Never Forget the People

No BS Newshour Episode #435

Never Forget the People

 

Beleaguered Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield can’t get a simple hole filled.

 

While the city firefighters work without a contract on the anniversary of 9/11 they say Never Forget.

But they have.

 

Ask New York Search & Rescue Firefighter Sean Cummins.

He was there at Ground Zero those 25 years ago.

 

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Sponsored by American Coney Island, Pinnacle Wealth Strategies, and XG Service Group

TRANSCRIPT:

I don’t think that we want to do any Sheffield scandal this week. What I want to do is give the media a week to actually come up with something original. Okay, you know, do some work, do some digging.

But next week, we’re going to light the house on fire. So y’all catch up, catch up real quick with what I want to do today is talk about the second most famous hole in the city. And Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield can’t get that one filled.

The hole is on 25th Street on the city’s west side where a house once stood. Y’all remember the house had a piano and on that piano in that house, little Stevie Wonder learned to play music. There should be an historical plaque there.

Instead, there is a massive open pit of super contaminated dirt that’s been pooling with rainwater for nearly two freaking months. The house was demolished a few years ago and the contractor then filled it with dirt, poisoned with lead at levels so high, it puts Flint’s water to shame. Another contract won a bid of nearly $100,000 to just dig up the dirt, take it to the landfill and refill the hole with clean dirt.

The hole is so contaminated that the contractor wrapped the neighboring house entirely in plastic sheeting. Do you remember? The contractor dug a little bit out, saw a swamp of subterranean water running from some unknown origin and promptly abandoned the project, leaving the excavator parked on the sidewalk. Can you imagine this? No.

Would you live this way? Hell no. It’s fucking illegal. The swamp water poured into the cellar of the neighboring home owned by Isalia Smith.

Now Smith’s house is contaminated with lead and the city is going to have to pay. Smith’s councilwoman, Gabriela Santiago Romero, decided to continue with her summer vacation rather than help her beleaguered constituent. And I called you, madam, and then no callback.

I didn’t call, I didn’t call your handlers. You know what I did? I called the line you asked the public to call to get the problem solved. I did that.

No. So get ready. Mayor Sheffield has not returned Smith’s phone calls either because she’s very busy.

And I’ll give you all one week to find out what she’s busy about. Now her honor continues to hide, caught up in a swirling scandal of graft and sex, a seedy scandal entirely of her own making. One of Sheffield’s former lovers faces federal indictment for poisoning hundreds, if not thousands of other demolition holes.

Sheffield, as a member of city council, voted to award millions in contracts to her lover, Brian McKinney, quote, while they were getting to know each other, unquote, as her handlers put it. Now, when the relationship was exposed by me, Sheffield’s first instinct was to claim she never voted for lover boys contracts. That was a lie.

Her first instinct to you, Detroit, was to lie. That’s not gonna, she blew it. There’s no credibility here.

Now listen to me. Nothing spells municipal C O R R U P T I O N like a dirt hole that can’t be filled by a mayor who can’t be found. So I called Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

You know, he used to work in the Detroit health department. He’s an expert. I called three times as a cricket, crickets too busy with meet the press to come out and meet the people of Detroit.

I called his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. His people said he’s more than willing to come check out 25th street. I’m going to hold him to that.

I call Jocelyn Benson, the Democrat candidate for governor who alleges that she lives in Detroit. Nada, nothing, no dice, no dirt, nice handbags. I was going to call her Republican opponent, John James, true story.

He called me first out of the blue. He’d seen our stories about the Stevie wonder hole and he wanted to know more. I told him I’d be happy to show his staff around just as I would with Sheffield or El-Sayed or Benson’s or Rogers.

It ain’t politics to me, people. It’s people. To my surprise, James showed up on 25th street last week without security and I introduced him to miss Smith.

She talked and he listened and then he did a tick tock video. Naturally, the congressman promised in the short term he’d do what he could to get her situation straightened away. Then James promised that if elected governor, listen to me, this is a real offer here.

James promised that if elected governor, he’d find the money to clean up the entire city where undoubtedly thousands of holes have been filled with toxic soil under the corrupt leadership of Mike Duggan and Mary Sheffield. James called the fiasco another flint and he’s absolutely right. Now, I’m not endorsing anybody, but Detroit will need, by my estimate, $200 million minimum to clean up this crime scene and only the federal government has that kind of It’d be good to have a governor in Lansing who has decent relationships in Washington and it’d be good to have a governor who is not afraid of Detroit.

Now, I made a video of that. Want to see it? Hit it. I could drive you around the city and all the shit they used to look.

See this stuff? That was the lean-to to cover the poison hole and then all the plastic fell down anyway. They came over, they took it out and they just threw it on the ground. What the fuck is this? Would you live next to this? No, no data boy.

Jay’s running for lieutenant governor. John James is the top of the ticket. You know, John James, you know, John had some black man who flew helicopters in the army or something.

John James, you’re a Republican. No, he’s a Republican. Oh, yes, he is.

Charlie said that you were here. And as soon as I heard about it, I was like, we’ve got to clear the schedule. I want to come down and talk to you.

Stevie Wonder learned to play piano at that spot. He sure did. Stevie won 30 grand to tear it down and 100 grand to dig up some dirt.

And they can’t dig up the dirt. Who’s in charge of this? It’s the city. Who does the city answer to? He’s getting paid off.

We’ll leave it to the FBI. They tore the house down. We found out it was poisoned.

Scandal. And then they come here and go, this is the most toxic scandal in the city. Then they came and wrapped her house in plastic.

They made a show out of it. Right? Remember? What’d you say? So you put me in a bubblegum machine. And they did.

And they didn’t get her permission. Show them. Then they unwrapped it, never finished it.

I can’t even have my grandkids over here. My daddy is 80 something years old. I can’t even have my daddy over here because he’s blind.

But when he come out here and walk up into that. No accountability. No nothing.

My friend told me to call the city county mayor or something. But I heard she messing with the man that’s over there. We spent three quarters of a billion dollars in the last decade for demolition.

So every one of these has got shit in them. It’s flint with dirt. And what we’re asking is helpers.

My boat’s for sale. Your’s for sale. Do something for me.

This town won’t do it. I’m not done from a crackerjack box. But me, I ain’t got no business living like this.

When these people are here f***ing up and trying to cover up. When I’m governor, we’re going to get to the bottom of these things. But before I become governor, I’m going to be looking into this to see what resources we can bring from the federal level to not just clean up this dirty hole, but to clean up all the dirty holes around the city.

Live from downtown Detroit, it’s the No Bullshit News Hour with my main man, Charlie LeDuc. No more bullshit. No more bullshit.

Is this the hole in one? It’s a hole in one. Fifty thousand dollars if you hit it. Luke Nowacki, financial wealth management.

What is 50 grand after tax? 37, 750. What about state tax? Yeah, that’s, I’m talking, throwing both in there. What about sales tax? There’s no sales tax.

Well, you’re buying a beer. It’s income. You’re buying a beer.

Eh, we rate that off. Luke Nowacki, Financial Wealth Management. Expense Allowance.

Call or text Luke Nowacki at 248-663-4748 for sound financial advice. At Michigan Drive. You saw the state, Detroit, you saw the state of the city.

That’s not an endorsement. And what I meant by my votes for sale, I noticed jokes going all around and $5,000 and all that. I meant this.

It occurred to me there. Why do I vote? I vote like it’s a duty. What do you get from it? And they ignore me.

So my, my vote, I, I’ve changed. I’m 60 years old. I’ve changed.

You can absolutely, absolutely have my vote. If you do something for me, something tangible, you get it done. You never hear from me again.

Right? Nothing, nothing but fucking failed. And the roads suck. And the insurance is too much.

And drivers around here pay the highest car insurance rates in the country. Why? Because the systems price people on everything, but they’re driving. Cure came to Michigan to do it differently.

Your rate is priced mainly on how you, well, you drive not your credit score. The fuck is the credit score got to do with insurance. It should be your driving record.

Am I wrong? No, you’re right. Cause they want to make sure you can pay them. Is there anything more corrupt in a city that, okay, listen, let me finish this here.

You’ve been driving these shit ass roads your whole life, but you should get priced like it. Like you deserve to be considered a human being on par with everybody else and not being gouged. How can the poorest city pay the highest rates for everything? Drivers who switched to cure see an average savings of over 40% go to cure.com right now and see what your driving is actually worth.

Cure.com. American Coney Island. So good. Even Al Roker from the Today Show eats here.

Not like that other guy, Al Joker, who eats at Lafayette. So make sure you are Roker and not a Joker. American Coney Island.

Well, you know, when it rains, the power goes out and when the power goes out, the internet goes out. When the internet goes out, I call my friend, Matt and Bernie at XG Service Group. Look at Bernie here on his hands and knees, giving it everything he’s got.

Look at that man crack. So busy. He forgot to wear a belt.

There’s Matt right there getting the board together. That’s 734-245-4100. If you need Matt and Bernie to come take care of your voice over internet, your security cameras, off-campus access control, Wi-Fi and cameras for homes and business, they’ll design it for you.

You got restaurants, they do drive-thru systems, railroad cameras for public safety, total wireless camera systems for your home and business. Yeah, that’s right. Call XG Services at 734-245-4100.

All right, listen. I was going to let it go by 9-11. I told a friend, 25th anniversary is a big deal and they won’t speak about it again for 25 more years.

And then my friend, my editor actually, Mark Knight over at the injury goes, I was wrong. You were right. It did mean a lot to people.

And it did not seem to me that those hundreds of men and women who rushed to ground zero on the morning of September 11th, 2001, didn’t seem to me they were heroes. They were just good people raised by good people. And they answered their neighbor’s call and we didn’t know what to call them.

So we called them heroes. Now, one of them was Sean Cummings, a New York city firefighter assigned to the squad one firehouse in Brooklyn, which lost half its men when the twin towers came crashing down. Yes, devastating.

Getting a little choked up just thinking about that. Cummings was built like a jockey and because of his size and specialized training for tight and closed rescues, he spent thousands of hours at ground zero digging and clawing through the muck and the ash and the steel and the heat. And on that first day, Cummings and firefighter Jimmy Lopez found alive an obese man pinned in a smoldering crag between buildings four and five.

The buildings were on fire and debris was still raining from the sky. And the two men thought they were going to die. But they found courage in one another and they carted the man to a medic wagon.

That man would be one of just 20 survivors. In the ensuing months, Cummings found bodies or parts of bodies of another hundred people, including the nail polished hand of a woman he gently tucked into the pocket of his bunker gear. Reluctantly, Sean allowed me to write stories about him and his workmates, both the dead and the living, their widows and their children.

All of them were heroes in my mind. And one day the following April we met for coffee in Midtown Manhattan. Cummings was tired and broken and weary of the adulation being heaped on him and other first responders.

The truth was not every hero wore a badge and not every badge wearer was a hero. Cummings I could tell was haunted. And here I was a pestering reporter trying to pry loose his pain only to share his most intimate thoughts in the New York Times.

Now he’s Irish. I’m going to try my Irish accent. Look, he said as he sat down his empty cup and stepped into the afternoon sun, I remembered this that fucking afternoon sun.

I remember like I’m standing there now. Sean said to me, I’m done talking. Just wearing a uniform doesn’t make you a hero.

And with that, Sean was gone from my life. You might say I lost another friend at ground zero. We had not spoken in nearly 20 years.

And then five years ago, the telephone rang. He’d found me through the internet. How are you, mate? Sean? It’s been real long, man.

He goes that it has. Now we don’t know each other well, Sean Cummings and I, but ours is a friendship forged in horror, which makes it different. There’s something familiar and forever in a friendship like that.

And there was a lot to talk about because Cummings is a man of substance. He faded away into the exciting and obscure life of service, the sort who occupies the dangerous places that only other people of action ever see, the place the rest of us run away from. He made the elite rescue one with the FDNY, plucking children from burning apartment houses and such.

Then dig it now. He was a paratrooper with the Air National Guard and volunteered for Iraq in 2006. His unit suffered terrible casualties.

Cummings said he felt it was obligation to his dead brethren at ground zero to serve. And when he returned home, he became a fire marshal. Then he caught the ground zero sickness, cancer in his sinuses and dormant cells in his throat.

He took a medical retirement and moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania of all places, working as a town guide. It reminded him of Ireland. He told me that’s where he grew up on a farm.

We talked to the battlefield photographers who in 1863 dragged around the corpse of a Confederate soldier and posed it in positions of horror and glory. We spoke of the photographer at ground zero who hid the severed hand of some unknown human being underneath a traffic cone, waiting for the light to get just right to steal a photograph. And that photograph now hangs in some museum.

We laughed how the media hasn’t changed all that much in 150 years. We spoke of the aptly named Captain Peter Generous, a soldier in the Michigan contingent who gave his life at Gettysburg so the great American experiment might survive. I wonder what a man like that must have been thinking, Sean said.

We talked about firefighter Steve Siller, Cummins’ running mate at Squad One. Siller’s shift was over the morning of September 11th. Driving home, Siller got word that the first plane had struck.

So he turned his truck around, he drove back to Squad One, he gathered up his gear, and then he sped to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, but the authorities had already closed it. So Siller gathered his 60 pounds of bunker gear and humped it through the tunnel underneath the New York Harbor, only to meet his end in the Twin Towers. Goddamn.

I wonder what a man like that must have been thinking, I said. We spoke of our children and grandchildren yet to be. We spoke for nearly four hours and we drank whiskey.

I did not tell Sean that I loved him. But I’ll say it now. Sean, I love you, man.

Well, thank you, Charlie. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good.

How’s the cancer? It hasn’t come back, which is good. That’s a blessing. And so that’s a good thing.

But I live in Florida now. I left Gettysburg. What do you do? You live in Miami? You go clubbing? No, I live in a place called Mount Dora.

Don’t tell him. Then everybody would be flocking to see the hero Sean Cummins. Yeah, I don’t think so.

Okay, Sean, what have you been thinking about? What do you remember? You know, I could ask you, what do you remember about that day? But how about like last week? What were you thinking about? I’m thinking this is going to be 25 years. I think it’s time now to my uniform is hung up. It’s done.

I’m over. So I have a whole life to live, as short as it may be or as long as it may be. But that’s an old life.

Time to move on. Yeah, it’s hanging on the wall. Yeah, but I don’t.

It’s like I know about Pearl Harbor. You know, I don’t I want I gave a talk at a at Muskegon Community College. It was really an honor because it was the young people.

And they, you know, they didn’t really know like the human part of it. And I don’t want them to forget. I’m never going to forget.

Well, I spoke on we have a cabin up in Murphy, North Carolina. And I was up there last week. And I spoke they did the first time they did a ceremony in the square.

So I spoke on Friday, for I think about 10 or 11 minutes. A quick synopsis of that day. Give it to me.

So give me give me this. You know, this is it’s the same story as before, you know. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s what it is.

Well, tell me tell me about you and Lopez finding that guy. Just just, you know, it was Jimmy, there was there was four of us. It wasn’t, we were just looking, we were underneath there.

And myself, Jimmy, and there was two other guys. Was this the same day? Or was it the next day? Oh, no, it was right there. It was right after the second hour come down.

The motherfuckers on fire. And you guys are like, on your hands and knees like crawling through that shit. But we were going through and I guess we heard a bone in our column for help.

So we went over there. And he was banged up like he’d a broken leg, at least a broken leg. And but we’re trying to get him out.

And of course, we’ve no Stokes baskets. You know, you’re trying to like the human body when it’s like limp like that is heavy as hell. Trying to crawl over rubble.

And they were starting to, I guess, collapse inside. So the chiefs like everybody out. So we sort of as I said to Jimmy afterwards was like, why didn’t you leave? I go, why didn’t you leave? Because you stayed.

So I stayed. And so we got him out. And I remember cursing at him.

I was like, I was so scared. I remember cursing at him. And then thinking I was going to get in trouble later on.

That’s how vast this was. We didn’t even realize how, you know how it was. So but yeah, he got off.

So hopefully I’m hoping that man lived to live a good you know. It’s but it’s funny. I since I last spoke with you, I have my son has a two year old now.

So and it’s funny. We were talking the other day. And I was sitting there up in the woods in my cabin.

And he’s heading into work. He’s, you know, he does. He’s Special Forces with the military.

So we’re chatting away. And we’re just saying his son is to 9-11 as I was to Pearl Harbor, meaning we’re the same distance. I was born the same amount of time after.

And he said to me, he said, Listen, I want you to sit down one night with me. He said, we’re going to get a pen and paper. He said, I want you to tell me all the little things.

He said, not the big things. He said, the little things that you guys said to each other. He said, he said, so we can have it on paper.

And he said, just the funny things. He said, like, that may have been said, because I remember saying to him, when the planes hit, I went upstairs, my house in Rockaways. And on the very top floor, there was a bathroom with a tiny little window.

And I remember looking out the window, and you can see the towers on fire. And he goes, he said, I never knew that. He said, those are the type of things I want you to tell me.

He said, so I’ll be able to pass them on. He said, but I want you to pass them on. But he said, if you write these down, we’re going to have them as part of a history, like everything you wrote, like he’s read all that, you know.

But we persevere. I’ve had four friends have died in the last two years. Bobby West from squad one died.

Did he really was? I know. Bobby died. Wow.

Bobby died. Yeah. Do you remember? Do you remember Eddie Keating, the photographer that I hung with all those days? Short? Yeah, he died of brain cancer.

Without doubt. He caught it there. Yeah.

Well, it’s, I pretty much told the World Trade Center medical to go to hell. And for me to get my medication, I have to go up there. I don’t know if they ever told you this, or I ever told you this.

Do you know we were tested three weeks afterwards, and the CDC took all our blood? Did I ever tell you that? No, I’m listening. Yeah. So the CDC took like 12 vials or 15 vials of blood.

They were in there in their uniforms and all this. And I remember saying, Oh, they’re like, Oh, this is for the baseline. I go, well, I said, I had a medical on the Friday before 911.

So my baseline was whatever that date was, you know what I mean? Four days before, that’s my baseline. But now we go up there, you know, I can’t get my medication unless I go to New York and get blood. And I sent him an email saying, Yeah, I said, you guys were just guinea pigs, because you want to see what this did to us.

I said, I shouldn’t have to drive come all the way from Florida, just to get my medication for something that you’ve been diagnosed with. I said, so you can go all go to hell. I said, I’m sick.

He said, we’re just guinea pigs for you people. I said to give the CDC more ammunition, so they can see what what it actually did to us. So a little bit around that.

Let me add, you said the Rockaways and for anybody doesn’t know, it’s a peninsula. It’s in Queens, but it’s actually next to Brooklyn. So it’s basically where Kennedy Airport is, you go out east towards the ocean.

That’s the Rockaway Peninsula. So it’s a distance from the city. And you saw the buildings burning and the Rockaways lost more than anybody.

Because all the firemen live there. And all of their sons and daughters went into high finance. So they were working, I think almost 100 people from the Rockaways alone.

Do you remember Bernie here in his bar? Yeah, Bernie. Bernie’s bar got destroyed in Sandy and they rebuilt it. The Harbor Lights.

The Harbor Lights. Now, yeah, I did. I did a story about all you folks in the Rockaway and how you got hit.

And I wandered on the Harbor Lights. And Bernie all broken up, lost his son, he lost his cook, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had to get out of New York after about two months.

I just drove home for the weekend, drank with my mother and drove back, crawled into bed. And the alarm goes off. And the airplane headed for the Dominican Republic from Kennedy flips over and crashes into the Rockaways two months later, right across the street from Bernie’s place.

Do you remember that? I was that was my first day off. I thought I told you that story where I went and got a coat from the local firehouse. And I went up on the pile.

Then I ended up staying there the whole day. I ended up becoming a runner for special operations, going back because communications is you know, so I was running backwards and forwards at that until the evening time. At that plane crash.

Yeah, I had the old turn it go to the old coats, the old fire coats. Not a not a bunker gear. Remember the ones back in the day? What like the like the tarp ones? Yeah, the big the rubber ones like the old fashioned ones you see in the movies.

Yeah, I was wearing that. Because one of my friends, he said to me, he said, he said, he said, I pull up. He said, we’re coming in.

He said, I pull up and I see you on top of the whole mess. He said, and you look like a Gloucester fisherman. Because I had, I had the boots on.

You know, so but yeah, that was there was because I thought I talked to you about that. Like, you know, I was coming in, I was I had built a deck. And I was coming in from Breezy Point.

I just gotten staying for the deck. And I was going home to stay in the deck and the plane hit. So I went straight got the gear.

I went back up there. And because I was like four blocks from our house, my house. So yeah, and yeah, because that was that was the weirdest thing.

Because I remember going to the people’s house because there was houses on fire. But this house next was perfectly fine. And the people were standing on the porch.

I remember going and asking a man, do you have any sheets? And he did a double. Oh, he knew what I was trying to do. So I thought we got a bunch of sheets.

We covered all the people. Because the people were all over the place was still strapped in their seats. It was a so that was a Yeah, so that was a that was that was really my first day off.

So I remember in that scene, some firefighters were putting bodies in the body bags, and they were melting out of the corpses. And it’s like you were smart enough to get sheets. Well, we were just covering because it was like the plane.

I mean, there was luggage, it was planes with people still in seats. It’s kind of weird. You know, surreal.

The train center was you’d expect to have seen 1000s of people which we didn’t. But in Rockaways, everybody was just lying there on the all over the streets, all of the houses. Fucking crazy.

Okay, so would let me go back to ground zero for a minute. You’re crawling around in there looking for remains. What things do you remember a little like you like your son as what little details? What? What? vision sticking your head up? Like, for instance, I’ll say, Well, I don’t remember a single doorknob in that pile.

I don’t remember seeing a toilet.

Well, I’ll show you. Look, it just, it just happens to be here. I think I showed it.

Can you see? Yeah, it’s a piece of glass. What is that? That’s from the trade center. I pick it up and put it in my pocket.

Why that? Because it was the only piece of glass I saw. I didn’t see any other glass the whole time. Let that sit.

Just let that, let that sit a second. This man, I would, I would assume every inch of that footprint you covered on your hands and knees and you saw no glass, but that that’s the only piece of glass I saw. So, and the only reason I picked it up, it was the only piece of glass I saw.

That’s why I picked it up. Why would you pick up a piece of glass? It was glass all over the place. You know what I mean? And, and that’s the shape of it.

I didn’t do that. That’s the shape it was like a, I guess like a deck of cards or pack of cigarettes. Okay.

So I want everybody to think about that. I want you to look at this. I want everybody to think about something about the very good men and women who went down there that I don’t know what to call them.

That’s the only piece of glass. You know how tall those buildings were? Do you know how much glass there was? It all vaporized and we were down at speed. I was there almost every day he was there.

That’s what we were breathing. So the ground zero sickness is true. Those buildings had asbestos in them.

No glass. Do you remember Sean for days and weeks afterwards, there was the heat that was causing an updraft and all the paperwork was floating around like birds. Do you remember? Well, I described it as the bodies were being poached, like you’d poach an egg, steaming them and you can smell the bodies as well.

Can you see this? I’m not sure if this is, what is that metal melted bullets? Yeah. It looks like bullets. Oh, there it is.

Yeah. Move it a little bit more in front of you to your right. Yeah.

There you go. What do you suspect that came from? It’s well, I mean, you had a NYPD, you had a port authority, you had the FBI, you had everybody down there. So it’s, you know, God knows it was melted again.

I picked it up. I just thought it was weird. It went to my pocket.

Like a lot of this stuff you put in your pocket and you found it like later when you put your hand in or whatever. But the glass was, as I said, the glass I picked up just because I never saw it. And I have something.

Let me just grab one sure thing. Wow. Wow.

This, this was taken Charlie when I, um, I came out of, uh, put a closer, put a closer to the camera. There you go. Fuck.

I had just come out of a hole. We’ve been in a hole and that ended up in some museum in Manhattan. And, um, somebody said, Hey, there’s a picture of you hanging in a museum.

So you can see, like, I got that you’re sweating. That’s that’s the way. And you want to hear something funny.

You see that helmet. Yeah. That that was my helmet.

And the fire department wanted a $50 from me when I was retiring to keep my helmet. So yeah, it’s right. So one of the guys, but Charlie, you know, the farmer, the farmer’s like, yeah, okay.

Yeah. He gave me the $50. Like when you’re turning your gear in, like it’s, it’s, it’s out my, it’s here.

It’s going to go to my grandson, but it’s just the typical, you can’t see the forest for the tree. Some of these people, like they said about Adolf Hitler, that it was the civil servants put them in power. And it’s a hundred percent true.

It’s a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You know, it’s, you know, I came to this. Yeah.

This is how I came to me. I want to, I want to mention the name, Marion Fontana, the widow of Dave Fontana. You’re running mate.

And this is how I first come to know all you boys is I’m down there and then we get wind that they’re going to shut down your firehouse. They’re going to shut it down right after this horror. And you know, the widows are down there and they, she doesn’t know where her husband is and, and there’s no fucking way you’re closing this because we don’t know where else to go.

And so I became close with Marion and then Marion called me one day and said, they’re not good. They’re going to change this from a search and rescue to a reclamation project. After they took the gold out of Deutsche bank member, they were just going to just start scraping it out and not look for people’s remains.

And she was crying and said, what do we do? I said, you get the girls together. I get the camera come down to ground zero. And you know, we got all that stopped.

That’s what your helmets reminded me of. That was a small thing. And then the bigger thing is what they wanted to do.

And there’s no fucking way because it’s we the people. Well, it’s I remember things there. Like if they had their way, they would have bulldozed all of that to Staten Island and moved on and they could care less.

It’s Charlie. So I retired and this is the truth. 23, 23 and a half years, I guess.

And I retired on the 27th of June 2019. I retired because as you said medical, and I got a phone call at about seven minutes to five. And the lady said to me, she goes, Fire Marshal Cummins at 0900 tomorrow morning, you will be officially retired.

If you have any questions, please call us back. Thank you. And that’s what you are.

You’re a number. That’s all you are. You’re a number and nobody cares.

It’s it’s it’s that’s it. You’re just I guess what? I watched the thing a guy was saying. Life goes on.

Time goes on. Time doesn’t stop whether you’re here or I’m here. Time goes on.

And you’ve got to realize that as the guys in the firehouse say the big red door goes up and the big red door goes down. That’s it. That’s it.

No move on. I refuse. I say I can move on.

But it’s been my honor and I never thanked you for letting me write you down for a moment in history. See, when I think back about the sweep of human existence, I think about 1500 AD 1000 AD 1000 BC 2000 you understand me? The year 2000 is monumental. And so computers and this and the spy state like things changed and you were there.

And it really is nice to hear a human being. Well, it’s like, the city doesn’t care. The guys care.

When I say that, like the city, you’re you’re a name on a piece of card like this. And you’re just a name. And they don’t know your face.

They don’t know your story. And they’re dealing with 10,500 farmer, they don’t care. Like you’re just one more guy.

And that’s that’s it. It’s the guys you’re with who care and your family and your friends. That’s okay.

Okay. And these guys are human beings. And I have some tape.

I want you to listen to it. It’s about four minutes and it’s it’s just before the towers fall. Do you mind? Can I play? It’s it’s fire dispatch.

Okay. Got it. Okay.

Get some people up to 40. We got people up here on 70. Do you think they can somehow get elevated past the 40th floor? We got people all the way up here.

No, no, no. Alright, 74, we’re on our way. Alright, can I hear 7-9-1-5-O-V? O-V.

Try and get down to the lobby, find out what type of elevators terminate below the 76th floor. That’s the type we’re going to want to use. 10-4.

75. South Tower, do you see South Tower? South Tower, we’re going to wait for Tower 21. Can I hear 7-9-1-5? 1-5.

Alright, I’m going to need two of your firefighters. Adam, stay away to lock down two fires. We’ve got a house-wide stretch.

We can get some water on it and knock it down, okay? Alright, South Tower, we’re coming up on 10. We’re on 77 now on the B scale. I’ll be right through you.

1-4-6-2-0-5. We’re on 71, we’re coming right up. Battalion 4-8-2.

Logging command post, Tower 8. That’s 15-O-V-15. That’s 15-O-V-15. We’re on 78, but we’re in the B scale.

We’re trapped in here. We’ve got to put some fire out to get to you. 15-O-V-15.

Go ahead, 15-O. We’ve got command post at the south stairs, the A stairs. Alright, 10-4.

We’re going to knock down some fire here in the B scale. We’ll meet up with you. You get over to the A stairs and help out Chief Palmer.

10-4. Battalion 7, Operation Tower 1. Battalion 9, I need you on the full course, 79. We’re about to the stairs, going up to 79.

Alright, I’m on my way up, Lario. 15-O-V-15. Battalion 15-O-V, Battalion 7, Operation Tower 1. Stop in the elevator, in the elevator shaft.

You’re going to have to get a different elevator. We’re stopping through the wall to get out. Maybe I’ll lobby command with that.

Tower 1. Battalion 7, 11-O-5. Yep, doing their job. Doing their job.

Brave, brave men. That’s it, but Charlie, you know how many brave people were there? Who were helping? Mr. Smith was helping Mr. Jones and vice versa. And they were helping down Mary because she had a sore leg.

And they could have got out, but they didn’t. And I start thinking this too. I start thinking, how many people knew they weren’t getting out, but they weren’t going to leave somebody.

You know what I mean? Like they knew. People, you know when you get hurt, and you’re seriously hurt, and you know you’re seriously hurt, and you’re trying to get up and do everything you can because you know it’s serious. You know when you just get that little bump, you’re playing it up.

You’re like, ah, I’m dying here. But real hurt, you’re trying to get up to prove to yourself you’re not. These people knew how serious this was.

They had to, and they knew they weren’t getting out, and they stayed. That’s why I felt it was important to play that because the thousands of others you speak of, there’s no record of their conversations that day. And I thought that recording was tremendous in the sense that all these men were different.

Some were very calm. You could hear it, especially one of those firefighters’ voices. He knew.

Then the other guy said, yeah, we’re making our way up to 70. That motherfucker’s on fire. We can’t take the elevator.

I don’t want to get caught in that shaft. They had to walk up all those stairs in 60 pounds of gear. Fucking consequential people.

And you know, I have a friend. He told me he came out of the subway, and he didn’t run downtown. He ran uptown.

And he said to me, that’s a great source of shame for him in his life. And I said, we all do what we do. You would have been no help down there anyway, so it was the right thing to do.

Yeah, but you get trained to do this. So here’s the thing that’s crazy. We’re coming out from squad, right? I get to squad, and the first tower collapsed.

Now, I thought they meant it fell over like a tree, if you were hit, if you know what I mean. I didn’t think it pancaked. And we’re going in, and we’re planning to go into the next tower.

Are we brain dead or what? You know what I mean? Okay, we’ll go in, and we’ll, I figured we’re going to be fighting fire for weeks. A week, you know, putting fire out, go up floor by floor by floor. But, no.

Let me tell you a story. Let me just tell you, it’s not an interesting story, I’m just thinking. You know that very famous, I guess, poster from the New York Times where it has every firefighter’s picture on it, right? Yeah.

That was the captain of my New York Times softball team, and he was a sports graphic designer, and his father was a firefighter, a retired firefighter. That’s why he, that was his contribution. And one day I went into work, and he said, my old man wanted to say, thanks for calling it a truck, you know, like the ladder.

He said, thanks for calling it the truck, like you’re getting the details right. And just shit like that made me feel, you know, I’m sorry dude, I’m a little choked up, just give me a second. That was my contribution.

And I just wanted to say hello, and I love you, man. Yeah, I love you too. You got to remember though, Charlie, the contribution.

People, I tell this, when I was handed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, six, seven, eight o’clock on the night of the 11th, it was the best fricking sandwich I ever ate. And somebody made that. Somebody made that.

Because they gave me a sandwich, I now could go on and keep doing what I was doing. Like, remember, 3% of the military go to war, 97% supports them. That shows you what it takes to do what you do.

Like, remember, every fire truck that drives around that city, if the mechanics don’t take care of it, it doesn’t drive. You know what I mean? There’s so much behind the scenes that, you know, it’s like… You don’t know this. I’ve told this story, I’m going to say it again because I’m not going to talk about it again.

The next morning, when 10,000 people were on the West Side Highway wanting to help, right? And we’re at the edge in the holding pit, the volunteers. And we’re going to go in and follow behind you. And we were told to write our names and our blood type on one arm and our phone numbers on the other arm in case we disappeared in the hole.

And I remember the phone numbers. I remember seeing 516, 718, 516 is the island, 718 are the boroughs, Brooklyn and Queens. Is the Bronx 718? I think it is.

Yeah, I guess the old numbers. Yeah, what about Jersey? What about Hoboken and shit? That’s what? 232, something like that? 201, I think. And now it’s 332.

Yeah, it’s new numbers now. But I remember not seeing a 212. That’s Manhattan.

There was not a 212 volunteer and it hit Manhattan. Well, go back to the Seinfeld episode where Elaine, she wanted her phone number got changed. Remember, there was only a handful of 212 numbers.

So most of Manhattanites are people from the boroughs or from other states for the most part. Other countries, man. You know what I mean? Yeah.

But Manhattan is another world. Like, I mean, I remember going to fires in Manhattan. And these people, like we laugh, we used to say millionaires row and now you’ve got billionaires row.

And I’m like, these people don’t know what reality is. Believe me, they don’t know the difference between a fire truck and an ice cream truck. They both have flashing lights and they don’t know you exist till they need you.

And when they need you, they want you 100 percent. They’re the only thing. I was at a fire, a high rise fire.

I was like, let’s say 25 story building, something like this, 22 story building. And the fire was on one of the lower floors. And you know, you said the smoke was up.

So I met a woman up on the top floor. I’d gone up and coming down the other stairs to make check for nobody. And I met this woman and like there’s more smoke in your cigarette than there was there.

And they’re like, oh, my God, we’ve got to get to the hospital. We’ve been breathing smoke. I’m like, wait, is there a fire somewhere? Like, is there another? Is there something I missed? These people don’t, there’s no, they don’t reality.

They’ve no concept. None. You know that.

I bet you it’s the exact same way you are. They don’t have a concept and they don’t care. And they don’t have to.

I mean, enjoy your little world, but there’s a better one out here. But they don’t. But here’s the thing.

There’s. They can’t see the forest or the trees. They’re just living their life there in Manhattan.

They think this is a real world. They don’t know what real world is. It’s a make believe land.

And it is what it is. Tis. OK, anyway, I was going to do a joke, but I’m not going to.

I’m just going to tell you one more time. I’ll call you later. I love you, man.

And thank you from the bottom of my heart for the life of service that you’ve given to us. Well, thank you. I really appreciate it.

And as I said, if you hadn’t written this down because I’ve said it. I remember day one. But day two and day five could be the same.

And day seven and day 20 could be the same. And if it wasn’t because nobody was writing down a diary. You know what I mean? You’re just going on with your life, doing your job.

And it all just blended into one. So now I can I can read through that. Oh, yeah, that’s right.

I remember that. I forgot that. Blah, blah, blah.

Plus, getting old doesn’t help. And drinking Guinness or whiskey doesn’t help either. I’ll meet you there.

Captain Generous. It’s a like, no, it’s that’s how much I tell Sharon, my wife. I’m like, no, it’s not the whiskey at Guinness that’s causing this.

What you mean, your bad attitude? Well, I have my horrendous like I just I’ve given up on all government. I’m done with them all. They’re all the same.

I’m just like, yeah. And let’s not take you know, I want this to be very clear to people. This isn’t some backwards militia member.

This is a guy who spent a life in government, worked for the government. It’s a firefighter. He’s a soldier, a paratrooper.

He’s just telling you it’s shit. Not that I hate we got to tear it down. It’s just leave me the fuck alone.

Oh, yeah. Oh, listen, if they called me today and said, we need you to go back immediately, I’d be right back. But because that’s for the country, not for these guys who are getting elected and not doing their job.

You know what I mean? I’m it’s I’m sick of them all. And I don’t care what party you belong to. If you’re not doing your job, get fired.

Get out. Like in the firehouse, if you went to if you were at a fire and didn’t do your job, your locker was thrown off the roof and you were told put in your transfer papers. No shit.

Now, that’s it. So that’s as basic as it comes. Why can’t we do that with people who are not doing the job when we elect them? I’m talking from from level here, like, you know, I mean, the HOA board all the way up to the presidency.

We should, you know, everyone should have accountability. I had to for years. And I’m going to ask you one last question, man.

After all of that. Absolutely. Did America bring it on itself? Did the people in Manhattan at Ground Zero, did they deserve that? Yeah.

Yeah. So I was in Saudi Arabia September of 2000. And I’m in Prince Sultan Air Base, peace out.

And I’m walking around. And, you know, from talking about very much into the whole terrorism, like coming from Ireland, I was very interested in that. And I’ve been reading that my whole life.

And I have a photograph and it says Bin Laden construction. They built the air base, Prince Sultan Air Base. That was our air base.

That’s still our air base, I believe. So. And then, like, when Bin Laden hit, they’re like, oh, who is this guy? And it’s it’s the people, the three, the 3000 people who died.

Absolutely not. They were getting up, going there. And what kills me is they are paying taxes for a government that that are they going to support them? You know, it’s sorry, I’m just ranting and raving.

No. When you get older and you look at it all, you’re like when you you know what I mean? You start to look at it. You step back and you’re like, as long as we’re fighting each other, Republican, Democrats down on this level are fighting.

They’re all in cahoots up there together. All of them. You don’t have 50 years in government.

If you’re not, you scratch my back, I scratch your back. Listen, you look at the NFL because I love football. But a quarterback makes 100 million a year.

His agent goes next year and goes, he’s better than him. He deserves one hundred and five million. And yes, we’re fighting on the field, but we’re not fighting.

We need each other to blow up, you know, to keep it going. So we all make millions of dollars. Government’s the same.

As long as we’re fighting each other. And I used to tell the fireman in the firehouse, as long as we’re fighting for the crumbs of the table, the city is happy. And that’s it.

Let me tell you something. I’m going to localize this. Never forget, it was last week at Campus Marshes, that’s the center of the city.

There was a 9-11 memorial and I walked up because, you know, I know the firefighters and I know the cops. You know who I gravitate to. I’m talking to an engine operator and I go, so how’s that contract? They have been working with a contract.

They’ve been working without a contract for three months. And the whole thing was never forget. Oh, we fucking forgot a long time ago.

So as you saw at the beginning of the show, this city’s caught up in scandal so badly that we can’t get the gears of the municipal machine to move. And they say, never forget. How fucking dare you attend some shit like this when the men circling protecting you aren’t getting what they deserve.

I’m fucking angry. So you retire. Goddamn right, man.

All right. I love you. I’ll call you when I open the bottle.

All right. My brother. Talk to you.

Thanks, Charlie. Sean. You as well.

Great to see you. OK, let’s go home, Mark.