The apartment was on the twenty-seventh floor of a high-rise in Harlem. Chris Voss, head of the FBI’s New York City Crisis Negotiation Team, was the primary negotiator that day, standing in the hallway outside its door.
The investigative squad had reported at least three heavily armed fugitives inside. Several days earlier, by Voss’s account, they had used automatic weapons in a shoot-out with a rival gang, so the FBI’s New York SWAT team was arrayed behind him and snipers were posted nearby. Outside that door, he writes, they couldn’t even see the fugitives.
So Voss talked to the door. He didn’t give orders, he writes. He described what he guessed the people inside were feeling, over and over, in what he calls his late-night FM DJ voice: deep, soft, slow.
“It looks like you don’t want to come out,” he said, repeatedly. “It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
For six hours, nothing came back. “The FBI coaches loved my DJ voice,” he writes. “But was it working?”
By the end, the team was almost convinced that no one was inside at all. Then a sniper on an adjacent building radioed that he had seen one of the curtains in the apartment move.
The front door slowly opened. A woman came out with her hands in front of her. Voss kept talking. All three fugitives came out after her. None of them said a word until they were in handcuffs.
Then Voss asked them the question that had been nagging him: why come out after six hours of silence? All three, he writes, gave him the same answer. “We didn’t want to get caught or get shot, but you calmed us down. We finally believed you wouldn’t go away, so we just came out.”
The words he repeated conceded nothing. “It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail” is not a promise that they won’t, and they were soon in handcuffs. What the fugitives described was something else: a voice on the other side of the door that seemed to know what they were afraid of, and that wasn’t going away.
The account is Voss’s own, from his 2016 book Never Split the Difference, and he does not give a date. In a 2018 podcast conversation with Sam Harris, he mentioned “some fugitives in a high rise in Harlem” among the few standoffs he worked before he became a full-time hostage negotiator at the FBI Academy at Quantico. Counting kidnappings abroad, his rough guess for the cases he went on to work was no fewer than 150.
In the book, the Harlem door is where he starts the chapter he titled “Don’t Feel Their Pain, Label It.”