FDNY ‘pals’ targeted me for bias case role

reviews from supervisors and — he thought — the respect and friendship of his Ladder 35 crew.

But his career ended abruptly this winter, when Rivera resigned with a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, allegedly brought on by his own co-workers’ ruthless and relentless persecution.

According to Rivera, his troubles began around 2014, when two so-called “priority hires” arrived at his firehouse, which goes by the nickname of “The Cavemen.”

The probie firefighters — one black and one Hispanic — landed their jobs through a discrimination suit filed by the Vulcan Society, the association of black FDNY firefighters.

The Vulcan Society case had forced the city to overhaul its outdated and ineffectual Civil Service entrance exams — and earned black and Hispanic candidates whose hiring was delayed or derailed a second chance at joining the FDNY.

It also created intense feelings in the Fire Department — which at that time was roughly 93% white and nearly 100% male.

Rivera, who joined the FDNY in 2002, was not a Vulcan Society member. Nor was he part of the original discrimination case.

But in 2012, as the suit closed, the Justice Department let him know that he was entitled to some remedy as a Hispanic firefighter.

“I had scored high on the entrance exam when I took it and got hired right away,” he said. “So the payout was really small, like $400. But I decided to take it; I believed in the case.”

As the controversy around the Vulcan Society suit roared through FDNY firehouses, Rivera says, he didn’t tell anyone about his small windfall.

“It was a toxic topic,” Rivera said. “A lot of animosity and blowback. I just kept my mouth shut.”

But when the two probie firefighters showed up at Ladder 35 and Rivera witnessed the “dehumanizing” treatment heaped on the new hires, he felt he had to speak up.

“I shared with a few people that I’d been a claimant, I was a senior firefighter by then, and I thought I had people’s respect,” he said.

But as it turned out, Rivera says now, he was dead wrong.

According to him, once his secret was out, plastic cockroaches began popping in his locker, his car and his bunker gear. When he found the first one — on his deodorant — Rivera suffered a fullblown panic attack at work, he says.

Sometimes, as in the case of a roach taped to his locker door, the bugs were real.

Though his childhood roach trauma was wellknown in the firehouse, it wasn’t until Rivera’s ties to the Vulcan Society lawsuit emerged that he was targeted by his colleagues, he says.

Despite his distress and de-