The Nation's Pulse / Infernal Machines
Conlon, Edward
L ike most New Yorkers, James J. Falihee watched the reports of the explosion at the World Trade Center with mixed feelings of pity, anxiety, and dismay, but when Channel 2 News announced that it...
...They discovered a piece of an eight-day clock, made by the Connecticut Clock Company, which had wound down to detonate just as the detectives opened it up...
...He only seriously injured one person, if I recall, with a slight skull fracture...
...at the anchor and considered calling the station to complain, but the damage, all around, had been done...
...He managed to earn an M.A...
...Besides bombs, Falihee worked on a variety of cases with the crime laboratory, from narcotics to rape...
...He'd slit the seat open and conceal it A s he watched the initial reports of the recent explosion, Falihee felt a sense of nostalgia, in its old, true meaning of "the pain of return": "I thought, gee, it's gonna be hard, with the water, all the debris...
...One thing I've always hated was when someone said it was a bomb...
...Even though an arrest was made in the World's Fair bombing, Falihee was reluctant to comment on that aspect of the case...
...You never use metal tools...
...Though he walks with the assistance of a cane and seems to spend a fair amount of time visiting doctors, he has few complaints...
...His attentions are spent reading, "not newspapers, but scientific material and books where the butler did it," and among his three daughters, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren...
...These days, Falihee is untroubled by the infernal machines...
...I'd guess it's the same today...
...They proceeded properly," he explained, "brought it to an open area behind the Polish Pavilion, cleared everyone out, including the cops, and opened it up with a glass knife...
...0grabs...
...More immediately, this year will see a special Senate election in Texas...
...A nice old gentleman...
...He laughed...
...His wife, Kathleen, died three years ago, but he "does not believe in mourning...
...James Falihee has taught at John Jay College for twenty years, and for the fifteen prior, he was technical director of Faurot, Inc., which manufactured criminal detection equipment...
...Born almost eighty-three years ago in Harlem, Falihee moved to the Bronx as a teenager and graduated from Manhattan College in 1932...
...He was a good machinist," Falihee says...
...An attaché case had been "kidked around the British and the Polish Pavilions for eight days" before it was reported, and Detectives Joseph Lynch and Frederick Soscha were sent to inspect it...
...Richard Nixon's non-stop campaigning helped win him the party nomination...
...But Falihee matched fragments of glass from the scene with a headlight in the Automobile Lens Library he had assembled, and an arrest was made within hours...
...T he "Mad Bomber" set off at least thirty-two bombs in New York City for several years before his apprehension in 1958, when he was revealed to be one George Metesky, a former Consolidated Edison worker who resented his company's failure to compensate him for an on-the-job injury...
...Most of the time it turned out to be unfounded...
...Every lunatic calls in...
...Anyway, during the war, we looked at a lot of suitcases...
...Though he is on sabbatical from John Jay for the semester, he will return to teach there in the fall...
...Fellows leaving for war, forgetting things or not coming back, who left luggage in Grand Central or Penn Station...
...Like many of the things that happen, this should never have happened, in my opinion and everybody else's...
...After that, we obtained a portable x-ray machine, a fluoroscope, to see all these packages we'd assume we'd get, and we did get...
...I didn't blow up...
...In 1966, two years after the Goldwater debacle, Republicans gained forty-seven seats in the House and four in the Senate, eight governorships, and ten state legislative chambers...
...Today you probably have the same procedures, look for the same evidence...
...He shouted, "Oh, you stupid ass...
...You always evacuate, bring in cops and the maintenance people to see what's out of place...
...A pre-med major, he intended to become a doctor but he had married—"That's personal . . . but it turned out swell...
...The voters of California helped define the Reagan presidency when they voted in June 1978 to pass the Jarvis-Gann initiative, Proposition 13, which cut their property taxes in half and required a two-thirds vote of the state legislature to raise new taxes...
...That is not in the realm of my duties...
...special House elections in Wisconsin, Mississippi, California, and Ohio...
...After the success of Proposition 13, a number of other states put similar initiatives on the ballot...
...In the old days, I didn't want my picture in the papers anyway...
...At the time, there were two civilian chemists employed, and he became the first policeman-chemist in the history of the department...
...inside...
...L ike most New Yorkers, James J. Falihee watched the reports of the explosion at the World Trade Center with mixed feelings of pity, anxiety, and dismay, but when Channel 2 News announced that it was suspected that a bomb was the cause, his reaction may have been unique...
...As the biochemical training of KO girls was never terribly rigorous, there was an occasional fatality: "The thing about poison," said Falihee, "is that enough of it will kill you...
...In 1978, Republicans picked up fifteen House seats, three Senate seats (defeating three nationally important liberals), six governorships, 279 state legislative seats, and the majority in seven chambers...
...At the end of 1936, he joined the Police Department and, because of his science background, was assigned to the crime lab after only a few months on patrol...
...The Bomb Squad never looks beyond the technical and forensic aspects of an explosive or explosion...
...One grandson is a policeman in Buffalo, and a granddaughter is a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic...
...I haven't had my picture taken with the old magnesium flash since I played ball for Manhattan Prep, so it wasn't actually dangerous...
...Anyway, they said it's some sort of explosive, all right...
...I never wanted to speculate, there were a lot of rumors but I wasn't there...
...On Channel 2. I wanted to call up the anchorman, but I decided not to...
...Off-year elections can redefine a party...
...Was married fifty-eightyears"—and the need to make money, coupled with the hardship of doing so during the Depression, dictated another vocation...
...And in the February 1951 issue of Park East magazine, he opined in an article on "KO girls"—who enticed men into hotel rooms, spiked their drinks with knockout drops, and took their wallets—that beer was their beverage of choice because it best masked the taste of chloral hydrate...
...The attaché case was originally left in the British Pavilion, and it was determined that the IRA was the culprit...
...But for twenty-one years before that, he was with the New York City Police Department, retiring in 1958 as Supervisor of the Bomb Squad...
...In fact, I used to threaten them...
...Anyway, they peeled the sides back and saw it, called out, 'Get back, this is the real thing.' And of course, it went off...
...Idaho's referendum was actually identical to Proposition 13, with "California...
...But you're nervous enough, when you're right there with something that's alleged to be an infernal machine, without all those flashbulbs going off in your face...
...There were seventeen barrels of ashes we took from an incinerator to find the bone fragments...
...Each would-be presidential candidate has at least two years to impress the Republican Party with his ability to raise funds, campaign effectively for other candidates, and champion new issues and legislation...
...Some exploded, some were unfounded, some were peoples' lunches that were left in the subway...
...God treated me well...
...Hoax' seems to have been one of their favorite words...
...and state legislative races in New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana...
...in Education from Columbia while doing "odd jobs" and taking civil service tests...
...m 6G y first bomb was on July 4th, 1940, at the World's Fair," said Falihee...
...They give them credit for everything, though they do enough damage...
...One photograph shows him at a table with four other men, sifting a kind of granulated rubbish through screens into bushel baskets...
...It was the worst thing, the worst thing they could have said...
...He was eventually released and has since died...
...That's what Ronald Reagan did when he embraced the Roth-Kemp supply-side revolution after he lost the 1976 Republican nomination...
...Didn't need it...
...Ronald Reagan learned from the Richard Nixon of 1966...
...Some were simulated bombs, that looked like bombs even under the fluoroscope...
...The identities,motives, and whereabouts of the responsible parties are left to other detectives or agencies...
...Whenever it turned out to be unfounded, the newspapers called it a hoax...
...governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia...
...The press, I used to chase them...
...I try to keep my fat Irish mouth out of it...
...In this world, you come without wanting to come," he said, "and you leave without wanting to leave...
...Both officers were killed...
...I don't know who did it...
...That's from a rape-murder case...
...Falihee and his partner collected all the evidence and examined it in the laboratory...
...We had to search the Empire State Building years ago, up and down, up and down, see if anything was out of place...
...A hit-and-run driver killed a woman and seriously injured her child in the Bronx one night, and no witnesses came forward...
...Presidential candidates follow election results...
...The bombs were well manufactured: clock-and-battery, small but potent, set in public places like theaters...
...There was a series of other calls claiming credit, and in half an hour there was a threat to the Empire State Building...
...Here I am on the other side, now...
...The Bomber was from Waterbury and they sent him to Mattawan," says Falihee, referring to the mental hospital...
...You tell everything from the scene search, you find fragments of the device...
...I can't tell you how many nights I spent in theaters, opening and fluoroscoping the seats, whenever there was a rip in the upholstery...
...I don't think they actually got the fella, though they do...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
