On the afternoon of Feb. 26, 1993, Malcolm Brady led a team from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into broken concrete in New York City. Their assignment: find out what had blown up four levels of parking garages - and more than 400 vehicles - below the World Trade Center.
Within a day, they found some crucial evidence: a piece of metal that helped identify the van that carried the explosives into the building. During his conversation with Dick Gordon, how he and his team were able to unearth pieces of the van, and how that led them directly to the person who rented the vehicle.
"Every little piece that you find is extremely important to the final culmination of the case," Brady says.
In the following excerpts from the interview, Brady, who retired in 2003 as assistant director of the ATF, explains to Dick the task at hand for the investigators of Monday鈥檚 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
How much time do you have to work on a scene, and gather the evidence to figure out what the bomb was and where it may have come from?
You want to be very proactive during the first 24 hours. You have to be extremely alert for the weather. If the weather鈥檚 going to change, and you鈥檙e going to have rain or snow in the area, you have to work real fast, or you have to protect the area. You have to literally tent it. If you don鈥檛, the rain will wash everything away, every little piece of wire, every little piece of metal. When the explosion happens, you鈥檙e going to lose all the evidence the explosives contain in them, whether it may be a pipe bomb or whatever it may be. It all blows apart, though it doesn鈥檛 necessarily destroy everything. So what you鈥檙e looking for is all the pieces and parts of that puzzle, so you can put it back together. Then you can identify it. You may also have a clock, you may have a piece of metal, or you may have whatever it was carried in, or a knapsack that you can take and trace it back to see where it came from.
What kind of tools might investigators now have that they did not have 10 years ago?
The biggest thing in explosive investigations is the ability to take a swab of explosive residue, and put it into examination at the lab and determine what it was within a few minutes. The laboratory people are extraordinary as to what they can do.
What are the investigators on Boylston Street, where the marathon ended, looking at right now?
Well, right now, they鈥檙e in the collection mode, so they鈥檒l be collecting every little bit of piece of evidence they can. Of course, they鈥檙e talking about it possibly being in a trash can, so they鈥檒l check all that. They鈥檒l be collecting, if it was a pipe bomb, which it may have been, they鈥檒l be looking for pieces of pipe blown apart. You know, if it鈥檚 an actual terrorist group, then there鈥檚 a signature that will go into the device. The people that make these things - the terrorists - they all make it one way because they鈥檝e done it before, and they鈥檝e been successful, and they still have all their fingers. If they鈥檝e been successful, they keep building them the same way, so you鈥檙e looking for signatures.
Hear . Also in this show: worked in anti-terrorism for more than 30 years during a series of bombings in London; and set out to create a better map of the U.S. - one that delineates the states and rivers and forests with more clarity.
