STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., Jan. 24 - They're not who I expect. More like an ensemble cast, I think, off a television soundstage - ER maybe, or NYPD Blue. A chorus of uniforms moves toward me, a man and a woman joined for a second by a passing remark, a fellow who looks up when someone shouts "Over here!" The rest of the group begins in lockstep, fans out, then closes back in, a bulwark of navy blue jackets in the center of an empty lot in the Fresh Kills Landfill.

I'm here to do a story about these agents and inspectors, a "friendly interview" for U.S. Customs Today. I don't know any of the volunteers personally, but I do know how they spend their days - sifting through mountains of dirt for reminders of nearly 3,000 people who arrived at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 and never went home did, in fact, have lives, futures, and people who love them.

A wedding ring. A watch face. A pen.

I expect a quick tour, a fact sheet about tonnage, manpower, and machinery. But there are no fact sheets, only these Customs people waiting to tell me stories I know right away no one will ever understand who hasn't crawled beside them through the soot blowing off the fields, into our mouths and noses.

Someone named Inspector Tursi introduces me, and the comfortable, welcoming way he does it makes me believe for a moment that despite all the horror piled up around us, this is not a bad place to be. I smile back, and glance past him at rows and rows of hardhats - yellow, blue, green - hanging on racks the recovery team has set up a few feet away. There's a collection of twisted metal, guns found in the wreckage, on the ground next to the racks, and license plates, lined up neatly next to the weapons, as though their owners, firefighters, and police officers, might suddenly appear to claim them. No one speaks, and I realize the group is waiting for me to say something, to start asking questions.

"Do you think we could do this inside the trailer?"

It's the only question I can think of to ask. The wind is kicking up, tearing at the pages of my legal pad, and I wonder if it's my imagination, or if the grit I feel ricocheting around us is real.

"No problem," he says.

Everyone regroups, and Inspector Tursi leads me up a ramp and into a trailer that's part of the compound. "See these drawings?" he says, pointing to a bulletin board on the wall. My eyes are tearing from the wind, and I can't see them clearly, but I nod anyway, and he says, "They're from a local school where my wife is a teacher - St. Clare's. A lot of letters and cards have gone to specific agencies involved in the recovery at Ground Zero, but the Customs people here at the landfill didn't get any, because no one really knew we were here, or what we were doing. So the kids sent these."

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Drawings of support from students at St. Clare's.

My eyes are better now, and I move closer to the wall. There's a child's drawing, a big red heart, and a message: "Happy Valentine's Day to our federal officers on Staten Island. I hope you find a lot of people."

One of the first things I found up here was a diaper bag, the kind of knapsack you carry kids' things in...it had pampers in it, and baby pictures, and that, in particular, really got to me...
- Inspector Richard Tursi

"OK," I say, hearing the rest of the team lining up behind me. "Maybe we can start with your names, and something about where you came from, and what you're doing now." It's a routine question, but it's a start. I really want to ask them about the smell - a grisly compound that barrels through your sinuses and crawls along your tongue until it gets to the back of your throat and hangs there, a slow drip tasting like chemicals and death.

"How do you stand this?" I want to ask, but don't, because I know the smell is the least of it for these recovery workers. I have already been told, in fact, that any signal, no matter how grim, that points the volunteers toward what they're looking for is a blessing. Since they began the recovery effort on September 23, the Customs team has recovered the remains of hundreds of people.

Even after the dogs can't search anymore - because canines trained to recover the living lose heart when everything they find is dead - these men and women from Customs go on. Recovery workers have already sorted through 1.2 million tons of dirt and debris, and before they go home, they will process a third of a million tons more.

Family members come up to us...a woman came up to me the other day and said 'I have no body...' I asked her if something belonging to her loved one might be missing, and she said 'yes,' so I made a note and told her we would look for it...
- Inspector Jack Russo

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Customs recovery workers use rakes to sift through the dirt, searching for a signal.

A man to my left steps forward. "I'm Inspector Jack Russo," he says. "I got here the first week. We were in tents then, and you remember how much rain there was. Everything turned to mud, but we were out there, sifting dirt in a tent, digging with our hands and rakes...just ordinary garden rakes. We didn't want to miss anything, nothing, no matter how small it might be. The National Guard was feeding us in a little makeshift tent with a dirt floor..."

Russo is one of the 'four constants' in the operation, along with Louis Boehner and Stephen Cook, both special agents, and Richard Tursi, an inspector who tells me he has 32 years of experience, "but nothing like this."

"No one had ever mounted a recovery effort of this size in the U.S. before," says Joe Gloria, ASAIC at the Newark Office of Investigations. "Customs started with the debris from our offices in Building #6, 40 feet north of the Towers. It was an 8-story building - 550,000 square feet - but it wasn't long before everything from Ground Zero was mixed together. It was impossible to separate the rubble - material from the Towers ended up in the Customs building, or with the stuff inside the Secret Service offices, and we figured it out as we went along."

"Try to imagine it," Gloria continues, "- no machinery, no clear top-down coordination, no precedents. Just these volunteers from Customs, NYPD, and the FBI with garden rakes and their hands. They were out there in the debris field, encased in Vytec suits for hours at a time, sifting clumps of dirt and debris with their hands..."

The Customs team works around the clock those first days, protesting when someone says the weather's too bad, or get some rest, not noticing when the holidays come, not listening when the agency says it's Thanksgiving, go home, have your turkey with the family.

After a while more Customs people began showing up, and you know, it was just good to see the Customs patch. It felt like you knew somebody.
- Inspector Jack Russo

In October, the tents began to disappear, and the open areas in the center of the landfill start to take on the appearance of a loosely-zoned community, wooden walkways connecting dozens of trailers festooned with American flags and graffiti: We will NEVER forget. On a step in front of the door to the trailer where police are sorting evidence, dropping loads of IDs and wallets and jewelry into bins marked with company names, someone has taken a knife and scratched U.S.A. deep into the new wood.

Machinery arrives - huge grapplers that separate the metal and concrete from the dirt. Sifters that process the soil the trucks bring over, churning it out onto a moving belt that crawls past recovery workers. Some workers still use their hands - "You don't want to miss anything that might bring a family closure" - but most admit, as time passes, there seems to be less to find. When someone does make a find, a wallet, a purse, a twisted eyeglass frame, it pumps up the rest of the team.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Sifting through debris on a conveyor belt.

When they recover human remains, work stops, a ritual that ends in a silence so profound, says a Customs inspector, that it "sends chills up the back of your neck." NYPD sets up an "evidence room," a trailer lined with bins and buckets and tubs of company ID cards, watches, rings, staplers, documents - the stuff of ordinary life.

The mess tent is replaced by another trailer, "The Hill Top Café," or, "As we call it," says one of the men, "the Belly of the Beast." The food, he tells me, is great, a gift from the Salvation Army. He looks at his watch. "We can go there later, after you get the tour and maybe a chance to operate a sifter...you'll probably be hungry by then."

Have I ever operated a sifter before? Listen, I never even HEARD of a sifting machine before I got here...
- Special Agent Robert Fitzsimmons

I ask them if anyone has ever done this kind of recovery or disaster work before. I assume some of them are ex-military, used to it, hardened. No, they tell me. None of them have ever been where they are now. Louis Boehner was working at JFK, in the Office of Internal Conspiracy, when he "heard they needed a shift leader." Pierre DeBono is an inspector, on duty at JFK when the towers go down. "This can't be real," he remembers saying - "This can't be happening."

September 11 was Inspector Michael McNamara's day off, so when the phone rang early at his house on Staten Island, he didn't answer it. Then he turned on the television. "It was unbelievable," McNamara says. "I looked out my window, then, and saw the skyline of Manhattan, smoking."

Two other volunteers are straight out of the Customs Academy. Michell Chase-Brown, a Customs special agent in Newark, says she was still in training on September 11. I ask her what she did before that, trying to gauge her age and experience.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellote

Twisted and charred recovered Customs material.

"I was in college," she says, "in Oswego, New York."

I think about my own daughter, and picture her here, then stop, and ask Michelle what her mother thinks about the work she's doing.

"She's so proud of me that she keeps passing out my business cards to everybody she meets," she says.

Stephen Cook is next, another "new" agent who volunteered after graduation, and I ask him the same question: "How does your family feel about what you're doing here?" It's an easy opportunity, I think, for him to say as little or as much as he wants.

Cook's voice is threaded with emotion, and I move a little closer to hear him. "My mother's been sick," he says. "And I think that's made it easier for me to relate to the families waiting for us to recover their loved one's remains-how you feel when you lose, or might lose, someone. My mother's in the hospital, but she's proud of me too - she keeps telling the nurses and doctors to watch C-Span, because 'they had a special on about the work her son is doing at the landfill'."

Special Agent Robert Fitzsimmons is not new to Customs. In fact, he tells me, he came to Fresh Kills from Ground Zero, where he'd been working with the Secret Service, looking for whatever was left from their office in #7 WTC, and then working with the same guys to get whatever was left out of the Customs offices at #6. "Evidence, guns, ammunition - we lost a lot," he says.

"So what's the worst part of this job?" I ask him, before I can take the question back.

"Suiting up," he shoots back, and everyone laughs. "That Tyvek suit is really a pain."

Everybody up here knows somebody, or some family, who's lost someone in the attack-a brother, cousin, friend-when the second plane went down on Long Island, I thought, "oh no, this can't be happening again-there's not a house in Rockaway that hasn't been touched by this thing...
- Inspector Chance Youngs

Even after we've gone down the line, and everyone tells me his or her name, I can't remember who's who. They look alike, I think, or wonder if maybe they just have the same look, expressions I've seen before on faces as intense as these in front of me now. Those other faces belonged to first-timers, too, a lot of them, and their eyes told you right away they'd seen in a different place what these recovery workers are seeing here.

Listen, it's not like they say" - It's 1968, and the voice belongs to a 19 year old Marine-"When it all hits the fan, you're not fighting for some cause, or the officers or medals-you're fighting for each other, for the guy lying there next to you in the dirt..."

"How many of you," I ask the group in front of me, "are native New Yorkers?"

Every hand goes up but one, Inpector Lautenberger's.

"I'm from northern New Jersey," he starts, and the others begin to argue with him...

"But you're a native New Yorker now, aren't you?" I say.

"Yeah..." and the rest of them are agreeing, slapping his shoulder good-naturedly, and pushing him around.

"There were Customs people working in #6, next to the North Tower, who lost people in the attack," someone says, and it's the second or third time I've heard it since I arrived at the landfill. "One of our agents had a sister working next door. Some of her personal effects turned up in the debris from the Customs building. Another agent lost his brother, a firefighter."

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

One of many scorched and mangled fire trucks on separate lot at landfill.

It strikes me suddenly that these agents and inspectors at the recovery site are more than brave, decent people bent on doing good, more, even, than the "heroes" that their supervisors say they are. These men and women with the Customs insignias and exhausted bodies are family, and they're here to take their people home.

Every person up here reacts differently to what they see...every person's a different read...
- Inspector Jack Russo

There's a tall man standing behind me, the last one, if we keep moving straight down the line, who's going to get a chance to talk. I can sense his impatience, a need-to-get-on-with-it so strong it's almost a physical force. I know he has work to do, that my interview is moving too slowly, and I turn around suddenly to face him.

"OK," I say. "I know you thought you'd be the last in line, but, believe it or not, you're next. Tell me, first, how to spell your name..."

"R-A-K-O-W-S-K-Y. Andrew," he says. "Senior Special Agent, SAIC/NY. Nineteen years with Customs. Father a federal agent. Brother a federal agent. Friends and neighbors - DEA, FBI, NYPD." On September 11, when the World Trade Center went down, Rakowsky was on the New Jersey side of the GW Bridge. "It was clear something was happening," he says. "I had the radio on, heard them talking about a plane hitting a tower, and then I saw NYPD up ahead. They'd shut down the bridge, and nothing was moving."

"What did you do?" I ask.

"I got out of my vehicle and helped," he says. "Cars backed up, people getting out - it was a nightmare."

Rakowsky didn't get into Manhattan that day. Instead, he turned around, drove to the Newark office, grabbed a cell phone and, with the rest of the Customs team, spent the next twelve hours tracking down their people in New York. On September 12, Rakowsky was back in New York, at Ground Zero, working the bucket brigade with firefighters and NYPD, struggling through the metal and concrete, like everybody else, looking for survivors.

Rakowsky's supervisors assigned him to the FBI Task Force, men and women who spend their days and nights manning the phones, following leads, looking for anyone, anywhere who might point U.S. law enforcement in the right direction - to the people who'd planned and carried out the attack.

"When we finally got back into our office at #6 WTC," he says, "we thought we might be able to rebuild, or reconstruct some of the evidence we had stored there. There was a file cabinet sitting intact in my office, but when I pulled open the drawer, it was all ashes. No files. Just ashes."

Rakowsky arrived at Fresh Kills in November. They gave him a rig, he says, still all-business, and he went to work. He stops there, and it seems to me that what he doesn't say next ignites the room as quickly as the heat that flashed though his office in lower Manhattan. I can almost see it, an unspoken oath that sparks like the end of a lit fuse, jumping from Rakowsky to Marzan, to Fitzsimmons, to Youngs, to McNamara and down the line, until it ends with me, the only noise in the room my pen scratching notes on the legal pad.

Sure, working here changes people...but you feel like you're doing something out of the normal, something special you might never get a chance to do again...and that makes you feel good...
- Senior Special Agent Jose Marzan

I've been with these people four hours now, and I don't want to leave. Lautenberger has a digital camera, and I say, yes, maybe we should take a few pictures of the group. They line up, the sun at their backs. I ask them if we can get a shot of the aircraft tires - the ones from the hijacked plane - lying on the ground a few trailers down, and the twisted metal torso in front of it, a piece of sculpture that stood in the lobby of the North Tower. A film crew from some major outfit is there, taking the same pictures, but already I feel like a member of the recovery team, an "insider," and I worry about the kinds of images making their way into the possession of these strangers.

I tell Lautenberger he can email the pictures to me, but he already has them on a disk, sealed in a plastic evidence bag. He hands it to Joe Gloria, the ASAIC in Newark who heads the volunteer recovery operation, and the man who's guided me through the interview. We walk to the Customs van we came in, but before he closes the door, somebody from the team runs up with news - they've recovered human remains. Gloria listens to the details, but the level of excitement is so high that I break in to ask him how often this happens.

"Pretty often," he says, "Almost every day we're able to find remains we hope we can identify and send back to a family."

I remember something I heard earlier, about families being happy to recover even something as small as a tooth, anything that means there can be a funeral, prayers at the graveside, a stone.

The Customs van is covered with the powder that coats everything and everyone at the site. "Look at this," Gloria says, pointing to the windshield and the side of the van. "Before they started bringing the debris from Ground Zero up here, they laid a brand-new level of asphalt over the entire area. Now you can't even see any paving. You shake it out of your clothes every night, wash it out of your hair. Everything is covered with dirt...this powder."

We leave Fresh Kills the same way we came in, past separate lots of mangled vehicles - one for police cars, another for firetrucks, and the last for civilian cars, trucks, and SUVs. We go through two checkpoints, the uniformed personnel at the last one using wands to wash down the vehicle with disinfectant. Gloria hands me some computer print-outs, aerial views of the landfill officials used early on to measure how quickly recovery workers were able to process the debris.

"There was so much," Gloria says, "they didn't think we could do it. But if you look at what was here in October, and what's here now, you begin to get some idea of what these people have accomplished."

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Customs ensign found in World Trade Center debris.

I ask him if he has any statistics I can use in the article, numbers to highlight the extraordinary work the Customs team is doing, work he's been responsible for coordinating.

"Not with me," he says. "But if you need it, I'll try to send it to you later."

We're just past the landfill now, on the road out of Staten Island, back to Newark. Some kind of tall, golden grass -Salt Hay, I think they call it - covers the hills next to the highway, and the sun is sending a sideways light through the waving stalks.

He leans over and pulls something out of the glove compartment. "See this fellow?" he says. He hands me a photo of a man in a firefighter's uniform in the center, and the words 'In Memoriam' underneath.

"This was a great guy, a good friend...he was in Fire Company #1, an elite unit in New York," says Gloria. "His firetruck is in one of our lots, right next to the Customs operation."

We drive for a few minutes without speaking.

"It isn't often," he says finally, "that you have a chance to work at something that means so much."

How Fresh Kills Landfill got its name So many ironies attended the destruction of the World Trade Center that you might think one more wouldn't make any difference. But the name of the place to which the World Trade Center rubble has been sent - Fresh Kills landfill - glares back at us like some final taunt, a source of concern to survivors, families, recovery workers, and much of the public. What most people may not understand, of course, is the benign etymology of the word, the Dutch "kil," which simply refers to the system of inland waterways, creeks and channels off the coast of New York and New Jersey. For the earliest residents of "New Amsterdam," Dutch settlers and businesspeople, the "kills" were critical to moving trade into and out of the New World. The marshlands and estuaries that fed off the kills were important to agriculture, and provided colonists with game and fish. The marshlands and kills that weave through Staten Island, where the landfill is located, lent the area a magical quality. In a letter to his family, Henry David Thoreau wrote "The whole island is like a garden and affords very fine scenery." When Thoreau penned these words, the shores of Staten Island had already become a dumping ground, but only for the mounds of empty oyster shells that Native Americans had been leaving on the beaches for hundreds of years. By the early 1900s, a growing population turned to the islands near the kills as logical sites for the disposal of New York's garbage. Two incinerators were built in West Brighton in 1902 and 1908, but in 1915 city fathers focused on empty island shoreline along the Arthur Kill, and land called Lake Island as a citywide dumpsite. In April, 1917, the first garbage scow arrived. World War I ended the garbage dumping along Arthur Kills and Great Kills, but in 1945, officials turned their sights on marshland along the west shore in the tidal creek of Fresh Kills. New York soon had a garbage landfill that would stay in operation until March of 2001. When it closed, environmentalists and residents of Staten Island knew they had won a hard-fought battle. Fate soon overturned their victory. On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center created mountains of debris, 10.5 million tons. Where to move the debris was a matter of heated debate. Many doubted that the Fresh Kills landfill could even accommodate the amount of debris already making its way onto barges. In the end, the picturesque marshland that Thoreau described as a "garden" was reopened, its name - the Fresh Kills landfill - a coincidental but brutally apt reminder of the catastrophic events of September 11. Officials, families, survivors, and recovery workers all agree that a name change for the site is in order. "This shouldn't even be called a landfill," said one recovery worker. "This is a sacred place, and it should be called what it is - a memorial."

Customs volunteers at Fresh Kills Landfill Special Agents - SAIC, N.Y. Wilcox Alexander Pete Angelino Louis Boehner Carl Brownholtz Enzo Cannizzo Michell Chase-Brown Nelson Chen Paul Chen Stephen Cook Richard Dalessandro Andrew Danchuck Francis DiMaio Brett Dreyer Robert Fitzsimmons Leo Ford III Joe Gloria Pete Grzywacz Christopher Herzog Drew Houlihan Rod Khatabi Rita Matula Robert McCrossen Tom McMahon Juan Munoz Shawn Newman Gail Papure Alex Povotsky Andrew Rakowsky Special agents & Customs patrol officers from other regions Thomas Adams Juan Bortfeld Douglas Bothof James DeBoer Peter Decensi Collette Dennehy Darren Eng Richard Flanary Edwin Flood Loic Funn Vincente Garcia Michael Gellick Matthew Goward Kenneth Hawsey Josef Holzer Nathan Lavoi Michael Lepore Lee Lowery Mark Madenfort Nicholas Maggio Michael Modrak Sharon Morissette Jared Murphey Nell Newman Carl Olds Robert Parish Vanessa Piepenberg Robert Pittenridge Clinton Povlish Nicholas Raudenski Arthur Reifke Tobias Roche Rodolpho Salcedo Eric Sallick Dave Schifo Jonathan Sherwin Allan Sperling Michael Spinella Martin Suarez Steven Sutherland Diana Tsang John Volpe Inspectors - Newark, N.J. Joseph Bodjo Clarence Bugayong Lucinda Carvajal Jacqueline Castleberry Jospeh Cerar Jason Cirillo Eric Crago Ruben DelValle John Dietz Franklin Dobbins Howard Farkas Dennis Gleason Joseph Grenier Katie Kinsey Lucille Kwas-Cirillo Thomas Moschetto Brian Mosher Osbert Orduna John Padilla Jack Russo Orlando Sarabia Richard Tursi Carlos Vales Inspectors, JFK Edward Abernethy Aleta Altrichter Jaime Alvarado Augustine Amadeo Ibtisam Amer Shirley Blount Edwin Brigantty Anthony Campos Louis Carducci, Jr. John Casaretti Deana Castoro Miseal Correa, Jr. Paul Croce Uriah Cruickshank Pierre DeBono Anthony DeCrescenzo James Dezendorf Debra Edwards Shawn Fayles Paola Figueroa James Garr Michael Ginsberg Elvis Gonzalez Vishnu Gopaul Daniel Hayden Brain Herbert Patricia Inglima Mark Isaacson Darrell Ivey Carl Jaigobind John Karszen Matthew Larko Richard Lautenberger Robert Le Goff Andrew Long Richard Loria Frank Madelina Vijayanti Maharaj Joseph Massimp Satish Mathai Thomas Mauro Jeffrey McDermott Michael McNamara Alan Nordman Frank Pedalino Jeannine Perniciaro Peter Pietrowski Javier Posada Francisco Ramos Kareem Rasheed Jaime Rocafuerte Eric Rosado Diane Ross-McCullough James San Filippo Michael Sauer Sean Smyth David Staubly Ronald Suess Bernard Sullivan Eugene Tortora Angelo Tufano Ernesto Valerio John Van Gostein Michael Verdi Chance Youngs James Zammit RAIC/N.Y.-IA Teresa Courtney Carole Hawkins Jose Marzan Terence Opiola RAIC/Newark Joseph Ferrigno Michael Fischrund Margaret Jordan Jose Martinez Phil Whyte AC/JFK-IA Paul Kastava Darlene Line Tim Moynihan Thomas Wischerth IA personnel from other regions Nancy Andrews Bill Balen John S. Ballman Dave Bearon Eric Bloom Robert Broyles Norman Del Toro Karl Golovin Lea Granato Ken Howaniec Jack Hynes Joe Isom Kaysandra Lockhart Steve Lovett Ernie Magana Steve McMartin Marlon Miller John Reddin Keith Roberts Martin Stanford Wayne Usyak Roberto Villarreal Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte Volunteers (from left to right): ASAIC Joseph R. Gloria and shift leaders SA Louis Boehner, SA Stephen Cook, CI Jack Russo, and CI Richard Tursi, with Customs recovered materials.