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June 5, 2025 - Rudy Giuliani
54:55
America's Mayor Live (684): Honoring America's Cop, Bernard B. Kerik
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This is Rudy Giuliani back with America's Mayor Live with probably the personally most difficult announcement I've ever made on television live.
My closest friend and my brother who saved my life, Bernard J. Carrick, passed away.
Just a few minutes ago.
There's so much I can say about Bernie that it's hard to find words.
Maybe I'll just begin with the personal.
Don't think there are very few people in my life that I relied on more than Bernie Carrick.
Nor are there too many people in my life.
Actually, there was no one in my life that was braver than he was.
There were some that were as brave.
And I was brought up by them and trained by them.
But he matched them.
And I didn't know that from afar.
I knew that by being in a situation where he could very easily have been killed and were thought to have been killed with him.
And with his assistance and his remaining strong and focused, and me too, and some others, we were able to get through and make the sensible and wise decisions that made it possible for the city to have an operating executive group that was extremely experienced.
And whether I had a big impact on September 11 and how we got through it or not, by bringing those 40 people through, I knew I had a very big impact on it.
And Bernie is one of the critical reasons I was able to do that.
That was in the middle of the time that I knew Bernie, but I've known Bernie from 1990 until now.
He was a hero police officer, more decorated than any or certainly than most.
I came from a family of police officers, one of whom was the hero police officer, my uncle Rudy, like him, who took people down from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge three times.
Bernie saved his partner's life.
Bernie wasn't afraid of doing anything.
I first met Bernie because of the death of a police officer that we were both involved in helping his family and became very close to him.
And when I became mayor, I made him deputy or third deputy commissioner of corrections because he had run a corrections facility in New Jersey and had gotten great accolades because of that.
He took over the worst prison in America in 1994.
I'll just summarize it this way.
In 1997 or 1998, 60 Minutes was going to do a piece about the worst prison in America, Rikers Island.
And I said to Bernie, do we really want to let them do it?
And he said, they promised me they'd do it honestly.
And Mayor, I don't know if you realize it, but the team's program that we put into effect, Which was a kind of based on ComStat, but applied to corrections and the needs of staffing and places to be and gangs and all of the different complexities of how you keep a prison safe.
He said, you've been at many of those meetings and you see the results that we get.
I knew it was for real.
I would go to the meetings to make sure it was for real.
I took the job of being mayor as a serious job.
I did not go to too many parties or cocktail parties.
I didn't have the time for it.
I had a city, when I took over, that had over 2,000 murders a year.
More than any in the history of the city.
My predecessor has the distinction of having the most murders in the history of the city and two terrible, terrible, terrible riots.
One of which was a pogrom going out looking for Jewish people to kill.
And I just vowed that we were going to have a riot.
They'd have to kill me to have a riot.
Well, they didn't kill me and they didn't get a riot.
And we took murder down to 600 by the time I left.
And then my predecessor, Bloomberg, took it down to 300 until the Democrats came back.
Bernie reduced violence at Rikers Island by 90%.
Yep, 90%.
Go look at 60 Minutes, if you don't believe me.
Go look at Mike Wallace's very, very critical report, which began as a hit job.
And became a major, major piece of the revival of New York, such that corrections departments from all over the country were coming to see how Bernie did it.
When the office of police commissioner opened up, because I was blessed by God with three great police commissioners, Bill Braddon, Howard Safer, and now the third one, Bernie Kerrick.
And they were...
You can measure it any way you want.
You can look at statistics and we could say one was better and the other was better and the other was better.
You know what I think?
Truly, God blessed me with having the right man at the right time.
I had the reformer when I needed the reformer.
I got the institutional guy who could make these programs permanent, so they're using them even today.
And then I got the guy who could...
You talk about morale when you're a police commissioner that goes out and makes arrests?
He was police commissioner in a couple of weeks, and I got a call about 5.30 in the morning from my press secretary, Sonny Mindell.
And Sonny said to me, boss, have we got a problem this morning?
I said, what is it, Sonny?
Whenever I got a call, it was always a problem.
When somebody shot or somebody or whatever.
She said, the new police commissioner just arrested some people.
I don't know, maybe he banged them around.
I'm not sure.
We got to stop this.
The press is going crazy.
I said, Sonny, you got to be kidding me.
He was like bad people.
He said, yeah, they're gang people.
Then he got into a little fight with them.
Did he prevail?
He said, well, yeah, sure he did.
He's a black belt in karate.
They were no choice.
I said, Sonny, you just made my day.
Are you kidding?
I don't care about the press.
I don't care about the press.
They weren't as bad as they are now, but they were...
I mean, I got...
And one of them was when they endorsed me for re-election.
Now, and they were a lot better then, by the way.
Now they're just...
Do the opposite and you'll be really successful.
I did.
I'll show you.
When I needed a new police commissioner, very close, because I had a very, very good choice either way.
And I selected him because of his innovation and because it needed to be revived.
It needed even more morale than it had.
Now it had been organized kind of like in a military style by the ex-Marine Howard Safer.
Because Howard Safer treated the press like they were a bunch of unnecessary jerks, they gave him a very bad press.
Howard Saver was a brilliant police commissioner.
Howard Saver invented the U.S. Marshal Service just about, and he invented...
But as far as the press was concerned, they wouldn't let you know that.
Those things are two really important to the public.
They're more important than brainwashing you.
So when he took over for Howard, he faced the same problem Howard faced, which was Bratton had done such a great job reducing crime.
How is Howard Safer going to do any better?
Gosh, he was never even a cop.
He did equally or better.
He kept producing crime more and more and more and more, and as different crimes emerged, his emphasis went in a different direction.
And then when Howard left, crime was down to levels nobody ever thought we would see.
I bring in Bernie, and Bernie faces, how's this kid, this guy, he was just a cop, and okay, he ran corrections, but you probably gave him the program.
I didn't.
He developed the program, damn it.
And then he brings crime down more than anybody ever did in history corrections.
Then I put him in the PD and he brings crime down even more, I think, or certainly equal to Bill and Howard.
And then he faces something no other police commissioner in New York or in America ever faced.
Really, a military attack, a foreign attack on the city of New York.
The biggest one since the Battle of 1812 and of a terrorist nature, which was a total surprise and shock.
And he had worked in the Middle East as a young soldier.
Can you imagine how God blessed us with someone who understood it?
And I had a partner along with my police commissioner, Tom Von Essen.
Man, what I used to say to the Queen of England, for example, when she knighted me, I stand on the shoulders of giants.
People would think this was some kind of false humility or feigned humility.
It came right from the bottom of my heart.
I see the picture right now.
I stood on the shoulder of the Giants, and I saw Tom right now, or Richie Shearer.
I'd tell you the same thing.
Richie was the head of emergency services.
And Bernie was the head of the PD.
And Tom was the head of the police, the fire department.
They got the biggest losses of any fire department ever, including Tom's best friends.
And they were.
Often walking into situations where they had no idea what would happen to them walking down there with me on that.
I mean, we didn't know if we were going to fall into four stories deep into 3,000-degree Fahrenheit fires, but it didn't matter.
It was our country we had to bring back.
And if I ever even thought of not doing it, I had these three men around that I would have been embarrassed not to.
One night I had worked so hard, I had to go out to a memorial service.
I was up in the Bronx, I think near my old college, Manhattan College.
I had to go all the way to Rockaway.
And I was really tired.
And I said, I wonder if I should go.
I may actually frighten them looking so tired.
And they looked at me and said, Mayor, they don't care what you look like.
You show up there and they'll go crazy.
And you're the only person they want to see.
And they've been waiting for you all day.
I said, okay.
And Bernie was in the car with me, and we talked about, what are we going to do tomorrow about this?
If we can get some more police from Chicago, where are we going to put them?
Then I would get on the phone and figure out how we're going to cover all the funerals.
I'll go to these five, and Bernie will go to these five, and Tommy will go to these.
And we got help from Governor Hugh Carey.
He'll go to that number.
And Mayor Ed Codd, she'll go to that number.
And my deputy mayors will come and read, read from me, Let me make sure I went to the way.
It was very...
I don't remember if I slept or not.
I remember I got into work.
That kept me.
And when I got out of the car, I can hardly lift myself up.
And I saw, I think, about a thousand people, and they had little candles.
It was about 9.30 at night.
This was Rockaway, New York.
It was the second most affected community in New York.
Staten Island was the most.
Within two days, I had been at the beautiful church for a requiem mass.
For a brave, brave, very, very well-known local guy, you know, fire guy who had walked in and saved people's lives.
And there's never a time you contemplate that where you aren't uplifted and challenged.
And I got to tell you, I saw the people.
I saw their reaction to the mayor coming there for them.
I gave a one-hour speech, and they had to stop me.
I didn't go to bed all night from the energy that I got.
And then I remember telling them over and over again, they would say to me, how is it that you have this energy?
And I'd look at Bernie, and Bernie would look at me, and we would say, you're giving it to us.
You're giving it to us.
He came with me to London to be knighted.
He received a great honor from the Queen of England.
We established very, very quickly one of the most prominent security businesses in the country, if not in the world.
We helped to build police departments in other parts of the world.
Some of them still functioning.
Then he was one of the first victims of lawfare.
Something we'll talk on later at another point, which needs to be straightened out.
And he was pardoned by a great president.
With a big heart and a lot of decency, and he loved that president.
Bernie dedicated, I would say, the last years of his life from about 2015 on to making sure that Donald Trump would become president and would succeed as president.
There's no way I have the time.
I will maybe, if I do a book or something, tell you all the things he did for President Trump, but he loved him.
He absolutely loved him, and when the president selected me, To run his legal situation, run his campaign and his legal situation after he had lost.
Bernie didn't even bother calling me.
Bernie got in a car, drove to Washington the next morning.
He's there.
And he said to me, I assume you want me as the chief investigator.
And I put my arms around him.
And I said, now I feel okay.
And we've been together since then.
We've been together since the beginning.
He's like my brother.
His two wonderful daughters are my children.
And his son is a hero policeman also.
Because he has the genes of this great man.
I was a better man for having known Bernie.
I certainly was a braver man and a stronger man.
And I wish my father had known Bernie because my father was the bravest man I ever knew.
And I think he put Bernie right up there in the Pantheon.
For me, bravery is so important.
And honesty and integrity and caring about people and putting them first.
And Bernie had all of that.
What a Christian.
I love him.
We'll talk.
More about different things about him and about the family and the beautiful, beautiful family and how they followed the girls and the boy and how they're following in his footsteps and his wonderful wife.
But right now it's all about my friend, Bernie.
I don't know what I'm going to do without him.
Never expected this.
I love him.
You don't go through death.
The possibility of death and come through the valley of the shadow of death with another man and not be attached to him for the rest of your life like that.
I feel like I should have been with him.
I was going there on Saturday to see him.
Today we got the information that it would be Saturday or he'd be fine to Saturday.
But God had other plans and I say to God as a prayer, Oh, I don't know, God.
We all need help.
I don't know the help my friend Bernie needs, but there may have been some things he did in his life that worked against him, but he did so many good things in his life, so many people that he helped, people that I saw, and I bet you you saw.
How about the guy that couldn't walk on September 11 when we were trying to get them away from the second building, and he took his car and he put the guy in his car.
He wasn't in the car.
He's walking in the car.
We bring the car over.
We put him in the car with a police officer because the man couldn't walk.
And we helped the old lady put her in the car.
That's just one, dear God, just one time.
And he didn't ask for credit for it.
So if the Bible is correct, he gets credit for it now, right?
Right?
The lives he saved as a police officer.
The lives he saved in Rikers Island and the lives that he saved.
Do you know that he volunteered to go to Iraq after the war was over to help him because he didn't have a police department?
I would talk to him at night and I could hear the guns in the background.
This is in the middle of our having a $40 million business.
I'd say, Bernie!
He said, don't worry, boss.
He worried about me.
I'll just end this.
I know I could go on forever, and I'm sorry if I'm doing this maybe for my own grief, but there's so much to remember about him and so much I'm going to miss him for.
Just counting on him.
Get Bernie!
Yeah, Bernie will know that.
Yeah, get Bernie!
You've still been doing that up until now.
I probably did it today.
Sigh.
And never, never backed off.
Look, no, no, no, no, no, no, no comparison, but, you know, I've gone through difficult times, right?
And I've found out who my friends are.
People that I thought were abandoned me because they were afraid.
A lot.
People who I thought would stay with me did.
Wasn't all that.
And people that I never thought had the courage were unbelievable.
But I knew from the beginning that Bernie wouldn't and Bernie didn't.
And Bernie was there for every single thing.
Not one inch.
What a man.
We've got to figure out.
What to do is the right thing for him, but now I want to get to his family okay.
But I had to put this here because he was a public man, and people should know what a great man he was.
This is the kind of man that makes America great.
This is at the core of us, people like Bernie.
This is how we win wars, and we protect ourselves from evil.
Bernie, I don't know, Bernie, I have one prayer.
And that is, when you get up there, go see St. Michael the Archangel.
He's the patron saint of policemen.
He's going to love you.
He'll be your advocate.
If I could, I would be.
I wish I was there for you, Bernie.
You were always there for me.
I love you.
God bless him and take just one second as we leave to pray.
I'm gonna just say a short hour, Father, silently, but you can say whatever prayer you want to say, okay, for him.
Then I'd suggest it directed to Michael the Archangel because I think he's the one who can get him through.
You don't understand, Bernie?
You don't understand.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
May he rest in peace.
Amen.
so
amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me
i once was lost but now i'm found was blind but now i see
it was grace that taught my heart to fear and
grace i first how i first believed through the the
the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the
the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the We'd
no less days to sing the face than when we'd first begun.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind, but now I see.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind, but now I see.
I once was lost, but now I see.
This is Rudy Giuliani back with America's Mayor Live with probably the personally most difficult announcement I've ever made on television live.
My closest friend and my brother who saved my life, Bernard J. Carrick, passed away.
Just a few minutes ago.
There's so much I can say about Bernie that it's hard to find words.
Maybe I'll just begin with the personal.
Don't think there are very few people in my life that I relied on more than Bernie Carrick.
Nor are there too many people in my life.
Actually, there was no one in my life that was braver than he was.
There were some that were as brave.
And I was brought up by them and trained by them.
But he matched them.
And I didn't know that from afar.
I knew that by being in a situation where he could very easily have been killed and were thought to have been killed with him.
And with his assistance and his remaining strong and focused, and me too, and some others, we were able to get through and make the sensible and wise decisions that made it possible for the city to have an operating executive group that was extremely experienced.
And whether I had a big impact on September 11 and how we got through it or not, by bringing those 40 people through, I knew I had a very big impact on it.
And Bernie is one of the critical reasons I was able to do that.
That was in the middle of the time that I knew Bernie, but I've known Bernie from 1990 until now.
He was a hero police officer, more decorated than any or certainly than most.
I came from a family of police officers, one of whom was a hero police officer, my uncle Rudy, like him, who took people down from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge three times.
Bernie saved his partner's life.
Bernie wasn't afraid of doing anything.
I first met Bernie because of the death of a police officer that we were both involved in helping his family and became very close to him.
And when I became mayor, I made him deputy or third deputy commissioner of corrections because he had run a corrections facility in New Jersey and had gotten great accolades because of that.
He took over the worst prison in America in 1994.
I'll just summarize it this way.
In 1997 or 1998, 60 Minutes was going to do a piece about the worst prison in America, Rikers Island.
And I said to Bernie, do we really want to let them do it?
And he said, they promised me they'd do it honestly.
And Mayor, I don't know if you realize it, but the team's program that we put into effect, Which was a kind of based on ComStat, but applied to corrections and the needs of staffing and places to be and gangs and all of the different complexities of how you keep a prison safe.
He said, you've been at many of those meetings and you see the results that we get.
I knew it was for real.
I would go to the meetings to make sure it was for real.
I took the job of being mayor as a serious job.
I did not go to too many parties or cocktail parties.
I didn't have the time for it.
I had a city when I took over that had over 2,000 murders a year.
More than any in the history of the city.
My predecessor has the distinction of having the most murders in the history of the city.
And two terrible, terrible, terrible riots.
One of which was a pogrom going out looking for Jewish people to kill.
And I just vowed that we were going to have a riot.
They didn't have to kill me to have a riot.
Well, they didn't kill me and they didn't get a riot.
And we took murder down to 600 by the time I left.
And then my successor, Bloomberg, took it down to 300 until the Democrats came back.
Bernie reduced violence at Rikers Island by 90%.
Yep, 90%.
Go look at 60 Minutes, if you don't believe me.
Go look at Mike Wallace's very, very critical report, which began as a hit job.
And became a major, major piece of the revival of New York, such that corrections departments from all over the country were coming to see how Bernie did it.
When the office of police commissioner opened up, because I was blessed by God with three great police commissioners.
Bill Braddon, Howard Saver, and now the third one, Bernie Kerrick.
And they were...
You can measure it any way you want.
You can look at statistics and we could say one was better and the other was better and the other was better.
You know what I think?
Truly, God blessed me with having the right man at the right time.
I had the reformer when I needed the reformer.
I got the institutional guy who could make these programs permanent so they're using them even today.
And then I got the guy who could...
You talk about morale when your police commissioner goes out and makes arrests?
He was police commissioner a couple of weeks, and I got a call about 5.30 in the morning from my press secretary, Sonny Mindel.
And Sonny said to me, boss, have we got a problem this morning?
I said, what is it, Sonny?
Whenever I got a call, it was always a problem.
Was somebody shot or somebody or whatever?
She said the new police commissioner just arrested some people.
I don't know.
Maybe he banged them around.
I'm not sure.
We got to stop this.
The press is going crazy.
I said, Sonny, you got to be kidding me.
He was like bad people.
He said, yeah, they're gang people.
He got into a little fight with them.
Did he prevail?
He said, well, yeah, sure he did.
He's a black belt in karate.
They were no choice.
I said, Sonny, you just made my day.
Are you kidding?
I don't care about the press.
I don't care about the press.
They weren't as bad as they are now, but they were...
I mean, I got...
And one of them was when they endorsed me for re-election.
Now, and they were a lot better then, by the way.
Now they're just...
Do the opposite and you'll be really successful.
I did.
I'll show you.
When I needed a new police commissioner, very close, because I had a very, very good choice either way.
And I selected him because of his innovation and because it needed to be revived.
It needed even more morale than it had.
Now it had been organized kind of like in a military style by the ex-Marine Howard Safer.
Because Howard Safer treated the press like they were a bunch of unnecessary jerks, they gave him a very bad press.
howard saver was a brilliant police commissioner howard saver invented the u.s marshal service just about and he invented But as far as the press was concerned, they wouldn't let you know that.
Those things are two really important to the public.
They're more important than brainwashing you.
So when he took over for Howard, he faced the same problem Howard faced, which was Bratton had done such a great job reducing crime.
How is Howard Safer going to do any better?
Gosh, he was never even a cop.
He did equally or better.
He kept producing crime more and more and more and more, and as different crimes emerged, his emphasis went in a different direction.
And then when Howard left, crime was down to levels nobody ever thought we would see.
I bring in Bernie, and Bernie faces, how's this kid, this guy, he was just a cop, and okay, he ran corrections, but you probably gave him the program.
I didn't.
He developed the program, damn it.
And then he brings crime down more than anybody ever did in the history of corrections.
Then I put him in the PD and he brings crime down even more, I think, or certainly equal to Bill and Howard.
And then he faces something no other police commissioner in New York or in America ever faced.
Really, a military attack, a foreign attack on the city of New York.
The biggest one since the Battle of 1812 and of a terrorist nature, which was a total surprise and shock.
And he had worked in the Middle East as a young soldier.
Can you imagine how God blessed us with someone who understood it?
And I had a partner along with my police commissioner, Tom Von Essen.
Man, what I used to say to the Queen of England, for example, when she knighted me, I stand on the shoulders of giants.
People would think this was some kind of false humility or feigned humility.
It came right from the bottom of my heart.
I see the picture right now.
I stood on the shoulder of the Giants, and I saw Tom right now, or Richie Shearer.
I'd tell you the same thing.
Richie was the head of emergency services.
And Bernie was the head of the PD.
And Tom was the head of the police, the fire department.
They got the biggest losses of any fire department ever, including Tom's best friends.
Often walking into situations where they had no idea what would happen to them walking down there with me on that.
I mean, we didn't know if we were going to fall into four stories deep into 3,000-degree Fahrenheit fires, but it didn't matter.
It was our country we had to bring back.
And if I ever even thought of not doing it, I had these three men around that I would have been embarrassed not to.
One night I had worked so hard, I had to go out to a memorial service.
I was up in the Bronx, I think near my old college, Manhattan College.
I had to go all the way to Rockaway.
And I was really tired.
And I said, I wonder if I should go.
I may actually frighten them looking so tired.
And they looked at me and said, Mayor, they don't care what you look like.
You show up there and they'll go crazy.
And you're the only person they want to see.
And they've been waiting for you all day.
I said, okay.
And Bernie was in the car with me, and we talked about, what are we going to do tomorrow about this?
If we can get some more police from Chicago, where are we going to put them?
Then I would get on the phone and figure out how we're going to cover all the funerals.
I'll go to these five, and Bernie will go to these five, and Tommy will go to these.
And we got help from Governor Hugh Carey.
He'll go to that number.
And Mayor Ed Koch, he'll go to that number.
And my deputy mayors will come and read from me.
Let me make sure I went to the way.
It was very...
I don't remember if I slept or not.
I remember I got into work.
That kept me.
And when I got out of the car, I can hardly lift myself up.
And I saw, I think, about a thousand people, and they had little candles.
It was about 9.30 at night.
This was Rockaway, New York.
It was the second most affected community in New York.
Staten Island was the most.
Within two days, I had been at the beautiful church for a requiem mass.
For a brave, brave, very, very well-known local guy, you know, fire guy who had walked in and saved people's lives.
And there's never a time you contemplate that where you aren't uplifted and challenged.
And I got to tell you, I saw the people.
I saw their reaction to the mayor coming there for them.
I gave a one-hour speech, and they had to stop me.
I didn't go to bed all night from the energy that I got.
And then I remember telling them over and over again, they would say to me, how is it that you have this energy?
And I'd look at Bernie, and Bernie would look at me, and we would say, you're giving it to us.
You're giving it to us.
He came with me to London to be knighted.
He received a great honor from the Queen of England.
We established very, very quickly one of the most prominent security businesses in the country, if not in the world.
We helped to build police departments in other parts of the world.
Some of them still functioning.
Then he was one of the first victims of lawfare.
Something we'll talk on later at another point, which needs to be straightened out.
And he was pardoned by a great president.
With a big heart and a lot of decency, and he loved that president.
Bernie dedicated, I would say, the last years of his life from about 2015 on to making sure that Donald Trump would become president and would succeed as president.
There's no way I have the time.
I will maybe, if I do a book or something, tell you all the things he did for President Trump, but he loved him.
He absolutely loved him, and when the president selected me, To run his legal situation, run his campaign and his legal situation after he had lost.
Bernie didn't even bother calling me.
Bernie got in a car, drove to Washington the next morning.
He's there.
And he said to me, I assume you want me as the chief investigator.
And I put my arms around him.
And I said, now I feel okay.
And we've been together since then.
We've been together since the beginning.
He's like my brother.
His two wonderful daughters are my children.
And his son is a hero policeman also.
Because he has the genes of this great man.
I was a better man for having known Bernie.
I certainly was a braver man and a stronger man.
And I wish my father had known Bernie because my father was the bravest man I ever knew.
And I think he put Bernie right up there in the Pantheon.
For me, bravery is so important.
And honesty and integrity and caring about people and putting them first.
And Bernie had all of that.
What a Christian.
I love him.
We'll talk.
More about different things about him and about the family and the beautiful, beautiful family and how they followed the girls and the boy and how they're following in his footsteps and his wonderful wife.
But right now it's all about my friend, Bernie.
I don't know what I'm going to do without him.
Never expected this.
I love him.
You don't go through death.
The possibility of death and come through the valley of the shadow of death with another man and not be attached to him for the rest of your life like that.
I feel like I should have been with him.
I was going there on Saturday to see him.
Today we got the information that it would be Saturday or he'd be fine to Saturday.
But God had other plans and I say to God as a prayer, Oh, I don't know, God.
We all need help.
I don't know the help my friend Bernie needs, but there may have been some things he did in his life that work against him, but he did so many good things in his life, so many people that he helped, people that I saw, and I bet you you saw.
How about the guy that couldn't walk on September 11 when we were trying to get them away from the second building, and he took his car and he put the guy in his car.
He wasn't in the car.
He's walking in the car.
We bring the car over.
We put him in the car with a police officer because the man couldn't walk.
And we helped the old lady put her in the car.
That's just one, dear God, just one time.
And he didn't ask for credit for it.
So if the Bible is correct, he gets credit for it now, right?
Right?
The lives he saved is a police officer.
The lives he saved in Rikers Island and the lives that he saved.
Do you know that he volunteered to go to Iraq after the war was over to help him because he didn't have a police department?
I would talk to him at night and I could hear the guns in the background.
This is in the middle of our having a $40 million business.
I'd say, Bernie!
He said, don't worry, boss.
He worried about me.
I'll just end this.
I know I could go on forever, and I'm sorry if I'm doing this maybe for my own grief, but there's so much to remember about him and so much I'm going to miss him for.
Just counting on him.
Get Bernie!
Yeah, Bernie will know that.
Yeah, get Bernie!
You've still been doing that up until now.
I probably did it today.
I probably did it today.
And never, never backed off.
Look, no, no, no, no, no, no comparison, but, you know, I've gone through difficult times, right?
And I've found out who my friends are.
People that I thought were abandoned me because they were afraid.
A lot.
People who I thought would stay with me did.
Wasn't all that.
And people that I never thought had the courage were unbelievable.
But I knew from the beginning that Bernie wouldn't and Bernie didn't.
And Bernie was there for every single thing.
Not one inch.
What a man.
We've got to figure out.
What to do is the right thing for him, but now I want to get to his family, okay?
But I had to put this here because he was a public man, and people should know what a great man he was.
This is the kind of man that makes America great.
This is at the core of us, people like Bernie.
This is how we win wars, and we protect ourselves from evil.
Bernie, I don't know, Bernie, I have one prayer.
And that is, when you get up there, go see St. Michael the Archangel.
He's the patron saint of policemen.
He's going to love you.
He'll be your advocate.
If I could, I would be.
I wish I was there for you, Bernie.
You were always there for me.
I love you.
God bless him and take just one second as we leave to pray.
I'm going to just say a short hour, Father, silently, but you can say whatever prayer you want to say, okay, for him.
Then I'd suggest it directed to Michael the Archangel because I think he's the one who can get him through.
You understand Bernie the bitch?
In the name of the Father and of the Son.
And of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
May he rest in peace.
Amen.
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