To most people there, it was a sophisticated, technologically advanced response to a looming catastrophe. But the police reaction to the report of a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday night was more than a century in the making, drawing on the expertise of a unit that has seen its share of lean times over the years, and tragedies.
A robot that looked like a moon rover was the latest issue, and an officer wore the most advanced Kevlar suit. Both were used after the authorities learned of a box with smoke pouring from it in the back of a Nissan Pathfinder sport utility vehicle parked on West 45th Street.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Police Department’s Bomb Squad came to be seen as the vanguard of the city’s terror response. On Saturday night, in its highest-profile test since then, they responded with flying colors, according to the unit commander, Lt. Mark Torre. They had been preparing for decades.
When the unit, created in 1903 and led by Lt. Giuseppe Petrosino, was called the Italian Squad, the bombs were sticks of dynamite, instruments of extortion used by the Black Hand to intimidate Italian merchants and residents.
Over the years, and depending on the perceived threat, the unit was called the Anarchist Squad and the Radical Squad, according to an article about the Bomb Squad printed in Spring 3100, an internal Police Department magazine. On July 4, 1940, two Bomb Squad detectives were killed trying to defuse a bomb planted in the British Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the unit chased the Mad Bomber, George Metesky, as he waged his battle against Con Edison with dozens of explosive devices. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were called simply the Bomb Squad, and they were spread thin. Dozens of well-known militant groups, including the F.A.L.N and the Weathermen, planted bombs all over the city, at times almost as fast as the technicians could be dispatched to deal with them.
Several of the unit’s members were killed or injured. A demolition expert in the unit, Officer Brian J. Murray, was killed in 1976 as he tried to defuse a bomb left at Grand Central Terminal. On Dec. 31, 1982, bombs set outside police headquarters and other locations maimed two squad members.
When William F. McCarthy became the Bomb Squad’s commander in 1984, the memory of the Police Headquarters bombing was still fresh, but it had done nothing to diminish the fearlessness of some of his officers. They were, he said, an “incredibly talented and competent risk takers.” The sense of humor tended toward the macabre, and the prevailing ethos was “hardly kumbaya,” he said.
More than half the squad then had served in Vietnam, and included Bronze Star and Purple Heart winners and 13 Marine Corps combat engineers. Lieutenant McCarthy, who had been the commander of the Organized Crime Unit, knew nothing about bombs, but more than a little about discipline. “I was a strong boss,” he said. “These were powerful personalities.”
Lieutenant McCarthy stayed in the unit until 1987, and helped write guidelines for bomb disposal that became the national standard. The guidelines started with a warning: “The history of bomb disposal is scarred by injury and death.” He added that the adoption of new safety techniques and tools seemed to occur only after accidents or tragedies.
After Sept. 11, the unit — which is charged with investigating suspicious items and helping in bombing investigations — was thrust into the forefront of the city’s law enforcement agencies, said Lieutenant Torre, who joined the Bomb Squad in 1993, and became its commander in 2002.
Immediately after the attacks, the Bomb Squad was besieged by calls about suspicious packages. Today the calls are fewer, and the unit responds to 200 to 300 suspicious packages a year. But in the post 9/11 world, there have been more requests to help with security sweeps or to get advice on security matters.
Lieutenant Torre said that millions of dollars in grants had let the unit buy new equipment, including some of the tools used in Times Square on Saturday.
In an interview, Richard Esposito, a journalist and co-author of “Bomb Squad,” a 2007 book about the New York unit, said many of its investigators retired after 9/11, and “a lot of fresh blood came in.” They studied bombings overseas, and gathered information on improvised explosive devices. The unit got new X-ray devices, bomb suits and computers. It also got more money.
Lieutenant Torre would not say how many people are in the squad — “We don’t like to show all our cards” — but said it was the oldest and largest municipal bomb squad in the country. Admission into the unit is highly selective, he added, noting that in some years, they have accepted 1 in 10 applicants. New members apprentice for more than a year and train for six weeks at an F.B.I. Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Ala.
“I could not have been prouder of the performance and success of my people last night,” Lieutenant Torre said.
NYPD
