By Sean Daly
The New York Post
NEW YORK — The Brooklyn firefighter who appeared in a controversial lawyers’ ad courting victims of 9/11 is competing on a major, new reality series this summer.
Robert Keiley — an aspiring actor/model who is assigned to a firehouse in Flatbush — will star with two of his fellow New York’s Bravest on a show called “Expedition Impossible,” according to a cast list released over the weekend by ABC.
Keiley was in Morocco last March filming the show in secret when a photo of him — dressed in a full firefighter’s regalia and gripping a framed picture of the smoldering World Trade Center remains — turned up in a print ad for a New York law firm soliciting 9/11 clients.
The ad read “I Was There,” which was not true. Keiley joined the Fire Department several years after the attack on The Twin Towers.
Keiley, 34, said he posed for the photograph not knowing how it was to be used. He threatened to sue if the photo was not pulled.
“It was taken out of context,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
The ad has since been yanked, and Keiley insists all is forgiven.
“It sucked because the law firm — it’s not like they knew,” he said. “They were paying [an advertising agency]. I hope they didn’t lose money.”
Keiley, whose acting resumé includes a Bon Jovi music video and an episode of “The Sopranos,” is competing on “Expedition: Impossible” — a sort-of combination of “The Amazing Race” and “Survivor” — on a three-man team of New York firefighters.
“The moment they speak, you know they are from New York City,” says producer Mark Burnett, who describes his newest show as “a real-life Indiana Jones experience.”
Keiley says fellow firefighters Michael Egan, Kevin Coursey and he are lifelong friends. They are assigned to different firehouses, all in Brooklyn.
Thirteen teams — including a trio of Puerto Rican women from The Bronx — compete in a race across Morocco.
“I definitely think being a New York City firefighter, having that training and mindset, helped serve us over there,” Keiley says.
Their first responder training came in handy during the show’s dangerous tasks.
“From the beginning,” said Burnett, “they said: ‘We want to win this thing. But our job . . . is to help others and save lives. So if it is a choice of winning the race or saving another team, we will save the other team.’ ”
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