Security is just good business

Joe SORDI’S life is on his belt. He’s a cop. So he has the standard gun, badge and cuffs attached to one hip, three phones on the other. The clunky yellow phone is NYPD. Sordi is a sergeant in the intelligence division, assigned to the Republican National Convention. The folding blue phone is for the security business Sordi runs on the side. He has hired 200 men, all active or retired cops, to protect a dozen big corporate clients doing business at the convention. The silver phone is for when Sordi’s wife, “my head of homeland security,” wants to find him. She’s home with the kids on Long Island. This week, she won’t be seeing him much.

“The great thing about America,” Sordi says, “is that you can work as hard as you want and no one will try to stop you.”

Sordi is working very hard this week, and so is everyone else in law enforcement in New York. Midtown looks like Moscow during an old May Day celebration. Tanks roll up 7th Avenue. A phalanx of centurions in blue uniforms sweeps past Macy’s on the way to a protest rally. Helicopters hover all day over Madison Square Garden. Every police agency known to America and private security company known to corporate America has a temporary command center squirreled away in some office building or hotel in Midtown.

It’s impressive. It’s working. But is it necessary? Or is the militarization of New York for this convention a grand visual to reinforce the central pitch of President Bush’s campaign -- that we need him to keep us safe? Walking up 8th Avenue before midnight earlier this week, past hundreds of sweaty and tired-looking policemen and past police trailers loaded with computers and fancy phone systems, I wondered about the real costs of all this. After all, most of those trailers have more technology in them than the average New York City public school. Then again, who would have questioned the cost if expensive airport security had nabbed those hijackers the morning of Sept. 11, 2001?

Preparing for the worst

Sordi would say it’s all necessary, the cement barricades, the check points and sophisticated cameras watching us all over town. He believes in working every angle, every worst-case scenario. His private business, started after 9/11, relies on “a philosophy of redundancy.”

“I have a 13-seat boat staged right now on the Hudson River in case I have to get my CEOs out of town on a minute’s notice. I have rooms booked at a hotel uptown in case there’s an anthrax hoax at one of their lodgings.” He also has staff listening to police radios and blasting updates into the Blackberries of the 60 VIPs his company, Strategic Security Corporation, is protecting this week so they know where to avoid demonstrations.

“We don’t want trouble to come anywhere near our high-level CEOs,” says Sordi, a young Jack Webb with an accent straight out of Brooklyn. Just like the powers that be, Sordi believes that terror and anarchy are possible, this week, next week, always in New York. He is 29, tall, beefy with a stylized crew cut and ready smile. He has been a policeman for nine years, but always with other ambitions. He earned a master’s degree in emergency management and additional certification for responding to terrorist bombs and handling hazardous materials. Two years ago he started SSC.

This will be the company’s biggest week, earning more money -- $300,000 for just one account -- than Sordi could ever hope to see working years as a cop. The restaurants and cabbies in this city may not be benefiting from the Republican festivities here, but many cops will. As I walked to Sordi’s temporary command center at a hotel on 52nd Street, every 30 feet I came across another off-duty law enforcement officer, protecting a Starbucks or a skyscraper on 6th Avenue. The guy in the double-breasted black suit is a retired corrections officer; the one in blue polyester is an ex-Marine; another works for a New Jersey sheriff’s department.

The private security business has ballooned in the last decade, but this convention illustrates just how much. In addition to the uniforms blanketing Midtown, there are layers of burly men in suits with characteristic lapel pins that denote their alliances.

At a party at the New York Yacht Club hosted by the Distilled Spirits Liquor Council of the United States, I couldn’t figure out who was working for whom. A crush of broad-shouldered men mixed in with graying congressmen and young fat cats in blue blazers. Sordi has 10 guys there alone, but also present are undercover Capitol Police, two U.S. Agriculture Department security guards protecting the Cabinet secretary and Secret Service agents.

“That’s the mystique,” says David Del Santo, Sordi’s vice president and a former organized crime detective for the NYPD. “The lapel pin puts you in the fraternity.”

From morning to night

Although the NYPD sanctions its officers to work second jobs, how these guys balance their responsibilities is a bafflement to me. “That’s why there is 28 hours in a day,” Sordi explains. But that is also why he has hired Del Santo. Sordi worked for Del Santo at the NYPD. “He can square-root any problem,” says Sordi.

On Sunday, Sordi started the morning at his company’s command center on 52nd Street. By noon, he was at his NYPD job. By 5, he was back at 52nd Street, briefing his men for several private parties that night. The yellow phone rang once during the briefing. Sordi’s voice dropped an octave as he answered, “Sgt. Sordi.” He listened, “I’ll call you back.” Then he returned to the briefing, using photographs and floor plans and color-coded maps.

The sergeant was sunburned, having spent most of the day right in the middle of the large-scale protests. He apparently had to wrestle several demonstrators to the ground. Smaller-scale street confrontations were also breaking out around town. “It’s clear,” he told his men, “they’re gonna look to branch out with new tactics later in the week.”

But more to the point of that evening’s party, Sordi reminded the guys that if anyone got “too sauced” they could tip off the catering staff to water down a person’s drinks. Sordi likes to point out that his company isn’t just about beefy guys in shirts. “We’re not bouncers; I’m hired for expertise and contacts,” he says. Those contacts with police come in handy. When a uniformed officer gave one of Sordi’s men a hard time about a permit he had obtained to park limousines on 12th Avenue near a party, Del Santo called that precinct’s captain.

Which is why, although his private business is booming, Sordi won’t be retiring from the NYPD too soon. “My whole generation is young and as they advance I’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, Tommy, what’s going on over there?’ ”

Who can judge whether all of this is overkill? But whether it is or not, why shouldn’t Sordi and his cops come out ahead at the end of a New York day?

It’s one of the great ironies of this convention that the delegates are listening to much speechifying about the horrors of Sept. 11 and dutifully visiting the scarred site at ground zero, but all they really need to do to understand the deepest level of suffering that day is turn at any one of the boozy parties and find the guy in the corner stoically standing watch with an earpiece and a lapel pin. He knows what happened.