Mayor Eric Adams is expected to name Robert S. Tucker as the new commissioner of the Fire Department, making him the 35th person to lead the agency, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Mr. Adams is expected to make the announcement at a news conference on Monday.
Mr. Tucker will take over leadership of the department from Laura Kavanagh, who stepped down last week after announcing in July that she would resign. Joseph Pfeifer, who served as first deputy commissioner under Ms. Kavanagh, briefly served as acting commissioner after her departure.
As commissioner, Mr. Tucker will oversee a department of 17,000 employees, including firefighters and emergency medical workers.
The appointment of Mr. Tucker was first reported by The Daily News on Sunday night.
Like his predecessor, Mr. Tucker has never been a member of a fire company. He has, however, maintained longtime connections to the Fire Department and to law enforcement circles in the region.
Mr. Tucker is on the board of directors of the FDNY Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the department. He also serves on the board of trustees for the New York City Police Foundation and as a police board commissioner for the Westchester County Police Department. Mr. Tucker was appointed in late 2021 to serve on Mr. Adams’s mayoral transition team, working on the Public Safety and Justice Committee.
Mr. Tucker’s appointment is “a good thing” for the department, said Daniel A. Nigro, who served as fire commissioner for eight years before retiring in February 2022. Mr. Nigro, reached by phone Saturday in anticipation of Mr. Adams’s announcement, said he got to know Mr. Tucker through the FDNY Foundation and that he was a “highly intelligent” person who “knows his way around New York.”
“He seems to be a very levelheaded gentleman, and he’ll look at everything from all points of view,” Mr. Nigro said. “He’s already got a head start because he’s been at every board meeting we’ve had, and listened to the commissioner’s report at each meeting, and really knows the department inside and out,” Mr. Nigro added.
Unlike Ms. Kavanagh, Mr. Tucker grew up in New York City, and as a boy in Manhattan, he said that he used to chase fire engines on his bicycle, describing himself as a young “fire buff” in a profile on the FDNY Foundation’s website.
As a teenager, Mr. Tucker worked in the department’s Manhattan Communications Office, where he spent time “mapping out all the multiple-alarm fires,” he told the foundation. His work proved that “multiple-alarm fire activity was taking place in clumps of neighborhoods,” he added.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “no one else was doing that kind of analysis.”
Mr. Tucker received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., according to his LinkedIn profile. He then attended Pace University’s law school, graduating in 1996.
He began his legal career as a special assistant in the Queens County district attorney’s office under Richard A. Brown, before leaving in 1999 to become the chairman and chief executive of T&M USA, a private global security firm.
A decade ago, Mr. Tucker was named honorary fire commissioner by Salvatore J. Cassano, who served as fire commissioner from 2010 to 2014. Mr. Cassano, reached on Sunday in anticipation of the announcement, said that he had given Mr. Tucker the title because he had “done so much to help us” as a member of the foundation’s board.
“He knows a lot of the operational end because he’s been very diligent in doing his job as a member of the executive board,” Mr. Cassano said.
Mr. Nigro, who rose through the ranks of the Fire Department during a five-decade career, said that Mr. Tucker’s lack of experience as a firefighter would not hinder his ability to lead the agency. “For every commissioner that came through the department like I did, there’s been two that didn’t,” he said.
Mr. Tucker’s predecessor, Ms. Kavanagh, faced criticism for her lack of firefighting experience after she became the first woman in the agency’s history to serve as commissioner.
Ms. Kavanagh, who worked in several different capacities in the department after joining in 2014, served as Mr. Nigro’s first deputy before being named interim commissioner following his retirement. But shortly after her official appointment to the position in October 2022, Ms. Kavanagh faced pushback, leading to a tumultuous tenure.
Four of her top chiefs filed a lawsuit last year against her and the department, saying that three of them had been unfairly demoted. The demotions created a “grave risk,” the chiefs said in the lawsuit, by leaving the city with no staff chiefs to properly oversee five-alarm fires and with only a handful of officials with four-alarm fire-command experience.
In another suit, also filed last year, a group of former chiefs sued Ms. Kavanagh for what they said was age discrimination.
In a Medium post days after announcing her resignation last month, Ms. Kavanagh wrote that she had decided to step down to spend more time with her family and friends.
“The Department needs a commissioner who can give it 100 percent of their all every day,” she said. “I gave that to F.D.N.Y. for 10 years. It’s time for me to give that time back to all the people who made it possible in the first place for me to serve our beloved city for so long.”
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