FDNY Firefighter | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #637

This Past Weekend with Theo Von. Episode 637. Guest: Tony Bonfiglio, retired FDNY firefighter. Duration: 2 hours 7 minutes.

Theo Von welcomes Tony Bonfiglio, a retired firefighter who spent 21 years with the FDNY, serving in Washington Heights and Queens. Tony is a born storyteller with the classic blue-collar New York Italian charm, and this conversation covers everything from his wild youth to the most harrowing days of his career, including his firsthand account of September 11th. What makes this episode special is the mix of laugh-out-loud stories and genuinely heartbreaking moments. It is classic Theo Von at his best, finding the humor and humanity in every corner of life.

Growing Up Italian in New York

Tony Bonfiglio grew up in New Hyde Park, just over the Queens border on the Long Island side. His whole family is from East Harlem, Italian through and through. His father moved them out of the Bronx when Tony was about six. He describes the neighborhood as all blue-collar workers' kids, bus drivers, cops, firemen, truck drivers. It was the kind of place where kids had total freedom to run around getting into mischief, hot rods, motorcycles, and sneaking into Long Island rock clubs to see bands like Twisted Sister.

Tony tells Theo his heaven would look like the 1970s, and you can hear the genuine nostalgia. He talks about his early jobs, first working at a meat factory in Mineola, scraping blood and fat off hanger room floors. As Tony puts it, it was like Paulie in Rocky. The descriptions are vivid and hilarious. There were butchers with their own toolboxes of knives, psychos who would grab kids by their shirts, tough women who were the packers, and a roach coach that would pull up with coffee and lousy donuts for break time.

Theo matches Tony's energy with his own stories of working at a grocery store where his buddy would clock in, go home, sleep, clock back out, and did this for eleven months without getting caught. The two bond over that magical period right out of high school when you worked with your friends and nobody had figured anything out yet.

The Meat Factory, Mushrooms, and the Road to the FDNY

Tony bounces between jobs. From the meat factory he goes to a plastic mold injection factory called Stonewell Plastics in Mineola, making game chips and colored beads. He could never remember the color names, kept mislabeling boxes, and his boss kept yelling at him. Theo counters with his own story about taking mushrooms before a shift at a mail center, getting so hot he took all his clothes off and mailed them to his first girlfriend. Her mother had to come bring him a raincoat so he could get to his car.

The pivotal moment comes when Tony's neighbor, Johnny Lima, walks through the back door with a fire department application. Johnny's words were simple: you will never get rich on this job, but it will put a roof over your head and food on your table. Tony had no idea it would be the biggest career move of his life. He took the written test with 40,000 other applicants. It was so easy he got a 98, probably the highest score he ever got on any test. The physical test was the real separator. You had to run a mile, jump over an eight-foot wall, and complete various stations. As Tony puts it, if you could not get over the eight-foot wall, you went to the police department. The line delivery is perfect and Theo loses it.

First Fires and Learning the Ropes

Tony describes his first fire and the adrenaline of arriving at a real blaze. The senior guys in the truck were experienced and calm, and Tony learned by watching and doing. He talks about the heat of summer fires where you would lose so much body water that taking off your turnout coat was like falling in a pool. He mentions drinking water straight off drain pipes because the thirst was so overwhelming.

The conversation takes on a wonderful buddy-cop dynamic as Theo keeps interjecting with perfectly timed jokes. When Tony talks about the freezer workers at the meat factory who looked like they were from the Antarctic, Theo suggests they were probably hiding from their wives. When Tony mentions French doors at a fire scene, Theo deadpans that you always expect someone French to be behind them but there never is.

The Little Girl Behind the Door

The mood shifts dramatically when Tony describes one of the fires that haunted him for years. His crew arrived at a large apartment where eight people were sitting around a card table playing cards and eating. They said something might be burning in the back. Tony's Irish lieutenant, Lieutenant Maloney, who he calls the bravest guy he ever met, cursed his way down the hallway. When Tony opened the French doors, the room was on fire.

They got on their knees, put masks on, called in a 10-75 for a working fire. Then the call came over the handy-talkie. There was a kid in the room. Tony went in frantically searching in pitch black smoke, feeling everywhere on the bed, under the bed, along the walls. He broke a window and looked out to see his ironsman Jeff in the street with a limp child. They rushed her to Columbia Presbyterian. She did not make it.

Tony was crushed. The girl had been right behind the door. The people playing cards never mentioned there might be a child in the back room. The deputy tried to calm things down as Tony lost his composure. His lieutenant put an arm around him and led him out. Tony went home to his wife and family, who had already heard the news. The way Tony tells it, raw and unfiltered, is devastating. Theo just listens.

The Kid in the Vacant Building

Tony shares another gut-wrenching story about a young addict, maybe sixteen or seventeen, who kept lighting fires in a vacant building to stay warm in winter. Tony's crew got called three times to the same sixth-floor apartment. The first time, his lieutenant yelled at the kid while Tony shined his flashlight on him. Tony remembers the kid's eyes, like tombstones. They put the fire out and left. Two hours later, they got called back. Same thing.

The detail that makes this story perfectly Theo Von is when Tony describes his friend Jeff putting out the fire with vanilla icing from an Entenmann's cake still on his mustache because they had just broken into one at the firehouse. The boss was furious because the call interrupted his dessert.

September 11th

The core of the episode is Tony's account of 9/11. He was at home in Queens when the towers were hit. He and two friends drove their Suburban down to Ground Zero, arriving around 11:30 in the morning. What they found was beyond comprehension. Rubble stories high, dust everywhere, the only sounds being other firefighters.

Tony describes the surreal moments. A Wall Street guy in an expensive suit covered in cement dust going around giving everyone water. Four women who appeared out of nowhere with two barrels, a piece of plywood, Wonder Bread, peanut butter and jelly, and started making sandwiches. Tony gets emotional recounting this, the way people of every race and background came together in that moment.

Then a deputy climbed on a car and yelled that they had gotten a call. People were trapped in a shaft and they were going to find them. It was the first time anyone heard that someone might still be alive. Energy surged. Tony grabbed a jackhammer from a crushed rescue truck and they set out climbing through massive jagged pieces of concrete, in and out of voids.

He fell into a void and hurt his right shoulder. He threw the jackhammer into a hole in frustration. They crawled into a high-end women's store through a window three stories up because the rubble was that high. They searched under clothing racks, yelling for survivors. Nobody there. They worked their way to the Marriott hotel lobby and found a lone firefighter sitting at a desk, covered in dust, pale white, in shock. It was a young guy from their own house who had just been transferred to Manhattan. They called him Monkey Man. He looked up at Tony and said, all my guys are dead. They are all dead.

They spent hours hosing water into a hole from hell with Building 7 burning about 100 yards away. When a chief ordered them to evacuate because Building 7 was about to come down, they wedged the hose into some rocks so the water would keep going and took off. On their way to their vehicle, a reporter named Penny Cohn tried to interview them. Tony said it was bad. His friend Bobby said horrible. She got nothing.

Tony saw an Asian woman covered in dirt, bleeding from her head, gripping a suitcase. They tried to help but she yanked the suitcase back and walked away. His friend said the suitcase was full of money.

They drove uptown to another firehouse, ate Milky Way bars and drank water from a drugstore where the cashier refused to charge them, and then went back to the pile. Building 7 collapsed while they were gone. Tony addresses the conspiracy theories directly. He was there all day. Building 7 was burning on every floor from the moment they arrived. No firefighter he has talked to heard explosions. He warns about AI-generated videos making fake firefighter testimonies that look completely real.

The Aftermath and Legacy

Tony talks about the long-term health consequences. 343 firefighters died that day. Many more died afterward from cancer and ground zero lung. His friend Bobby spent months searching for his nephew's body at Ground Zero. The physical toll was enormous, but Tony also describes the psychological weight of carrying those experiences.

The conversation lightens as Tony talks about the firehouse culture, the brotherhood, the cooking, the pranks. He describes the firehouse as a family where you spent more time with your crew than with your actual family. The bonds formed in moments of life and death are unlike anything else.

Theo asks about whether Tony would do it all again. Without hesitation, Tony says yes. The job gave him purpose, brotherhood, and a front-row seat to the best and worst of humanity. His neighbor Johnny Lima saved his life by bringing that application through the back door.

Fire Department Culture and Brotherhood

Tony shares stories about the unique culture of the FDNY. The pranks, the cooking competitions between firehouses, the unspoken rules about who sits where in the truck. He talks about the hierarchy, from probies who clean everything and keep their mouths shut to senior men who have earned the right to the best seat.

The conversation is peppered with Theo's signature non-sequiturs. When Tony describes the physical test, Theo imagines someone failing the wall climb and sheepishly walking over to the police department line. When Tony mentions the French doors, Theo launches into a bit about the French always sending their doors but never showing up themselves. The comedy is seamless and never disrespectful.

Key Takeaways

This episode is a masterpiece of conversational storytelling. Tony Bonfiglio is one of those rare guests who can make you laugh until you cry and then actually cry minutes later. His 9/11 account is one of the most vivid and human firsthand narratives you will hear anywhere, not from a politician or a journalist, but from a guy with vanilla icing on his mustache who ran into burning buildings because that was his job. Theo Von proves once again that his real talent is not comedy, it is creating space for people to tell their stories honestly. If you listen to one podcast episode about the reality of being a firefighter, make it this one.