A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  Nobody knew what the hell was going on, and then Commissioner Joe Dunne came in and said, “I want to keep you informed. Coffee and some doughnuts will be here soon.” They were assuming people weren’t going to leave, so we camped out. It must have been two o’clock in the morning, and there were still ten families there, and nobody knew what to do. The Police Department didn’t know what to do. Twenty-three NYPD officers were missing, maybe killed. At any other time this would have been front-page news for months all around the world. So we were walking and talking, and the adrenaline was flying. Joe Dunne came back in, and people were swarming around him. He came over to me and said, “Mr. Vigiano, can I speak to you? Most of these people have no idea what’s going on, but you do. I want to ask you a favor, to explain to them how people survive in building collapses. About voids. About water. Food.” He said, “We want to try and keep their hopes up.” I said, “I didn’t even see the building, I just saw it on television.” But I spoke to the people there as an officer experienced in emergencies. But one father of an officer just wouldn’t let go; he wanted results. I said, “Look, I got two kids in those buildings. They’re tough kids, physical kids. If there’s a void they’ll find it. There’ll be plenty of food, because it’s an office building. There’s water, because they’re putting out fires. Water pipes break. There’s water fountains. There’s plenty of air. You can last a long time in that environment.” I said, “We just have to dig them out. It’s going to take time.”

  At about two o’clock in the afternoon my daughter-in-law said to Joe Dunne, “I want to go to the site.” Joe said, “Okay,” and asked if I was going to go with her. They had a motorcycle unit drive us over to the site.

  When we pulled up and I looked at that zone, I knew right then and there that there were no survivors. There were no survivors. There was no way anybody could be alive in that building. They had already gotten Jay Jonas out [see page 52] and all those peripheral people on the eleventh; this was the twelfth. Kathy walked the entire perimeter, questioning cops. She knew most of them because she worked the Seventy-fifth Precinct. I was right behind her; I’m just looking. Back at One Police Plaza Joe Dunne got ahold of me and asked what I had seen. “Well,” I said, “I can’t make that speech to these people anymore.” He said, “That bad?” I said, “I really think so.”

  The next day, the thirteenth, Truck 1, Emergency Service Unit, picked me up and took me to their quarters, where they gave me a pair of boots, a helmet, and some clothes. We went to the site and started digging, and they took me into some tunnel—probably one of the subway tunnels—and it was scary. We were poking around for about an hour but didn’t find anybody. When we came out I watched the anthill with a thousand people picking stuff up and filling buckets. I walked around a little bit more, talked to firemen and some cops, and got back to 1 PP around seven o’clock

  By now they had brought in army cots and were serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were trying to make it hospitable, but we were still in an auditorium. Joe Dunne again came up to me and said, “I’m going to ask you a favor, Mr. Vigiano. I have a friend, Dennis Duggan, who works with Newsday and wants to do an article. He’s a friend of the Police Department, and he’s the only reporter I would ask you to talk to. Would you consider an interview?” I said, “Do you want it?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay.” Duggan was a real gentleman, and the headline of his piece was TWIN TOWERS, which ran with photos of both boys.

  Up to that point at One Police Plaza we hadn’t been allowed to see TV or read the newspaper. They were sheltering us. Because I had been at the site, I was the voice, so fathers would come over and ask me questions, and I’d say, “They’re working hard.” At around eleven o’clock each night kids from the ESU would come in, filthy, dirty, and would give us an update: We were digging here. We found this. We had a void. Most of the people had no idea what they were talking about. But everyone was getting information from the site.

  At the end of the following day I got back to 1 PP around eleven o’clock, and Joe Dunne says, “I have another favor to ask. We want to get you people in a hotel. This is not good; you can’t stay in an auditorium.” I asked, “Well, what do you want me to do?” He said, “Where you go, they will go. But they are not going to leave here as long as you are here.” I said, “I answer to Jan. You convince her. If she says go, we’ll go; otherwise we’ll stay here.”

  He said, “Mrs. Vigiano, I’d like you and your husband to go to a hotel. We’re going to take care of that. Would you please go?”

  She said to him, “I have two sons probably sleeping on concrete tonight, and you want me to sleep in a hotel? That ain’t gonna happen.”

  Well, this six-foot-five-inch police officer was speechless. He got me outside and said, “Are you kidding me? You’ve got to convince her. Beg, do whatever it takes.” I said, “What, do you need the floor that we’re sleeping on?” “No, no,” he said. “We want you in beds, with a shower. Police headquarters is not a place to live.”

  I went back and talked to her. I said, “Mama, my back is killing me, these army cots are not doing me any good. I need a shower.” She gave me a look that said, You wimp, or words to that effect, but finally agreed, and Joe had us escorted to the Roosevelt Hotel before we could change our minds. The other families followed.

  At 6:00 A.M. a police officer would be there to pick me up and take me back to 1 PP for breakfast. After breakfast I’d be out the door and down to the site, and I’d come back to 1 PP around eleven o’clock and stay there until twelve o’clock, when they would take me back to the hotel. This went on for two weeks, when Kathy told us that our grandson was waiting for us. He wanted to see us.

  So we made a deal: From now on Mama would stay home and I would stay at the site until Friday night. On Friday I would come home, wash clothes, have dinner with Jan, and then go back in on Sunday afternoon. I did this until they closed the site down; that was my goal.

  At the site I just sat and listened to the radio. But I had my binoculars, and as soon as I heard that a body had been recovered, I put everything in my bag and walked down to be part of the honor guard. I had the honor of being there when they found my son Joe in October. He had been on the thirty-eighth or thirty-ninth floor in the C staircase. I know this because the NYPD emergency service had it on their radios. They had everybody pinpointed, because the ESU cops all had a chip in their radios indicating where they were. We were one step away from that modern technology in FDNY.

  I had the honor of escorting my son to the morgue. I didn’t get to see him. They asked me if I wanted to, and I said no. The picture I have of my son is not the picture I’m going to see there. I saw what those buildings had done to the human body, as I had recovered a few of them. I remember finding one fireman with an open pocketknife right next to him. He didn’t die suddenly but had to open that knife to try and cut his mask off, and he didn’t succeed. And we saw him five, six weeks later, and it was like watching a Stephen King movie. I didn’t want to see that with my son.

  They never found John, and why they never found him was a matter of tactics. The man in charge had to make a decision: One pile they were going to leave, the other they were going to work on. Two things destroy DNA, fire and water. The South Tower, where John was, burned and burned and burned, and to put it out they used water, water, water. So any remains that may have been found, no matter how small, were lost.

  On the twelfth of November they closed the site and locked down the city when Flight 587 crashed in Rockaway and killed 260 people onboard and a few on the ground. Afterward everything got back to normal, but they did not reopen the site. They planned to reduce the forces there to twenty firemen and twenty cops, and Mayor Giuliani had agreed to have a meeting at the Sheraton Hotel with the family members to discuss the manpower reduction: We don’t need them because the situation is under control, all kinds of crap. So that was the agenda.

  Giuliani prefaced the meeting by saying, “I have to go to another meetin
g and can only be here for a few moments, but Commissioner [Thomas] Von Essen and Deputy Commissioner [Lynn] Tierney will answer all your questions.” The medical examiner was there, as was Sal Cassano [the second ranking fire chief and now fire commissioner]. Each person on the podium made a presentation, and the deputy commissioner said that because of the size of the tragedy, in which 343 firefighters perished, the Fire Department was overwhelmed.

  The mayor was getting ready to leave when this young lady sitting just on my left, who was there with two big men, went up to the microphone. They recognized her, and she said, “I want to address this to the Fire Department. Do you know what overwhelmed really is?” She said, “Overwhelmed is taking care of six-month-old twins and telling a three-year-old girl that her father will never come home. That’s what overwhelmed is.” She sat down, and you could have heard a pin drop. I looked at her and thought, Holy crap. She has three kids; she looks like she’s only about thirteen. We later became very good friends, and it turned out that the two men who were with her that day were her brothers, both of whom were firefighters. Her husband had been killed.

  Giuliani now started to field some questions. I waited my turn and said, “Mr. Mayor, I have a question to ask you, and a question to ask Mr. Von Essen. Can you tell me why the site was closed today?” And I swear, Giuliani didn’t know. He looked around as if for some assistance, and then, being the astute politician that he is, said, “Well, you know, John, the men and women have been down there nonstop for two months. It’s Veterans’ Day. We figured they needed a break to regroup themselves.” I said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor. What is Veterans’ Day? Macy’s going to have a big sale? It’s not a holiday. We don’t celebrate it like we celebrate Easter or Christmas.” I said, “If there is anybody in this city who knows that the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is when the Armistice was signed, it is the firemen. Firemen do not leave because it’s a holiday. There are still men missing. How can we leave?” He said, “You have my assurance that the site will never be closed again.” I said, “Mr. Mayor, I know that, because I’m going to be at that site every day. I’m going to be there every holiday. And I’m going to hold you to that.”

  I then said, “My second question is to Mr. Von Essen. Tom, you pride yourself in saying that you worked in a very busy truck company in the Bronx. From what I understand, all busy truck companies critique after a fire.” I said, “You’ve just had the world’s biggest office fire, and you haven’t critiqued it yet.” Sal Cassano then got up and said, “We have been discussing this at length.” I said, “Sir, I can give you the names of three men who were there when the building came down, and nobody has spoken to them. How can you critique without talking to the witnesses?” Man, I got their attention with that.

  Not long afterward I was at Macy’s with my granddaughter at the union’s Christmas party for the kids. Mayor Giuliani said hello, and then Von Essen came over and asked, “We still friends?” I said, “Why wouldn’t we be friends? The PD offered us police cars for all the families. Did you get my message about the police cars?” He said, “Yeah, but we gotta take care of our own, John.” “Taking care of your own?” I said. “Does that mean taking trips to Hawaii? Is that taking care of your own?” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Your chief of the special operations companies is leaving Tuesday for Hawaii with a bunch of family members. We haven’t found Ray Downey’s [the chief of special operations who was lost on 9/11] body yet. And he’s going to Hawaii. Why? Does he have trouble sleeping at night the way we do? Does he wake up at night in a sweat? Does he cry over stupid things? Does he have to stop his car when he’s driving because he’s crying and he can’t figure out why? If he has those symptoms, then maybe I should go with him.” He said, “Are you sure about this?” I told him, “The problem is, Tom, it’s your command. He works for you. I’m retired—how come I know about it?” He said, “Well, he’s not going,” and before he left Macy’s he called that chief and told him he was not taking that trip. Three days later we found Ray Downey. The trip was canceled. People on the trip came home a week early from Hawaii.

  At the funeral for Ray Downey that chief came over to me, but I walked away from him and have never talked to him since. I later found out that there were a lot of guys who went on trips while we were still digging. What kept me going was that I had two pretty good kids who were good men. They were brave, they were good family men, and I would assume they were very good husbands. They were great fathers, and for me to be anything less than that would be a dishonor to them.

  After Joe died, one of the police chiefs asked me if there was anything I needed. I said, “You know, you could do me a favor. Joe has a whole bunch of medals, and I have no idea what they mean, and I have three grandsons who may ask me one day. Could you give me a list of what he has and what they mean?” “Oh yeah, no problem, we can take care of that.” So, four months go by, I forgot about it. And I assumed he forgot about it. After six months I got a phone call: “Mr. Vigiano, what you asked for, it’s being worked on as we speak, and we’ll get back to you shortly.” I said, “Wow. How difficult could that be?” Another couple of months went by, and I got another phone call. “Mr. Vigiano, would you and Mrs. Vigiano care to come in to Commissioner Kelly’s [Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly] office at your convenience?”

  At One Police Plaza, we went to Kelly’s office, and the NYPD chief of department, Chief [Joe] Esposito, my wife, and I just sat there. I had known Ray Kelly a long time, and finally said, “Thank you very much for inviting us, but it’s a long way to come for a cup of coffee.” He laughed and said, “Well, you asked for something, and I wanted to give it to you personally.” He took out a box and said, “This is for you and Mrs. Vigiano.” It was a shadow box [a special case that protects against light damage] with Joe’s name, and it held his badge, the ribbon they wear for the Medal of Honor, and the combat cross. Then he handed me a booklet, in color, with the Police Department shield on it. And it was a record of Joe’s career: The medals he got, how he got them, and what they meant. And I looked at it and said, “I don’t know what to say.” Kelly said, “There’s one for each of your grandchildren, so now you don’t have to share it.”

  My son Joe had a remarkable career in the Police Department, and before he died a producer named Rob Port had filmed a documentary on the ESU featuring him. At their first meeting Rob was sitting between Joe and his partner, siren blasting, as they were heading to Harlem. Rob asked, “Where are we going?” It was a gun run—somebody with a gun. They gave him an NYPD Windbreaker to wear. By the time they pulled up, the operation had been neutralized: Whatever it was had been taken care of. They took Rob into this tenement, where there was blood all over the floor, blood on the landing, a couple of people killed, and a guy in handcuffs, deranged, on drugs. Rob’s eyes were like egg yolks, sunny-side up. One of the cops said, “Now you’re going to see what kind of world we live in.” Just after this, they started filming a series called E-Man.

  But 9/11 occurred, and twelve of the sixteen or seventeen men who were in E-Man were killed. The producers said, There is no way we can capitalize on those men’s lives. I said, “Wow, to see all those cops—and I knew most of them—it would be a shame if their voices weren’t going to be heard.” But then they found out that one of the officers had a brother, a firefighter, who was killed—Newsday had called John and Joe Vigiano “the Twin Towers.” So Rob asked me if we would be interested in a film about my sons. I said the decision was beyond me: I had two daughters-in-law, Kathy and Maria, and five grandchildren, Nicolette, Ariana, Joe, Jim, and John Michael, who had to be considered. I told him my wife and I would go along with it only if my daughters-in-law and my grandchildren agreed. So Rob contacted both of them, and they said if our mother-in-law and father-in-law want to do it, we’ll do it.

  The producers had a lot with Joe, but they needed film and photos of John, so we supplied them with everything. Through the magic of editing, t
hey put together a short documentary called The Twin Towers. My sons were boys of action, and you can see it in that video. You can see what Joe’s made of: I’m the first one in. I got to be the first one in the door. And John was a very aggressive firefighter. On 9/11 they were doing their jobs the way they were trained.

  So, fast forward. We left the Sundance Film Festival and were past the first hurdle, and a few months [later] get a call asking if the family would like to come to Hollywood. I said, “For what?” “For the Academy Awards; it’s one of the five nominees.” So in 2003 a lot of firemen and cops all rented tuxedos and flew with us to California. On the red carpet a lady with a microphone goes, “And here we have . . . ? Who are you?” Nobody knew who we were. Our seats were all over the place; we couldn’t even sit together. I was with my two grandsons up in the mountains someplace. My wife, Jan, was with one of my grandchildren and my daughter-in-law down below.

  When it was announced that The Twin Towers won, boy oh boy, it was bedlam.

  Afterward we were in limousines, going from party to party, and everybody was looking at us again, Who are they? Here’s this beautiful blond lady with handsome grandchildren. Rob was showing us off. We had a few cops with us too, so we had a super time.

  The next day Rob came to the hotel and found out that the Oscar doesn’t float. Cops took it for a swim in the pool, among other things. Oscar doesn’t drink—can’t hold his liquor. It was a good time, and Rob became part of our family. Oprah wanted us to go on her TV show. I called Rob and said, “This is your world. Where do I go?”

  So you can see how our lives changed. Joe Dunne, who was the first deputy commissioner, put up a wall around us with the press, and the only ones that got in our house were people that Joe Dunne approved. That’s why we got mostly the anchor people, and we met some very good people. I still kept my guard up, because of my training from the Fire Department about not trusting the press, but I have to say, the people that we met in those months were kind, very much like Boy Scouts.