A Smoke for a Life


A few years back, I was involved in a negotiation with a would-be burglar who’d been surprised and then trapped inside an apartment in New York. He had a hostage with him, which of course greatly complicated matters.

Under ordinary circumstances, hostage negotiators find that career criminals—and believe me, crime for this fella was no hobby—are almost always the easiest to deal with. These folks are pros, they know how the system works, and they’re generally interested in cutting their losses and getting on with things. I don’t doubt that a number of them have better lawyers than I do, but that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, the session went along somewhat slowly. We went around a bit, and after a while we got to the point where he was willing to let his prisoner go and surrender. But he got hung up on the ego thing. What I mean is, he wanted to save face and say that he’d gotten something out the cops. I don’t know what kind of status that gave him inside of Riker’s Island prison, but it soon became clear that it was really important to him. He may have started in with silly demands—I forget now, but they were probably along the lines of a car or something outrageous. He worked down and must’ve said something about smokes, or maybe I mentioned a cigarette, and before I knew it we were talking about whether he could have a carton of cigarettes. This was back in the days before Mayor Bloomberg and the antismoking mafia banned cigarette smoking from all public places in the city, so cigarettes were not off the table during a negotiation. I told him I couldn’t get a carton of cigarettes.

He said a pack.

We didn’t have a pack.

“Three cigarettes, then. Give me three cigarettes, and then I’ll release the lady.”

Frightening what some people think other people’s lives are worth, but let’s not digress.

“We might be able to do three cigarettes,” I told him. “Let me talk to the commander. I’m not the decision maker.”

“Three cigarettes, Dom,” he said. “Three cigarettes and she walks.”

And you come out.”

“I throw the gun out and do everything you say.”

Now look, that is not a bad deal. That is a good deal. That is a winner of a deal. You have a woman who’s been locked up for hours, bad guy with a rap sheet longer than my arm, and a gun with enough bullets to end two lives and at least four others. Three cigarettes is a very good deal. I say so, you say so, the whole world says so.

The whole world except for the commander, who vetoed it when I laid it out.

“No way.”

“Uh?”

I’m eloquent when I’m baffled, truly I am.

“We have a rule. We never give the suspect something first,” said the commander. “He’s got to release the hostage. Then we’ll give him the cigarettes.”




Negotiate and Win. Proven Strategies from the NYPD's Top Hostage Negotiator
Negotiate and Win: Proven Strategies from the NYPDs Top Hostage Negotiator
ISBN: 0071737774
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 180

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