In the spring of 2001, Chris Trucillo had a corner office on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
He was a Port Authority police captain, commanding a unit headquartered in one of the most famous buildings in the world. He thought it was a pretty great place to work.
“I had the best office of any captain in the United States of America,” he said.
Then Lower Manhattan real estate took off. The Port Authority, which is in the real estate business, decided it didn’t want cops taking up space on the 84th floor. In June, Trucillo’s unit was told to move out.
“I was not happy,” he said. “I was upset. I lost that beautiful view.”
Three months later, the tower was gone.
Trucillo, now chief of the NJ Transit Police Department, told the story Oct. 1 at a dinner held by Cento Amici, a nonprofit that awards scholarships, as advice for the students in the room.
This year’s event marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — an event that happened before any of the recipients were born.
Bob Zito, the co-founder of Cento Amici (and someone who was in NYC on that day as he worked at the New York Stock Exchange), brought a number of speakers to not only share their stories of the day but to explain why the next generation should never forget.
Along with Trucillo, the lineup included retired Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti, the NYPD’s first deputy commissioner for counterterrorism; NYPD Chief of Department Michael LiPetri; former FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker; and former NYSE Chairman and CEO Dick Grasso.
They all offered life lessons, too.
For Trucillo, it was obvious.
“Don’t get overly exercised when things don’t go your way; it might be for a reason,” he said. “Make the best of it.”
Here are five more lessons from the night.
5. When the call comes, answer it
After 35 years in the Marine Corps, Libutti was asked by then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to lead the department’s new counterterrorism bureau after 9/11. The conversation, he said, lasted about five minutes. He left Washington on a Saturday night and had dinner with Kelly.
“I started work on Sunday morning,” he said. “Why? Because we had just faced a horrific event.”
He also had an assignment for the students: If they haven’t been to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, go. It honors not just police and firefighters, he said, but average Americans who ran to the fight.
“Take the time to do that because it’ll make a difference in your life,” he said.
4. Own your gaps, then fix them
LiPetri was blunt about what the NYPD lacked before 9/11: intelligence.
“We lacked that in 9/11. We learned that from the 9/11 Commission, and our intelligence gathering is just phenomenal,” he said.
Today, the department’s counterterrorism bureau has hundreds of officers, ties to every federal agency and 13 detectives stationed overseas, so when something happens abroad, he gets word almost immediately. He’s honest about the rest, too.
“Do you get lucky? Yeah, you get lucky,” he said. “But also, have we stopped a lot of attacks in New York City and also in other cities? Yes, we have.”
3. Surround yourself with the right people
Before he was FDNY commissioner, Tucker ran a small security business whose main client was the New York Stock Exchange. That put him close to Grasso, and he watched how Grasso shook hands every morning with people 20 rungs below him.
“I was afraid of him,” Tucker said. “But I wasn’t so afraid that I didn’t want to copy everything he was doing.”
He took those lessons to the FDNY, where he learned the other half: No one succeeds alone.
“You can’t do it alone. You got to team up,” he said.
Grasso said the same about his years running the exchange.
“If you take only one lesson as you pursue your careers and finish your education, as you begin to climb the ladder, always have people around you that are smarter, more intuitive, more hardworking,” he said.
2. Love your work, and the people you work with
Grasso started on the floor of the exchange in 1968.
“$81 a week, and I thought I hit the lottery,” he said.
He loved the job just as much then as he did as chairman and CEO, he said.
“What you do best, what you love to do, when you make it your career, you’ll never work a day in your life,” he said.
His other advice: remember how you felt on your first day, and treat your employees that way when you’re at the top.
“The officers eat last,” he said. “The people who make it happen eat first.”
1. Remember the families
The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers on 9/11, and 67 children lost a parent. Trucillo, then a captain, ran the effort to stay in touch with the families. When a lieutenant asked what to tell them with no information to give, Trucillo said, “We tell them that.”
“There was no playbook for planes going into buildings, and there certainly was no playbook for taking care of 37 killed in the line of duty on one day,” he said.
More than half of the 37 were never recovered.
The NYPD lost 23 officers that day. LiPetri, then a young cop, spent weeks digging through the pile with others, hoping to find one more survivor.
Tucker asked the room to think of the FDNY’s 343 not as a number but as people.
“Those are friends,” he said.
Twenty-five years later, he said, the department is still healing.
“On an emotional level, we will be rebuilding forever,” Tucker said.
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When the speeches were over, Zito gave the students one last assignment.
“A lot of 9/11 stories in this room,” he said. “Now’s your time to get up and go talk to people and ask them. This is what it’s all about.”
It’s how you ‘Never Forget.’
