Behind the Scenes With NYC Bomb Squad

March 6, 2007 — -- In "Bomb Squad: A Year Inside the Nation's Most Exclusive Police Unit," ABC News' Richard Esposito and Ted Gerstein go behind the scenes of the New York City Police Department's bomb squad.

They checked suspicious briefcases and handled the potential dangers of large crowds in Times Square during New Year's celebrations.

ABC News reporter and producer Esposito has won a George Polk Award for television reporting and two Associated Press Awards and shares a Pulitzer Prize. For the last 10 years, Gerstein has been a producer for "Nightline."

The following is an excerpt of the book.

From Book One Chapter Four:

THE PAST

1 POLICE PLAZA, DECEMBER 31, 1982, 9:30 P.M.

Tony Senft had been on the Bomb Squad for just about two years, and a cop for just about seven, when the call from Police Headquarters came in to the squad room at 9:30 P.M. on New Year's Eve 1982. He answered it, and a chain of events began that altered his molecules and his brain waves, and cost him his eyesight and his dexterity.

"I lost my right eye. I was broken here and here." He pointed to his face as he spoke. "I've had face ... facial work done; I've had new eardrums put in. They cut your ears down and skin graft new eardrums in. My right hip was broken. My whole face was reconstructed. I'm a little scarred up. I suffer a severe case of vertigo and a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I crouched over, and that was the end of it. All I remember is a loud explosion. According to witnesses, I was blown fifteen feet off the ground."

Senft's call to action had come on crisp, fatally dark New York night. For a little over a decade the city had been the target of a set of sustained bombing campaigns by groups including antiwar extremists, black nationalists, right-wing anti-Castro groups, right-wing Zionists of the Jewish Defense League, foreign nationalist factions from Croatia, Puerto Rican separatists, and countless other groups with a grudge and access to explosives.