s some of you already know, PBA chief of staff Frank Bruno died July 27 of complications following a heart attack. His death was a real loss — to his family, of course — to this organization in general and to me in particular. He was my mentor, my ally and my friend.

Frank was a many-faceted personality. Blessed with organizational and people-friendly skills, he was the heart and soul of the PBA office. Widely read in history and politics, he was an intellectual without the Ph.D. Intensely interested in national and international affairs, he followed a political philosophy as blue as the NYPD uniform he had worn for so many years.

But the Frank Bruno I want to concentrate on here is the talented and passionate activist that he remained until the end of his days.

I was talking to Bill Gamble recently and he recalled how Frank’s combative streak was apparent from the beginning. Bill — who retired in 1999 and had served the PBA membership as a delegate, city-wide trustee and Manhattan North financial secretary — goes way back with Frank. Bill came on the job in June 1973 and Frank was one or two Academy classes ahead of him. It was a crucial period in New York City’s financial history, a time when the seeds were planted that eventually brought our metropolis to the brink of bankruptcy during the so-called fiscal crisis of 1975. And, appropriately, Bill and Frank really got to know each other at the beginning of a labor disaster that occurred as a result of that crisis.

TBill met Frank at PBA headquarters on June 30, 1975, one day after the cash-strapped city announced that it was laying off almost 3,000 police officers. They struck up a friendship and formed the Former Police Officers Organization (FPOA) — with Bill as president and Frank as treasurer — which initiated many programs, including a monthly newsletter called “Off the Job,” which Frank usually wrote.

Frank worked the phones tirelessly, enlisting the aid of laidoff officers and sympathetic politicians in an intense lobbying effort to get cops their jobs back, seeking support in the State Legislature and Congress for funding to enable the city to restore the NYPD to its pre-fiscal crisis police strength. The group also organized a march on Washington on Sept. 18, 1975, in which almost 40 busloads of laid-off NYPD, Transit and Housing cops wore their uniforms in defiance of Police Commissioner Mike Codd’s attempt to prevent them from doing so. (They pointed out that the uniforms belonged to them and wore them minus NYPD insignia — a typical Frank Bruno tactic that the bosses were powerless to argue with.) The lobbying effort was ultimately successful, leading to the re-hiring of almost all laid-off cops within two years and the remaining by the third year. Later, in contract negotiations, the PBA got them their seniority back.

I met Frank in 1990 when he was a sergeant and I was his driver. In those days — even though he was technically a boss — he was still a cop at heart and stood up for rank-and-file police officers at every opportunity. He had been a strong PBA delegate and — in the bosses’ minds — remained one even after he had joined the Sergeants Benevolent Association.

After his retirement from the NYPD, when he worked tirelessly in the campaign to elect the current PBA administration, tirelessly in his duties as chief of staff, and tirelessly to help accomplish the successes that we’ve had. How he inspired me and provided a role model for union solidarity could be the subject of another column.

To say that I — and the police union movement — will miss him would be an understatement.

Patrick J. Lynch
President