At one point in the investigation, Michelle’s dad called me and tried to start ordering me around, admonishing me to get all the paperwork done properly in the case. His attitude, and the fact that he’d somehow missed the fact that his teen daughter was having a months-long affair with someone his age, infuriated me—and I told him as much. It was the last time I heard from the guy.
One of the parents I interviewed described to me how she’d seen Marganti and the Dooley teen making out on a beach in Port Monmouth one night. The woman made it clear that she didn’t want to “get involved” and most certainly didn’t want to testify in any courtroom.
Girls were coming out of the woodwork to accuse Marganti. But those cases only involved improper sexual touching—nothing that would have put the guy behind bars for any length of time. I wanted him to do some heavy time in a state prison for what he’d done to the Dooley kid. But a social worker on the case had already warned me that the girl was going to be a reluctant, and ultimately awful, witness on the stand.
The Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office agreed to take the case but cautioned me going in that it would be a hard one to get a conviction on because there was no physical evidence and everything hinged on Michelle Dooley’s testimony.
The case went to trial the following year. Marganti had hired an expensive and highly skilled defense attorney whom I knew. I testified at length for the prosecution. In a stunning twist, the defense opted not to cross-examine me, and I was dismissed from the courtroom. I was shocked that he let me go and wondered why. The only thing I could guess was that he was worried about additional damage to his defense if he kept me on the stand for even a minute. I’d never seen that happen before in my entire career. Michelle Dooley’s testimony, which had been shaky going in, fell apart on the stand, and the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. Marganti went back to living his life as if nothing ever happened.
Another year passed. I got a call from one of my buddies in the department with some devastating news: Michelle Dooley was dead. The teen had gotten her hands on a gun and used it to shoot herself in the head. That poor, vulnerable girl was gone.
Michelle couldn’t handle explaining her conduct in a public forum. It broke her.
What cuts me so deep is this: she didn’t see her own beauty, her own niceness. And she had it. She was a nice, young girl. She didn’t hurt people, she didn’t act cruelly. She got used for base reasons. She was a throwaway, until the day she took a handgun and shot herself in the head. Women rarely use a gun to end it. Pills or razored wrists, that’s the female way. Men take a shooting iron and blast a bullet to their heads.
How tortured inside was Michelle? Many believe that there is justice in the hereafter, that the scales are evened. They had better be. If this teenage girl isn’t set free of torment when she is in the hereafter, then this entire world is a meaningless playground for too many people worth less than shit.
What is it like to be a cop, a detective, a patrolman?
You are in a profession where ever admitting to being wrong, even when you commit the most human of mistakes, can cause you to be publicly placed in stocks. If you are involved in any sort of controversy, expect to be Monday-morning quarterbacked in a uniquely nasty fashion.
Cops are the lowest part of the criminal justice system. They must face the inequities of society as a sort of whipping post. If your life is turning to shit, and you have run out of elements to lay into, they are your last stop. People speak to cops and make demands of them that these same people would find unspeakable if they later saw the videotape. Wearing the badge, I have been spat on, slapped, called every disgusting adjective known to man—all for the high crime of being sent there to help.
At times, the badge was the only thing that held me back from administering my own type of justice, using the skills that I’d honed with the Pagans. I arrested one guy for taking his eight-year-old son’s arm and holding it over an open flame on the stove as a way of disciplining the child. He held his son’s arm there until the roasted meat started to melt onto the stove top. Hours later, that same man asked me what I could do about getting him a reduced bail. I wanted to turn his face into hamburger. But I didn’t.
The badge stopped me from crushing the face of a gentleman who told me that he fucked his 12-year-old daughter because she “was asking for it.” The badge stopped me from slapping the face of a motorist who smoked a red light simply because he drove an expensive Mercedes-Benz and felt he was entitled.
I have worked with too many cops to lie about the nobility of it. It is noble only if you make it so. The job is a unique method of making a difference in the world every day, in real time, no bullshit.
But I hate the cliché of “making a difference.” I despise the touchy-feely, politically correct jargon of this disappointingly non-enlightened age. All too often, cops conform to the images they are molded into by mass media. But if you are a mid-level business professional, a sanitation worker, a small-business owner or a supermarket cashier, you can easily be as noble as any of the “brave police officers” called to the profession.
Follow the words from the Hagakure: make compassion, courage and wisdom your everyday goal. Weep at nature’s beauty and cut down those who spit on justice. And, like the Toltec warrior, understand that the Creator really did give us two choices, strength or misery, and choose strength. I do not follow these precepts as I should. I am often too weak, but I will never end my trying. It remains the only task worthy of my manhood.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
WORKING THE PILE AT GROUND ZERO
The gray dust that covered lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers fell still sits deep within my lungs—just as it does in the lungs of the thousands of other volunteers who raced to the site that day. None of us got too hung up about safe breathing apparatuses. We just wanted to help.
I was hanging out in the Middletown Police Department’s detective bureau, complaining about how the New York Giants had let themselves get hammered by the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football, when the first TV broadcast hit about a plane striking one of the towers. When the second plane hit, the NFL, like so many other things, became as trivial as old dreams.
Detective Jerry Wiemer and I hopped in a car and raced to Mount Mitchell, a scenic promontory in Atlantic Highlands with clear views of lower Manhattan. We watched the towers fall from there. It seemed as if all of Manhattan was covered with a grayish-brown smoke. We stood in stunned silence, unable to comprehend the disaster that was taking place miles away. Jerry and I both knew that countless residents from Middletown and nearby areas worked in the Twin Towers and the Financial District, commuting daily by train or via the ferry that ran from the Atlantic Highlands Marina to either Jersey City or Hoboken. The ferry terminal was only two miles from our hilltop location.
Back at headquarters, all of the detectives were ordered to change from street clothes into uniforms and await orders. The department’s leadership had no idea how we would be used that day, but one thing was clear: we’d be needed.
On the ferry on September 11, 2001, heading to lower Manhattan.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had information—which ultimately proved false—that some of the ferries used to transport commuters to the Wall Street area were going to be targeted by passengers with bombs. I volunteered, along with Jerry, Mike Rubino, Cliff O’Hara and a few other guys, to go to New York and help secure the ferry lines. We were given the green light, and we headed out to the ferry terminal at the marina.
Shell-shocked commuters were fleeing New York in droves, and the ferries coming into Atlantic Highlands were packed. We checked on the ferry passengers for a while and then started hearing that police volunteers were needed for the work at Ground Zero. Early information was spotty at best, and rumors and facts were blended. The best information seemed to be coming from the workers themselves, while senior leaders back at Middletown Police he
adquarters were relying on other sources that appeared way off the mark.
Around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, we headed back into New York along with members of the department’s Special Weapons Assault Team to render any assistance that we could. There was a Catholic priest on the ferry who was going over to help. “Father, what should we do to the people who did this to us?” I asked.
“Nuclear war. Exterminate them,” he said. “They are burning and killing innocent civilians. They …” He couldn’t continue.
Lower Manhattan was a frightening chiaroscuro of twisted metal, in places where it couldn’t be, yet was. Smokey and desolate, with bits of paper flying everywhere and tossed about in the acrid smoke. The ash was several inches deep, and we were covered with gray soot that invaded our being.
We stopped at a fire station to use the bathroom and found a small group of firefighters with a thousand-yard stare in their eyes; they were the only survivors from their house.
Ground Zero, lit with klieg lights powered by generators, was a thick pall of smoke and ruin. We assembled at nearby Stuyvesant High School to prepare to work in rescue teams. Cops and other people who had already been working on the pile filtered in, soot-covered and exhausted. Nothing seemed to work. Even the toilets were backed up. The air became fetid.
Our small volunteer group separated from the SWAT team. Rather than sit and wait for some organizer to put us to work, we headed off to Ground Zero, intent on doing what we could. There, a New York City Police Department supervisor thanked us heartily for our efforts but said that we should stand down until daylight. “We have to assess how to even proceed with the start of a rescue,” he told us. “It’s too risky in the dark.
“Our guys are exhausted,” he continued. “Please come back. I’ll get you a ride to Jersey City. I’m told there’s one train on your line that’s still running. You can get out while it’s still possible tonight.”
Seven of us hopped onto the back of an NYPD pickup truck and sat in the cargo area, atop jerry jugs full of gasoline used to keep the generators going. The sergeant jumped in and drove us through the eerily empty Holland Tunnel. We were literally the only vehicle going through the tunnel in either direction. He dropped us off near the train terminal in Jersey City, waved goodbye and headed back to Ground Zero.
We had an hour to kill before the train left and decided to look for a bar; all of us were in dire need of a beer or two. Though we had our uniforms on, technically we were off duty. We noticed a couple of young guys with long hair who were clearly pipe heads—drug users. Normally, the guys would have deliberately steered clear of us. But this was 9/11, and everything was different. One of them walked over to us.
“Just back from the towers?” the guy asked.
“Yeah. Any place to get a beer around here?” Rubino said.
“Yeah, man, one place open that will be cool for you. I’ll walk you there.” The man took us to an upscale pub in a newly gentrified section of Jersey City.
“Hey guys, thanks,” he said. “You know. For going over there to help.”
For that moment, the guy wasn’t a pipe head, he was one of us, an American. The whole nation seemed to come together that day. I wonder if that’s what it felt like for Americans the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
When the seven of us walked into the bar, we got a standing ovation from a room full of complete strangers. We hadn’t said anything, but they immediately knew where we’d been from the gray dust that so thoroughly caked our uniforms. People started buying us drinks, far more than we could consume. Women kissed us, men shook our hands and many said, “God bless you.” The owner gave us a case of beer and refused to even consider taking money.
A short while later, we headed back to the train station and boarded the one headed for Middletown. Somehow, the conductor arranged for us to have our own car. I got home about 4:30 a.m. and was back to work with the rest of the guys at 8 a.m.
Me with Detective Barry Grimm and Detective Lieutenant Michael Rubino in the Holland Tunnel on September 11, 2001. The tunnel was completely empty and eerily silent as we headed back to New Jersey.
The mood was somber in headquarters that day. The chief was manic and determined to micromanage everything that we did. Our task that day was to check all the ferry and train stations for anything that looked out of the ordinary. Nothing was running to New York City, and any car left overnight in one of the parking lots likely belonged to someone who’d died in the World Trade Center. We took down the plate numbers and passed the information along to a group back at headquarters that was working on victim identification and notification of families. Middletown was the hardest-hit single community in the country in terms of deaths on 9/11. The brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald, with offices in the World Trade Center, had a number of employees who lived in Middletown; some died, and others survived. We were tasked with notifying the survivors’ families that they had been located.
It was a very strange aura that hung over the land anywhere in the tri-state area. Crime had come to a standstill. People appeared to be moving at a much slower pace, and it seemed many were reaching deep within to try to cope.
Amid the devastation, the words of the stoic philosopher Epictetus on our mortality comforted my soul:
What God/Zeus would say to Epictetus if he but could. My son and servant whom I love, I wish I could provide for you a body that would not so easily be shattered. But mortals possess bodies like clay vessels, and easily broken. I would love to give to you, Epictetus, a home never destroyed by the storms. But alas I cannot. But I can give you something much better, a treasure, a piece of the Gods. The faculty of using the appearances of things, the faculty of desire and aversion. If you take care of this faculty and consider it your only possession, you will never be hindered, never meet any impediments, you will not lament, you will not blame, you will not flatter any person.
Rubino was in contact with relief workers actually moving debris on the pile. He told me the guys were exhausted and happy to have cops from anywhere relieve them. The chief, meanwhile, was towing the bureaucratic line that the relief effort was going smoothly, and that only those who were trained for rescue efforts should be there. Having seen the actual site, I was stunned. How many people could there be who are trained to deal with mass-casualty disasters in which skyscrapers are brought down by jet aircraft?
A view of the lower façade of the World Trade Center with first responders on September 11th.
My experience, as well as Cliff O’Hara’s, suggested that no one really knew how to proceed, and they were winging it using ingenuity, guts and lots of manpower. So, on September 13, Mike Rubino, Cliff O’Hara, Jerry Weimer, Steve Dollinger and I, along with several other men, took personal days and headed back to Ground Zero—despite opposition from the chief, who feared that someone could get hurt and trigger a worker’s compensation claim. I couldn’t fathom the chief’s position and thought I was in some kind of twilight zone. We left police headquarters under the glare of doom from higher-ups.
Building 7 comes down right in front of me.
The Middletown Police Department routinely worked with the team from the nearby coast guard station in Sandy Hook, so our group arranged to hitch a ride on a cutter from Sandy Hook to lower Manhattan. Normally, the waters south of Manhattan would have been a busy hub of activity. But that day, there was nothing moving on the water. There were no recreational boats, no ship traffic and no commercial or private planes overhead. We were on the only boat moving through the area. An occasional air force fighter would fly by high overhead, as well as a few helicopter gunships.
We went straight to Ground Zero and regrouped near a fire engine parked outside a tall building. Some of the other volunteers were trying to figure out the best route onto the rubble pile. One of our guys, Larry Hall, grabbed a seat on a folding metal chair; seats were at a premium.
Suddenly, a chorus of
panicked screams came from the nearby building.
“Run, run! It’s coming down!”
Hundreds upon hundreds of rescue workers—and anyone else nearby—started running for their lives. Pieces of debris began falling around us, and we all thought we were going to get buried alive or crushed. Hall tripped as he was getting up from the chair. He fell forward, landing face down, and suddenly had shoe and boot marks on his back as people ran over him.
I grabbed the guy under his left arm and hauled him to his feet, just as others smashed me to the ground. I went down hard on my surgically repaired right knee. Afraid of being trampled—or potentially getting killed by a falling building—I stood and began to run with the group of panicked humanity. The pain in my knee caused me to view the world through multicolored dots. The people who trampled others were not cowards or uncaring persons. Hell, they’d volunteered to be there, just like us. What took place was primal, a fear of being buried alive or crushed like an insect.
To this day, I’m not quite sure what happened. I believe that the American Express building suffered some kind of internal structural collapse but remained standing. Some debris cascaded down, and it truly was a close call. We never could have outrun the carnage had that building actually collapsed; we were way too close.
After catching my breath, I realized my knee was stiffening and giving me some real pain. I went to an aid station nearby, and they wanted to take me to a hospital. I refused, saying I wanted to go back on the line, and they relented when I walked away showing more confidence in my knee than I felt inside.
Jersey Tough Page 30
