For months, Peter Tully, the scion of one of New York City's most durable but low-profile contracting families, was dogged by a writer stalking a key participant in the post-9/11 World Trade Center cleanup and renovation for an account of the project that later appeared in Atlantic Monthly magazine and as a book.
Despite the firm's pivotal role as one of the first construction early responders to the devastating lower Manhattan attack, Tully characteristically refused to talk to him. The writer's controversial epic later drew howls from a number of Ground Zero insiders and observers, including Tully's own father. But Peter Tully has come to relish its description of the firm, which he now leads, as the site's "red meat guys."