You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.

In the criminal justice system, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law.

The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that has defined American history.

These are their stories.

February twenty sixth, nineteen ninety three, twelve eighteen pm, New York City.

The CEO of the World Trade Center, Charlie Makish, was high above the city alone in his office when suddenly the floor moved beneath him.

I was sitting at my desk when I felt the whole building heath.

It actually lifted.

My office was on the thirty sixth floor.

I looked out the window on the side where the Hudson River was, and I actually saw a ripple go across the Hudson River.

I said, what's going on here?

It didn't take long to get an answer.

Within seconds, my secretary got a call that we had a major explosion within the Trade Center itself.

In an instant, an ordinary work day turned into a crisis.

I had let my deputies know that they should organize the command center I said, get everybody together in the conference room and I'll see you downstairs.

Every protocol says to stay put, but for Charlie that wasn't an option.

He built the towers and felt responsible for everyone inside.

He needed to find out what was going on.

I had a fire key, and I keyed one of the elevators so that I could take the elevator down.

I was down within minutes or two of being to fight.

What waited at the bottom was worse than anything he could have imagined.

When I came out of the elevator, there was heavy dog smoke, a lot of players one hundred feet beyond where you're looking at, and there's a flash of light and the building ship flash of light.

You started the pendice.

You could hear the building actually making noises because like.

Night of a living day, he came out of nowhere.

The whole area is completely distorted, ceiling walls locking.

A tremendous explosion from behind us.

The room that we were in was devastated.

I got a call, get out to LaGuardia Airport.

There's been a bombing.

There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

I was trying to figure out am I dead?

Am I alive?

Where am I?

I'm aniseg and NICOLASI.

That's why terrorism works.

It doesn't care who you are.

From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order, criminal justice system.

The early nineteen nineties were a time of transformation.

The Cold War was over and global capitalism was taking root.

Skylines stretched higher and borders grew thinner, and the United States, especially New York, stood at the center of it all.

But not everyone saw that as progress.

With extremism on the rise, a new kind of anger was brewing and found a target in the World Trade Center, a symbol of American economic power, international trade and the spirit of New York City.

The buildings were towering and unmistakable, and from the day they rose over the skyline, there were those determined to bring them crashing down.

Heney.

This has been a terrible day for New York City, an apparent active terrorism in the city's tallest building, with of course, hundreds of innocent victims, and the tragedy speaks for itself, But it has also been one of those days that proves New York City's greatness.

From the professionalism of the emergency service workers, the police, and the firefighters, to the toughness of ordinary New Yorkers.

Long before the World Trade Center was built in Lower Manhattan, Charlie Makish was just a kid from the Bronx, still finding his footing.

I started with a program at Manhattan College and Engineering, and I saw myself basically as a civil engineer.

But I interrupted that study to go into a seminary for two years.

Once I was told that I started at the very top, close to God, and then I fell to the very bottom when I became a lawyer and a banker.

He may have wandered for a while, but Charlie soon found his way back to engineering and onto the most ambitious construction site in New York City.

I went to work for the Port Authority in nineteen sixty eight as a field engineer on the construction of the World Trade Center.

This wasn't just any office space.

The World Trade Center promised to attract and house the powerhouses of business from far and wide.

And that's what authorized the Port Authority to build those towers.

Because the Port Authority was charged with facilitating international trade and commerce.

What began as a construction assignment would evolve into his calling and his legacy.

I helped build it, I helped defend it, and then I was its chief executive.

So they were my twins.

I used to refer to them as my twins, and they were my life for twenty seven years.

And what he helped build was more than a set of towers.

It was a vision, a bet on scale, on strength, and on what America could raise from the river's edge.

The ambition wasn't just to build high.

It was to build differently.

And that was a concept of building a perimidal wall in panels, so that eventually you had a closed box that was buried.

The approach started from beneath, in a pit where the Hudson River pressed close.

What happened there would become the foundation for one of the most recognizable structures on Earth.

The slurry wall.

It was a technology that was used in Italy to retain the river and the groundwater back and eventually what you wound up with was what we called the bathtub, which was an area that was totally excavated, but there was no bracing on the inside of it.

Those two towers went down to rock sixty to eighty feet below the street level, and it was an eight acre bath tub, so that was the first time in the country that it was constructed that way.

Two towers would rise from that space, each with a structural logic that broke with tradition.

They were basically a box within a box.

The exterior wall of the trade Center towers was structural.

It actually served to support the trade center itself, and then there was an interior core where the elevators were in all the infrastructure, and that was basically very heavy steel and concrete construction going up.

The outer walls bore the wind.

The inner core carried the load.

We would have anywhere between four and six thousand people in each of the towers every day, and then we would have as much as fifty thousand people in the complex.

You had one hundred and ten stories, and it actually went down six stories.

In each of the towers.

You had four million square feet of commercial office space, and then you had the space below.

As well between them, room to dream and rent.

The twin towers significantly expanded Manhattan's commercial space.

The floor space within the bathtub comprised ten million square feet of lower Manhattan had one hundred million square feet of commercial space we were adding ten percent to that inventory.

It was more than a workplace.

It was a world of its own commerce layered with retail, restaurants, utilities, and transit.

But all of it was possible because of its construction.

They would sway three foot off center or six feet if we had a heavy wind, and you could actually see the water sloshing in the commodes at the top of the building.

When that happened, it was like being in a ship sometimes, but you never really felt it unless you looked out the window, so people did not get motion sickness as a result of that, and the windows was small so that people would not feel the height when they were up there.

The World Trade Center's towers were much more than just a pair of unique skyscrapers.

Everything about them celebrated globalization and the US's economic power.

Sixteen acres of intentional ambition spread across seven buildings.

Surrounding the Trade Center were a number of perimeter buildings.

There was four World Trade Center, five World Trade Center, and between those buildings and the towers was a plaza, an eight acre plaza.

It could hold as much as ten thousand people for an event.

A transit network underneath linked five subway lines to the path trains coming from New Jersey, and above it all was a rare kind of vertical density, offices stacked over, retailers, embassies, besides banks.

It was an ecosystem.

It was a city within a city, and the jurisdiction of that area was in the port authority.

The city police didn't have jurisdiction, although the city fire department responded.

Our police were also firemen themselves.

It was built as an independent entity within the complex.

By the end of the nineteen seventies, the World Trade Center had transformed a neglected corner of Manhattan into a global command post.

It was built as a symbol of trade, but by the early nineteen nineties it had come to represent something else.

Power.

It was the icon or the symbol of Western capitalism, our way of life.

When I traveled internationally to visit my tenants, anywhere I went backdrop to CNN was the World Trade Center TALIS.

Whether you were in Japan, whether you were in China, whether you were in Europe, CNN always had the Trade Center as the backdrop.

And by then the man in charge of it all was the same engineer who'd once helped design its foundation.

I was its chief executive.

I was the directive.

Whether it was leasing, commercial operations, capital improvements, budget security, all aspects of the World Trade Center were within my purview as the executive.

I started in sixty eight in the mud as a young civil engineer and wound up in the sky ninety three.

The Trade Center was complex and tightly managed.

Everyone had their role and everything had its place.

Then came the warning that threatened to destroy it.

My police captain got an alert from the Israelis that they had intercepted a phone call from a terrorist group saying they were going to bomb a commercial office complex in Manhattan.

We took action at that point to shut the observation deck, remove all of the trash cans, et cetera, et cetera, put in an additional police But that never happened in January.

It happened in February.

Charlie Makish was in his thirty sixth floor office when the Trade Center lurched beneath him.

He saw a ripple across the Hudson, then got the call there'd been an explosion.

Within minutes, he was heading down into the unknown.

Thick smoke was everywhere.

Both towers were affected.

The elevator pits were blown out, the elevators were not operating, and the smoke actually went up through the elevator shafts.

It acted like a chimney and spread throughout the entire trade center.

People were coming down the stairs where they were putting their hands on the shoulders in front of the people in front of them and moving very slowly to get down, and some of them were coming down ninety to one hundred stories.

We had no lighting in the stairwell, and we had no communication in the stairwell.

Took about an hour and twenty minutes to get down, no public announcement system.

Didn't know whether they could go and stay there.

And while they weren't yet sure what happened, they knew this was a disaster.

It was pretty messy, glad to brie all over the place.

Fire broke out, electrical wires.

Well, was it just an explosion.

I don't know what it was yet.

We're still trying to verify what it was.

But it felt it felt like the walls collapses.

The world just like blew up and came towards you.

There was smoke all over the place.

You could not see you couldn't see the next step you were going to take.

Here, Charlie soon saw the first of what would become a steady stream of survivors, wounded and stunned by the blast devastation.

We had airline ticket booths along the south wall in the concourse of one World Trade Center.

One of the ticket agents, a young lady, came around the corner and she was bleeding.

She had been injured, her face was cut, and she was somewhat hysterical.

And I grabbed her, and I grabbed the concierge.

I said, if you have a towel, put the towel on her face.

Get her some help.

Charlie could tell that this impact was much bigger than a single hallway or a storefront.

Crowds were streaming through the concourse.

The lobby of the Trade Center was evacuated.

Everybody was going out to West Street.

It was there that the World Trade Center CEO got his first look at the gaping void that marked the epicenter of the explosion.

And I could see heavy dog smoke coming out of the two ramps that fed the parking for the Trade Center under the towers.

Next he realized the scale, Then the human toll.

There was a litany of more serious injuries, cardiac arrests, concussion injuries, trauma from the explosion itself, plus fractured and broken bones.

Some of the injured didn't retreat, they returned.

I had a lieutenant, his name was Lieutenant Gebora, and this is an interesting fact.

He was taking the Beakman Downtown Hospital because he was injured.

He received the head injury.

He came back bandage, put on a Scott airpack and went up into the towers.

That's how dedicated these people.

Were, but not everyone survived.

The grim reality and the magnitude of this disaster quickly set in.

We knew that the people in the lunchrom had died.

We knew that there were other people injured.

Ambulances had responded, and we knew that people were being injured coming down the stalewell because they were breathing in this dark, heavy smoke, so we had smoke inhalation problems.

We knew that people were psychologically damaged as a result of the terror that they felt coming down those stairwells.

We had up to ten thousand people between the two towers.

It only took minutes before sirens were converging from every corner up Manhattan.

Suddenly, the street surrounding the one hundred and ten story building turned into a sea of rescue equipment.

Thousands of people.

Were trying to escape the smoke billowing into their offices at hallways.

The fire department had already responded.

It was an all city response meeting.

Every piece of equipment in the City of New York was called to respond.

While the city's first responders were in motion, Charlie secured a base of operations and began mobilizing his ranks.

My staff started to arrive on West Street.

I told them that we would set up a command center in the ballroom of the Vista Hotel right off of West Street.

I made contact with the police desk at the Holland Tunnel.

They had a van that they sent over, and the police captain used that as his command center for the Port Authority police.

The question soon turned to what happened.

At this point, there was only speculation, and back in nineteen ninety three, terrorism wasn't the first thought that came to mind.

Think back to the sixties.

You could go to an airport and walk through to the gate before there was any security that would affect your boarding the aircraft.

You know, you could get ticketed at the gate and go right up.

So that's when the Trade Center was designed.

It was designed in the early sixties and terrorism was not a factor.

And as a result, modern day protective measures weren't yet a consideration.

In fact, in ninety three, security started at the tenant's door.

We had no turnstiles, We had no package delivery vetting system, we had no visitor vetting system.

You didn't see bollards all over the city around buildings, and you didn't see visitor desks in the buildings where you had to be checked in, et cetera.

Because the concept of terrorism and commercial office space was not joined together before ninety three.

So when the explosion occurred, no one assumed wrongdoing, not even Charlie.

He thought it was the systems beneath the blast zone, the machinery that powered the towers in.

The refrigeration plant, which was directly below where this bomb went off.

We had large transformers for stepping power down to basically power these seven ton refrigeration plants.

We had enough cooling capacity in the Trade Center again to cool all the homes in Cleveland.

That's how big it was.

It was fifty thousand puns of air condition capacity in the trade center.

So the first thing that I thought of is that we have multiple transformers explode.

But within hours one of the investigators came to a different conclusion.

ATF and FBI responded immediately.

The ATF guy was a bomb expert, and he identified very quickly from the residue that it was a bomb, what they call an iod, a truck bomb.

It created a crater half the size of a football field.

And the FBI agent Charlie's talking about.

David Williams, I go by Dave, and I spent a total of twenty seven years with the FBI, the majority of it in the FBI Explosives Unit Laboratory.

I was a supervisory special Agent Hazardous material and Explosives specialist at the FBI lab in Washington.

That morning, Dave wasn't at his desk in Washington, he wasn't in New York and nowhere near a crime scene.

Well, I was on a golf course in Maryland, and of course it was snowing.

We got the call on our shoe phone, and back then they were as big as a car battery.

Said, there's been an explosion at the Trade Center and looks like you have the ticket to go up there, And at the time they thought it may have been a generator that exploded.

So we took Amtrak up to New York because the airports were shutting down because of the amount of snow.

It took us six hours to get from DC to New York Penn Station, so by the time we got there it was well after midnight, checked in the hotel, changed clothes, where we were escorted to the crime scene itself.

By the time Dave arrived, the smoke had begun to clear and he got right to work.

When I walked down the West Street exit rampant by the South Tower, one of the first things I saw was a crater, the widest part being on the B two level at one hundred and twenty some feet diameter.

Gradually it tapered down to the lowest level on BE four that was breached, so you can imagine an ice creaking cone if you will.

As far as the crater itself.

And what he saw didn't look like an explosion resulting from mechanical failure.

By looking at that crater area, it was obvious that the device exploded right on the B two level, and there was no other components there that could have exploded, so that immediately suggested that it was not something mechanical.

For Dave, the scene read like a crime.

The automobiles were caved in or overturned, and a lot of the different materials suggested to me that the explosive that was present in there from the time it initiated till the event was over, the velocity of detonation was about fifteen thousand feet per second, and by looking at the totality of the damage, I was able to guess, if you will, that there was about fifteen hundred pounds shy of a ton of explosives that caused that kind of damage.

And from there what caused it, or should I say, what carried it in soon came into focus.

Fifteen hundred pounds likely didn't come in in a sedan, an automobile, and it's unlikely it was in the back of a pickup truck.

It's in Manhattan, you don't see a lot of pickup trucks, probably a panel truck, a van, and the clearance in that area to get into that specific spot was only six foot eight inches.

That eliminated Dodge and Chevrolet vehicles to make the clearance, so that probably came in in a Ford panel truck.

The Trade Center didn't fall that day, but it did fracture, and in the hours that followed the priority went from rescue and recovery to keeping the towers from collapsing.

Thousands made it out of the buildings to safety.

We evacuated the other buildings as well, the Customs House and the Northeast and Southeast Plaza building.

But none of what remained of the complex itself, including Charlie's command center, was safe.

We had gathered in the ballroom of the Vista Hotel.

The chief engineer, Jean Fassolo, came down.

We got Les Robinson, who was the engineer of record, to come down and less in Gene while the place was still burning.

I went down into the below grade area to take a look at the structural damage.

And they came back and they said, the flaws under the Vista Hotel, which are the lateral support for the columns, is gone, so the Vista Hotel is actually sitting on stilts.

They said to me, you've got to empty this because this is in jeopardy.

The hotel itself could collapse.

So I got up on the stage in that ballroom and I said to everybody, you have to leave, and we're going over to the Big Kitchen, which was vacant space in the concourse, and set up a command center.

Nobody listened to me.

So I got a bullhorn and I said, listen, it's structurally unsound below this floor.

You all have to leave.

Next came fast decisions.

When we went over to the big kitchen, I called for a conference of the top leaders in the various agencies.

We got around in a circle and I said, we're not going to deal with what we're going to do tomorrow with the next day.

We're going to deal with what we're going to do with the next three, six and nine hours.

First on that list, who was in charge of what We.

Had three different police jurisdictions present there.

My police captain was there, and Fox, the regional director of the FBI, was standing there.

He said to me, you know this is a crime scene.

It's a federal crime scene.

We have jurisdiction.

I said, define for me the federal crime scene.

He said, anything affected by the bomb.

I said, that's the whole trade center.

I said, mister Fox, if you don't let us do what I want to do.

You're gonna have a hotel sitting in your crime scene because it's going to collapse.

So he said, all right, He said, I'll define the crime scene as the crater, and everything around the crater is the federal crime scene.

Fine, you've got that, I told Ray Kelly, the police commissioner.

He said, the Portathori police have jurisdiction within the trade center.

We need New York City Police to secure the perimeter of the trade center.

He says, you got it.

Their next priority was the buildings themselves.

Second thing we needed to do was to establish the structural integrity where the tower is going to collapse.

We were concerned about the slurry wall collapsing and the Hudson River pouring into the basement of the Trade Center because the below grade flows had been compromised.

If that had come to fruition, we could have lost part of West Street, which was a major thoroughfare.

As you know, as the slurry wall collapse, what would have come in is mud and water.

That roadway would have.

Collapsed, and if that happened, it wouldn't stop at the pavement.

It may have caused the same to occur to the telephone building that was on the corner of VZ and nine A, and that was a major, major telephone switch facility for the region.

Actually the international phone lines went through there.

Another mission also pressed forward, controlling misinformation and preventing panic.

The third thing that we needed to do was to ensure the public that the smoke and the air quality was okay.

It was lightly snowing that day, and the press was reporting that the snow was actually asbestos when it wasn't.

I can just imagine the mayhem that report caused.

Oh it did it cause mayhem.

We took air samples, and we took soot samples, and we were going to put out a press release saying that the air was safe around the trade center.

All the necessary to do lists were physically and mentally exhausting.

Next came the lights.

I got to get Jean McGrath, the head of Connett, isn't really credit for this.

I said to him, you know, we got to get power restored to the towers.

And Jean said, I can run temporary lines.

And I said to him, the towers will not stand dark against the skyline because it would send the wrong message to those that try to impose terror upon us.

Through the night, Cruz stabilized steel braced walls, and kept watch on the river.

The towers were still standing, the city was still connected, but what caused this catastrophe was still a mystery because the next morning's headlines still hadn't caught up with the reality being uncovered underground, and at dawn politics arrived.

Governor Cuomo was told that it was a transformer explosion.

And when I saw him early the next morning, the Governor got out of his Christ's Look.

You wouldn't catch him in a Mercedes Pepatone was his advanced man, and he had a state trooper with him who was his driver.

And the governor said to me, who are you.

I said, I'm the director of the Trade Center.

And he said to me, oh, you're the guy I'm going to fire.

You can't even handle a transformer explosion.

And I said to him, Governor, you know you're a lawyer with whole judgment until you see what I'm going to show you.

I took him into the center of the Trade Center, to the center stairwell, and we started walking down to the below grade and there was water still coming down the stairs and Peppertone said to me, he's not going to get his shoes wet, is he?

And I said why, he said, because he's very particular about his shoes.

I walked him in water up to his ankles, and I walked him through collapsed banks of conduit the international telephone lines to the edge of the crater.

And actually the troopers said to me, you're going to kill the governor.

I said, I'm not going to kill the governor, but he needs to see this.

And that's when he saw the crater and he said, this wasn't a transformer explosion, it was a bomb.

The day after the nineteen ninety three World Trade Center attack, the wreckage was unmistakable, and the silence that left behind was even louder.

The human toll was beginning to sink in.

The last thing that I needed to get done was to notify the families of those that had been killed.

On my staff.

Six people in an unborn child were.

Killed John di Giovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Mako, Bofredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith.

She was pregnant when she died.

Who lived and who died came down to nothing more than timing and location, a margin measured in moments and mere feet.

The list of survivors was enormous.

We had thousands of others that were injured as a result of this, whether it be smoke inhalation or whether it be the impact of the bomb itself, and they were in the low grade area, they were injured.

The odds that day had been razor.

Then we had at least in the buildings themselves, anywhere between ten and fifteen thousand people evacuated.

And then you had people in the concourse and in the retail, and on the observation deck, and in windows on the world, in the restaurants.

We could have as much as fifty thousand people in the complex on any day that day.

It's hard to say it happened at lunchtime too, And if the bomb had been moved one hundred feet west, it would have exploded under the concourse and killed many more people.

It basically exploded between the two towers, where there was very few people except white people in the lunch room and the people that were in the parking garages.

As the families and friends began to grieve and others worked to secure the buildings themselves.

The question remained, if this attack was intentional, then who was responsible.

The FBI is confirming what was suspected all along.

The massive explosion at the World Trade Center was caused by a bomb.

The question now is who planted it and what kind of bomb could do this.

The theories were flying, but once the investigators got in, one thing was clear.

It would take an army to process the wreckage.

What started as a local emergency ultimately triggered one of the largest joint responses in the city's history.

Right off the bat, it was immediately determined to be a task force project.

So we had local law enforcement, state and federal agencies all in the same group, and by the time it became daylight, we had an office set up for our evidence response team, and we had a place to take the evidence.

The tools they needed weren't guns or handcuffs.

They were ones you'd find in a hardware store.

I grabbed the one agent and said, I need five hundred rakes, five hundred shovels, I need two hundred sifting screens with quarter inch mesh, and get it done.

Every inch of rubble might hold a clue, every scrap of metal might tell a piece of the story.

As the equipment arrived, so did the manpower.

We were running twenty four hours a day, usually eight to ten hours per shift, with a little bit of overlap, and in total we had seventeen hundred people processing that crime scene.

Some of them had knowledge of post last some of them were for encounter intelligence or white collar crime agents, so they had no knowledge.

So in the process of processing the crime scene, we also educated the people picking up the pieces.

This was a collaboration in full force behind the scenes.

It was a masterclass in coordination, agencies from every corner coming together with a single mission to piece together what happened.

Investigators first had to preserve what was left.

Before human intervention gets in there, and before too much water is put on the crime scene.

We want to get chemists in there to start taking samples to try to determine explosive residue.

It was probably about two am when I had three teams.

Each team consisted of two chemists and two bomb texts to escort the chemists, because when you put a chemist in an environment like that twisted steel, they're going to be not paying attention to where they're going.

So the bomb.

Text job was to keep them safe.

They worked tirelessly collecting chemical traces from the crater, essentially reconstructing the bomb from the inside out, not just how it exploded, but what it was meant to do.

There was a sixteen hundred pound bomb in a van, made up a fertilizer and oil, and they laced it with cyanide.

It was ignited by a fuse, and the fuse was in tubing wrapped around the inside of the van.

It was self oxygen eating and it was a time fuse.

They actually laid cylinders of hydrogen on top of the bomb itself to accelerate the bomb and to vaporize the cyanide into a gas, but it didn't.

What happened is the cyanides just burned.

The architects of the bomb had placed it with surgical intent.

They were trying to collapse the trade Center from the south wall of the North tower and hopefully hit the South tower.

They were trying to kill everybody in the complex.

They had the bomb, the fuse, and the target, but what they lacked was an understanding of the engineering.

What they didn't realize was that the steel columns that supported the Trade Center at that point were mass huge.

They were four inch plates steeled each column which went up three stories, weighed fifty tons.

And even with out structural collapse, the device still achieved what it was meant to do.

It wounded and it killed, It terrorized thousands, and it marked the start of a new era in American law enforcement.

This was one of the first major terror investigations run through the Joint Terrorism Task Force or JTTF, and one of their first orders of business was to find the truck that brought in the bomb, and utilizing their pooled resources, it didn't take them long.

The World Trade Center bombing investigation is a perfect example of how the Joint Terrorist Task Force concept works that we use not just federal resources, but stayed local as well.

We had our Evidence Response Team, our ERT team, and they were key to breaking this case.

That's Jim Maxwell, who by ninety three was already a veteran FBI agent out of Trenton, New Jersey, assigned to violent crime and drug cases by day, but also trained and working SWAT as a SWAT operator and defensive tactics instructor.

He was one of the bureau's boots on the ground responders when their specialized skill set was needed.

So when the call came in about the World Trade Center bombing, Jim and his team were ready and that's where he got a front row seat to the JTTF.

In action, it expands the eyes and ears of law enforcement.

The FBI doesn't do traffic stops.

Local police officers do that, and sometimes they encounter or come across things that we would never see while they're doing their normal duties.

Like a serial number found in the middle of a massive crater.

They located the VIN number off the rider truck that was used in the bombing.

Dave Williams remembers the moment of discovery.

I guess it was about four o'clock in the morning.

I walked back into the crime scene and I saw two two of the bomb techs carrying a stretcher out, and I thought, oh man, one of our chemists bit the dust.

But it turns out in the bottom of that crater they found what appeared to be the frame rail with explosive damage.

It was that frame rail they were carrying out.

On that frame rail was a dot Matrix number, which was the confidential vehicle identification number of a vehicle, and by looking at that frame rail, you could tell that it was very near the seat of the explosion.

Not to mention it was found directly under where the seat was on the B two level, but down in the B five level.

Every car has a signature, you just have to know where to look.

All vehicles have a vehicle identification plate, usually on the windshield, on the dash.

It's also on the inside of the door on a vinyl sticker, but on two, three or four different places, depending on the vehicle.

There will be a dot matrix number.

It would be stamped in the frame rail, this particular one on the left rear frame.

Rail, and from that identification they were able to determine who rented the vehicle, and the rest of the case blossomed.

Mayor Dinkin started his day by meeting with the heads of city, state, and federal agencies that are investigating the explosion.

Later, he said that the city must assume that the bombing was the work of terrorists until it is proven otherwise.

While the FBI hunted for the men responsible, another kind of urgency was building across the street.

Because the World Trade Center wasn't just a crime scene, it was a symbol.

It was home to more than three hundred and fifty businesses, and shutting it down also meant shutting down a part of the city's economy, and the pressure to bring it back to life was mounting.

Governor Cuomo asked me the very pointed question.

He said, Charlie, how long is it going to take you to bring the trade center back?

And what I said to him is, Governor, we have no way of cooling the trade Center.

By the time we get the refrigeration plant back, I said, it's gonna be months.

I said, we're talking about probably next four six to nine months.

And he said to me, you don't have six to nine weeks, Charlie.

He said, because if the trade Center is not reopened and functioning within that period of time, it's going to have a major impact on the economy of Lower Manhattan.

It's going to have a major impact upon the economy of the state and the nation.

What was at risk was clear, and.

Then he said, you have all of the resources of the state available to you to get this done.

I said to myself, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but we'll get it done.

That night, the Board of the Port Authority met passed the resolution authorizing the Executive Director and the Director of World Trade to take any and all actions necessary for the full recovery and restoration of the Trade Center without my mind miltary limitation.

There were two races now, one to reopen the trade Center and another to find the men who tried to bring it down.

Next time on Law and Order Criminal Justice System.

They were actually manufacturing their own nitriglacering.

In that storage area.

We found one two court glass bottle that was about half full of liquid nitroglasering.

That one piece of evidence really broke the whole case open.

We ultimately figured out at least one suspect and within a few days had search warrants being executed and the rest and within a couple of days, I'm in court doing an arrangement.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

Our host is Anna Sega Nicolaze.

The show was written by Cooper Mall, executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts.

Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.

This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolaze.

Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmidge.

Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.

Original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zarnkelton.

Special thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show.

For more podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pope podcast, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening.