Scoppetta was New York City's fire commissioner from 2002-2010. He was responsible for more than 16,000 firefighters, emergency medical personnel and civilians on staff at the FDNY.

The son of Italian immigrants living on the Lower East Side, Scoppetta was abandoned at the age of five and placed in a children's shelter; he ended up living in foster homes for much of his childhood. Scoppetta served in the Korean War, then attended Bradley University on the G.I. Bill. After graduating from Brooklyn Law in 1962, he worked as an assistant district attorney before going into private practice. He returned to public service in 1996 as the head of the Administration for Children's Services, a job he once described as an excellent "emotional fit" for him given his childhood in and out of foster homes. In 2002, Mayor Bloomberg called on Scoppetta to rebuild the New York City Fire Department, which was still reeling from Sept. 11th; the appointment came as a shock to the highly insular FDNY, as Scoppetta was an outsider who had had zero experience with firefighting or department administration.

When Scoppetta took command of the FDNY, the department was struggling to rebuild itself after the World Trade Center attacks, which took the lives of 343 firefighters. His tenure hasn't been an easy one. Bloomberg's 2003 decision to close six firehouses may have made fiscal sense, but it was sharply criticized by firefighter advocates like Stephen Cassidy, and perceived by many to be an insensitive move in light of the raw emotions within the department. Scoppetta also took heat for bad behavior on the part of firefighters over the past few years, like a brawl at a Staten Island firehouse that left a firefighter in critical condition and allegations that superior officers tried to cover up the incident, or the fallout from the death of two firefighters at the Deutsche Bank building, with a subsequent investigation revealing that other firefighters' negligence led to the two men getting trapped in the burning building. Since his retirement in 2010, Scoppetta has shifted focus to his non-profit New Yorkers for Children, which supports at-risk children and those in foster care. [Image via Getty]