Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 911 by Wayne Barrett & Dan Collins

Author:Wayne Barrett & Dan Collins [Barrett, Wayne & Collins, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 21st Century, 19th Century, Military
ISBN: 9780061747960
Google: MKYQZrq8ef8C
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-10-13T01:44:45.342214+00:00

CHAPTER 7

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

WHEN RUBY GIULIANI testified at the 9/11 Commission in May 2004, members of the audience—some of them relatives of dead firefighters—began yelling “What about the radios?”

The radios—the antique “handie-talkie” devices that had served the firefighters so badly during the 102 minutes when good communication was needed most—were a scandal, and one that haunts Giuliani to this day. The bereaved survivors are not the only ones mystified by how New York’s Bravest wound up unable to get simple information that could have saved their lives that day.

“What about Motorola?” the families yelled.

Sally Regenhard, who believes that her firefighter son, Christian, died because he didn’t hear a radioed evacuation order, was one of the voices in the theater of The New School, where the hearing took place. Giuliani had delivered the eulogy at her son’s funeral on October 26, 2001. “In those days, people thought having him was a good thing,” Regenhard explains. “I thought it was a good thing.”

Regenhard stood on 13th Street outside the school after Giuliani’s testimony. She pointed out Bob Leonard, the public relations adviser for Motorola in New York, who had been a spokesman for the Fire Department when it began the process that led to the Motorola contract she believes contributed to her son’s death. Leonard’s public relations company, Dan Klores Associates, also represented Giuliani Partners. It represented Miramax Books when it published Giuliani’s Leadership and Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, the Los Angeles–based agent for Giuliani that produced an HBO 9/11 special featuring Giuliani. It represented Bernie Kerik when he imploded as the nominee for Homeland Security Secretary. Leonard, who also used to work in Giuliani’s City Hall press office, was hanging out in the May sun that day with the current Fire Department spokesman. To Regenhard, Leonard embodied at that moment the incestuous ties between Motorola and the administration whose radio business it disturbingly monopolized.

While in fact Leonard’s multiplicity of hats was more coincidence than conspiracy, the details of indifference and collusion engulfing the Motorola deal tore at some firefighter families almost as painfully as the recurring memories of their loss. The record of favoritism and failure became a wound that throbbed every time Giuliani was knighted, lionized in cover stories, cheered at conventions, retained for millions as a security consultant, or boosted as America’s Churchill on his way to the White House. It was not as if Giuliani himself had taken a dime from Motorola, not even in campaign contributions. But the layers of cozy relationships, and the chronology of deception and connivance that infected his administration’s dealings with the company, were just the sort that prosecutor Giuliani once focused on like a laser beam.

Under Giuliani’s watch, the Fire Department had tried to equip its firefighters with portable radios from Motorola that didn’t actually exist when the FDNY took the first steps to order them. The radios were so “undeveloped,” according to a subsequent investigation, that the company didn’t even put them on its sales list until months after the order was placed in 1999.

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