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Home / Books and Series / Another Nineteen / Chapter 14: Rudy Giuliani and the World Trade Center

Chapter 14: Rudy Giuliani and the World Trade Center

Kevin Ryan | June 2013
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As mayor of New York City on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani was in a unique position to benefit from the attacks. That’s because he gained national notoriety for his presumed valiant response that day, and he received the kind of publicity that every ambitious politician desires. Immediately after 9/11, Giuliani’s approval rating rocketed to 79% among New York City voters, a dramatic increase over the 36% rating he had received a year earlier. He was called “America’s Mayor” by Oprah Winfrey at a 9/11 memorial service. And on December 24, 2001, TIME magazine named Giuliani its Person of the Year for 2001.

In the years since 9/11, Giuliani’s public persona has unraveled. It has been revealed that he did more damage than good during his tenure as mayor and there are many reasons to suspect him with regard to the events of 9/11. These reasons include the following.

  • He led enforcement actions against the terrorist financing network BCCI and then joined a law firm that represented that terrorist network.
  • In the years between the first WTC bombing and 9/11, Giuliani’s administration ignored problems with the NYC fire department radios. Those faulty radios contributed to the deaths on 9/11.[1]
  • He and his staff had foreknowledge that the WTC towers would fall when no one could have predicted such a thing.
  • He was primarily responsible for the destruction of critical WTC evidence.
  • He told people in the Ground Zero area that the air was safe to breathe, when it was not, in order to speed the removal of evidence at Ground Zero.
  • Several members of Giuliani’s family have been involved with organized crime, and Rudy hired companies linked to organized crime to remove and dispose of the WTC debris.

Considering these things it is worthwhile to look at Giuliani’s past before looking closely at his actions and decisions with respect to 9/11.

The History of Rudy

Rudolph W. Giuliani was born an only child in 1944. Rudy’s father, Harold Giuliani (alias Joseph Starrett), was a convicted hold-up man who served time in Sing Sing prison, and was later employed as an enforcer for a mafia loan shark operation. Rudy’s uncle (his mother’s brother), Leo D’Avanzo, ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation with Jimmy Dano, “who was a made man.”[2] Additionally, Rudy’s cousin Lewis D’Avanzo “was a stone cold gangster who was shot to death in 1977 by FBI agents when he tried to run them down with his car.”[3]

Of course, the sins of his father, and his uncle, and his cousin, should not be used to judge Rudy himself. Although Rudy was close to his family (he was actually married to one of his second cousins for 14 years) that doesn’t mean he inherited the family penchant for mafia associations. These connections to the mob are worth considering, however, in that Rudy hired mafia–connected companies to cleanup Ground Zero after the attacks. Additionally, Rudy’s friend and close colleague Bernard Kerik, whose police department provided crucial 9/11 evidence, was also linked to organized crime.[4] Also worth considering is that, as mentioned in the introduction, deep events often involve cooperation between government leaders and organized crime.

Despite (or perhaps due to) his family’s background, Giuliani’s career soared from the start as if he had friends in high places. At the age of 29, after graduating from law school and working briefly for a judge in NYC, Giuliani was appointed as the attorney in charge of the cases resulting from the Knapp Commission’s investigation of police corruption. The indictments and convictions of NYC police officers that followed did not end the corruption however and, in particular, drug-related corruption continued unabated.[5]

Two years later, in 1975, Giuliani was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler. A former judge from the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Tyler was the original choice to be the Watergate special prosecutor but he rejected the position. He was then brought into the Ford Administration, along with his young chief of staff Giuliani, specifically to restore the public trust after Watergate. Giuliani worked with Ford Administration officials, including Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney, during this time. As early as May 1976, Rudy was warning about domestic terrorism and recommending that intelligence collection policies be relaxed.[6]

In 1981, at the age of 37, Reagan appointed Giuliani to be Associate Attorney General, the third-highest position in the Department of Justice. In this position he supervised several law enforcement agencies including the Department of Corrections and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Journalist Gary Webb reported that the DEA protected Norwin Meneses during this time while Meneses ran cocaine into the United States to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.[7] 

Rudy’s mentor, Harold Tyler, became the chief author of a report that exonerated the Reagan Administration of any wrongdoing related to the 1980 killings of four American nuns in El Salvador.[8] At the time, L. Paul Bremer was effectively running the State Department that had commissioned the report and Brian Michael Jenkins was reportedly running a “war of terror” against the citizens of Nicaragua.[9] 

While Giuliani was in the Justice department, he chaired a committee that provided oversight to the government’s use of the software called PROMIS. A database integration program, PROMIS was used by Oliver North to track terrorist threats and may have evolved into a tool for deep state uses.[10] Reportedly the software was also used by the Continuity of Government group led by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Clarke.[11] An enhanced version of PROMIS was said to be capable of functioning as a tool for espionage, collecting and relaying information from the systems on which it was installed without the knowledge of the system owner. 

One of Giuliani’s colleagues in the department, Peter Videnieks, was involved with illegally distributing the enhanced PROMIS software to foreign governments with the approval of “high level Justice Department officials.”[12] Journalist Daniel Casolaro found that Videnieks and Earl Brian were involved in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy involving PROMIS, BCCI, organized crime, the “October Surprise” holding of the hostages, and the Iran-Contra affair. Brian was a CIA and Reagan associate who had previously been part of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and went on to run United Press International (with Stratesec investor Arnaud de Borchgrave). Casolaro was apparently murdered as a result of his investigation.[13]

Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for SDNY in 1983. It was in this position that he first gained national prominence by prosecuting high-profile cases, including those of Wall Street figures Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. As the U.S. attorney for the SDNY, from 1983 to 1989, Giuliani was not only handling drug and organized crime cases, he was also in charge of representing the Federal Reserve Bank in its enforcement actions against Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). These actions led to a RICO plea agreement and forfeiture of BCCI’s United States assets, valued at $550 million.[14] It was reported that during this time Giuliani received documents about secret bank accounts related to terrorist financing that were held by companies like Citibank, Barclays, Credit Lyonnais, and the Japanese company Nomura.[15] 

During Giuliani’s tenure at the Department of Justice in the 1980s, Kamal Adham and other high-level Saudis behind BCCI were allowed to gain control of several American financial institutions. BCCI was subsequently allowed to continue funding terrorism, without being prosecuted, for many years.[16]

Giuliani remained in the U.S. attorney position until January 1989, resigning at the end of the Reagan Administration. He then joined the law firm White & Case in NYC as a partner.

While working at White & Case, Giuliani ran for mayor of NYC in the 1989 election. In that failed campaign, it was revealed that Giuliani’s firm represented the Panamanian dictator, and colleague of President George H.W. Bush, Manuel Noriega. Author Russ Baker wrote that Bush, “as Ford’s CIA director and then as Reagan’s vice president, had fostered a relationship with the notorious drug trafficker [Noriega] during the seventies and eighties, even keeping him on the payroll at more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.”[17] 

Giuliani’s reaction to the revelation that his firm represented Noriega was to claim ignorance of the fact, which brought derision down upon him. Incumbent mayor Ed Koch remarked, “Obviously, you’re vulnerable when you are receiving income from a firm that’s lobbying for a company that’s perceived as damaging our civilization. You can get rich, or you can get elected.” Harrison Goldin, former city treasurer, added, “If Rudy Giuliani doesn’t know his law firm is representing Noriega, a notorious drug dealer and dictator, how is he going to manage a city with nearly a quarter of a million employees?[18]

At the time, White & Case also had an office in Saudi Arabia. What is less well reported is that Giuliani’s firm represented not only Noriega but also BCCI, which was funded by powerful royals in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.[19] This should be of concern considering that “BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.”[20]

Another fact of concern is that Giuliani’s reputation for being tough on crime was a false front. He actually did such a poor job in his prosecutions that many of his major convictions were later overturned.[21] The question of whether he was purposely placed in that position to undermine such cases, and thereby provide a door out for some of the accused, must be considered. His primary activities at the time included “publicly handcuffing mob bosses and business leaders on trumped up charges only to quietly drop the charges later,” demonstrating that, for his own part, Rudy was in it for the publicity.[22] 

Nonetheless, with detailed knowledge of the terrorist funding bank BCCI, it is remarkable that Giuliani never mentioned terrorism as an issue in his second campaign for NYC mayor in 1993. In fact, he barely mentioned the 1993 WTC bombing that had occurred earlier that year, referring to it only once publicly. What’s more, when he won the election, and began looking for his first police commissioner, he never questioned the candidates about terrorism. For someone who had made a career both before 1993, and after 9/11, as a terrorist fighter, it was inexplicable that Giuliani would never talk about terrorism when running for his first elected office. Some have said that it was his relationship with BCCI, and questions that might arise about it, that kept him quiet.[23]

Considering that al Qaeda and 9/11 are commonly seen as a direct outgrowth and evolution of BCCI intelligence operations,[24] Giuliani’s link to that network is enough to justify investigating his possible role in the attacks. There are a number of other compelling reasons to do so, however.

Foreknowledge 

In a televised interview with ABC News immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Rudy Giuliani stated that he was told that the World Trade Center towers were going to collapse before they actually did. This is what he said of the warning, which occurred shortly before the first tower fell.

“I .. I went down to the scene and we set up a headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna’ collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit, got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.” [25]

Problems with this remark include that, at the time, no one familiar with structural fires or tall building construction expected anything of the kind.[26] That is because no tall building had ever suffered global collapse from fire before and, moreover, none have experienced such a failure since that day. In fact, many architects and engineers still consider it impossible.[27] 

In this same interview Giuliani claimed that no one had ever predicted airliner crashes into the WTC, saying, “Oh there’s no question we were all caught totally off balance. No one, no one, no one could possibly expect, uh, large airplanes to crash into the, you know, the World Trade Center, uh, the way this happened.”[28] This stammering statement was not just unconvincing, it was patently false. Those in charge of securing the WTC in the decade before 9/11, specifically Brian Michael Jenkins of Kroll Associates, had considered exactly that scenario.[29] Another person who worked with Jenkins at Kroll Associates was James R. Bucknam. Once a senior adviser to Louis Freeh, Bucknam had worked with Giuliani and Freeh in the offices of the SDNY during the time that Giuliani was investigating BCCI.[30]

On 9/11, staff at Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) also had foreknowledge about the collapse of the buildings, and they warned some people. This was reported by Richard Zarrillo, an Emergency Medical Technician at the scene, when he said: “OEM says the buildings are going to collapse; we need to get out,” and “I was just at OEM. The message I was given was that the buildings are going to collapse; we need to get our people out.”[31]

Fire department Captain Abdo Nahmod was with Zarrillo, just before they were warned, and both had been told to make the OEM functional in WTC Building 7. But, Nahmod reported: “Moments thereafter we were advised by the staff at OEM that we were to vacate the building [and] that they believed there was another possible plane on its way and [we] proceeded down the stairwell of World Trade [7] all the way down to the ground floor.”[32] 

In the lobby of Building 7, Zarrillo and Nahmod apparently met with Division Chief John Peruggia, OEM Deputy Director Richard Rotanz and an unidentified representative from the City’s Department of Buildings. Peruggia later said “it was brought to my attention, it was believed that the structural damage that was suffered to the towers was quite significant and they were very confident that the building’s stability was compromised and they felt that the north tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse.”[33] 

Richard Rotanz was later said to be the one behind the claim that a third plane was heading toward New York. Rotanz reportedly got that information from a Secret Service agent who was with him in WTC 7 at the time, and spread the information to OEM leadership.[34] Therefore Rotanz was actually behind two important claims that morning, the first was that there was a third hijacked plane headed for the area, which was presumably the reason why the OEM emergency center was closed down before either tower fell (before 9:44 AM), and the second claim was that the towers were in danger of imminent collapse. 

In any case, this is an incredible statement – that “they felt that the north tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse” – considering that no building had ever suffered global collapse from fire. Zarrillo learned just how incredible this information was when he tried to spread the word to the fire chiefs in other areas, none of whom had predicted any such danger. When Zarrillo told Chief Peter Ganci about Peruggia’s startling news, Ganci’s response was, “who the fuck told you that?”[35]

Rudy’s Posse

While Zarrillo was trying to warn people, Giuliani and his police commissioner Bernard Kerik were wandering around the WTC site after the planes had hit the towers. Fire Marshal Steven Mosiello stated, “At that point the Mayor shows up. I was standing away from the command post, and the Mayor showed up… I remember the Mayor being with Commissioner Kerik and himself and a lot of their aides and escorts or whatever.”[36]

By the time the south tower did fall, Giuliani and Kerik had already moved away from immediate danger. As they were walking, they coincidentally happened upon a TV reporter who had, just the year before, published a flattering biography of Giuliani called “Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City.” This supposedly coincidental meeting is what led to Giuliani being portrayed as the heroic leader of the response to 9/11, through a series of “walking press conferences” on that day.[37]

Fire Chief Joseph Pfeifer, who was at the command post in the lobby of the North Tower, testified that, “Right before the South Tower collapsed, I noticed a lot of people just left the lobby, and I heard we had a crew of all different people, high-level people in government, everybody was gone, almost like they had information that we didn’t have.”[38]

Who were these high-level people in government gathering in the lobby of the North Tower that had information others did not have? This group reportedly included Richard Sheirer, the director of the OEM. It was said that, “He’s the guy Giuliani calls the man behind the curtain.”[39] Others suggested: “Since September 11, Sheirer has taken charge of the biggest cleanup effort in American history.” Whether or not he helped with the cleanup, Sheirer did have significant responsibility in his role as director of the OEM, having at various times “briefed President Bush, Tony Blair, and Henry Kissinger”.[40] 

The group of high-level government officials congregating in the north tower lobby also included John Odematt, the First Deputy Director of the OEM and former Executive Officer of the NYC Police Department’s Intelligence Division. Odematt left the OEM in 2003 to work for Citigroup, the parent company for WTC 7 tenant Salomon Smith Barney. 

It was reported that Sheirer and others spent a full hour in the north tower lobby, while the towers were burning. But no one knows what they were doing there. As stated before, the OEM center in WTC 7 was shut down early, and Sheirer himself never went there. Instead, he and his staff went to the north tower lobby and apparently did nothing but waited. Although Sheirer later claimed to have made some calls, “no steps to coordinate the response were ever discovered.”[41]

To some degree, Sheirer was officially portrayed as incompetent. John Farmer, a 9/11 Commission staff member, said of Sheirer: 

“We [the 9/11 Commission] tried to get a sense of what Sheirer was really doing. We tried to figure it out from the videos. We couldn’t tell. Everybody from OEM was with him, virtually the whole chain of command. Some of them should have been at the command center.”

Fire Captain Kevin Culley, who worked for the OEM, was later asked why most of the OEM’s top brass were with him at the scene of the incident, and he said: “I don’t know what they were doing. It was Sheirer’s decision to go there on his own. The command center would normally be the focus of a major event and that would be where I would expect the director to be.”[42]

After 9/11, Sheirer joined Giuliani’s new consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, along with Pasquale J. (Pat) D’Amuro, the FBI agent who ran the PENTTBOM investigation and stole evidence from Ground Zero (see below). Also at Giuliani Partners was Michael Hess, who was present in WTC 7 when explosives were going off in the building, along with witness Barry Jennings.[43] 

Bernard Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners as well, from the time he left his police commissioner post in December 2001 until resigning from the firm in December 2004. While he worked at Giuliani’s firm, Kerik took a short leave when he was appointed by George W. Bush to be Minister of the Interior for Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to L. Paul Bremer, then the Iraq Occupation Governor. In Iraq, Kerik was assigned to oversee the training of the Iraqi Police by contractor Dyncorp. 

It was claimed that “Mr. Kerik brings a wide array of experience to the new job, and a familiarity with the culture and political realities of the Middle East. Beginning in the 1970’s, he worked in the region as a security expert, including four years in the employ of the Saudi royal family.”[44] During Kerik’s first experience in Saudi Arabia, starting in 1978, he worked in security at a construction site in the desert and learned from a “squad of mercenaries and disillusioned Vietnam War veterans how to carry himself.” He also developed “a taste for the spoils of mercenary pay: Gucci shoes, Rolex watches, European suits, according to his memoir.”[45]

Kerik’s later work in Iraq was widely recognized as a dismal failure. By the time his remarkably short assignment was over, he had offended the U.S. military and left the newly forming Iraqi police force in shambles. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top military leader in Iraq during that time said that Kerik focused more on “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes” than training the Iraqis.[46]

It seemed that only one person was impressed with “The Baghdad Terminator,” as Kerik was called during his three months in Iraq, and that one supporter was Donald Rumsfeld. For some reason, Rumsfeld’s perspective on Kerik’s performance seemed biased. “Since Bernie Kerik left,” Rumsfeld complained, “I understand things have slowed down on police training.”[47] 

After returning from Iraq, Kerik went back to Giuliani Partners and remained there until President Bush nominated him to replace Tom Ridge as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. That nomination was shot down quickly, as the public began to understand more about Kerik’s background.

Giuliani had appointed Kerik as NYC Police Commissioner in August 2000, despite the fact that “More than half of Giuliani’s cabinet opposed Kerik’s appointment.”[48] Giuliani later remembered having been briefed “on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik’s relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik’s appointment as New York City police commissioner”. It seemed odd that Giuliani would need such a briefing, however, considering that Kerik had worked for Giuliani as a campaign bodyguard and chauffeur as early as 1993.[49] 

Kerik’s connections to the mob were not a surprise to many people, because he was regularly embroiled in scandal. Bribery, tax fraud and document falsification are only some of the crimes for which Kerik was accused.[50] Finally, in October 2009, Kerik was sent to federal prison after a judge revoked his $500,000 bail and berated him publicly from the bench. The judge described Kerik as a “toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance.”[51]

What is known about Kerik today should make people wonder about the leadership he provided while he was still a public figure. For example, Kerik was the first person to tell the public that explosives were not likely to have been used to bring down the WTC buildings. When asked this question in their first press conference on the afternoon of 9/11, Giuliani turned to Kerik for the answer and Kerik responded in the negative.[52]

An Unprecedented Destruction of Evidence

Regardless of who had foreknowledge or what the imminent danger was, in the weeks and months after 9/11 there were heroic efforts made to rescue survivors. But those efforts were hampered by Giuliani’s drive to clean up the site rapidly. The commonly held story was that the government wanted to re-open Wall Street, and for that reason didn’t care about the health of New Yorkers and first responders or about facilitating the most careful rescue operations.[53] But the facts also align with the hypothesis that authorities were actually in a hurry to remove evidence that pointed to the use of explosives.

The U.S. House Committee on Science reported, in March 2002:

“In the month that lapsed between the terrorist attacks and the deployment of the [FEMA] BPAT team, a significant amount of steel debris — including most of the steel from the upper floors — was removed from the rubble pile, cut into smaller sections, and either melted at the recycling plant or shipped out of the U.S.. Some of the critical pieces of steel — including the suspension trusses from the top of the towers and the internal support columns — were gone before the first BPAT team member ever reached the site.”[54]

The steel evidence, “a significant amount” of which was quickly removed before investigators arrived, might have shown evidence of explosive damage, like metal “pedaling.” But the steel was not the only evidence that was removed. For example, the black boxes that contain the flight data recorders and cockpit data recorders on every airliner were officially never found for either American Airlines Flight 11 or United Airlines Flight 175. This claim came from the FBI and was supported by the 9/11 Commission Report, but was contradicted by a number of people who worked at the site. Two Ground Zero workers claimed that they helped authorities find three of the four black boxes in October of 2001. One of them, New York City firefighter Nicholas DeMasi, described the recovery of the devices in a book.[55] Additionally, a source from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said – “Off the record, we had the boxes. You’d have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here.”[56]

The idea that the indestructible black boxes could not be found also appears to be in contradiction to the official claim that a passport of one of the alleged hijackers was found. On September 12th, 2001, it was reported that the passport of Satam al Suqami, who was said to be aboard American Airlines Flight 11, was recovered.[57] Because Flight 11 crashed directly into the middle of the north face of the north tower, and was buried within the building, this passport would have had to stay intact throughout the crash event and then withstand the blast from the fuel fire and the ensuing fires fed by office furnishings (and thermitic materials). The rest of the spectacularly improbable path of the passport is not entirely clear, as the first reports said that it was found “in the rubble” but, later, 9/11 Commission staff member Susan Ginsberg testified that “A passerby picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed.”[58] In other words, the passport was delivered through Bernard Kerik’s department.

During the five-month cleanup effort, there were unprecedented measures taken to control access to the site. The site was restricted,and photographs were banned, by order of Rudy Giuliani.[59]Anthony Mann of E.J. Electric, one of the contractors for the WTC towers, said that “Security is unbelievable. It’s really on a need-to-be-down-there basis.”[60]

Several people were reported to be in charge of the cleanup operation at Ground Zero. It was said that OEM was in charge, and that Richard Sheirer was the point person for the cleanup efforts.Others believed that Mike Burton, the executive deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), was in charge. Although Burton managed some of the demolition and cleanup operations, he later testified that “Everything was coordinated through his boss Holden, deputy mayors and the mayor.”[61]

After his WTC work was done, DDC’s Burton was hired as Senior Vice President of URS Corporation. URS is the same company that bought The Washington Group (i.e. Morrison-Knudsen), the south tower tenant that, in the preceding years, had been hired by the Army Corps of Engineers to demolish over 200 buildings.[62] 

At Ground Zero, DDC handed over the most important of its decision-making responsibility to LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti, whose leaders were Charles Thornton, later a member of the advisory board for the NIST WTC investigation, and Richard Tomasetti. The importance of LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti became clear when someone needed to take responsibility for the decision to recycle all the steel evidence. It was finally said that Richard Tomasetti made that decision, despite the outrage from the public, fire engineering experts and the victim‘s family members. When asked why he did it, Tomasetti claimed that, “had he known the direction that investigations into the collapses would take, he would have taken a different stand.”[63]

The recycling of the most important steel evidence was done in a hurry, as indicated by the U.S. House Committee on Science report mentioned earlier. It was done so fast, in fact, that the City took much less than market value for the scrap metal. At the time, steel scrap was selling for $150 per ton, but those in charge of the WTC cleanup took just $120 per ton for the WTC steel.[64] It’s not difficult to see that the $9 million lost in that transaction would have been useful to the many 9/11 first responders who became gravely ill from their exposure to toxins at Ground Zero.

Tomasetti’s extremely unpopular, and possibly criminal, decision was supported by the new mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg. Using a strange, diversionary excuse, Bloomberg said: “If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that’s in this day and age what computers do. Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn’t tell you anything.” Bloomberg’s claim was not at all true, as forensic investigators will confirm.

Other than the supervisory firm LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti, the City also hired five construction companies to handle the majority of the debris removal, and the site was divided up among them. These five companies were AMEC Construction Management, Bovis Lend Lease, Turner Construction, Tully Construction and Tishman Construction. Charlie Vitchers, who worked for Bovis, said the site was then broken up “into basically five segments. Building 7 debris was given to Tishman. The northwest corner of the site was given to AMEC. The northeast section of the site was given to Tully. And the southwest corner of the site and Tower 2 debris removal was given to Bovis.”[65] Turner Construction was assigned to a central location between building 5 and building 6.  

Other sub-contractors were hired to complete most of the actual debris removal. Most of those companies were suspected of being associated with organized crime. Some sub-contractors were reportedly linked to the Colombo crime family, including Civetta Cousins and Yonkers Contracting. Others were associated with the Luchese crime family.  

A contractor with a big presence at Ground Zero was Seasons Contracting, owned by Salvatore Carucci, a reputed Luchese associate. “We were called in by AMEC, one of the team of general contractors managing the cleanup,” said Bill Singley, a Seasons project manager. AMEC also hired Big Apple Wrecking, owned by Harold Greenberg, a reputed mob associate whose firm was barred from government work because of his convictions in bid-rigging and bribery conspiracies. Another firm allegedly controlled by Greenberg, Safeway Environmental, was also hired to work at Ground Zero.

One of the first debris removal companies on the scene was Mazzocchi Wrecking, brought in by the New York City Housing Preservation Department, but then hired by AMEC. A few months after 9/11, the N.J. Division of Gaming Enforcement “charged that three members of the DeCavalcante crime family worked for Mazzocchi.”[66] Another member of the DeCavalcante family, Thomas Vastola, was known to be an associate of a BCCI-backed arms dealer.[67] 

Other AMEC contractors that were linked to the mob were Peter Scalamandre & Sons, and Breeze National, both linked to the Luchese crime family. AMEC’s lead person on the ground was Vice President Leo DiRubbo, a reputed associate of the Luchese crime family. Another company that was “all over ground zero” was Laquila Construction, run by mob boss Dino Tomassetti.[68] 

These companies all made a lot of money at the WTC site. Of the $458 million in federal 9/11 aid spent on debris removal, AMEC took $65.8 million, Bovis hauled in $277.2 million, Tully got $76 million and Turner got $39 million. Subcontractors Breeze National, Peter Scalamandre & Sons, Civetta Cousins, Safeway Environmental and Yonkers Contracting made millions of dollars from their work at the site. Subcontractors Mazzocchi Wrecking and Seasons Contracting made tens of millions of dollars.

Turner Construction, one of the primary contractors at Ground Zero, occupied the 38th floor of the north tower, and was involved in performing the fireproofing upgrades in the towers. It has been noted that these upgrades were completed, in the three years before 9/11, on floors that match up almost identically to the floors of impact and failure on 9/11.[69] In any case, since 1999 Turner has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Hochtief AG, and its CEO is Thomas Leppert, who later became mayor of Dallas. President George W. Bush appointed Mayor Leppert to the President’s Commission on White House Fellows, and Bush now lives in Dallas, about a mile away from Leppert.[70] 

Of the other primary contractors, Tishman Construction oversaw the construction of the new WTC 7, as well as the “Freedom Tower,” designed to replace the north tower. Tully Construction retained Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI), a company that had been involved in the demolition of the bombed Murrah Building in Oklahoma in 1995. CDI was led by Mark Loizeaux, who later became a major defender of the government’s story about 9/11. Like some other experts with large government contracts, Loizeaux was at first uncertain about what had happened at the WTC, then he changed his opinion, apparently in order to harmonize with the official story.[71]

Once the cleanup was fully coordinated, the operations were consolidated under the control of two of the five primary contractors: AMEC Construction Management and Bovis Lend Lease. These are the two companies that were originally assigned the areas of Ground Zero that included the north tower (AMEC) and the south tower (Bovis).

At Ground Zero AMEC was led by its Vice Chairman, John Cavanagh, who had previously been the President and COO of Morse Diesel International, the predecessor to AMEC. Morse Diesel had also retrofitted WTC building 7 for Salomon Brothers in 1989. But at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Cavanagh reported to Peter Janson, the CEO of AMEC Construction and long-time business associate of Donald Rumsfeld. Under Janson’s leadership, AMEC had just completed a $258 million refurbishment of Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, exactly where American Airlines Flight 77 impacted the building.[72] 

Bovis Lend Lease was another British construction giant founded by Sir Frank Lampl, a Czech holocaust survivor who worked in the Middle East in the 1970s.[73] The company built the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and the Riyadh Olympic stadium in Saudi Arabia. 

Years later, Bovis project leader Jim Abadie was also in charge of the Deutsche Bank demolition and the September 11th memorial. This was before he resigned in the midst of an investigation into billing and payroll practices at five Bovis projects in New York, including the memorial and Deutsche Bank.[74] For the Deutsche Bank demolition, in 2004, Abadie hired a previously non-existent company called John Galt Construction.[75] After the deaths of two firefighters during the demolition project, John Galt was found to be in the middle of a multi-million dollar “check-cashing” scandal led by two characters named Riad Khalil and Neil Goldstein.[76] 

Also involved in the Deutsche Bank demolition was Charles Schwab, an associate of Harold Greenberg who “once controlled seven banks, a casino in Reno and a big chunk of Hilton Head Island [and] the largest demolition company in the country.”[77] Schwab was also associated with Phoenix Wrecking, a demolition and abatement company. It‘s not clear if this is the same company as the Phoenix Fireproofing listed in FOIA-obtained documents related to the WTC fireproofing upgrades.[78] But it is clear that mayor Bloomberg’s office and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) were aware of the suspicious companies involved in the Deutsche Bank fiasco.[79]

LMDC was mandated to “alleviate existing conditions that pose a serious and immediate threat to the health or welfare of New York City or meet community development needs resulting from Sept. 11, 2001.” In practice, this meant that LMDC made a lot of the decisions about what happened at Ground Zero after the cleanup and perhaps even before it was completed. LMDC was created by Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani without approval from the state legislature, in November 2001.[80] 

The federal government promised $21.4 billion in aid in order to rebuild Manhattan, and LMDC was in charge of spending a great deal of that money. Unfortunately, much of it was doled out in pork projects that benefited friends of LMDC.

A good friend of George W. Bush was a director of LMDC. This was Roland Betts, who once owned the Texas Rangers with Bush and Bush’s relative, Marsh & McClennan’s Craig Stapleton. Betts was also a “heavy contributor to the Bush election campaign in 2000.”[81] Another LMDC director was Frank Zarb, who was one of the first U.S. Energy Czars, appointed by President Ford.[82] 

Debris Removal and Theft

The debris removed from Ground Zero was either hauled away on trucks or shipped away on barges. Despite the effort to rapidly dispose of the steel and sell it a bargain price, the WTC debris was considered highly sensitive. At first the trucks were tracked using a paper-based system, and later GPS devices were fixed to each truck with “antennas to monitor location, cellular wireless antennas to communicate, and multiple I/Os to track vehicle signals from engine systems.”[83] Apparently it was important for officials to know not only where the trucks were at any given time, but also the status of the engine. As for the barges, the process was setup “in record time,” in order to “transport debris to the city’s Fresh Kills landfill and to recycling sites, all scrutinized by the Corps of Engineers.”[84]

As the debris was received at Fresh Kills landfill, it was sorted carefully. This sorting process was supervised by federal agents, and described in this way: “Teams of officers and agents watch as the rubble is sifted down to a fine ashy silt that they then rake through by hand.”[85] 

More than a year later, honest FBI agents reported the theft of some of this debris at the Fresh Kills site. It was then discovered that Evidence Recovery Teams (ERTs) involved in the sorting process stole pieces of debris, and kept or disposed of them. This removal of debris was condoned and encouraged by the FBI agents in charge.

The final report on the debris theft concluded that “many FBI agents took rubble as souvenirs from Fresh Kills.” An example given was that one Oklahoma City Emergency Response Team member took 80 pounds of various debris materials, including things like an “electrical outlet.” More commonly, building pieces were taken, including “red granite building façade.” The claim that these were merely souvenirs seemed unlikely considering the volume of materials stolen, and considering that WTC building 7 was the focus of much of the theft. In fact, pieces of the building “were stacked in a designated location of the Building 7 inspection area” in order for Secret Service agents to retrieve.[86]

Pat D’Amuro, who was mentioned earlier as an employee of Giuliani Partners, was involved in the theft of WTC debris materials from the Fresh Kills site. D’Amuro had specifically requested that certain kinds of items be kept for his retrieval, ostensibly so that he could give them away as mementos to various dignitaries. What is odd about that is that D’Amuro was not in charge of the Fresh Kills operation, but he had been the counterterrorism chief in the FBI’s New York City office since 1997, which meant that his responsibilities included oversight of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. 

As the FBI’s lead person in terms of investigating and preventing terrorist acts before 9/11, D’Amuro had also been appointed to lead the investigations of the 1993 WTC bombing and other al Qaeda-attributed crimes. The 1993 bombing plot had been infiltrated by the FBI, which played a role in either trying to prevent that operation or allowing it to go forward, as described in Chapter 4. It was later claimed that the investigation of the bombing, led by D’Amuro, was fraudulent. Frederick Whitehurst, of the FBI crime laboratory, said that “attempts had been made to alter his lab reports to exclude scientific interpretations other than” the official explanation. Whitehurst went on to claim that FBI leadership had been altering evidence and test results for a number of years, in order to support pre-determined conclusions.[87]

Despite failing to follow-up on any of the leads that could have prevented the attacks of 9/11, D’Amuro was placed in charge of the PENTTBOM investigation immediately after the attacks.[88] PENTTBOM stood for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing and was notable for how quickly the case was solved. U.S. authorities claimed to have had little knowledge of or ability to stop the 9/11 attacks in advance yet, within 72 hours after the attacks, the FBI was able to identify all nineteen alleged hijackers.[89]

Giuliani’s Public Image Faded as Facts Became Clearer

In the days following 9/11, Giuliani downplayed the health effects of the air in the areas surrounding Ground Zero. He said, in the first month after the attacks, “The air quality is safe and acceptable.”[90] However, that was not the case and thousands of first responders have paid dearly for such false claims with their health and their lives.

Firefighter and police unions have since criticized Giuliani over the issue of protective equipment and illnesses after the attacks.[91] An October 2001 study by the National Institute of Environmental Safety and Health confirmed that workers in the cleanup operations lacked adequate protective equipment.[92] A letter from the International Association of Fire Fighters in 2007 suggested that Giuliani rushed to end the victim recovery effort after gold and silver had been recovered from World Trade Center (WTC) vaults. The letter stated that “Mayor Giuliani’s actions meant that fire fighters and citizens who perished would either remain buried at Ground Zero forever, with no closure for families, or be removed like garbage and deposited at the Fresh Kills Landfill.”[93]

During 9/11 Commission hearings, victims’ family members interrupted to demand answers on another Giuliani-related scandal. They wanted an explanation from Giuliani for the first responders’ lack of working radios. The radios used by firefighters in the WTC were a concern, and were actually known by NYC officials to be faulty as early as 1993.[94]

By April 2007, Giuliani had been forced to limit his appearances in New York City due to the increasing protests by family members of 9/11 victims, particularly police, fire and other emergency workers.[95] A general campaign sponsored by The International Association of Firefighters followed, aimed at exposing Giuliani as a fraud with respect to his 9/11 activities.[96] 

All of these facts point to the need to investigate Rudy Giuliani with respect to the environmental crimes of 9/11. However, his actions and decisions related to the work at Ground Zero imply that he was hiding something greater. What needed to be hidden was evidence of the demolition of the WTC buildings.  

During the cleanup of Ground Zero there were many indications that the public was being deceived. These included the discovery of foreknowledge about the destruction that originated with Rudy Giuliani, his OEM staff, and perhaps the U.S. Secret Service. Additionally, the steel was destroyed in an unprecedented manner and the black boxes were officially reported as not being found when it was clear that they had been. The restrictions on FEMA investigators and photographers and the extensive site security are all indications that something was being hidden. 

These facts give us additional reasons to suspect that explosive materials were being hidden or destroyed during the cleanup. Those who were in control of Ground Zero certainly had the means and opportunity to dispose of any evidence of explosives. The opportunity came in the form of access to the highly secure site, as well as the authority to hire suspected crime syndicate companies to perform the actual cleanup. Theft of evidence by FBI agents at Fresh Kills landfill provides yet more suspicion that remnants of explosive devices were being removed.

As for motive, those who were involved in activities at the WTC site appear to have gone on to profitable partnerships with each other, with WTC tenant company representatives, and in the Middle East. Examples included Giuliani Partners like Bernard Kerik, who was promoted to work with L. Paul Bremer in Iraq, and also Mike Burton, who was hired as a Vice President at URS (Washington Group). URS and its Washington Group division are among the companies that were awarded major contracts in Iraq and that depend largely on military contracts in general.[97]

Perhaps not surprisingly, those involved with the cleanup had strong links to Saudi Arabia. This included Giuliani, whose law firm represented BCCI shortly after Giuliani led enforcement actions against that terrorist network. It also included Kerik and the British construction companies AMEC and Bovis. Kerik worked for the Saudi royal family for years and AMEC and Bovis had done significant work for the Kingdom. AMEC also went on to win enormous contracts in Iraq to renovate buildings, rebuild water and sewage networks, restore power, “and improve operations and security at military bases for the new Iraqi Armed Forces.”[98] 

Another company that was connected to both the cleanup of Ground Zero and the cover-up of the crimes of 9/11 was Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The next chapter will cover the man in charge of SAIC at the time.

Rudy Giuliani can be brought up on charges today for his participation in the deception and negligence that led to the deaths and illness of so many workers at Ground Zero. However, his actions in that regard, and his personal history, point to the possibility that he was engaged in greater crimes related to 9/11. There is no question that 9/11 provided this publicity-greedy man the ideal opportunity to grow a legend around his perceived response to those crimes. That legend has now faded into something which points toward a need to look more closely at Rudy Giuliani.

Notes to Chapter 14

  1. Wayne Barrett, “Rudy Giuliani’s 5 Big Lies About 9/11: On the Stump, Rudy Can’t Help Spreading Smoke and Ashes About His Dubious Record,” Village Voice, August 8–14, 2007, p. 35-36
  2. Wayne Barrett, Thug Life: The Shocking Secret History of Harold Giuliani, the Mayor’s Ex-Convict Dad, The Village Voice, July 4th 2000
  3. The Smoking Gun, Giuliani: The Hits Keep on Comin’, April 06, 2007
  4. William K. Rashbaum, .Kerik Is Accused of Abusing Post as City Official, The New York Times, November 16, 2005
  5. Dean J. Champion, Police Misconduct in America: A Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO, 2001, p 15
  6. Timothy Naftali, “There’s Very Little We Can Do:” Gerald Ford and Counterterrorism, Version 1.3, Draft Section for Study of US Counterterrorism Strategy, 1968 – 1993, Washington Decoded, http://www.washingtondecoded.com/files/tngrf.pdf 
  7. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance, Seven Stories press, 1998
  8. Wolfgang Saxon, Harold Tyler, 83, Lawyer and Former Federal Judge, Dies, The New York Times, May 27, 2005 
  9. Gerry O’Sullivan, Boom! – World Trade Center bombing – Column, Humanist, May-June, 1993 issue
  10. Christopher Ketcham, The Last Roundup, Radar Magazine, May 5, 2008
  11. Ibid
  12. The Inslaw Affair, Investigative Report By the Committee On The Judiciary, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992
  13. Casolaro’s death was ruled a suicide despite many suspicious facts that indicated he was murdered. His family and associates contend to this day that he was murdered due to his PROMIS-centered investigation. For details, see Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith’s book “The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro,” Feral House, 1996.
  14. Beth Kaswan describes her role as a Giuliani assistant managing the BCCI case in her bio at Scott & Scott, http://www.scott-scott.com/attorney-beth-kaswan.html 
  15. Lucy Komisar, Tracking Terrorist Money — Too Hot For U.S. to Handle?, Pacific News Service, October 4, 2001, http://130.94.183.89/magazine/money.html 
  16. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, pp 177-178
  17. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, p 430
  18. New York Magazine, Is Giuliani Running Like It’s 1989?, March 19, 2007
  19. One case in which White & Case represented BCCI is listed here: http://tinyurl.com/c6mn3xd  
  20. David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, Follow the Money: How John Kerry busted the terrorists’ favorite bank, Washington Monthly, September 2004
  21. James Traub, Rudy’s reversals: Giuliani’s lost convictions, The New Republic, September 9, 1991
  22. Biography.com, Rudy Giuliani, http://www.biography.com/people/rudolph-giuliani-9312674?page=2 
  23. Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, HarperCollins, 2006, pp 94-101
  24. David DeGraw, The Financial Puzzle Behind 9/11, Consortium News, October 22, 2010
  25. Peter Jennings of ABC interview with Rudy Giuliani, 9/11/01 Rudy Giuliani warned of WTC collapse beforehand – Interview with Peter Jennings, accessed on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou4MakVHCYc 
  26. Jim Hoffman, Giuliani Warned: Mayor Giuliani Had Privileged Warning of Unprecedented Collapse, 911Research.WTC7.net
  27. See Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, http://www.ae911truth.org/ 
  28. Peter Jennings of ABC interview with Rudy Giuliani
  29. In 1993 Kroll Associates, an investigative and security consulting firm headquartered in New York, was asked by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner and manager of the World Trade Center at the time, to assist it in dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist bombing that took place in February of that year and to help design new security measures. This report’s Principal Investigator, Brian Michael Jenkins, was then Deputy Chairman of Kroll and led the analysis of future terrorist threats and how they might be addressed. The report specifically considered the possibility of “terrorists deliberately crashing a plane into the towers.” http://transweb.sjsu.edu/MTIportal/research/publications/documents/Sept11.book.htm#pgfId-1010258 
  30. Windfalls of War: Kroll Inc. The Center for Public Integrity, http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=32 
  31. World Trade Center Task Force Interview, EMT Richard Zarrillo, October 25, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/clrdagc  
  32. World Trade Center Task Force Interview, Abdo Nahmod, October 11, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/btz5ng9  
  33. Graeme MacQueen, Waiting for Seven: WTC 7 Collapse Warnings in the FDNY Oral Histories, Journal of 9/11 Studies, January 11, 2008
  34. History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline: Profile for Richard Rotanz 
  35. Graeme MacQueen, Waiting for Seven
  36. World Trade Center Task Force Interview, Fire Marshal Steven Mosiello, October 23, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/ccoa23g 
  37. Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, HarperCollins, 2006, p12
  38. World Trade Center Task Force Interview, Chief Joseph Pfeifer, October 23, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/bmzybnp 
  39. Testimony of Richard Sheirer to the 9/11 Commission, May 18, 2004
  40. History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline: Profile for John Odermatt
  41. Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion, p 33-35
  42. History Commons profile for John Odermatt
  43. Dennis P. McMahon, Barry Jennings Revisited, Ae911truth.org, May 31, 2012
  44. Christopher Marquis, Ex-Top Cop Gets Iraq Post, The New York Times, May 16, 2003
  45. Russ Buettner, Tough Guy With Charm, Often Living on the Edge, November 10, 2007, The New York Times
  46. Stephanie Gaskell, Former Iraq Commander: Bernard Kerik was ‘a waste of time’ in Iraq, New York Daily News, May 5th 2008
  47. Memo from Donald Rumsfeld to Jerry Bremer and Gen. John Abizaid, CC: Gen. Dick Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith, “Subject: Training Iraqi Police,” September 29, 2003. See also Memo from Donald Rumsfeld to Jerry Bremer, CC: Paul Wolfowitz, October 2, 2003. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG847.pdf  
  48. Wikipedia page for Bernard Kerik
  49. William K. Rashbaum, Giuliani Testified He Was Briefed on Kerik in ’00, The New York Times, March 30, 2007
  50. Paul Kiel, TPM’s Ultimate Kerik Scandal List!, TPM Muckraker, November 9, 2007
  51. The New York Times, Times Topics – People, Bernard B. Kerik, Nov. 5, 2009
  52. See video of the 2:30 pm press conference which was televised by ABC and can be found at YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epqoa6TJZWI 
  53. Suzanne Mattei, Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero: How the Bush Administration’s Reckless Disregard of 9/11 Toxic Hazards Poses Long-Term Threats for New York City and the Nation, Sierra Club, http://www.gothamgazette.com/rebuilding_nyc/sierraclub_report.pdf 
  54. Report from the Committee on Science, US House of Representatives, March 6,2002
  55. Gail Swanson, Behind-the-Scenes: Ground Zero, A Collection of Personal Accounts, available at this link: http://www.summeroftruth.org/groundzero.html 
  56. Jim Hoffman, Black Boxes: Contents of Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders Are Missing, 911Research.wtc7.net
  57. ABC News, Terrorist Hunt: Suspects ID’d; Rescue Efforts Go On; White House Originally Targeted, September 12, 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/abc_hunt.html 
  58. Susan Ginsberg testimony to National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Public Hearing, Monday, January 26, 2004
  59. Jim Hoffman, Access Restrictions: The Closure of Ground Zero to Investigators, 911Research.WTC7.net
  60. Amy Florence Fischbach, CEE News, September 20, 2001
  61. Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion, p 257
  62. Mark MacIntyre, Bunker Hill: light at the end of the tunnel, The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, August 20, 1998
  63. History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline: Profile for Richard Tomasetti
  64. China.org.cn, Baosteel Will Recycle World Trade Center Debris, http://china.org.cn/english/2002/Jan/25776.htm 
  65. PBS, Interview with Charlie Vitchers for the film “America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero”, http://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds/profiles/profiles_vitchers_t.html 
  66. New York Daily News, Exposed: Map of Ground Zero spoils: Where the money went to clear Trade Center debris, cached at AsthmaMoms 9/11 WTC Environmental Health News, http://www.asthmamoms.com/worldtradecenter2005.htm 
  67. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, p 181
  68. Charles V. Bagli, US: At Ground Zero, Builder Is Barred but Not His Kin, The New York Times, July 21st, 2006, accessed at CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13922 
  69. Kevin R. Ryan, Another amazing coincidence related to the WTC, 911Blogger, January 6, 2008
  70. Aidan Monaghan, Pre-9/11 WTC Steel Fireproofing/Post-9/11 Ground Zero Clean-Up Contractor, Planned 2000 Seattle Kingdome Demolition, 911Blogger.com, March 4, 2009
  71. Jim Hoffman, Notable Retractions: Experts Change Their Tune to Harmonize with the Official Story, 911Research.WTC7.net
  72. U.S. Department of Defense, News Transcript, Mr. Lee Evey, Pentagon Renovation Manager, September 15, 2001, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1636 
  73. Wikipedia page for Frank Lampl
  74. Douglas Feiden and Greg B. Smith, James Abadie, executive at Bovis Lend Lease in charge of Sept. 11 Memorial, resigns amid probe, New York Daily News, June 15th 2009
  75. Charles V. Bagli, David W. Dunlap and William K. Rashbaum, Obscure Company Is Behind 9/11 Demolition Work, The New York Times, August 23, 2007
  76. Colin Moynihan, 2 Charged in Check Scheme Uncovered After Bank Fire, The New York Times, July 28, 2009
  77. William K. Rashbaum and Charles V. Bagli, Demolition Man, The New York Times, July 31, 2009
  78. See WTC Fireproofing Documents obtained by James Gourley via FOIA, 911blogger.com, February 2, 2009
  79. Charles V. Bagli and William K. Rashbaum, Questions on City’s Role in Demolition Near 9/11 Site, The New York Times, August 29, 2007
  80. The New York Daily News Investigative Team: Russ Buettner, Heidi Evans, Robert Gearty, Brian Kates, Greg B. Smith and Assistant Managing Editor Richard T. Pienciak, Ground Zero: $2.7B money pot, December 6, 2005, http://listserv.fsl.com/pipermail/wtcrc/2005-December/000032.html 
  81. Wikipedia page for Roland Betts
  82. The initial directors of LMDC are listed in documents obtained via FOAI request by Cryptome, http://cryptome.org/wtc-foia.htm 
  83. Jacqueline Emigh, GPS on the Job in Massive World Trade Center Clean-up, Access Control & Security Systems, Jul 1, 2002 
  84. Debra K. Rubin, Creating order from chaos in leading the public-private construction team that responded to the Sept. 11 devastation at Ground Zero, Engineering News-Record, April 22, 2002
  85. NPR News, Sifting Through the WTC Rubble: ‘Ground Zero’ Effort Nears End, Search Continues at Fresh Kills, May 30, 2002
  86. Ibid
  87. John Kelly and Phillip Wearne, Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab, The Free Press, 1998, pp 162-167
  88. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bios of James T. Caruso and Pasquale J. D’Amuro, January 31, 2002, http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel02/mueller013102.htm 
  89. Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Announces List of 19 Hijackers, September 14, 2001, http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/091401hj.htm 
  90. Anita Gates, “Buildings Rise from Rubble while Health Crumbles,” “New York Times,” September 11, 2006, reporting on the documentary, “Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11”
  91. Ben Smith, “Rudy’s Black Cloud”, New York Daily News, September 18, 2006, p. 14
  92. Wayne Barrett, “Rudy Giuliani’s 5 Big Lies About 9/11
  93. Fletcher Smith, Giuliani Criticized by Firefighters in Letter, Yahoo News Network, May 9, 2007
  94. Wayne Barrett, Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11
  95. David Saltonstall, “Rudy gets earful at stop here: Some FDNY survivors rally against him”. Daily News (New York). April 24, 2007
  96. See the website Rudy Giuliani, Urban Legend, http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/
  97. David R. Baker, US: SF Firm Awarded Contract in Iraq, San Francisco Chronicle, March 12th, 2004
  98. See AMEC website, Iraq webpage, http://tinyurl.com/bwgp8b8 and see AMEC description of just one of these contracts, worth $500 million, http://tinyurl.com/bszmdlu  

Photo by Robert D. Ward, U.S. Department of Defense.