Legendary hostage negotiator Francis 'Frank' Bolz focus of NYPD podcast

Francis “Frank” Bolz Jr. lives in a Melville assisted living facility these days, decades retired now and away from the mayhem and chaos that surrounded him during his career as a hostage negotiator with the New York Police Department.

But the fame that comes from being a founding member and a leader of the Hostage Negotiation Team on the most storied police department in the world has followed Bolz, 92, into his golden years.

At the Brandywine Assisted Living Center, where he is a celebrity to the staff and other residents, Bolz is also the focus of an NYPD podcast titled “Talk to Me,” which traces the history of the hostage negotiation unit from the beginning to the present.

The podcast series takes its title from the motto of the hostage negotiation unit: “Talk to Me.” Through the years, Bolz said it also served as his guidance while trying to defuse tensions handling hostage takers.

"First of all, you have to be able to talk to people and listen, talk and listen,” Bolz said of his experience handling potentially explosive situations. “You have to find out what is important to the [hostage taker] and talk about it.”

The brainchild of former NYPD media specialist and ex-police officer Edward Conlon, the podcast launched last fall, and its 26 episodes deal with everything from the tragic events of the 1972 Munich Olympics — where several Israeli athletes were killed — to hundreds of notorious New York City hostage incidents.

Those exploits seem to have found an audience. The latest numbers show “Talk to Me” has notched more than 165,000 streams so far and is available on platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From Munich to Attica

Bolz, who retired from the NYPD in 1982, believes its hostage negotiation unit has saved thousands of lives over the years. Conlon estimates that Bolz alone was responsible for saving 800 lives while handling 300 incidents after he joined the unit in 1973.

During a recent interview at the Brandywine, both Bolz and Conlon noted that the approach in hostage negotiations is to reduce the stress level of the situation. Munich and also the Attica prison incident in 1971, which led to 39 deaths — mostly from law enforcement gunfire — showed the need for negotiators.

Over the years, the team of specially selected and trained officers, steeped in the psychology of negotiation under potentially deadly circumstances, is credited with using patience and persuasion to save hundred of lives. The policy of the hostage negotiation team is not to resort to force, Bolz said.

Gunfire, even when suspects are shooting at officers in hostage situations, is not the way to solve things, Bolz said. Previously, the attitude of officers toward suspects was “If you shoot at me, I shoot at you,” Bolz explained during a recent interview in Melville.

Such was the case with Francis “Two Gun” Crowley, a 19-year-old who in the spring of 1931 shot and killed Nassau County Police Patrolman Frederick Hirsch and then led police from all over the area in a chase that ended at a building at 90th Street in Manhattan. 

The ensuing standoff saw as many as 300 NYPD officers on the scene firing hundreds of rounds into the building where Crowley was hiding with a girlfriend and another criminal.

A wounded Crowley surrendered — the other two people with him were uninjured — and said he had no regrets about killing Hirsch. Crowley went to the electric chair on Jan. 21, 1932.

'Whole point was to lower anxiety'

Bolz said he keeps an old archival photo of the Crowley shootout, a reminder of how dangerous hostage standoffs can be, particularly if police don’t have good crowd control and shoot indiscriminately. 

“The whole point was to lower anxiety, and you don’t do that by shooting,” Conlon said.

The initial training on how to handle hostage situations was immediately put to the test in early 1973, less than a month after Bolz and Harvey Schlossberg, an officer with a doctorate in psychology, devised the negotiation methodology and tactics. 

On Jan. 13, four gunmen took over John & Al’s Sporting Goods store in Brooklyn during a robbery. Officers surrounded the building, and in the initial confrontation, NYPD officer Steve Gilroy was shot dead as he peeked from around an elevated railway pillar. Two other officers were wounded trying to retrieve Gilroy’s body.

The gunmen were robbing the store because their Imam’s family had been murdered in Washington, D.C., allegedly by the Nation of Islam, Conlon explained. At the time, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan denied his group was behind the violence. 

One of the John & Al hostages was the store owner, who heard what he thought were ominous conversations that indicated the gunmen were prepared to commit suicide and perhaps harm the hostages, recalled Bolz. The store owner devised a plan in which he convinced the gunmen to let the hostages go to an upper floor in the building, ostensibly to keep them out of the way. It was a fortuitous move because once the hostages were away from the gunmen, they were able to escape through the roof, with the help of emergency service unit officers.

“Hundreds of shots were fired by the bad guys and once the [dead and wounded] police were removed in the first hours, not one shot was fired by police for the two and half days,” Bolz said.

“The impact is time is on our side,” Conlon added. “Things tend to get better over time.”

Once the hostages were rescued, the gunmen had no bargaining chips and they surrendered after the nearly 60-hour standoff, Bolz said. The hostages were communicating with police, primarily through Bolz’s old beat partner, Ben Ward, who later went on to become NYPD commissioner.

“Communication is very important,” Bolz said.

Hostage situations are always tense, and police today sport raid jackets emblazoned with the words “NYPD” on the back to avoid officers getting hit by friendly fire.

The attire was something Bolz and his late wife, Ruth, worked on to avoid police being mistaken for bad guys, he said. An established antique dealer, Ruth Bolz had some lightweight shell jackets and sewed an NYPD police patch to the front while her husband fabricated cardboard stencils so that he could use white paint to stencil the letters “NYPD” on the back.

The John & Al Sporting Good incident was the baptism under fire for Bolz, Schlossberg and others who pioneered the hostage unit, and over the years the group took part in hundreds of rescues. By mid-1973, the hostage negotiation team was in full swing, and its early success gave a boost to an NYPD battered by allegations of corruption, which surfaced in the Knapp Commission inquiry and a rising crime rate.

An enduring friendship

During his career as a hostage negotiator, Bolz made a habit of never staying in touch with the people he helped rescue.

“We never really make friends with the hostages afterward because a lot of them want to forget this terrible thing that happened to them," Bolz explained.

There was one exception: the enduring friendship Bolz has with Larry Haber of North Bellmore. 

Haber was the manager of a Bankers Trust branch at W. 12th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan when, on Oct. 6, 1975, a heavily armed 24-year-old man with emotional problems came in to rob the place. Inside, 10 people, including Haber, found themselves hostages.

Bolz quickly arrived on the scene and began talking to the suspect, Cat Olson, through the bank's front door. Immediately, the tension began to ease.

“It was the most amazing thing,” Haber recalled in a recent interview with Newsday. “In 30 seconds, in 30 seconds or less, Frank diffused the situation, [and] the tension almost evaporated from the room.”

Olson was so heavily armed that Haber believes he would have killed some hostages and perhaps taken his own life. But, after Bolz talked with Olson, Haber said the suspect gave him the weapon he held and then asked him what he should do.

“I said it was time to go,” Haber recalled, to which Olson replied "OK” and then left the bank and was taken into custody.

In the aftermath of the Bankers Trust incident, Haber said he and Bolz were asked to make media appearances, and as a result their friendship deepened over the years. Both men and their wives socialized, and Haber said he would invite Bolz and Ruth to family functions like bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Ruth Bolz died in May 2021 at the age of 90, just weeks before she and her husband of 69 years were scheduled to move in together at the Brandywine, Conlon said. 

With Bolz living at the Brandywine facility in a three-room suite, Haber makes it a point to take his old friend out to lunch once a week, sometimes with other retired detectives joining them. 

“It is an honor for me to have Frank see me … we have become very strong friends,” Haber said.

Asked what he considers the most important aspect to be being a good negotiator, Bolz said: "I don’t know if I have all the answers. I was just lucky, very lucky.”

By Anthony M. DeStefano

tony.destefano@newsday.comtonynewsday

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.