FOR THE RECORD

The Fire Department families who have been targeting former Mayor Rudy Giuliani for what they call failed leadership before, during and after 9/11 took their message to New Hampshire last week to try to hurt his chances of winning the state's Republican presidential primary, the nation's earliest.

The family members of firefighters who died on 9/11, many of whom participated in an International Association of Fire Fighters video outlining what they view as Mr. Giuliani's shortcomings, allege that the ex-Mayor was responsible for leaving firefighters with the same inadequate radios that failed after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, even though Mr. Giuliani had received a report about the radios' problems in 1994, his first year in office. Because of the faulty radios, they said, more than 100 firefighters never heard an evacuation call and died when the building collapsed. The 9/11 Commission also found that these radios did not perform sufficiently.

The families went to Concord, Manchester and Hanover, having public breakfasts, visiting firehouses, speaking at town hall forums and to local news outlets telling voters that Mr. Giuliani was not the hero of 9/11 his campaign makes him out to be.

"We've made a lot of progress," said Deputy Chief Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son on 9/11. "We got the message out."

Mr. Giuliani's presidential campaign has maintained that the radios were in fact working but that a repeater system in the Trade Center failed after the hijacked plans struck the buildings. Mr. Giuliani has said that the firefighters received evacuation calls but ignored them in order to rescue more people.

The IAFF video and the families also charge that Mr. Giuliani's decision to quickly move the debris at Ground Zero to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island without allowing firefighters to continue searching for their fallen comrades' remains was disrespectful. They also note that Mr. Giuliani proved himself unable to prepare for a terrorist attack when, they allege, he ordered the creation of the city's emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center, instead of a location in downtown Brooklyn that was far less likely to be a terrorist target. The building collapsed eight hours after the attacks. Mr. Riches said the group plans to either return to New Hampshire or go to Iowa to educate voters there.

"TV made this man a hero," Mr. Riches said. "But to take him down in politics, the way to get this message out there is through the media, because the media is so powerful."

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Retired Fire Lieut. John Finucane will read from his new novel about South Bronx firefighters in the 1970s battling the infamous blazes and the arsonists who defined the borough's landscape at three locations in December.

In "When The Bronx Burned," Mr. Finucane, who served the FDNY from 1967 to 1987, focuses on one fictional group of firefighters, led by protagonist Jackie Mulligan, who demand that the department assign more Fire Marshals to investigate the fires, but to no avail. Angered, they embark on a journey to find the perpetrators.

Mr. Finucane paints the abandonment and desolation of the once-thriving borough with near-Joycean detail. In one scene, Mr. Finucane writes, "The firefighters continued through Miniford to the next block, 170th Street, then onto Seabury Place, a short block strewn with debris and garbage, looking like a garbage dump. On the right side of the street stood a vacant public school with black burn marks on many of its glass-less, frame-less windows. Across the street in the middle of the block stood the fire blackened shell of a synagogue."

The social and physical destruction of The Bronx causes the protagonists to respond not just as firefighters, but as residents who watch the carnage in disgust.

Mr. Finucane will read and sign copies of his book at the AnBealBocht Café at 445 West 238th Street in The Bronx on Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m., the Will Library at 1500 Central Park Avenue in Yonkers on Dec. 18 at 7:00 p.m., and the East Bronx History Forum at the Huntington Free Library at 9 Westchester Square in The Bronx on Dec. 19 at 7:30 p.m.