“I was a hotshot and I got results, and that was all anybody cared about. Nobody questioned it, least of all me. Nothing else mattered so long as the job got done. And I was a pretty good drinker those days. Never on the job, always after. Interesting thing about a hostage situation: you can never walk away cold. There’s a downtime afterward when you have to get together with the other men involved and toss back a few, to relieve that tension, that adrenaline, whatever it is, to flush it out of your system for good. Primitive therapy, but absolutely necessary, because there is no one else you can share it with except those who went through it with you. Not your wife. Not your kids, your clergyman. And that was when I really held court. Those were exciting times — heady — and I guess I came to live for them, situation after situation, triumph after triumph. Like a drug, over and over. I was at the top of my game then. In other words, I was pretty well primed for a long fall.” He nodded, surprising even himself with his candor. It relaxed him to tell it. Didn’t it all seem so clear to him now. “Ever heard of the World Trade Center?” he said.
Kearney nodded. “Seen pictures. Where that bomb went off in New York City.”
“This was almost three years before that. A huge place it is, with two zip codes of its own, millions of people passing through it every week. A large complex of buildings and tunnels and walkways. This was at the World Financial Center, which is part of the complex but separate from the twin towers. Tuesday night late in June. Raining hard, I remember, because this was lower Manhattan down near the Hudson, and Vesey Street was flooded and shiny black when we pulled up outside.
“A Cuban national had taken his wife and daughter and thirty-seven other people hostage on the Fixed Income Trading Floor of one of the largest brokerage firms in New York, seven stories up. We were called in as feds because it was thought initially to be some sort of Free Cuba ploy or other act of terrorism. Turned out later it was just the messy end of a simple domestic dispute. He was a maintenance worker in the building, a heavyset guy who had been beating his Cuban-born wife for more than a year and had started in recently on their twelve-year-old daughter. For this, and various other reasons, the wife had become very unhappy with her life in America and decided to steal the child away from him and move back in with her mother’s family in Cuba. But for some reason, she decided to go to his work to tell him of her intention, and brought along the daughter. Two policemen responding to initial reports of a disturbance in the lobby of the World Financial Center were overpowered. The Cuban took their guns, chemical Mace and car keys, went out yelling into the street, got the shotgun from the trunk of their cruiser, then retreated back into the building with his wife and daughter up to the seventh floor, where he took over.
“Logistics were a problem from the beginning. The seventh-floor trading area was wide open, an L-shaped football field of rows and rows of desks spaced by white rectangular columns, and two stories high. For security reasons, the elevator did not stop there after six at night, so the only way you could get in was if you had permission — Capital Markets salesmen catching up on work after the markets closed — or were a maintenance man with keys. There was no eighth floor, except for a side flight of stairs leading to a catwalk elevation of desks and offices above the trading area. He had barricaded that entrance and said it was rigged to a bomb. That was nonsense, but forced entry was an operational no-go regardless, as the upper area was visible from almost anywhere on the trading floor below.
“The next lowest floor was the fifth, the Equity Trading Floor, which was also two stories high and therefore prohibitive in terms of gaining access through the ceiling. The floor above Fixed Income Trading, the ninth, the Public Finance Trading Floor, was just one story tall, but too far above the seventh floor to be effective. Even if we broke through the floor itself, Hostage Rescue would have had to rappel unprotected down forty feet of wide-open space.
“The one thing the seventh floor did have was telephones. Hundreds of them, on every desk throughout the trading area. We established a control base on the fifth floor below and evacuated and sealed off all the floors above the seventh. By this time it was late at night, so the evac went quietly and smoothly. I got him on the phone right away. One ring. He was too distraught for English, so we used an interpreter. I made progress quickly, getting some hostages released in exchange for meals he had requested from a small Cuban restaurant off Fulton Street. We had to locate the proprietor in Bedford-Stuyvesant and get him to come in and open up the place in the middle of the night. He said the suspect had eaten lunch there every day for more than two years. The waitresses all knew him by name.
“We negotiated through the night. I said yes to everything he wanted in exchange for more hostages, while at the same time moving Hostage Rescue snipers and assault specialists into position, filling the stairwell with guns and men and working on rewiring the elevators. I talked him down finally to just thirteen hostages, seven male and six female, including his wife and daughter.
“The suspect was clearly unbalanced. One moment he was demanding to talk to his mother in Cuba, and the next, Castro himself. He was unstable. His life had somehow gotten away from him, he felt powerless, and he said many times that he had nothing left to live for. That was my main concern. You have to give a hostage-taker some sense of responsibility, some meaning to his actions. Otherwise, there is nothing stopping him from executing the hostages and you’ve lost him. I remember I convinced him at one point to put his wife on the phone. I can’t recall now what she told the interpreter. But I do remember her crying. I remember her praying.”
Banish stopped a moment to collect his thoughts.
“The problem with using a public phone line in a hostage situation is that anybody can call in. This was a major concern, as we had been through recent scenarios where television reporters telephoned hostage-takers for interviews in the heat of a standoff. For that reason alone, I wanted to shut down all the phones on the Fixed Income Trading Floor, save one. This was met with resistance on three fronts. First, the World Financial Center managing group had made numerous legal guarantees to the brokerage firm, among them the provision that WFC could secure their offices and operating space against unlawful intrusion and provide adequate communications service at all hours. New York Telephone had made a similar agreement with the firm, and was having trouble anyway locating a technician who could circumnavigate the complex WFC branch exchange at that late hour. Then representatives for the firm itself arrived on the scene. Lack of telephonic access to the Fixed Income Trading Floor during normal operating hours would be devastating enough, they said, but a Wednesday morning shutdown of the Equity Trading Floor, which we were currently occupying, not only meant the instant loss of millions of dollars in business, but would have serious repercussions on the opening of the New York Stock Exchange and various financial markets around the world.
“So I listened to them. And I held off. I sent someone down to talk to the news media camped out in the lobby below, to play up the risk to the hostages and get them to agree not to attempt to contact the Cuban under threat of arrest. I should have just gone ahead and cut the cords and let everybody fight it out afterward, but I did not. I let it go. The phone lines remained open while our people scrambled to get a court order, and I sat back patiently to wait.