Jack Cambria might be the last person one would expect to bump into at a business executives’ conference devoted exclusively to Israeli companies. The decorated lieutenant with the New York Police Department was the guest of honor at an event this week sponsored by the Israel Management Center.
Cambria is widely thought of as the best hostage negotiator in the United States. He has been involved in more negotiations with hostage-takers than anyone else in the world, which is why he was invited to share his experiences and insights with some of the leading figures in the Israeli banking and insurance industries, as well as with legal experts.
He is the typical NYPD lieutenant — blunt, to-the-point, well-dressed, and careful to proudly wear his police badge on his belt. Cambria is a tough Sicilian whose owl-like discernment has saved many lives throughout his career. In the past, he has started some of his mornings by trying to talk a desperate father out of throwing his children out of their apartment window and ended some of his workdays by persuading a weary, lonely war veteran to abandon plans to kill himself.
The insane hustle-and-bustle of New York City makes Cambria’s job quite unpredictable and diverse. It is a round-the-clock job. After 30 years on the force, the 58-year-old has seen it all and heard it all. So has your mortgage broker, who was most likely in the audience listening to Cambria, although it’s highly doubtful that the Israeli executives who heard his remarkable tales of heroism ever had to do their jobs with the same level of intensity.
Still, if there were two main themes that those executives took home from the 45-minute talk by “Gentleman Jack,” they were “the importance of listening” and “telling the truth.”
“In negotiations, you need to tell the truth, but it isn’t always wise to reveal it,” Cambria said, hitting on a fundamental rule that every professional mediator should follow. He also says that he never tells his interlocutor to “calm down.” According to Cambria, when you tell someone to calm down, you’re not really listening to them, and so you end up with the opposite result that you intended.
In the State of Israel, where people are always looking for shortcuts and shady, underhanded deals, and yelling have become sanctified manners of speaking with one another, it’s quite doubtful whether the values that Cambria espouses would be understood here. Judging by the applause he received at the end of the lecture, as well as the enthusiasm displayed by the interpreter, who spoke even more forcefully than Cambria, it seems that parts of his message were heard loud and clear.
When Cambria finished shaking hands with those who came to hear him speak, I managed to pull him aside for a one-on-one conversation. Being on the other side of a conversation with this man, who is accustomed to talking to people under the most extraordinary of circumstances, is quite an undertaking. At times, it can be nerve-racking. He is not wont to waste words, and he closely monitors your every movement. When I implored him to answer one last question, which was followed by another question, he certainly took note, though he did respond politely.
“You need to really care about people in order to do my job,” he said. “There’s no doubt about this. Whoever is thinking about finding a job in service to the public, and a police officer is certainly a job that fits that description, needs to understand this. There are a lot of downsides and difficult moments in the life of a police officer. A police officer is always expected to do the right thing, and only the right thing, in service to the public. Obviously, we are human beings, and so we can’t always do the right thing. Mistakes are made along the way.”
Just before he was about to retire after serving 20 years on the police force, Cambria was appointed the commander of the NYPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team (HNT). His superiors knew that they had an individual who not only knew police work inside-out but was also cut from a different cloth, which made them determined to keep him before he hung up his badge.
The unit badge which Cambria wears reads “Talk To Me,” which is fitting since this is what he does all day, sometimes into the late hours of the night. He talks, wielding the most effective weapon a human being could ever ask for — words. At the same time, though, he insists on sticking to the truth while doing all he can to avoid the worst-case scenario — the need to resort to real firearms.
“When you don’t use the truth and don’t speak the truth, you fail to create any trust between yourself and the person standing in front of you,” he said. “If there’s no truth, the whole thing could end really badly, really quickly. You can’t lie at any point in the negotiation, because if you’re telling lies after a five-hour negotiation, what have you accomplished? You’ve wasted five precious hours. So I tell people who work with me, ‘Always tell the truth.’ They should say, ‘Yes, sir, I’m going to handcuff you,’ ‘Yes, you will be taken to the police station for questioning, but you will have a lawyer whose job is to look out for your interests.’ It should be clear to you that not only you know what’s going to happen to the hostage-taker, but the hostage-taker also knows that he or she will be arrested and that they will be met by an attorney.”
Time is Cambria’s most valuable commodity. Like the experienced negotiator that he is, he says: “Time is on our side.” The officers in his unit are never in a rush. He once oversaw an operation in which a man held a pistol to his head for over 12 hours threatening to commit suicide. Wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, Cambria spent half of an entire day face to face with this man, talking to him the entire time. Ultimately, he managed to prevent a tragedy.
For Cambria, time is irrelevant. No matter how long it takes, the most important thing is that the outcome not be too costly for any of the parties involved. Acting too hastily could result in tragedy, very similar to that witnessed by a New York police officer recently. The officer sought to bring a swift end to a lengthy negotiation by using force. The ordeal ended with a suicide. The public fallout was embarrassing, with the New York tabloids serving up wall-to-wall criticism. The aftermath was too much for the police officer to handle, and he ended up taking his own life as well.
“You can’t rush things, because then the cost is infinite,” Cambria said. “You pay the price, the victim’s family pays the price, the media jump on the story, and instead of calm and quiet, we have chaos all around.”
“Don’t lose your temper”
Cambria personally knows a number of colleagues in the Israel Police as well as the special negotiating team in the General Staff that deals with terrorist incidents. Although the division of responsibility for negotiations differs in the Israeli and American law enforcement systems, Cambria claims that the principles on which the job rests are ultimately the same. He said that a number of young Israelis have expressed an interest in the field, though he stresses that any decision to take on a job of this nature should be made at a relatively young age.
“Here, people do three years of military service, and then they are given a choice of whether to stay in the army or enlist in the police,” he said. “If anyone wants to work in the field of hostage negotiations, it would be preferable if they amassed experience as a soldier first, because experience is the name of the game in this field.”
Watching Cambria operate leads one to think that this is the man that should be by your side the next time you ask your boss for a raise. He doesn’t raise his voice, and with his endless patience, it seems that he is incapable of losing an argument. The temptation to ask what it is like to be his relative is irresistible.
“Yes, it was certainly interesting to watch my children argue with me when they were little, and I’m certainly not an easy person with whom to argue, but I do listen,” he said. “Now my kids are grown up, so I have less control over them, but I think they notice what happens when they argue with their father.”
Cambria has assembled a handsome wardrobe for himself. “I don’t wear the police uniform because uniforms project authority,” he said. “The people whom I deal with don’t need an authority figure at that moment.”
He is always quick to flash a smile, and he hasn’t lost a bit of that hard-edged, New York cynicism. When asked to comment about a YouTube clip showing a man who leapt to his death from a roof, he dryly remarked: “He went out okay.” He grows serious and his eyes become sadder when he talks about the long days and endless nights that immediately followed the September 11 attacks. Those events are etched in the hearts of every New York police officer, including Cambria, who spent many days digging survivors and bodies out of the rubble.
“I’m an old man who is supposed to be in retirement, so you can imagine that I’ve experienced quite a number of conflicts in my day,” he said. “I remember one cardinal rule, and that is this: If I’m in a conflict, that means that I also have a part in it, whether it be big or small, but I have a part in it because I chose to take part in it. When you are in a difficult situation with another person who threatens to do something, you need to not only listen but also to give him time to finish saying what he has to say. It’s like two deer whose antlers get entangled — animals don’t move when they are stuck to one another. When you respond to anger with anger of your own, you get nowhere. But when you are willing to listen and look at yourself and the part that you play, then you get somewhere that allows you to move forward.”
On set with John Turturro
This can’t be proved scientifically, but judging from all the cases that Cambria discussed in his lecture, the impression is that American society is currently wrestling with the ramifications of the war in which it has become entangled in the recent and not-so-recent past. In one video clip that he brought with on his laptop, Cambria introduces us to an American Naval officer whose wartime traumas sent him on a downward spiral toward schizophrenia. The man is shown climbing out onto the fire escape of a New York apartment building. Just moments before he is set to leap to his death, Cambria decides to show him the ultimate respect and salute him for his efforts in combat. The man suddenly wavers and ponders what has just occurred. The ordeal ends with the two men in a warm embrace. A spark of optimism was lit inside a man who had nearly given up completely.
Since he has jurisdiction over all of New York City, Cambria doesn’t leap out of bed at 3 a.m. over every incident, nor has he lost a great deal of sleep over the years. “If it’s a case of someone locking the door and refusing to come out and there are no hostages involved, then my staff know how to do the work,” he said. “But if there are hostages, then obviously I get involved.”
The most infamous case in his long, storied career involved a man who claimed to have been a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. Adrian Leibovich, 44, was brought in for routine questioning at a police station in Queens. In a moment of rage, he pulled out a pistol and took one of the officers hostage by holding the gun tightly against his temple. Cambria, who is unaccustomed to negotiating with hostage-takers on his own turf, kept his cool. The two men spoke for hours.
When Cambria began talking about life in the Israeli army, it became apparent that this was Leibovich’s most sensitive topic. “I told him that I knew that there are decent, fair people in the Israeli army, and that what he was doing was not fair,” he said. This simple logic did the trick. Leibovich reconsidered the situation for a few minutes, and finally put down his weapon and left the room. “Afterward, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and he even said that he ‘agreed with the sentence.’”
Cambria isn’t anything like the typical gunslinger, trigger-happy police officer. “If you enter a hostile environment using routine police tactics, you have a 50-50 chance of coming out of there alive,” he said. “Those odds aren’t good enough for me, so I need to think and act differently in the field. That’s also what I tell the generation of officers after me.”
The success of “Gentleman Jack” is not lost on the major figures in the film industry. Three years ago, the late director Tony Scott approached Cambria about taking on an advisory role for his film “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.”
“That was an interesting experience,” Cambria said with a hint of nostalgia. “Tony Scott met with me and asked me if he could take some still photographs of me. I said, ‘No problem.’ Then, in no time I’m suddenly on the set with John Turturro, who is dressed exactly like me. He’s wearing a suit, a blue shirt, a yellow tie. He’s even got the same pin on his lapel.”
Cambria advised the filmmakers for four months, during which he discovered just how demanding Hollywood can be. “They work very hard and they work long hours every day,” he said. “They deserve the money that they earn.”
Since his successful foray into the entertainment industry, he has continued to do advisory work on films and television series. Cambria can certainly envision a future in Hollywood, just after he does decide to retire.
“I haven’t yet decided what I want to do when I grow up,” he said, a mischievous smile creeping across his lips. “But I think that movies interest me, as does teaching at a college in Manhattan, which I do now. This will certainly happen in another five years, after I really retire.”
