Tales Of The City, Revisited

Sunday, Aug. 29, 2004 By AMANDA RIPLEY

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Months after 9/11, even survivors who weren't injured became physically ill. "I'd have high fevers. I'd go to the hospital. They couldn't figure it out," says Elia Zedeno, a financial analyst. One day, Zedeno saw a man run by her on the street, and without thinking, she started running behind him. "Then I realized no one else was running," she says.

Recently, these survivors have started to organize, as the families of victims have done. Last year Gerry Bogacz, who escaped from the 82nd floor of the north tower four minutes before the south tower collapsed, invited a few other evacuees to dinner. "We found that everybody was pretty much stuck," he remembers. "The rest of the world, even New York, has kind of moved on. But with each other, we can talk about anything." They formed the World Trade Center Survivors' Network. They now have 130 members. The group meets monthly and has adopted a platoon in Afghanistan. The survivors make adjustments in their lives, some very small. One woman no longer wears heels in the street, in case she has to run. Bogacz is getting training in emergency preparedness. On Sept. 11 this year, a group of these survivors will, for the first time, officially join the families in the pit at ground zero to memorialize all that they lost and all that they witnessed.

What's Happened to "America's Mayor"?

After 9/11, anytime Americans encountered a really hard problem, someone would nominate Rudy Giuliani to solve it. There were calls for him to take over WorldCom, the SEC, the state — even the country.

But by January 2002, Giuliani had already reinvented himself as a businessman. The experiment has been extremely lucrative. Giuliani Partners, the consulting and investment firm that he started by transplanting key members of his administration into a dark-wood-paneled office on Times Square, is bringing in just over $100 million a year in revenue, according to a source close to the company. That would mean the firm is collecting over $2 million per employee, which is phenomenal. (By comparison, Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking giant, takes in roughly $1.2 million per employee.) Companies like Nextel, Purdue Pharma and the nuclear-power-plant operator Entergy hire the firm to advise them on logistics and security. And, of course, for the name Giuliani.

The office is decorated with framed magazine covers about Giuliani — including a larger-than-life reproduction of TIME's 2001 Person of the Year cover. At a staff meeting last week, Giuliani's new world appeared seamlessly woven into his old. His former fire chief, former emergency-management commissioner and longtime spokeswoman all sat at the table. One employee briefed him on a client, and another told him how well a summer camp for children of 9/11 victims had gone. At the end, someone handed him pictures to autograph for fans.

"It's roughly the same amount of work but not the same amount of pressure," Giuliani says. Still, he occasionally misses the adrenaline. "I remember the first couple of times I heard a siren [after leaving office]. I was getting ready to go, and I realized it wasn't my job anymore."