better than others.

  Although they lived far apart, the partners tried to retain their special bond as they rebuilt their lives. They’d meet on a quiet Long Island beach for a day of surf casting, standing on the edge of North America with 15-foot poles in their hands, facing the ocean and the uncertain future they knew awaited them. Both relatively young men who could no longer work, they also threw themselves into helping others facing similar problems. They realized that they had been lucky enough to have each other, but they knew that many of their colleagues had no one to turn to when things looked darkest. They volunteered at the detectives’ union, joined the big lawsuit against the city, and later launched their own foundation to help others deal with the legacy of the dust. Valentin became the more active by far, often traveling to Washington to testify before congressional committees and urge members to not turn their backs on the responders. That had already happened once, in their eyes. “The city had to do what it had to do in the first two weeks to preserve life,” Valentin said. “But after two weeks, it was a cleanup. There was no need to move so fast after that. There was no life at stake.” He thinks somebody should have been there to say, “Stop.” It’s not right to put others in danger when there was no need. “We were a well-oiled machine,” he said. “Somebody should have protected that machine. But that didn’t happen.”

  As Valentin got more involved with the victims’ group, Vallebuona turned inward. As time went on, he, like Dave Fullam, felt a need to put the dust and the ash behind him so that he could focus on the future. Just as mysteriously as he had gotten sick, he had been given a second chance to live and he was intent on taking full advantage of it. He wanted to spend more time with his family and his boys, Ernest and Ethan, fully tasting the life he had feared he would not have. When his lymphoma had proved hard to defeat, Vallebuona had been riddled with doubts about his own ability to survive and care for his family. He had been advised to keep a medical journal, recording medications and his reaction to them. But focusing so much on himself quickly got boring. He was far more concerned with his family, especially his boys, whom he was afraid would have to grow up without him. He pushed aside the medical journal and began collecting in a small notebook the words of wisdom he had once expected to pass along to them personally. He wanted to warn them to stay away from drugs and to respect women, of course. But he thought they’d need to know other things he had picked up on the streets at a different time, well before 9/11. “My guys are like little shrimps right now,” he said, recalling what it was like when he was in school and there were bullies in the hallways. So he wrote this: “If you’re the little guy and you’re outnumbered, always punch the big guy first and then run away. This way, at least they’ll respect you.”

  Vallebuona knew what it was like to come up against guys bigger and tougher than he was. And now his work on the pile had forced him to face a different kind of bully: a disease that ravaged his body despite his best efforts to fight back, and a system that dug in its heels and continued to doubt that he and his partner had surrendered their health, and the stability of their families, by going to work. That enraged him. “I realized that politicians would love for these problems to just go away,” he said. He was not afraid of dying, but for the sake of his family, and the families of other men and women who had gotten sick, he was determined not to simply go away. He vowed to get in the face of anyone who denied that something bad h
ad happened at ground zero.

  Valentin and Vallebuona were just two of the thousands of people whose futures had been altered by their work at or near the pile. By 2010, more than 28,000 people who had worked the pile—cops, steel workers, volunteers—had been screened by Dr. Stephen Levin and the crew at Mount Sinai. But an entirely different group of people, a group just as large as the responders and volunteers, had been exposed to the dust and smoke of ground zero for months on end. And this group was being routinely ignored by the federal, state, and city governments. Even Mount Sinai’s screening program, comprehensive as it was, had been closed to them from the beginning. For these people, ground zero was not a rescue operation or a crime scene.

  It was home.

  Endnotes

  1 Personal interview, 6 June 2009.

  2Ibid.

  3 Personal interview, 6 November 2009.

  4 Fitzgerald, S.D., Rumbeiha, W.K., Braselton, W.E., Downend, A.B., Otto, C. M.. “Pathology and Toxicology Findings for Search-and-Rescue Dogs Deployed to the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack Sites: Initial Five-Year Surveillance,” Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation 20 Issue 4(2008): 474–484.

  5 Various personal interviews, 2007–2009.

  Part III: Doubt

  8. Life and dust

  The vast concrete plaza at the base of the twin towers, a windswept butte that architectural critics and office workers alike recognized as sterile and uninviting, was the perfect place for Catherine McVay Hughes’s two sons, Philip and Matthew, to learn to ride their bicycles. On weekends, when the suits and briefcases were nowhere in sight, the big space was all theirs. Children of the city, they also ice skated there in the winters, when the Port Authority installed a rink to break up the plaza’s bleakness. For the Hughes family, the plaza became a substitute backyard. Their own home was a roomy apartment on the 14th floor of an old loft building on Broadway, just one block away. The huge copper windows of their apartment looked out over the roofs of lower buildings across Broadway and down Cortlandt Street for a block directly west onto the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Their apartment actually is located on the 13th floor, but by New York tradition, it is designated floor 14. Despite the old superstition, McVay Hughes likes to think of it as being the 13th floor, her lucky 13. And never did good fortune grace her and her family more than the time following September 11 when they escaped unharmed and the disparate chapters of her life came together to help her represent tens of thousands of New Yorkers who felt that they had been abandoned by their government and left to fight for their homes on their own.