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

parties. It can change your life, as it has changed mine.
I’ve always thought of myself as just a regular guy.
Hardworking and willing to learn, yes, but not particularly
talented. And I’ve always felt that life holds amazing
possibilities. In my much younger days, I just didn’t know
how to unlock those possibilities.
But with the skills I’ve learned, I’ve found myself doing

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extraordinary things and watching the people I’ve taught
achieve truly life-changing results. When I use what I’ve
learned over the last thirty years, I know I actually have the
power to change the course of where my life is going, and
to help others do that as well. Thirty years ago, while I felt
like that could be done, I didn’t know how.
Now I do. Here’s how.

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CHAPTER 2
BE A MIRROR
September 30, 1993
A
brisk autumn morning, around eight thirty. Two masked
bank robbers trigger an alarm as they storm into the Chase
Manhattan Bank at Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street in
Brooklyn. There are only two female tellers and a male
security guard inside. The robbers crack the unarmed sixty-
year-old security guard across the skull with a .357, drag
him to the men’s room, and lock him inside. One of the
tellers gets the same pistol-whipping treatment.
Then one of the robbers turns to the other teller, puts the
barrel in her mouth, and pulls the trigger—click, goes the
empty chamber.
“Next one is real,” says the robber. “Now open the
vault.”
A bank robbery, with hostages. Happens all the time in the
movies, but it had been almost twenty years since there’d
been one of these standoffs in New York, the city with more
hostage negotiation jobs than any other jurisdiction in the
country.
And this happened to be my very first feet-to-the-fire, in-

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your-face hostage job.
I had been training for about a year and a half in hostage
negotiations, but I hadn’t had a chance to use my new skills.
For me, 1993 had already been a very busy and incredible
ride. Working on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, I
had been the co–case agent in an investigation that thwarted
a plot to set off bombs in the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels,
the United Nations, and 26 Federal Plaza, the home of the
FBI in New York City. We broke it up just as terrorists were
mixing bombs in a safe house. The plotters were associated
with an Egyptian cell that had ties to the “Blind Sheikh,”
who later would be found guilty of masterminding the plot
that we uncovered.
You might think a bank robbery would be small potatoes
after we busted up a terrorist plot, but by then I had already
come to realize that negotiation would be my lifelong
passion. I was eager to put my new skills to the test. And
besides, there was nothing small about this situation.
When we got the call, my colleague Charlie Beaudoin
and I raced to the scene, bailed out of his black Crown
Victoria, and made our way to the command post. The
whole cavalry showed up for this one—NYPD, FBI, SWAT
—all the muscle and savvy of law enforcement up against
the knee-jerk desperation of a couple of bank robbers
seemingly in over their heads.
New York police, behind a wall of blue and white trucks
and patrol cars, had set up across the street inside another
bank. SWAT team members, peering through rifle scopes

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from the roofs of nearby brownstone buildings, had their
weapons trained on the bank’s front and rear doors.