I grew up in Regal Park, Queens. A little bit of an old school growing up. I had three older brothers. We lived in a building that my grandfather built. My grandfather came here from Italy, was a construction worker, built his own company, became very successful, very wealthy, and he built this building in 1938 for his family.
And when I say old school, One, my aunt and uncle were upstairs with their two kids. Across the hall, in another apartment, was my other aunt and uncle with their two kids. My parents, we slept in bunk beds.
Four of us in the bedroom. My parents slept on a fold-out couch. couch in the living room.
Downstairs was my grandmother, and there was also a basement apartment in the building that would be occupied at times by different members of the family. So it was real traditional. It was like one big family. I would say the big dramatic change came in 1967 or 68 with my uncle next door. They took the big step.
They bought the house across the street and they moved it across. So it was a big family. Kids were interchangeable. You had on top of your own parents, you had aunts and uncles.
You really had to be careful if you got out of line because somebody was always watching. My family was a little bit of a... Particularly my older brothers were hell raisers in the neighborhood.
So that side of the family was Italian. They did steal erection. The other side of the family was Irish.
Now, my father grew up in that building, and he married my mother, who literally lived on the next block. So you had the Irish... slide down on the bottom of the hill, and the Italians were up on the hill, and the Irish side of my family was even bigger than the Italian side of my family. So it was a really, I can't stress enough what a wonderful time it was growing up. Great time to be a kid, and just cousins, family everywhere.
I don't think you see that too much anymore. in New York City, but that's how I grew up. You were born in 61? Born in 1960. I was the last surviving child. My brother born before me died of leukemia six months before I was born.
And then my mother lost another child at birth in 1967. So I was technically the baby. Three older brothers. What? One brother was particularly insane.
He was the clown. He was the guy always in trouble. He was always the mama's boy.
But generally, if there was something going on in the neighborhood, particularly around Fourth of July with a large explosion or the schoolyard, something got blown up, it was usually my family. It was a wonderful time. It was a great time in New York City and it was a great family to grow up in. My grandfather passed away when I was very young. He was, I believe, four years old.
This was a guy that came to New York City from Italy and he told my mother, he says, you know, sometimes the day before payday I'd have a nickel in my pocket. He says I could use the nickel to take the subway from Wall Street back to East Harlem, where he was staying, where he says I could buy myself a hot dog and eat for the day. And my mother was like, what did you do? She said, I had to eat.
And he ate the hot dog and he walked home and then walked back to work. He became a very successful builder. And in the 1950s, He actually did all the steel work for Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father. So life was pretty good. Up until about the mid-'70s, things started to change.
I went to high school in the city, Xavier High School, great school, Jesuit education. Was I the best student? A bit of a bookworm, terrible athlete.
My brothers were all four years and better than me, so there was a little bit of an age gap. And the family business went under. Just all of a sudden the smack of reality from a really happy childhood, the world gets turned upside down pretty quick.
I was an industrious kid. I always worked, always had some kind of job or two jobs. If it could be delivered, you know, everybody does DoorDash and Zoom. Not back then.
You had kids in the neighborhood just lining up. I delivered chicken, pizzas, newspapers. I didn't like newspapers. You had to get up too early in the morning.
And even to this day, all these years later, I am not a moron. person. So it was also about that time I started experimenting with alcohol with friends on the weekend and got through high school, went to St. John's University in Queens.
and my friend of mine from the neighborhood bought the bar across the street from the school. That was the beginning of the end of my academic career. I became a bartender six months later and a lot of drinking, a lot of carrying on. In 1981 You know, I always wanted to be a cop. A lot of my uncles and my grandfather were all cops.
Everybody gravitated towards the detective bureau in my family. And with fairly storied careers. and accomplishments.
And that's the stuff I grew up hearing about as a young kid. And so literally I got my life's wish at the age of 20. I went into the police academy. me.
I took to it like a duck takes the water. And here I am, full of piss and vinegar. And my first assignment as a rookie cop is Central Park Prison. I'm like, you got to be kidding me.
The slowest place. And that's a relative term these days. Back then, we were doing 40, 50 robberies a month. A lot of of guys, bad guys who do crimes outside of the park and run into the park.
And so it wasn't that quiet. And I wind up, I got taken under the wing by an old-timer. And he really taught me how to be a professional police officer, how to look sharp, how to talk to people.
And I had drug deals all over my post. And I got to know these guys pretty well. And it pretty much came down to, when I'm here, you are not. What you do when I'm not here, you know, that's a different story.
But when I'm here, that's it. And, you know, guys are always sneaking around. It was Central Park South, and these guys were making money here. hand over fist, chase them, arrest them, this and that.
After a couple of years, well actually only a year and a half, I wound up going into the plainclothes team. You ride around in mock vehicles and you really learn to begin to become a hunter. I'm not a hunter of animals.
I love animals. Hunting people, whole different world. It takes patience.
It's not easy. And we would get out on foot and we'd, I'm talking, six, seven hours you'd follow somebody. And I can't explain it. Not admissible in court. You would see a guy walking down the street and you're like, wow.
You got to look. And sometimes you would follow these guys for hours and then bang! Take out an old 80s snatcher purse. Grab somebody, throw them up against the wall, pull out a knife.
That was the kind of work I gravitated to. to. I enjoyed it.
I did that for a while and I wound up getting transferred to the narcotics division. It's not where I wanted to be. My police career is always like, oh yeah, you're going to this place and I wind up somewhere else.
I thought I was going to public morals, I wind up in narcotics. But like everything else, I hooked up with a great bunch of people and a busy, busy shop to work in. When I first got there, nobody ever heard of crack. The first time I see crack, we arrested two old-timers.
So we arrested these guys for heroin. Pull them out of the back seat. I check under the seat, and there's two vials. I have no idea what this is.
So I show it to the boss. He goes, I don't know. He says, looks like old drugs.
Eh. Run with the sewer. I'm walking these guys into the precinct.
They're looking at each other and they're smiling. They're also very happy they're not getting blamed for it either, but... The guy said to me, he said, Officer, you didn't know what that was? I said, never seen it before.
He goes, that's crack. I said, what the hell is crack? He said, have you ever heard of bazooka?
And bazooka was... Like the garbage byproduct of cocaine processing. Really like a low-rent drug. I don't know who the evil genius was that went, took it a step further and says, let's try this. And this guy told me, he says, that's the love drug.
He says, once you smoke it, you love it. Within two months, crack had exploded across. New York City and we were grabbing people in the street.
The degradation, the damage it did to people, I've never seen before. How people, people that, you know, you see them at the beginning of the summer and then by the end of the summer, they're destroyed. and a lot of degrading, nasty stuff went along with it for people to obtain money to get crack. Prostitution, this is stuff above and beyond the street robberies and stuff like that.
I was there for three years, and in that time from 85 to 88, the violence exploded in New York City. Anybody could get into the game. And beginning in 1988, I found myself in 77th Precinct, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights area.
Crap dealers everywhere. 17, 18 years old, driving Mercedes. I got the girlfriends with him and It was insane because these kids were also shooting each other left and right I Went we had a guy it was killed one night and I was looking to get the book that people saw at the at the wake See we visited I go to the funeral home and then we didn't have much on it.
We had a nickname on this And went to the funeral home and the director was a very nice man. And he says, listen, we're just packing this guy up, we're shipping him back to Jamaica, we're going to take the cardboard top off. Okay, first time I ever did anything like this. New experience.
but he says I'll get you the book so while they're getting it I'm waiting and I'm in the showroom and of coffins and there's a beautiful blue coffin there and I said what do you call that one he says He says, oh, that's popular. He says, that's the going home model. I said, a lot of people going home? And he goes, this is detective. He says, I'm going to tell you something.
He says, up until 85, 86? He says, I do maybe 70, 80 funerals a year here. He says, I'm doing 160 a year now. And I says, and they're all kids. And he goes, yeah, all kids.
These kids, no concept of the permanence of death. No impulse control, but no concept. And the first homicide interview I sat in on, this kid says, yeah.
He says, he stepped on my sneakers and, you know, had a beef. So I Voltroned his ass. I'm the new guy.
I don't say nothing. When we get out of the room, Voltron. He goes, yeah, Masters of the Universe. That was the big cartoon at the time. The bad robots when they kill somebody, they Voltron you.
So he says, yeah, he Voltron'd his ass. This kid's 16 years old over a sneaker scuff. His life is over. The violence was disgusting to the point—and this is never mind just with the homicides, was the volume of shootings.
And we operated in a different manner back then, and you really basically had to be dead to get us to work on the case. We'd investigate as much as we could. The homicides were overwhelming.
One of the supervisors there, old-time guy, very dapper dresser, his hair slicked back. He looked like Cab Calloway. And he calls me in and he goes, sit down, young man.
He says, let me see your case folder here. He's looking at all these different cases. He says, you understand about the clearance rate. And that's what your batting average was as a detective, clearing cases.
And I said, yeah, it's like 35%. He goes, correct. He says, 40%, you're a stupisar.
He says, above 45%, am I allowed to curse you? Yeah. He goes, you're a lying motherfucker.
And he says, I'll tell you what. He says, all that stuff you got in there, he says, that's great. Do a nice work on it. It's a bunch of bullshit.
He says, you know, on the stuff where you got to make a rest, you take care of business. He says, look at that wall. We had an Entire wall filled with brown homicide folders. He says, every one of them folders got a body in them. That's what you take care of.
And I got an education my first, second night there. Old-timer says, kid, get your coat. I said, what's up? He says, new shooter. He says, we're going to break your cherry.
And it was my first homicide. It was a dump job in a building on 99 Rogers Avenue. There's been hundreds and maybe thousands of incidents since then, but I'll never forget 99 Rogers Avenue.
That was my first one, and I didn't solve it. And it was just the violence, the shots fired, and it was the kind of place you could get killed. We were only a mile and a half long by a mile wide and we were knocking out 90 murders a year in that little area. Other priests and had bigger numbers, but nobody was really as small as we were.
And you could go out on a misdemeanor assault case or whatever it is and literally drive into a shootout any time in the day and night. I went out one day with an old timer I work with, and he says, I got to lock this kid up. He assaulted his grandmother. I said, okay, let's go.
We go to the apartment, very beautiful, old building. And that was another paradox in that part of Brooklyn. You had magnificent brownstones that would blow the brownstones out in Manhattan, and then the other side of the street burnt out. And gentrification did not arise. arrived there.
Gentrification tried to start in 1986 with a lady that bought an old brownstone. She was going to renovate it. She wanted to hire guys from the neighborhood.
And that ended 56 stairwells later when she was murdered. We went into the house, and the lady's like, yeah, my grandson punched me in the face, this and that. He says, why are you locking her up?
He says, well, she made the complaint on you. And he's like, nah, man. He goes, look at my neck. He turned around. I've never seen a disgusting burn on a human being as I saw on this kid.
And he goes, look at my fucking goose down. She was baking a cake. And right before a cake turns into.
to a cake it's like molten lava he mouthed off there and she went I'm like look at it oh my god and I told the old-timer he goes what are we gonna do here cuz I listen she's 78 years old with a heart condition I don't know what to tell you. Maybe with this one's a wash. I don't know.
With that the kid jumps out the window of the apartment on the second floor. Just gone. So I'm like, case solved. We're done here.
As we go to walk out the building, Probably one of the closer instances I ever came to getting shot, two guys open up with handguns and another guy opens up with a MAC-10 shooting across the street. The guy with the MAC-10 is about six feet away from the doorway we're about to exit. The sound waves are literally passing through our body. I got my foot up against the door I got my gun up gun out. I put it over the radio.
There's a shootout in progress I says take your time wait till they run out of ammo Which they eventually did and they left We came out of the building. The entire street shot up, cars, light poles, windows. Nobody hit. A hundred rounds laying on the ground.
We found two handguns. All right, well, let's go to lunch. That was life in that place. You jump ahead a few years.
It was an excellent education. Wind up back in Manhattan. I moved to Manhattan. I was the guy living in the basement apartment of my grandmother's building. by the way, in 1987, I developed a pretty bad drinking problem.
I had to go for an interview with the police department because of the nature of the work we did when you got promoted back then. They would give you a psychological interview and in the course of this interview I don't know where it came from. He asked me about drinking and I just looked at the guy and said I'm gonna be honest with you, I can't stop drinking. And the guy was shocked.
He was kidding me. I said no I'm not. And he said, I'm drinking every night. Blackout drunk. He says, you know, I work out a lot.
I was in the gym. I got rid of the car because I don't want to deal with drinking. I'd rather keep drinking and take the subways. And of course I probably saw every train station in New York City, getting on a train, falling asleep. But I got help.
And I have to say the police department program in place that time was fantastic. And, you know, you jump ahead. Here I am 37 years later, still sober. I go to Manhattan.
Eventually I wind up going into the Homicide Squad. Manhattan Homicides are... are totally different than Brooklyn homicides. I never once saw the eyewitness news van show up to a homicide out in Brooklyn.
That was the running joke. Hey, there goes the eyewitness news van. That was their commercial tag back then. Never saw them in Bed-Stuy.
Get a homicide in Midtown Manhattan, you're gonna see more news vans than you ever wanna see in your life. And the pile on starts. Then the brass is asking questions and you're trying to function.
this circus-like atmosphere. We had a couple of doozies. And what I tell young cops today, young detectives, back then we didn't have cell phone technology, surveillance technology, Metro cards, cell phone radio towers.
We can pinpoint you, lock you in anywhere. None of that existed. We did it old school.
We didn't have computers. Everything was done on a note. notepad.
Everything was done on typewriters. IBM Selectric was my best friend for about a part of 15 years. And you joke, you say, yeah, yeah, you know, we're out the shoe leather. Yeah, we did. Knocking on doors, building canvases, interviews.
And it's become a lost art today. where people don't understand. The integral part of police work is being able to communicate with another person, to get them to give you the information you need. Today, a lot of detectives, you know, they're locked in front of that computer.
everything's computer checks. At the end of the day somebody's still got to go in the box and sit down with a bad guy did a homicide and get a confession. For the old guys like me all that stuff is icing on the cake. Different mindset today I understand it.
I did it the old-fashioned way. Got promoted sergeant. 1995, we had Shanghai's Internal Affairs Bureau, which, a guy like me, I was put there because I had a background in homicide. How many homicides Internal Affairs is investigating?
Zero. But the chief says, oh, he's a homicide guy. I want him.
It was miserable. It was the most miserable two years of my life. And it was one of these things, if you put in to go to an investigative unit.
you roll the dice. IAB got first dibs at you. And while I was there, my older brother Tom, the guy who was the mom, he was really the mama's boy. He was with my mother every day of the week, stopping by. He was the guy in trouble.
He had a rough life. Day after Christmas 1996, my brother died suddenly. The toughest thing I ever had to do in my life was tell my mother that he was dead.
I don't think she worried about me too much, especially after I got sober. She used to beg me not to drink. My family never recovered it. My other brother was an Irish twin of his.
They were 11 months apart. It just devastated us and it led to a couple of crazy years in my life. And the one good thing about being in internal affairs was the other five or six draftee sergeants.
I'll lay Mr. Rob, because we were all miserable. To this day, it's almost 30 years later, these guys are still some of my closest friends. They carried me.
They really enabled me to get through that time in my life. I took a leave of absence. trying to straighten out my brother's affairs. In some ways, my brother was quite the brilliant guy.
In other ways, he was quite the train wreck, drinking and drugging and... Opened up a nightclub in Meatpacking District. He was the first guy to really get in big down there, and he didn't live to see it. It took a couple of months.
Eventually we had to just shut it down and walk away from it. I went back to my life in the police department, and I finished. I used up my time in internal affairs and it was a hard time, you know. Didn't drink, but...
When I first got sober about five years in, like the dark cloud of like depression descended. And I got through it with the help of friends, and I went and got professional help. My life was moving along pretty good until my brother died and having to deal with my mother. My mother was a basket case. She never recovered from that.
Like I said, lost one son to leukemia. She lost another at birth. And now Tom.
Bit of blow. My old man was a tough guy, stoic, probably physically one of the toughest people I've ever met in my life. Not a man of many words and you know we did the best we could and in the end we wound up getting custody of my my brother's daughter who was three years old at the time.
And my parents wound up raising her. And I rolled along. I retired from the police department in February 20...
2000, 2001. I was out for four months. After four months, I was absolutely miserable. After 20 years...
I'm like, what am I doing? I love this stuff. And here I am. When I left Internal Affairs, they offered me a whole bunch of different positions.
I says, I'm going back to patrol in uniform doing steady midnights where I never should have left. Never should have gotten involved with your people. And there it was, back doing midnights. Very nice place, 19th Priest in the Upper East Side. Very busy, but just living the dream for me.
Chasing burglars, stick-up men, car chases, you know, the usual insanity. That summer I was in my first really bad, horrendous car accident and I was out for a while. I come back, I'm back two nights and the guy does a stick-up and then he wants to go suicide by cop.
And we're trying to keep his hand out of the pocket, away from the gun, and he's just screaming, kill me, kill me, kill me. One of the cops that was there hit this guy with a haymaker of all time. He broke his hand doing it, but he knocked the guy out.
And we're like, oh, man, holy shit. And we got the guy cuffed. A couple of days later, I'm supposed to be down in court.
That was September 11th. And the DA who had the case calls me up, and she says, listen, I know you worked at midnight last night. Come down around 11 o'clock.
Don't come down at 9. She saved my life, because had I been down there earlier, I might have done something incredibly stupid. And so I'm just hanging out, killing time. And September 11th, it was a beautiful night before. It was a cool September night. And not a cloud in the sky on during the day.
the day, just a beautiful morning. And one of the guys comes running into the locker room and goes, hey, Sarge, the plane just hit the Trade Center. So I'm thinking, a little plane? I put the TV and I'm like, holy shit, and the Trade Center was burning.
And then, bam, second shot, second plane comes in. He says, that's got to be a replay. I said, that's not a replay. I said, the one built, it's burning already. He says, we just got hit.
hit again. Ran downstairs. We had a van load of cops.
I was going down with the lieutenant and three firemen from the firehouse next door says, hey, can we jump in with you? Because their rigs were already gone. And I drove.
It was one of the few times I'd seen something really work right in the police department is the road closure program. We made it to the Trade Center in seven or eight minutes. And you know, there's things that morning I forget.
There's things I will never forget. And I hear the firemen in the back cheering. And I look out the window, and there's a guy on a motorcycle, like a Norton, full throttle.
He's got a leather cap on and goggles. And I look. There's a fireman on back of this guy's motorcycle, oxygen tank, helmet, axe, hanging off a deer life.
I'm doing probably 70, 75 miles an hour. And this guy's passing me. And. We got to the trade center, I let the fireman out.
And me being a typical cop or experienced cop, I'm looking at all these trucks and hoses and rigs and I'm like... I said, you know what, Lieutenant, I said, I'm going to take the car across over to Battery Park City. I said, with all these fire trucks, we're never getting out of here. You know, I said, let me put the car over there, which we did. And coming back across, as we're coming up Vessi Street, we got to get to our command post.
There's stuff, there's debris. The lieutenant I was with, he's like, he stops, he goes, did you see that? I said, yeah, I saw it.
I said, keep walking. He goes, you know, I said, yeah, I know what it is. And I said, there's nothing you can do to help them.
It was the people jumping out of the towers. Just don't even look. I said, you got to keep walking, keep focused, let's go.
As we're walking, walking up, a couple of old men stopped him in the street. I didn't realize it. And there's a lot of stuff coming down. And we're on Vesey, right in front of 7. And I look back and I'm going, hey, Lieutenant, let's go.
And I hear this roar. It's not loud, but like this. And I see the top of the building coming apart.
I take off running. I get to the front of 7. The doors are locked. The lieutenant's dragging the two old men. I got my gun out, shoot the glass, and somebody pushes the door open and we run in. And I said, head for the escalators, getting back at them.
That entire lobby came crashing in on us. I made my peace with God. And I said, you know what, God? It's funny the way you think about things in life. I said, you know what, God?
Thank you for the last 14 years. Those were my sober years. I said, take care of my parents, take care of my niece.
I'm not getting out of here. It's amazing as much how fast your brain can process things. And I braced myself and the debris, everything came in. And I'm laying there. You're not dead, so make yourself useful.
I get up, pull the two old men up. I had lost a lieutenant at this point. Pull the two old men up, and the guy says, you guys priest?
I'm not really a religious guy. He goes, yes, son, God bless you, and you know. Wow, a couple of aces.
in my pocket here. And that's when you think, God's got a plan. Wasn't meant for me to die.
The lieutenant had escaped out the back of the building. I tried going to the roof of 7 with a retired detective, one of the bravest men I ever met. met. We made it about 15 flights and I'm puking uncontrollably. I'm pure white, vomiting.
I says, listen, I'm done. So I'll go back down the street. I'll see if I can get emergency service guys to come up here with you.
I says, I don't think we're going to make the roof. I walk out. I'm standing on the corner of S.E. and West, maybe two minutes. And somebody yells, the tower's leaning.
And the North Tower came down. I made it to the first fire truck, got in back of it and... It's funny, I ran into a guy I hadn't seen in 10 years.
He goes, hey, Pete. I said, hey, Jimmy. I'm like, I'm taking the rest of the day off. I'm fucking done.
And we hung on. And everybody that made it into that area within that group where the four fire trucks were, we made it out. At first, it was so quiet and so dark and dense. I'm thinking.
And we were under the wreckage. But then the air cleared up. We got out.
The firemen, two of the firemen, never came back. I think of this man often, Ray Murphy. Kind of like my equivalent in his firehouse, one of the older guys. And that big grin on his face as we were going down there. I didn't know for a couple of days.
And the guy that's in the firehouse next door says, Ray, the other guy didn't make it. Somebody snapped a picture of him. Walking, he survived the first tower collapse.
There was a picture of him going into the North Tower. I didn't know that man. I'd met him, I'd seen him around, and I gave him a car ride.
And here he is walking in there. I didn't know the whole tower came down when I was in 7. I just thought the roof, the top part came down. He knew.
Many years later, another agency called, and I was in the detective squad at the time, and the guy says, Oh, yeah, we're trying to help each other out on something. And he goes, Hey, you might have known my brother, Ray Murphy. He says, I'm the guy that drove your brother to the Trade Center. And the guy started crying, I was...
He says, we've been looking for you for years. We didn't know who my brother was with. He says, we knew who the firemen were, but we didn't know how the whole story, how we got there. He says, your brother's, bar none, one of the bravest men. And I says he had a big fucking grin on his face as we were driving down there.
Not scared, ready for the challenge. Let's do this. That's how your brother went out. That's my last visions of him.
And wishing me well when they went off and me going to find somewhere to put the car. And they sent me that picture. I have that picture up in my house today of him going back into the Trade Center.
The Trade Center changed my DNA. It changed who I am, not for the better. The first six months we were down at the Trade Center every night.
And you don't think about it. I didn't get back until 1 o'clock in the morning, back to my own home. And I was a mess.
My uniform was burnt, covered, filthy. And you get up the next day, put your pants on, go back to work. That's how I dealt with stuff.
That's just me. And for the next six months, I worked. I worked whatever it is that needed to be done, six, seven days a week, 14 hours a day.
Trade Center cleanup eventually winds down. They put me in charge of the plainclothes teamwork in the midnight shift in the 19th precinct. Which is, now I'm back doing what I did as a rookie cop, except now I'm the sergeant and I'm driving around in a taxi cab, you know, looking for bad guys.
Work that I truly love. It's when the quiet time hits that the bad stuff starts. The nightmares, the videotapes over and over in my head and thinking of getting pancaked in a stairwell, trapped in an elevator.
What if? 19 people I knew died that day. Good, good people. And, you know, the nightmares got pretty bad for a while.
Buried alive, waking up gasping for air, screaming. A couple of really dark years. I went to work every day.
That was my therapy. Get up, go to work, push your way through it. And in time, you know, I sat down with a professional and I says, I really need to talk this stuff out. Didn't want to drink, didn't want to hurt myself or anything like that. But man, just fucking black.
And I got through it, but not on my own. And within this, and I went on for almost another 20 years in the NYPD, and I know I wasn't the only one, and one thing that's been consistent over my course of my career is police officers taking their own lives. We see it a lot with the military, PTSD issues.
And they've really upped their game in recent years into how PTSD leaves a mark in the brainstem, and they can track this stuff now. I know so many people. It's never the answer.
And there was just two in the last week of people that... I don't get it. I just don't get it. And was I in that boat? No.
Was I in the boat of darkness? Yeah, I was in that tunnel. And I got through it. Good people in my life, good friends, good woman in my life.
Professional help and you work your way out of it eventually and that's one thing I would like to get across and I didn't drink I stayed sober. For me that I will always have a fighting chance as long as I am. not drinking. And it's funny, people say, you didn't want to drink after 9-11? I ran across the street.
After we got out of the second collapse, I found myself across the street in a bar where somebody put out tables and tables of water. I went there and dumped it on myself. And I'm also looking for a phone, something that works to call my parents. I just got off the phone at 9.30 telling my parents, yeah, I'm at the trade center.
I don't know when I'm going to get home. I said, you might have to go in and take care of my daughter. York, five minutes later, sitting there watching it.
And my mother caught a glimpse, some news camera, and she told my father, she goes, that's Peter. She says, I can tell by the way you walk. She says, you're left-handed, your gun was on the left side.
She says, I can tell that gait that you have. She goes, that's Peter. He's alive.
And she always told me. She says, you know, I watched that. And she says, I knew you were there.
And she says, I also knew in my heart that if one person was going to walk out of that thing, it would be you. She says, that's the kind of the way you've just rolled through life. And, but when I was in that bar, and this is what you explain to people when you're dealing with alcoholism, is that you may be sober for a tractive period of time, but that's not to say that the disease is not, to me, it's like a mugger. It's always in my head somewhere. I don't want to drink.
I don't wake up thinking about it. But you just never know. Diseases, you need to pee a little today. We got to dinner, and that's a nice steak you have in there.
You know what would go with that steak? A nice glass of red wine. I never had a glass of red wine in my life with anything.
I might have a keg of a barrel of red wine, but I never drank wine when I ate anyway. This is the crap that goes through your head. That morning, I'm looking over, and I look in the mirror, and I'm a mess. And I'm like...
Nobody would begrudge you if you walked behind the bar and had a shot at Johnny Walker right now, would they? And I actually laughed at myself. It might have been the first time I laughed that morning.
I said, nah, not today. Maybe tomorrow. Not today. I got too much work to do and I'm not dealing with this bullshit.
I got passing thought. So, you know, you get through it, you move on. I went back to a detective squad.
They gave me the Medal of Valor a couple of years later, the 9-11. And it's an honor, it's an incredible honor to be recognized like that. It's also me saying, I don't deserve this.
I don't think I did anything that was, you know, did I get people out? Yeah, I did. I stayed there all day getting people out and doing whatever I could.
And I'm like, and I'm not saying this to blow my own, to me it was just, no matter what it was, I'm doing my job. This is what I spent my whole life doing. Today is a particularly bad day, but I'm alive and I'm going to keep working.
To me... I don't view myself as a hero in any way shape or form. Somebody else did and it's an incredible honor but it's not to say you're not thinking about those that didn't make it out that day or those that we have a lot of people dying now from 9-11 related disease.
I went back into that detective world which I grudgingly went And in one of the busiest detective squads in the city, maybe not so much with like street crime, with the violence that we dealt with in Brooklyn, but the kind of place where everything is newsworthy and headquarters wants to know about it, the chief's yelling at you about this and that. We had some high-profile homicides up there. It's amazing. I think about the stuff over the years. I've seen some incredibly sick shit, incredibly violent, and also, I mean, really, some of the stupidest ways to die.
Through violence, through accidents, through death, through suicide. And, you know, we live in a media-driven world, and these people descend like locusts. You know, they're stalking you, they're staking you out, you gotta worry about these people if they're trying to intercept your phone calls.
Everybody wants that inside piece of what's going on. It's a pressure cooker environment. I was lucky.
I supervised detectives that were up to the challenge. I had some of the most senior guys in the detective bureau, guys that had been around forever. knew their jobs and there were changes as the years went by and upper management us peons the worker bees and you know we keep going day by day And I used to deal with the crisis of the hour, whatever it was.
But when a homicide happens, it blows everything out of the water. There were some biggies. One was a young girl who came to New York.
from Ohio, murdered by a would-be suitor, and the media just descended on this and wouldn't let go. And I had a laugh, because the guy who caught the case was laughing. like, I don't know, we don't have phone records, we don't have this, we don't have that. Listen, police departments have been solving homicides for 150 years with a lot less, okay?
We'll get through this. We'll get it together. To a realtor who lived on Fifth Avenue who a lot of people didn't like. No shortage of ill will directed at this lady. And somebody bashed ahead in her.
her apartment. Same thing. We always will solve it.
There weren't too many, especially in cases like that, the resources that get dumped into these cases, it's amazing. They're at your beck and call. Nobody was at my beck and call when I was at 99 Rogers Avenue over some kid. killed over whatever bullshit crack deal in the basement of an abandoned building.
And it's another thing I'd like to reiterate, especially in the inner city areas. A lot of times, you know, cops take a lot of bad hits. With the detectives, one thing you'll find that if we didn't care, nobody cared.
I don't care if you're on a park bench or if you're on Park Avenue. If you're a homicide victim, to me, you're the most important person in my world. And if your family's disowned you or whatever, you know what? We're not going to disown you. We're going to find out who did this.
That, to me, was always the level where you separated the men from the boys, I guess. I don't want to mean, you know, the pros from the amateurs. I don't want to get in trouble. I don't mean anything. Tons of really good female detectives out there.
It's just a colloquialism of my old self old man self but I Kind of had a brain fry in 2010 we had a murder of a 70 year old 74 year old man inside a jewelry store and I think it was an inadvertent Part of the shooter, I think he tripped, he fired a shot and he killed this old man. And... You know, it was game on. The particular chief of detectives at that time was canvassing 4,500 apartments, finds out who lives in them. We did a search of cabs in the area, New York City cabs.
There was 2,300 cabs. I think 14 years later, cab drivers are probably still calling the detective squad saying, Oh, hello, did you call my phone? It was insanity and not focused on what we had right in front of us. And I'm always the optimist. There's always going to be a break in the case, which there was.
And people don't realize this. I'm a stickler for canvases. I don't care where you are in New York City. Somebody is always looking out the window. I'm a late night guy.
I'm up all night. I hear things. Little old lady sitting across the street, she's bored.
She's looking out the window. somebody is always listening. There's a delivery man coming or going.
There's somebody coming home late from work. And if you work hard enough you will find that key piece. And we got the break in the case. The case was micromanaged on my behalf, but like I said, I'm a worker bee.
The guy in the end, we arrested him, we recovered a million and a half in jewelry, and in the end, he turns around, and this guy wound up pleading guilty to grand law sitting. It was personally to me, revolting, considering the amount of work. we did on it. There was a whole host of outside issues I won't get into with different agencies and stuff and responsibilities.
That guy essentially walked on a murder. I was gonna quit. I had a good chief at the time, and he's like, he used to call me 007. Off-duty one night, coming back from a formal function, and I stopped at my house, got my dog, and I was going up to my girlfriend's apartment, and she's in a gown. I got the dog, and I hear this woman screaming.
And two young guys come running past us, and I go to hip check one of them. I can see one guy's got a purse. I go to him, and this guy smokes me.
He's gone. And I tell Hud, take the dog. Take the dog. And I take off running.
And I look back on him, and I'm in a tuxedo. And I turn the corner. It's in the 19th Precinct.
I know the neighborhood like the back of my hand. I said, this kid couldn't have made it off this block. And I go running past the doorman building, and there's a bunch of people there.
I say, you see a kid running by here? They're all screaming at me. He's gone. All right, listen. Guy in a tuxedo is not going to be the guy out here causing you harm.
I found the kid. Turns out this whole thing was captured on video of me in a tuxedo chasing. a kid one-third my age, and catching him. I told the bad guy, I said, you should be embarrassed, my old ass catching you.
So the chief used to call me 007, and he says, I got a new job. We're going to start a midnight night watch team covering all the detective stuff south of 59th Street in Manhattan. And I want you to be the boss.
You can pick your own guys. That was in 2010. And you know what? No more meetings, no more massive amounts of reports, no more phone.
I had a very short chain of command, one or two supervisors, that was it. They knew I'd already been around 30 years at this point, so they tell the chief, you sleep at night. I says, if I'm calling you, it's bad, or it's going to be bad.
He says, I'm here. You can relax. I got a good crew. We'll take care of business.
We'll cover the bases, and we'll have this ball up and running. I told my men and women, you treat these cases like they're your own cases. These detectives, detectives today are bowled under with massive amounts of paperwork.
Let's give them a leg up. Let's get a good starting point. Let's get the show running until 8 o'clock in the morning.
They can run with us. And we did some great work. We had a couple of really heavy-duty cases right from the get-go.
A young man murdered a girl, murdered his girlfriend in a bathtub in a Soho house. He drowned her. And... And...
We got the work done early, so by the time it turned into a media circus, we already had this guy in custody. We already knew what happened. The case gained notoriety because this guy's father was a well-known songwriter who also was under the influence of the media.
indictment on a whole host of like human trafficking charges. But I don't know, under the, I mean, if you mention the name, I mean, the story hasn't been in the paper. The guy wrote the song, You Light Up My Life.
Mid-trial, this guy hangs himself while his son's on trial for homicide. And that was my start of my last ten years of my career. It was just like this insanity. You'd be amazed, people don't realize there's only a couple of detectives on duty in Manhattan on the midnight shift. You might have a couple of them in Manhattan South, a couple of them in Manhattan North.
North. I got involved with the hostage negotiation team and became quite active. I was one of the few supervisors in the team, but we would cover the city. And I would find myself at the Bayonne Bridge or I'd go up to Van Cortlandt Park. You could wind up anywhere.
We did barricade jobs, suicides, bridge jumpers. Being on the bridge in the middle of the night, totally solid. Sucks, okay? I can't tell you this enough. You don't realize how much these things shake, rattle, and roll.
The emergency service guys would be the guys hooked up, standing out on the limb. I didn't even like going near the ledge of these things. Just before I retired, I was on my way into work, and they're like, listen, guy just killed his girlfriend. He says, and? He says, he's standing on the ledge of a building over here on 3rd Avenue.
Not far from it. from where I live. I said, I'll be there in two minutes. And I got there, and it's funny because...
This guy is up on the ledge. All the emergency service guys are up there. They all have ropes on them. We stand back.
Big thing. Don't get involved with their wires, their lines, should one of them go over. And this guy ranted and raved for four hours.
And all my time in hostage, I've never had somebody wear me out to the point where my brain went blank. This guy managed to achieve it. I am a master of bullshit. I can talk forever.
And this guy literally wore me out. He was one of the more annoying people. It's good that I didn't see the video of the homicide itself, because I would have walked up there and told this guy, you know, bro, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, jump. That's not what we do, though.
It was a brutal, brutal homicide. And he went back and forth with me and I says, listen, she's not dead yet. You know, she's in critical condition.
Doctor's working on it. And he's yelling, I know she's dead. I stuck that fucking knife in so deep it's stuck in the floor.
Hmm, alright. Might have to work on this line of approach a little bit. And I said, she's not dead, bro. Eventually he screwed up. He stepped off the parapet.
ESU guys took him right out. And this was a guy for two and a half, three hours screaming. He was gonna kick everybody's ass on that roof.
Split our helmets open, you know, with karate chops. First thing he says is, don't hit me! All right, I retire and I get a phone call from a DA, a guy who I knew, and he's like, he says, I'm listening to all these body cams and I hear the voice and he says, that can't be Pete. He says, Pete's got to be retired by now. And I start laughing.
I says, that was me. He goes, oh man. He says, I just want to tell you something.
You got him to confess about a half dozen times on that video. He says, we going to trial? He says, yeah, we're not offering him a deal.
So he says, do I have to subpoena you? You'll be available? He says, with pleasure.
You don't need a subpoena. I'd be more than happy to come to court on this one. I had a 10-year rock and roll period there, doing what I really loved. I like working midnights. I had work with great people.
And not many people get to say that, you know. Here I am at the end of my career. I did almost 40 years. I had a blast.
I really, really, you know, with things that happened. My father passed away in 17. And, you know, it was tough. But man, it was a wild ride of just crazy cases every night. And I always generally knew when my life was going to be bad when like a patrol boss would call me and say, let me run this past you.
And I'd say, let me get a cup of coffee first because I just knew. You know, or if it starts off, this is probably bullshit, but it never was. I think some people, especially less experienced people, realize, oh, this is a homicide.
You know, now you've got to cope with it. The easiest coping mechanism is just call me and my guys. We'll take care of it.
And today's police department is that every big boss out there is like, oh, we've got to do this, we've got to do that, we've got to do it. And it was kind of like becoming a running joke with me towards the end. Some of the uniformed cops used to say, uh-oh, bogey's here. That was a running joke for many years with me.
People said I look a little bit like Humphrey Bogart because I would show up, cigarette, cup of coffee. And sometimes I just have two guys, and I have a guy who's half my age, who outranks me by a couple of ranks. We've got to do this.
We've got to. And my guys would look, they would smile, and I'd say, are you done? Well, nice captain, inspector, whatever. Give me about a half hour just to get this organized.
He says, well, you know, I said, yeah, you got to call the chief. All right. This guy's still dead.
You get one crack at this at a crime scene and a homicide. One. You don't screw it up. I says, you just rattled 40 things off.
I says, first off, this is my responsibility. I'm the Detective Bureau Supervisor. It's my crime scene. I call the shots. And this is going to be done my way.
I says, I have done. this once or twice before. And I says, I understand you need certain information to pass along. I get it. Leave me alone for a little while and I'll get you what you need.
But I'm not fucking this crime scene up for you. I'm not doing it. I said, the most important guy right here is that guy laying there on the ground with his toes pointing up.
That's how we're gonna run this. The smarter ones caught on very quickly when they realized, yeah, I'm carrying on with a guy here who's doing this 40 years, twice my age. And it got to the point where some of the guys would show up like, oh you're here? Yeah, I'm gonna handle it.
Can I give you my number? Give me your number. Don't worry.
I'll take care of it. We'll get this squared away. Okay, can you just keep me posted? Whatever you need, we'll keep it posted. Crime scene integrity is important, and you just never know what you're going to find.
We had a guy kill his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend and then himself in an apartment one night. And he sat there. He sat there for 24 hours with the stove on.
I get there and the brass is coming out of the woodwork and I was a stickler. You're not going into your apartment. I'll open the door, you peek in, nobody's touching the crime scene and I was good friends with a lot of crime scene bosses and these guys would show up and they'd be like, how'd you keep them out of here?
I said, I have to be an asshole. I said most, 99% of the world gets it. I said then there's one or two and then you had guys that would throw.
Shit in the game. He says, oh, well, you know, downtown. I says, I don't care about downtown. Well, they're looking.
I says, it's 4 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Nobody's calling from downtown, all right? So I don't want to hear that bullshit.
I'm doing my job, and you're not going in the crime scene. But on this particular one, pretty much everybody was behaving. Crime scene guys show up. And within a couple of minutes, they're like, not only did he kill them, they had insult to injury, he ate one of their steaks.
And I could see one of the steaks was eaten. I says, how do you know? He says, I'm going to show you something. Balanced underneath the fork on the table was a 9-millimeter shell casing.
And I said, son of a bitch. He says, yeah. You can shoot 10 million rounds, and you're not going to get that fork balanced on top of a 9mm shell casing.
Yet he did. It's those little things that, you know, and I don't claim to be an expert in it. These guys were experts.
I'm experienced with it, but I always defer to them. And this guy nailed it right away. And, you know, they're like, oh, they think this guy's a cop.
Why does downtown think this guy's a cop? Well, he's got a 9mm Sig Sauer. I said, do you know how many people in this country have 9mm Sig Sowers in that model?
Well, you know, I said, you can tell whatever wizard you're talking to, it's not an NYPD weapon. He goes, well, how do you know that? I said, it's real simple. The ham is cocked.
On a New York NYPD 9mm, we can't cock those weapons. I says you ever seen an NYPD gun it could be cocked. I said that shit went out. I says we had them, the old revolvers, but no automatic.
I said tell Sherlock Holmes, whoever's downtown, no it's not our gun, okay? Calm the fuck down. We always get through it though. We get to the end of it.
I retired in 2020. COVID was......rock the world there pretty good. Nobody knew what was going on. We respond to DOA jobs just as a routine we go to them. And here we are, I go to one of the first ones where they say it's COVID-related. I walk in there, I look at the body, and I'm like, this guy's 60 pounds, if that.
So they're like, oh, well, they think it's COVID. I said, who's they? I got the family in there.
When was the last time he was out of the house? He was out of the house. He hasn't been anywhere in months.
He said, who's got COVID here? He said, none of us. I said, so, because at that time, if you said presume COVID, I was like, red alert. People were going bizarre. I said, what's wrong with him?
He said he's had cancer for 14 years. Ugh. I said, you know, this stupidity is going to reign supreme with this. And it got to the point where I go, a guy hit by the train. We had a lot of those.
It's disgusting. A lot of people get hit by trains or commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. And I would go there. And the ME, who was a friend of mine, he said, what do you got?
Presumed COVID. He goes, they all are. I said, this is a bunch of bullshit.
And he goes, yeah. And that wasn't, you know, not even going to be tested. Homicide, gunshot victim, you know.
Presume COVID. And we got the whole nine yards with plastic suits and gloves. I look like a spaceman. I walked out of a building on the Lower East Side and people started screaming in the street.
They're like, holy shit. I look like the... thing from that movie back in the 50s coming down. Was it something to be cognizant and concerned about?
Absolutely. Nobody knew where this was going. And then we segue into George Floyd. Protest and protested to me was some of the most hateful things I've ever seen in my life. And from protest we segued right into riots in the most insane Spate of violence that I've seen in my entire career.
That's including Washington Heights and Crown Heights. I had never seen anything like this. And I think that's where the shift was coming, where it was time to go.
Turned down lower Broadway one night. And I'm with three guys in the car, and there's hundreds of people. They drove trucks through the windows. It's a party atmosphere. They know we're there.
We're in uniform. And people are just waving at us. Hey, officer.
And the guy driving me says, what do you think? They says, put the car in reverse. He says, after 39 years, he says, you know what?
I ain't having anybody get hurt. A couple blocks away, there's 400 cops. They know what's going on. He says, us, we're not doing Custer's last stand here. This is insanity.
Back out of here. And we did. And it was disgusting. To me personally, it was disgusting. You know, we had a clean city here for 20 years.
Don't want to get. ...to the political end of it, but in 2014 we got de Blasio in here, who I refer to as Bill de Bolshevik, and man, things started to change, and not in a good way. And along with the, around 2020 with the changes in the law, guys that used to...
when they got arrested, they went to jail. The first night, January 1st, 2020, they get a guy, we had 16 open burglaries on this case. I come into work the next night, the lieutenant from that particular prison calls me and he goes, He goes, maybe it's me.
He says, maybe my phone's not working. He says, you're that guy we arrested last night? I says, yeah. He says, can you run him in a desktop on your system to see where he, see where this guy's still in? He says he got cut loose 7.30 tonight.
16 open burglaries. They cut him loose. I says, this is going to be bad.
And that's what it's been in this city ever since. And then, like I said, major civil disorder here. And places like where I live now haven't recovered. Closed stores, homeless people, crazy people. Migrant shelters on my, there are 5,000 people living in migrant shelter right near me.
And these are not little homogenous families, mom, dad, couple of kids. These are all Venezuelan street dudes. I'm not going to go any further on that because I do have my own opinions on it. They're quite severe. But you want to talk about destabilizing an area.
5,000 young guys tatted up gang tattoos Nothing to do drink You know what's gonna happen. It doesn't you don't have to be a rocket scientist. You know, my point is now is it? You know this city sucks It was a really world-class city just a few years back so I finally After I came, my wife had a talk one day and she says it's time to go.
She says I know you. You're out there chasing looters and I was. Absolutely. Sixty years old. I'm chasing 15 year olds down the street trying to run away with computers and whatever else.
She says you're gonna get jammed up. You're an old school You're going to wind up punching somebody, hitting them with a nightstick, and you're going to be all over the front page of the news."And she says, for what? They're letting these guys go. And at that particular period, you know, my dog at home had been sick with cancer for two months. And he had to get a leg amputation. He was home. And cancer came back. So you have COVID. You have lockdowns. People shut it in. Sick dog. Civil disturbance. And I says, you know what? Maybe it's time. I miss the people. I miss the people terribly. I mean, I stay in touch with them. I really enjoy going. with this crew of knuckleheads every night. I really did. And we did good work, and we had good laughs. We enjoyed what we did, and we helped people. I miss that. I miss that tremendously. If I could turn back, I don't think I'd want to be involved in policing in an environment like we're in now. That I don't want. You know, that following July 5th of 2020, I came back into work and I'm watching the jobs come across the screen. We had 22 people shot in Manhattan North. That's the area from 59th Street up to Washington Heights in a seven-hour period. Six of them were homicides. I've never, even in my days in Brooklyn, we had busy nights. We had nights, we had one night, three homicides, we had eight shootings and an amputation. They cut this guy's leg off. The guy was a dick, too. I don't agree with their method, but he also probably shouldn't have antagonized this group as long as he did. They reattached it. I think he's been on Dancing with the Stars since then. The gun violence that night and then that whole entire month. I said, we put this stuff to bed. And look who's getting killed. It's something that people need to realize. It's young kids, it's old people, people from all walks of life. They're just minding their business. They just want to live their lives getting slaughtered. The first day I retired I went to a Now the first responders, a central workers rally that was conducted by two of the most antagonistic councilmen in New York City towards the police. And I went up to one of them. I used to give him a hard time on Twitter and I went up to him. He's a councilman. He goes, hi, how are you? I said, I'm Pete the cop. He goes, ah, the ball breaker from Twitter. Yeah, that's me. And I says, do you have a moment? He goes, you know what? Absolutely. He says, I really want to talk to you face to face. And he did. His politics are not mine. And he listened. And another guy who showed up, turns out he went to high school with this other guy, and he goes, oh, you're the other guy that tortures me. And we talked for about an hour and a half. And I give him his props on that, that he did listen. And we talked. In the midst of it, who comes over? This guy Brad Lander, who's now the city controller. Quite possibly one of the most deranged people I've ever met in my life, who's now in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of city money. And he went on nonstop for 10 minutes without breathing in about, you name the cause, he's on it. Except New York City. So finally I stopped him. I says, stop. He goes, what do you mean? I said, that's all bullshit. He goes, what? I says, listen, maybe nobody's getting killed where you live in Park Slope, but you know what? Some old man will be sitting down in the Red Hook houses tonight having a beer. He's going to take a round through his head. I says, in Brownsville, a couple of young teenagers will get into a shootout. One of them will die. Harlem, Washington Heights, South Bronx. I says all over this city, and I says it's not just What is wrong with you that you don't know that you don't see that the cops can no longer do their job Cops can't defend themselves It's just how do you expect them to defend the citizens? It's what is wrong with you. You took away that qualified immunity with the only city workers that can be sued You know as as a civilian you lose your house over a stop questioning frisk because you stopped somebody It's what part of this of common sense does not register with you? I have to give him credit. He's a true politician. He goes, Oh, got another meeting to go to. See you later. And he walked away. Which he did. He couldn't leave fast enough. And the other politician that was there, he goes, Welcome to my world. He says, I'm the voice of moderation. He says, can you imagine listening to that all day for nine hours a day? He says, him and his cabal are some of the most irrational. He says, don't get me wrong. They hate cops. He says, their belief system is based in Marxism, socialism. Good government doesn't spring forth into their skulls. Nonprofits, NGOs, nonprofits in New York City are the miracle grow of government corruption. Everybody's involved in them and there's billions of dollars. We have a homeless industrial complex here. where a lot of companies and certain politicians are making tremendous money off of these situations. So I kind of got involved afterwards with a good government group. And it doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. What matters is you have honest, decent government and represent the people properly. We have people living in the streets. And money is just getting pissed away on God knows whatever. And that, as a lifelong New Yorker, don't have to be this way. So, yep, so I'm still here. A great run. Met a lot of wonderful people along the way. A lot of insanity along the way. It's a great city. I was thinking about that as I was talking about My car to come over here and I'm walking up 40 47th Street as a kid It was such a thrill They got like in Queens. You didn't you know, you're in Queens. The city was Manhattan go into the city go down to It was such a huge the rail and I would be fascinated by everything and everything about the city, the subways. And my aunt lived in Greenwich Village on Waverly Place. She lived there since 1920. A good chunk of the city. of the Irish side of my family came from Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen and it was such a treat whenever I would stay in the city with her and she would take me there was a place called Sutter's Bakery I love cherry pie Sutter's made the best and whenever she came out the Queens because she was also like a surrogate mother helping my mother and his sister because there were kids all over the place and she would always come out and stay with one or the other over the weekend her husband who had passed away, he was Mayor Jimmy Walker's chauffeur back in the roaring 20s. And it was such a thrill and for me, wonderment to come in to the city and then, you know, and even through high school. And then I came to work here as a cop. And I live here now. I just felt that walking down the street today. It's funny because I walked past the building where one of my first homicides in Manhattan occurred. It was pretty disgusting. And I'm looking up at the building. I said, wow. This is how I remember that one. That was bizarre. And I'm crossing the avenue and you look at the subway grates and the noise. And I felt that feeling like I haven't felt in years. I felt like that little kid again being back. And I don't know why that hit me tonight. I don't know why. And it is a great city and it's got a rough road ahead. Myself, and there's a lot of good people here that don't want it to be like this. It's tough. There are times where, you know, I'm like, what do I need this for? But I think, you know, my mom passed away and there was a small building, my grandfather's building. I don't want to sell the building to developers. Developers absolutely flattened my whole neighborhood. I may be the last holdout against gentrification on the block because I'm like, you know what? My grandfather when he came here, he brought craftsmen here from Italy, ironwork and marble work that was part of his business. Building is magnificent. You know what? My family's there all these generations. But on top of that, just from the eye, it's a beautiful building. And we've ripped crap down here. Beautiful old structures get taken down left and right. Trust me, the family homestead is never going to be on the National Register of Historic Places. It's on my National Register of Historic Places. And if I'm the holdout, so be it. But you know, the Italian side of the family, they're from Fort Lee, New Jersey, except for my grandfather. I don't know how the hell my grandfather wound up over here with everybody over there. And I laugh because my grandmother, when she was six years old, she was in a half dozen movies with Enrico Caruso in some of the first talkies, because Fort Lee, New Jersey was the movie capital of the East Coast. at that time. I like Jersey. It's a nice place to visit. I visited as a kid. It was always a thrill going over the George Washington Bridge. But I think I'm firmly planted on for good, bad, ugly, indifferent. I think I'm going to be here for a while. So. All right. Pete, thank you so much for sharing your story. I hope that entertained your audience. You're a great storyteller.