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Letters to the Editor: Cloud Over Giuliani's Radios

Letters to the Editor
Cloud Over Giuliani's Radios

To the Editor:

After reading the letter to the editor from Al Regenhard and Family about Rudy Giuliani in the Aug. 10 edition of THE CHIEF, I write to echo the appreciation of reporter Ari Paul's coverage of the news conference at the headquarters of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association last month. Numerous family members of firefighters who died at the World Trade Center faulted the former Mayor for eight years of failure to replace personal radios that were useless at the same site in 1993.

Several years ago, THE CHIEF editor Richard Steier wrote of an encounter on the sidewalk outside of the New School, where the 9/11 Commission was holding public hearings. Pete Gorman, then president of the UFOA, and myself were talking to Steier about an outburst at the hearings by family members while Giuliani was testifying. They were shouting at the Commission members, "Ask him about the radios. What about the radios?"

Steier wrote abut that conversation and noted that a UFOA official replied that, "Someone took a payoff." I couldn't prove that when I said it, and I can't prove it today. But I believe it deeply because in 52 years of working in and around City Hall, I've never seen nor heard of a dirtier, more corrupt city contract than the one for the Motorola digital radios that failed so miserable they never made it into acceptable service to the FDNY. Or anywhere else in the country that I know about.

Though the city paid an enormous amount of money for those radios, somewhere around $14 million (and double that amount when "appurtenances" were added in), the digital radios flunked numerous FDNY tests before they were issued to firefighters in the field in early 2001, and numerous times after they were recalled when a Queens firefighter in a dark cellar shouted "Mayday" seven times into his radio, calls for help that were not heard by his nearby comrades all seven times.

After the March 2001 recall of the digitals, the old, worthless, useless Motorola handi-talkies (the ones that an FDNY report on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing said did not work in the high-rise buildings, subways and other large buildings such as schools and hospitals) were reissued to all New York City firefighters, and that was what they carried into battle on 9/11.

The digitals were taking up space in a warehouse someplace while the manufacturer was working "to get the bugs out" so they could once again replace the old Motorola analog radios. But long after the disaster at the World Trade Center, the digitals were brought back again, only to fail field tests, again and again. Finally, the Bloomberg administration told Motorola to just convert the expensive digitals to the analog mode, which was done. Nobody ever asked for a refund, and none was offered. They never did get the bugs out.

Many of us who believe the Motorola digital radio contract was corrupt from its beginnings to its end first became suspicious when it was learned that the digital radios had been offered for sale to the Fire Departments of Boston, Chicago and Washington and failed field tests in those cities before they were accepted blindly here. To make it even worse, at the same time the FDNY was signing off on 3,800 untested radios, our own Police Department tried them and rejected them. The Police Department said the digital radios were dangerous to their undercover cops.

So what does all that tell an otherwise trusting soul? It tells me the Fire Department's insistence they would ram those radios down their firefighters' throats was unconscionable.

So I will reframe what I said several years ago on the sidewalk outside the New School, and this time with my name attached:

I have never seen nor heard of a more corrupt contract than the Motorola digital radio contract for the FDNY. And it's a civic shame no one in law enforcement, at any level, has ever taken the time or the trouble to put the people responsible under oath in a search for the truth. Considering that 121 New York City firefighters died because they were sent into a war zone with old, useless radios that couldn't work from one floor to another in the World Trade Center, and one lobby to another there, it is still not too late for someone with a badge to at least inquire into that dirty, corrupt contract.

MARTIN J. STEADMAN, UFOA Media Consultant