For Port Authority police, Ground Zero is their home

By KRISTOFFER A. GARIN

THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: Jan. 27, 2002)

NEW YORK - The upper floors of the little building at 4 Vestry St. stood abandoned for more than 35 years before the Port Authority Police Department s World Trade Center Command moved in after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The sergeants' room is finished now, with a TV, a sink and a microwave. They are working on getting a "livetrack" electronic fingerprinting system online because, as the mantra goes, "They had one down there."

"It's not the Trade Center," said Officer Mike Megna, who set up the Vestry Street facility. "But temporarily, I think it's pretty nice."

Five months after the attacks, there is no escaping the aftermath of Sept. 11 for the Port Authority Police Department.

"When we get a body recovered and it's pouring rain up to your ankles or it s 20 below with the wind, I tell them they're doing God's work," said Lt. Mark Winslow, a 27-year veteran of the department who lives in Eastchester and runs the department's operations at the site. "I'm very proud of these officers."

For a force of roughly 1,400 uniformed officers, the department's 37 dead in the World Trade Center suicide hijackings is a huge tally.

Among them was Capt. Kathy Mazza, commanding officer of the Port Authority Police Academy in Jersey City. She responded with a group of officers from the academy, five of whom also died.

Mazza was last seen by civilians in the lobby of Tower 1 shortly before it came down. They saw her racing back inside after she shot out the thick glass panes in the lobby, letting hundreds escape when the revolving doors became clogged with people.

In many ways, the department's loss has been overshadowed by the stunning hit taken by the New York Fire Department. Because the Trade Center was the jurisdiction of the Port Authority police before the attacks, the department offers a kind of continuity in a moment when the whole world seems skewed -
a link between the realities of the World Trade Center and Ground Zero.

Capt. Anthony Whitaker had been Mazza's counterpart - the commanding officer - at the World Trade Center Command for three years when the first plane hit. He survived, and fellow officers said he saved thousands of lives by ordering an immediate evacuation of the entire seven-building complex.

As he manages his unit from the third floor of 4 Vestry St., Whitaker is still trying to put the pieces together. At the academy, survivors of the group that went with Mazza to the towers said they were doing much the same thing.

Whitaker's strongest memory is the fireball.

He was in the lobby of Tower 1 when the first plane hit. He didn't feel the impact, but minutes later he heard the first of what he has come to call those roars."

"I heard a roar, a tremendous roar, coming from the south side elevator banks," Whitaker recalled. "When I first saw the fireball, it appeared that it was pushing people in front of it. People were floating inside, and there were people in a ring on the outside - it looked like they were orbiting the fireball."

Whitaker dived into an open doorway to take cover and the mass of flame passed him by. Much of that day is still a blur for him, but his memory of walking through the charred lobby after the blast is painfully intact.

"You could hear a pin drop," he said. "I started walking, stepping on soft things that felt like pillows. Instinctively, I knew I was stepping on people, on body parts. Two people on fire ran past me ... issued no sound, just ran past me."

Nearby, after the second plane had hit and the rescue effort was in full swing, the noise of shouting and sirens was so intense that academy EMT instructor Eugene Fasano could not make himself heard as he shouted to Mazza 150 feet away.

Fasano had stopped to tend to a victim's broken leg. The last time he saw Mazza, she was disappearing with Lt. Robert Cirri, her executive officer, into the maze of tunnels in the Trade Center's basements.

"I tried to catch up with them," Fasano said. "They couldn't hear me. I didn't know where that door led. I thought, 'Do I get lost or do I go back to help this guy?' "

The authority's information on the 37 lost is cobbled together from sightings and radio tapes. Fully reconstructing their movements is next to impossible.

"I can think of four or five guys on that poster that I hugged and told them 'Be careful,' " Fasano said. "It was controlled chaos - nobody knew what was going on."

Officer Sharon Miller had followed Mazza from Jersey City in the academy van She was with Mazza, Cirri and several other authority officers - Chief James Romito; Instructors James Nelson, James Parham and Richard Rodriguez; and Officers Steve Huczko and Paul Laszczynski - in Tower 1, the North Tower when Tower 2 came down.

"We all went up together. Chief Romito said, 'OK, this is what we're going to do: We're going to go up, we're going to get the people out, then we're going to get out,' " Miller said.

Miller recalls Huczko and Laszczynski breaking off on the 22nd floor to help a group of firefighters. Then, darkness and rumbling. "If you didn't grab the railing you would have fallen. I thought the
building we were in was falling," Miller said. "Romito says, 'We're going to go up a couple more and then get out of here.' "

They continued up several more floors until the order came for everybody to get out, then they were separated in the rush. Miller is the last surviving authority officer to have seen Mazza, Romito or the others alive.

"I waited for them at the stairwell. ... Nothing," Miller said. "Then I waited outside the lobby. I was pacing around, waiting, when someone said, Run.' "

When Tower 1 fell, Whitaker said, it started with a movement he was not quite sure was real.

"I looked up at the eeriest thing I ever saw: The antenna on the North Tower was wavering just a little bit," Whitaker said. "I started running, got two blocks away, and then I heard that roar again."

Before he ran, Whitaker tried to get the people with him to follow. Many of those who stayed that extra moment didn't make it.

Nobody knows for sure where Mazza went after she was seen shooting open the passages out of the bottlenecked lobby with her service revolver.

Cirri had called his wife shortly before Tower 1 fell to tell her he was safe and was redirecting confused office workers away from the flames. Fasano and Miller are convinced Mazza went to join Cirri, her
second-in-command.

"I guarantee you, when they find them they're going to find the two of them together," Fasano said.

Mazza and Cirri, who charged into the World Trade Center on a lifesaving mission, have yet to be found at Ground Zero.

Whitaker's officers are looking for them.

Two shifts of 25 authority officers work daily 12-hour tours in the mud and metal of Ground Zero as "spotters," looking for remains in the rubble dug up by the huge claws of the "grabbers" run by private contractors.

"I knew every single officer. Some of them, I knew their children," said Winslow, the lieutenant who runs the department's operations at the site. "A good day is when we recover somebody, when we recover anybody."

Two trailers just outside the site make up the department's base of operations "down there." One is stuffed with electronic equipment and is difficult to walk through unless people get out of your way.

The larger trailer, part rec room and part shrine, is mostly empty. Along with sandwiches, sodas and coffee, it is full of photographs, newspaper clippings, flags and patches from recovered uniforms. Two engraved crosses welded from beams that once held up Tower 2 sit on a table by a poster of
the fallen.

On the chalkboard that keeps track of the missing, only 11 of the 37 names have stars next to them indicating the officer's remains have been found. The television that no one is watching is turned up loud.

"I was angry when it first happened," Winslow said. "But I want to be down here every day. I'm proud to be a part of this rescue and recovery effort."

Winslow said he has not had a single transfer request from the officers stationed at the site, although his people are hurting from the brutal schedule.

At any given time, each "grabber" is assigned an officer from each of the departments, the PAPD, the NYPD and the FDNY. These officers look for clothing, shoes, anything that appears to be human remains. If they see something, it is their job to stop the machine and initiate a hand search.

This is especially difficult for the officers of the old World Trade Center Command, who are invaluable to the recovery effort because of their intimate knowledge of the buildings.

"We have people who used to work at the World Trade Center for years and years and years," Winslow said. "They can tell us if the place we find a pile of shoes is where a shoe store used to be."

Such advantages come at an awful cost. Whitaker, as part of what he calls his "community policing philosophy," spent the time between 8:30 and 9 a.m. four days a week in the same spot in the plaza outside the towers. Now he pores over the published faces of the victims.

"I can't help but wonder how many of my people made it," he said, looking over a special section from a months-old newspaper. "I saw faces. I didn't know names, where they worked. A lot of these people to me are just faces, but you build up a rapport over time."

It's no different for the other members of the command. Even forgetting for a moment their fellow officers and the 38 civilian Port Authority employees who died on Sept. 11, there are thousands of faces, thousands of memories, and no way to resolve them.

After the attack, it all disappeared.

"They parked there, they had their lockers there," Winslow said. "Afterwards they had no clothes, no cars. They were lucky to have their lives. But their friends were dead."

This past Tuesday, looking down into the pit, Officer Alan Arbutina took off his hat and slowly shook his head as he watched the PAPD officers, firefighters and NYPD officers lined up to honor the remains of Port Authority rescue dog Sirius as they were carried from the rubble.

On his first day off after the attack, Arbutina went home, sank into his chair and flipped on his stereo. It played a record by the Temptations, an album that Officer Nathaniel Webb had liked so much he asked Arbutina to copy it for him.

That turned out to be the last gift Arbutina ever gave his friend. He had made the copy only a few days before the attacks, and hadn't gotten a chance to relax at home since. A world away from the disaster, the original disc had been sitting in Arbutina's stereo, a relic from a time when Ground Zero had been the World Trade Center.

Webb and Arbutina had worked together at the Holland Tunnel, along with Officers Walter McNeil and Donald Foreman, since Arbutina joined the department in 1974. Now, only Arbutina is left. Hearing that music, he said, was almost too much for him.

"Everybody's pushed to the max," he said. "We haven't been able to deal with the grief part of it. The first four months, you're running on emotions and adrenaline. ... Now we're just so tired."

Then Whitaker called over the radio, and Arbutina went back to work.

Send e-mail to Kristoffer A. Garin - kgarin@thejournalnews.com or

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