inside the office of the nypd police commissioner

In any case, the younger men had taken the proper precautions. Torre added that it seemed doubtful that even if the switch had worked, the match heads would have burned hot enough to ignite the fuel. Putkowski, a 15-year veteran of the squad, didn't think it would have ignited either. 'I'm not sure it would have worked,' Torre said. The idea was that the sparks would ignite the fuel and send the flames down into the gas tank, triggering a satisfyingly lethal explosion. Its trigger mechanism was designed so that when the car door was opened and the front seat sat in, a motion switch was flipped and a jolt of electricity snapped down a hot wire stripped of insulation and rigged over the fuel line. 'It comes back and I see the battery, the switch, the filler, and the hot wire.' He handed over a pale gray and milky white X-ray picture to Torre.ĭean explained the device. 'Right up until the picture came back we were sure it was a hoax,' Dean said. Joe Putkowski wandered in and got comfortable on the other side of it.

He sat on the edge of the black vinyl couch that was jammed against one wall. It was the squad's pride that it had the freshest, strongest coffee of any NYPD office, including that of the commissioner himself.ĭean, a tall man with a soft, husky voice, stepped into Lt. Every hour or so the standing coffee would be tossed and a fresh pot brewed. The commercial coffeemaker was on inside the kitchen, pushing piping hot water through the grinds. They were finishing up their paperwork on the energy drink bomb. Perricone and Dean sat outside in the squad room. The year's first pile of paper was already in front of him. Mark Torre was at his desk sipping his morning coffee from an oversized dark blue Bomb Squad mug. Mischievous eyes and a red and white sawtooth grin painted on the nose point the way inside. A large, finned, khaki green military bomb hangs nose down from the ceiling above it. It took a split second.īomb Squad Base is a suite of three shabby rooms behind a plain beige steel door on the second floor of a Greenwich Village police precinct. The water stream severed the power supply, disrupted the electrical circuit, and sprayed parts of the device all over the front lawn of the attacker's intended victim. Perricone and Dean set up their water disrupter, loaded a shotgun shell, and pulled the trigger. The X-ray showed it was packed with match heads and attached to the car's gas line. The suspicious package was a Red Bull can. Kenny went down and took an X-ray, and you could see a mercury switch, a battery, you could see what looked like a load. We shot over quick I suited up Kenny quick-and I wanted to have at least a picture in our hands before showed up. We were a little nervous, but Kenny and I were a little excited to have a real bomb. On the way there I called my buddy working on Emergency Service that day, and he says to me, 'Paulie, you know that I open everything, and I'm the last guy to call the Bomb Squad unnecessarily, but if I had to guess what a mercury switch looked like.this would be it.' So we had a bit of pucker action on the way there. Perricone and Dean were two of their replacements. Security and family came first, and 11 sets of retirement papers were sent to Police Headquarters. If they elected to stay, they would later retire on much smaller pensions. They had completed a year fat with hard-earned overtime and, if they elected to retire, their pensions would be figured against the swollen earnings. It had been a massive influx of new blood for such a small unit a unit that had had less than 225 members in its first 100 years.Īfter the World Trade Center attack, many of the most senior squad members had been faced with a choice. Perricone and Dean, along with seven other newcomers, had joined the squad in February 2002.

The job came in, just before we were scheduled to go off,' Perricone said afterward. 'We had done a marathon worked the overnight on New Year's Eve into New Year's Day started at 3 P.M., worked until 7 A.M., and then began a day tour. It appeared someone had rigged a homemade bomb to the undercarriage of a man's car. They notified Bomb Squad Base, tossed their gear back into their response truck, and headed out to Whitestone, Queens, under lights and siren.

The two young NYPD bomb techs had just finished up a security sweep. Listening to the excited radio traffic, Kenny Dean and Paulie Perricone had heard enough. 'UNDERNEATH WHITE AUTO- STS PACKAGE IS ATTACHED TO HIS AUTO-SOMETHING-UNDERNEATH-HAS ELECTRICAL-TAPE AROUND IT-BOMB SQUAD RESPOND TO LOC-'

Inside the office of the nypd police commissioner