Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

hostage-taker inside—and this naturally set the commander
off. I didn’t learn this until later, but I could see why he
would have been angry and embarrassed at this latest turn.
All along, he’d been telling the media there were a bunch of
bad guys inside—an international assemblage of bad guys,
remember? But now that it turned out it was essentially a
two-man operation, and one of the bad guys had wanted no
part of it, the commander looked like he didn’t have a
handle on the situation.
But like I said, we didn’t know about the commander’s
reaction just yet. All we knew was that we’d just gotten all
this new intel, which told us we were closer to achieving our
desired outcome than we had just thought. This was a
positive development, something to celebrate. With what we
now knew, it was going to be a whole lot easier to negotiate
our way through the rest of it, and yet this commander was
angry. He didn’t like that he’d been played, so he turned to
one of the guys from NYPD’s Technical Assistance
Response Unit (TARU) and commanded them to get a
camera inside the bank, a mic . . . something.
Now that I was huddled with Bobby, the commander
swapped me out in favor of another primary negotiator on
the phone. The new negotiator played it the same way I had,
a couple of hours earlier—said, “This is Dominick. You’re
talking to me now.”
Dominick Misino was a great hostage negotiator—in my
view, one of the world’s great closers, which was the term
often used for the guy brought in to bang out the last details