Чак Хоган - The Standoff

“A Cuban national had taken his wife and daughter and thirty-seven other people hostage on the Fixed Income Trading Floor of one of the largest brokerage firms in New York, seven stories up. We were called in as feds because it was thought initially to be some sort of Free Cuba ploy or other act of terrorism. Turned out later it was just the messy end of a simple domestic dispute. He was a maintenance worker in the building, a heavyset guy who had been beating his Cuban-born wife for more than a year and had started in recently on their twelve-year-old daughter. For this, and various other reasons, the wife had become very unhappy with her life in America and decided to steal the child away from him and move back in with her mother’s family in Cuba. But for some reason, she decided to go to his work to tell him of her intention, and brought along the daughter. Two policemen responding to initial reports of a disturbance in the lobby of the World Financial Center were overpowered. The Cuban took their guns, chemical Mace and car keys, went out yelling into the street, got the shotgun from the trunk of their cruiser, then retreated back into the building with his wife and daughter up to the seventh floor, where he took over.

“Logistics were a problem from the beginning. The seventh-floor trading area was wide open, an L-shaped football field of rows and rows of desks spaced by white rectangular columns, and two stories high. For security reasons, the elevator did not stop there after six at night, so the only way you could get in was if you had permission — Capital Markets salesmen catching up on work after the markets closed — or were a maintenance man with keys. There was no eighth floor, except for a side flight of stairs leading to a catwalk elevation of desks and offices above the trading area. He had barricaded that entrance and said it was rigged to a bomb. That was nonsense, but forced entry was an operational no-go regardless, as the upper area was visible from almost anywhere on the trading floor below.

“The next lowest floor was the fifth, the Equity Trading Floor, which was also two stories high and therefore prohibitive in terms of gaining access through the ceiling. The floor above Fixed Income Trading, the ninth, the Public Finance Trading Floor, was just one story tall, but too far above the seventh floor to be effective. Even if we broke through the floor itself, Hostage Rescue would have had to rappel unprotected down forty feet of wide-open space.

“The one thing the seventh floor did have was telephones. Hundreds of them, on every desk throughout the trading area. We established a control base on the fifth floor below and evacuated and sealed off all the floors above the seventh. By this time it was late at night, so the evac went quietly and smoothly. I got him on the phone right away. One ring. He was too distraught for English, so we used an interpreter. I made progress quickly, getting some hostages released in exchange for meals he had requested from a small Cuban restaurant off Fulton Street. We had to locate the proprietor in Bedford-Stuyvesant and get him to come in and open up the place in the middle of the night. He said the suspect had eaten lunch there every day for more than two years. The waitresses all knew him by name.

“We negotiated through the night. I said yes to everything he wanted in exchange for more hostages, while at the same time moving Hostage Rescue snipers and assault specialists into position, filling the stairwell with guns and men and working on rewiring the elevators. I talked him down finally to just thirteen hostages, seven male and six female, including his wife and daughter.

“The suspect was clearly unbalanced. One moment he was demanding to talk to his mother in Cuba, and the next, Castro himself. He was unstable. His life had somehow gotten away from him, he felt powerless, and he said many times that he had nothing left to live for. That was my main concern. You have to give a hostage-taker some sense of responsibility, some meaning to his actions. Otherwise, there is nothing stopping him from executing the hostages and you’ve lost him. I remember I convinced him at one point to put his wife on the phone. I can’t recall now what she told the interpreter. But I do remember her crying. I remember her praying.”

Banish stopped a moment to collect his thoughts.

“The problem with using a public phone line in a hostage situation is that anybody can call in. This was a major concern, as we had been through recent scenarios where television reporters telephoned hostage-takers for interviews in the heat of a standoff. For that reason alone, I wanted to shut down all the phones on the Fixed Income Trading Floor, save one. This was met with resistance on three fronts. First, the World Financial Center managing group had made numerous legal guarantees to the brokerage firm, among them the provision that WFC could secure their offices and operating space against unlawful intrusion and provide adequate communications service at all hours. New York Telephone had made a similar agreement with the firm, and was having trouble anyway locating a technician who could circumnavigate the complex WFC branch exchange at that late hour. Then representatives for the firm itself arrived on the scene. Lack of telephonic access to the Fixed Income Trading Floor during normal operating hours would be devastating enough, they said, but a Wednesday morning shutdown of the Equity Trading Floor, which we were currently occupying, not only meant the instant loss of millions of dollars in business, but would have serious repercussions on the opening of the New York Stock Exchange and various financial markets around the world.

“So I listened to them. And I held off. I sent someone down to talk to the news media camped out in the lobby below, to play up the risk to the hostages and get them to agree not to attempt to contact the Cuban under threat of arrest. I should have just gone ahead and cut the cords and let everybody fight it out afterward, but I did not. I let it go. The phone lines remained open while our people scrambled to get a court order, and I sat back patiently to wait.

“There was this morning radio personality in New York City. Very popular in that market. About six in the morning he comes on, reads the news off the overnight wire, and gets the bright idea to try and call the Cuban. He gets through and puts the Cuban on the air live. We didn’t know it was happening until they were about halfway through. The DJ was asking the Cuban questions and drawing him out about his family and his troubles, and basically trying to talk the man down — but using pop psychology. There is nothing more dangerous than that. The Cuban was getting all wound up again and starting to lose his English, after I had worked all night to stabilize him. Then we started hearing phones going off upstairs. One after another, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. This DJ’s listeners had figured out that they too could dial the firm’s exchange, plus four random numbers, and have a chance to talk directly to the hostage-taker themselves. I sent men down to the communications center with fire axes but it was too late, there were already a hundred telephones going off all around this guy, and every other caller telling him, Kill them .

“Then we start hearing gunshots. The Cuban is losing it, firing wildly, at the floor, up into the air. Then he comes back on our phone. He’s screaming about executions. He says he’s going to kill all the hostages one by one. My people begin to scramble and I get into the elevator at this point. I do not know why. The negotiator never participates in any arrests, but the situation was starting to slip away from me — me , you see — so in the confusion I grabbed a portable phone and went inside the elevator. We were jammed in there — myself, a technician, and six HRT members, all just two floors below him. The elevator had been rewired and was ready to go. I called up to the ninth floor, and our sonar equipment placed him not ten feet away from the elevator doors, some forty feet away from the hostages. More wild shooting then. I didn’t have any choice. I pushed the button for the seventh floor. I gave the order to fill the room with gas and sent my men in.”