Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 5:57 am

Part 1 of 2

Five: A Star Rises on the Potomac

As HE SPOKE TO A GROUP OF FEDERAL PROSECUTORS AT THE DEDICAtion
of a new Manhattan prison one afternoon in the spring of 1975,
Deputy Attorney General Harold "Ace" Tyler noticed a pasty-faced young
man sitting front-row center, "watching me like a hawk." Tyler found himself
glancing again and again, as he spoke, at those fixed, coal-colored eyes. The
man seemed to be processing Tyler's every movement, taking in his every
word-and the second most powerful man in Gerald Ford's Justice Department
thought to himself: This must be Rudy Giuliani.

"I asked Paul Curran who he was," said Tyler. "And it was Rudy. He was a vacuum
cleaner in his ability to absorb everything that might help him." His calculated
stare was also his own brand of introduction.

A distinguished New York Republican, Tyler had resigned a few months earlier
from the Southern District bench to become Attorney General Edward
Levi's top deputy. He was looking to bring a young legal dynamo with him to
Washington as his aide, and the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan was a hive
of candidates.

Rudy applied for the job with the backing of his old mentor, Lloyd
MacMahon. "MacMahon always raved about Rudy," said Tyler. "He kept telling
me to bring him to Washington."

Tyler dallied, but MacMahon's calls kept coming. Soon after meeting Giuliani
at the dedication, Tyler took MacMahon's advice. He hired Rudy as an associate
deputy attorney general, a position that paid $38,000 a year. It was a great job,
putting Rudy at the center of power, where he would help Tyler run the criminal
wing of the u.s. Justice Department. But Rudy also viewed the appointment
as a stepping stone to even bigger, better jobs. "It was a terrific opportunity," he
said. "I thought it would be a seminar on how government works."

Bald, soft-spoken and possessed of a cool equanimity antithetical to the likes of
MacMahon, the six-foot-two-inch Tyler had earned his "Ace" nickname in his
youth by scoring fifteen points in a prep school basketball game. This was not his
first stint in Washington, and he was not unfamiliar with its mercurial currents
and undertows. In 1959, President Eisenhower had appointed Tyler the first head
of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. He was named us. District
Court Judge by President Kennedy three years later in 1962. Now, in September
1975, when Rudy joined him, Tyler's job was to oversee the day-to-day operations
of Justice, a task made all the more onerous by Watergate. Sapped of its morale,
the department's criminal division was so sluggish Tyler billed it a "fudge factory
with 680 lawyers."

"Tyler was very good under pressure," Rudy said. "1 learned from him that in a
pressure situation, the best thing to do was remain calmer than everybody else. I
also learned that it was good to become angry and upset when everybody else is
calm and complacent. It helps to motivate them."

A few other promising young lawyers had clambered their way onto Tyler's
staff, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork-two conservative icons who
would eventually be nominated, one successfully, to the US. Supreme Court.
"Nino Scalia was a bouncing Italian," says Tyler. "He played the piano. Rudy and
he got along pretty well."

Rudy did not get along so well with another member of Tyler's staff, a young
black lawyer named Togo West, who handled the deputy attorney general's civil
matters. A tension blossomed between Rudy and West, according to Tyler. "Rudy
was always difficult with West," said Tyler. "Rudy didn't think he was savvy."
Tyler thought West, who had clerked for him, was just too subtle for the headstrong
Rudy. "Togo was a master at the indirect," Tyler noted, a fact that seemed
to completely escape Rudy's notice. fIScalia really liked Togo," said Tyler. "Even
Bork liked him." Only Rudy went to war with him. West went on to a distinguished
career in the Clinton administration as secretary of the army and, later,
secretary of veterans' affairs.

Also detecting a deeply rooted contempt within Rudy for members of Congress,
Tyler thought it wise to steer his aggressive aide away from Capitol Hill. "If you
don't suffer fools gladly," he explained, "you better not try to sell them anything."

One of Rudy's primary tasks was to "keep an eye" on the FBI and US. Marshals
Service. The FBI "considered Rudy their man," said Tyler. The thirty-one-year-old
associate deputy joined his boss at meetings with FBI head Clarence Kelly and
other top law enforcement officials, including the then director of operations for
the Marshals Service, Howard Safir, who would eventually become Rudy's police
commISSIOner.

The "white collar crime committee"- founded by Attorney General Levi in
October 1975 and placed under Harold Tyler's supervision-became Rudy's responsibility.
Charged with critically examining the Department's performance on
white-collar crime and recommending improvements, the committee was established
in response to a group letter sent to Levi that August. The letter was signed
by a number of legislators and consumer advocates, including Ralph Nader and future
New York Public Advocate-and Giuliani nemesis-Mark Green.

When Togo West resigned to return to private practice, Rudy inherited his responsibilities
and was suddenly Tyler's point man on both the criminal and civil
fronts. He became a de facto chief of staff.

In June 1976, Rudy sat in on a meeting Tyler held with Philadelphia's mayor,
Frank Rizzo, the rough-edged former chief cop of the City of Brotherly Love.
Worried that the upcoming July 4th bicentennial celebration to be held in
Philadelphia would become the target of terrorists, Rizzo asked Tyler to order that
15,000 federal troops be assigned to the city. As Rizzo and Tyler spoke, Rudy sat in
quiet awe of the crude Italian-American politician, mesmerized by him.

Rizzo was notorious for his blunt, bigoted remarks. During his first campaign for
mayor, he boasted: "I'm going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot after this
election's over." An unequivocal racist, Rizzo told an acquaintance during his second
run for mayor: "Forget about the niggers, I don't need 'em." He called Governor
Milton Shapp "that Jew in Harrisburg" and referred to City Councilman Pete
Camiel as "that Polack."

A six-foot two-inch Navy veteran, who had earned nicknames such as "The
Cisco Kid" and "Super Cop," Rizzo was also famous for his Stalinist approach to
policing. He had made headlines in 1970, when, in the wake of the shooting of a
cop, he ordered a raid of the Philadelphia Black Panther offices. With no evidence
against them, fourteen Panthers were arrested and stripped naked in the street. It
turned out another group was responsible for the police killing. In 1973, Rizzo was
caught running a secret thirty-four-man special police unit formed expressly to
dig up dirt and spy on his political enemies.

At the sit-down with Tyler, Rizzo told Tyler that he was especially concerned
about two activist organizations, even though both had already obtained permits to
protest the day's activities. Without troops, Rizzo insisted, chaos would surely erupt.
Tyler recalls Rizzo's request as excessive, if not slightly maniacal. "He wanted to
move the Eighty-second Airborne into combat position!" says Tyler, incredulously.
"He was saying, 'We're gonna be attacked!'"

During the discussion, Rudy's attention remained fixed on Rizzo. "Rudy was
fascinated," said Tyler. "He was staring at Frank like he had stared at me. I was
thinking that he kind of likes this guy's approach."

After watching Rizzo bluster his way through a press conference on the bicentennial
terrorist threat, Rudy told Tyler he thought the Philadelphia mayor was
"masterful." Tyler guessed that the press conference "maybe influenced Rudy."
Ultimately, Rizzo's request was denied. As for what happened in Philadelphia on
the 4th of July, 1976? "Nothing," said Harold Tyler. "Nothing happened."

***

Rudy's lifestyle changed in Washington. After he had decided on a rather
modest apartment and returned to New York to pack, resourceful Regina
discovered a comparably priced palace. Rudy heard her description over the phone
and instantly agreed.

Looming high above the Iwo Jima memorial, stolidly stationed on top of a steep
ridge in Arlington, Virginia, Prospect House looked more like a modern fortress
than a high-rise luxury apartment building. Angular and aerodynamic, it was
shaped like a shallow "W" vaguely reminiscent of a stealth bomber, as if the building
might roar thunderously into the sky. The 268-unit, eleven-story building featured
such amenities as a swimming pool, in-house gourmet restaurant, private
garden, underground valet parking, grocery store and dry cleaning service. The
view from this elite residential bunker was spectacular: a panoramic vista of the
entire D.C. skyline, with the monuments and federal buildings laid out below like
a sparkling miniature city.

Their neighbors at Prospect House included a host of congressmen and other
Washington luminaries, like Larry King. The Giulianis were thrilled with their
new $550-per-month, fifth-floor duplex, replete with a sunken living room, thirteen-
foot-high ceilings, a giant bay window and balcony overlooking the splendor
of the nation's capital. The couple entertained many visitors at their new pad, often
hosting parties on their broad balcony. "The building was so crowded that
when you looked up and down the terrace," said Regina, "you were almost afraid
the building was going to fall over because the whole place had parties." On the
night of July 4th, 1976-the 200th anniversary of the United States of America,
the auspicious day that had had Frank Rizzo so desperately worried-Rudy and
Regina hosted a bicentennial bash for a swath of friends and acquaintances. As the
daylight dwindled, everyone gathered on the balcony to watch the fireworks.
"There were dozens of Justice Department people," Regina recalled. Among them
were former FBI director William Gray and future Attorney General Richard
Thornburgh, then chief of the Department of Justice's criminal division. Rudy
Giuliani was making some very powerful friends.

With the brisk change of scene, the new apartment, and the parties, Rudy and
Regina's marriage was being molded into more conventional shape. Regina, whose
presence was much more evident in Rudy's life here than it had been in New York,
was giving the relationship a second try.

In accompanying Rudy to Washington, however, his wife was also pulling up
fresh but firm roots in New York, leaving a brand-new job she liked almost as
much as Prospect House. On April 1, 1974, she had been appointed a higher education
assistant at the City University of New York's York College in Queens.
Earning a salary of $15,280, she served as the program coordinator for York's
Continuing Education Department, which was run by an affable CUNY professor
named James C. Hall. York was a new college that targeted Queens's growing
African-American community and had drawn a number of black educators. Hall
was one of many black professional colleagues who would become a close friend of
Regina's, nudging her politics in a liberal direction, just as Rudy's moved rightward,
surrounded by his new Republican friends.

After a long job hunt in Washington, Regina was hired as the coordinator of the
Center for Continuing Education and Mental Health, an affiliate of the Psychiatric
Institute of Washington, a local hospital. Her primary responsibilities were organizing
seminars and other programs for the hospital's employees and overseeing continuing
education programs for psychiatrists who needed to renew their licenses.

Tyler met Regina on a handful of occasions, most memorably at two Justice
Department parties in Virginia and Maryland. His wife and children also met her at
the Virginia party, said Tyler, and "thought she was terrific." He added, "So did I."
Rudy's wife, however, was curiously timid. "She was withdrawn," said Tyler.
"She wouldn't react. She was extraordinarily quiet, pushing everyone away."

***

After a year and a half at Justice, Rudy suddenly had to look for work. Gerald
Ford had lost his re-election bid to Jimmy Carter and the musical-chairs
flurry of fresh political appointments was about to beset Justice. The most seductive
voice whispering in his ear was Harold Tyler's. Rudy's mentor suggested that
they present themselves as part of a five-lawyer package deal to high-powered
New York law firms. Also part of the package was another Tyler protege, a black
attorney named Richard Parsons. In early 1977, Tyler signed on with the oldmoney,
Republican firm of Patterson, Belknap & Webb; his name was quickly appended
to the firm's already lofty, but somewhat stale, triumvirate of names. Rudy
was initially offered an associate position, but after persistent protestations and a
little pouting-no partnership for Rudy and Rudy walks-the firm relented. Rudy
even got a stake of less than 1 percent of Patterson's profits.

From offices in Rockefeller Center, Patterson's attorneys, most of whom had Ivy
League degrees, represented a roster of corporate clients and worked on estates,
trusts and taxes. It was an unequivocally stodgy outfit where few cases went to
court.

Tyler was brought in as a rainmaker, a big-name attorney who could lure
clients with deep pockets. At first, Rudy found himself replicating his Justice
Department role. "Essentially, I served as Tyler's chief of staff," said Rudy. "He'd
bring in the business and I'd work on the cases."

Emboldened by the hubris of Washington, Rudy soon came to be viewed as an
iconoclast of sorts at the staid, buttoned-down Patterson. Renee Syzbala, who
had joined the firm shortly before Rudy, said the new partner would often flout
the office's rigid code of conduct. "No one could know what anyone else was
making," said Syzbala. "Rudy would tell you who was fighting with who, what
so-and-so was making. Rudy would take people out on the firm .... I wasn't
happy until Rudy got there. When Rudy came, the place got to be fun."

Rudy's mild insubordinations earned him the loyalty of a group of associates,
including Syzbala, who worked and played with him. Known as "Rudy and the
Rudettes," the upstart clique would regularly meet after work for a few rounds
of scotch. The social outings often became late-night affairs that might start at a
bar or restaurant and end up at a disco joint in the early hours of the morning.
On some occasions the Rudettes stayed out so late that they would eat breakfast
together. "Rudy was a cigar smoker, a heavy drinker," said Renee Syzbala.
"Completely un-health conscious."

Spurred by a spontaneity seldom seen in his later public life, Rudy was famous
among the crew for his hijinks. After one night of reveling, he climbed
into the public water fountain in front of the Seagram Building and splashed
around, daring his colleagues to join him. And so they did, wading in the fountain,
splashing each other.

When Syzbala first met Rudy in January of 1977, she said he led her to believe
that he and his wife had already been separated for a period of several years and
that he was a free man. Rudy even went on a few dates with Syzbala's cousin,
whom he had met at Renee's wedding. Syzbala said years later that she thought
her night-clubbing pal was single all of the four years he was at Patterson. Jeff
Harris, Rudy's friend from the U.S. Attorney's Office, said of the marriage that "it
was clear by the time he was at Patterson Belknap that they were not together."

Harold Tyler, who knew Regina from Washington, said he never saw her again
after Rudy joined Patterson. "1 knew something was going on," he said. "But
that was more intuition."

In fact, Rudy was not only still married; he lived with Regina for all of the
first three years at Patterson.

The fun-loving fountain jumper once staged a practical joke on Syzbala that revolved
around the perception of him as a wild man. One morning Syzbala heard
a knock at her door. It was a partner, Mike Mukasey, who was also a friend of
Rudy's. Mukasey was worried. He told Syzbala that Rudy hadn't come into work
and wasn't at home. Then he blurted out that their friend had been arrested by an
undercover police agent the night before for soliciting a prostitute. Mukasey convinced
Syzbala that the two of them would have to break the news to Tyler. "Mike
pushed me in front of him," said Syzbala. "I knocked on Judge Tyler's door." When
she opened it, Rudy was sitting in the office, laughing. "I didn't truly believe
Mike, ... but it was believable that it could happen."

The bulk of Rudy's work at Patterson involved contracts, real estate and libel
suits. Since two of his and Tyler's major clients were the Tribune Company, which
owned the Daily News, and Dow Jones, which owned the Wall Street Journal,
much of Rudy's early litigation experience involved First Amendment work.
Though he had earned a reputation as a capable trial attorney in the SDNY, he
tried very few cases at Patterson, none of them criminal.

One of his handful of civil trials involved Dow Jones. The company was being
sued in March 1977 by Robert Nemeroff, a Manhattan dentist, who alleged that
one of its publications, Barron's National Business & Financial Weekly, had used
its columns to depress the price of a listed stock he owned. In the spring of 1978,
after a round of motions, counter-motions and other legal maneuvers, Nemeroff
dropped the charges. But the settlement allowed Rudy to pursue Nemeroff for
Dow's costs and expenses and he did. He submitted a fifty-one-page memo of law,
calling Nemeroff's suit "an attempt to silence the press" and "circumvent the First
Amendment." Dubbing Nemeroff's action a malicious lawsuit that had been "filed
either with the knowledge that counsel had no adequate basis to sustain the allegations
or in reckless disregard of the fact that proof of the charges was not available,"
the judge ruled in Rudy's favor. He ordered that Nemeroff and his attorneys
reimburse Dow Jones for $50,000 in legal fees incurred in fighting these "unsupported"
charges.

Rudy made the claim, many years after his stint at Patterson, that, as a private
attorney, he was exceptionally picky about his clients-rejecting anyone with a
sleazy profile. Definitely no mob guys, he had decided. Anyone Rudy Giuliani represented
would have to be a "legitimate" individual, he said, who had "redeeming
social value."

A reasonable definition of "redeeming social value," however, would have to be
drawn and quartered to apply to Albert Terranova, the frumpy head of a New
Jersey job training program called National Training Systems Corp. In 1977,
Terranova, his staff assistant and his company were all indicted by the U.S.
Attorney in Newark on thirty-five counts of bilking the government by filing
false records. Two years later, after hiring Giuliani as his personal attorney,
Terranova entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of "knowingly and willfully"
stealing federal funds. His company pled guilty to felony charges of conspiring
with Terranova and his assistant to defraud the U.S. government. The
judge said that the only thing keeping Rudy's client out of jail was the fact that his
wife was gravely ill.

Five months later, Terranova and his wife acquired a Brooklyn vocational school
and renamed it Adelphi Institute. Rudy helped Terranova draft the incorporation
papers for Adelphi and notarized his application for a New York vocational school
license. The school was dependent on the same sort of vocational school funding
Terranova had already stolen in New Jersey. But loyal Rudy went even further for
his convicted client-in August of 1980, he wrote a letter to state officials on
Terranova's behalf, stating that "Adelphi's management is experienced, dedicated
and responsible." The letter did not mention that Terranova was currently serving
probation-in a deal Rudy had worked out himself.

Rudy would later insist that "there was nothing else I could do as a lawyer,"
adding, "1 would have had to want to gratuitously hurt my client to have added
facts concerning his misdemeanor conviction."

Adelphi Institute secured its license and, over the next eight years, harvested
more than $80 million in federal vocational funds. In the summer of 1986, the
Terranovas bought a $1.9 million house in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. A year
later, Adelphi went bankrupt. In July 1989, Terranova was arraigned on charges
that he stole more than $63,000 in tuition funds from Adelphi students as part of
a nation-wide multimillion-dollar fraud scheme. In September 1989, the incorrigible
thief pled guilty. He got a $150,000 fine and was later forced to pay a $1.3 million
settlement.

Terranova, who still lives in Arizona, has remained friendly with Rudy over the
years. When Rudy remarried in 1984, and when his son was born in 1986,
Terranova sent gifts.

The Terranova matter, like the draft deferment issue, also made it into the "vulnerability"
study that Rudy's campaign commissioned when he ran for mayor in
1993. The study's authors warned that Giuliani could be accused of "being sneaky
and hypocritical" when he wrote the Terranova letter. The study's "rebuttal strategy"
recommends: "If asked about Terranova, Giuliani should rebuke him in harsh
terms for breaking the law. Beyond, that, the best answer to this rather frivolous
charge might be 'no comment.'" The authors also noted that in the 1989 campaign,
Giuliani "made the mistake of discussing the particulars of the case which
forced him to claim he could not remember facts and prevaricate." This, they cautioned,
"is a bad strategy."

Terranova wasn't Rudy's only conspicuous client at placid Patterson. Elliot
Cuker, an eccentric, bow-tie-wearing proprietor of a Greenwich Village Rolls
Royce limousine service, hired Rudy to represent him in the late 1970s in a tax investigation
stemming from an IRS audit of his business. After coaxing his client
into paying back taxes and interest, according to Cuker, the resourceful Rudy even
helped him set up a computerized accounting system.

Cuker, who would forge an enduring friendship with Giuliani, was a savvy businessman
with a tendency toward the garish. A late 1970s billboard advertisement
for his limo service showed Cuker in a chauffeur's outfit, leaning nonchalantly
against an old Rolls-Royce, a glass of champagne glinting in his hand. Below his
photo, as one friend recalls it, was the smug slogan: "Poverty Sucks."

After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York,
Cuker struggled through the 1960s-mostly unsuccessfully-to find work as an
actor. He purchased a pair of 1954 Bentleys, though, and began renting himself out
in the mid-1970s as a driver. Affecting a British accent, Cuker told his clients:
"Your chauffeur's name is Elliot. please make sure you give him the proper gratuity."
Within three years, he was running a limo service with a fleet of thirteen
cars. By the time Rudy met him, Cuker's business had grown into a highly successfulluxury
classic car dealership.

When he settled the tax probe, Cuker sold or gave Rudy a vintage white
Porsche. It was one of four cars the quirky entrepreneur would convey to Rudy
over the years, all of which Rudy would wind up returning. Of Cuker, who eventually
became one his closest personal advisors, Rudy would say in 1998: "1 really
love him."

***

Rudy's biggest case at Patterson landed squarely in his lap, courtesy, not of
"Ace" Tyler, but, rather, of that crusty old U.S. District Court judge with the
bushy eyebrows: Lloyd MacMahon. Aminex Resources Corp., a coal-mining company
in Kentucky had been plunged into bankruptcy due to the looting of more
than $1 million by two executives, and in March of 1978, MacMahon appointed
Rudy as its legal receiver.

MacMahon had to wrest jurisdiction away from another federal court to deliver
this prime patronage cut to his protege-who had never been a receiver and had
no background in bankruptcy cases. "Rudy didn't have any experience," said Tyler.
"MacMahon knew Rudy didn't know anything about this."

Further stretching the legitimacy of MacMahon's decision to appoint Rudy was
a simple matter of geography: The Aminex mines were located in the forlorn backwoods
of Kentucky and Patterson was situated in an antiseptic honeycomb of offices
at Rockefeller Center in New York City. A Kentucky firm certainly would
have commanded a more intimate understanding of the local issues affecting
Aminex and its employees.

Nonetheless, Rudy went south. For three years, he, fellow Patterson partner Joel
Carr and a team of six other attorneys kept Aminex above water and finally managed
to right it back to its feet. For a period of nine months, Rudy claims he spent
an average of three days per week in Kentucky, overseeing efforts to ensure
Aminex's prompt coal deliveries to an Ohio utility. By Rudy's account, his time
was split between the company's offices in Lexington and its mines in a remote
town called Hazard-although, years later, two Aminex executives told Newsday
that they couldn't remember Rudy making many visits to Hazard.

Kentucky, as the antithesis of New York, had an exotic appeal for Rudy: the
beautiful though sometimes desolate landscape, the Southern twangs, the giant
mounds of coal, the ubiquity of shotguns and chewing tobacco, the rugged, unadorned
texture of everyday life. It was also a place which perhaps reminded the
young attorney of his freshly well-heeled status, a place that captured his curiosity
the wayan inner-city slum initially entrances a kid from the suburbs. He
was also quite taken with the local racetrack and spent many weekends there
with a colleague or two from Patterson. "Rudy got a big kick out of going to
Kentucky," said Tyler, who added that the Aminex case was "one of the best parts
of his life."

In 1981, in an arrangement Giuliani and Carr negotiated, Aminex was sold for
$15.1 million, and creditors were repaid 100 cents on the dollar. Patterson drew
$2.4 million in legal fees and sought an additional $500,000 bonus for "spectacular
results" in salvaging Aminex. Attorneys for the company's new owners opposed
the bonus on the grounds that "Giuliani and his firm [have] already been
rewarded for their excellent legal services." Bankruptcy Court Judge Joel Lewittes
concurred in part, approving only a $200,000 bonus.

Rudy's self-described single-handed bailout of the Kentucky coal-mining company-
frequently cited as evidence of his "CEO" prowess in both his 1989 and
1993 mayoral campaigns-was another example of his penchant for hyperbole.
Joel Carr, who was portrayed by some newspapers as Rudy's loyal sidekick, "was
really running the show," said Harold Tyler.

The Newsday piece also cast doubt on Rudy's rescue role by reviewing his work
days in Kentucky and discovering that he was a "distant manager who did not run
the day-to-day affairs of the mining operation, preferring to delegate most of the
work to subordinates." When Rudy resigned as Aminex receiver in March of 1981
to leave Patterson for a new Washington post, MacMahon named fellow mentor
Tyler as the replacement receiver. Tyler stayed on as receiver until the pre-negotiated
sale of the company was completed later that year.

***

While Rudy enjoyed his man-about-town days during the Patterson,
Belknap years, Regina found a new life on the York College campus,
where she returned to work after their Washington stay. She and Rudy continued
to live together in the five-and-a-half-room apartment they jointly owned on the
fourth floor of their sixteen-story West End Avenue building, but it was an increasingly
chilly home, with distant partners sharing the same refrigerator. With
two bedrooms and attached baths, the apartment seemed designed for people who
walked through its French doors in the foyer and went in different directions.

The garrulous Jim Hall, twelve years older than Regina and the dean of the
adult and continuing education department, was becoming a more and more important
figure in her life. Tall and stocky with a mustache, ex-marine Hall was a
commanding figure when he entered a room. He talked endlessly, slipping often
into philosophical tangents. While getting his graduate degree at NYU, he co-authored
a book published by Vantage, a vanity press, called Damn Reading! (A Case
Against Literacy), which railed against the teaching of reading as a socioeconomic
"screening process" and a cause of psychological distress. He saw literacy as a stigmatizing
weapon used against black youth and called for "discarding literacy, as
we know it, from our educational system." A leader of black students and faculty
at York, Hall was a thorn in the side of York's white administrators and attempted,
at one point, to mount a campaign to become president himself.

Regina shared a small office with Hall and wrote the proposals that kept the
adult program percolating. One of her biggest-in the early '80s-won federal
funding for a project targeting the thousands of new Haitians arriving in New
York, refugees from the Duvalier tyranny. Hall was part of a City University-wide
underground railroad of black professionals-especially those running adult education
departments-and Regina became part of that network as well. Hall's
Damn Reading! co-author Jim Gibson was the assistant director of the York de-
partment. Gibson, Hall, Regina and another woman in the small unit began hitting
after-work bars in Manhattan together. Hall was already in the middle of his
second divorce, leaving his wife and Staten Island home by the summer of 1979,
and moving into Manhattan.

In February of 1980-according to divorce papers filed more than two years
later-Regina left Rudy and began a twelve-year relationship with Hall. It's unclear
exactly when she moved in with him. Property records indicate that she lived
with him at 75 Livingston Street in Brooklyn-a new co-op building that he
moved into soon after it opened in 1982. Records also show they bought a house
together in 1985 on Lincoln Road-near the D' Avanzos' old Hawthorne Street
home in what had become an almost entirely black section of Brooklyn. Finally, in
1989, after their Lincoln Road home was burglarized, they moved into a large
apartment building with a capped doorman, overlooking Grand Army plaza and
Prospect Park.

Hall's connections helped Regina become the top aide to Augusta Kappner, who
ran the adult programs on all twenty-one City University campuses, and move
into the university's central office by 1984. A few years later, she replaced
Kappner, who became a college president, and became Hall's boss, directing the
citywide program. In 1990, Kappner was vice chair of the board at Marymount
Manhattan College, when Regina was named its president. But two years later,
Hall, at the age of sixty, dropped dead while he and Regina vacationed in Maine.

Hall's close friend Solomon Goodrich, the executor of his will, said the main
reason the two were never married was because "Jim was scared of Rudy."
Goodrich recalled: "1 said, 'Why don't you marry the woman?' He said the whole
Rudy factor was one of the impediments to that. Jim didn't think Rudy liked him
being black." Of course, Rudy was in two powerful law enforcement posts during
most of Hall's years with Regina-associate attorney general and U.S. Attorney.

Rudy had never been much of a presence in Regina's York life during the years
they were together. Secretaries remember that as late as 1979, Helen Giuliani
phoned more often than Rudy. Colleagues recall Rudy coming to the wedding of
one York friend of Regina's, but otherwise, Hall and Regina were usually together
at campus events. Regina made the final decision to leave their apartment
in 1980-a decision Rudy would not make. With Harold Giuliani already seriously
ill, neither Rudy nor Regina made a move to turn their latest separation
into a divorce. Harold was now Regina's champion. "Being Catholic, divorce is
not supposed to happen," Giuliani said in an unpublished interview in the late
1980s. "But when you separate for the second time, the handwriting is on the
wall. It just wasn't working out."

InNovember of 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, making the White
House once again an elephant's fortress. A month later, on December 8, 1980,
Rudy Giuliani, the once outspoken Kennedy fan, switched his voter registration to
Republican. His political metamorphosis was now complete. Rudy's switch coincided
with the handing out of new political appointments by the Reagan administration.
And Rudy, whose former Patterson colleague, Richard Parsons, was on the
Reagan transition team, knew he had a shot at one.

Rudy's mother confirmed that her son's registration switch was designed to
snare a Reagan job. "He only became a Republican after he began to get all these
jobs from them," said Helen Giuliani in an unpublished 1988 interview. "He's definitely
not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn't. He still feels
very sorry for the poor." In a simultaneous interview, Regina recalled that when
she split with Rudy in early 1980, she had still considered him to be liberal
Democrat. "He generally won't do things unless he believes them," said Regina,
adding, "but he's not a saint, and he will do things that serve his interests."

While Regina was always a Democrat, Helen Giuliani was herself no stranger to
party hopping. Twenty-four years earlier, she and her husband had bolted the
Democratic Party when the family relocated to conservative Garden City, Long
Island. They later switched back when they moved to moderately liberal North
Bellmore. As far as his voter registration records indicate, Harold remained a
Democrat at least until his late sixties. Helen, however, would switch again back to
the Republican Party by October 1988.

Unlike his parents' party hopscotching, Rudy's political journey had been a
slow, steady trek from left to right. He parted with the Democratic Party years before
becoming a Republican, registering independent by designating his partly affiliation
box as blank. He claimed in subsequent interviews to have registered as an
independent in 1973 while at the u.s. Attorney's office. He said he did so to avoid
any perception that his public corruption prosecutions were politically motivated.
The earliest voting records available at the New York City Board of Elections,
however, indicate he registered as an independent in 1977, when he returned from
Washington.

Harold Tyler recalls Rudy's registering as an independent-perhaps from his
Virginia address-during his first stint at the Department of Justice in 1975.
"When Rudy was with me, he registered as an independent," said Tyler. "He
changed his registration."

In early 1981, a month after his party switch to Republican, Rudy was to be appointed
the NO.3 man in the Reagan Justice Department, the associate deputy attorney
general under Attorney General William French Smith and Deputy
Attorney General Edward Schmults. Since neither Smith nor Schmults had any
background in criminal law, they both wanted an experienced criminal prosecutor
at their side.

But it was more than Rudy's criminal experience or the fact that he knew someone
on the Reagan transition team that opened the door at Justice: The old mentor
network had revved back into action. Harold Tyler had spoken with both Smith
and Schmults and "told them Rudy was a very good man."

The nomination was a crowning achievement for Rudy. Casting a shadow; however,
over the sweetness of the moment was the rapid deterioration of his father's
health. Prostate cancer had spread mercilessly throughout much of Harold
Giuliani's body, guaranteeing constant pain. A pacemaker had also been installed to
keep his troubled heart beating. Since moving to Bayside, Queens in 1978, the stubborn
champion of toughness had worn down into a groaning, crumpled form under
hospital blankets. Now Rudy was forced to confront his hero father, confined to a
bed, robbed of all his hubris, his mortality as bare and fragile as his body.

As his father's condition worsened, Rudy had moved him from Northshore
Hospital in Queens to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. With
his Senate confirmation looming, it was a busy time, and the rising Republican star
made frequent trips between New York and Washington, trying to fit hospital visits
in between.

Further crowding the clock was a matter from Rudy's days as Tyler's assistant in
the 1970s that had stubbornly clawed its way into the present. In March 1976, the
Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility had asked Giuliani to assign
"a lawyer under your supervision" to review allegations brought by a
Pennsylvania building contractor named Jack A. Nard. Nard charged that several
Justice Department officials, including Rudy's friend Richard Thornburgh, had covered
up their failure to prosecute officials of an Iowa-based meat-packing company,
Armour & Co., for committing perjury in two civil suits in the late 1960s. As a result
of the suits, Nard and his partners had been ordered to pay Armour more than
$800,000. Nard produced a footlocker of documents for review; and Rudy assigned
his subordinate, Mary Wagner, to examine the materials. On July 26, 1976, Wagner
wrote Nard a letter informing him that, due to a lack of evidence, his case was being
dropped.

Four years later, in late 1980, Rudy became one of several targets of a Senate
Judiciary Committee investigation into the Justice Department's alleged submarining
of politically sensitive public corruption cases, including the Nard probe.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah, who had formerly represented Nard as
a client, and Democratic Senator Dennis DeConcini from Arizona, began pushing
for an investigation of the department's handling of Nard's allegations.

In April 1981, while Rudy worked as a Justice Department consultant pending his
Senate confirmation, he admitted in the Federal Times that when the Nard case was
under review, "1 had a close working relationship with Thornburgh" and considered
him a "personal friend." His primary involvement in the case, he said, was advising
Wagner on routine questions such as whether to issue subpoenas. He also said that
Wagner's review of the Nard case took "several weeks."

Congressional investigator Peter Stockton, who reviewed the Nard documents for
the Senate Judiciary Committee in the fall of 1980, claimed, however, that Wagner
had admitted she only spent one day looking into Nard's allegations. In his report,
Stockton wrote that he had found evidence of an "inefficient and possibly corrupt
operation by the Justice Department." He described the Wagner investigation as fIno
investigation at all."

"The Nard case was a major priority before and during the time that Rudy's
confirmation was pending," said Robert McConnell, then assistant attorney general
for legislative affairs and the Justice's point man for all its nominees facing
confirmation.

McConnell was ordered to conduct an investigation into Rudy's relationship with
the case. Without formally interrogating Rudy, McConnell concluded that a review
of the records found no proof Rudy was involved in the decision to spike the probe,
nor any evidence that he wasn't. "1 then told Hatch that it would impossible for me
to prove a negative," McConnell says.

In March 1982, McConnell wrote what he now refers to as a "stop this" letter that
cleared Giuliani. A close friend of Rudy's, McConnell would sit on the dais of Rudy's
1993 inaugural, visit the mansion and ask Rudy to be his daughter's godfather.

The Nard investigations ultimately resulted in a three-month delay in Rudy's
Senate confirmation. When he testified on the matter before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, the crackerjack trial attorney widely reputed to have a steel-trap memory,
insisted that he had "virtually no recollection" of the case. McConnell said with
a laugh that Rudy was "absolutely worthless" as a witness. "He couldn't remember
a thing."
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 5:58 am

Part 2 of 2

What was most surprising about Rudy's confirmation and background review
for this pivotal position was that no information about his family's criminal past
surfaced. While Rudy may not have known about his father's 1934 armed robbery
conviction, he had to be aware of the Leo/Lewis mob wing of his family. His aunts
and cousins certainly knew about it when interviewed years later. Rudy also knew
that his father worked for the man who ran the mob wing, and that a cousin tied
to the mob had done time in federal prison before being gunned down by the FBI.

Yet, despite two probing background checks performed in 1975, when Rudy
first went to the Justice Department, and 1981, nothing about Harold, Leo or
Lewis appears to have been discovered. Rudy filled out exhaustive questionnaires
and submitted to extensive interviews by FBI agents, but the family's secrets remained
intact.

"I never heard of any such fact-if it were a fact-that he had a cousin or any
other relative that was charged with having a criminal history of some sort," said
Harold Tyler. "I would be surprised to hear that there was something developed at
that time, because I think I would have heard about it from the FBI, but I did not.
I never heard of anything like that."

Asked if knew about any criminality in Rudy's family history, Jeff Harris,
Rudy's friend from the Southern District who accompanied him to Washington to
serve as his deputy in 1981, said, "I know of no such problem." Harris is convinced
that if Rudy knew, "I would have known."

Former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Brombwich had to undergo
a background check similar to Rudy's and remembers being asked by FBI
agents to volunteer any potentially scandalous information about his own or his
family's history. "I pretty clearly recall that I was asked that-is there anything
about your background or anything about your associations that might prove embarrassing
if it were publicly disclosed?"

The onus, Brombwich explained, was squarely placed upon the candidate. "It's
up to the discretion of the person, the judgment of the person," he said. "[That
way], if you're the person doing the background, you can't be accused of engaging
in a witch hunt. You're basically asking them to provide you with the information
that they think is relevant and that they think may be germane."

If FBI agents had independently unearthed the criminal histories of Lewis and
Leo D' Avanzo and Harold Giuliani, they would have surely informed Rudy, according
to an ex-FBI agent familiar with background check procedure.

The "sad footnote" to Rudy's confirmation delay, said McConnell, was that
Harold Giuliani never got to see his son sworn in as associate attorney general. In
late April of 1981, Rudy's father died at the age of seventy-three at Memorial
Sloan Kettering hospital in Manhattan.

Jeff Harris recalled the day Rudy got an emergency call summoning him to
New York. "We were in the office, he got a call in the morning sometime, saying
his father was fading," said Harris. "He dropped whatever he was doing and
headed for the shuttle to New York."

Harris was one of a throng of friends and colleagues, including, of course, Lloyd
MacMahon, who attended Harold Giuliani's wake on the north shore of Long
Island. It was at his father's wake when Rudy got a call from one of his aides in
Washington: the confirmation had gone through.

"My father gave me such a great gift," Rudy said years later. "He gave me an
internal sense of how to find a positive way to deal with whatever life has in store
for you. But I lost a great source of strength when he died."

On May 15, 1981, less than a month after his father's death, Rudy Giuliani was
sworn in as the youngest associate attorney general in history.

***

One of the very first matters Rudy handled as Reagan's new no. 3 man at
Justice involved a criminal case against the McDonnell Douglas Corporation,
a St. Louis-based airplane manufacturer. The mammoth company and four of its
executives had been charged with authorizing $1.6 million in secret payments to
Pakistani officials between 1972 and 1977 to push the sale of four $80 million DC-
10 jetliners for Pakistan's national airline. The payoffs were merely tacked on to the
listed price of the aircraft. The company was also accused of making false statements
to hide payments of $6 million to airline personnel and government officials
in South Korea, the Philippines, Venezuela and Zaire.

Michael Lubin and George Mendelson, the department prosecutors handling
the case, had secured the indictments against the company and its executives in
November 1979, when President Jimmy Carter was still in office. Now, with the
pro-business Reagan administration in power, they were both concerned about the
fate of the case-concerns that would soon prove well founded. As chronicled in
James Stewart's The Prosecutors, the story of the McDonnell Douglas investigation
became an almost Orwellian nightmare.

The two prosecutors were stunned to learn from defense lawyers that the new
associate attorney general, Rudy Giuliani, had, without their knowledge, met
McDonnell Douglas counsel John Sant to discuss the indictment. The meeting,
which also included Giuliani's aide, Ken Caruso, had occurred on May 14, 1981, the
day before Giuliani was sworn in. Sit-downs between attorneys for indicted defendants
and top government brass were certainly not standard operating procedure,
especially without informing the prosecutors handling the case. Fearing a fix in the
works, Lubin and Mendelson penned a harsh letter to Giuliani expressing their
"shock" and "dismay" at learning of the meeting and arguing that it could seriously
undermine the prosecution's case. Figuring it best that some select people be
made aware of the incident, they cc'd copies of the letter to several colleagues.

One of the last paragraphs of the letter read: "It is sadly ironic that a corporation
that has been charged by a grand jury in connection with the purchase of improper
influence and under-the-table dealings in foreign countries should be
permitted by the Department of Justice to engage in back door approaches, presumably
in an effort to dispose of the case. We would ask you to think back to
your years as a federal prosecutor and contemplate your own reactions had former
Congressman Podell or his lawyers lobbied senior Department of Justice officials
without your knowledge while the case was awaiting trial."

Within a few days, Lubin and Mendelson were summoned to Giuliani's office.
After they waited a considerable time out front, the secretary told them to enter.
They walked in, noticed the dour Giuliani sitting silently behind his desk. Beside
him was his assistant, Ken Caruso, also silent. Without shaking hands or saying
hello, Lubin and Mendelson sat down.

Then Rudy Giuliani exploded.

"As far as I'm concerned, we were watching a madman," Lubin told Stewart. "It
would have made a great videotape. I've never seen or heard anything like it, even
in the movies. He ranted and raved for a full twenty minutes. He just went nuts.
I've never seen a public official behave like this."

Later that night, Lubin got a call at home from a United Press International reporter.
A few days earlier, other reporters had obtained copies of his and
Mendelson's letter from someone they had cc'd. Lubin learned from the UPI reporter
that Giuliani, in an attempt at damage control, had crafted a response to
their letter that was leaked to the press. Among his many sharp-tongued counterlashes,
Rudy wrote that "Messrs. Lubin and Mendelson displayed a disrespect for
the facts and an immature petulance."

Rudy then told the Washington Post that he didn't know the purpose of the
meeting beforehand and, in fact, had not even known that McDonnell Douglas
was under indictment-a dubious assertion, since the case had already attracted
more press attention than any criminal fraud matter in the department. Rudy insisted
that he had done nothing wrong and said he would continue to meet with
defense attorneys without line prosecutors present.

On June 24, 1981, Republican Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri, who had
set up the meeting with Sant, offered a version of events in direct conflict with
Rudy's. Danforth told the Washington Post that he had explained to Rudy that the
company's attorney wanted to meet with him expressly to discuss complaints
about treatment by the Justice Department. "I certainly imagined he [Rudy] knew
what it was about," Danforth said.

During his earlier blow-torch session with Lubin and Mendelson, Rudy claimed
that he had notified the criminal division chief, D. Lowell Jensen, of the meeting
and had requested the file on the case from him. A memo written by Caruso, and
addressed to Jensen proved he had done this, said Rudy. But Jensen, when ques-
tioned by Lubin, would not confirm that any such memo had ever been sent.
Lubin submitted a Freedom of Information Act request years later for Caruso's
memo, and the department informed him they could locate no such document.
Lubin suspected all along that it had never existed.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, asked for a review of
Giuliani's conduct. The Office of Professional Responsibility, headed Mike
Shaheen, responded by conducting an investigation into the propriety of Rudy's
meeting with Sant but ultimately determined that it was "a permissible exercise
of his discretion."

Wertheimer told reporters in July, after the Giuliani review results were announced:
"His conduct may have been permissible, but it would be disastrous for
the system it if became a regular activity."

The dispirited Lubin and Mendelson were somewhat buoyed by a June 9, 1981
letter announcing that they had both been chosen to receive the Special
Commendation Award, one of the Justice Department's highest honors. But three
weeks later they got another letter saying their awards were being held "in abeyance
pending resolution of issues arising from your letter of June 19, 1981, to Associate
Attorney General Giuliani with respect to the McDonnell Douglas prosecution."

They had already seen the programs for the awards ceremony with their names
listed in them, but they soon discovered that everyone of those programs had been
destroyed. "This kind of retaliation was almost unbelievably petty," Lubin said.

Rudy insisted that Lubin and Mendelson didn't deserve the awards. "They are
jerks," Rudy said. "They had no perspective or judgment." The two prosecutors,
Rudy claimed, exemplified what he would later describe as the Carter administration's
"McCarthyism" in pursuing white-collar criminals.

On September 9, 1981, Rudy announced that the criminal charges against the
four McDonnell Douglas executives would be dropped. More than three years of
Lubin and Mendelson's work was summarily erased. The case concluded with a
plea bargain Giuliani approved, in which the corporation alone pled guilty to fraud
and making false statements and paid $1.25 million in penalties.

Philip Heyman, the department's criminal division chief under Carter who had
initially approved the criminal charges against the McDonnell Douglas executives,
told the Washington Post shortly after Rudy's announcement: "1 would have been
extremely reluctant to drop any charges brought after very careful consideration
by a previous administration."

Rudy, in rationalizing his decision, remarked: "Do the innocent ever get convicted?
That is the nightmare of being a prosecutor. There are enough cases of
clear criminality that we shouldn't waste a moment on a case when the individual
might be innocent." Rudy then conceded: "I did think the conduct was wrong. But
when they committed the misconduct, it wasn't clear what they did was illegal. A
foreign bribe was not a clear violation of u.s. law."

Those same arguments, Stewart points out, had been used by the McDonnell
Douglas defense and had been soundly rejected by both the trial court and the
Court of Appeals.

Months after Lubin and Mendelson left the government and started their own
law firm in Washington, they received a box in the ma

***

In late 1981 and early 1982, the new associate attorney general began making
frequent trips to Miami. Two items of business drew him there: thousands of
Haitian boat people who were overwhelming the Florida coast and an anti-cocaine
initiative led by Vice President George Bush. In early February of 1982, however,
he discovered a third reason to visit: a pretty, blond, 32-year-old TV anchorwoman
named Donna Hanover.

Donna had the bubbly bearing of a 1950s high school cheerleader. Often attired
in tight pants and low cut dresses, she was enviably dishy and readily disposed to
play the part of trophy. With green eyes offset by crinkly crow's feet, she flashed
a disarming smile and emanated a facile charm, able and quite willing to create the
illusion of immediate intimacy. She was perfect for Rudy.

Shortly after arriving at NBC affiliate WCKT in Miami in 1980, Donna didn't
waste any time investigating her romantic possibilities. "She wanted to know
where a lot of lawyers hung out," said David Choate, her news director. "It was
one of the first things she asked me." Choate added that soon thereafter she
started auditing a law course at the University of Miami. That meant she didn't
show up at the station some days until 2:30 P.M.

After getting a degree from Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism in 1973, Donna's first journalism job was as a radio newscaster in
Danbury, Connecticut, at WLAD-AM. Late that year, she took her first TV job at
WKTV in Utica, New York, where she also was an associate instructor in broadcast
journalism at nearby Syracuse University. In 1975, she accepted an on-air position
in Columbus, Ohio, and in 1977, moved on to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she
co-hosted the Evening Magazine, a feature production of the news department. In
this role, she earned the reputation of an indefatigable and entertaining spot re-
porter, who, among other things, rode a dolphin, piloted a blimp, drove a race car
and scaled an icy mountain.

Art Greenwald, Donna's producer, characterized Evening Magazine as "TV
boot camp." Hanover, whom he called a "combination of smarts and talent," once
stayed up all night editing a story, and in the morning, after a few furtive hours
of sleep on the office couch, was roused by Greenwald, put in a van and driven to
the banks of the ice-cold Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. They hopped into
the water, and Donna went white water rafting. Since the camera sustained water
damage, they had to return several days later to get more footage. "We got a good
story," says Greenwald.

Like Rudy, the bright-eyed broadcaster had struggled through a difficult marriage
marred by separation. Now, two years past the landmark age of thirty, her biological
clock was ticking rapidly. Her marriage to a Harvard-educated intellectual
named Stanley Hanover was, in some respects, even more mysterious than Rudy's
and Regina's.

In 1968, Donna Anne Kofnovec, the sunny daughter of a Navy lieutenant commander,
met Hanover on a tennis court at Stanford University. A wise, soft-spoken
erudite three years Donna's senior, Stanley made an instant impression on the
nineteen-year-old freshman. In 1972, after Donna's graduation, the two were married
and moved east to New York City.

"We had a church wedding, somewhere not in California," Stanley told a reporter
in one of the few instances he's answered any questions about their life together.
"It wasn't a big deal."

Stanley, who was described in a 1997 Dallas Morning News story as a lawyer
and writer, followed his new wife as she jaunted from job to job around the country.
Despite his Ivy League English degree, it wasn't clear if Hanover worked while
his young wife put in long hours in front of a camera. In 1973, when the Hanovers
lived in Utica, the first signs of marital tension surfaced. A former colleague of
Donna's at Utica's WKTV told New York magazine in 1994 about a conversation
he had had with Donna about Stanley years earlier. "Stanley was home all the
time," the colleague said. "And she was earning the dollars." The colleague recalled
asking Donna what her husband did for a living. "He's a 'quote unquote writer',"
she said. "I asked what he wrote, and she gave me a stare that could kill. 'The great
American novel' she said."

By the time Donna arrived in Pittsburgh in 1977, Stanley Hanover seems to
have dropped out of her life. Greenwald says he never met Stanley Hanover. "He
did not live with her," Greenwald said. Bruce Kaplan, another Pittsburgh colleague,
who says he socialized often with Don:na, also never met her husband.

Yet when Donna moved to Miami in 1980, Stanley Hanover reappeared-at
least on legal documents. On October 17 the two Hanovers bought a $60,000 condominium
together at 8035 South West 107th Avenue. They listed themselves as
"husband and wife" on the deed, and both of them signed it. Florida's Homestead
Law requires that marital partners be listed on the title of any residential property,
but Stanley's name also appears, with Donna's, on the mortgage documents.
Donna kept the condominium for a decade after she left Florida, reporting rental
income of about $6,000 per year, apparently from a sublet. A January 5, 1992
"Quitclaim" deed indicated that the property was transferred from Donna K.
Hanover and Stanley I. Hanover exclusively to Donna. Donna sold the property to
a new owner the same day. That deed bears a new signature accompanying
Donna's-Rudy Giuliani's.

The Hanovers have declined in numerous interviews to say where and when
they divorced, and Stanley, who still lives near Columbus, Ohio, continues to
refuse. It's clear, however, from the Florida records that they were married and
presumably separated-much like Rudy and Regina-until at least shortly before
Donna and Rudy met.

"It seems to me," said Rudy's friend and colleague Jeff Harris, "that by the time
[Rudy] met her, she was in the final throes of her divorce or had it."

Donna's first marriage isn't the only arena in her life where curious inconsistencies
have cropped up. Two different versions of how she and Rudy first met
have floated freely throughout newspaper and magazine accounts. The first and
most common begins with the Justice Department colleague who cleared Rudy in
the McDonnell Douglas case-Michael Shaheen-attending a wedding in
Memphis. Donna was a bridesmaid at the same wedding. Shaheen told her he
knew someone who visited Miami often and asked if she would be interested in a
blind date. When she said yes, Shaheen added that his friend would make a great
interview as well.

Rudy had his secretary, Kathy Smith, make the call. According to several
Giuliani friends, and one published account, Rudy had been dating Smith for some
time, and had brought her from Patterson, Belknap to Justice. All Smith, a short,
cute woman with a blondish, page-boy hair cut, said to Donna was that "Mr.
Giuliani" would be in Miami and understood that Donna had expressed interest in
an interview. Annoyed, Donna said she thought he would be more interested in
arranging a dinner date.

"Rudy called me the next day, and he didn't seem to know about my conservation
with his secretary," Donna recalled. "I told him he ought to get his personal
relations and press relations straight."

Rudy recalled the conservation as more of an interrogation. "She asked me
what I was all about and why she should go out with me," he said. "I said, 'Do you
want my resume?' She said, 'O.K.' I thought that was very cute. I told her I liked
New York, baseball and opera. She said she liked warm weather, football and country
and western music."

Despite the stilted exchange, the two met for dinner on February 7, 1982 at Joe's
Stone Crab in Miami Beach. The evening was pleasant--except for Donna's persistent
political questions. She wanted to find out just how conservative this top
Reagan official was. She inquired if he was pro-choice; he said yes. She asked if he
thought anyone who smoked marijuana should automatically go to prison. He
said, of course not. Donna says she interviewed him live the next day.

Three weeks and a few dates later, Donna got a call late at night in her Miami
apartment. "Rudy tells me he loves me," Donna recalled. "I thought, 'What makes
him so sure I'm here alone?' I didn't know what to say because, while I liked him
very much, I really wasn't sure about my feelings toward him. So when he told
me he loved me, I said, 'Ah, well, gee, that's very nice.'"

Donna's reluctance quickly thawed, and in another three weeks, at a prosecutor's
convention at Disney World, Rudy proposed marriage. She made him repeat
the question. When he did, she giddily nodded, yes, yes, yes.

Version number two of Rudy and Donna's romantic debut, which appeared in a
1993 Fort Lauderdale story in the Sun Sentinel, has the plucky anchorwoman receiving
a tough afternoon assignment: interview Vice President Bush's point man
in the war on drugs, a Justice Department bulldog named Rudy Giuliani.

"I thought I was pretty tough on him," Donna said of the interview.

By this account, Rudy then asked this cute, spunky TV reporter for a date.
That's where the two versions merge.

On May 28, 1982, Rudy's thirty-eighth birthday and three and a half months
after first meeting him, Donna quit her job at WCKT, left Miami and joined Rudy
at his Capitol Hill apartment on Maryland Avenue in Washington. Tucked into the
back of a quaint, four-story, red-brick townhouse, the apartment was roomy and
lightly furnished. Separated from the building by a dainty flower garden,
Maryland Avenue was a shady, hedge-lined, upper-middle-class corridor of tasteful
townhouses and brownstones. The Supreme Court and the Capitol were only a
five-minute walk. The neighborhood was just what Rudy wanted: tranquil,
anonymous and quietly oozing power.

Enchanted by her new home-the cherry blossoms, the museums and the marble
halls of power-Donna did not find a job in Washington. "I had worked very
hard for many years, and it was nice to be in Washington," she said later. "I would
go and listen to Senate hearings about various issues. I heard part of the Hinckley
trial. It was a wonderful environment for a journalist, because you go to these
hearings, and you didn't have the responsibility of writing stories afterward."

Rudy had a conspicuously dangling loose end to tie up before his new life with
Donna could officially begin. On June 2, 1982, right around the time Donna
moved in with Rudy in Washington, a financial agreement between Rudy and
Regina, "disposing of all rights and obligations as exist among and between
them," was finalized. Their apartment at 470 West End was sold in the same time
period, with the new owner moving in that July. Two months after the legal separation,
in August, Rudy applied for a civil divorce, and on October 14, 1982, it was
granted in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. They acknowledged in
court papers that they had separated in February 1980.

Donna has never disclosed whether she did the same with Stanlet Hanover.
Instead she has deliberately shrouded the marriage in mystery-saying it occurred
in a civil ceremony, while he has said it happened in a church. The same
trail of inconsistency occasionally clouds her career description. She redacted from
her resume her idle year in Washington when she told the reporter for the Sun
Sentinel that she left her job in Florida in order to take one in New York. In several
sassy profiles of her, references pop up proclaiming she had worked as a reporter
in Los Angeles-something she never did.

What neither Donna nor Rudy has ever mentioned in the many cheery interviews
they have given on their whirlwind courtship was that Rudy was in Miami
so often primarily to oversee the detention of thousands of Haitian immigrants.
Harris, Rudy's deputy on Haiti, who often traveled with him, produced calendars
showing that in April 1982, Rudy visited Miami three weekends in a row, arriving
each time on a Thursday or Friday. Rudy himself estimated he was spending more
time on Haitian matters than any other single issue during this period.

Ironically, the leader of Miami's Haitian community, the Reverend Jean Juste, a
Catholic priest who chaired the Haitian Refugee Center, remembered years later
that Donna, while at WCKT, had broadcast a particularly distasteful piece about
the refugee center. Located in front of the center's building was a small green donation
box inscribed with the words: "Give what little bit you can." Donna's story,
according to Juste, focused on his failure to renew his permit for the donation box.
Roger Biambi, another Haitian community leader in Miami, also remembers
seeing the broadcast. Several former colleagues of Donna's could not remember
whether she did such a story, though none denied it.

"How could she find this story?" Juste wonders now. Rudy's conflict with Juste
and the center would become one of the most troubling episodes of his young life.

Image

Eighty-four-year-old Helen Giuliani, the teacher in Rudy's life, at his mayoral inaugural
in January 1994. ( Photo by Richard B. Levine)

Image

Rudy's yearbook photo from Bishop
Loughlin Memorial High School, Class of
1961-alreadya politician with a yen for
the operatic. (Photo by Catherine Smith)

Image

Staged embraces were a staple of the early Rudy and Donna fantasy marriage. This
one was at the Columbus Day Parade during the 1993 campaign. By 1996, it was
impossible to get them inside the same camera frame. (© Frances M. Roberts)

Image

Regina Peruggi, a.k.a. Regina
Giuliani, was "offended" when
Rudy annulled their fourteen-year
marriage "with what her brother
called a lie"
(Courtesy of The Daily News)

Image

Lilliam Paoli, the Mexican-American welfare
commissioner in the Giuliani era who was
deemed unfit for draconian duty.
(10 Frances M. Roberts)

Image

Rudy's smash performances at the Inner
Circle annual revue-a fundraiser thrown
by the city press corps-ranged from his
portrayal in 2000 of pelvis-swiveling Tony
Manero in a parody of Saturday Night
Fever (Left), to his 1998 Rudy-the-Beast
from Beauty and the Beast (Below), to his
1997 version of a pink-chiffoned Marilyn
Monroe (Opposite page). He and Hillary
Clinton shook hands at the 2000 extravaganza,
while still-secret girlfriend Judi
Nathan sat next to him at his ballroom
table. (© Joe DiMaria)

Image

Image

Image

"Gentleman" Dave Dinkins greets Giuliani at City Hall right after Rudy's 1993 triumph.
Their two campaigns were a blood war, with Giuliani probing Dinkins like he was a grand
jury target. (10 Fred W. McDarrah)

Image

After a bus ride through the city that lasted ninety-six virtually unbroken hours, a hoarse and
exhausted Giuliani delivered a 1997 re-election victory speech that announced his determination
to reach out to minorities who felt left out. He did not return to that theme until he got
prostate cancer in 2000. (© Frances M. Roberts)

Image

Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch were two pivotal figures in his public career-his endorsement of
Cuomo in 1994 damaged him with the GOP for years and Koch's endorsement of him in 1993 put
him over the top (© Fred W. McDarrah)
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:03 am

Six: Heat Stroke: Delusions About Duvalier

ON HIS WAY INTO THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE IN PORT-AU-PRINCE,
Haiti, on March 16, 1982, thirty-seven-year-old Rudy Giuliani was patted
down. The offending hands were those of the Leopards, the elite personal
guard of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. When his father, Francois "Papa
Doc" Duvalier, died in 1971, eighteen-year-old Jean-Claude had become the
youngest president-for-life anywhere since Rome's Caesar Augustus.

Only twenty-nine when he met Giuliani at 11:30 that sunny morning,
Duvalier was used to looking over his rather large shoulder. Just two months
earlier, twenty Leopards had lost a mountain gun battle with eight revolutionaries
from Miami who had seaplaned to the beautiful Haitian island of La
Tortue in hopes of stirring an uprising. The regular army had to take over,
killing five and delivering the surviving three to the palace, where the president
emerged from his hermetically sealed living quarters to question them
and order their instant torture and execution. Interior Minister Edouard
Berrouet had then issued a communique officially informing the Haitian public
that all eight had died in the island gun battle.

Three dead Haitians and the truth, however, were hardly the only casualties
of the white-pillared, Mediterranean-style palace. Its two Duvaliers, who ruled
for three decades before Baby Doc finally fled in 1986, gouged the hemisphere's
poorest country of a provable half billion dollars, some of it American
aid diverted into Swiss accounts. They also killed at least 60,000, a per capita
body count that put them among a bloody century's bloodiest tyrants.

Giuliani had arrived in Haiti two days earlier, on a Sunday 2:40 P.M. flight,
accompanied by Jeffrey Harris and Renee Syzbala, his two old friends who had
become top assistants at Justice. Georges Leger, the Haitian ambassador to the
United States who had invited Giuliani four months earlier, met the trio, plus
Harris's wife, at Duvalier International Airport. They went immediately to the
American embassy, guests of Ambassador Ernest Preeg, who'd first met Giuliani
in Washington in June, shortly before beginning his Haiti assignment.

Preeg's early contacts with Giuliani were an indication of just how singleminded
the Reagan administration's Haitian policy was. All that mattered was
stanching the flow of "boat people," who had been washing ashore in Florida at a
rate of 1,500 a month aboard crammed and leaky freighters and sailboats. Rudy,
whose expansive Justice portfolio included the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, was, in Preeg's terms, the Reagan "point man" on Haitian issues.

His first visits to the White House, beginning in the spring of 1981, were as
working staff for a cabinet-level task force on immigration chaired by Rudy's boss,
Attorney General William French Smith. With the president championing the
cause of the 125,000 Cubans dumped by Fidel Castro's government, mostly also in
Florida, the Haitians had quickly become the administration's substitute bogeymen.
Though far outnumbered by the Cubans, they were both black and fleeing a
government backed by the White House. In the Reagan era, that made them convenient
targets in a politically turbulent sea otherwise bereft of scapegoats.

Giuliani had already helped negotiate a September agreement with Leger that
allowed Coast Guard cutters to effectively blockade Haiti, interdicting the ships
whose only cargo was human misery and sending them back to Haiti. The deal
was cut in Washington talks with Giuliani and the State Department-the first
time American force had ever been deployed to keep a troubled people home.

That spring he'd also launched Reagan's new detention policies, ending a preference
for paroling illegals to families and churches that had been in place since
1954 and putting them instead in camps and federal prisons. By the time of
Giuliani's visit, 2,000 Haitians were in a jailed limbo awaiting hearings, mostly at
Krome, a converted missile base at the edge of the Everglades. Giuliani had even
traveled with Syzbala to San Juan in mid-1981, convincing Puerto Rico's governor
to accept 800 of the Haitians at Fort Allen, a military facility closed on environmental
grounds by a federal court order.

The Puerto Rico agreement, personally signed by Giuliani, moved half the
Krome population to Fort Allen, where they lived in stifling canvas tents behind
twelve-foot-high wire fences embedded with giant fishhooks. Allen was a treeless,
grassless, sun-soaked sinkhole-similar to the fifteen-acre Krome, which had been
housing as much as three times its ordinary capacity of 530. The punitive conditions
in both large camps, as well as at a dozen other prisons where smaller numbers
of Haitians were jailed, were transparently designed to prod Haitians to
voluntarily surrender their right to a hearing and return home. Hundreds did.

If Rudy was devising wily ways of encouraging repatriation, Duvalier had come
up with his own scheme to discourage the departures in the first place. The police
fired at one boatload as it left Cap Haltien, killing twenty and sparking the stoning
of the police chief's car at the mass funeral. Then, when the corpses of twentythree
who drowned off Fort Lauderdale were shipped back in November 1981,
Baby Doc personally ordered the funeral home opened to the public. Large crowds
streamed past the bodies Duvalier had turned into object lessons.

Though Giuliani refused to acknowledge it, the timing of his Haiti trip was inextricably
linked to a lawsuit filed in Miami by the Haitian Refugee Center
against the detention policies he'd implemented. He had done a private deposition
in the case on March 5, and would testify April 1. As he, Preeg, Harris and Syzbala
sat in a row of wooden chairs in Duvalier's austere office, opposite the awkward,
obese boy-king, lawyers for the Haitians were calling their opening witnesses in a
federal courtroom in Miami. Rudy was in Haiti preparing to become the government's
key witness in the two-month-Iong trial, taking a crash course that would
soon qualify him as Justice's Haiti expert.

Duvalier played with a chain-link bracelet on his bulky wrist, sitting behind a
paperless desk, underneath a large ceiling fan. Thick, boot-shaped sideburns
framed a vacuous, smirking face. A translator stood beside him, repeating Rudy's
words in French. Oddly, Duvalier would listen to the translation and respond in
English. His two-piece, short-sleeved khaki leisure suit, with matching pants, gave
the meeting a military air, as did the office itself, which had no furniture or wall
decorations other than a potted plant and photos of his mother, Simone, and wife,
Michele. Giuliani would later testify that the meeting lasted an hour and fifteen
minutes, suggesting that a substantive discussion had occurred. Harris remembered
it as a "ceremonial ten- to twenty-minute courtesy visit."

"You are the highest-ranking U.S. government official to ever come to Haiti,"
Duvalier announced. "1 would be favorably disposed to an invitation to come to
the U.S."

Giuliani said he would report that to the State Department, but his subsequent,
seven-page memo on the trip, sent to Undersecretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger on April 14, made no mention of the unrealistic reques

Giuliani's memo did say that Duvalier's "main concern" was the Caribbean
Basin Initiative, a new Reagan program of foreign aid that was less generous to
Haiti than virtually any other nation in the region. "1 explained that this was not
within my area of responsibility," Giuliani wrote, adding that he had also stated
that "the Justice Department would make its own concerns about aid to Haiti and
those of the Government of Haiti known to the Department of State."

Giuliani also reported that Duvalier argued that "the problem of illegal migration"
would not "be solved without the development" of his country. He said, according
to Rudy's memo, that "his government was a good friend of the U.S. (one
of the few remaining in the area) and ought to be treated as such." This and other
parts of the Giuliani memo read like a brief for more aid to Haiti. His regurgitation
of the Duvalier bailout line at the meeting, however, ignored the abundant
evidence that Baby Doc's government was a kleptocracy, as a Canadian government
report had just branded it.

An International Monetary Fund review had also found that $20 million of a
$22 million IMF crisis supplement to Haiti, made in late 1980, had disappeared
within weeks. The IMF revealed that $16 million wound up in various personal accounts
of the president's family and $4 million with the Tontons Macoutes, the
notorious civilian secret police who embodied decades of Duvalier terrorism. A
milder U.S. General Accounting Office report, issued just a month before
Giuliani's visit, attributed the" failure" of aid programs to the "poor performance"
of the Haiti regime, corruption and the "frequent and capricious changes of key
Haitian development personnel for allegedly political reasons."

In fact, Giuliani and Harris had actually seen a group of vendors the day before
selling grain in bags marked "Food for Peace: A Gift from the People of the United
States" or the side of a dirt country road. The two old friends shook their heads at
each other as they passed the vendors, who were hawking the grain from open bags.

They had also already heard the sordid aid pitch they were now getting from
Duvalier. The night before, Rudy and his Washington companions had driven up
the mountain overlooking Port-au-Prince for a lavish 8 P.M. dinner hosted by the
chief minister, Henri Bayard, and attended by the entire cabinet. The view of Haiti
from the restaurant, the Belvedere, created an illusion: for an evening, Haiti did
not appear to be a destitute nation. The valley below was lush with shimmering
lights and treetop green. But the festivities ended with a media ambush, well
planned by Bayard, who'd taken on such a fatherly air with the young Duvalier
that Jean-Claude freely called him "Pere."

Foreign Minister Jean-Bertrand Estime, the son of a president prior to Duvalier,
had assured Preeg that there would be no press. But when the dinner conversation
died down, the klieg lights went up. Bayard rose, standing at the far end of the
long table covered by a gold cloth, and delivered a toast that was really a screed for
more aid. He added nationalist protests over the detention of Haitians for the cam-
era, even though no one in the regime, including Duvalier himself the next day,
would utter a word of protest about the policies.

"It seems unthinkable," Bayard declared, "that in a corner of the U.S., the land
of liberty, justice and the Fatherland of Abraham Lincoln, that human beings,
whatever their race, find themselves in conditions strangely reminiscent of the
concentration camps, the memory of which is a shameful page in the history of
the last war. We thus ask for our brothers in Krome, the application of those humanitarian
principles which the U.S. brandishes like torches in its unceasing
struggle for human dignity." Leger, the gray-haired, erect ambassador with a talent
for mediation borne from his family's legal service to the Haitian government
since 1804, tried to soften this attack in translation. But what the television crews
recorded was what appeared in the subsequent State Department cables.

Preeg was worried by the rhetoric since he had not briefed Giuliani for the
event, trusting Estime's promise that it would be an informal celebration. But an
unfazed Rudy rushed to his feet as soon as Bayard paused.

In a dark suit, dark tie and white shirt, unaided by the microphone Bayard kept
in his own hand, Rudy made the case for detention without ever addressing
Bayard's invocation of the Holocaust. He blamed American lawyers representing
the detainees for the year-long stays they were suffering in prison, saying that the
attorneys were now arguing that detainees are "political refugees fleeing persecution."
Based on "my own observations," as well as other reports he'd reviewed,
Giuliani said he knew that was untrue. By stating the refugee claims were" casting
something of a false light on this question," Giuliani planted the notion that
he was on the side of the Haitian government in challenging the ctncocted charges
of the detainee lawyers.

The Haitian press, of course, reported Bayard's statements and omitted
Giuliani's.

Duvalier's transparent shakedown at the meeting the next day was merely a
muted echo of Bayard's, linking cooperation on the interdiction/detention front
with a louder clang of the government's tin cup. And just as Giuliani had waited
for Bayard to finish his predictable posturing, he waited for Duvalier to finish.
Then Giuliani got to the concealed point of his visit. He wanted a promise he could
use like a weapon in the courtroom where the fate of thousands of Haitians would
shortly be decided. "At my request, the President gave me his personal assurances,"
Giuliani's memo proclaimed, "that Haitians that returned to Haiti are not,
and will not be, persecuted." Duvalier also insisted that there was no political repression
in Haiti-of returnees or anyone else. His pledge and claim would be-
come the centerpieces of Giuliani's Miami testimony, though Harris recalled that
Giuliani left the meeting describing the no-repression contention as so "preposterous"
it was "laughable."

"Did Duvalier sound sincere?" asked Harris years later. "Yes. Did I believe him?
Not for a second. He was just mouthing the words."

As soon as Rudy's meeting with Duvalier was over, he hurried back to the embassy
for a 12:30 luncheon with a half dozen prominent guests, where he pressed
the same two questions. The setting, however, was hardly conducive to candor.
Victor Laroche, head of the government-tied Haitian Red Cross (unaffiliated with
the International Red Cross) and soon to be a Duvalier minister, was prominently
placed at the table. Laroche's brother-in-law commanded the presidential guards.

Yet Giuliani would report in his memo that" all present stated that the allegations
concerning political persecution of returnees" were" absolutely untrue" and
that they had seen "no evidence of persecution." He said that Papal Nuncio Luigi
Conti "was particularly adamant on this point." In Rudy's subsequent Miami testimony,
he'd turn each of the luncheon guests into unwitting witnesses for the detention
and repatriation programs, creating the impression that he'd talked to
them individually.

He'd been trying to collect evidence to support this predisposition since he'd arrived
in Haiti. In fact, during his first meeting with State Department staff that
Sunday, he'd pressed them about the treatment of interdicted or detained returnees.
Several had gone to some length to make it clear "that tracking such people"
was" an extremely difficult and time-consuming job." Towns, they explained,
"are often loosely knit rural areas covering miles," where" addresses are frequently
of little use" and "roads are poor or nonexistent." The best they could offer,
according to Giuliani's own memo, was the assurance that the embassy would
"continue in this effort" and obtain" the information required."

Yet Giuliani's testimony, only days after this embassy briefing, was that "a huge
amount of material both written and oral" had "documented the fact" that repatriated
Haitians had "been returned to their villages" and had not been arrested or
persecuted.

The Haitian lawyers in Miami countered with affidavits-like the one from a
woman whose weather-battered boat had returned to Haiti and who'd wound up
at the Cassernes Dessalines, a notorious prison where she watched ten men from
her boat stripped and "beaten with sticks as big as my arm." Another affidavit recounted
the imprisonment of fifteen refugees who'd returned from Fort Allen,
pointing out that it was a crime to leave Haiti without an exit visa.

Years later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees revealed that
they and the u.s. Government had documentary evidence that dozens of returnees
had been harassed, beaten, tortured and in some cases, even murdered. But
in 1982, the evidence was impressionistic, largely because the INS refused to release
the names and addresses of voluntary returnees. When the lawyers did manage
to get the addresses of five and tried to visit them, none could be found. The
only hard number Giuliani cited involved just sixteen returnees. The American
mission, Giuliani told a congressional committee, tracked this handful unmolested
to their homes. Their safe passage became the shaky foundation of the policy
Giuliani celebrated on his Haiti tour.

***

The day before the meeting with Duvalier, Giuliani, Harris and Syzbala helicoptered
to the Coast Guard cutter Westwind, anchored just outside the harbor
of Port-de-Paix, the longtime launching pad for boat people. Insulated for ice
cap forays, the Westwind boiled in the Haitian sun. The mere presence of this and
other 210- to 378-foot armed ships, supported by Dolphin helicopters, Falcon jets
and Hercules long-range surveillance aircraft, had clearly, as the captain and crew
argued, deterred Haitians from attempting the 700-mile voyage.

The INS staff aboard the Westwind told Giuliani that all the required questions-
necessary under law and international treaties to determine if any passenger
might have a legitimate claim for entry-were asked of those on the first of
the two vessels so far interdicted. But that "somewhat fewer questions were asked
during the interdiction" of the second boat, because it had already turned around
and was heading back to Haiti.

Despite the INS admission of incomplete compliance, Giuliani would testify in
Miami that everyone on both boats was asked the brief battery of questions and
that none had offered answers that would" give rise" to an asylum claim. He did
not disclose that when he had made the same claim at a House hearing two
months earlier, he had been vigorously challenged by a congressman. The House
committee's staff director had witnessed the debriefing of the boat people aboard
the second vessel. His report indicated that a mandated question "was not asked in
any of the instances observed by staff." The unasked question was the $64 one:
"Do you fear return to Haiti?" The only question that really mattered to the INS
was why an interdictee was going to America. As soon as he said he wanted a job,
he'd get a return ticket as an "economic refugee." During the nearly two years
that Rudy ran Haitian policy, only five Haitians were granted asylum as political
refugees, the highest record of rejection in modern immigration history.

In addition to the Westwind visit, the Giuliani team toured two of the sixteen
boats that made up the Haitian navy, which, with American fuel subsidies, had
joined the interdiction force. A Coast Guard officer working with the navy said
that it was now patrolling the coast for boats 200 hours a month, whereas it didn't
patrol at all before the interdiction subsidies. The navy commander asked Rudy to
keep the gas money coming and his memo echoed the request.

Incredibly, 68,696 returnees would be intercepted over the thirteen-year life of
the interdiction agreement. The annual average was 2,215 through 1990, when the
turmoil surrounding the election and overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide caused
a sudden and dramatic upswing. Not only did Giuliani testify that he "had a role
in negotiating" the deal, Preeg says that from the moment he met Rudy in mid-
1981, "it was clear to me that he was really in control" of the interdiction talks.
The "floating Berlin Wall," as it was called, would remain intact until Aristide, the
first democratically elected Haitian president in decades, ended it in 1995.

Haitians who had been turned around at sea and their American advocates could
never get standing to sue in a US. court, just as a pre-policy memo to Giuliani
from the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice had predicted. The memo acknowledged
that there was "no precedent for such an operation" but doubted that "anyone
would be able to challenge it." Ultimately, appeals courts reversed three
different restraining orders against the interdictions, finding that intercepted
Haitians had no right to sue because they were outside US. territory. The rulings
led one frustrated judge to remark in his dissent: "Haitians, unlike other aliens
from anywhere in the world, are PREVENTED from reaching the continental US."

Another department memo acknowledged that the interdiction strategy flew in
the face of the United Nations protocol and Convention, which required governments
to "adjudicate refugee claims prior to returning a claimant to his homeland."
Instead of placing UN. representatives aboard the interdiction ships, as the
memo suggested, Haitian Navy officials were often on the Coast Guard cutters,
further cowing intercepted boat people into compliant answers to the questions
when asked.

***

Duvalier's acquiescence to interdiction was so important that one of Giuliani's
final stops on his Haiti tour-right before his palace visit-was designed to
reward him for it. He went to the foreign Ministry that morning and met with
Estime, Berrouet and Leger to spell out what Justice would do about the Floridabased
Haitian insurgents who were constantly planning invasions to overthrow
Duvalier. As he put it in the State Department memo, "we explained in some
depth" the prosecution of Bernard Sansaricq, an exile who owned a gas station in
Fort Lauderdale and had put together the attack in January led by the eight revolutionaries
whose deaths were falsely described in Berrouet's communique.

Sansaricq and thirty other men had tried, aboard a motorized sailboat, to join the
eight, but they were caught by a Coast Guard cutter. The Coast Guard brought
Sansaricq and his group back to Florida, confiscating their thirty-three guns,
twenty-two pipe bombs and 5,320 rounds of ammunition, charging them with violations
of the Neutrality Act.

Estime and the rest of Duvalier's ministers were, Giuliani wrote, "extremely interested
in this case." Estime offered to turn over to the U.S. Government the
weapons they'd seized from the eight who'd been killed or captured at La Tortue.
"We arranged for an FBI agent or prosecutor involved in the case to travel to Haiti
to continue this discussion," Giuliani concluded. Harris recalled that the ministers
were "very concerned that the U.S. would allow these things to occur" and that
Rudy was "strong and definitive" in his assurances that he would "look into it and
investigate it."

Fifteen members of Sansaricq's family, including a two-year-old child and a
crippled woman, had been slaughtered by Papa Doc's Tontons in 1964. "Don't cry,
I'll dry your eyes for you," the Tontons lieutenant supervising the killing told a
four-year-old boy, before pushing a lit cigarette into his eyes. Another Macoute
tossed the boy into the air and stuck a knife into his belly as he fell. The legend of
the Sansaricq slayings haunted the Presidential Palace. After Giuliani's visit,
Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted the Sansaricq rebels, only to be frustrated
by a judge who sentenced them to probation.

The only other noteworthy stops on Giuliani's Haiti tour were a visit to a
casino, where Rudy and the rest gambled briefly, and a cocktail party at the home
of the general manager of the Rawlings baseball factory, which at that time was
manufacturing the balls the major leagues used. Haiti produced 90 percent of the
world's hardballs, and Rawlings employed almost a thousand piecework seamstresses.
With a needle in each hand, the women stitched the balls, 104 swooping
butterfly strokes a ball. Each ball took ten minutes for a fast, young seamstress and
earned her ten cents. Yet Rawlings's little white factory in a grimy industrial suburb
of Port-au-Prince was in a tax-free enterprise zone.

As Harris recalled it, Rudy was only interested in the ball itself. Grandson of a
seamstress, he did not ask a single question about the payor working conditions
of the women. Instead he grilled the general manager about the so-called "pill,"
the red golfball-sized pellet at the core of the ball. He wanted to know how tightly
wrapped it was, and what went into the cork and rubber mix that made it hard.

He wasn't interested in prison conditions either. In fact, Syzbala, who was so
moved by her three days in Haiti that she sent money to a family there for the
next nineteen years, remembers walking past a prison on a dirt road with Rudy
and saying she wanted to see inside. "Go look," he said and kept on walking. She
stopped and looked in, and afterward he expressed no interest in what she saw.

They rode through the countryside near the tawdry port town where the
Westwind anchored but, by Rudy's own account, never stopped to talk to the
people.

They did not speak to any of the on-site monitors or advocates that were independent
of both the Haitian and U.S. governments. Nor did they meet a single returnee.

They did listen to Bach, almost nightly. Preeg's other guests at the embassy
during Giuliani's stay were Sam and Ellie Thaivu. Concertmaster with the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Sam was spending two weeks teaching at the
Trinity School Orchestra in Port-au-Prince. At Rudy's urging, he played violin
at the mansion each night. The Thaivus, who had vacated the downstairs wing of
the mansion when Giuliani's party arrived, never talked politics. Instead Rudy
recounted his old days as an usher at the Met, and the three shared their mutual
love of music. When the help disappeared one night, the Thaivus and the
Giuliani gang whipped up a spaghetti dinner together. Ensconced in this manicured,
antique-filled estate on a hill, complete with swimming pool and servants,
the Giuliani group could pretend, with Sam Thaivu's masterful sounds floating
through the house, that they were in a tropical paradise.

Indeed, pretense was in such substantial supply that Rudy closed his State
Department memo with a final bit of fancy: "Throughout this trip, we were shown
great hospitality and all our questions were candidly answered." A younger Rudy
was so incensed at Bert Podell's prevarications he'd wanted the convicted congressman
stripped of the right to practice law. He'd traveled to Virginia to get the
"Prince of the City" to finally come clean. He'd enrolled in a seminary in search of
a life of integrity. No less than Carl "Kojak" Bogan had taught him how to recognize
falsehood in the eyes of a culprit. And now, having risen to the forefront of
American law enforcement, he was saluting the self-serving declarations of a
despot and his interchangeable minions. The exigencies of power had eclipsed the
urgency of truth.

***

Ten days after Rudy left Haiti, DEA agents arrested Franz Bennett, the
twenty-eight-year-old brother of Baby Doc's wife, Michele, on cocainesmuggling
charges in Puerto Rico. Bennett had offered undercover agents "safepassage
for a drug-laden aircraft through Port-au-Prince for $60,000," according
to a DEA memo.

Bennett also agreed to handle monthly shipments of fifty-five kilos of cocaine,
worth $2 million each, steering them through Haiti without police interference.
He even offered to guarantee passage for heroin. When the agents asked him in
tape-recorded conversations if Duvalier knew about his activities, Bennett replied
with surprise: Of course he knew.

Another agency like the INS that reported directly to Giuliani, the DEA saw the
Bennett sting in the context of an elaborate, Haiti-based drug operation. According
to the agency, shortly after Bennett's arrest:

Reportedly, several large narcotic trafficking organizations based in Haiti utilized
Bennett's fuel concession at Duvalier International Airport in Port-au-
Prince to refuel private aircraft while smuggling cocaine and marihuana from
Columbia [sic] to the US. Haiti is used as a storage depot and transshipment
point for narcotics destined for the US. It is alleged that military personnel
guard the storage depot and that Bennett was insulated from arrest in Haiti
since his sister is married to President Duvalier. Bennett has also been smuggling
approximately 40 kilograms of high quality cocaine per shipment in
false bottom suitcases aboard an air taxi service from Port-au-Prince to
Miami via Nassau.

The bust was the first public look at the drug scandal inside the presidential
family. Michele's father, Ernest, was, according to Haiti bureau chief for Reuters
Elizabeth Abbott, "Haiti's most important link in the Colombia-Haiti-US. cocaine
traffic, soon winning the title 'The Godfather.'" Determined to protect her brother
from jail and to keep a lid on the family business, Michele thought anything could
be fixed. Ernest Bennett visited Preeg at the embassy to see if he would intervene.

A few days after the arrest, Jean-Claude and Michele were at a routine dinner
party at Bayard's home and the avuncular Bayard decided to take the president
aside, in an upstairs room. He said he'd just talked to Leger, who was being
hounded by American reporters about the Franz Bennett case. Leger had consulted
with top American lawyers, Bayard said, and everyone advised that the Haitian
government should stay away from the case. He told Duvalier that Berrouet, another
minister and two top police officials had listened to the DEA tape of Franz's
conversation and that, under the circumstances, "silence would be golden."
Duvalier went downstairs and told his wife what Bayard had said. She stormed out
of the house, her husband trailing behind her.

Bayard, Berrouet, Leger and the police officials who had listened to the tape
were fired, with everyone ousted by May 6. A month and a half after Giuliani's
departure, the entire upper echelon of the government he'd just met was gone, dismissed
because they wouldn't rally around a cocaine dealer. Bennett had to plead
guilty anyway, getting a four-year jail sentence in August.

Duvalier even dumped the well-connected Washington law firm that had set up
Rudy's Haiti tour in the first place, Anderson, Hibey, Nauheim & Blair. Stanton
Anderson, the lead partner in the firm, had signed up with Duvalier in January
1981. Counsel to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and a director of the presidential
transition, Anderson was as wired into the Reagan White House as a lobbyist
could get.

The first foreign government Anderson registered for was Duvalier's, filing a
February lobbying contract for $37,500 per quarter, plus $5,000 in expenses with
the Justice Department. The firm's filings indicate that they lobbied Giuliani,
Harris and Syzbala throughout the period of October 1981 through February
1982. They submitted an expense voucher for February 2 for a lunch with Harris
"to discuss Justice Department delegation to Haiti." As Harris recalls, "we had
been talking to Bob Davis," an associate in the Anderson firm, "and he suggested
that someone from the U.S. should come down and talk about the refugee problem."
Davis actually joined the Giuliani group in Haiti, sitting in on the key meeting
at the Foreign Ministry and the dinner at the Belvedere.

Anderson's post-trip filing took full credit for producing Giuliani. "Registrant
coordinated an official visit by Giuliani, Harris and Syzbala," the firm's disclosure
statement read, "accompanied them to Haiti, and assisted in communicating the
concerns of the Government of Haiti." Elsewhere in the filings, the firm cites some
of the specific issues they discussed with Giuliani et al. before the visit, indicating
that they "provided liaison between U.S. officials during Sansaricq invasions of
Haiti and criminal investigations of the same." They also billed $176.33 for a dinner
with Giuliani in early April, right after his testimony in Miami and right before
he wrote the April 7 memo about the trip that he later sent to the State
Department. Leger and the Anderson firm were forced out at the end of April.

On April 1, while these key allies were still hanging on, Rudy walked into a
Miami courtroom to defend the Duvalier regime. Asked at the end of his crossexamination
if he was aware that Haiti had "an authoritarian government,"
Giuliani initially replied: "1 really don't think it is appropriate for me to characterize
the government." Pressed a second time, he said it "probably does have"
one. Asked if he knew "what constitutes political oppression in Haiti," he said he
"didn't understand the question." When the question was repeated, he jousted:
"What do you mean by that?" Asked if there was any political opposition to
Duvalier, he said he thought it was a one-party system, but added: "1 am not absolutely
sure of that."

Pressed about the secret police, he testified: "1 don't know if the Tontons
Macoutes exist or don't exist," suggesting that they'd only "existed under Francois
Duvalier." In fact, Harris recalled his wife Joyce seeing Macoutes in their distinctive
black sunglasses and a Peugeot while sightseeing, and embassy officials debriefed
Rudy on their continued role in Haiti, as his own memo indicated.

In addition to these evasions, Giuliani insisted that "political repression does not
exist, at least in general, in Haiti." He repeated this claim again and again over the
course of his day of testimony, basing it on "my own trip to Haiti." He cited his
conversations with "the people who ran the Peace Corps, AID, and CARE." He invoked
the hopelessly compromised administrator of the Red Cross. He stressed his
talk with Papal Nuncio Conti. "Every single person that I spoke to," he said,
"agreed that it was not a problem of political repression, that by and large, people
were not leaving because they feared intimidation by the government." This assertion
was the heart of Giuliani's testimony, refuting any possible political asylum
claim and making the detainees excludable.

But Larry Holzman, the CARE director at the embassy lunch, says now: "1
never said that. He misquoted me." A retired, sometime-consultant to CARE,
Holzman recalled how impressed he was with the way Giuliani handled himself at
the lunch, but said: "1 don't think anyone would have said there wasn't any repression.
I think we were pretty frank as to what we thought was the misuse of
American aid."

Harlan Hobgood, a career USAID official with a Yale divinity degree assigned
by the Reagan administration to take over the Haiti program in July 1981, said he
never spoke to Giuliani and neither did his deputy. "I could not have concurred
with any such statement," said Hobgood. "1 find it totally unbelievable. The political
climate was one of state political repression. Elements in the military and the
pseudo-military through the Tontons Macoutes maintained a firm grip on secu-
rity. Repression would be used whenever suitable to the regime." Hobgood even
contended that it was "a delusion on the part of u.s. policymakers-one of selfinduced
proportions-to say the motivations for refugees were purely economic.
They were as much political as economic."

Ernest Preeg said there was no Peace Corps in Haiti until July 1982, well after
Giuliani's trip. "I was pushing for it to come in for over a year," says Preeg. "I just
don't understand how Rudy could say that. He may have talked to someone who
had Peace Corps experience."

Michael Hooper, a lawyer with the International Lawyers Committee on
Human Rights, testified in Miami as a rebuttal witness, insisting that Conti told
him "that he would never comment on the existence or nonexistence of political
conditions, because, as the Vatican representative, that would compromise his position."
In a later interview, Hooper said that Conti told him he was "extremely
concerned" about Giuliani's testimony and "wanted to clarify that he had made no
such statements." Hooper also worked for Church World Services, another organization
Giuliani erroneously listed in his memo as attending the embassy lunch
and joining in the no-repression claim.

The irony is that nine months after Giuliani's visit, Pope John Paul II visited
Haiti and publicly reproached the Duvaliers, refusing to dine with them and demanding
that "things have got to change here." The January 1983 papal visit
makes Giuliani's invocation of the Nuncio-whom Rudy cited under oath in
Miami a half dozen times-all the more absurd.

Rudy had, in fact, been told by embassy staff about the November 1980 mass
expulsion of opposition press and party leaders-a rout described in a 1982 State
Department report. What prompted that sweep was the Duvalier "happy-timesare-
here-again" anticipation of the Reagan years, welcomed by a champagne party
at the palace. One of the few leaders not expelled was Silvio Claude, who was in
prison when Rudy visited. He had been tortured twice, once with electric shocks,
on September 28 and October 14, 1981, at the very time that Giuliani was negotiating
the interdiction treaty.

Hooper's human-rights committee published a list of nineteen incommunicado
prisoners in the National Penitentiary as of the day of Giuliani's meeting with
Duvalier. This list did not include dozens more who had been charged on political
counts but never tried, though jailed, often for years. Hooper testified that "you
can't understand anything" by "looking at what occurred in Haiti in the last 3 or
4 months." Very little is happening in terms of recent arrests, he said, "because
there is no one left."

In mid-June, u.s. District Court Judge Eugene Spellman overturned the detention
program, ordering the release of all the Haitians at Krome, Fort Allen and
elsewhere. He rejected the plaintiffs' charge that the policy had intentionally discriminated
against Haitians while agreeing that it disproportionately impacted on
them. Spellman threw the policy out because the Reagan administration "never
seriously undertook the difficult task of drafting a set of guidelines" spelling out
"who would be placed in detention." INS made "a conscious decision not to promulgate
a rule" about this new policy, leaving no one with any notice that it was
in effect.

"Those who would assert the omnipotent power of the government" have to
recognize that "they are never above the rule of law," Spellman said. "The Court
cannot think of any administrative action that would have a greater impact on a
regulated group of people than a change in policy which results in their indefinite
incarceration where, under the previous policy they would have been free." A
moderate Democrat, Spellman and his law clerk, Jeffrey Fisher, had retreated to
Key West to write the fifty-five-page decision, debating it one night in a bar until
the early hours of the morning, outlining it on a napkin while consuming a bottle
of Stolichnaya. Death threats and hate mail from the Floridians who wanted the
Haitians gone descended on Spellman after he ruled.

"Because we did not give the world advance notice that our immigration laws
were to be respected," Giuliani charged, "we have been told they must be ignored."
Even though he had played a last-minute card to try to forestall the ruling-
offering a plan to parole some of the Haitians two days before it-Rudy now
tried to get an injunction barring its implementation. His brief bellowed that the
release of the Haitians could pose a threat to national security. He lost again. The
same three-judge Circuit Court panel that rejected the injunction would now hear
the appeal on an expedited basis. Giuliani decided to argue it himself.

By then, he and the administration were swimming in bad ink. Back on March
10, right before Rudy's Haiti trip, a New York Times editorial saluted a finding by
a New York judge, Robert Carter, the same judge who'd presided at the Podell trial,
that the eleven-month detention of eighty-six Haitians in Brooklyn was discriminatory.
Another Times editorial in April charged the detention of Haitians had
"started to smell: like the detention of Japanese-Americans in World War II; like
racism, like cruelty." A July editorial recounted how thirty detainees had tried to
kill themselves-"some swallow shards of glass, try hanging themselves with
trousers or cut their wrists." Opposing any judicial stay, the Times: "What is it
about those 1910 pitiful Haitian migrants that makes otherwise reasonable
Reagan administration officials so relentless?" Even a Dade County grand jury in
Florida issued a report blasting the detention camps as "discriminatory and racist."

By the time the Circuit Court heard the appeal in September, half the Haitians
had already been released. Still Rudy fought on, hoping at this point for legal vindication
since all the detainees would surely be free before the appeals court ruled.
In April 1983-as Rudy prepared to leave Washington for New York-the panel
not only ruled unanimously against him on Spellman's notice findings, they also
reversed Spellman's decision on equal protection, finding the detention discriminatory.

The panel juxtaposed "the plaintiffs' statistical evidence" disclosing "a stark
pattern of discrimination" against the testimony of Giuliani and two subordinates,
which it characterized as "inconsistent" and" self serving affirmations of good
faith." The panel said the three" contradicted one another several times, and did
not agree on the substance of the policy," indicating "the disarray with which the
administration" acted. It was clear, the court concluded, that "no one knew exactly
what the policy was, and no one in authority attempted to supervise the exercise
of discretion under the policy." While these findings were an unmistakable blast at
the architect of the policies, Giuliani was named only a handful of times, accused
at one point of utterly misrepresenting the applicable parole statutes.

This panel would be effectively reversed in 1984, when the full twelve-judge appeals
court, with five judges dissenting, found that migrants like the Haitians have
no constitutional rights, meaning they were not entitled to equal protection. The
U.S. Supreme Court would also hear the case. Their opinion questioned whether
the Circuit Court had to go so far as to rule on the question of the constitutional
rights of aliens. Neither of these two decisions altered the heart of the Spellman or
panel factual findings. Rudy lost the notice war 4-to-O and discrimination war 3-
to-I. Ringing in the ears of anyone who read the decisions was a Supreme Court
opinion from years earlier, upholding the parole policies for illegal immigrants
that had lasted for three decades prior to Rudy's 1981 changes. The Court found
that releasing refugees exhibited the "humane qualities of an enlightened civilization."

***

Rudy described himself on the witness stand, in answer to a question raised by
Judge Spellman, as "the singular individual" responsible for immigration
policy. He conceded he'd never taken an immigration law course or sat in on an
immigration hearing, even while admitting that he'd written instructions to the
immigration administrative judges handling the Haitian exclusion cases. He said
he'd worked closely in drafting the president's immigration policy with William
French Smith's chief of staff, Kenneth Starr, but that he had carried it out virtually
alone. At times, he testified, it "felt like" he was spending 100 percent of his time
on it.

He had convinced himself from the start that the policies had a rationale: protecting
the country's borders. He had contempt for the vacillation of the Carter administration,
claiming repeatedly that more immigrants entered the United States
in 1980 than at any time in our history. He fixated on the 15,000 of them who
were Haitian, rather than the Reagan-protected 125,000 who were Cuban. Yet the
appeals panel in Spellman said the government's description of a "massive influx"
of Haitians" colors the issues." Noting that Haitians were only 2 percent of the illegals,
the court added: "By almost all accounts it was mass immigration of Cubans
that prompted tightening the net in which the Haitians were caught."

Giuliani was at the center of these contradictory policies, releasing Cubans with
criminal records while jailing Haitians who had none. Reagan, who'd campaigned
in Miami as a champion of Cuban refugees, was pressing so hard for their parole
that Rudy had to spend his July 4,1982 weekend writing a memo to him about the
handling of 950 Cubans still left at Fort Chaffee.

His July 6 memo explained that the Cubans "have problems that prevent their
release into the community." It listed those problems as "250 mentally ill and retarded;
400 antisocial; 100 homosexual; 100 alcoholics or drug users; 100 women,
babies, elderly and handicapped." Aside from the bizarre suggestion that homosexuals
could not be released into the community, much less women with babies,
the memo demonstrated just how personally involved Reagan was in pushing for
release.

One news account, little noticed at the time, revealed that the Coast Guard had
interdicted a boatload of Haitians that had rescued two Cubans bobbing about on
an inner tube raft. The Guard quickly got sanctuary for the two Cubans in Miami
and sent the 161 fleeing Haitians home.

of course the rationale was that the Cubans were escaping a dictator and the
Haitians weren't. This paradox only made Rudy's job of defending these policies
more impossible.

The ferocity with which he did it would come to define him. Ira Kurzban, the
Haitian refugees' chief attorney, sized him up: "He wanted the government to win
at any cost. He went after the Haitians as a zealous prosecutor would go after anyone
committing a crime. The difference, of course, is that the Haitians hadn't committed
a crime."

He was so determined to defend the policies that even after he left Washington,
he tried to rationalize a 4ecision he did not make: separate detention for male and
female Haitians. He told a 1983 Barron's interviewer that INS kept them in separate
facilities because "if you let the men into the women's camp, they go around
raping them." The INS, however, said that it "had not turned up any evidence of
alleged rapes."

Bruce Winick, who knew and liked Rudy as a classmate at NYU, was one of the
Haitian refugees' lawyers and tried to approach him after a speech Giuliani gave
at the University of Miami Law School, where Winick taught. It was shortly before
the case would go to Spellman and Winick thought they should talk and see
if they could find a way to settle it. Giuliani waved him aside.

The deeper the mire, the harder he tried to plant his heels. All he knew was that
it was working-the combined fear of interdiction or detention was closing the
coast. The number of new arrivals was plummeting. Renee Syzbala would occasionally
get him to focus briefly on conditions at Krome; he'd order minor improvements
and feel better. His white cocoon at Justice, where the fate of
thousands of black lives could be decided without the input of black voices, reassured
him.

The memory of his Kennedy past seemed more and more remote. For the first
but hardly the last time in his life, he was taking on the liberal establishment,
challenging liberal orthodoxy. He did not even seem conscious, to those around
him, of the turning point he was living. He just knew that he would be what he
had to be. Not just his party affiliation had changed. His heart had.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:04 am

Part 1 of 2

Seven: Mr. Untouchable

HELEN GIULIANI COULDN'T FIND HER SON AND WAS STARTING TO GET
frustrated. She had gone to his office at the Justice Department one afternoon
in 1982 but was told that Mr. Giuliani had recently left to meet with
Senator Alfonse D' Amato at his Capitol Hill office. The frail seventy-twoyear-
old made her way to Capitol Hill and navigated a maze of marble and
metal detectors to find D' Amato's office in the Russell Senate office building.
Parking herself in the lobby, she waited for her important, perpetually-in-motion
son to amble out any minute from the inner sanctum. But he didn't.
Finally, the senator himself walked out.

New York's new junior senator, D' Amato had been elected in 1980 in a bitter
three-way contest against Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman and the four-term
Republican incumbent Jacob Javits. A brazen but cunning political pugilist,
D' Amato had beaten the ailing senator by making an ugly issue out of Javits's
struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease. D' Amato was a product of the Long Island
Republican machine-an organization so corrupt that it compelled county employees
to pay 1 percent of their salaries as a tithe to the Republican Party. His
mentor was Republican boss Joe Margiotta-later convicted by federal prosecutors.
Although he would never be netted by prosecutors himself, D' Amato
was already dogged by mob and ethical allegations that clung to him like an
bad suit.

During his Senate campaign, his mother, "Mama D' Amato," was Alfonse's
most avid spokesperson, appearing in campaign commercials and traveling the
state to harvest votes for her boy. A political brochure designed like a cookbook
and entitled "Mama D' Amato's Inflation- Fighting Recipes" was a big hit with
traditional Republicans. Now, in the lobby of his own office, Senator D' Amato
found a little old Italian lady from Brooklyn who reminded him instantly of
his own mother.

After they introduced themselves, D' Amato, nicknamed "The Fonz," told
Helen Giuliani she'd missed her son. He then ushered her back into his office
for a friendly chat and proceeded to personally take her on a tour of the Capitol
Building.

Renee Syzbala, a Giuliani aide, recalled being warned by Justice officials to avoid
AI D' Amato. But after this demonstrable act of hospitality toward Mama Giuliani,
"D' Amato was no longer an untouchable/' said Syzbala.

From that moment, Rudy developed a bond with the crudely charismatic
Republican junior senator. The two dined together on many occasions. Rudy always
immediately returned the senator's phone messages.

D' Amato's prime asset, in Rudy's eyes, was his popularity and prominence not
in Washington, but back home. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Nassau County,
like Rudy, D' Amato was a tenacious Italian New Yorker with a cornucopia of connections
in the city and state. From late 1982 on, Rudy was planning to exploit this
newfound friendship to pave the way for his return to New York.

No one was happier about that than Donna. She had had her fill of Senate hearings
and cherry blossoms and idle days. Most of alt she was itching to get in front
of a camera again. "I needed to work," said Donna. "So Rudy said, 'How about I
become US. Attorney in New York?'"

In February 1983, John Martin, then US. Attorney for the Southern District of
New York, traveled to Washington to see Giuliani, who, as associate attorney generat
was responsible for supervising all ninety-four US. Attorneys across the
country. Martin told him he was going to resign and wanted to give the Justice
Department a few months to find a replacement. Appointed by President Carter in
May 1980, Martin still had a year left to serve in his term. But he knew the
Reagan administration-in the person of Rudy Giuliani-had been pressuring
Democratic holdovers to leave. Martin had not been strong-armed out of office,
like others, notably Iowa's James Reynolds. His signal to leave had been subtler.
The US. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, considered one of the
nation's most prominent federal prosecutors, was traditionally asked to serve on
the national advisory committee of US. Attorneys. The Reagan administration
had pointedly not offered Martin a spot on the committee. He knew he was not
wanted and decided to quietly and gracefully accept the inevitable.

After the meeting with Martin, Rudy went to see Al D' Amato. "We talked
about the candidates on the list he had submitted/' said Rudy. "During the conversation,
the possibility of my doing the job came up. I think D' Amato brought it
up. I didn't dismiss the idea."

Rudy talked it over with his mother, Donna and close friend Jeff Harris. Helen
strongly disapproved. Taking the position, she told Rudy, would mean an instant
demotion, like going from CEO to salesman. But Rudy saw the change as more of
a switch from head coach to star player.

Donna, who desperately desired to land a TV gig in New York, told Rudy that
he should definitely take the post-it was the perfect job for him. Harris agreed. It
was 2-to-l in favor. Rudy phoned D'Amato and told him he wanted the position.

Both Attorney General William French Smith and Deputy Attorney General Ed
Schmults weren't exactly sorry to see Giuliani go, according to James Stewart's
The Prosecutors. A number of Justice Department lawyers even suggested that
D' Amato's private proposal to Rudy had been prompted from above. On March
16, 1983, D' Amato, backed by Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan, endorsed
Rudy as a candidate for Manhattan's federal prosecutor's post. Less than a month
later, on April 12, President Reagan formally nominated Rudy, who viewed the
$67,200-a-year job as the apex of his career, the ultimate opportunity to pursue
his operatic crusade of good against evil. In addition to being" one of the best jobs
a lawyer could have," said Rudy, "it was a chance to run my own operation and try
some of the ideas I'd developed over the past six or seven years."

It could also serve as a launching pad for a New York political career. After
Rudy's decision to step down as the NO.3 man in the Justice Department was announced,
speculation immediately percolated about his political aspirations.
Rudy's best friend Peter Powers believed at the time that Rudy saw his new job, in
part, as an electoral vessel. "It was natural to think that with Rudy's interest in
politics, the U.S. Attorney's office would lead to a run for public office," Powers
said in an unpublished 1988 interview.

Three days after her husband was sworn in as New York City's top federal lawman,
Donna got her wish: an on-camera job. Hired by New York's WPIX on June
6 as a general assignment reporter at a starting annual salary of $55,000, she owed
her coveted position not to any of her former bosses-but, rather, to one of
Rudy's.

"Ace Tyler represented us on a number of cases," recalled former WPIX news
director John Corporon. "What he asked us to do-he said 'Donna is looking for a
job. Would you interview her?'"

Tyler recalls that Rudy contacted him in the spring of 1983, after securing the
nomination for U.S. Attorney, to discuss Donna's job prospects. Tyler then met
Donna when the couple visited New York and was "impressed with her credentials."
He contacted WPIX, his old client, on her behalf. "I was very friendly with
the President of WPIX," Tyler said. "WPIX checked up on her and thought she
was good."

Donna and Rudy bought a 35th-floor cooperative apartment on East 86th Street
in Manhattan's exclusive Upper East Side. With a living room, a large bedroom and
a regular-size kitchen, the apartment was spacious by Manhattan standards but
still too small to contain all of their belongings, some of which had to be shipped to
storage. The lack of space was redeemed by the spectacular view: a sweeping
panorama extending from the East River to the Bronx. On the spring night when
Rudy and Donna first inspected the apartment, Rudy spotted the glow of Yankee
Stadium in the distance and instantly knew that this was the place for him.

The apartment also had a small extra room, eight feet by ten feet, that was intended
as a study. But Donna had another use for it in mind. "We had talked about
it and I definitely wanted children," she said. "Rudy wasn't driven to do it, but I
was thinking ahead."

***

Lloyd MacMahon administered the oath of office to his protege at 1:45 P.M. on
June 3, 1983, in a third-floor courtroom in the U.S. District Court at Foley
Square. Just as he had been the youngest associate attorney general, Rudy
Giuliani, at thirty-nine, became the youngest man ever to lead the Southern
District of New York's staff of more than a hundred crack attorneys.

Since its inception in 1789, when President George Washington established
thirteen judicial districts in a new nation, what became known as the SDNY has
been the pinnacle of prosecutorial prowess. Past leaders of the office filled a lofty
roster: Henry Stimson, Elihu Root and the legendary Thomas Dewey. Over the
years the Southern District had attracted a competitive crop of America's best and
most driven young lawyers. At the time of Rudy's arrival, only one in two twenty
applicants made the cut.

Headquartered in a drab, nine-story, cement-block building in lower Manhattan,
with the incongruously eminent-sounding address of 1 St. Andrews Plaza,
the U.S. Attorney's office looked more like a parking garage than a monolith of
justice. Constructed in the late 1970s, after Rudy's stint as an assistant, it was connected
by glass-enclosed walkways to the federal courthouse at Foley Square and
a modern federal prison called the Metropolitan Correctional Center. City Hall,
the municipal building and the police department were all less than two hundred
yards away. It was within that cluster of buildings, the corpus of the federal and
city governments, that Rudy Giuliani would spend the majority of his career.

Located on the eighth floor, Rudy's office was a large and oddly shaped room
with five walls. A sprinkler system could be seen projecting out of a drop ceiling of
acoustical tiles. The bright fluorescent lights and gray carpet conspired to create a
blanched, antiseptic atmosphere. The unremarkable view revealed an exposed segment
of Roosevelt Drive and a swath of buildings that had sprouted up along the
highway. On the office's large mahogany desk were a collection of autographed
baseballs, piles of scrawled-upon napkins and sheets of yellow legal paper and tall,
neat stacks of court documents. Behind the desk was a table upon which Rudy
would deposit all matters relegated to the back burner. Leaning against a wall was
a folded Yankee Stadium bleacher seat, which Rudy had taken down to
Washington and had just hauled back to New York.

Another piece of furniture in Rudy's office-which, like the Yankee seat, would
stay with him for most his career-was Deputy U.S. Attorney Denny Young. A
former assistant with Rudy during the glory days of the 1970s, Young was short,
bespectacled and diffident. Functioning as the de facto chief of staff, he served as
Rudy's interoffice mechanical arm, managing personalities and press releases. He
was with Rudy so often that appointment logs listing meetings with the two men
often neglected to mention Young. An ever loyal sidekick, he had long ago fused
his public identity with Rudy's, and was widely regarded in the office as an extension
of his boss.

Flamboyant and flashy, Elliot Cuker was Denny Young's extreme opposite. The
luxury-car dealer would often park his Rolls-Royce on the curb outside Rudy's office
to share a cigar and a story or two. Once the subject of an IRS inquiry, the exactor
livened up the stale, fluorescently lit atmosphere.

Aside from Cuker, Rudy allowed few other distractions. Refusing to be lulled by
the elation of his new, powerful position, he immediately went about the task of
imprinting his insignia on one of the most venerable law enforcement institutions
in America. The first and most obvious task was to distinguish himself from his
predecessor, John Martin, whose management style, Rudy alleged, had been
weighed down with self-congratulatory torpor.

"The office was no longer in the forefront of law enforcement, where it had
been for much of its history," Rudy claimed later in an unpublished interview. "1
thought too much time was spent by people patting themselves on the back. You
don't just say you're terrific. You've got to prove it."

The Southern District under John Martin had been repeatedly outshone by the
Eastern District's prosecution of sensational cases-notably the famous Abscam
cases tried by Thomas Puccio in Brooklyn and the prosecution of Long Island political
boss, and D' Amato mentor, Joseph Margiotta. Martin was a chronically cautious
prosecutor who eschewed high-profile trials in favor of low-key, routine
cases. Although his style was understated, even timid, he ran an efficient office.

In 1981, as associate attorney general, Rudy had ordered a staff cut in Martin's
office, arguing that most important federal cases were being brought elsewhere.
Now, as he took up the reins from Martin, he appealed to his contacts at Justice for
a staff increase and was immediately assigned eight extra slots. Further increasing
the size of his battalion by borrowing, through cross-designation, assistants from
the state attorney general, Manhattan district attorney and the New York
Department of Investigation, Rudy would amass, by 1986, a sizable staff of 132 assistants-
the largest US. Attorney's office in the country, and nineteen more
lawyers than Martin had had at his peak.

The new US. Attorney vowed to jolt the office back into action. Under his leadership,
Rudy proclaimed, the Manhattan federal prosecutor would once again regain
its spot as No. I, becoming an inexorable juggernaut of justice.

"My father used to have this expression," Rudy said, "which was that he didn't
want me to love him, he wanted me to respect him. After I respected him, I would
learn to love him. I never quite understood how that worked at home, but it
seemed to me a very good philosophy for running an organization."

Despite the fanfare, Rudy's reign as US. Attorney did not instantly ignite the
landscape of law enforcement in New York City. The first two years, while certainly
not uneventful, were primarily a period of reordering priorities and cultivating
momentum.

The first order of business was the redeployment of troops. Upon discovering
that the public corruption unit-which Rudy led in the mid-1970s-had been dismantled
during Martin's term, he quickly reassembled it. He assigned five assistants
and named Jane Parver as unit chief. Eight assistants were also pulled off
various cases and moved into the narcotics unit, which soon grew to the Southern
District's largest division with twenty-one attorneys. Rudy also presided over a
precipitous personnel shuffle, replacing several other unit chiefs and removing assistants
from stalled cases.

The tentacles of Rudy's assertiveness reached far beyond his own office. When
judges were handing out sentences, federal prosecutors typically submitted
memos on select cases, but treated the matter of recommending punishment with
a diplomatic restraint. Rudy, however, inserted himself unabashedly into the center
of the sentencing process, encouraging draconian punishments, and, in one
case, recommending a life sentence for a drug dealer.

As Rudy created the Southern District's new agenda, four major areas were
identified as the new prosecutorial priorities: drugs, organized crime, public corruption
and white-collar crime. "It would be a mistake to decide one is more im-
portant," he told the New York Times in April 1983. "In the Southern District, we
are gravely affected by all four."

The one that got the most initial attention, an issue designated by the Reagan
administration as a top priority, was drugs. With his newly enlarged narcotics unit,
Rudy pledged to relentlessly pursue drug racketeers and pushers, to support the
death penalty for top-level dealers and to take on local cases from "overwhelmed"
district attorneys. By using wiretaps and electronic surveillance, the new us.
Attorney said, the location of shipments could be pinpointed and couriers could be
nailed before they ever introduced dope to the street. The majority of his resources,
Rudy said, would initially be brought to bear on Manhattan's Lower East
Side, a widely reputed narcotics epicenter.

Newspaper reports credited the new "big gun" with having the credentials necessary
to lead a citywide campaign against heroin and cocaine. While associate attorney
general, the articles noted, Rudy had been behind the creation of regional
drug task force units that had provided 200 new assistant US. Attorneys (AUSAs)
and 1,200 additional FBI, Treasury and Drug Enforcement Agency agents in an expanded
war on drugs.

Rudy would also make the claim that while in Washington, he had forged the
merger of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement
Administration in an attempt to streamline federal anti-drug efforts. Indeed, in a
thirty-three-page Justice Department booklet entitled "Challenge, Change and
Achievement: The Department of Justice 1981-1985," Rudy was pictured in a
photograph with Attorney General William French Smith, above a caption that
read: "Then-associate attorney general Rudolph Giuliani, FBI Director William
Webster and DEA Administrator Francis Mullen look on as the attorney general
announces the merger of the DEA into the FBI."

The FBI-DEA "merger," however, turned out to be more fiction than fact. On
February 16, 1985, the Washington Post published a story quoting both FBI and
DEA spokespeople bluntly refuting that any kind of merger of their organizations
had ever taken place. "They definitely have not merged," said DEA spokesperson
Bob Feldcamp. It was only in 1984, well after Rudy left the Justice Department, that
joint projects were developed to integrate the two agencies' drug-fighting efforts.

One of the earliest and most publicized of Rudy's anti-narcotics initiatives as
US. Attorney was the "Federal Day" program, in which undercover police officers
infiltrated a neighborhood, made arrests and hauled the suspects into federal,
rather than state, court. The dealers unlucky enough to be netted on "Federal
Day," would be subjected to far stiffer sentences than suspects brought to state
court. The program debuted in September 1983, and soon spread beyond the
Lower East Side to other neighborhoods in Manhattan and the Bronx, resulting in
as many as 300 additional drug arrests a year. Employing what Rudy called the
"Russian Roulette" model of deterrence, "Federal Day" made dealing drugs a far
riskier proposition.

Several of Rudy's deputies, including associate US. Attorney Bart Schwartz and
criminal chief Larry Pedowitz, voiced concerns that Federal Day could waste the
office's time and resources on small fish in a big pond. Rudy, however, was not one
to govern by consensus. "You can't run an organization on the basis of people's
complaints," he explained. "You'll never accomplish anything that way."

The program also drew criticism from lawyers and federal judges who felt it administered
an arbitrary brand of justice, unfairly targeting minority neighborhoods.

Rudy responded that he had gone after middle- and upper-class cocaine users by
seizing the cars of people who drove into the city from Westchester County and
Connecticut to buy drugs. He also ordered the drug arrests of 15 Wall Street executives,
who were chained together and marched across Foley Square.

Leniency, compassion-these were not concepts Rudy applied to hard drug
dealers and users. In a barrelful of vermin, they were among the dregs. Then he
discovered one of those dregs was right under his nose.

Assistant US. Attorney Daniel Perlmutter, a bespectacled, twenty-nine-year-old
phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College and former editor of the New York
University Law Review, had come to be known as "Mad Dog" for his aggressive
prosecutorial style-particularly when it came to drug cases.

Tortured by a secret maelstrom of depression and alienation, Perlmutter started
free-basing cocaine and shooting heroin. He hired prostitutes. He had become
what he claimed to despise.

The first time he stole drugs and cash from the evidence safe at the US.
Attorney's office was in November of 1984. For the next several months, he
covertly continued to pilfer the safe. As his addiction gre\¥, he became increasingly
desperate. On one occasion, he surreptitiously signed in at 3:30 A.M., using the
name of another assistant, John Savarese. He used fellow assistant David Zornow's
name when dealing with call-girl services.

There is evidence in the transcript of Perlmutter's sentencing hearing that suggests
Rudy had reason to know about his assistant's possible drug problem, or at
least his overtly fragile emotional state, months before his arrest. Ronald Fischetti,
Perlmutter's attorney, told the judge that starting in December 1984, his client,
without calling in sick, frequently missed work. "No one knew where he was," said
Fischetti. "He would take absences for days, weeks at a time." The National Law
Journal reported that, within a five-month period starting in December,
Perlmutter only spent a total of twenty-five days in the office.

Fischetti noted at the hearing that Giuliani became so concerned about
Perlmutter that, as far back as January, he and Criminal Division chief Bart
Schwartz "went out to find him." When Rudy and Schwartz found their assistant,
he was holed up alone in a cold, unheated apartment. They took him to a restaurant,
"in an attempt to help him," said Fischetti, who also noted that, during that
period of time, Perlmutter was "hopelessly addicted to cocaine." In a subsequent interview,
Fischetti said that when Rudy and Schwartz found Perlmutter in the unheated
apartment, he was naked and shivering. The great crime-buster did nothing.
It was months after Rudy's visit that Perlmutter committed his worst thefts from
the evidence vault, even stealing the heroin he needed for a case he was trying.

Rudy later admitted in press reports that he knew Perlmutter was enduring
"psychological and emotional problems," but attributed them to his separation
from his wife the previous December. He never explained why Perlmutter had free
rein for half a year.

When the FBI collared Perlmutter in May 1985 and the story hit the newspapers,
any compassion Rudy felt for the man instantly vaporized. Perlmutter had
indeed scuffed the prestigious patina of the Southern District-especially with a
righteous reformer running the show. In January 1986, a few months after pleading
guilty to taking $41,800 and five pounds of drugs from the U.S. Attorney's
Office, he was sentenced to three years in prison. Rudy offered his opinion on the
sentencing. In view of his former assistant's "personal betrayal," he believed the
"appropriate sentence" should have been a hefty twelve years.

There was a time when Rudy might not have recommended such a harsh sentence,
even for an anonymous junkie who had never been his assistant. Over the
years his philosophy on drugs and punishment shifted significantly. The "vulnerability"
study cautioned that Rudy could be accused of a "drug legalization flipflop."
The authors noted: "Giuliani never has been criticized for his flip-flop on
drug legalization. However, the campaign should understand that Giuliani used to
favor legalization of drugs. Today, Giuliani is firm in his opposition to legalizing
drugs." The study then presented a published statement Rudy had made on drugs
years earlier: "There were times in New York when I thought-back in the early
70s-that, although morally and philosophically I was very troubled by the idea
of decriminalizing drugs, that it might be the practical, necessary thing to do-the
problem was getting so bad." It was in the early 1970s that his cousin Joan died after
being beaten in an alleyway. Her addiction and death may have colored his
early, softer view on drugs. The authors of the "vulnerability" study advised: "If
presented directly with the quote below, Giuliani can explain how his position on
drug legalization has evolved over the years, and how he looked at the issue, like
all others, with an open mind. However, in the end, through careful analysis, he
has come to the firm conclusion that legalization would be a very harmful idea for
this country."

One of Rudy's earliest, and arguably most admirable, actions as US. Attorney
pitted him squarely against his boss: the Reagan administration. It was standard
practice for the civil divisions of US. Attorney offices to defend the federal government
in a slew of varied suits, including those involving federal benefits programs.
Using a 1980 law allowing for periodic reviews of Social Security
beneficiaries, the Reagan administration, in blatant disregard of court precedents,
was precipitously stripping disability benefits from ineligible and eligible recipients
alike. Since March 1981, Reagan's budget battering rams had knocked hundreds
of thousands of people off the rolls. US. Attorneys around the country were
deluged with lawsuits. It was an onerous responsibility that muddied the white
knight image of offices like the Southern District.

Howard Wilson, whom Rudy had lured away from private practice to become
his civil chief, brought the issue to his boss's attention. Though they said they
feared it might cost them their jobs, Giuliani and Wilson together decided to "aggressively
refuse to defend" the weakest of the government's Social Security disability
cases. They would stand up to the Reagan administration, opposing its
policy of cutting people from the disability roles.

Rudy assigned four assistants to review the Social Security cases. Any "indefensible"
cases were to be remanded to the US. Department of Health and Human
Services. In late 1987, the office was remanding roughly 50 percent of Social
Security disability cases, many for the immediate payment of benefits, and winning
more than 75 percent of the remaining cases.

"One of the things of which I am most proud," Rudy said at the January 1989
press conference announcing his resignation as US. Attorney, "was our attempting
to do justice," in the Social Security cases, "knowing that there was some risk
in doing it."

Rudy's view was vindicated when a federal magistrate issued an injunction in
May 1985 halting the Reagan administration's policy of purging the Social
Security rolls.

***

It was the summer of 1983, and Rudy was in the newspaper-this time having
nothing to do with a criminal case. His name was side by side with Donna's, and
they leapt off the gossip page in that signature boldface type reserved for celebrities.
On August 21, less than three months after their arrival in New York, Donna
and Rudy were already mentioned in a New York tabloid item. The item announced
their plans to wed during the upcoming "Christmas holidays." Falling for
Donna's reconfigured resume, the item's authors erroneously noted that she had
co-anchored in Los Angeles and dubiously gushed: "Donna's well-known in
Hollywood." The reader was also let in on where and when the juicy news broke:
"They spilled the beans about the wedding over dinner at Ryan McFadden's."

The announcement proved to be premature. The wedding never happened during
the "Christmas holidays," despite the fact that arrangements were made. In
December 1983, another gossip item mysteriously reported that "a Christmas
wedding was planned but the miserable weather blocked travel plans for her family
and friends who live in California." The new wedding date, the readers were informed,
would be on April 15, 1984, "probably at St. Monica's Church on E. 79th
St. or at Manhattan College, Rudy's alma mater." Monsignor Alan Placa, "Rudy's
best friend," would be officiating.

Weather might not have been the only obstacle facing the would-be newlyweds.
Rudy had already divorced Regina-but in order to marry again in the Catholic
Church, his first marriage would also have to be annulled. In 1982, he had turned
to Placa for help. Since he and Regina were second cousins, placa told Rudy, they
should have obtained a special dispensation to marry. If they hadn't, the marriage
could be annulled, said Placa, who also had a law degree.

Placa had been Rudy's best man at his wedding to Regina in 1968. A seminarian
at the time, he had dated Regina years earlier. Helen Giuliani recalled that
Placa told her son and his fiancee that their consanguinity wouldn't be a problem,
but Placa says he never offered such an assurance. Placa remembered that the
priest who performed the marriage, Father James Moriarty, had never asked Rudy
and Regina about their relationship.

But couples who filled out the prenuptial form at the time were "under oath and
expected to answer all questions truthfully" according to New York Archdiocese
canon law expert William Elder. If there was any question at all regarding a blood
relationship, "the Church has to investigate it," said Elder. Had Rudy and Regina
answered the questions and acknowledged that they were blood relatives, it would
have set in motion a family tree review that would have revealed that they were
second cousins and needed a dispensation.

In addition to the form, Rudy and Regina had another opportunity to inform
the Church that they were cousins: a PreCana conference at which the couples discussed
with a priest the meaning of marriage and the relationship of marriage to
the church. Had Rudy and Regina notified the church of their blood relationship
and obtained a dispensation, Placa would have had to find, if possible, some other
way to manufacture an annulment.

When Father John O'Leary-who became pastor of St. Monica's Church two
years after Rudy and Donna's wedding there and later arranged for Andrew's baptism-
heard that Rudy had not obtained the proper dispensation for marrying a
second cousin, he remarked: "Lucky guy." He explained that "it's an application of
law and very often, the law favors the lawbreaker."

A Catholic lawyer familiar with annulment proceedings noted that "the Church
marriage tribunal functions like a civil court, and what Giuliani did in using Placa
was the equivalent of finding a well-connected lawyer with courthouse contacts to
handle your case."

In an unpublished 1988 interview, Regina said she was "offended" when she
found out about Rudy's plans to obtain an annulment.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:05 am

Part 2 of 2

"When Gina heard that Rudy wanted an annulment," said Helen Giuliani, "she
was very upset. It gave Gina the feeling she was never married. She actually went
to diocesan headquarters to fight it. Alan was a friend to both Rudy and Gina, but
of course Gina is not Alan's friend anymore. She feels Alan manipulated the whole
thing and carried it though."

Placa, who characterized Regina's reaction as "irrational," not only stewarded
Rudy's annulment through the proper channels; he also claims to have arranged
an annulment of Donna's marriage to Stanley Hanover. The marriage tribunal was
just a few doors down the hall from placa's office at the diocese of Rockville Center
on Long Island. He collected the documents establishing that Rudy and Regina
were second cousins and that no dispensation had been awarded. In 1982, despite
Regina's protests, the annulment Rudy sought was granted.

Donna has never discussed the annulment that Placa disclosed in an unpublished
1988 interview. Indeed, she has refused to answer questions about their divorce
as well. No record of their divorce exists in the locales where they lived after
the 1972 marriage. In any event, Placa says he had the jurisdiction transferred
from Donna's diocese in California to him. Both annulments were approved.

In 1989, when the annulment surfaced during the campaign, Rudy at first was
indignant. "There's nothing about my life that I'm embarrassed about," he told re-
porters. Then his responses became equivocal. He told Maria Laurino of the
Village Voice: "I thought of us as distant cousins. I never calculated the exact degree
of consanguinity, which is how the law of the church-it's a pretty ancient
law-works." He later attempted a more straightforward explanation: "She was
my father's second cousin. I was her father's second cousin. That made us second
cousins once removed."

The "exact degree of consanguinity" quickly became a matter of confusion.
Rudy's campaign manager and buddy Peter Powers told the New York Daily
News: "Rudy's father and Regina's father were first cousins. Rudy always assumed
that he and Regina were third cousins."

In the same article, Regina said that "we knew that we were cousins. We attended
PreCana and all that. It was our impression that we didn't need a dispensation."
Her brother, Richard, was quoted, responding to Rudy's claim of ignorance
on the second-cousin question. "That's a lie," Richard said. "He knew he was my
second cousin."

In 1997, Rudy and Regina's uncle, Rudolph Giuliani, told the New York Daily
News's Paul Schwartzman, "I knew they were second cousins," adding that their
romantic relationship had "seemed natural-they shared common interests."

Rudy and Donna lived together for almost two years prior to their wedding.
They were hardly devout Catholics. Donna publicly announced years later that
she was merely" raised Catholic" -the classic formulation of a lapsed Catholic.
Their tax returns in the 1980s included no charitable deductions, and friends said
they rarely went to church, just like much of the rest of Rudy's family. Rudy understood,
however, that divorced Catholics were barred from remarrying in the
church but an annulled marriage opened the church door a second time around.

If it wasn't a religious motive pushing Rudy to obtain an annulment that
Regina vigorously resisted, why did Rudy go to such lengths to get it?

Rudy's college girlfriend, Kathy Livermore, remembered a conversation with
Rudy about a "political annulment." She recalled it as a comment about Nelson
Rockefeller annulling his first marriage, but she must have juggled Rocky's name
with President Kennedy's, since there had been rumors, never proven, that JFK
had an initial, annulled, marriage before the one to Jackie. "We had a big discussion
about that, and how many years it would be before a president was able to be
divorced and be president, and it was a very smart move on Rockefeller's part.
Because it erased the marriage, it makes no record of the marriage. We had a big
discussion about that."

The unmistakable inference is that Rudy got his annulment for the legions of
Catholic voters in New York-with his political future clearly in mind.

On April 15, 1984, Rudy and Donna were married at St. Monica's Church on
Manhattan's Upper East Side. Another gossip item soon appeared in May 1984,
opening with the line: "Sometimes, life can be a bowl of cherries." Reporting that
Rudy and Donna had been married the previous month, the item's authors also
mentioned Donna's promotion at WPIX from reporter to anchorwoman. It came
right after the honeymoon. "Does being married to a crack prosecutor help a TV
woman's career?" they asked. "Nope, says a colleague at the station, explaining
her promotion: 'She's got B & B-beauty and brains.'"

***

No matter what else he accomplished as U.S. Attorney, Rudy knew what
would reestablish the Southern District as the most prestigious and feared
federal prosecutor's office in the country and what would anoint him as a crusading
man of the people: an all-out, take-no-prisoners campaign against the New
York Mafia.

"It is about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime," he declared
to reporters in the fall of 1984.

Rudy's assault on the Mafia, he claims, began before he became U.S. Attorney.
One evening he was watching 60 Minutes. Joe Bonanno, the seventy-eight-yearold
"retired" mob boss, was promoting his new autobiography, A Man of Honor.
Bonanno boasted that the book told the true story of his career running the infamous
New York crime family that bears his name.

In a sudden rush, Rudy ran to a bookstore, bought the book and trotted back to
his apartment. He devoured A Man of Honor, noting cryptic terms that read like
a code. Intrigued by Bonanno's detailed descriptions-not only of his own life, but
of the lives of New York's other mob bosses-Rudy believed,he'd discovered
something that could translate into an indictment. In Bonanno's lavish telling of
his tale, he had explicitly spelled out the history of "The Commission," the ruling
body of the American Mafia-how it was created, how it operated and who belonged
to it.

"Look at this," Rudy said to Donna in amazement. "This is a RICO enterprise."

RICO was an acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act of 1970, which defined as a federal crime any activity that could be described
as a "pattern of racketeering." Bonanno's book had triggered an epiphany: Rudy
could use RICO to prosecute the heads of New York's five Mafia families as the
governing body of an organization, instead of individually. The rarely used act
could be wielded to hobble the mob en masse, especially since it carried heavy sen-
tences-a maximum twenty-year prison term and a fine up to $250,000 for each
count.

Sunk into his reading chair, adrenaline surging through him like a narcotic,
Rudy decided that RICO would be his Excalibur.

"Joe Bonanno had really described the Commission," Rudy said. "How it
started in 1931, how it functioned in the 1960s, how the members were the bosses
of the five families from New York and outside families, how they coordinated disputes
and put out contracts. If you allow for euphemisms, it's all there. I went back
to work the next couple of days and dug out FBI reports. I determined we were going
to put together the case as soon as I got back to New York."

Before the "Commission" case was ready, however, Rudy tested the power of
the RICO statute in a mob case virtually ready for indictment when he arrived at
the SDNY. His target was the Colombo family, which had been under investigation
by the FBI since 1981. In October 1984, Rudy indicted eleven members of the
family for extorting money from restaurants and construction businesses. The
chief defendant was the family's ruthless leader, Carmine "the Snake" Persico. In
June 1986, nine of the eleven indicted Colombo family members, including
Persico, were convicted of labor racketeering.

The Colombo case tapped into an ancient rivalry between the Southern and
Eastern districts. When the FBI initiated the Colombo investigation, it was agreed
that the districts would work together, jointly investigating the case. When it came
time for indictments, however, one office would take control. Justice officials originally
decided, since most of the crimes were perpetrated in the Eastern District,
that Eastern District officials should get the case. But when Rudy arrived, he used
his Justice Department connections to pry jurisdiction away from the Eastern
District. "I feel very strongly that case belonged in my office," Edward A.
McDonald, chief of the Eastern District's organized crime strike force, told the
New York Times. "Virtually every act was in the Eastern District, almost all the
defendants lived in the Eastern District and we did at least half the work."

Rudy responded dismissively: "We did almost everything."

Rudy's use of the statute against an individual crime family like the Colombos
was hardly innovative. John Martin had brought a RICO case against the Bonanno
crime family that led to the conviction of five bosses and underbosses. In fact, two
other RICO investigations were under way before Rudy arrived in the Southern
District. One was the "Pizza Connection" case, which resulted in the racketeering
convictions of eighteen people for running a vast international heroin operation
through a network of pizza parlors. The indictments came in April 1984, and a seventeen-
month trial ended in June 1986. The three-year covert investigation was
the first simultaneous drug probe of American and Sicilian organized crime
groups, and it long preceded Rudy's arrival at the SDNY. In another RICO case,
brought against the Gambino family's powerful boss, Paul "the Pope" Castellano,
Southern District organized crime chief Walter Mack won a seventy-eight-count
indictment of Castellano and twenty-three Gambino family members and associates
in March 1984. Six months later, Rudy rewarded Mack by demoting him and
naming Barbara Jones as his replacement as the new chief of the organized crime
unit. It was a move widely perceived as a preemptive attempt to prevent career
mob prosecutor Mack from getting media credit for the work of the office. As
Rudy would demonstrate again and again over the course of his public life, credit,
in his mind, was reserved for Rudy and Rudy alone. In any event, the Castellano
trial ended with several convictions.

With the early mob cases, Rudy honed a skill that would serve him well
throughout his tenure as US. Attorney: how to run a captivating press conference.
While most US. Attorneys traditionally handled journalists with restraint, Rudy
seduced and embraced them-and they reciprocated with a hail of positive coverage.
In addition to press conferences, Rudy sought exposure through lecture circuits,
breakfast seminars, panel discussions, talk shows. "The only way to deliver a
deterrent effectively is to publicize it," he explained to reporters. "I want to send a
message."

Not everyone bought his argument. The spotlight-seeking federal prosecutor
was criticized by members of the New York bar for conducting "trial by press conference."
One anonymous assistant told the National Law Journal: "A lot of people
around here feel as if they are being used to launch somebody's political
career." Another assistant noted in the American Lawyer the high priority Rudy
gave to press releases, saying he delegated Denny Young to finesse them. "Denny
would review press releases as though they were indictments," the assistant said.
"He'd cross out assistants' names and put Rudy's in .... Denny had a phenomenal
devotion to press releases."

In an act that many interpreted as the peak of Rudy's scene stealing, the US.
Attorney accompanied Senator D' Amato to Washington Heights to make an undercover
drug buy in the summer of 1986. Newspapers across the country ran
photos of the two dressed up unconvincingly as street thugs, Rudy in a Hells
Angels jacket. The publicity stunt, designed to aid D' Amato's 1986 re-election
campaign, was portrayed as evidence of the open drug market in New York-with
five almost instant buys. Arrests were promised up the road. Though it was organized
by local DEA chief Robert Stutman, Andy Maloney, US. Attorney for the
Eastern District, refused to participate in the event. Sources say that only two of
the celebrated buys were real drugs-meaning "the Fonz" and friend bought
harmless powder in most of the stops. Robert Stutman said he couldn't remember
if that was so.

Two years before the drug buy-early in Giuliani's tenure-D'Amato had
asked for Rudy's help on a hush-hush matter, reflecting the senator's confidence in
his cozy relationship with the prosecutor. Mario Gigante, a captain in the
Genovese crime family, and brother of mob boss "Chin" Gigante, had been convicted
in June 1983 of extortion and loan-sharking and was sentenced to eight
years in prison. That was the same month Rudy took office. Gigante's attorney,
Roy Cohn-an infamous mob lawyer and former protege of red-baiting Senator
Joseph McCarthy-had filed a motion for a reduction of the sentence. A political
fixer with powerful ties to D' Amato and the Reagan White House, Cohn had
helped install his partner, Tom Bolan, as a member of the senator's screening panel
that cleared Rudy's appointment. In the fall of 1984, D' Amato phoned Rudy to
suggest that Mario Gigante wasn't that bad a fellow and wondered if maybe the
government could go easy on him.

Rudy claimed years later that, after talking to D' Amato, he immediately summoned
Bruce Baird, the assistant handling the Gigante case, and instructed him to
make sure he did everything possible to see Gigante's sentence was not reduced.
Baird, however, says he does not recall Rudy mentioning D' Amato's interest in the
case and that he only had a "vague recollection" that his then boss might have
spoken to him about the Gigante motion. He did remember that Cohn was furious
when he learned that Baird had written a letter to the judge on the case opposing
any reduction in Gigante's eight-year term.

A key mob informant, Vincent "the Fish" Cafaro, later told the FBI in March
1987 that, on Chin Gigante's orders, he had delivered a $175,000 cash payment to
Cohn's office. The payment was made after Judge Charles Stewart had approved,
without comment, a two-year reduction in Mario Gigante's prison term.

A year after the Gigante call, in early 1985, Rudy got another call from
D' Amato that was even more vexing. This time, the senator from Long Island was
phoning on behalf of Paul Castellano. D' Amato asked Rudy to look" carefully" at
charges pending against the mob boss. Giuliani recalled thinking it bizarre how
D' Amato never mentioned that Castellano was then the most notorious criminal
in the United States, accused of serious crimes, including multiple murders.
Troubled by the senator's advocacy of a prominent gangster under investigation
by his office, Giuliani claimed he gave his friend a mini-lecture.

"I told Al that these are the kinds of things that should go from lawyer to
lawyer," Rudy said. "I said, 'We shouldn't be talking about these kinds of things.
It's not good for you and it's not good for me.' I thought I was helping him, educating
him because he seemed naive. I don't know if it helped him, but it helped
me because he never talked to me about a case after that."

However alarmed Rudy was by 0' Amato's mob calls, he maintained close ties
with the senator, and continued to make public appearances with him in addition
to the drug buy. In 1985, they even traveled to Italy together, reportedly to promote
the war on drugs.

***

Even if Rudy hadn't so eagerly courted the media, his track record at the
Southern District would have made him a major media figure. Starting with
the Colombo case, he presided over a stunning series of dramatic and daring prosecutions-
mob and otherwise-that were the stuff of legend, even without a publicist.
The media fed his burgeoning reputation-and he fed them with a regular
regimen of juicy press conferences. He became a celebrity, a folk hero who, although
unabashedly overzealous, even evangelical, earned apt comparisons to
Eliot Ness and Tom Dewey. Giuliani was even cast by some in the media as a modern-
day Savonarola, the zealous fifteenth-century Florentine priest who was
burned at the stake.

The idea for the mob case that would cement Rudy's renowned crime-fighting
reputation, the fabled "Commission" prosecution, had actually been bandied about
for years by several New York law enforcement officials-long before Rudy read
Joe Bonanno's book. In August 1983, two months after becoming U.S. Attorney,
Rudy met with one of those officials, Ronald Goldstock, head of the New York State
Organized Crime Task Force. Goldstock told Rudy about incriminating tapes he'd
collected from a bugging device planted in the Jaguar of a reputed mob leader, who
kept talking about the Mafia's "Commission." Excited by Goldstock's tapes, Rudy
ordered his assistants to sift through hundreds of hours of FBI surveillance tapes
and to review old Senate hearings for additional "Commission" references. In addition
to Goldstock's tapes, the FBI had succeeded in March 1983 in planting a bug inside
the Staten Island home of Paul Castellano, who ran the Commission. That bug,
which preceded Rudy's appointment, would be crucial in the ultimate case.

A chart and thirty volumes of evidence were put together, cataloguing the
crimes and delineating the leadership of each of New York's five Mafia families.
First on the chart was the Colombo family headed by Carmine Persico, whose No.
2 man, or underboss, was Gennaro "Gerry Lang" Langelia; Persico, of course, was
already under indictment in the Colombo case. Listed next was the Gambino fam-
ily-then the largest Mafia organization in the country, with a thousand members
who engaged in everything from drug running to stolen cars to pornographyheaded
by Castellano. The third entry on the chart was the Luchese family, headed
by "Tony Ducks" Corallo. The chart would later be expanded to include the last
two of the five entries: the Bonanno family, then headed by Rusty Rastelli, and the
Genovese crime family, reportedly headed by "Fat Tony" Salerno.

In September 1983, a month after his meeting with Goldstock, Rudy flew down
to Washington to meet with his old boss, Attorney General William French Smith,
and FBI Director William Webster. He showed them the partially completed
"Commission" chart and described his idea for trying the five New York leaders as
an organization.

"If I go to trial today," he asserted, "I could convict two or three of the Family
heads of being members of the Commission. If I can do that now, then if we investigate
this thing, we should be able to convict four or five of them."

He would need their backing, he then explained, to cut into other jurisdictions.
He would also need to "borrow" agents in fourteen cities to gather data on the
"Commission."

French and Webster swiftly approved the case and told the ambitious prosecutor
they would personally see to it that he got whatever resources he needed to get
the job done.

As the investigations neared completion, Rudy flew out to Tucson, Arizona,
where the man who had first opened his eyes to the possibility of this case-Joe
Bonanno-lay in a hospital bed. The mobster's lawyer had claimed his client was
too sick to travel to New York, although Rudy suspected the gravity of Bonanno's
illness might be just as exaggerated as the man's sense of his own "honor." What
Rudy wanted from the old man was a deposition regarding the existence and operation
of the Commission. He was, after all, its only living founding member.

The meeting in Bonanno's room at St. Mary's Hospital was civil. Ostensibly delighted
to have visitors, the amiable gangster told Rudy" off-the-record" stories
about prominent figures. He seemed to enjoy telling the stories. At one point, he
said to Rudy: "You're doing a good job."

Toward the end of the interview, "an anger had really started building up in
me," Rudy said. The crime organization Bonanno described had tainted and troubled
many Italians in America, even infecting Rudy's own family. But, as he left,
the anger was replaced by intense satisfaction: Joe Bonanno had given him what
he needed.

Back in New York, the "Commission" investigation had been split into two primary
areas. The first was collecting interviews from cooperating witnesses, some
of whom had held positions within the families. The second involved tapes of the
subjects, made possible by the daring installations of bugs. On the tapes were
thousands of conversations proving the involvement of each of the five bosses
with irrefutable clarity. Even more incriminating was the fact that mobsters from
different families in different parts of the city were heard talking about the same
meetings, the same people, the same concerns. It was undeniable proof of a relationship
between the families.

Also on the tapes were repeated references to payoffs made to construction
companies, revealing the extent to which the five families essentially ran New
York's construction industry. One boss remarked to an associate that "not a yard
of concrete was poured in New York" without the mob's say-so. It became clear
through the recordings that any construction company that wanted work had to
pay 2 percent of the price of the contract directly to the "Commission." Some
mobsters were directly involved with the companies. Salerno and Castellano, for
example, became partners in S&A Concrete and subsequently saw to it that the
company got a greater cut of the jobs.

In early 1985, Rudy decided he had enough evidence against the "Commission"
and would try the case himself. On February 25, he signed the indictment and sent
it to the grand jury for a vote. That night, fifty major mob leaders were busted and
hauled before a swarm of cameras in Foley Square. When FBI agents got
Castellano into an office overlooking the square, he glanced out the window.

"Isn't that Giuliani?" he asked.

The agents looked down, and there he was, standing on the courthouse steps,
talking to reporters.

"Well," said the boss of bosses, "if you've got to get fucked, it might as well be
by a paisan."

For twenty-seven days, Rudy had worked almost without sleep. He was haggard.
His nerves were jumpy. But the next day, none of that mattered. On
February 26, 1985, Rudy Giuliani attained a national visibility two stints in
Washington had never given him.

PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour was trying to book him for an evening interview
in its uptown studio. Rudy had been on the show several times when he was
Associate Attorney General, but he apologized, he couldn't do it-he already had
two interviews scheduled that evening, one on ABC's national evening newscast,
and the other on the 11:30 P.M. edition of ABC's Nightline. He had also agreed to
appear on the same network's Good Morning America" the following morning at
6:15 A.M. and the CBS Morning News at 7 A.M.

when the press conference began at 11:40 A.M., the room was packed with more
than a hundred reporters, photographers and cameramen. He was joined on the
stage by Webster and several local prosecutors. Flanked by charts showing reporters
how La Cosa Nostra operated, Rudy proudly announced: "This is a great day for
law enforcement, but a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia." He then
presented the indictment, which covered twenty-five counts and charged twelve individuals,
including the five alleged bosses, with running a RICO enterprise.

The gladiatorial style that had become Rudy's trademark wasn't just reserved
for mobsters and other criminals. In March 1985, a month after the "Commission"
indictment was announced, he was one of several prosecutors to testify at a
New York City Bar Association hearing on whether new federal anti-crime initiatives
could lead to abuses by an overambitious prosecutor, especially in organizedcrime
cases. While others who spoke maintained a subdued tone, Rudy bluntly
confronted the panel. He accused them of being "provincial" and behaving like a
"trade association."

A top federal prosecutor inveighing against a panel of defense attorneys-in
fact, pitching unadorned insults at them-was not only brazen but highly irregular.
u.s. Attorneys and high-ranking assistants, who usually serve from three to
five years, work at maintaining congenial relations with the attorneys they oppose,
well aware that they will soon be looking for jobs on the opposite side of the
courtroom. Not Rudy. He had other plans. There might be an overzealous downside
to a politically ambitious prosecutor. But the upside-at least from a public
perspective-was that he was more interested in making cases than making
friends.

When the "Commission" case finally went to trial, Rudy, who had always
planned to try it himself, opted instead to try a pivotal municipal corruption case
that was hardly as clear-cut a winner. It was a chancy move, but Giuliani was determined
to get convictions in both cases. He also relished the drama of going up
against his old counterpoint from the Eastern District, Tom Puccio, who was representing
a key defendant in the corruption case.

Rudy turned the "Commission" trial over to a young assistant, Michael
Chertoff. Working, like Rudy, fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, Chertoff had
been involved with the case since its inception. In November 1986, the defendants
were found guilty on all counts. Chertoff proved that the heads of New York's
Mafia families had acted as a board of directors, which had, among other things,
approved mob murders and divided mob construction industry interests. On
January 13, 1987, they were hit with heavy, face-blanching sentences. "Fat Tony"
Salerno, "Tony Ducks" Corallo and Carmine "the Snake" Persico were each sentenced
to 100 years in prison. Five of their associates were also hit with heavy
prison sentences, ranging from forty to 100 years. Castellano escaped his punishment.
In December 1985, he was shot dead in front of Sparks, a Manhattan steak
house. Rusty Rastelli, the Bonanno boss, had a previous engagement on the day of
sentencing; he was in a Brooklyn courtroom being tried in a separate case in which
he eventually got a twelve-year prison sentence.

Rudy's handling of the "Commission" case had been a professionally and emotionally
taxing experience-punishing hours, ridiculous accusations of bias from
prominent Italian-Americans and even threats on his life. It was the kind of heat
he loved.

Many of those who worked on various elements of the case, however, felt the
pugnacious prosecutor sought credit beyond what he deserved. The organizedcrime
indictments surfacing when Rudy arrived at the Southern District were the
result of an exhaustive law enforcement effort that been on-going for at least
twenty years. Robert Blakey, a Notre Dame professor who, as a consultant to the
Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1960s, created RICO, put it this way in a June
1985 New York Times Magazine article: "It's like stuffing a pipe. You put it in at
one end, and for a long time, you don't see anything. And then finally it shows.
Rudolph Giuliani is the guy lucky enough to be standing at the end of the pipe."

When asked by Newsday in 1989 about Rudy's claim of dreaming up the
"Commission" case after reading Bonanno's book, Tom Sheer, the FBI's former
New York City bureau chief, replied: "That's his position." Sheer, who praised
Rudy on many fronts, said the FBI had been mulling a "Commission" case since
1980, three years before Rudy's arrival. "That was always the ultimate goal," he
said.

Ironically, John Martin, in addition to laying the groundwork for the Pizza
Connection and Castellano cases had also sown the seeds of the Commission case
for Rudy to reap.

Rudy's own organized crime unit chief, Barbara Jones, admitted in the
American Lawyer that "all of these cases were carved out of a body of investigative
work that the FBI had done and many assistants [in the Eastern and Southern
districts] had done." But Rudy's prosecution of New York's Mafia leaders, Blakey,
Jones and others agreed, was a bold and unprecedented feat that did extensive and
lasting damage to the Cosa Nostra.

"A lot of federal agencies said it couldn't be done," said Ron Goldstock, the top
state investigator. "Giuliani had the open-mindedness to see ways in which the
case could be done. He raised the right issues and moved it in days."

Rudy had immersed himself in the culture of the Mafia. He saw Francis Ford
Coppola's The Godfather enough times to memorize most of the dialogue and music.
He even picked out a favorite real-life mobster-"Fat Tony" Salerno-whose
clubhouse was only a few blocks from where Harold Giuliani had grown up. The
US. Attorney, who had listened to hours of Salerno's tapes, did a convincing impersonation
of the rotund, cigar-chomping gangster he had sent to prison, mimicking
his scratchy, sardonic voice. "Fat Tony is the most interesting of the bosses,"
said Rudy, "because he has a terrific sense of humor."

In imagining which of the top mobsters would be most likely to grant clemency
to a condemned man, Rudy mused: "If you had to pick one of them to appeal to,
to spare you, you might have a chance with Fat Tony. I think you'd have no chance
with Persico and very little with 'Tony Ducks' Corallo. With Castellano you might
have a chance. With Fat Tony, I think you might be able to get a little softness, on
human terms."

Rudy's favorite mobster died in prison in 1992, but he would still come back to
haunt the prosecutor years later. In a 1997 federal racketeering and murder trial,
assistants from the US. Attorney for Eastern District alleged that Vincent "the
Chin" Gigante was in fact running the Genovese crime family during much of the
period covered in the "Commission" case. Gigante's attorneys submitted into evidence
Rudy's 1985 indictment naming "Fat Tony" Salerno as the Genovese head.
Their argument was that if Salerno was convicted of being boss, how could the
feds now charge Gigante with masterminding a racketeering enterprise? Genovese
capo "Fish" Cafaro had testified in 1988 before a US. Senate Subcommittee that
Salerno was once boss, but that he had been demoted in 1981 after a stroke.
"Gigante allowed Fat Tony to continue to front as the boss," Cafaro told the committee.
Philadelphia crime family boss Philip Leonetti testified at Gigante's trial
that he was told Gigante took over as boss in early 1980. During the Gigante trial,
an assistant US. Attorney played a tape of a conversation at Salerno's social club
in 1984, in which Salerno referred to Gigante as "the boss."

Ultimately, Gigante was convicted and sent to prison for twelve years. A federal
jury had implicitly found that Rudy Giuliani convicted the wrong man as boss of
the most powerful crime family in New York.

Indeed, the irony is that as strong as Giuliani's record of mob prosecutions was,
it cannot match that of Andy Maloney, the US. Attorney for the Eastern District
from 1986 to 1992. In addition to taking down Gigante-whose organization was
headquartered just blocks from St. Andrew's Plaza-Maloney also convicted John
Gotti, the most infamous boss, whose dapper profile embodied the modern mob.
Giuliani and Maloney had worked out a distribution of the various allegations
against Gotti, who rose to power in 1985 by murdering Castellano in the heart of
Rudy's Manhattan district. But it was Maloney who finally nailed the "Teflon
Don," who had beaten three prior cases, and put him in prison for life.

Maloney also convicted Vic Orena, whom Carmine Persico installed as his
Colombo successor, and Vic Amuso, who replaced "Ducks" Corallo as the Luchese
chief. It was Maloney who followed the threads of the "Commission" case and
sunk the mob that Rudy had helped cripple.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:05 am

Eight: The War Against Greed

IN THE EARLY 1980s, WHILE ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY GENERAL, RUDY HAD
characterized prosecutors who relentlessly pursued white-collar criminals
as "zealots." Now, in the late 1980s, as corporate greed became the sordid leitmotif
of the times, Rudy did an about-face: He declared war on Wall Street.
Starting in 1986, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York became
the scourge of white-collar criminals who hid behind the sterile facade of
big names firms. With a Pattonesque verve, Rudy blasted open one of the
biggest insider trading scandals in history.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had initiated the insider trader
probe before the reign of Rudy-but as he had with the mob, he scooped up
the work that preceded him and swiftly sculpted it into arrests.

Rudy's first big bust came in May 1986, with the arrest of Drexel Burnham
investment banker Dennis Levine. A crass, overweight man with extravagant
tastes, Levine was a well-connected rising Wall Street star who happened to
have made a daring series of illegal trades. After his arrest, he agreed to pay an
$11.6 million civil settlement and to cooperate with the government. Shock
waves rippled through Wall Street, as many traders panicked, fearing that
Levine would finger them. One of them was legendary arbitrageur Ivan
Boesky. With $3 billion worth of stock-buying power, Boesky was a financial
colossus who had fantasized about becoming a "latter-day Rothschild" and in
1985 told graduates of the University of California that "greed is all right."
Thinly disguised as Gordon Gecko and played by Michael Douglas in Oliver
Stone's film Wall Street, Boesky became a widely recognized symbol of the excesses
of the 1980s. After being fingered by Levine and served with a subpoena
by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Boesky decided to make a preemptive
strike: he surrendered voluntarily and worked out a secret deal with
Rudy, agreeing to pay a $100 million penalty. He admitted he'd traded on inside
information supplied by Levine.

Rudy's office persuaded Boesky to wear a wire and cooperate with the government.
Soon, with Boesky and Levine cooperating, the Wall Street swindlers fell like
dominos. The next were Kidder, Peabody & Co. investment banker Martin Siegel
and Boyd Jefferies, head of Jefferies & Company. The natty perpetrators of securities
fraud, Rudy learned, were a lot more willing than corrupt cops to give themselves
and their colleagues up-they practically got in line. In the end, a total of ten traders
pled guilty, cooperated and were sent to prison. Wall Street was reeling, in a sudden
siege mentality, bracing for another out-of-nowhere blow by Giuliani.

Levine and Boesky, in return for their cooperation, got relatively mild sentences.
In early 1987, Levine was sentenced to two years in prison and fined
$362,000. Boesky drew a three-year prison term in November 1986. Defense attorneys
representing defendants prosecuted on Boesky information later discovered
that Boesky had been allowed by Rudy's office to take a $50 million tax
write-off on his $100 million penalty, and to put up stock rather than cash. The
deal was widely faulted as a generous overreach.

On February 11,1987, upon to returning to New York after a week's vacation in
California, on-a-roll Rudy selected yet another trading target: multimillion-dollar-
a-year arbitrageur Timothy Tabor. Based on a tip from Siegel, Rudy ordered
Tabor arrested in the evening at his home on the Upper East Side. It was a strategic
time for an arrest: too late for bail to be granted or to contact a lawyer. Tabor
faced a night in jail.

Unlike the others, however, Tabor did not fold. He maintained his innocence and
refused to work for the government. That left the ball in the government's court:
They had to prove Tabor was guilty of conspiring to trade on illegal inside information.

The next day, U.S. marshals marched into the solemn offices of the investment
firm of Goldman, Sachs and arrested Robert Freeman, a financial executive linked
to Tabor by Siegel. Tabor's former boss, Richard Wigton, was nabbed at Kidder,
Peabody & Co. and-in front of his colleagues-pushed against a wall, frisked,
handcuffed and marched away in tears.

Such a display of sudden force is usually reserved for suspects considered dangerous
or likely to flee. Tabor, Freeman and Wigton would have surrendered voluntarily,
a process ordinarily arranged through attorneys. Rudy's two arrests of
Gambino family crime boss Paul Castellano, for example, had both been far more
genteel-the first time, the gangster was allowed to surrender at the Manhattan
office of his trial attorney, and the second time, he was not handcuffed when
picked up at his home and allowed to buy a Snicker's bar on the way to the arraignment.

The other oddity was that the Wall Street arrests had occurred before the case
had been presented to a grand jury and before the indictments were obtained.
Indictments weren't handed down for seven weeks. The raids were solely a result
of Siegel's insider trading tip. While not unprecedented, such precipitous action
was reserved for cases in which there was a great deal of urgency or prosecutors
were exceedingly confident of their information.

Rudy, however, was defiantly defensive about the Wigton, Tabor and Freeman
arrests. He told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "This isn't an invitation to a tea party.
People are arrested in the hope they will tell you everything that happened. The
important thing with Tabor, Wigton, and Freeman that gets obscured, because
they're rich and powerful and have the ability to affect public relations, is that
they were treated exactly the same as sixty or seventy New York City cops, and
they hadn't committed violent crimes either. They were arrested for taking bribes
from $50 to $5,000."

Of course, he had never arrested sixty or seventy cops-especially without an
exhaustive grand jury probe. Rudy also neglected to note one difference between
corrupt cops and dirty Wall Street dealers: cops carry guns. Perhaps most important,
Rudy may well have acted so decisively precisely because his tipster was as
well-heeled as the targets. The suave Siegel got a responsive respect from Rudy's
office that someone less "rich and powerful," as Rudy put it, was unlikely to receive-
especially without tapes or any other form of corroboration.

When a judge refused the prosecution's request for a trial delay, Rudy's office,
faced with a dearth of evidence, withdrew the indictments against the three men.
Rudy promised a new indictment in "record-breaking time." After languishing,
however, for two and a half years, the new investigation finally, mercifully, fizzled
out. When no new charges were brought against Wigton and Tabor, both men
were, at last, cleared. In the anti-climactic end to Rudy's sensational string of insider
trading cases, Robert Freeman copped a minor plea to a single count of illegal
insider stock trading and received a four-month prison sentence. The story of
the Wall Street Three became a lasting symbol of prosecutorial fanaticism and
grist for future Rudy opponents.

"That was a gaffe," said Harold Tyler in a 1993 Newsday article on Rudy's handling
of the Tabor, Freeman and Wigton matter. "Totally unnecessary."

Tyler is also now highly critical of another infamous case prosecuted by his protege,
a case that Tyler himself investigated as a federal judge.

Bess Myerson had a long list of notable credentials: the first Jewish Miss
America; 1980 U.S. Senate candidate; New York City Cultural Affairs Commis-
SIOner; and former confidante of Mayor Ed Koch. She also had a mob-tied
boyfriend who was a major city contractor caught in a successful Giuliani tax
prosecution. Taken together, these attributes made for an irresistible target in
Rudy's eyes.

Tyler, who submitted a report on the Myerson case to Koch, told Newsday in
1993 that Rudy's prosecution of Myerson was "an appalling mistake, a waste of
government money ... a tragedy. What's the point?"

It all started in the spring of 1983 when Myerson's boyfriend, Carl Capasso, was
trying to wrest himself loose from a prior marriage. The judge presiding over
Capasso's divorce case was Hortense Gabel. During the height of the divorce case,
Gabel was trying to help her thirty-five-year-old daughter Sukhreet find a job,
and sent out her resume to dozens of people-including Cultural Affairs
Commissioner Bess Myerson. After a few dinners and outings with Sukhreet,
Myerson hired her as a special assistant. The story was soon in the newspapers:
the Cultural Affairs Commissioner who hired the daughter of the judge who was
presiding over her boyfriend's divorce case. Sukhreet, after a falling out with
Myerson, left the job.

On October 7, 1987, Rudy announced at one of his trademark press conferences
the indictment of Myerson, Capasso and Hortense Gabel on bribery and mail-fraud
charges. In addition to the charge that Myerson had hired Judge Gabel's daughter in
exchange for the judge's favorable treatment toward Capasso in the divorce case,
Myerson was accused of obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to influence
Sukhreet's grand jury testimony. While some questioned whether the case should
have been brought at all, even Giuliani allies agreed that it was a critical mistake to
include the seventy-four-year-old, nearly blind retired judge, who, at worst, was
guilty of loving a clinically depressed daughter too much. That error was compounded
when Giuliani put the erratic Sukhreet on the stand to testify against her
mother. What particularly appalled many-on the jury and across the city-was
Sukhreet's clandestine tape-recording of a conversation with her mother.

What also shocked some lawyers and judges was Rudy's attempt to get the
judge assigned to the case, Kevin Duffy, to recuse himself. Noting that Judge Gabel
and her lawyer Milton Gould had ties to Judge Duffy-Gould had once recommended
Duffy's wife for a judgeship ten years earlier-Rudy argued Duffy was
unfit to preside over the case. Duffy wrote an opinion in which he alleged that the
cavalier prosecutor was trying "to throw a little mud and see if it sticks."
Nonetheless, Duffy voluntary stepped down.

On December 22, 1988, more than a year after the indictment was announced,
Myerson, Capasso and Judge Gabel were acquitted of all charges.

What perplexed Tyler most about Rudy's handling of the Myerson case was
that his protege, with whom he had worked closely for five years, never consulted
him on the matter. "Rudy didn't want to hear from me about anything," he says
now. "He could have called me. I don't think [the case] did Rudy any good. He was
guilty of overkill." Tyler adds: "Rudy's a very insecure person in a way, and it
takes security to seek advice."

Tyler felt Rudy could have also used some advice on the highly publicized racketeering
and fraud prosecution of Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos, telling
Newsday that his protege "deserves" the criticism he received on the case. Marcos,
who had been indicted by Rudy, went on trial after he left office and was acquitted
on July 2, 1990 of charges that she had raided her country's treasury and invested
the money in the United States.

Although he lost both the Myerson and Marcos cases, Rudy successfully prosecuted
another prominent woman, the self-proclaimed "Hotel Queen" Leona
Helmsley. Helmsley, who once reportedly said" only the little people pay taxes,"
was indicted by Rudy and convicted after he left office, in August 1989, of cheating
the government out of more than $1.2 million in federal income taxes.

A former aide of Rudy's told New York magazine in September 1985: "He was
striving hard in those times, with long range goals in mind. He wanted to achieve
the Thomas Dewey identity, the gangbuster, the Eliot Ness crime fighter ... on the
running boards with the Tommy guns blazing-it's Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, bustin' the
mob, bustin' Wall Street, bustin' the crooked politicians. So every time the FBI,
whose people really did the grunt work, brought in a case with a big bow on it, he
would insist on taking the lead. If anyone else held a press conference, he'd go
nuts. Nuts. This man does not do a duet, he only does a solo."

***

Known as "The King of Queens," Donald Manes was the Queens borough
president, Democratic county leader and, more importantly, indispensable
political ally and friend to then Mayor Ed Koch. He commanded a de facto right of
approval over every public project, land-use decision and development plan in his
borough. Combining the perfect mix of negotiating skill, governmental knowledge
and budgetary mastery, Manes had, by the mid-1980s, proven himself a highly effective
politician. Taking deeper and deeper slices out of the multibillion-dollar
city budget, Manes delivered the goods for Queens. He had even stanched the advancing
decay of the Jamaica area by convincing the Social Security
Administration to station its regional headquarters there and arranging the opening
of York College-Regina's longtime employer.

In the early morning of January 10, 1986, Manes was driving erratically on the
Grand Central Parkway. Two police officers pulled him over. Peering into the car,
they noticed the Queens borough president was bleeding from a two-inch gash on
his left wrist. "I'm cut," Manes said.

Although Manes denied he had attempted suicide in January, he attempted it
again two months later at home by driving an eight-inch kitchen knife into his
heart. This time he was successful. Both attempts were a response to the pressure
of a sudden Giuliani probe that had begun with undercover tapes in Chicago and
would end with the prosecution of the city and state's most powerful Democratic
boss, Stanley Friedman, Manes's secret partner in crime.

From the moment of Manes's first suicide attempt on, a scandal smoldering beneath
the surface of the Koch administration erupted. The city's Parking
Violations Bureau (PVB) had been accepting payoffs in exchange for collection
contracts. A friend of Manes's, Geoffrey Lindenauer, was the deputy director of the
bureau, and he'd shared a half million dollars in bribes with Manes. The Chicago
tape opened the door because one Manes briber was also making payoffs there and
talked about it to an FBI informant. Over the next two years, as the scope of the
scandal was revealed, it became clear that dozens of city officials and pols were involved
in a wide range of scandals.

Since Rudy had resuscitated the Southern District's public corruption unit in
early 1984, its attorneys had been prosecuting a smattering of low- and middlelevel
officials. When the Parking Violations Bureau scandal broke, the public corruption
unit went from being a remote outpost to central command center.

It was a time of unparalleled ethical turmoil in the city. One scandal after another
was served up in the pages of city newspapers-with many of the details
leaked by Rudy's office-and Rudy became the acclaimed antidote to a culture
that groaned with corruption. In a tarnished, soulless city, he was Mr. Clean.

Three weeks before Manes's final suicide attempt, Rudy's office indicted
Lindenauer on thirty-nine counts. The parking bureau's former deputy director
quickly pled guilty to racketeering and mail fraud and agreed to testify against others
involved in the bribery scheme. On March 26, two weeks after Manes's death,
Rudy's office indicted millionaire businessman and former transportation administrator
Michael Lazar and former Parking Violations Bureau head Lester Shafran.
The indictment charged that Lazar and Shafran had conspired with Manes and
Lindenauer to extort payoffs from companies doing business with the bureau.

On April 9, Rudy hooked the great marlin of the scandal: the Bronx boss
Stanley Friedman, who had more influence over Koch's City Hall than anyone
outside the administration. With a goatee and a penchant for gold chains, he was a
powerful kingmaker, who had recently orchestrated the reelection of his puppet,
Stanley Simon, as borough president. He was also a lobbyist with a bustling practice.
In 1985, he pulled in $900,000 from various clients, most of whom did business
with city government. He would exercise his muscle as a county leader to get
people hired and then he would lobby them to get what he wanted. Rudy used the
RICO statute to indict Friedman and the rest-defining a city agency, for the first
time, as a racketeering enterprise and threatening its predators with the most severe
punishment possible.

Friedman was charged with paying a $30,000 bribe in November to Manes and
Lindenauer to obtain a parking bureau contract sought by Datacom Systems,
Corp., a company he represented. He was also accused of attempting to bribe
Lindenauer and Manes for help in acquiring a $22.7 million parking bureau contract
for Citisource-a company in which he held $2 million in stock-for the
manufacture of hand-held traffic ticket computers. The bribes came in the form of
stock. The indictment also alleged that Friedman engineered a towing deal for the
parking bureau that could have potentially raised $50 million in revenue for the
city-one percent of which was to go straight into his pocket, and 10 percent into
the pockets of Manes and Lindenauer.

Rudy wanted to try the case himself, but since it was going to trial at the same
as the "Commission" case, he was forced to decide between the two. "The commission
case could not be lost," one assistant told the American Lawyer. "It was
all on tape. As Rudy put it, he had to make a choice between being a trial lawyer
and being a disc jockey."

Friedman's lawyer, Tom Puccio, was a prime reason Rudy chose to try Friedman.
Rudy thought the former Eastern District prosecutor and now celebrated defense
attorney, who had been close to Rudy during the Leuci days, was gaining an upper
hand with the judge in the case, Whitman Knapp, who had headed the Knapp
Commission on police corruption. The two assistants who had been handling the
Friedman case, Bill Schwartz and David Zornow, would not, Rudy feared, be a
match for the formidable Puccio.

The other reason Rudy chose to prosecute Friedman was a churning contempt
for public corruption. In 1987, he told Vanity Fair: "1 don't think there's anybody
much worse than a public official who sells his office, expect maybe for a murderer."

The Friedman trial was the climax of one of the worst scandals in New York
City history. Rudy knew that if he lost, it would be viewed as a devastating personal
defeat-diminishing his chances for high public office before they were even
announced. It was Rudy's first big criminal trial since Podell's twelve years earlier
and the first he had ever tried in such a fishbowl environment.

To protect against the possible prejudice that could accompany a monsoon of
New York City press coverage, the trial was moved to New Haven, Connecticut.
The relocation only led, however, to the siege of the New England college town by
a swarm of cameras and reporters. Rudy suddenly found himself center stage in
the most important trial of his life. The crush of publicity was dizzying. The stage
lights were searing. The stakes were higher than they had ever been.

He went to New Haven with a seven-member team of assistants, FBI agents and
a city Investigations Department attorney. They stayed in the Park Plaza hotel, a
nineteen-story structure near the courthouse. One hotel suite became a document-
cluttered rehearsal chamber where Giuliani, Schwartz and Zornow took
their own witnesses through practice cross-examinations.

When Donna finished her nightly news show at WPIX, she would often rush to
Grand Central to catch the two-hour train to New Haven and hail a cab to Rudy's
hotel. As soon as she got to his suite, Rudy would devour her with kisses-sometimes
in front of a reporter or staff. She would spend the night, often staying up
early into the morning to listen to her husband run through the case. In the morning,
she would go back to New York for work. A day or two later, she would repeat
the strenuous commute.

At home was their first child, Andrew Harold Giuliani, born on January 26,
1986, within days of Manes's attempted suicide. Rudy had frantically worked on
the PVB case throughout Andrew's first months of life. Grandma Helen, stillliving
in Queens, family friends and a baby-sitter, cared for Andrew during Donna's
frequent sojourns. Eight-month-old Andrew made one appearance with his
mother and father in the New Haven courtroom, prompting Friedman to point his
finger at the family parading before the cameras as evidence that he was the victim
of a prosecution calculated to spur a political career.

During a lunch break after Rudy's morning cross-examination of Friedman,
Donna became a supportive but forceful trial coach. The cross had not been stellar.
Rudy was visibly nervous, stumbling through his own questions. His assistants
held their tongues, but now, during lunch, Donna did not. She firmly told him he
was faltering and needed to get his act together.

It was a sharp contrast with the events of the cross-examination lunch break of
his last big trial-Podell-when a pre-planned plea agreement was used to turn
Rudy's performance into legend. His afternoon cross of Friedman was, however,
more focused and productive, wearing the defendant down.

On November 25, 1986, after eight weeks of testimony and contentious crossexaminations
and a blitzkrieg of press, Stanley Friedman and three others were
found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy and mail fraud.

A stunned Friedman, flanked by his wife and children, returned to the theme of
Rudy's ambitions. "1 suggest when he throws his hat in the ring and when he announces
his candidacy," he told reporters, "1 hope you say somewhere along the
line that maybe Stanley Friedman was right."

It was an unrivaled victory for Rudy. But it was not just Stanley Friedman's fate
that he had altered. Rudy had presided over a radical transformation of the political
landscape. The scope of his investigations of Koch administration scandals
widened to include Congressman Mario Biaggi and Bronx Borough President
Stanley Simon-who also both went to prison. By the end of Rudy's term as U.S.
Attorney, he had ushered in the end of an era: the demise of Democratic machine
politics in New York City.

It is customary after a major trial for the U.S. Attorney to take the assistants
who handled it out to a fancy dinner to celebrate the win. But Rudy hosted no dinner
immediately after Friedman. Finally, a few months later, he gathered up
Zorn ow, Schwartz and the others. The location: a Chinese restaurant called Flower
Drum. At the end of the evening, Rudy started figuring out how to split the tab,
and the assistants, slightly surprised, reluctantly reached for their wallets.

***

In late 1987, after his four years at the helm of the Southern District, the persistent,
gossip-fed speculation that had dogged him since the day he took office
finally hardened into fact: Rudy Giuliani was mulling a run for the United States
Senate.

Newspapers reported in early December 1987 that Rudy's resignation as U.S.
Attorney was anticipated by the end of the year. Although he wouldn't officially
announce his candidacy for several weeks, Rudy told the New York Times on
December 3, "1 think I'd be very good" as a senator, adding, "I don't have any
question that I could do the job in an innovative and creative way."

The voice feeding Rudy political advice was the same nasal, Long Island purr
that had landed him his current job-AI D' Amato's. Rudy had been prodded years
earlier by a number of Republican luminaries to consider a run for governor-a
suggestion that got little support from D' Amato, who had an unofficial, nonag-
gression pact with Mario Cuomo at the time. "Somewhere in that process," recalled
Rudy, "his advice was, 'Do not run for governor, don't consider it, but I really
think you should keep your mind open to the idea of running against
Moynihan in 1988."

The two went out on a double date in the summer of 1987-Rudy with Donna,
the separated Fonz with "a woman who works in Washington"-to discuss the
Senate bid. D' Amato, who had promised to raise millions for Rudy's race, cranked
on his churlish charm, making an all-out pitch for Rudy to run.

Donna echoed D' Amato's enthusiasm in subsequent talks with her husband,
telling him that he "had a good chance of beating" Moynihan. Upstate was a locale
in which Rudy would have a particularly good chance, Donna believed. "She said
that I get along with those people," said Rudy. "We see eye to eye."

On January 11, 1988, the New York Times ran a story headlined: "Giuliani Says
He Is Available for Senate Seat." Rudy was quoted cautioning that "I cannot leave
unless I'm sure the right person succeeds me." He added that his successor "must
be chosen within the next two weeks," or he would "remain in office as U.S.
Attorney." He also noted that he had "been talking with Senator D' Amato about
several possible candidates." A month later, however, Rudy would say that negotiations
with D' Amato to find the "right person" had actually ended in early January.

The race to fill Rudy's considerable shoes was already becoming highly politicized,
entangled with concerns about how two sensitive cases underway in his office
would be handled if he left. The first was a sprawling bribery and racketeering
probe that reached into the top levels of the Reagan White House.

The Wedtech Corporation was founded in 1965 as a small South Bronx-based
machine shop by John Mariotta, a tool and die maker whose parents had emigrated
from Puerto Rico. As the fledgling company, then known as the Welbilt
Corporation, expanded, Mariotta hired a Rumanian immigrant, Fred Neuberger, as
his partner. Billing their company as home-grown panacea for the plight of the
poverty-racked South Bronx, Mariotta and Neuberger expanded Wedtech from a
small machine shop into a prominent defense contractor by bribing a host of influential
public officials and exploiting contracts designed for minority-owned
businesses. Eventually acquiring almost $500 million in federal contracts, Wedtech
plied a network of well-connected lobbyists and helpful pols, even winning a public
commendation from Reagan himself.

The host of public officials recruited as Wedtech allies included D' Amato,
Congressman Mario Biaggi, Bronx Borough President Stanley Simon and even
former Reagan campaign manager Lyn Nofziger and White House counselor and
Attorney General Edwin Meese III.

Rudy's probe-begun in early 1986 and based on a tip from an informant-was
part of the office's wide-ranging investigation of Bronx politics and focused initially
on local officials like Biaggi. With several top Wedtech executives pleading
guilty and cooperating, Giuliani announced the indictments of Marriota, Simon
and Biaggi and others in June, 1987. By then, the Giuliani probe had also uncovered
the role of Nofziger, a lobbyist for Wedtech.

In February 1987, a federal panel of judges in Washington appointed prominent
Washington trial attorney James McKay as an independent counsel assigned to investigate
Nofziger-whose alleged influence-peddling on behalf of a variety of
clients had attracted media attention. McKay's probe eventually widened to include
Meese as well. Wedtech was also part of McKay's Meese investigation.

The link between Meese and Wedtech was a personal-injury attorney from San
Francisco named E. Robert Wallach, who had known Meese since 1958, when they
were classmates together at Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California
at Berkeley. When Meese was appointed counselor to the President on January 21,
1981, he immediately threw a bone to Wallach, naming him to the Presidential
Task Force on the Administration of Justice. Wallach invited a group of fifty local
civic leaders to a dinner at Jack's Restaurant in San Francisco and announced that
if anyone had any concerns or ideas they wanted brought to the White House's attention,
Bob Wallach was the man to see.

As Rudy's probe into Wedtech expanded, his cooperating witnesses, and a trove
of documents discovered in Washington, led him to Wallach. Wallach had lobbied
Meese to help obtain a $32 million army contract for Wedtech. Between 1981 and
1986, the ingratiating injury lawyer received $1.3 million in fees from the company,
while also collecting stock. He flooded Meese with memos and calls about
Wed tech, and Meese did intervene on behalf of the company regarding the army
contract.

Bob Wallach was no Stanley Friedman-but he was no Richard Wigton, either.
When his friend attained high-level positions in the administration, Wallach paraded
his influence with Meese like a kid flaunting a new toy. He was a sycophantic,
self-promoting inside dealer, whose behavior invited investigation. Whether he
committed crimes, however, was another matter entirely.

Rudy's willingness to pursue a man who had been widely described as the "best
friend" of the attorney general-and, indeed, to pursue the attorney general himself-
displayed a unusual independence and courage. It also required unusual discipline
and judgment.

Rudy's office reeled Wallach in for the first time in late 1986, trying to get his
cooperation. They kept the heat on through 1987, informing him in April that he
was a target of the probe. That forced Meese to sign a recusal statement, removing
himself from any matters involving his friend. If Wallach cooperated, however, it
would be against Meese-and that would put Rudy's probe in direct conflict with
McKay's, who had been charged with investigating Meese precisely to get the case
out of the Justice Department's hands.

These concurrent investigations had been bumping against each other for some
time. In a June 23, 1987 memo, McKay's deputy, Carol Bruce, complained of ongoing
conflicts with the Southern District. "Over the last 2 weeks," Bruce wrote, "we
have become deeply concerned and frustrated over our inability to move forward
on information [about] which SDNY is taking the lead." As a remedy, she proposed
that all matters relating to Bob Wallach-and two other Wedtech consultants connected
to Meese, Franklyn Chinn and Rusty Kent London-be removed from
SDNY and placed solely in the hands of the Independent Counsel's office. McKay
could not, however, get the Justice Department to approve that switch.

When Rudy quietly moved to indict Wallach, Chinn and London in December
1987, he had to inform McKay, who raised strong doubts about the way Giuliani
was handling the matter. A December 18, 1987 letter from McKay to Rudy began:
"We have very serious concerns about both the timing and the content of this
draft indictment." McKay was in the middle of plea negotiations with Chinn, who
was, in addition to his Wedtech ties, Meese's personal investment advisor. "On
Friday, December 11, you advised me that your office had decided that you now
had sufficient evidence to indict Chinn, London and Wallach and that you wanted
to return an indictment on December 23, 1987," McKay recounted, noting that the
indictment date was subsequently moved up even further-to the 21st. "I expressed
concern about the short turn-around time," complaining that Giuliani was
"forcing" Chinn to make a quick decision on his plea offer. McKay said this also
compromised the negotiations with Rusty London, who was Chinn's business associate
and was contemplating a plea bargain.

McKay pointed out that his office's repeated requests for a copy of Rudy's draft
indictment had gone ignored until the last minute and blasted Giuliani's attempts
to lean on Wallach to cooperate. "I am particularly troubled by your gratuitous
comments in your December 1, 1987 letter about the 'pressure' purportedly put on
Wallach by your office," McKay's letter bluntly stated. Indicating that he was never
made aware of the attempts to turn the heat up on Wallach, McKay wrote that "we
never concluded that such 'pressure' was beneficial to [our] investigation."

Rudy brushed off McKay's objections and issued an eighteen-count indictment
against the three defendants. What McKay didn't know was that Rudy was in a
rush to indict Wallach, due more to his own personal-and political-calendar
than any legal circumstances. Rudy wanted the Wallach matter settled before he
took a long Christmas break. He planned on assessing his career options over the
break, having promised D' Amato he would make a decision about the Senate race
by early January. He had already scheduled meetings with political and public relations
consultants-among them, Republican heavyweight Roger Ailes and famous
TV ad whiz Tony Schwartz, who had worked on the 1964 Johnson campaign.
Rudy also later claimed that he wanted the indictment done so that if he left,
Meese couldn't install a replacement who would kill the Wallach case.

"When Wedtech got indicted," Rudy said in an unpublished interview, "and,
right before Christmas. That was really the point at which I said, 'Now I can really
devote some time to thinking about leaving and about running, and the timing of
it.' Over the Christmas holidays I spent time looking at all these different polls
people gave to me, talking to Denny about it, talking to [old Justice Department
pal] Jay Waldman about it."

It was an extraordinary example of a character flaw that would brand Rudy's
public persona: unmitigated, unconditional myopia. He forced the Christmas indictment
of a pivotal figure in a national scandal to the consternation of an independent
counsel so he could talk to campaign advisors without complications.

A couple of days before Christmas, around 9 P.M., Robert Wallach got a phone
call at his San Francisco home. It was his lawyer, Ted Wells, in New York. Realizing
it was midnight in New York, Wallach braced himself for bad news. Wells informed
him that he had just spoken to Rudy's deputy, Baruch Weiss, who said that
the U.S. Attorney's Office was prepared to indict Wallach by the end of the weekunless
he agreed to travel to New York, sit down with Rudy and "tell him the
criminal acts in which Meese engaged." If Wallach cooperated, Wells explained,
the indictment would be reconsidered. A stunned Wallach instantly told Wells that
"I wouldn't do it." He remembers that "Ted didn't urge me" to do it.

Rudy's ambush attempt to flip Wallach was, according to Wallach, inconsistent
with a promise the office had made months before. He recalled Weiss reassuring
Wells, "We will give you ample notice if we indict Bob Wallach." Frantic at the
last-second notice, Wallach told his secretary and live-in girlfriend, Glenda Jones,
that Rudy Giuliani was going to indict him. Then he broke down and wept.

In August 1989, Wallach and friends were convicted on racketeering charges. In
June 1991, the conviction was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals when it
was discovered that a key government witness had provided perjured testimony.
The government retried Wallach, but on July 30,1993, a hung jury refused to convict
him, resulting in a mistrial. Seven years after the case against him began,
Wallach was finally free.

The case against Wallach was always a close call. The ultimate outcome made it
clear how misguided Giuliani was to allow his own personal agenda to dictate
when he would decide it.

Meese seemed oblivious to the ethical compromise caused by his ties to
Wallach. While the Wallach investigation was going on, Meese had offered his
friend several Justice Department jobs, including a high-level position of counselor
to the Attorney General. Indeed, it was only three weeks after Deputy
Attorney General Arnold Burns had advised Meese to "distance yourself" from
Wallach, that Meese presented his friend with the coveted counselor job. "Mr.
Meese continued to support Mr. Wallach and to defend Mr. Wallach in the press,
in testimony before the Congress, and in the public," said Burns. "This continued
after Mr. Wallach was indicted by Mr. Meese's Department of Justice."

Criminal Division Chief William T. Weld was of the same view. He testified before
the Senate that the relationship between Meese and Wallach" constituted the
use of Mr. Meese's public office for the private gain of Mr. Wallach."

On March 29, 1988, Weld and Burns presented letters of resignation to Meese.
They were shortly followed by the resignation of Burns's top aide, Randy Levine.
They had all been Giuliani allies within Justice and would remain close associates
of his for years. Giuliani's Wallach probe had in effect prompted a mutiny in the
halls of justice.

Three and a half months later, on July 18, 1988, Independent Counsel James
McKay concluded his fourteen-month probe by releasing a 829-page report stating
that, although Meese had probably broken conflict-of-interest laws, there was
"insufficient evidence" to prosecute the attorney general for taking bribes or illegal
gratuities. Claiming he had been "vindicated" by McKay's report, Meese resigned
in August.

Meese's worst public moment, however, would come less than a month later,
during the racketeering trial of Biaggi, Simon and Mariotta. The trial became a
volatile exchange with Meese's reputation pummeled by both the defense and the
prosecution.

Biaggi's attorneys argued that Wedtech did not need to bribe their client and
other Democratic politicians-the company, they maintained, only needed to put
a call in to high-powered Reagan administration figures for help in obtaining government
contracts.

Rebutting these contentions, assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Little said in his summation:
"What's the defense here? It's very clear: The Wedtech officers would not
have bought Congressman Biaggi [because] they already bought Ed Meese. Well,
this is ridiculous. This isn't a who-dunnit case .... Wed tech bribed a whole ream of
people .... There are two short answers to this 'Meese defense'," he continued.
"The first is, Meese was a sleaze. The second is, Meese was a sleaze, too. In addition
to these people."

Little got Giuliani's approval beforehand to use the word "sleaze" to describe
Meese, an extraordinary event in the annals of federal law enforcement. On
August 4, 1988, Biaggi and his co-defendants were convicted.

"The Wed tech investigation has been one of the most comprehensive and revealing
investigations of corruption in history," Rudy told reporters. "It involved
significant members of both political parties and businessmen willing to payoff
those officials."

The other case that weighed on Rudy as he pondered a Senate run involved billionaire
junk bond king Michael Milken and his corporate Leviathan, Drexel
Burnham. Implicated by Ivan Boesky, Milken, the Drexel high-yield securities
head, was targeted by Rudy's office along with Milken's brother, Lowell, and others
in a massive, three-year, insider-trading probe. The eventual $650 million settlement
with Drexel and the guilty plea extracted from Milken--obtained after Rudy
had left office-were the crowning achievement of Rudy's war on Wall Street.

Rudy publicly acknowledged during his January deliberations about a Senate
run that" four or five very, very sensitive investigations" were getting in the way
of his possible candidacy. Wedtech was high on that list. The case that worried him
most, though, was the one he had developed against Drexel and its infamous junk
bond head.

A number of alarming coincidences had come to Rudy's attention linking
Drexel to none other than Rudy's political patron, Al D' Amato. Milken had personally
hosted a fundraising party for D' Amato in Beverly Hills, two months after
the senator announced that his securities subcommittee would hold hearings
on junk bond reforms. Rudy also learned that Drexel bankers had given D' Amato
$70,000 in campaign contributions, as well as thousands more from Drexel clients,
publicists and lawyers. Mike Armstrong, D' Amato's attorney and the chairman of
the screening committee that would hand-pick Rudy's replacement, was on retainer
to Drexel, representing Lowell Milken in Rudy's criminal probe.

After D' Amato refused to support Rudy's top aide, Howard Wilson, as his successor,
Rudy's unease with the senator solidified into palpable scorn. When Rudy
learned that D' Amato's screening panel was considering a slate of successors for
Rudy who also represented Drexel clients or principals, the antipathy between the
two men erupted, with each taking shots at the other.

Rudy even started carrying with him copies of the National Law Journal containing
articles condemning his securities prosecutions that were authored by
Armstrong and Otto Obermaier, D'Amato's favored candidate to succeed Rudy. He
was afraid Obermaier would scuttle his office's RICO and insider-trading investigations.

On February 8, 1988, Rudy announced that he wasn't running for Senate after
all. "It would be wrong for me to leave this office now," he told reporters, "whatever
the allure of another office or opportunity, because it would adversely affect
some very sensitive matters still in progress."

D' Amato's interest in fielding a viable Moynihan challenger quickly evaporated.
He barely raised a dime for Giuliani's substitute. Rudy stayed on as US.
Attorney for nearly a year, leaving the post in January 1989.

***

The legendary legacy of the crime-crushing US. Attorney with the altar boy
lisp suffered a few serious setbacks in the two years after Rudy left office at
the start of 1989. In the spring and summer of 1991, for instance, a number of
lauded victories, particularly in white-collar crime, were overturned in rapid-fire
fashion, one after the other. From March to August, the Second US. Circuit Court
of Appeals consecutively reversed or voided four major convictions-including
Wallach's, the guilty verdict against Ivan Boesky associate John Mulheren for securities
fraud, and stock manipulations convictions against GAF Corp. head James
T. Sherwin. In reacting to the string of appeals decisions, the Wall Street Journal
ran an editorial headlined "The Greed Decade Reversed." Giuliani's post-partum
defeats fed the clamor of accusations that he had been a self-aggrandizing prosecutor
more interested in media attention than justice.

A lengthy March 1989 piece in the American Lawyer on Giuliani's legacy as
US. Attorney reported that in a survey of fifty-five lawyers and federal judges, "a
majority voiced criticism of Giuliani and the office he has led." The article's author,
Connie Bruck, wrote that a common theme of the various criticisms was an
"unease" with Rudy, and "a sense of an ambition so raw and consuming that that
which sustains it is embraced willy nilly."

In November 1989, Judge John Sprizzo dismissed charges in a major drug case
brought by Rudy's office. He told Rudy's assistants: "There is in your office, a kind
of overkill, a kind of overzealousness, which is not even-from my viewpoint as a
person who has been a prosecutor-rationally related to any legitimate prosecutive
objectives."

The vast majority of Rudy's famous prosecutions, however, remained intact,
and his overall reversal rate was comparatively insignificant. That Rudy made a
substantial impact as a prosecutor-however controversial or suspect his tacticsis
irrefutable. His insatiable appetite for blockbuster cases-and his successful
prosecution of the majority of those cases-badly wounded the Mafia and altered
the face of New York politics. In discussing his legacy, Rudy told the New York
Times on July 11, 1989: "I think we made cases more successfully during the period
of time I was US. Attorney than ever before in the history of the office, and
that's what did it. I don't think it's a myth-like thing. I think it's a matter of substance."

Posted on the city's official web page, a segment of Rudy's current biography
covering his days as us. Attorney proclaims: "He spearheaded the effort to jail
drug dealers, fight organized crime, break the web of corruption in government
and prosecute white collar criminals. Few US. Attorneys in history can match his
record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals."

Assessing the performance of Giuliani's five-and-a-half year reign as US.
Attorney, however, is not as simple as a roundup of his greatest hits or his greatest
failures-or the recitation of one set of numbers. When his record is put to statistical
scrutiny, the great legacy loses a considerable amount of luster.

The annual average number of total cases handled during the Rudy years,
9,933, increased 20 percent from his predecessor's annual average of 8,304. The
rate of guilty dispositions under Rudy rose from 70 percent to 88 percent.

Those numbers, however, paint only a partial portrait. The rest of the canvas is
wide open.

First of all, the 4,152 convictions that "few us. Attorneys in history can match"
is a figure Rudy reflexively cites as proof of the stunning success of his record. While
he'll admit he had twenty-five reversals, what Rudy won't mention is that, during
his five-and-a-half-year term, he also had 540 acquittals. Nor does he mention that
the percentage of criminal cases dismissed during his tenure nearly doubled, rising
from 5.3 percent in 1984 to 10.1 percent in 1988. During the same period, dismissals
in the Eastern District declined from 7.7 percent to 5.6 percent. Rudy also doesn't
explain that few us. Attorneys serve for five and half years and simply don't have
the time to rack up as many convictions. When the number of Rudy's convictions is
annualized, it is, in fact, lower than that of the maligned John Martin. Rudy's office
snared an annual average of 830 convictions, while Martin's got 940. In fact, an
analysis of the overview data provided by the Department of Justice shows that
Martin was a markedly more productive us. Attorney than Giuliani.

The average number of assistants during Rudy's term was 128, compared to 104
under Martin-giving Rudy a staff 23 percent larger than Martin's. The number
of total cases-criminal and civil-handled by each assistant, however, during
Rudy's term, dropped from 79.9 to 77.6, a 3 percent reduction. More importantly,
the annual average number of cases closed by each assistant fell, during the Rudy
years, from 31 to 22.1, a 29 percent drop.

The performance of the Southern District during Rudy's tenure also pales when
compared to the ten other largest U.S. Attorney's offices around the country in the
same time frame. Although the Southern District had an annual average of 128 attorneys-
the highest number of any office in the country-its annual rate of
cases closed per assistant, 22.1, was the lowest among all the offices. The Texas
Southern District had the highest closing rate, 56.2, more than double the
Southern District's. Collectively, the ten other offices closed an average of thirtyfour
cases per assistant, 54 percent higher than Rudy's office.

The most striking comparison, however, emerges between Rudy's office and
that of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District in Brooklyn. Although the
Southern District, during the Rudy years, commanded a staff 80 percent larger
than the Eastern District's, assistants in the Brooklyn-based district handled an
annual average of 169 cases, 118 percent higher than Rudy's assistants. They
closed an annual average of thirty-seven cases, a rate 67 percent higher than
Southern District closings.

While the average annual number of civil cases handled under Rudy, 7,811, rose
33 percent over Martin, the number of civil cases closed by Rudy's office dropped
by 1 percent (nationally, civil case closings rose by 7 percent during the same period).
The average annual number of criminal cases handled during the Rudy
years was 21 percent lower than in Martin's office, a drop from 2,428 to 1,921. The
decline in the annual number of criminal case closings during the Rudy years was
even deeper, from 1,339 to 972, a 27 percent drop.

In late 1984, Rudy released an annual forty-nine-page report spelling out the
record of his office for 1983, a year he'd split down the middle with Martin.
Annual reports had been issued at the Southern District for years, allowing reporters
and others to measure the effectiveness of the office. A New York magazine
story a few years earlier relied on the reports to document the SONY's
decline in the prosecution of public corruption cases. Giuliani's 1983 report came
so late in 1984, it said the 1984 report would be available soon. But the second report
wasn't released. In fact, Rudy never published another annual report. The effectiveness
of his service was left to be judged by press conferences, newspaper
articles and his own legendary aura.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:06 am

Nine: Looking for Love: The Ed Koch Investigation

ON HIS WAY TO THE NEW YORK POST FORUM ON AIDS THAT AUGUST
6 morning in 1987, sixty-two-year-old Ed Koch was overwrought. The
day before, while sitting with Deputy Mayor Stan Brezenoff, special assistant
John LoCicero and press secretary George Arzt, he'd suddenly blurted out: "1
am not a homosexual. I am not a homosexual."

"Do you know how much pain he must be in?" Brezenoff said when they
left Koch's office. A mayor who lived with a shield around him-insulating his
private life even in his best-selling memoir-was suddenly engulfed by the
most personal innuendo. Arzt and his deputy Lee Jones were fielding persistent
questions from reporters about a supposed former lover of the mayor's,
Richard Nathan.

Newsday's Lenny Levitt was all over the story. So were the Village Voice's
Jack Newfield, the Daily News's Marcia Kramer, the Post's Joe Nicholson, the
Amsterdam News's Bill Tatum, the New York Observer's Tom Robbins and
even the L.A. Weekly's Doug Sadownick. The delicacy of the story pushed reporters
to collaborate more than compete-sharing information and jointly
trying to figure out the best placement and presentation. Levitt, Newfield and
Robbins lunched at a Village restaurant, Bradley's, on July 31 to discuss their
mutual interest in the story. Newfield and Levitt tried unsuccessfully to convince
a Nathan confidant, gay rights leader and Koch critic David Rothenberg,
to reveal whatever Nathan told him about the relationship.

What few knew was that Nathan had also inexplicably become a subject of
intense interest to federal investigators working for U.S. Attorney Rudy
Giuliani. Unbeknownst to City Hall, the federal probe and the press inquiries
had become surprisingly intertwined. All an exasperated Arzt and Jones knew
was that suddenly a half dozen tough reporters were asking again and again
about a Californian the mayor hadn't seen in almost a decade.

The crisis had been building since 1986, when Nathan had dinner at an otherwise
empty Los Angeles restaurant with Larry Kramer, the legendary AIDS
activist who'd helped launch ACT-Up and the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Nathan told
Kramer about an alleged 1977-78 affair with the bachelor mayor that ended around
the time Koch took office. Nathan had worked in Koch's 1977 campaign, co-chaired
a health-care task force for the mayor in early 1978, and, when he did not get the
post in the new administration he wanted, moved to California later that year.

A few months after his dinner with Kramer, Nathan came to New York and repeated
the story at Kramer's Fifth Avenue apartment to Rodger McFarlane, the
head of a Memorial Sloan Kettering AIDS program. Kramer and McFarlane made
clear to Nathan their desire to "out" Koch. They were convinced Koch had failed
to adequately fund the fight against AIDS for fear that too much concern might
feed public suspicions that he was gay. Nathan said he "wanted to help" when he
met Kramer in L.A.; but now he was hesitating. By mid-1987, Kramer, who literally
held Koch accountable for the deaths of thousands, was telling anyone in the
press who would listen about Nathan. He was also handing out Nathan's phone
number and address.

"Someone is going to say something" -either directly about Nathan or the gay
issue-Koch predicted the night before the Post forum. "I hope Larry Kramer
doesn't stand up and shout from the audience." Jones recalls that they were collectively
"concerned that a question might come up, either from Kramer or a reporter."
The mayor's sexual orientation was, says Jones, "an active issue and a
question about it would've greatly disturbed all of us."

Koch thought he'd made a mistake by refusing to meet with Kramer years earlier.
He'd even asked his police detail to remove Kramer when a city commissioner
introduced him at a 1982 party and Kramer launched into a tirade about the administration's
indifference to the plague. Since then, Kramer had written a play,
The Normal Heart, which chronicled, among much else, the failure of the Koch
administration to confront the epidemic. It was after seeing that play in L.A. that
Nathan approached Kramer at a political fundraiser and suggested the dinner.
Koch merely regretted his Kramer rebuff as an ill-advised political error; the
Nathan allegations, however, tormented him. Now the two issues were joined.

Koch had lived with the nightmarish specter of a gay news story most of his politicallife.
When he ran against Mario Cuomo for mayor in 1977, Cuomo supporters
sent sound trucks through Brooklyn streets, blaring: "Vote for Cuomo, not
the homo." When asked directly-by Playboy and at a City Council hearing on a
gay rights bill-he'd refused to answer. He'd once stated movingly: "If I were gay,
I hope I'd be proud enough to admit it." Now, Koch was faced, for the first time,
with a concrete charge. It was coming, at least indirectly, from a credible Harvard
grad with a substantial health-consulting business who'd once been part of the in-
ner circle that had attended regular Sunday suppers at Koch's Village apartment.
Not even the spectacularly brusque Koch could easily dismiss it.

But it wasn't just the general press clamor that had City Hall uneasy about the
Post forum. Rodger McFarlane had relayed the Nathan story to Nicholson, the
Post's medicine and science editor, and Nicholson had gone to Arzt with it. He'd
told Arzt that "an ex-romantic interest" of Koch's was willing to go public about
the relationship, but that Nicholson was not going forward with the story. "If the
mayor is ever interested in telling his own story and is looking for a sympathetic
ear," Nicholson added, "I hope he will think of me." The first openly gay reporter
on a New York daily, Nicholson was queasy about the Kramer/McFarlane thesis
that Koch's bumbling on the AIDS front required the expose of this deeply personalliaison.
But he did buy into the Kramer thesis enough to propose a question
at a planning session for the upcoming Post forum.

A member of the panel that would question the mayor, Nicholson told his fellow
panelists shortly before the scheduled breakfast event that he wanted to ask if
Koch had been "hesitant" in dealing with AIDS "because he was a closet homosexual."
Eric Breindel, the editorial page editor of the paper and another panel
member, hotly resisted such an inquiry. Somehow word of the possible question
made its way into City Hall, where the Post's former bureau chief, Arzt, was now
press secretary.

But Kramer did not appear at the forum, Nicholson did not ask his question and
Koch, as always a jewel of a political performer, wowed one of the largest audiences
to ever attend a Post extravaganza. On the way to the car, though, the mayor
suddenly said to his aides: "I feellightheaded." He spoke of a twinge.

Koch, Arzt and Bill Grinker, the Human Resources commissioner, got into the
backseat of the city car, behind two cops, driver Eddie Martinez and shotgun
Michael Aponte. They left the midtown Sheraton Hotel and headed toward a welfare
center in the Bronx, with Grinker briefing the mayor on what to expect. Koch
pitched forward in his seat, grabbing Martinez by the shoulder. liMy speech is
slurred," he said. "Turn around and take me to Lenox Hill." Aponte put the siren
on. The car headed for Lenox Hill Hospital, a nearby private hospital with an excellent
reputation. The irrepressible Koch paused and quipped-" or Bellevue," the
closest municipal hospital. By the time they got to Lenox Hill, Martinez had to
wrap his arm around the gangly, six-foot-one-inch mayor, who when he tried to
stand up was bent at the waist and pointed headfirst toward the ground. The left
side of his face sagged visibly.

It was the first time in Koch's life that he felt at risk. He would later say: "I had
a stroke and I got out of the hospital in four days without any paralysis or diminu-
tion of my faculties. That was a miracle. And, in fact, that's what they told me. I
came within a hair's breadth of being paralyzed." A doctor tried to put the best
face on it, saying Koch had a "trivial stroke."

"Trivial to him," the mayor retorted. Koch would later make a point of telling
Nicholson it was" a full-fledged stroke," as if the reporter's threatened question
had prompted it. The mayor's prognosis, after a four-day hospital stay, was uncertain
enough that Koch sent a letter to the City Clerk on September 25 delegating
many of his powers to Brezenoff in case of a "temporary inability to discharge the
duties of my office by reason of sickness or otherwise."

***

Three weeks before the Brezenoff letter, Richard Nathan flew to New York
again, this time to prepare for a command performance at the U.S.
Attorney's office at Saint Andrew's Plaza, a few steps behind City Hall. In a year
and a half of federal witnesses beating a path from City Hall to Foley Square, none
was summoned for a stranger reason than Nathan. A man who hadn't actually
been to City Hall for nine years would now spend an hour and a half answering
questions about a mayor he may have once known too well, at least as far as federal
prosecutors in Manhattan were concerned.

His primary interrogator was Tony Lombardi, an IRS agent assigned to the
Southern District at Rudy Giuliani's personal request. An investigator with unrivaled
access to Giuliani, Lombardi had reached out to Nathan in August, calling
him twice in L.A. "I was invited to New York to meet him. One way or another, he
was going to talk to me," Nathan said in an interview years later. "I thought he
would've subpoenaed me."

Nathan went with his attorney Jack McAvoy on September 9, 1987, for a 10
A.M. meeting that, as they recalled it, also included two other government investigators.
McAvoy, a partner at White & Case, one of the most prestigious firms in
the country, had flown up from Washington. "We were responding," he recalls
now, "to contacts that were very much official and from within the office of the
United States Attorney."

McAvoy says that the meeting took some time to put together after Lombardi's
initial call to Nathan's home, which certainly occurred in August or earlier.
McAvoy and Nathan had to discuss the issues that might come up, and Nathan decided
to arrange business meetings in New York to coincide with his visit with the
feds. Lombardi's daily appointment diaries list Nathan's name a couple of times in
August, once with his phone number. It's unclear how Lombardi identified and
found Nathan because he did not talk to Larry Kramer until a month after Nathan
first appeared in the logs.

when they finally got together, they sat stiffly in an office on the one of the top
floors at St. Andrew's, underneath two framed headshots of Ronald Reagan and
Rudy Giuliani.

Lombardi's logs also indicate that he'd already been talking to reporters about
Nathan, including an August 26 entry that read "Len Levitt re Richard Nathan."
Marcia Kramer (no relation to Larry), who, like Newfield, also appeared often on
Lombardi's logs, told Newfield on September 3: "I hear Nathan flew in to meet
with Rudy's office," suggesting he arrived several days before the interview.
Marcia Kramer, who ran the News's bureau at City Hall and was talking repearedly
to Arzt about the unfolding Nathan events, added, according to
Newfield's notes: "Koch berserk-reason for stroke." Kramer's comment was
clearly Arzt's chilling diagnosis, more a personal than medical assessment. But the
sequence of events had convinced a few Koch insiders that the connection could be
real.

In a book Koch wrote twelve years later, I'm Not Done Yet, he would observe in
a half sentence that he believed "the corruption crisis precipitated my stroke." In
fact, the two high points of the crisis-the Manes suicide and Friedman trial-occurred
in 1986, many months before the stroke. The other major indictment, involving
his Cultural Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson, wouldn't happen until
October. The scandal was in fact finally receding in August 1987. In the same book,
however, Koch made a reference to the Kramer efforts to "out" him, oblique
though it was. "Those who seek to 'out' people who mayor may not be gay can be
described as comparable to the Jew catchers of Nazi Germany," he wrote. His
anger, so many years later, is a measure of just how deeply he still feels about the
attempted use of Nathan.

"Lombardi really wanted to probe into things that I told him were of a personal
nature," Nathan recalled. So did two L.A.-based reporters who came to his front
door. So did Tatum, the owner and editor of the nation's largest-circulation black
weekly, who pressed Nathan on the phone until he broke down in tears. Nathan
was getting so freaked out he was reaching out to his longtime conduit to Koch,
Dan Wolf, the mayor's closest friend and ever-present political adviser. He was
telling Wolf-during his periodic New York visits as well-everything that was
going on.

He was also talking to Arzt, Jones and Maureen Connelly, the mayor's former
press secretary who'd known Nathan since the 1977 mayoral campaign. Connelly
was brought in to try to calm the wiry and intense Nathan, who'd backed off his
initial indication to Larry Kramer that he'd go public, but needed professional
press advice on how to handle the heat he was getting. Jones said he and the fortynine-
year-old Nathan had a couple of jittery conversations: "You could tell he was
not the kind of guy to go public."

By the time he met with Lombardi, Nathan was outraged and ready to fight.
Described by a friend as someone who "never even discussed his homosexuality
with his family," Nathan adopted a simple motto for prosecutors and press. He
made it clear to Lombardi at the outset: "My private life is private." McAvoy recalls
that Nathan" gave them a sermon"-declaring that he "would not answer
questions about his personal life with the mayor"-and that they then backed off.

The rest of the questions from the press and from Lombardi, which closely
dovetailed because they were feeding off each other, focused on a $12,800 consulting
contract Nathan had received from the city in 1981. It was a no-bid deal,
awarded by Brezenoff personally when Brezenoff was the president of the city's
Health & Hospitals Corporation (HHC). But Brezenoff had also rejected Nathan's
bid for a much larger contract in 1980, and Nathan's credentials as a management
consultant were substantial. Nathan believed that the only reason so puny a contract
was attracting such enormous interest-even after the statute of limitations
would have made any conceivable prosecution involving it impossible-was because
of the sex story that lurked behind it. The theory was that it could be portrayed
as a public favor to hush up a disgruntled lover.

"My meeting with Lombardi had a two-part agenda: there were the HHC contracts,
which was the above-ground agenda, and the private life, which was the below-
ground agenda," said Nathan. "It was an open secret what he was chasing.
You don't get summoned to New York to discuss your love life. They don't put
that on a subpoena."

Lombardi, said Nathan, was "a hired gun looking for dirt. I guess he figured if
he huffed and puffed loud enough, he could get something out of me." Instead
Nathan threw the HHC deal in Lombardi's face, countering any thought that he
"was bought off" by rattling off his consulting credits. Lombardi's "eyes began to
glaze over," Nathan remembered. Lombardi had a slew of documents about the
contract-including the two reports Nathan had written to earn his paltry fee. His
eyes glaring at Lombardi like searchlights and his hands punctuating the air,
Nathan recited in machinegun-like fashion the elaborate work he'd done, saying
later: "Lombardi had zero interest in ambulatory care in Staten Island"-the subject
of a Nathan HHC report.

When questioned by a reporter years later about this interview, Lombardi
tried to describe Nathan as a "witness" in a "confidential investigation" unre-
lated to Koch's sex life and claimed that it was the consultant who wanted to talk
about sex. "The guy gets on a soapbox about this pillow talk and all this crap,"
the investigator said. "We had to restrain this guy. He talked about Mr. A, B, C,
D and E."

Though Nathan never revealed his Wolf, Arzt, Connelly and Jones conversations,
he said in a subsequent interview that he didn't know if Koch was aware of
Lombardi personally, "but he sure as hell must have been aware that people were
out looking over his bedtime activities." Nathan also believed that Lombardi was
partly responsible for the press barrage, saying: "I do think that there were some
leaks." Lombardi listed Nathan in his diaries six times, with the last entry on
September 20.

As soon as the references to Nathan ended, Larry Kramer's name appeared. On
September 23, Lombardi went to Kramer's apartment at 1:30 P.M. Kramer visited
the Southern District, apparently on September 30, for a second conversation. "It
was a very friendly meeting," Kramer said of the Lombardi sessions. "I was
amenable to giving them anything I knew. I was interested in outing Koch and he
was interested in the contract I guess. Or he might have been interested in outing
Koch too and used the contract." The second meeting was attended by an assistant
U.S. Attorney CAUSA) Kramer couldn't identify and Kevin Ford, a city inspector
general deputized to work with Giuliani's office on public corruption cases.

Kramer had heard of the alleged affair with Nathan even before the two met in
L.A. and he'd told Nathan from the outset that he would go public with anything
Nathan told him. He felt no guilt about a breach of either Nathan's confidence or
any gay ethic. "Lombardi asked a lot of questions about who was gay in city government,"
Kramer recalled, adding that they even discussed prominent gay
women as well as two gay male judges. "I was told by somebody that Koch would
go every Monday night to a building in the West 20s; the implication being that
was where his boyfriend lived. I told Lombardi that. I was given a list of names of
everybody who lived there to see if I could recognize a name."

Lombardi listened, intently, always chewing gum. A six-footer with slickedback,
glistening black hair who always leaned forward in the direction of whoever
he was talking to, Lombardi was a trained sponge. He had 163 carded confidential
informants over a twenty-two-year IRS career, sucking information out of them
with a beguiling you-take-care-of-me-and-I'll-take-care-of-you ease. He was so
conscious of every form of surveillance he would take elaborate steps to avoid an
overhear, picking a source up in his garish white Caddy and sitting silently until
he was driving through a car wash. Then, with suds, water and brushes beating on
the car, he'd speak in clipped sentences that were barely a whisper.

His slick suits, manicured fingernails and pocket-squared shirts mimicked those
of the gangsters he'd put away. His stiff and wide walk advertised that he was "carrying"
and, in between his interviews with Nathan, Kramer and others, he scooted
off to the firing range more often than most other agents with accounting degrees.

The proudest part of a career that ranged from Richard Nixon's security detail
to staffing the President's Commission on Organized Crime was the work he was
now doing for Giuliani. Lombardi, at forty-four, had become an extension of
Giuliani. Often leaving his wife and four kids alone in their Staten Island home,
Lombardi would drive Rudy all over the city, babysit his kids and get him free
tickets in skyboxes at Giants Stadium and Yankee Stadium.

As the only agent exclusively assigned to the public corruption unit at the peak
of the municipal scandal, he and Rudy met often at the end of the workday, close
to 8 P.M., when all but Rudy's closest aides were gone. His diaries contained
Giuliani's phone numbers at his in-laws' California home during a 1987 vacation,
and indicated he was invited to Rudy's birthday, "private" Christmas and anniversary
dinners. Lombardi bragged that, when Giuliani ran for mayor a year and a
half later, that he would get a top post in a new Rudy administration, predicting he
might even become a commissioner.

Lombardi's spinning wheel of media contacts-his diaries named nineteen
members of the New York press corps he spoke to-was a consequence of the
widespread perception that he was Rudy's designated leaker. Reporters were so
sure he was Giuliani's eyes, ears and, most of all, mouth they assured editors that
when they had a tip from Tony, it was as solid as if it came from Rudy himself.

A Treasury Department report on Lombardi a few years later-when he was in
some trouble himself-would quote him as saying that he "took his instructions
from Giuliani." He told the Inspector General's office, according to the report, that
he "basically did what Giuliani, his power base in the U.S. Attorney's office,
wanted." Lombardi also subsequently testified in a federal grand jury that he "reported
directly to Mr. Giuliani" and that "everyday I came to work I went to him
to seek out what duties I needed to perform."

Even in a press interview about his Nathan and other politically sensitive
probes, Lombardi later maintained: "1 followed their direction on everything.
There is not one thing I did that they didn't know about," referring to Giuliani and
his top aides. "One way or another they would know about it."

Confronted in the same press interview about the Kramer questioning, he acknowledged
he'd talked to the activist, but insisted that Kramer was a witness in a
secret investigation, just like Nathan. He said Kramer's claim that they talked
about Koch's reputed homosexuality was "absolute bullshit." Kevin Ford, how-
ever, said Kramer described "in gross detail" what he claimed to be first- and secondhand
accounts of "Ed Koch's sex life." Ford thought Kramer called and asked to
come in, but Kramer and Lombardi's diaries indicate that it was Lombardi who
first went to him.

Even before the interviews with Nathan and Kramer, Lombardi, Kevin Ford and
an AUSA in Giuliani's office, David Lawrence, had begun questioning Herb
Rickman, an openly gay aide in City Hall who'd been close to Koch for decades. In
Rickman's case, however, the initial inquiries clearly did involve a legitimate lawenforcement
issue. Lombardi, Ford and Lawrence were investigating criminal allegations
against Bess Myerson, the former Miss America who had joined the
administration as Consumer Affairs Commissioner. Rickman would ultimately
become a key government witness at Myerson's trial.

One of the hottest cases in Rudy's office, it was the Myerson case that so expanded
Lombardi's media rolodex. It would also prove to be Lombardi's biggest
embarrassment in the Giuliani years. He was the agent who installed a bug on the
phone of impressionable Sukhreet Gabel, allowing the government witness to tape
her own, seventy-eight-year-old mother, Hortense, a state judge ultimately
charged by Giuliani with fixing a divorce case for Myerson's boyfriend. Testimony
about the taping helped turn the Myerson trial into pathetic theater and soured
the jury, leading to one of Rudy's biggest prosecutorial losses.

The first of dozens of times that Rickman appeared in Lombardi's diaries was a
June 15 lunch. It's unclear when Lombardi and his colleagues began discussing
Koch's sex life with Rickman, but he says now that "it came up six or seven times
over the course of months of witness preparation." A former Southern District
AUSA, Rickman was initially considered "a potential subject" in the Myerson
probe, according to Ford. But he quickly convinced the prosecutors, as he puts it,
that he "was clean," and began boasting in City Hall about how well he was getting
along with them.

Although he had been a frequent social companion of the mayor's, Rickman's
enthusiastic cooperation with the Myerson investigators drove a wedge between
him and the embattled Koch. It didn't help that Rickman came back to City Hall
from one of his frequent visits with the prosecutors and told a top Koch aide: "Get
ready for the next round. These guys are saying stories are coming on Ed and the
whole homosexual issue. Reporters are coming to them." The comment fueled the
Nathan fears already consuming the mayor.

"There was a great deal of candor going back and forth," Rickman says of his
talks with Lombardi, Lawrence and Ford. "They never pushed me against the wall.
They would mention it and drop it. I knew it wasn't proper; it wasn't germane. I
said you're going outside the confines of my testimony. Lawrence's line was 'we
need to prepare for any surprises' on cross-examination." Rickman said Lawrence,
another close Giuliani aide, raised the issue more often than Lombardi.

"They also told me about leaks coming out on this issue from everywhere,"
Rickman said. "When I heard Larry Kramer's name, I bristled. They mentioned
he'd been calling them. I thought this was no longer kosher. I was surprised assistant
U.S. attorneys were going into that." Asked when the three began raising
Koch's sexuality, Rickman said: "Almost from the start, they got involved in the
whole question of cross-examination surprise."

Ford denied that they'd probed Rickman about sex-life matters, but added: "We
had a series of meetings with Herb in which he would talk about the mayor's personallife
and how it would be played out in the press and things that were being
said, that sort of thing. Most of it had no particular relevance for what we were doing."
The logs also contain several references to a Rickman assistant at City Hall,
David Mack Gilbert, who was a gay activist hired by the administration to act as a
liaison to gay groups. First listed on the diaries in August-the peak moment of
the sex inquiry-he did not tell Rickman he was talking to Lombardi. Gilbert has
since died, but Rickman says he had no involvement in any Myerson matter.

Lombardi even began calling a former commissioner of business development,
Larry Kieves, who'd been dumped in 1986 in a grand display of Koch intolerance
of ethical conflicts (he'd made a small investment in a company that did business
with his agency). Listed four times in Lombardi's logs, starting within days of the
Nathan interview, he was finally questioned at the Southern District in the late afternoon
of October 22. The ostensible purpose of the interview was that Rickman
had referred Sukhreet Gabel to his agency for a possible job, a matter certainly relevant
to the Myerson case (a city job for Sukhreet at Myerson's agency was the
bribe charged in the indictment).

"Then they said they wanted to move on to other things," said Kieves, who was
also questioned by "two or three guys" but was never used as a witness at the
Myerson trial. "They started asking other weird questions. It was a free-form
search of who I knew and what I knew and they certainly left me with the impression
that they were interested in Koch's sexual preference. Did I think Ed
Koch was gay, they asked. I thought it was odd." It did not occur to the heterosexual
Kieves that he might have qualified for this rather special Southern District inquiry
simply because he was thirty-nine and single.

In addition to the four who confirmed the sex-life questioning, Lombardi's diaries
for the same period include several other Koch associates close enough to
know about his personal life. Dan Wolf was listed in mid-March 1988, as was his
home address (Lombardi usually spelled out the location of meetings in his logs,
whether at "SDNY" or outside). Kramer told Lombardi that it was Wolf who convinced
Nathan not to go public with the affair. Henry Stern, the Parks
Commissioner, was brought in for questioning the same day as Kramer that
September (he "can't recall" it). Victor Botnick, the mayor's top health adviser
who had trekked out to California to see Nathan at city expense, appeared on the
logs on April 8, with his high-profile Washington criminal attorney, Andy Lawler.
Botnick was a top HHC official overseeing the consulting work Nathan had done.
In addition to this meeting, Lawler's name pops up elsewhere in 1987 and 1988.

As Lombardi put it: "We called in a number of people who would, I think, have
a sensitivity about their background. And we would do the best not even to talk
about it. who the hell cares what their sexual persuasion was?" Ford added that
he, Lombardi and Lawrence "spoke to a number of people who were involved
with the letting of Nathan's contract." Botnick was also grilled, according to
Ford, about a threat against Rickman that Botnick supposedly heard from
Myerson and relayed to "both Rickman and Koch." Botnick raised the eyebrows
of the sexually vigilant trio by confirming Myerson's threat, Ford said, and volunteering
that "he was in Koch's bedroom when he called Rickman" to tell him
about it. The innuendo of the location stuck in Ford's mind even though the
thirty-three-year-old Botnick was married, with a three-year-old. Part of Koch's
guarded private world since high school, Botnick was frequently described as the
mayor's surrogate son.

When the Lombardi team asked Koch about the Myerson threat-and Lombardi
did list three interviews with the mayor in his diary, including one in Gracie
Mansion the same day as a Kramer session-the mayor insisted he'd spoken to
Botnick by phone. Koch was questioned because he would also become a government
witness in the Myerson trial, though a far less eager one than Rickman.

Once Nathan drew his line in the sand on sex, Lombardi never reached out for
him again. The contract was such a transparent excuse they never even questioned
Brezenoff, the man who had awarded it. All he remembers is putting together a
package of documents on the Nathan deal to respond to "press implications of a
quid pro quo."

Throughout the time that Lombardi et al. were gathering intelligence about the
mayor's predilections, the logs indicate his constant exchanges with Giuliani: five
entries in September; more in October. The Lombardi probe took a vacation when
Giuliani briefly considered a run for the Senate against Pat Moynihan at the end
of 1987 and beginning of 1988, but it resumed in March, when Giuliani had
clearly refocused on a probable mayoral run.

On February 8, Giuliani announced that he wasn't running against Moynihan
and the Times speculated that Giuliani "may be waiting to run for mayor next
year" against Koch. "I guess we scratch off the Senate," Giuliani said. "Other offices
in the future, it's silly for me to speculate." The Times reported that" early
soundings by Giuliani" had revealed his name recognition and reputation "were
greatest in New York City and that there were decided weaknesses among upstate
conservative Republicans."

Bill Lynch, who was deputy to Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins,
recalls two meetings he had at the Vista Hotel in the spring and summer of 1988
with Marty Benjamin, a close friend of Giuliani's. Benjamin was feeling out Lynch
about the possibility of his taking on a managerial position in what he said was
Giuliani's planned mayoral race. The city's top black political operative, Lynch was
viewed as a valuable asset in winning the anti-Koch black vote in 1989. Lynch says
that Benjamin and he planned a third meeting in the fall, with Peter Powers and
Rudy, but by then Dinkins decided he was interested himself. Lynch wound up
managing Dinkins's campaign.

Giuliani said in December that he had been talking with Staten Island Borough
President Guy Molinari and others about entering the mayoral race "for four or
five months." He told the callers that he had "not ruled out the option of running
for mayor," but could not say more while U.S. Attorney. The Lombardi probe of
Koch occurred against this background of beneath-the-surface mayoral interest,
but it never led to the big-bang story that might've knocked Koch out of the race.

Newsday's Lenny Levitt anguished over doing a story, but decided not to. Bill
Tatum, who wrote a weekly diatribe in the Amsterdam News demanding Koch's
resignation, was so moved by Nathan's tears, and the quality of the reports
Nathan wrote for the city, that he dropped the story. The L.A. Weekly published a
meandering, analytical piece on October 9 headlined: "Mayor Ed Koch: Is He
Gay?" It didn't name Nathan, but cited an unspecified person who supposedly had
a relationship with Koch, citing Kramer and others.

The Village Voice followed a week later with another tepid analysis of the link
between Koch's reputed sexuality and AIDS policy. It named Nathan, though, explored
his HHC contracts and reached no hard conclusions about the relationship
or Koch's sexuality. Throughout 1988, especially during the Myerson trial in the
fall, the air was filled with talk of possible revelations about Koch's sex life.
Myerson's public threats, suggesting she had information that could lead to "the
downfall" of the Koch administration, were coupled with rumors about Koch's
"Westhampton gay trysts," which Lombardi fed. Koch and Rickman had visited
Myerson at a Westhampton summer estate.

Unbeknownst to Lombardi, he himself was, by October 27, 1987, the subject of
a criminal investigation. The IRS Inspector General had opened a probe of his relationship
with Arnold Herman, a New Jersey businessman who had a big tax
problem. Lombardi's name surfaced in tapes made by a wired informant who was
talking to Herman. A friend and confidential informant of Lombardi's for almost
twenty years, Herman would eventually plead guilty to tax charges.

He testified that he had lent the agent $7,000 that was never repaid, sold the
Cadillac and another car to him at a discount, paid for Lombardi's Giants season
tickets for fifteen years and, on about twenty occasions, arranged and paid for
rooms for Lombardi at two New Jersey hotels. IRS rules prohibit agents from having
any type of financial relationship with an informant. Herman, supported by
the tapes, alleged that Lombardi provided "inside information" to him on the IRS
handling of his own tax problem.

On November 30, 1988, Herman had a taped conversation with his co-conspirator
in the tax scam, unaware that his associate was wired and cooperating with
the government. So intrigued by his friend Lombardi's work that he actually visited
the then ongoing Myerson trial, Herman related his own version of the probe
of Koch's sex life:

HERMAN: There's more to it than Bess Myerson.

JOE GIAMBATTISTA: Oh, really? Oh that's what you're not reading
about.

HERMAN: There's more to it than Myerson, they're trying to nail Koch.

JOE: He seems so clean.

HERMAN: They don't want to understand that, so now they're saying well
he's gay, he's got a lover, oh so what, who gives a shit. Does that make
him better or worse or whatever?

JOE: SO long as he doesn't get AIDS.

HERMAN: I say this to you very honestly, I say Lombardi what's the big
deal but on the other hand, you know, he looks at it, like, this is his job.

On January 11, 1989, two weeks after Myerson, Gable and Capasso were acquitted,
Rudy Giuliani announced that he was leaving the U.S. Attorney's office.
As Koch had been publicly predicting since October, Giuliani would soon declare
his candidacy for mayor. No gay story had appeared to drive Koch from the race,
and none hung in the offing. He said he would seek a fourth term, a decision he
said he had reached in the aftermath of the stroke, when he had found an inner
strength.

Dick Nathan concluded that what he called "Subject X"-the not-too-veiled
purpose of his SDNY interrogation-"was exposing Ed Koch in order to win for
Giuliani the mayorship of the City of New York." Nathan died in July 1996 at the
age of fifty-eight. The self-made millionaire left a $2.5 million estate, most of
which he gave to nonprofit organizations. His will said the goals of his bequest
were "to promote increased understanding of the nature of homophobia and the
irrational fear, hatred and rejection of gay persons, their lives and their values." A
secondary purpose was to "foster positive attitudes with regard to being gay
among gay persons themselves." Like Nathan, Rickman looks back now at the sex
inquiry as something done "purely for Rudy's political purposes." Even Larry
Kramer, who concedes that "there wasn't anything" he wouldn't have done to get
Koch, sees the probe now as "heinous, in the clear light of day."

"They were trying to get blackmail stuff on Koch," Kramer concluded. In a book
that Koch co-authored with New York's Cardinal John O'Connor and published in
early 1989, he referred to the L.A. Weekly and Village Voice pieces about Nathan
and his sex life. He also recounted how Kramer had" decided he would bait me,
cause me anguish or destroy me by denouncing me as homosexual." Koch said his
staff was "more pained than I was" by the Kramer strategy, but that none of the
regular press picked up on "this objectionable material." Since the incident occurred,
he noted, at the time of Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart's
public sexual escapade, it was "to the credit of the New York press" that it did not
publish the Kramer charges.

"I have been in 24 elections beginning with 1962," Koch wrote, clearly conscious
of the campaign that was about to begin. "In every single one of those elections,
my opponent would seek to defame me by spreading the rumor that I was
gay." He said he decided that "people could think whatever they wanted to. My
sexuality, just like my religion, is a private matter."

But in March, with Giuliani an all-but announced opponent, Koch suddenly
claimed in a radio interview, for the first time ever: "It happens that I'm heterosexual."
At a press conference the next day, he denied he'd made the statement on
the eve of the race to defuse the issue. His aides were alarmed at this voluntary revival
of the controversy, but the Nathan/Kramer hubbub had never died down in
Koch's head and, as he faced his fateful final election, it haunted him.

The Lombardi sex probe contaminated an office Rudy had revered and, in many
ways, uplifted. It was the ugly flip-side of the corruption prosecutions that had
brought down the party pillars of the Koch regime, Manes and Friedman. It was
also a harbinger of the dirty tricks operation to come. Lombardi's work was hardly
done. The race for mayor had barely begun.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:06 am

Ten: In John Lindsay's Footsteps

ON MAY 17, 1989, RUDY GIULIANI ANNOUNCED FOR MAYOR. A WEEK
shy of his forty-fifth birthday, he was finally a candidate for something
other than class president. It wasn't the office he'd always imagined, but it was
the right stage-a fight to rule the world's grandest city fit him just fine.

He wrote his speech himself-in longhand on a yellow legal pad -just like
he'd done his homework at Bishop Loughlin. In fact, he returned to Loughlin
to give the speech. It had such a Kennedyesque cadence and message, his college
girlfriend Kathy Livermore would have felt at horne with it. It carne out
of him as naturally as a bedtime story for his three-year-old son, Andrew.
Everything his church had taught him in sixteen years of Catholic education
about the corporal works of mercy and a reverence for service found its way
into this memoir of hope. Everything his law enforcement career had taught
him about the power of evenhanded justice and government's duty to defend
found its way into this statement of strength. It was a summation-not of trial
evidence-but of the best in his own life.

Homelessness is not a matter merely of statistics and economics, it is a
matter of conscience. Each time the administration attacks those less fortunate
by exaggerated and cruel characterizations, New York loses a bit of
its soul.

***

We must recognize that the problem of homelessness is not one problem
but many. Some of the homeless are mentally ill. Others are drug addicts.
But many more simply are people who can no longer afford a place to
live.

***

New York must encourage a system of smaller and more tailored facilities
to help the homeless rejoin society quickly and productively ....

Corruption in New York must be confronted and confronted directly.

As a candidate for mayor and as mayor I am seeking support on one basis
and one basis alone-that you agree with me that honest, decent and effective
government must be restored.

If you offer support or money expecting any special deals, forget about it,
save your money.

Let me repeat it one more time-no deals for jobs, no deals for contributors.

If you are now receiving special favors to which you are not entitled, you
had better be willing to give them up or you better redouble your efforts to
defeat me ....

***

Most of my career has been spent in law enforcement. No one is more
qualified to lead New York in the fight against crime.

As mayor I will instill a sense of fear in those who commit serious crimes ...

***

This is the city of my roots.

It is in my heart and it is in my soul.

My grandparents and my father are buried in the soil of this city.

All of my past draws me to take on this challenge, to restore the city of my
grandparents and parents, of my relatives and my friends and to offer New
Yorkers hope for the future once again ....


Rudy opened the day at the noisy and sweltering Metropolitan Republican Club
on the Upper East Side, delivering his thirty-minute speech in the large meeting
room where Fiorello La Guardia announced for mayor in 1933. A three-term
mayor whose name is synonymous with the city, La Guardia was one of three
Republicans to win City Hall this century. He beat the Democrats as a fusion candidate-
merging the Republican line with other small, independent parties and
forging, said Rudy, "a movement by people of every political stripe to kick out an
old, tired and corrupt administration." Giuliani said he would do the same. Taking
no questions, he, Andrew and a pregnant Donna headed on a campaign bus to appearances
in every other borough-Loughlin in Brooklyn, an evangelical church
in the South Bronx, and predominantly Catholic sections of Queens and Staten
Island.

Several of the early campaign speeches that followed-and the detailed elevenpage
program on the homeless and nine-page program on AIDS-were far more
liberal and daring than those of any of the four Democrats then running in a party
primary. After opening with a quote from Bobby Kennedy, Giuliani's July 23
speech on race relations used the mob stereotyping of Italian Americans as a parallel
for the street-criminal stereotyping of blacks, finding common ground for
ethnic victims who are often antagonists. "The truth," he said, "works for blacksas
well as for Italian Americans."

Promising "a government of inclusion" and an "end to alienation," he made a
commitment to "recruit and bring into government blacks, Latinos, Asians and
women ... so that everyone sees a direct connection to the governing of this city."
Calling for "an end to the shame of racism," he said he would establish a Mayor's
Council for Racial and Ethnic Harmony, strengthen the New York City Human
Rights Commission, push for stiffer penalties for discriminatory conduct, make a
"real city investment" in what he called "neighborhoods of opportunity," expand
the City Youth Corps, and establish a Mayor's Championship Series for little
leagues and other baseball programs.

A week later, he offered a rationale of why he was moving from the U.S.
Attorney's office to City Hall in a speech at St. John the Divine titled "A City That
Cares." A prosecutor, he said, "cannot ease crushing poverty, or end homelessness,
or treat drug addicts, or help people with AIDS. But a mayor can. And a mayor
must."

"Our city had to be sued to open emergency shelters for homeless men," he said
in one of his repeated attacks on the heartlessness of the Koch administration. "And
sued again to shelter homeless women. And sued once more to house homeless
families. What kind of leadership leaves the governing of our city to the courts?
Common decency, conscience, commitment compels us to do better." Citing the
need for shelter, permanent housing, drug treatment and" an agenda driven by
compassion and commitment," Giuliani said that "government's crucial role in
helping people over the pains and difficulties of life" was its "most noble" purpose.

"I will face these problems as a challenge to my conscience," he said, "and the
conscience of our city to help our fellow human beings." He visited shelters in the
dead of night with Bob Hayes, the lawyer whose suits had forced the Koch administration
to agree to a right to shelter. "I watched him walk through a sea of beds,"
Hayes recalled their visit to the 1,000-bed Washington Heights shelter for homeless
males. "Homeless guys recognized him. He was connecting. He greeted them,
talked to them, listened and this was a crowd of 90 percent African Americans.
They recognized him. They seemed to like him. It was a good feeling to take him
around. He was engaging."

Hayes said they spent three or four half days together, that Rudy "very much
wanted me to meet his wife" and was "very excited about making change, getting
her involved." The homeless plan Giuliani later announced was drawn from
Hayes's blueprint. The two also toured some of the street and subway camps
where the homeless gathered, and Rudy began listening as well to the television
journalist who'd given homelessness its human face, WNBC's Gabe Pressman.

In an unpublished interview taped in the spring of 1989, Giuliani spoke of "the
need to open hundreds of small shelters, intermediate and small term," saying you
might have to "break a thousand" by the time "you're finished." With these small
shelters replacing "the barracks," he said, a mayor would "have to exercise some
political leadership and courage" to overcome community resistance and locate
them fairly all across the city."

"It's not easy to overcome some of the stereotypes of homeless people, but I
think it can be done," he said. "I think you can call on the things that are better in
people. You can ask people to do things that are painful if you can show people a
way to resolve this problem."

He accused Koch-in interviews before his announcement-of "beating up on
homeless people." He said Koch's description of them as drug addicted and mentally
ill was an example of "trying to make political points by using harsh words."
Instead he tried to use his law enforcement credentials to legitimize and decriminalize
the homeless, saying in one speech that it was "the advocates for doing
nothing" who "dramatically exaggerate the number of homeless who are criminals
or mentally disturbed."

He even tried to present his long-standing support of the death penalty through
a liberal prism. In a New York magazine interview with Joe Klein published just
before his announcement, he said, "I'm in favor of the death penalty in cases of
aggravated crime-the murder of a law enforcement officer, mass murder, a particularly
heinous killing. I think it should be imposed only in cases where there is
a certainty of guilt well beyond a reasonable doubt." He told Howard Kurtz in the
Washington Post: "The death penalty is an irrelevant issue," refusing to play what
he called "the death penalty game" even though the vetoes of two consecutive
Democratic governors had made it a proven vote-winner in city and state politics.

One of his first campaign dinners was with David Dinkins, the African-
American borough president of Manhattan who was running against Koch and
others in the Democratic primary. Giuliani asked for the dinner, saying he wanted
an understanding with Dinkins that if they opposed each other in the fall, the
campaign would not be "between an Italian-American and an African-American,"
but "between two New Yorkers, two concerned public servants, each offering their
own vision of the city's future."

As with so much else Rudy did that spring and summer, however, the approach
to Dinkins was geared to building bridges with a potential November ally in the
general election race that Giuliani had always expected: a head-to-head with Koch.
With Koch saying that Jews would have to be "crazy" to vote for Jesse Jackson in
New York's 1988 presidential primary, he had so alienated himself from black voters
that Giuliani expected to carry this core Democratic vote in November. Had
Koch won the primary, Dinkins's campaign manager Bill Lynch was considering
playing a role in Giuliani's November effort, independent of his 1988 conversations
with Giuliani pal Marty Bergman. Efforts on Rudy's behalf were made to
reach out to anti-Koch black leaders like Congressman Major Owens.

The emphasis on the homeless was a calculated attempt to position himself to
the left of Koch on an issue that, for the moment, was profoundly affecting moderate
and liberal Democrats.

The unwillingness to pander on the death penalty was a reminder of how
Candidate Koch had milked it in the 1977 mayoral run against Mario Cuomo.

The commitment to inclusion was in contrast with a twelve-year Koch record of
minority exclusion.

The "guarantee" of "drug treatment on demand" was an impassioned rebuke of
Koch for the drug explosion on his watch, offered repeatedly as a gentle complement
to the law enforcement focus on drugs everyone expected of him.

Certainly the ethics rap that Giuliani did everywhere-"we've had a mayor for
too long who has kept his eyes closed, his ears clogged and his mouth gaping when
corruption has been unearthed in his administration"-was a direct hit on Koch.
Even in his seminal announcement speech, he targeted Koch alone among the
five other candidates in the race: "If you're happy with the way things are," he
said, "re-elect Ed Koch."

The assumption of the Giuliani candidacy from the outset was that he had to
marshal the support of disaffected liberal Democrats-turned off by the scandals
and polarization of the Koch years-to defeat a renominated mayor in a tough
November battle. Roger Stone, a Republican political strategist, observed later:
"Giuliani was perfectly positioned to beat Mayor Koch," adding that in a race
against the incumbent, "the liberal-black-Latino coalition would have opened up
to Rudy the Reformer, simply because he was not Koch."

So Giuliani never mentioned his Republican roots in his announcement or any
other early major speech or commercial. Instead, he fixated on gaining the endorsement
of the Liberal Party, a once influential third party founded by labor
leaders Alex Rose and David Dubinsky in 1944, when the Communist left took
over the other progressive party with ballot status in New York, the American
Labor Party. The Liberals had twice helped elect the only prior Republican mayor
in the second half of the twentieth century, John Lindsay, endorsing him, together
with the GOP in 1965, and alone in 1969. It had not endorsed a mayoral winner
since, though it had lent its ballot line to Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, the two
Democratic governors who'd ruled the state since 1974. It stuck with Democrats in
state races to assure itself of the 50,000 votes a party must get in a gubernatorial
election to maintain its automatic line on the ballot.

By 1989, the patronage-starved party, at temporary odds with Cuomo and hated
by Koch, had become little more than a one-man unincorporated business, headed
by lawyer/lobbyist Ray Harding. A six-figure rainmaker at a wired law firm after
leaving a post on Hugh Carey's personal staff, Harding had a tempestuous relationship
with Cuomo that cost him the inside track. He was, by 1989, a struggling
sole practitioner in search of a new public benefactor. As skeletal as the party
was-with only 23,479 members in the city, less than 1 percent of the city's registered
voters-its designation could still make a Republican candidate more acceptable
to the city's otherwise solidly Democratic electorate.

With Democrats outnumbering Republicans 5 to I, and President Bush gaining
only 33 percent of the city's vote in 1988, Liberal endorsement was indispensable
to a Giuliani candidacy. Had Rudy faced Koch, the Liberal nomination would have
been a "master stroke," said Roger Stone, because it would've given the minority/
progressive coalition "a justification for backing Rudy," to say nothing of a
ballot line where they could comfortably vote for him.

The party, however, had never endorsed a pro-death penalty candidate for
mayor or governor. In fact, the death penalty was a major reason for its rejection
of Koch in each of his four previous runs for mayor. The Liberals' other implacable
principles were an opposition to tuition tax credits or any other form of publicly
subsidized parochial education, and an unambiguous commitment to abortion
rights. If Harding was to steer his party behind a death-penalty candidate, Giuliani
would have to at least appear to support these other two core values.

That meant Rudy had to make choices that satisfied either the Liberals or his
Catholic base. He attempted to position himself on both issues in ways that met
Liberal needs, but Harding was so palpably eager to back him, he thought he had
enough leeway he could fudge it. He became so awkward, especially on abortion,
his wavering statements confounded voters. Since his conversion was forced, he
did not voluntarily mention abortion in any major speech or policy statement until
he addressed a women's organization in late September, dealing with it only
when pressed by reporters or advocates.

The tuition tax credit issue rarely came up at all, but when it did, he initially
clouded his opposition with a caveat, but eventually dumped any hedge and said
straight out that any such credits "would encourage people to take their kids out
of the city school system."

His" one thumb up-one thumb down" abortion ambiguity, however, became a
singular disaster. Giuliani wanted to become the first candidate ever endorsed by
both the Liberals and their ideological opposite, the Conservative Party, a 1966
pro-life invention of the anti-Rockefeller right that was a force in state politics,
aligned with the GOP, but with little clout in the city. Giuliani first had eight
courting dinners and lunches with the rotund Harding, whose party maintained a
small, seedy midtown office near Manhattan's finest restaurants. Once confident
he'd sealed that ballot line, Giuliani rode out to the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn
to visit Mike Long, the Conservative Party state chair who owned a liquor store
right around the corner from the party's state headquarters. He wined and dined
Long and the five county leaders of the party from the city.

Giuliani told the Conservatives he was "personally opposed to abortion, did not
favor government funding or criminal penalties, did favor an exemption in cases
of rape or incest, and was in favor of overturning Roe vs. Wade." Long then announced
that Rudy's views were "acceptable" to the leaders, whose party had
slightly fewer city members than the Liberals, and Harding went temporarily ballistic.
For a few hours one March morning, Harding told a reporter he now had
"irreconcilable differences" with Giuliani. He said Giuliani's announced opposition
to funding "would mean that a poor woman would be treated differently than
one who could afford an abortion."

Harding added that in his own rambling conversations with Rudy, he'd never
specifically asked about funding. Instead he'd merely extracted a pledge that
Giuliani wouldn't impose his personal opposition to abortion on city policy and
would "administer whatever the law required." Harding logically read Giuliani's
Conservative Party comments to mean that he would decline to provide the city's
share of Medicaid-funded abortions or might refuse to permit municipal hospitals
to perform them.

When the reporter called Giuliani for reaction, he instead called Harding, and
explained that he was merely telling the Conservatives how he'd vote if he were a
member of Congress or the legislature, a curious thing to do while seeking their
support for mayor. He assured Harding that, as mayor, he'd use city funds to pay
for abortions and let city hospitals do them. He added that while he favored overturning
Roe, if it ever happened, the state's 1970 pro-abortion law would automatically
become effective and he'd abide by it. Harding then called the reporter
back, said it was he who'd "improperly drawn an inference" from the Conservative
quotes, and announced that his problems with Giuliani had been "straightened
out."

The flirtation with the outraged Conservatives was over; rubberband Rudy had
discovered that even he wasn't elastic enough to stretch across the full length of
the city's political spectrum.

So, on Saturday, April 8, with polls putting Giuliani from 10 to 20 points ahead
of Koch, Harding hosted a morning press conference in a tiny ballroom at the
Intercontinental Hotel. The unannounced candidate happily accepted the endorsement.
"I would uphold a woman's right to abortion. It's a constitutional right, a legal
right," he said, simultaneously dismissing the death penalty as a "phony" issue
in a mayoral race. Harding included affirmative action, gay rights and gun control-
as well as abortion and tuition tax credits-among the issues that brought
the party and Giuliani together.

Koch charged that the Liberals "sold themselves and sold themselves cheap," insisting
that they would ordinarily "throw themselves off buildings before they
would surrender" on death penalty and abortion issues, and insisting that Giuliani
opposed them on both. Calling it a "patronage party," Koch said, "They've been shut
out, they say, from New York City jobs. They've been shut out, they say, from state
jobs, and they want to come back in, so they have attached themselves to Rudolph
Giuliani." The patronage hunger of the party was so transparent that even John
Lindsay, who'd long ago left politics and was a practicing attorney, told a reporter in
May, that the Liberals are "always worried about stuff like patronage."

Giuliani, however, apparently oblivious to the party's well-known appetite,
chose the Harding press conference as the setting to promise an end to patronage
in a Rudy regime. Raising the specter of the Talent Bank-a Koch patronage mill
probed by prosecutor Giuliani-he vowed: "There will be no Talent Bank operating
in the basement of City Hall if I'm elected mayor." Standing beside Rudy with
a few other party leaders-at least two of whom, Frank Marin and Fran Reiter,
wound up with top appointments in the eventual Giuliani administration-
Harding could only manage a tight-lipped smile. Both of his sons would also win
major Giuliani posts, and he would become a millionaire lobbyist at the Giuliani
trough.

Harding was so wired into the clubhouse network Giuliani deplored that he'd
borrowed $5,000 from Bernard Ehrlich, a lobbyist convicted in the Wedtech case,
visited his old friend Stanley Friedman in prison in September 1988 and was still
talking by phone to Friedman at the time of the endorsement. A few years earlier,
Harding had rushed an early congressional endorsement of another soon-to-be
Giuliani felon, the very conservative Mario Biaggi, in order to convince a congressman
with a liberal record, Jonathan Bingham, not to challenge him in their
reapportioned Bronx district.

In a poisonous dispute with Mario Cuomo throughout the mid-'80s, the party
leader with the license plate "Mr Lib" on his 1985 Caddy had actually only been
back in control of the state party a couple of years. The dispute had gotten so bad
that Harding had even helped prompt a criminal probe of the governor's son
Andrew. Harding let it be known that Cuomo was now threatening not to run in
1990 on the Liberal line if the party backed Giuliani, a possible death blow to the
party.

Harding defied that threat to roll the dice with Giuliani, knowing that the
party's mayoral support was window dressing for a Democrat, but defining for a
Republican. If Giuliani won, Harding would be a kingmaker, and jobs and contracts,
he understood, are the coin of any realm. Cuomo, of course, wound up running
on the line in 1990, and he and Harding eventually grew so comfortable with
each other that son Andrew was honored at an annual party dinner in the 1990s.

The abortion issue, however, continued to dog Giuliani and embarrass Harding.
When the u.s. Supreme Court ruled in July that states could limit abortion rights,
Giuliani told reporters who pressed him at a July 4 parade that he would not lobby
Albany to preserve the current state law if elected mayor. "I have a different moral
view about abortion than the other candidates do and I would not be able to do
that," he said, standing amidst a crowd in Bay Ridge again, the same heavily
Italian neighborhood where he made the February comments that got him in such
hot water.

When the New York Pro-Choice Coalition ranked Giuliani below all the
Democratic candidates in August, he issued a statement" clarifying" his position
again. This time he said he "will oppose reductions in state funding" for abortion,
as well as "oppose making abortion illegal." He would not let his "personal views
interfere with his responsibilities as mayor."

Every newspaper branded it a "flip-flop" and Koch said: "You shouldn't run
from your conscience because you're afraid to lose an election." Dinkins charged:
"It was interesting that he is able to alter his position on such a matter of basic
principle in so short a period of time."

Giuliani himself would subsequently concede that he'd butchered the abortion
issue in the campaign, but his hindsight analysis was purely cosmetic. He told the
Post's Jack Newfield in 1992, while positioning himself for a second run: "I made
a terrible mistake on abortion last time. I should have said I was pro-choice and
stopped. But I spent so much time explaining the ideology and theology of how I
reached my opinion, nobody understood what I was saying." The vulnerability
study Giuliani commissioned for the 1993 campaign concluded that "most voters"
in 1989 "seemed to think all the explaining by Giuliani meant he was just another
pro life male politician trying to explain how he wasn't anti-woman."

The truth is that Giuliani did undergo a political transformation on the issueutterly
reversing 1987 positions like "1 don't think abortion should be freely available"
and "1 would vote against public funding for it." He approached abortion as
if it was merely one more policy arena-susceptible to polling, networking and
endless readjustment. Though he constantly talked about it as a personal matter,
he never searched inside for any authentic belief, or took a stand that resembled
conviction.

He sat in the homes of friends and tried to figure out what the electoral market
might bear. Even a favorably disposed journalist like Dan Collins wound up writing
that Rudy did "more head spinning" on abortion "than Linda Blair in The
Exorcist." All his cheap manipulation and marketing came through to voters, and
diminished him.

Rudy's other pre-primary break with the Liberal Party, as well as the liberal
general electorate he hoped to appeal to in November, was on gay rights. When
Koch announced a plan to grant a few days of bereavement leave to gay couples
and unmarried heterosexuals who work for the city, Giuliani blasted it as "an illconceived
political giveaway." He cited current budget problems as the reason for
his attack and ridiculed "the highly questionable" expansion of benefits "that appears
to include college roommates."

He also criticized a state court decision the same day that upheld the right of a
nonmarital domestic partner-a gay man in the appellate case-to inherit his or
her deceased partner's rent-stabilized apartment, just as a marital spouse would.
Giuliani assailed the decision because it appeared "to make a gay couple a family
unit." He even refused to march in the Gay Pride Parade and opposed a citywide
registry for domestic partners, as well as health benefits for municipal workers
who met a partnership standard.

The Post put this laundry list of gay rebuffs on the front page and, from then
on, gay protesters from ACT-UP and GMHC-two organizations Larry Kramer
had helped found-occasionally appeared at Rudy events. ACT-UP's Jay Blotcher
said at one demonstration: "Giuliani's people are trying to make him a very macho
candidate. They're trying to position him against Koch, implying he's the
wimpy, faggot mayor." It certainly didn't help that the campaign did not have a
single openly gay staff member, an unusual omission in a New York mayoral effort
premised on "inclusion."

While some in the campaign thought Giuliani had simply miscalculated and
adopted a legalistic stance on issues like apartment rights, others thought the intent
was to contrast himself with Koch, implicitly raising the gay question. Had he
faced Koch in November, the utility and significance of this strategy might have
become clear. Certainly, Giuliani's posture on bereavement was strikingly out of
step with his other efforts to occupy the ground to Koch's left and reinforced the
heartless prosecutorial image he was trying to shed. Since Giuliani as mayor
would ultimately champion extensive domestic partnership benefits, his 1989 hard
line was both philosophically contradictory and politically expedient.

The gay and abortion maneuvering may also have been designed to give
Giuliani enough conservative camouflage to get him through the Republican primary
in September. His opponent, Ronald Lauder, the son of Estee Lauder and a
perfume potentate worth $333 million, was trying to push him to the right. For
example, Giuliani's abortion acrobatics momentarily mimicked Lauder's, who was
pro-choice but against public funding. No poll showed Lauder making much
headway-he was behind Giuliani by 40 points or more from beginning to endbut
only about 100,000 of New York's 419,000 registered Republicans were expected
to vote. With that small a turnout and $14 million in Lauder's campaign
kitty, Giuliani had to give himself a little wiggle room to guard against the improbable.

What shaped the heart of Giuliani's early campaign, though, was a November
strategy that attempted to combine the 28 percent of the electorate that year that
was black with the 22 percent that was white Catholic. He wanted to take on Koch
with those blocs as his core. Many of the 17 percent who were Hispanic were also
Catholic, and many shared communities across the city with blacks, so he hoped to
win a lion's share of their vote as well. His campaign in the primary-even his
abortion and gay jockeying-was affected by his need to put that foundation in
place for the general election.

But a sudden, tragic event reconfigured the Democratic race. The brutal slaying
on August 23 of a sixteen- year-old black youth, Yusef Hawkins, who was attacked
by a white gang in the heavily Italian Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, doomed
Koch. The murder led to black marches through Bensonhurst, headed by the activist
Reverend Al Sharpton, who was taunted by a watermelon-flashing white
mob. Koch called for an end to the protests, a comment that infuriated blacks and
provoked Giuliani to declare that "people have a right to march." Giuliani went to
the Hawkins funeral and was jeered nonetheless, but only mildly. Koch was booed
so badly by the more than 1,000 people who jammed in and around the church
that he had to leave through a side door.

"The last thing we need in this delicate, sensitive, difficult situation is for Ed
Koch and Al Sharpton to be shooting their mouths off," Giuliani said. Lauder
blasted Rudy, saying he went to the funeral "to get votes." Giuliani tried to strike
a balance between his anticipated November voting blocs-repeatedly identifying
himself as Italian and saying Bensonhurst should not be tarred with "a broad
brush," while simultaneously supporting the protests. But even Giuliani finally
realized with about a week left, as did Koch, that Dinkins was now the likely primary
winner-the beneficiary of a bloodied social fabric.

The Wall Street Journal condemned Rudy's lefty campaign and called him a
"Lindsay Republican." Al D' Amato flatly predicted that if elected mayor Giuliani
would, like Lindsay, leave the party.

Throughout its first five months, Rudy's campaign was guided by the combined
social gospel of the Kennedys and the National Conference of Catholic Bishopsa
liberalism of the heart. It was also inspired by the political legacy of John
Lindsay, who proved that a Republican could get elected mayor by drawing hundreds
of thousands of black and Latino votes. It was a strategy concocted principally
by Rudy himself, since the political consultants he'd inherited from George
Bush's presidential campaign were too national to really understand it. Ray
Harding and the Liberals had lived it, and helped him to see it. Only Koch, by losing
in September as he did, could make it obsolete.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:07 am

Eleven: Blood Feud: The Fight with the Fonz

No ONE HAS EVER RUN AN UGLIER CAMPAIGN FOR NEW YORK MAYOR
than Ron Lauder. He spent a family fortune on a relentless series of
negative television commercials, never even throwing a major fundraiser. He
only bothered to put a single positive spot on the air, and that one ever so
briefly, demonstrating for all to see that his media campaign's only purpose
was to damage Rudy Giuliani.

Lauder could have spent a fraction of what he did on the Giuliani campaign
and secured a much larger profile for himself in New York GOP circles. In the
middle of 1989, for example, upstate businessman J. Patrick Barrett was named
chair of the financially distressed state GOP because he was willing to write
checks that tallied in the mere tens of thousands. Lauder could've been chair
for what he was spending weekly on his Giuliani smears. In his first political
speech in 1988, Lauder indicated an interest in running in the 1990 governor's
race. With a commitment to spend a fraction of what he lavished on his virulent
anti-Giuliani ads, Lauder easily have been the GOP candidate for governor,
presumably a far more attractive launch for a political career than taking
on Rudy in a city GOP primary.

Nonetheless Lauder decided to make a race he was so uninterested in he
rarely made a public appearance. And it wasn't an effort to lay the groundwork
for a future real race. He never ran again for public office.

The ambassador to Austria under Reagan, Lauder was hard pressed to put
together plausible consecutive sentences on a matter of municipal policy. He
did manage, in a single sentence, however, to tell conservative NYU professor
Herb London, who was considering entering the race, why he was making this
expensive and impossible run: "I'd do anything for Al D' Amato," he said.

The bizarre campaign actually began in Albany on January 4 when Lauder
became the first candidate for mayor of New York to ever announce 140 miles
away from it. He did it there because D' Amato was visiting for a day. The an-
nouncement was held in the office of State Senator Guy Velella, the d' Amato ally
who also chaired the Bronx GOP.

The gangly and shy scion had been one of the first to contribute to D' Amato's
initial Senate run in 1980. Now that D'Amato was at war with Rudy-a blood
feud rooted in the 1988 conflict over the Senate race and Giuliani's SDNY successors-
Lauder was quite willing to buy both the commercial bazookas and
popguns.

Though Lauder ads would fire most of the shots at Giuliani, D' Amato surfaced
to take some himself, accusing Rudy in early 1989 of having "smeared" certain
unnamed people and branding him a "publicity hound." Giuliani could not get
over the irony, recalling in one interview the golden days of 1986, when he and
the senator toured the drug warrens of upper Manhattan in disguise. "1 do have a
picture of us in our hats and uniforms," he said. "1 take it out to remind myself."

If a determination to damage Giuliani was D' Amato's top priority, he was also
using Lauder to help his friend and political ally Koch. The Lauder commercial assault
on Giuliani during the primary was designed to leave a battered Rudy, vulnerable
for take-out shots from Koch in the general election. Giuliani would make
that charge publicly-saying that D' Amato "is acting on behalf of the person who
supported him and who he has supported, Ed Koch" -and no serious observer
doubted him. Lauder could not have made it clearer himself-his family businesses
contributed $15,000 to Koch and though he was theoretically running for
mayor, his attack commercials never mentioned the incumbent.

Whatever hope Lauder and D' Amato might have initially had about seriously
testing Giuliani in the GOP primary ended when Guy Molinari, the congressman
from Staten Island who was running for borough president, quickly moved to endorse
Rudy. The suburban-like and heavily Catholic Staten Island is the heart of
the city GOP, and Molinari was king there. The initial Times story in January
about Lauder's candidacy said Molinari had "encouraged" it. Yet Molinari had
been calling Rudy since at least mid-1988, by Giuliani's own account, urging him
to run. D' Amato, who was so close to Molinari they'd actually shared a
Washington apartment, was reported to be "furious" over the switch.

Molinari and Harding instantly became the campaign's seasoned local advisers,
with Molinari named to chair it. They were the only two professional politicians
to join Giuliani and his usual entourage of lawyer friends in interviewing
prospective consultants for the campaign, picking three with Bush campaign credentials,
including pollster Robert Teeter. Since Mike Long's wife was on
Molinari's payroll, as was the Staten Island Conservative leader, the congressman
also served as the temporary bridge to the Conservatives, helping to arrange
Rudy's Bay Ridge confab. In the end though, Long, a D' Amato sidekick steered
the ballot line to Lauder.

Lauder's first ads-which ran in April on radio and TV at a weekly cost of
$350,000-assailed Giuliani for accepting the Liberal endorsement, voting for
George McGovern and supporting tax hikes. The script pointed out that the
Libs oppose the death penalty and tuition tax credits, suggesting that Rudy did
too.

The commercials provoked the resignation of Roger Ailes, the ex-Bush campaign
consultant who had originally signed up with Lauder but became so alienated
he wound up charging that the only purpose of the campaign was to
"destroy" Giuliani. Ailes candidly explained why he and other top-flight consultants
were attracted to a transparent loser like Lauder, calling him a "cash cow."
Left to rake in the cash was Arthur Finkelstein, D' Amato's media guru.

The Lauder/D' Amato camp fired its first damaging shot the morning of
Giuliani's announcement. The Daily News carried a story alleging that the whiteshoe
law firm Giuliani had joined in February, White & Case, included on its vast
client list the Government of Panama, which was then controlled by Manuel
Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on drug charges. Adam
Nagourney, the News reporter who did the story, says now that it came from
"Lauder/D' Amato sources." Forty-eight hours after it appeared, Lauder followed
with a shrieking TV ad that featured side-by-side photos of Noriega and Giuliani.

Giuliani wound up responding to the Noriega charge on the campaign bus that
took him and reporters around the city for his announcement appearances. He insisted
he'd known nothing about the Noriega representation until the News informed
him, claimed the firm only represented the state-controlled Bank of
Panama and had received no compensation in six months. He seemed to be taking
what even Nagourney thought was a trivial tabloid piece so seriously that he suggested
he would quit the best-paying job he'd ever had in his life. "I want absolutely
nothing to do with Noriega and will take whatever additional steps are
necessary to disassociate myself from him," he said, promising a review of the
matter with the firm and "remedial action."

When Koch jumped into the Noriega fray, taunting Rudy for "taking drug
money," Giuliani came unglued, blasting Lauder and Koch as liars. "If they really
were men, they'd apologize," he whined. A one-day blip had become a campaign
convulsion, lasting weeks. Acknowledging his own overreaction, Giuliani
promised the fat-cat Waldorf audience at his first major fundraiser on May 23: "I
will try my very best not to dignify their scurrilous lies and smears with a response,
no matter how shrilly they are made." He attributed his defensiveness to
his mother and father, who, he said, "raised me to believe that honesty and integrity
were the truest measures of a man."

"I felt compelled to defend my honor," he said. In fact, instead of the toe-to-toe
boxer Harold had trained Rudy to be, he was looking more and more like a bleeder,
taking punches round after round just like Vic Dellicurti.

Barry Slotnik, the prominent criminal attorney who had taken over representation
of the bank from White & Case, kept waiting for Giuliani to point out that as
u.s. Attorney, he'd brought a successful action to freeze its assets. In fact, as
Slotnik recalled it, W&C represented the bank when Giuliani initiated the proceeding.
Slotnik never mentioned this to the reporters who cited him in stories
about the campaign controversy, claiming he instead called a Giuliani aide, who
said they'd forgotten about the freeze.

When other questionable W&C clients started making the news, Giuliani
stormed off the set of a WNBC interview. He had always planned to take a leave
of absence as the campaign heated up; so now he pushed his departure date up to
June 6 and left. He was barely with the firm for four months, collecting at least
$260,000 of the $700,000 a year W&C had agreed to pay him.

As ugly and absurd as the Noriega hoopla was, the Nazi attack in August was
worse. Rudy was first confronted about the story as he was leaving a rather tame
editorial board meeting at the New York Post. Jerry Nachman, the paper's editor,
asked him to stop in his office for a minute and began tossing out questions about
a bizarre incident that had occurred at the u.s. Attorney's office in February 1986.

Giuliani was on a tight schedule and getting late for his next event. He also had
a breaking story he had to deal with that every newspaper was chasing-federal
prosecutors announced that day that they were dropping charges against two of
three prominent Wall Street traders, whose spectacular arrests Giuliani had ordered
on 1987. "It was a mistake to move with that case at the time that I did,"
Giuliani was telling reporters, apologizing to the traders. He made a quick attempt
to convince Nachman he'd done nothing wrong in this other, rather arcane, case.
He'd heard that the Post was working on the story, but he didn't expect it to happen
so fast. He called Nachman that night from a restaurant pay phone to discuss
it further, but it was already too late.

The next morning, the Post's banner screamed: "Auschwitz survivor charges
... RUDY'S MEN ACTED LIKE NAZIS." Next to a heads hot of Giuliani was the
subhead: "L.l. man's SS nightmare at hands of feds." Rudy's photo caption read:
"on hot seat." The story charged that a Holocaust survivor imprisoned at
Auschwitz was "roused" from his Long Island home at 7 A.M. on a Sunday and
taken in handcuffs to Giuliani's office, where he was seated in "an empty corridor
that contained nothing but a straight-backed chair facing a blackboard." Scrawled
on the blackboard were the words "ARBEIT MACHT FREI"-German for "Work
shall set you free." The words were the same as those that greeted arrivals at
Auschwitz, where Berger's brother and sister perished.

Nachman, who co-bylined the copyrighted story, quoted Giuliani as saying he
knew about the incident and that it was "reprehensible." He said it was investigated
at the time. "If we found the person who did it, and that person was with a
federal agency, I'm sure we would have fired them. I think the government did
precisely what it should have done: preserve the evidence and turn it over to the
defense counsel." Indeed the Post ran a photo of the blackboard taken by the feds
and turned over to Berger's attorney.

Berger, a security lock manufacturer, was eventually charged with bribing a
NYC Housing Authority official to get a contract-an indictment announced by
Rudy at a press conference-and acquitted at trial. The jury took barely four
hours, with dinner included. The story ended with Berger's comment: "Giuliani
did the same thing to me that the Nazis did and the people of New York should
know this."

The AUSA who handled the Berger prosecution, as well as the internal probe of
the blackboard incident, was David Zornow, a widely respected assistant who had
tried the celebrated case against Stanley Friedman with Rudy. Jewish, married to
the daughter of survivors and shaken by the incident, Zornow was nonetheless
unable to establish how it happened. Benito Romano, a top Giuliani aide, said later
that the Zornow probe did determine that the scribble was "the mindless musings
of IRS agents" who had nothing to do with the Berger case. They had written it in
jest and "turned the blackboard" to the wall long before the Berger arrest.
Someone accidentally moved the board when Berger was brought in.

Nonetheless, regurgitating its skewed version again and again, the Post kept the
story alive for a week, running consecutive covers on it, pushing the Anti-
Defamation League (ADL) to investigate it, even getting their television reviewer
to write about media coverage of it.

Though Nachman's story pointed out that the judge on the case was Lloyd
MacMahon and went into details about the draft deferment and his other ties to
Giuliani, it never quoted from MacMahon's opinion on the blackboard issue.
"There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the government intentionally
directed the phrase toward Berger," concluded MacMahon.

The Post also ignored two letters to the judge sent by Berger's trial attorney, Ben
Brafman, who called the incident" a regrettable series of horrible coincidences."
Brafman, who asked that the record on this issue be sealed so that no one could
"use it to malign the u.s. Attorney's office," wrote that there was "no evidence that
any representative" of the office "was involved." In fact, the ADL ultimately concluded,
after the election controversy was over, that "the Nazi phrase was written
several weeks before Berger was arrested and was not directed at him."

Berger's lawyer at the time of his arrest was Barry Slotnik-the same lawyer
who represented Noriega's bank and government. The wily Slotnik had his own
agenda. A Republican who publicly entertained the idea of running for congress
from Westchester in 1990, Slotnik contributed $1,000 to D' Amato on June 7, 1989,
and his firm kicked in another thousand later that year, part of $4,500 in total
D' Amato donations.

Slotnik claimed later that he had no idea how the Post got onto the Berger story
three and a half years after the arrest and three weeks before the Republican primary,
but he did say Berger "loved Al D' Amato." Berger, his wife and son contributed
$3,700 to D' Amato campaigns prior to the story, starting when unknown
Al first ran statewide in 1980 and including $200 on August 7, 1989, almost exactly
when the Post was first approached on the story. He gave D' Amato another
$900 that December.

The Post pieces were filled with Slotnik's quotes. To help keep the story alive,
Slotnik started calling for Justice Department and congressional investigations,
though he never had when the incident occurred. He now says it was "such a bullshit
story" that "it blew itself out," adding that, "of course, Rudy had nothing to
do" with the blackboard incident.

Giuliani attributed the story to "political bosses" he declined to name, and
blasted the Post for stretching it "way beyond any legitimate bounds." Nachman
recalls that" a couple of people told him it was out there" and that" one of them
was Al D' Amato," who, Nachman said, "was jumping up and down" with outrage
about the case. D'Amato told Nachman that Berger was "a constituent, a terrific
guy and a devout Jew," adding that his story was "an example of what a fascist
Rudy Giuliani is." Nachman said the Bergers came to meet him and brought documents:
"There was a lot of sobbing and wailing." He also said that Rudy sent
Arnold Burns, the former deputy attorney general and Giuliani's campaign finance
chair, to try to "muscle" him into not doing the story.

D' Amato had such a special relationship with Peter Kalikow, the Post's owner,
that he used Kalikow's Fifth Avenue apartment as his legal address when he left
his wife, even visiting the penthouse for a change of clothes now and then.
Kalikow served as the chairman of D' Amato's campaign committee for years and
hired D' Amato's top aide as a Post executive. Kalikow was also close to Lauder, yet
the paper published a sizzling pre-election roast of his service as Austrian ambas-
sador. In fact, the only major candidate spared a Post blast was the one it endorsed
and D' Amato was covertly aiding, Ed Koch, who publicly feasted off the Berger
story, chortling over Giuliani's discomfort and salivating over the thought of using
it again in November.

The vulnerability study Giuliani commissioned for the 1993 campaign contended
that D' Amato" created the Berger story" and urged that the senator, since
he was now supporting Rudy, "be enlisted in the effort to kill it." The study, which
reviewed the shortcomings of the 1989 effort, recommended that D' Amato "broker
a rapprochement between Berger and Giuliani," and get "a guarantee" that the
issue would not reappear. Not only did it not reappear in 1993, the Berger issue
died in 1989 when Koch and Lauder lost the primaries. The same paper that had
tortured Giuliani with it in August endorsed him against Dinkins in October
without ever mentioning it again.

Lauder, of course, went on the air with his harshest ads right after the Nazi
stories:

Why are people afraid of Rudy Giuliani? Because he's a shameless publicity
seeker who used Sukhreet Gabel to tape-record her own mother. Handcuffed
innocent stockbrokers in front of co-workers. And ignored the taunts of a
Holocaust survivor. Because he tried to cover up his huge salary at White &
Case ($700,000), the law firm that represents Panama's dictator Noriega ...
Why are people afraid of Rudy Giuliani? Because they should be.

One week after the Berger story broke the Post published a front-page poll
headlined "Giuliani drops off charts." Buried in the fine print was a virtually unchanged
forty-point lead over Lauder. But the Post's numbers showed him losing
by twenty-two points to Dinkins and two points to Koch, a sharp reversal of June
numbers that had had him beating both soundly. Citing its own story as a possible
cause, the Post noted a 59 percent turnaround in his favorables and unfavorabIes
among Jewish voters.

A campaign blessed by twenty-point leads in one early poll after another was
bottoming out due to months of high-octane blasts. It was broke and implementing
across-the-board cuts in staff salaries. Rich Bond and Russ Schriefer, the costly
consultants from the 1988 George Bush campaign, were bounced.

In the midst of all this madness, with Helen Giuliani seriously ill in a hospital
for what turned out to be a five-week stay, Caroline Giuliani was born. On August
22, four days after the Berger story, Donna gave birth to a nine-pound sevenounce
girl. Under the crushing pressure of a foul campaign against him, Giuliani
was running around the city wearing a patient-type wristband that allowed him to
visit his mother, wife and baby daughter. He was even trying to keep the Post
story away from his seventy-nine-year-old mother.

Still rooted in the progressive campaign he'd launched in May, he went to a
day-care center in East Harlem three days after Caroline's birth and spoke of his
daughter: "Four babies born in New York the same day as Caroline," he said, "are
suffering the terror of drug addiction." He promised to name a Deputy Mayor for
Children and vowed to make sure "pregnant women and women of child-bearing
age" had" access to drug treatment."

"To Caroline, to all the children born this week and to those who will be born
here in the future, I dedicate my efforts to wipe out drugs in this city," he pledged,
never mentioning the tragedy of his cousin Joan, whose torment with drugs so
haunted his own family.

The Post peppered him at the Harlem event with more questions about Berger
and ignored his plan on drug addiction. He did not flinch. Maybe his overdose of
family reality was just the antidote he needed to combat the unreality of the campaign
media world. It certainly seemed to help him handle all the ugliness.

Donna had spent most of the first half of 1989 caring for three-year-old Andrew
and maintaining her nightly anchor job at WPIX. She didn't leave the station until
a week before the Caesarean delivery. She made occasional campaign appearances,
and advised her husband and others in the campaign, especially about media
strategies. When Rudy seriously considered boycotting the Post completely over
the Berger story, it was Donna who convinced him not to, maintaining her equilibrium
at a moment of high emotion. Level heads on the campaign staff turned to
her on that and other matters.

For the second time since she met Giuliani in 1982, however, Donna was also sacrificing
professionally to help his career. She'd quit her Miami job to live with him.
Now his political ambitions were colliding with her news career. Questioned that
March by the Daily News about Hanover's possible conflict, WPIX news director
John Corporon said that she would remain anchor of their 7:30 P.M. show, but not
handle any mayoral election news. "There's no issue here until and unless Giuliani
announces," he said. Her co-anchor Brad Holbrooke said later that he did every
story related to city government: "I ended up reading a lot more of the news copy
than she did."

When Rudy announced in May, Hanover resisted any suggestion that she take
a leave, maintaining that all she had to do was continue avoiding city coverage.
Corporon, still concerned that her mere appearance was "a subliminal plug for her
husband," talked to her about returning to street reporting. Rudy called Corporon,
he recalls, "to reassure" him that Donna would, at most, "occasionally accompany
him to events where spouses were expected." With that exception, Corporon insisted
she take no active role in the campaign. Still, Lauder refused to send his
schedule to the station, and David Dinkins later called its coverage biased.

"From a journalistic standpoint," Holbrooke recalled, "it was certainly a gray
area and everybody had their own opinions about it. I was totally in support of
Donna. It was an uncomfortable situation for her to be in. But I guess she had a
little bit more of a narrow view of it, a more personal view of it. To her, it was all
a matter of her own achievement and integrity as a working journalist and that
wasn't the only issue. She wasn't naIve, she did know that there was this unprecedented
situation where an anchorwoman in the number one market in America
was married to the guy running for the number one political job."

While on paid leave with Caroline, however, she did a television commercial for
Rudy that began airing in early October. "1 wish all those people who think he's so
tough could see him with children," Hanover said in her thirty-second spot.
"That's the real Rudy." Depicted walking with Giuliani, Hanover's soothing narration
concluded: "When I first met Rudy, he seemed strong and at the same time
gentle, and I liked that. I thought-this was the kind of man I want to be the father
of my children-and Rudy is such a great dad!" Tom Goldstein, then dean of
the School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, said, "It
would just seem that she has put her station in a very delicate situation."
Corporon took the public position that the commercial "did not embarrass the station,"
though Hanover hadn't sought WPIX's approval.

She may have won the battle, but she lost the war. Shortly after her six-month
maternity leave ended on January 29, 1990, she returned to WPIX, but not for
long. Though she came back with big plans to do a segment on "America's
Children" as a weekly feature on her nightly newscast, she suddenly left the station
that July. Her departure was never explained by WPIX, though Donna told an
interviewer in 1993: "The whole business contracted and the show was taken off
the air. I wasn't a victim of politics. The show was lost, and with it, my job."

Actually, she was the only anchor let go. Holbrooke, who also did the 10 P.M.
newscast, stayed, as did the show's other anchor, Sheila Stainback. Hanover was
dropped though she'd been an anchor at the station for nearly three years longer
than Stainback. The two anchors of the syndicated national broadcast were also kept.
"1 offered her a general assignment job," says Corporon, "but she said she'd already
done that. She wanted to do specialty reporting, but we didn't do that at that time."
Holbrooke adds: "They offered her a job where she would just come in and read
the news and leave, like come into work for an hour and a half, and they would pay
her a third of what they would have paid somebody who was a traditional fulltime
anchor person. She was, I think rightfully, offended. I mean Ted Knight [on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show] would do that, but that's a parody of something
that really doesn't exist much in the TV business." Corporon insists that Donna
left only because it was her show that was "blown out," and that he couldn't
change the 10 P.M. team: "They were established and things were going okay."

A forty-year-old woman with two young children, dropped after six years with
a single New York station, was not exactly a hot property on the media market.
She would never get another evening anchor job, and she didn't get another television
job of any type until May 1992, when she began doing freelance street reporting
for the local Fox station.

Whatever impact the 1989 controversies had on Donna's news career, she was
able, once she recovered from Caroline's birth, to playa stronger role in the campaign
than she had prior to her leave. Peter Powers had by then also taken over as
campaign manager, and Liberal boss Ray Harding, a savvy hand at city politics,
had moved into the headquarters. Roger Ailes, the Bush consultant who had quit
Lauder, was on the team as well, and the four became the nucleus of the day-today
decision making.

Ailes was giving Rudy sound-bite lessons designed to cure his rambling ways.
His early performance reviewers had labeled him "wooden," "robotic," "solemn,"
"medieval." The Times reported that he "came across as an arms length candidate,
shaking hands stiffly and rarely shedding his suit jacket." He was so formal at first
that when he stopped at a stickball game in East Harlem, he kept his suit jacket on
until aides convinced him to take it off and wound up pictured in the tabloids
swinging at a pitch with a tie on. He would speak at Town Hall gatherings designed
so he would interact with folks from the neighborhoods and deliver such
compound answers he would only have time for a handful of questions. New York
magazine's Joe Klein fixated on his "severe" appearance at a March GOP dinner,
noting that "his very presence seemed a reproach." The Voice's Dan Collins
watched him at street fairs and on walking tours and wrote that he "looked ominous
at times."

"If he held up a baby," concluded Collins, "it might cry."

But most pundits conceded, as the weeks wore into September, that he was getting
more relaxed, smiling, engaging. "1 didn't really start running last time until
August," he said four years later.

His sole debate with Lauder in early September was vintage Giuliani. Taunting
Lauder by calling him "Ronnie," Rudy slammed Lauder's indifference to the
homeless: "Suffering to him is the butler taking the night off." When Lauder
called for stringent measures against street vagran ts, he said that was" cruel." He
extended his hand to Lauder offering to support the winner of the Republican primary
and asking if Lauder, who was on the Conservative line, would do the same.
"If Ronald Lauder was a real Republican, he'd support the winner of the
Republican primary," Rudy declared when Lauder balked. Each of these on-target
shots at the time would come back to haunt a future Giuliani.

Rudy smashed Lauder by 50,000 votes in a September 12 primary when three
out of four Republicans stayed home. But, thanks to Lauder's millions, the damage
had been done.

Every postmortem on the November loss to Dinkins, including Rudy's, would
lay the blame on D' Amato. The Times analysis cited the Lauder hammering and
quoted Giuliani as saying: "There's no question that it hurt. And to the extent that
Al D' Amato was a larger part of it, then he has to take responsibility for that."
D' Amato did do a speaker-phone endorsement of Rudy from Washington, praising
him to a roomful of reporters but never climbing into a photo frame with him. In
the aftermath of the loss, Giuliani would not answer questions about the possibility
that he might challenge D' Amato in the 1992 senate campaign. "Would I rule
out such a thing?" he said in early 1990. "I just don't know what the future is going
to hold."

The Times said D'Amato waged this extraordinary war because he was "angered"
about Giuliani's "presumptuousness" in insisting on selecting his
Southern District successor in 1988. The explanation satisfied few. Could so minor,
and even understandable, a Giuliani slight have prompted so nuclear a D' Amato
response? Neither D' Amato nor Giuliani would talk publicly about the real reason-
the politically sensitive investigations, especially the Milken probe, that had
sparked and followed the succession fight. These prosecutions were still going on
in 1989, and were driving D' Amato and some of his closest political friends nuts.

In early 1989, D' Amato lost the battle in Washington to install Rudy's immediate
replacement. Rudy's old friend from Justice, Attorney General Dick
Thornburgh, appointed ex-Giuliani aide Benito Romano interim U.S. Attorney
over the vigorous opposition of D' Amato. It was a vital assist to Rudy's campaign.
Had a D' Amato appointee been installed instead, the new U.S. Attorney could
have found a hundred ways to embarrass Giuliani in the middle of the mayoral
run. From the beginning, Romano's appointment was only for a year, when
D' Amato's designee, Otto Obermaier, was set to take over.

One of Romano's first acts-on March 29-was to indict D' Amato allies
Michael and Lowell Milken. Giuliani had forced the Milken investment bank,
Drexel, to its knees shortly before his departure. But plea discussions dragged on
with the brothers for months-with Lowell still represented by Mike Armstrong,
D' Amato's personal attorney.

The juxtaposition in the timing of the Lauder candidacy and the Milken case
was convincing evidence of their interconnection. Lauder hurriedly announced in
early January, just days before Romano's selection was revealed. Soon after the
Milken indictments, on April 19, the Conservative Party gave Lauder its line, solidifying
his candidacy, and on April 26, Lauder's first commercials blasting
Giuliani aired. On May 26, D' Amato launched a verbal broadside at Rudy, blasting
him for going "to any length to aggrandize himself, regardless of the guilt or
innocence of a person." The senator had never before criticized the handling of
any case in Giuliani's office, and did not specify what cases he was talking about
now. 'Tm for people's rights," he said. "And I don't think you take people and
smear them the way Rudy Giuliani has without conscience."

On August 7, Romano announced that an expanded indictment was coming
Milken's way by October I, shortly before Romano's scheduled departure.
Romano later said: "I wanted to resolve the case before D' Amato's replacement
got there. Whether they were waiting for Obermaier, you'd have to ask them."
Milken was later quoted as viewing Romano's threatened superseding indictment
as "the Giuliani method, still going strong." Romano says plea negotiations had
begun at an AUSA level before he left in October.

Within a couple days of the news of a revised Milken indictment, D' Amato
went to the Post's Nachman with the Simon Berger story. It appeared two weeks
later. On August 23, D' Amato told the Times that appointing Giuliani was "the
biggest mistake I ever made."

"I certainly don't hold Rudy in any esteem," D' Amato continued. "And because
of his shortcomings I don't want to see him in a higher political position." The titular
head of a state party was setting a public ceiling on how high a rising star
could climb. The new indictment threat proved to be enough, and Milken ultimately
pled guilty, cutting a 1990 deal with Obermaier's office.

"We're in the realm of speculation," Romano said years later. "But the coincidence
of events"-linking the Milken prosecution and D'Amato's anti-Rudy hostilities-"
is striking." Insisting that nothing D' Amato did affected his own
determination to resolve the Milken case, Romano said: "It may have prevented
Rudy from getting elected mayor the first time."

As nicely as the Milken and D' Amato pieces fit, however, Milken wasn't the
only reason for the enmity that would dominate New York GOP politics for years.
The Wallach trial started in April, featured a withering cross-examination of
Meese and ended with a conviction on August 8. It offended an inner circle of
Reagan and other national Republicans. D' Amato's statewide allies were still incensed
about the 1988 indictment of State Senator Richard Schermerhorn and the
reported attempt to wire him up against the state's second most powerful
Republican, Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson. The only reason these two
cases did not become larger factors in the state party's response to Giuliani was
that Anderson and Reagan left office, by January 1989.

Perhaps more important than any of these cases was the fact that, beginning in
1988 and running right through the 1989 campaign, key Giuliani aides were coming
after D' Amato personally. Rudy had put the pieces in place for these probes
before leaving the Southern District. His old friends, watching the campaign
slugfest from Foley Square, were ratcheting up an attack on the senator that
would cut him like a knife. It was hardly, however, the first, or, for that matter, the
last time, that the Giuliani crew would target D' Amato with lethal intent.

***

Three days after Rudy Giuliani and AI D' Amato launched their initial succession
attacks on each other in 1988 news stories, Tony Lombardi, Giuliani's
favorite G-Man, made an eerie entry in his diary: "Rudy mtg re D' Amato." It was
January 16, 1988, and it was the first time Lombardi had ever listed a meeting regarding
any D' Amato matter, much less one with the boss.

On January 13, the dispute over Rudy's SDNY successor had erupted on the
front page of the metro section of the Times. D' Amato, who had been trying for
months to convince Rudy to step down and run for Senate, described the conditions
Giuliani was setting as "provocative and not too smart." The Times said
D' Amato was telling friends that Giuliani had put him "in an untenable position."

On February 8, Giuliani announced that he would not run for the Moynihan
seat, indicating that he hadn't spoken to D' Amato since early January, when their
negotiations ended. Lombardi's appointment logs suggest that Giuliani's closest
aides began targeting D' Amato criminally as soon as Rudy broke with him politically.
These dry details implicitly confirm the political origins of the investigator's
Koch probe as well, since they reveal how readily Lombardi embraced an investigation
of a Giuliani opponent.

The logs carry six references to Jack Libert, all in 1989. Libert was the treasurer
of D' Amato's campaign finance committee, the ex-counsel to the Long Island
board of supervisors D' Amato dominated and a law partner of D' Amato's brother
Armand. The Southern District would develop a tax case against Libert, after investigating
him for years on fraud and other charges. In his 1995 book, Power,
Pasta and Politics, D' Amato says Libert was "very close to me" and says Libert
"suffered greatly" because he knew D' Amato. He cites the prosecution of Libert as
one of "the meanest examples of dirty politics run amok," contending "the criminal
justice system was used and abused for transparently political purposes."

In an embittered four-page account of the case, D' Amato never mentions
Giuliani. Yet, from the outset, the point of the Libert probe was to flip him to get
D'Amato, a purpose apparent to everyone, including the targeted senator.

Lombardi's references to Libert come between July 12, 1989 and August 11,
1989. One reference refers to the investigation as Libert/D' Amato. Another on
August 10 refers to an 8 P.M. meeting with Romano. The logs indicate he was supposed
to make a "Libert report" to Romano. In addition to the Libert references,
Lombardi's diaries contain another "D' Am" reference on August 17, indicating he
should make a call to a source about the senator. Just as the SNDY's Milken decisions
dovetailed with D' Amato's 1989 actions against Giuliani, Lombardi's entries
on Libert also coincide. Lombardi's last D' Amato listing comes the day Rudy was
confronted by Jerry Nachman about the Simon Berger story.

Lombardi was certainly aware the Berger story was brewing. On August 15, he
listed the Federal Records Center in Bayonne, New Jersey in his diary and Simon
Berger's name twice. The only other entry that day are the names of Benito
Romano and Louis Freeh, Romano's deputy, who is now the head of the FBI. A
large arrow is drawn from the top of the day, where the records are listed, to the
bottom of the day, where the meeting with Romano and Freeh is listed. Romano
recalls getting pre-publication information about the Post's story on the Berger
blackboard allegations and discussing it with Freeh. He doesn't recall meeting with
Lombardi about it, though he says Lombardi "knew the IRS agents who were
working in the room" where the Nazi slogan was written.

Not surprisingly, as soon as the Berger story broke, Rudy's campaign was handing
reporters the affidavits and other documents from the file that proved how intensely
the office had probed the incident. Liberal Party head Ray Harding even
did it at a press conference. Reporters, lawyers and the general population can wait
weeks to review an archived court file, but the U.S. Attorney's office can get it virtually
overnight. Romano says he doesn't know how the federal file wound up in
the hands of the campaign.

Lombardi's entry about the Berger file is one of many that indicates his continuing
political involvement with Giuliani after Rudy left the U.S. Attorney's office.
He listed three Rudy campaign dinners or announcements in March and May. He
also listed Rudy's primary and general-election night parties at the Roosevelt
Hotel and was seen at both. He wrote "security" as a function for himself at the
November party.

The same day as Rudy's first fundraiser at the Waldorf on May 23, Lombardi
wrote: "RWG meeting-W&C," indicating he was going to Giuliani's office at
White & Case. He also recorded two other meetings at the law firm, including one
on September 14, two days after Rudy and Dinkins won the primary. The only
two numbers listed in the back of Lombardi's 1989 diary were Giuliani's and
Young's at W&C.

A 1990 U.S. Treasury Department "report of investigation" indicated that the
department's regional inspector general found that Lombardi "did engage in prohibited
political fundraising activities on behalf of former NYC mayoral candidate
Rudolph Giuliani." The report noted that this allegation, as well as three others
against Lombardi, were" corroborated" through" a covert investigation." As
Romano later put it: "Tony was permitted a good deal of roaming room."

The timing of Giuliani's meeting with Lombardi on D' Amato in 1988, coupled
with the subsequent events, underlined just how connected Giuliani's prosecutorial
and political objectives were.

D' Amato had called Rudy on behalf of Mario Gigante and Paul Castellano in 1984
and 1985 and yet Giuliani continued to maintain his close ties with the senator,
telling virtually no one about the shameful interventions of a U.S. senator. Rudy
even did the 1986 pre-election drugs-in-drag raid for the senator after the calls.

It wasn't until D' Amato defied Giuliani on succession and publicly criticized
him that the senator became a Lombardi target. It wasn't until late 1988 that
Giuliani first revealed the Gigante and Castellano calls, and then only to two
trusted biographers, Dan Collins and Michael Goodwin, whose book was scheduled
to appear in late 1989 (it did not). Yet the senator's ethics had been the subject
of sizzling headlines for years prior to 1988, as had his character testimony in
Brooklyn federal court for a mob-tied disco operator. Probable cause for Giuliani,
at least in some cases, was Personal Cause.

***

The D' Amato inquiries inspired by Giuliani went beyond Lombardi, and
lasted long after the 1989 election. As pivotal a factor as these probes may
have been in framing the enmities during the first mayoral run, they continued to
haunt the relationship for years to come.

Lombardi worked with an AUSA named Jim McGuire on the Libert investigation.
The logs contained twenty references to McGuire, starting in early February
1988. Several entries in the summer of 1989 cite the Libert case. (When they
started working together, Lombardi would freely gossip with McGuire about
"Koch's gay liaisons.")

McGuire was such a tiger that D' Amato made rabid attacks on him in his 1995
book, contending that "many who worked with McGuire" said he had "a real fixation
on me." Citing Libert's attorney, Robert Fink, D' Amato writes that McGuire
made" a corrupt offer" to drop all charges against Libert if he would" give us
D' Amato." When Fink returned to McGuire and told him Libert was "not aware
of any wrongdoing by either Al or Armand," McGuire insisted that Libert come in
anyway. "After we hear what he has to say, we'll talk about a deal for him," Fink
quoted McGuire as saying.

Fink added in a later interview that McGuire said that "the only way" for Libert
"to avoid indictment" was to provide information on the D' Amatos.

Rhodes Scholar, point guard on the Yale basketball team and Harvard Law grad,
the thirty-three-year-old McGuire joined the SDNY in 1987. When Giuliani interviewed
him for the job, they swapped Brooklyn neighborhood stories and compared
notes about McGuire's high school days at Brooklyn Prep and Giuliani's at
Loughlin, two of the borough's premier Catholic high schools.

McGuire volunteered to handle the Hells Angels drug cases, winning a half
dozen convictions, three at trial. The black leather motorcycle vest Giuliani wore on
his 1986 drug buy with D' Amato was seized in the case McGuire tried. When Hells
Angel "Wild Bill" Medeiros saw pictures of Giuliani with a vest with his colors on
it, he told McGuire he wanted to sue Rudy. Medeiros was a cooperating witness
who admitted on the stand that he'd committed countless rapes, and his vest had
been seized in a raid at the Angels' Lower East Side headquarters.

The sandy-haired and single McGuire went on a post-Hells Angels vacation in
January 1988. When he got back, Rudy moved him up from general crimes to
public corruption. Almost from the beginning, he was given pieces of whatever
was in the office on Rudy's drug-buying partner, the senator whose succession dispute
with Rudy had apparently turned him into a target just as McGuire was reassigned
to the corruption unit.

D' Amato was already deeply involved in the far-flung Wedtech case. He had intervened
countless times in Washington on behalf of the defense contractor, usually
at the behest of Congressman Mario Biaggi. After Biaggi's conviction, Ed
Little, one of the AUSAs handling the case, asked McGuire to look at D' Amato's
role in the scam. D' Amato had received $30,000 in illegal contributions from the
company. Giuliani's office had also learned that D' Amato had met with the Biaggi
defense team-a serious breach for a sitting U.S. senator about to testify for the
government. Little said Rudy wanted McGuire to include it in his grab bag of
d' Amato inquiries.

In May 1988, D'Amato had testified in the Biaggi trial. The New York Times reported
that though D' Amato was a government witness, "he often seemed more
helpful to Mr. Biaggi," claiming that the assistance he and Biaggi had given Wed tech
was "aboveboard." Asked if he would have helped the company if he had been aware
that the congressman's son Richard was set to soon receive stock in it, D'Amato did
say: "I think it would have given me some pause to reflect. I don't know." That was
his only damaging statement. His performance managed to anger both sides. Even
before this appearance, D' Amato had been a government witness in another successful
case against Biaggi tried by Brooklyn federal prosecutors in 1987.

Biaggi says now that "Giuliani's guys" -McGuire wasn't one-tried to flip
him against D' Amato. Biaggi can't remember when the meetings occurred
though he believes they happened before his and his son's July 1988 SDNY conviction.
He says two meetings occurred-both were in the office of his lawyerand
that prosecutors "offered to take care of me and my son."

"Their original information that I was not on friendly terms with D' Amato
was correct," Biaggi says. "They thought they could get me to zap him. They
brought me just so far. I thought my son would benefit. For some, it could have
been tempting. There was an interest the first time so they came back for a second
meeting. They had my diaries. They said I met with D' Amato fifty-three
times. They were looking for me to say that I saw Al take money from contributors.
I couldn't do what they wanted me to do. I'm not made that way."

The attempted flip of Biaggi was a measure of just how serious the office was
about D' Amato. McGuire recalls that Rudy made it clear-in three or four different
conversations-that he thought D' Amato was dirty. Giuliani talked about
D' Amato's" reputation in office," about his ties to wise guys.

Then, just as Rudy was leaving the u.s. Attorney's office in late January or
early February 1989, McGuire was called to meetings with Giuliani and Romano.
He was asked to handle a number of D' Amato probes in the office. He was told to
talk to Lombardi and Little, both of whom had files. He subsequently collected
FBI memos, surveillance reports, "a boatload of newsclips" and Lombardi's tips.

McGuire felt honored.

He got a witness from the Long Island board of supervisors who was damaging
to Libert and, at the very start of 1989, the case went to the top of his deck. He
followed the trail right into Armand D' Amato's law firm. By September, a top
aide to Romano was telling two reporters that Libert might flip, a measure of how
well the McGuire/Lombardi probe was going. McGuire even went to Romano to
get authority to subpoena the law firm's records. But it was getting so close to
Romano's scheduled departure and Obermaier's ascendancy in October that
Romano demurred.

In addition to Libert, agents working with McGuire were also involved with an
attempt to wire up a lawyer named Jack Solerwitz, who'd been convicted in a state
scam case. Solerwitz volunteered to approach two individuals tied to the senator,
one of whom was another member of Armand's firm.

McGuire had free rein on these cases until Romano left in October, shortly before
the November election. But soon after Otto Obermaier took over, McGuire found
himself in trouble, reduced suddenly to an unprotected pawn in Giuliani's chess
match with D' Amato. McGuire recalls receiving a new D' Amato allegation around
Thanksgiving, though it hardly turned out to be something to be thankful for. He
would later tell investigators an IRS agent brought the allegation to him, though
subsequent news accounts indicated the agent denied he had. The allegation was that
several executives from a major investment banking house had offered to bundle a
quarter of a million dollars in contributions to D' Amato if D' Amato would install
Obermaier as U.S. Attorney. McGuire went to his immediate superiors about the allegation
and the next thing he knew he was in the eye of a storm.

The allegation was referred to the Public Integrity Division in Washington, but
it could not be confirmed. McGuire was grilled at SDNY about the inflammatory
charge, yanked from the corruption unit and informed that his cases were being
taken away from him. The Libert case was sent to the main tax division at Justice.
The division eventually indicted Libert and in 1992 a jury took all of three hours
to acquit him. Washington officials killed the Solerwitz sting shortly after
McGuire was put on ice.

The investigations of Armand D' Amato's firm that began with McGuire and
others in Rudy's office were a prelude to Armand's eventual indictment and conviction
in the Eastern District. Al D' Amato called his brother's case, involving his
law firm's billings, the worst "nightmare" of his life. It ended with an appeals court
unanimously overturning the conviction. D' Amato told associates for years that
he blamed Giuliani for Armand's prosecution. Since it was an Eastern District case
brought long after Giuliani's departure from the U.S. Attorney's office, the only
possible connection was the door-opening McGuire probe of the firm.

The persecution of McGuire that followed Romano's departure continued for
much of the years in between Rudy mayoral runs, and was a measure of the ten-
sions between the senator and the mayoral-candidate-in-waiting. In February
1991, McGuire was suspended with pay from the u.s. Attorney's office. The only
explanation given was that the Justice Department in Washington was trying to
determine if he'd fabricated the allegation involving Obermaier. On leave until
this probe ended, McGuire began sinking into a tailspin.

As McGuire's limbo entered its second year in February 1992, he took another
hit, this time on the front page of the Daily News. A drug case he'd worked on
years earlier-with the same IRS agent who he said brought him the Obermaier
tip-was blowing up in federal court. The three defendants had filed papers contending
that they were only prosecuted because they were gay. One claimed that
McGuire told him: "If you were not who you are, you would not be indicted."
Subsequent stories quoted Obermaier as saying that this, too, was under investigation
by Justice.

Newsday's account said that Justice officials appeared in court and asked that
the charges be dropped because McGuire and the agents had used" falsified evidence"
against the gay men. They would not disclose what it was.

By May, McGuire finally worked out a deal with the department. He resigned
and the SDNY put a negative letter in his file. The letter reportedly indicated he
was resigning to preempt a dismissal. He was not charged with fabricating either
the evidence in the drug case or the allegation in the Obermaier case. The IRS
agent, however, was indicted on charges of manufacturing a memo of an interview
in the drug case that October and acquitted at trial.

D' Amato wrote that McGuire "was censured for trying to launch an undercover
investigation of his own boss" and "fired" for a "personal vendetta against gays
and minorities." McGuire insists he was neither censured nor fired, and Justice
won't comment. The anti-gay allegation against him was never explored in the
public record beyond the self-serving affidavit of a felony defendant (no anti-minority
charge was ever made).

McGuire was no babe in the woods. His supporters at the office said he was a
tough prosecutor-even a cowboy-who tested the limits. That was probably why
Rudy handpicked him to carryon the D' Amato job during the 1989 mayoral
showdown. That was probably why the Court of Appeals reversed and upbraided
him for telling a jury: "While some people go out and investigate drug dealers and
try to see them brought to justice, there are others who defend them, try to get
them off, perhaps even for high fees."

Yet at McGuire's lowest moment-in the middle of the 1992 Justice
Department review of his conduct-Rudy certainly didn't walk away from his
loyal soldier in the holy war with the Fonz. Giuliani submitted what McGuire describes
as "a fabulous letter" of support for him to the Justice Department. And either
Rudy or Denny Young, he says, put in a good word for him when he
eventually became a partner at his current law firm, none other than the prestigious
White & Case.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:08 am

Twelve: Political Possession of Stolen Property

AL D'AMATO AND RUDY GIULIANI SHARED A SINGLE POLITICAL
assumption in 1989: both believed that Rudy would wind up in a tough
general election race with Ed Koch. The purpose of the Lauder smears, from
0' Amato and Koch's perspective, was to soften Giuliani up for a November
kill. Similarly, it was Koch's wounded and weary government that convinced
Rudy he could win in the first place. History told all three that David Dinkins
could not become the first black mayoral nominee of a major party in city history,
overcoming the advantages of a three-term incumbent. History was off
by about nine percentage points.

It wasn't just that the post-primary Giuliani had an unanticipated
November opponent. His campaign lost its aura of grand mission, its Catholic
clarity. What had seemed so pure a May crusade against the tarnished Koch
was suddenly a murky November conundrum. Instead of facing his first election
astride a white horse, Rudy's only hope now was to be carried into office
by a wave of white fear.

The man he faced in the general election was so disarming he reminded
Giuliani's core voters of the butler Rudy had cleverly mentioned during the
Lauder debate. This surprise Democratic nominee spoke as if manners were
more important than manipulation. He warmed to people of all backgrounds.
He embodied racial peace at a moment in the life of the city when Yusef
Hawkins proved color could still kill. He was a black man who did not shrink
from his blackness yet had earned a death threat in Madison Square Garden
from Louis Farrakhan. He was a mediator, yet marine enough, after a tour of
non-combat duty, to go to battle three heartbreaking times before winning the
borough presidency, which he then gave up to take a chance against Koch. If
"tough" was the first adjective that came to mind when New Yorkers spoke of
Giuliani, "nice guy" was the common first impression of David Dinkins.

Worse yet, Rudy was now the trooper blocking the schoolhouse door. He was
history's obstacle. Instead of leading the reform movement he'd imagined at his
announcement, he was impeding one so much larger than his, a struggle that had
started on slave ships centuries before and had finally arrived at this summit of
power, the mayoralty of America's empire city. What was most remarkable about
Rudy-poised at this racial crossroads-was that he did not even seem to notice.
What was chilling about him was how readily he attempted to adjust to this unexpected
moral and political challenge, how eagerly he became whatever he
needed to be to win.

He no longer spoke of small homeless shelters in every community, or identified
with crack babies. He made no more cathedral addresses about the unity of
African Americans and Italian Americans. The death penalty he had blasted as a
"phony issue" in March suddenly became a crusade he promised to lead as mayor,
vowing to "lobby and fight very, very hard for it" in Albany. The administration
he had condemned as corrupt was magically extended to include Dinkins even
though the borough president had been one of its staunchest Democratic critics.
The peace dinner he and Dinkins had had at the start-its promises brokenprompted
only "agita" now for Dinkins, and amnesia for Giuliani.

A campaign mounted in May to bond a partitioned city would, by November,
divide it into polarized blocs. The Rudy who launched his first run for office, listening
to the finest heartbeats of his life, would disappear in its final weeks. He
would prove that all he wanted was to win, that all he feared was losing. No one
would have expected him to simply lie down and lose, but few who knew him
thought he would do whatever it took to win. He had waited until he was fortyfive
years old to run, leaving little time for comebacks if he was to achieve the fate
he felt should be his. Not even history could get in the way of that destiny.

***

Down by twenty-four points to Dinkins by late September, with Koch and all
the rest of the Democratic establishment supporting Dinkins at a mass unity
rally at City Hall, Rudy went on the attack. His first post-primary commercial revived
the question of Dinkins's failure to file tax returns from 1969 to 1972. It
aired on Donna's station, WPIX, during the newscast.

"Some people will try to tell you this is a negative commercial," an announcer
said as scrolling text repeated the message. "But it isn't because it's fair and the
facts are true." Dinkins disclosed the facts himself in 1973, when he had to step
aside because of his tax delinquencies after Mayor Abe Beame had picked him as a
deputy mayor. He'd paid $28,645 in penalties and fines for four years of avoidance.
It had already cost him one seat in the sun and had been used against him every
time he ran for office.

Dinkins claimed that at their dinner in february, Giuliani told him "the income
tax matter was very, very old and was not an issue." Giuliani changed his mind,
Dinkins concluded, "because of the polls." While Giuliani personally responded to
Dinkins's charge that the ad was a sign of desperation, he left it to his press
spokesman to discuss the dinner promise: "He does not remember the tax issue
coming up."

Simultaneously with the commercial, which bought far more free press coverage
than the campaign bought airtime, Giuliani also placed an ad in the largest
Yiddish newspaper, the Algemeiner Journal. It cost only $800 but reaped a whirlwind.
The ad counterposed a picture of George Bush and Rudy with one of Jesse
Jackson and Dinkins. It read: "Let the people of New York choose their own destiny."
The ad was a holiday greeting for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Giuliani denied that the ad had anything to do "with the color of your skin,
your religion or your ethnicity." Yet almost anyone who'd ever pulled a lever in a
New York voting booth knew it was a naked appeal to Jews, connecting Dinkins
with the turbulent tide of black anti-Semitism. The dishonesty of it was transparent
since Dinkins, who led a boycott protest of farrakhan, had a track record on
Jewish issues no one could question. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post called
it "anxiety by association."

Rudy said it was tit for tat-likening it to Dinkins's branding of him as a
Reagan Republican. He could not see the difference between his role as Reagan's
associate attorney general and Dinkins's endorsement of the first black presidential
candidate. He could not distinguish between the high-water marks of his career-
which were a consequence of two appointments by Ronald Reagan-and
Dinkins's identification with a symbolic candidacy.

The ad was reprinted on the news pages of every tabloid, and while it was called
"troubling" by the American Jewish Committee, it began to take a toll on Dinkins,
eroding his Jewish support. Dinkins had kept Jackson at bay until the 1989 murder
of Yusef Hawkins, when the celebrity preacher finally came to town and
turned the protests into a rallying cry for Dinkins. He and Dinkins didn't make a
joint appearance until September 2. But Dinkins allowed Jackson to dominate his
victory party the night of the primary, talking to the cameras for fifteen minutes
and opening the door to this Giuliani hit.

The irony was that if Koch had won the Democratic primary, Giuliani no doubt
would've welcomed Jackson's support. After all, his emissary, Marty Bergman, had
sought out Bill Lynch as a possible campaign operative for Rudy, and Lynch was
one of the directors of Jackson's 1988 New York presidential campaign. Bergman
in fact met Lynch at a fundraiser Bergman threw in his home for Jackson.

At the same moment as the explosive Jackson ad, a furor arose over the racial
monologues of Jackie Mason, the borscht belt comedian and Orthodox rabbi who
had been accompanying Giuliani on campaign appearances. First, Mason told the
Village Voice that Jewish support for Dinkins was based on guilt and that Jews
were "sick with complexes." Once that story broke, Newsweek revealed that
Mason had earlier referred to Dinkins as a "fancy shvartze with a mustache," a
Yiddish expression that had become the colloquial equivalent of "nigger."

Mason made the remark at a luncheon with Giuliani and four Newsweek reporters
weeks earlier, but Newsweek did not report it until after the Voice piece.
Giuliani maintained he had not heard the remark, but according to Newsweek,
"Giuliani joined in the nervous laughter, making no attempt to rebuke Mason."
Giuliani aides cited the same punctured eardrum that got Giuliani out of the Air
Force ROTC in 1963 as the reason he'd missed the slur at an intimate lunch.

The prominence of Mason in the campaign was a reminder of how Kochphobic
it was from the outset. Giuliani had met Mason in January 1989 when Mason debuted
an anti-Koch shtick at the Village Gate, where Giuliani, Dinkins and other
soon-to-be mayoral candidates were celebrating the publication of City for Sale, a
chronicle of the Koch scandals, with Rudy as hero.

Mason invited himself to the Gate, coming with constant sidekick Raoul Felder,
whose representation of Andy Capasso's wife had helped bring to light the tawdry
details of the Bess Myerson case. Mason's ridicule of Koch's" didn't-see-nothingdon't-
know-nothing" defense had Giuliani giddy all night, and a marriage from
heaven, at least for a race against Ed Koch, was made. Mason even did an anti-
Koch commercial for the Giuliani campaign. But a comedic bonanza against Koch
turned out to be a bust against Dinkins.

What no one in the press noticed was that Rudy acknowledged that his press
aide had raised the issue of the shvartze comment with Giuliani immediately after
the August 31 luncheon. All Giuliani did-with Koch still in the race-was ask
Mason's manager to make sure he never used the phrase again (and this was the
day after Giuliani's visit to the Hawkins funeral). But when the much milder
Mason comments broke a month later in the Voice-and Koch was no longer in
the race-Giuliani asked the comedian to leave the campaign. It was obviously a
combination of the difference between getting caught (Newsweek didn't publish
the shvartze comment until October) and Mason's diminishing utility. Mason's
slur itself was not a cause for decisive Giuliani action.

The attraction to Mason was not just that he was Giuliani's "ambassador" to the
Jewish community, as the New York Times put it, but that he helped show that
Rudy "has a sense of humor." This rationale was openly stated by Giuliani's press
secretary. The assumption was that Rudy was such a lead weight the only way to
lighten him up was to let people see him laugh at someone else's jokes. He did that
whenever deadpan Jackie opened his mouth. This wit deficit was only a problem
when Rudy was counterposed to the jocular Koch, since Dinkins was as heavyfooted
as Giuliani.

With the Mason incident and the Jackson ad as a backdrop, the underlying dynamic
of the campaign had clearly become race. That theme would be repeated
again and again in October, with Rudy's campaign targeting four Dinkins aides, all
black, in news revelation after news revelation.

Newsday revealed that Dinkins manager Bill Lynch had approved $10,000 in
campaign payments to a nominal organization, the Committee to Honor Black
Heroes, controlled by notorious race-baiter Sonny Carson. Carson had been convicted
in Brooklyn in 1975 of the kidnapping of a black man. Depicted as an anti-
Semite in follow-up stories the Giuliani camp encouraged, Carson obliged by
holding a press conference in the black Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-
Stuyvesant, surrounded by bodyguards in nationalist colors, and declaring how
offended he was. "I'm anti-white," he boomed. "Don't limit my anti-ing to just being
one little group of people. I think you'd insult me if you tried to do that."

The reporter who broke the story, Lenny Levitt, says he noticed the strangely
named committee, without an address, on the Dinkins campaign filing and tracked
it to Carson. Levitt said he made the discovery without a Giuliani tip, but that after
the story, the Giuliani camp called to congratulate him. Levitt can't remember
if it was Ray Harding or Peter Powers who spoke to him, but whichever one it was
said the story was "perfect" and that it allowed the campaign "to put out other
stuff we have" but previously couldn't, presumably because of the racial climate.
Giuliani immediately threw an ad up on the tube focusing on Carson's kidnapping
conviction and Rudy said: "This ex-convict was set out on the streets to get votes."

Another Giuliani target, Jitu Weusi, was a public school teacher during the
racially explosive citywide strike in 1968 who at that time read a stridently anti-
Semitic poem on the radio that had been written by a student of his. He had since
founded a successful, Afrocentric private school and, unlike Carson, been a positive
nationalist force within black Brooklyn, respected by leading black elected officials.
When Giuliani found him on the Dinkins payroll, the leaked stories pigeonholed
him as an anti-Semite based on a single, distant, event. "I have spent the last 20
years apologizing as well as suffering," he told the Post. "When do I get a reprieve?"

Harding was quoted in the lead of the story, which was headlined: "Liberal
Chief: Dinkins Aide Is a Jew-Baiter," leaving no doubt about where the wellshopped
allegation was coming from. Weusi, whose name alone beat drums in
white ears, said the poem did not represent his views then or now, and that he
found it "deeply offensive." The combination of the Carson and Weusi storieswhich
the Giuliani campaign kept alive for weeks-helped provoke cries of "Jackie
Mason was right" from Jewish crowds greeting Giuliani.

Word of the Carson and Weusi roles with Dinkins traveled a strange route to
Giuliani headquarters. Giuliani knew about Carson in fact before Levitt wrote a
word. The campaign's original source, ironically, was the Brooklyn-based
Reverend Al Sharpton. Dinkins was keeping Sharpton-another alarm bell for
Jewish voters who happened to be under indictment on state tax charges at the
time-as far away as possible. Without an indirect assist from street-savvy
Sharpton, the Giuliani campaign wouldn't have had the slightest idea who
Weusi and Carson were. Sharpton heard that Carson was putting together a
breakfast for Dinkins at Junior's in downtown Brooklyn and running a registration
and pull operation for the candidate in Brooklyn projects. Sharpton told
Brooklyn GOP leader Arthur Bramwell about the Carson/Weusi roles, and
Bramwell relayed it to the campaign, citing his source and precisely why
Sharpton was talking.

"Yes, he fed me the information," said Bramwell, a Bedford-Stuyvesant GOP
district leader active in the Giuliani campaign. "I was the only guy he'd talk to."
Bramwell had known Sharpton's mother for years, as well as the bishop Sharpton
credits with bringing him into the ministry, and had helped deliver a Sharpton endorsement
of Al D'Amato in the 1986 Senate race. Bramwell even told the
Giuliani people how deep the enmity was between Sharpton and Dinkins, recounting
a story of how Dinkins, as a private attorney, had overcharged Sharpton
years earlier for incorporating an organization then run by the young minister.
Bramwell was the vice chair of that organization. Chris Lyon, the research director
for Giuliani's campaign, recalls that they first heard about Carson and Weusi
via this bizarre pipeline and that, on a weekend, he hurriedly did Nexus and other
searches on these targets.

Sharpton says he doesn't remember the incident, though he acknowledges talking
to Bramwell during the campaign. "I knew Sonny and them were working
voter registration," he recalls. "If I told them anything, I told them these guys
were involved in the campaign."

Jim Bell, the vice president of a United Auto Workers local who took a leave
from his union job to coordinate security and travel for the Dinkins campaign, was
nailed in an October television story by WNBC- TV's John Miller. Bell's yellow
sheet featured a 1971 misdemeanor conviction for hitting a police officer and was
being circulated to reporters by none other than Tony Lombardi. He offered the
story to one reporter who turned it down. When Miller went with it, he cited unnamed
"law enforcement sources."

Miller's name appears in Lombardi's logs several times, including once a few
days after the Bell story. Miller would not confirm that Lombardi gave him the rap
sheet, but several sources knowledgeable about how he got the story confirmed
that it came "from the Giuliani camp." Bell's swipe at the cop was so minor he was
fined $100, and he claimed that the cop had called him a "nigger."

Phil Thompson, who earned a meager total of $515 as a consultant to Dinkins
and was a fellow at the Robert Wagner Sr. Institute of Urban Public Policy at New
York University at the time, was blasted in a Post story for having a "fiery red
past." At one time a member of the central committee of the Communist Workers
Party, the Harvard-educated Thompson was red meat for the Rudy machine.
Lynch had brought Thompson to Dinkins after meeting him in the Walter
Mondale campaign of 1984, and Thompson is now a full professor in Columbia
University's political science department. Hardly Maoist credentials. But the Post
story-and one in a weekly that quoted from decade-old speeches of his-convinced
him that "someone had been going through my FBI file." The scandal also
cost him a job at the Ford Foundation.

Strangely enough, Harding, who was fast becoming the campaign's garbage dispenser,
made his own living on legal cases referred to him by the Yugoslav mission.
Confronted by a reporter, he could not see the contradiction between
smearing a young black once tied to a fringe left party and his own fees from a
communist government.

"Many of the stories that surfaced this week," the New York Times concluded in
the midst of the Carson, Thompson and Weusi stories, "had circulated widely as
rumors, but it was not until the Giuliani campaign made them into campaign issues,
that they were picked up by the press."

This collection of negative New York stereotypes about blacks-criminals, anti-
Semites, communists-led Giuliani to conclude: "So some real questions now
have to be raised about Dinkins's judgment, the kind of people he surrounds himself
with. And then, importantly, if he were mayor, what kind of people would he
have surrounding him in City Hall." He said Bill Lynch should be fired for hiring
this questionable crew.

In fact, Lynch too was apparently targeted. On September 28, 1989, two weeks
after the primary, Lynch got the first of three letters from the IRS about his 1985
tax return. The return had been filed on time and no question about it had been
raised in the intervening three years. When Lynch got the notice, which was resolved
in 1990 without any additional tax or penalties, he thought it was routine.
In fact, the IRS says auditing a return that old is not ordinary.

Around the same time as the audit letter, a top deputy in the SDNY personally
close to both IRS agent Tony Lombardi and Giuliani, told two reporters that Lynch
had a tax "problem," though he refused to be specific. The deputy appeared "tickled"
about the "problem," said one reporter. Lombardi, who has not conceded any
role he might have played in the audit, later said in an interview: "I don't recall if
another agent could have said that they had him under investigation. I don't rule
that possibility out."

In addition to the audit, Lombardi, who had met Lynch and Bell at a June garden
party, mentioned matter-of-factly to a reporter that he tailed Lynch during the final
weeks of the 1989 campaign. Pressed about the surveillance in an interview in
1993, Lombardi said: "I can't ever remember that happening." Lombardi went on to
talk about Lynch as if he had, at some point, been a subject of sordid interest: "I
don't recall anybody ever coming to me to say that Bill Lynch has done anything
wrong. I heard a story about his son. I heard some matters that I would think he
would be pained about as a father. I only knew of what little rumors one might
want to have floated about the guy." Lombardi, the rap sheet expert, was apparently
referring to a dismissed disorderly conduct charge and a farebeating arrest.

Lynch said that he and Bell, who has since dip.d, believed that they were followed
on several occasions during the campaign as they left the West 43rd Street
headquarters: "We'd leave anywhere from midnight to 2 A.M. and pick the car up
in a parking lot on West 44th Street. We had the same routine: drive up 8th
Avenue, then over to Broadway and 72nd Street," where they would buy hot dogs
and newspapers. "We'd go north on Central Park West or Amsterdam Avenue. At
some point, we both were sure that we were being tailed by the same car each
night. I didn't really think about it that much until it happens for like the fourth
or fifth time. So we pulled over one night at 105th Street and jumped out of the
car and ran back towards the guy behind us. That's when he backed up and cut
out." Lynch said the tails ended that night.

Lombardi freely admitted he investigated a reputed girlfriend of the very married
Dinkins. "There was one case which was given to me to handle in a very, very
delicate way. And that was Dinkins having a love liaison with a woman who was
on his staff and that he was doing whatever was necessary in order to get this
woman promoted," he said in a taped interview. "Everybody knew about it. The
thing was if there was some criminality to it."

While Lombardi declined to name the woman and claimed he conducted the inquiry
when Dinkins was mayor, his 1989 diaries contain a detailed entry about
605 Water Street in Manhattan, the home of a Dinkins aide named Cindy Ng. The
entry occurred on October 30, nine days before the election. Peter Powers told the
Times the same day that "New Yorkers deserve to know the facts concerning
Cynthia Ng's apartment."

Ng had already taken an ugly news hit in the Post back in August, when a reporter
and photographer surprised her at a meeting of a Chinese-American political
club where Dinkins was speaking.

The thirty-seven-year-old aide, when stopped by the Post, fled to a phone booth
and hid in the dark for twenty minutes. Dinkins's angry "explosion" at the reporter
was reported in the Post as "unusual." The story detailed how Ng's salary
had doubled-reaching $49,000-since she had joined Dinkins's staff in 1984. It
also charged that she submitted false income affidavits to qualify for her city-subsidized
apartment near Dinkins's office. Someone in Dinkins's personnel office had
verified Ng's understated income, according to the story. The Ng story had faded
off the news pages until Powers tried to revive it in October.

The fixation on Ng had more to do with what was suspected to have gone on in
the apartment than the subsidy for it. Newsday revealed in 1987 that the $95,000-
a-year executive director of the New York City Housing Authority, who lived
alone, was illegally occupying a subsidized apartment reserved for a low-income
family of five. No other newspaper even reported it, including the Post, and the
city investigation commissioner declined to investigate. As soon as the Ng story
was published, however, a Department of Investigation (DOl) probe was publicly
announced.

The Post's Jerry Nachman defended the selective focus on Ng, contending that
"it didn't matter" if her low-balled income claims were "commonplace," they
should still be examined. The Daily News's Barbara Ross, who was assigned to the
Giuliani campaign, had passed on the story before the Post went with it, but only
after Ross asked Dinkins to his face if he was having an affair with Ng. When
Dinkins was elected, his DOl commissioner referred the case to the Manhattan
district attorney to investigate "to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest."
The DA soon announced that no charges would be filed. After a stint in Dinkins's
City Hall, Ng moved to California, where she works in a management position at
Stanford University today.

The Giuliani campaign was prepared, however, to go much further than Ng on
the Dinkins sex trail. They had a time bomb they wanted to detonate as close to
the November 7 election as possible. Shortly after the September primary, they
obtained a devastating fifty-four-page file of letters, with seventeen photographs,
taken from Dinkins's public office.

The letters were from eight different women, and the photos were of him with
his arms wrapped around them or sometimes posing cheek-to-cheek, often in tennis
whites. Dinkins had apparently traveled from one public position to the next
with the letters, since the earliest were addressed to him at the New York City
Board of Elections, which he used to chair, and the latest were sent to him at the
City Clerk's office, which he headed until 1986.

One woman signed her name but referred to herself as "cupcake "; another addressed
him as "my chocolate button." "Cupcake" wrote on January 7, 1983: "1
thought of you at the dawn of 1983-wanting so to feel close and share memories
of our special moments together. Always my mind returns to Philadelphia and how
you swept me off my feet (smile)." Shelley wrote: "Thanks for the loving so sweet
and so free-searching, exploring, being with me." One from PeggyAnne in Puerto
Rico written at 7:10 A.M. said: "You have changed me with your touch." Collected
over an eleven-year period, the letters, which clearly referred in some cases to
physical relationships, came from Puerto Rico, Spain, Florida, and California. The
candidate who failed to file his taxes apparently never misplaced a love letter.

The route the letters took to campaign headquarters would've set off stolenproperty
alarms were Rudy still at the U.S. Attorney's office. Research director
Chris Lyon says he was given the letters "in an open shoebox one Saturday at the
midtown campaign office by Raquel Vidal," Dinkins's secretary until July 1986.
After Dinkins was elected borough president in 1985, Vidal expected a significant
position in the new office. According to Vidal, Dinkins said at one major fundraising
dinner: "You want to see my committee. Here's my one-person committee,"
pointing at Vidal. Angered by promotions Cindy Ng had achieved, Vidal was so offended
by her own contrasting treatment, she quit and took at least one file and a
rolodex with her.

Vidal's sister Sara was a regular volunteer in the Giuliani campaign, even
though she was on the payroll of City Council President Andrew Stein, a
Democrat. Dinkins had run against Stein for Manhattan borough president in
both 1977 and 1981 in bitter campaigns. A covert ally of Giuliani's in 1989, Stein
had "no problem" with Sara's frequent involvement in the Giuliani campaign,
Vidal now says. Occasionally joined by Raquel, Sara Vidal accompanied Giuliani to
Hispanic events throughout the campaign, also working on outreach efforts to
Hispanic voters. Sara raised $3,575 from twenty-nine individuals for the Giuliani
campaign, all on October 2, 1989. The sisters also donated $635 to Rudy's mayoral
campaigns over the years.

Raquel Vidal's decision to turn over the letters was not simply a product of
three-year-old anger. Half Dominican and half Puerto Rican, the sisters lived with
their mother Ercira in a one-family home in Queens. Their mother, who'd met
Rudy once, died on June 17, in the middle of the campaign. They were deeply
moved when Giuliani showed up first at the funeral home. He got there at 1:45
P.M. for the 2:30 funeral, the sisters recall, prayed, and left a mass card, amazing
even the funeral director. "You never forget that/' Sara says now. Though Raquel
had worked for Dinkins for years and Dinkins knew her mother, he did not call or
come. "Joyce Dinkins sent flowers," Sara recalled, referring to Dinkins's wife.
Raquel did not turn over the love letters to the campaign until well after her
mother's death, and soon after Dinkins' primary win.

In an extended interview in 1999, Raquel Vidal would neither directly confirm
nor deny delivering the letters. "You can write what you want to write and I will
have no comment," she said, after listening to a detailed description of her visit to
the Giuliani headquarters. "Talk to Dinkins and Lynch. They would understand
why I did what I did. I don't have anything to add to what they have to say." Lynch
said Vidal was "livid" and "flipped out" when Dinkins's office refused to rehire
her. She tried to return months after she'd quit, says Lynch, and got "angrier and
angrier" when she could not get another job "for a long time/' adding that he certainly
believed she took the letters when she left.

Raquel acknowledged she was quite familiar with the letters, saying they went
to "the character of the person involved" and argued that they were a legitimate
public issue, even though none of the women who wrote them had any connection
with Dinkins's official position.

Sara Vidal wound up a deputy commissioner of human rights under Giuliani,
earning a city salary twice her Stein paycheck as soon as Rudy took office in 1994.
Since then, she's received several salary increases and now makes $80,000 a year
as the director of the city's office on Census 2000.

Raquel Vidal got a secretarial job in 1987 with the Federal Home Loan Bank of
New York, a congressionally chartered quasi-public bank. She rose from the secretarial
ranks, starting as a temp, to an executive position as public information officer
after Giuliani became mayor. Guy Molinari, the Staten Island borough
president close to Giuliani, chaired the bank board when she was elevated to her
executive post. The bank will not disclose her salary increases or discuss her references,
political or otherwise. By all accounts, even those of the Dinkins camp, the
Vidals are competent and hardworking staffers.

The day the letters arrived, campaign headquarters was abuzz about them.
"Everyone" at a senior staff meeting-Harding, Peter Powers, and others-"had
one in their hand," according to Lyon, who was present at the meeting. "They
were filled with glee," says Lyon. "It was the giddiness of teenage boys looking at
Playboy. I felt, and so did most people in the room, that if the letters were printed,
Giuliani wins." Rudy was at the meeting himself, but cautionary. Since the letters
indicated Dinkins was taking trips, sometimes with women and sometimes to visit
them, Giuliani focused on it as a financial scandal, contending Dinkins could not
afford these trips. The question he posed, says Lyon, was how to link the trips and
the women to city funds. No immediate decision was made about how to deal with
the letters but they were taken from Lyon and "kicked upstairs."

The first attempt to get the content of the letters out was an anonymous mailing
to selected members of the New York press. On October 4, the three-page
memo appeared in the name of a concocted organization called the Independent
Democrats of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The memo defended Giuliani,
dismissing attacks on him written by columnist Jimmy Breslin, and charged that
Dinkins was "enjoying immunity from the press in the name of racial harmony."
It called Dinkins "a gigolo in a permanent state of mid-life crisis."

"Although he has been married to whom he refers as 'his bride of 36 years,' evidence
is available which shows that he has been involved in extramarital affairs as
far back as 1970. With so many problems in the Black family structure, does NYC
need Dinkins as a role model? Yes, there is a need for role models within the Black
community, but no one who has no respect for wife and home. He speaks of high
roads, yet leads a low life."

The press memo named Ng, who contributed no letters to the old file, and eight
women, most of whom were identifiable from the letters. The memo contained information
about several of the women-including identifying one as "blond and
blue-eyed" for obvious racial purposes-that could not be obtained from the letters
alone. The places of work of some were listed. That's where the Vidal rolodex
may have come into play. The memo also challenged reporters to ask Dinkins
about these women and promised that "if and when he denies these facts, we will
present you with the evidence."

Chris Lyon remembers getting a copy of the flyer, though he says his research
unit had nothing to do with producing it. When it got no press response, a debate
erupted at the highest levels of the campaign about what to do with the letters. Lyon
and several other campaign sources recall that the biggest fear was that if a story
about the letters was printed, their release might be traced back to the Giuliani campaign
and wind up hurting Giuliani as much as it did Dinkins. Too many people
within the campaign knew about them, and any planted story would be traced back
to Giuliani. It was decided at that point not to give them to reporters.

But in the final days of the campaign, public polls started showing the once wide
gap between Dinkins and Giuliani narrowing to a very winnable margin. The
pressure to use the letters grew. No subsequent high-level meeting was held reexamining
the earlier decision. Instead, on Thursday, October 26, the Post's Fred
Dicker, a skillful, hard-boiled reporter with a decidedly Republican/conservative
tilt, got a phone call and a tantalizing offer. Three hours later, he had the letters,
given to him, according to three sources, who asked not to be identified, through
Ray Harding. Lyon remembers that the custodian of the letters, after he turned
them over at the staff meeting, was Carl Grillo, Harding's aide.

So Dicker started working the phones, trying to locate the women who'd written
the letters. The next day he called Bill Lynch and set up a meeting for 2 P.M.,
when he gave Lynch copies of the letters and asked for comment. Dicker soon got
a call from Andrew Cuomo, the governor's son.

The Post's regular Albany bureau chief, Dicker knew the Cuomos well.
Unofficially aiding Lynch in the Dinkins campaign, Andrew Cuomo said he was
calling to give Dicker "friendly advice to be careful with the matter." According to
a memo to file Dicker wrote at the time, Cuomo warned: "people will be going after
you." Efforts were being made, Dicker learned, to go around him to his superiors.
That night Cuomo called back to "make sure nothing got into print," Dicker
said.

That night, a Friday, Cuomo and Lynch took copies of the letters to Dinkins,
who was staying at a suite at the Sheraton Centre. It was twelve days from election
day, and Dinkins, who met the two in a bathrobe, shifted quickly from denial
to desperation. The attention-grabber was Cuomo's question about whether the
phrase "my chocolate button" meant anything to him.

The Dinkins camp reached out to Peter Kalikow, the Post's owner, talking first
to Kalikow's top adviser, public relations consultant Marty McLaughlin. Nachman
and McLaughlin talked. They agreed that there were lots of editorial and political
problems with the story. No city employees were involved; none of the women
were talking. It was obvious that publication of the letters, with the first black
mayor on the verge of election, would be racial dynamite, to say nothing of the
possible electoral backlash if a paper endorsing Giuliani printed them.

Dinkins, who rushed out to a black-tie dinner after the session with Lynch and
Cuomo, reached Kalikow at his home. Kalikow was uncomfortable with the story.
He liked Dinkins personally. He bought Nachman's and McLaughlin's arguments.
When Dinkins got off the phone, he seemed reassured that the Post would not
print the letters. The next morning, Cuomo was the first to inform Dicker that his
story would not be published. He presented it as a done deal.

That same Saturday morning Cuomo called a Village Voice reporter at home,
having heard that he might have the letters and write a story. It took half an hour
for the reporter to convince Cuomo that he'd turned down the letters when they
were offered by a Giuliani source. It had been rumored for days that the Voice was
doing the story, although in fact no one at the paper was even considering it. The
scuttlebutt, encouraged by the Giuliani campaign, was designed to induce a daily
to scoop the weekly Voice. Instead, the paper was getting calls from other news organizations
promising to credit the Voice if they could get an advance copy of the
fantasy story.

Dicker called Nachman at his Connecticut home after his Cuomo conversation
and Nachman said he had "a million questions" about the story, putting him off to
Monday. Another editor told him on Monday that the Post didn't want the story.
Nachman said years later that a Dinkins call to Kalikow killing the story was
"plausible," but the editor was so dismissive of the letters himself that he contended
they were "in crayon without any pictures," which is not true.

Dicker said he had "an icy feeling" when he learned the story was spiked, calling
the decision making one of "the shabbiest and most poorly handled things" in
his long Post career. By Monday afternoon, however, word about the letters had
spread to every newsroom in the city. Josh Barbanel of the Times called Dicker and
said he'd heard the Post had killed the story; Dicker declined to comment. Arthur
Browne, a top editor at the Daily News, called a Giuliani political consultant asking
about the prospect of a Post story.

Giuliani's efforts to expose Dinkins's romances were apparently unaffected by
any concerns about his own. Ironically, Kathleen Smith, the ex-secretary he'd dated
in his Justice Department days, was working as the director of volunteers at Rudy's
campaign headquarters. Smith's sister Therese McManus was another top campaign
aide, in charge of scheduling. Smith had left a Washington job to come up to
work in New York for Rudy. Single and attractive, she'd been the subject of internal
campaign gossip, with many aware of her once intimate ties to the candidate.

In late October, with the press awash in talk about the love letters, Dinkins had
a warning letter hand-delivered to Giuliani headquarters. "If you persist in your
present course," Dinkins wrote without any specifics, "you will learn something I
learned in the Marine Corps. Marines aren't very good at picking fights, but they
certainly know how to end them." Shortly thereafter, the Dinkins camp reached
out to Regina Peruggi, hoping to turn her story into a weapon against Rudy. Jim
Hall pressured her to help, according to Hall's closest friends. Gussie Kappner, her
mentor and confidant, was seen by others at CUNY headquarters pressuring her
to meet with Dinkins's people. Friends say she even playfully wore a Dinkins button.
Her black and white worlds were colliding.

Regina talked for the first time to a reporter-Maria Laurino of the Village
Voice-the same week the letters were delivered to Fred Dicker. She had been
fighting reporters off up to then. Laurino was focused on the annulment and
Giuliani's contrived loophole that won it-namely that he had originally thought
they were" distant cousins."

While Regina's minimal quotes did not directly counter that, Peruggi's friends
and a relative did. Peruggi's maid of honor, Pat Rufino, who lived in Florida, called
Rudy's contention "baloney," saying they knew exactly how close the ties were.
"Regina was extremely upset. To turn and tell someone not only is this marriage
over, but it didn't exist, is a real slap in the face."

Another friend, Jackie Moore, cited the same anger: "It kind of negates fourteen
years of your life." Moore and Rufino confirmed that Regina, who decided that a
divorce was necessary, had sent a letter of protest about the annulment to the
archdiocese. Her brother Richard said of the Rudy rationale: "That's a lie. He knew
he was my second cousin." That, of course, meant that Rudy knew at the time of
the wedding that they were closely enough related to require a dispensation.

Laurino's point was that Giuliani had engaged in an "obvious public prevarication"
to gain the annulment, undermining the image of probity he was trying to
sell to the electorate. As damning as the Laurino facts were, the dailies shrunk
from the story. Regina's friends said she had wanted out "because of problems in
the marriage," but the story shed no light on what those problems were and
Regina's friends would not spell them out in detail. The cloud long cast over his
first marriage-with its separations and on again/off again ambiguity-now hung
over the campaign.

The Regina story-and the threat of more of it-was driving the Giuliani campaign
berserk. Rudy told the Daily News that the Dinkins campaign had prepared
a TV commercial focusing on his first marriage but hadn't aired it because of adverse
reaction from a test audience. The Amsterdam News, a strong Dinkins supporter,
ran two stories in its pre-election issue on the Peruggi annulment, one on
the front page. Peter Powers, armed with the love letters and facing the Regina
rumors, offered a telling analogy to a consultant with friends in both camps: "Tell
the Dinkins people it's like the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Dave Seifman, the Post's level-headed City Hall bureau chief, wrote a column
headlined "Low Blows" that vaguely listed the invisible punches and counterpunches
in what a source in his story called "the most vicious campaign" he'd ever
seen. Seifman blamed both camps, concluding: "The Giuliani camp is clearly the
more active."

Giuliani aides pushed on to try to get references to the love letters published in
any fashion that might open the door, even if it was a trick story about how the
Post had killed its own scoop. Right up to the Sunday before the Tuesday election,
everyone at the highest levels of both campaigns was on edge. One top Giuliani
campaign operative said: "There was a lot of joking and intense speculation about
whether the letters would appear. Rudy was involved in it himself. We were counting
on the letters. We didn't think we'd win without them."

Most of the focus in the last week was on the News, where Adam Nagourney
came in for unusual Saturday duty four days before the election. Though
Nagourney, Arthur Browne and others at the News said they never saw the letters,
they did not want to get scooped if the Post made a last-minute decision to
publish them. A story could be done about the buzz surrounding the letters without
citing them directly, and Nagourney and his editors were also considering that
option. Nagourney says, "We were getting faked out by the Giuliani people; they
were trying to convince us that the Post was doing it." Another News reporter involved
in the coverage said, "The Giuliani people were trying to steamroll us into
doing the story."

Andrew Cuomo calmly reasoned with Nagourney in mid-afternoon. He appealed
to Nagourney on the basis of the confidentiality of a public official's private
life. Jack Newfield, a News columnist at the time, saw paragraphs on Nagourney's
screen he thought were the beginning of a piece and argued against a story, pointing
out to Browne and others that the private lives of many white politicians had
never been so publicly exposed. The editors were on the phones with lawyers, who
had raised questions about the legality of receiving, much less printing, the letters.
One attorney, as Newfield recalled it, contended that the letters might be the copyright
property of the women who wrote them, making their use more difficult.

That same weekend, Chris Lyon approached Powers for a final conversation about
the letters. Lyon told Powers that he thought someone he knew at the Washington
Times would print a story if the New York papers wouldn't and that local tabloids
would have to follow the Washington story. "Peter told me we couldn't do it because
our fingerprints at this point were all over the letters," Lyons recalls. "The New York
follow-up story, Peter said, would be about how the Giuliani campaign planted the
letters in Washington." Lyon says he knew then that "the campaign was over."

Finally, the Sunday sex bombshell so coveted by the Giuliani camp fizzled out,
just as the Regina ruckus died down. Raquel Vidal complained years later that the
story was "squashed," saying all the letters did was bring city and postal investi-
gators to her door in the 1990s, another event she blamed on Dinkins, who was
mayor at the time. Rudy had pressed every chocolate button he could, but he
would have to face Dinkins on November 7 without a word of it in type.

A year or so after the loss, Rudy and Donna went to Philadelphia to the annual
regional awards dinner of the Radio Television News Directors' Association. WPIX
director John Corporon had invited them, and the three were having drinks in a
cocktail lounge at the hotel when Corporon raised the love letters. Ever since
Corporon heard about them during the 1989 campaign, he'd wondered why no
story ever appeared. He'd once bumped into Jerry Nachman and grilled him about
it, recalling that Nachman said he didn't know if it would've been "appropriate" to
publish them.

"We were chatting about politics," Corporon recalled his conversation with
Rudy and Donna, "and I said, by the way, I meant to ask you ... about those love
letters. It was just curiosity and gossip as far I was concerned. But Rudy wasn't
playing that game." Corporon said he couldn't remember precisely what Rudy
said, but he indicated he "didn't want to talk about it." It was" absolutely clear that
he heard about the letters," said Corporon, and it was just as clear he "didn't particularly
want to discuss it."

Though Rudy spent the four years in between mayoral elections running
against Dinkins, and Dinkins spent them fending off Giuliani, the dueling dynamite
of the letters and Regina had been defused. Neither would appear on Rudy's
radar screen again, even when Harold Ickes, the counsel to the Dinkins campaign,
became Post owner Peter Kalikow's lobbyist soon after Dinkins took office. Ickes
successfully steered a major development project for real estate baron Kalikow
through the city approval process. And Rudy Giuliani, the daily commentator on
everything else that happened in the Dinkins administration, did not say a word
about the Kalikow decision that might've decided an election and cemented a mutually
beneficial political friendship. The episode was potentially so embarrassing
to everyone involved Rudy could never mention it.

***

It wasn't as if sex and race were the only weapons available to Giuliani in his run
against Dinkins. Newsday and the Village Voice broke stories about Dinkins's
only significant personal asset, the stock he owned in a cable company. As
Manhattan borough president and a member of the city's Board of Estimate,
Dinkins had voted twice on franchise issues affecting the company, despite an
ethics opinion advising him not to. He supposedly transferred the stock to his son,
but proof of the transaction was as dubious as the lowball value he placed on it in
his financial disclosure statements. The media storm over the cable revelations was
so hot Rudy's electoral stock soared.

With help again from Raquel Vidal, who was identified as a former Dinkins secretary
and quoted in one Daily News story on the stock, the Giuliani campaign
extended the original conflict-of-interest stories into another tax evasion controversy.
One paper after another did stories raising questions about Dinkins's failure
to pay gift taxes, and Giuliani rightly connected that to the otherwise ancient history
of evasion. New York magazine revealed the day before the election that the
quotable secretary who'd helped prepare the disclosure forms was the sister of
Giuliani's "Latino coordinator Sara Vidal," suggesting the source on the tax story
was biased.

While Rudy's campaign aides quietly fueled the sex firestorm, the candidate
himself brilliantly worked the cable scandal. Dinkins faced a supposed tell-all,
standing-room-only press conference on the stock in the unaired heat of his strobelit
headquarters, but his answers were more sound bite than substance. He handed
out a "Dear Dad" letter from his son that theoretically memorialized the stock sale
for $58,000, but could explain why years of financial disclosure filings had never divulged
it. More than Carson or any of the other racial flare-ups of the campaign,
the cable scandal damaged Dinkins and narrowed the polls. Democrats who wanted
to vote against him for wrong reasons were hand-delivered a right reason.

As effectively as Rudy rode this issue, he didn't believe it could win the election.
So in the final week, he tried a new race formulation. At Columbia University, he
started saying race wasn't a reason to vote for anyone. He said lithe potential for
their frustration "-by which he meant the possible anger of Dinkins's black supporters
if he lost-"is not a rationale for the election of David Dinkins, any more
than the potential for the dissatisfaction among my supporters is a legitimate reason
for electing me." He down played the importance of racial harmony, saying it
wasn't pivotal. lilt's wrong for David Dinkins to expect the voters to choose him
because he's black," he said, "just as it would be wrong for me to expect the voters
to choose me because I am white."

It was his second speech on race since the campaign began, and one was the inverse
of the other. By saying now it wasn't the issue, he was making it the issue.
The first time, in the liberal phase of his early campaign, he was talking to blacks;
the second time he was talking about them.

Similarly, when pressed about his Haitian actions in the early 1980s, Candidate
Giuliani said, "I defended that policy and still do," adding it II saved a lot of lives."
Yet he issued a four-page statement entitled "Issues That Concern Irish New
Yorkers," saying he was "a strong proponent of amnesty for undocumented immigrants."
He even promised to press for "extending the cutoff date for amnesty
applications from 1982 to 1989," meaning he wanted to grant immigration status
to the Irish for precisely the years he'd worked to deny it to the Haitians.

Incredibly, he said "it does not make sense to deport people who are hardworking,
law-abiding individuals," though he had admitted, in his testimony years earlier
in the Haitian case, that the Haitians he was excluding were both. For the
Irish, he favored "full legal status to people who are here already and who are contributing
to society," as well as "complete and unimpeded access to municipal services"
for all residents-"citizen or alien." No Krome for Celts!

His turnaround on Koch was just as drastic. Three days after the primary,
Rudy's campaign sent a letter to Koch contributors saying that their support of the
mayor demonstrated their "commitment to the future of our city" and their "concern
about the quality of leadership that will guide New York." With every poll
showing that Koch Democrats were reluctant to vote for Dinkins, Giuliani went
out of his way to praise Koch, even saluting him on a corruption issue a week before
the election.

In less than a year as a politician, Rudy had mastered the art of reinvention. He
could recondition himself overnight. The Rudy who might have been mayor had
Ed Koch won the primary would not be seen again-a Rudy the Wall Street
Journal said was "the last thing either the city or the national GOP needs-another
Lindsay liberal to give Republicanism a bad name." The dynamic of the campaign
had turned Rudy into a political carousel, spinning round and round with a
hundred, ever changing, faces.

Shortly before the election, Fiorello La Guardia's granddaughter Katherine
stood up at an Italian-American political breakfast and announced her family's
choice for mayor-David Dinkins. She said Giuliani had made "improper comparisons"
between himself and her grandfather. John Lindsay in the end said Dinkins,
not Giuliani, represented the coalition that had elected him.

The night he lost, Rudy's party was at the Roosevelt Hotel. Tony Lombardi was
there, doomed not to be the commissioner he'd long been talking about. The gang
from Foley Square and Justice was there-Ken Caruso, Denny Young, Randy
Levine, Arnold Burns, all of whom had played key roles in the campaign. So was
Mike Mukasey, who was telling stories about D' Amato though the senator had
supported his appointment to the federal bench in the fall of 1987, when Rudy and
Al were still talking about a Moynihan race.

The ballroom was filled with the frustrated supporters he'd closed the campaign
invoking-white, male and mad. It was also filled with ugly untruths about how
blacks had stolen the election at polls in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, where the dead had
supposedly voted by the thousands.

Rudy gathered himself in a suite upstairs. His three-point, 44,000-vote loss was
a miracle finish-the closest mayoral election since 1905-and he knew the numbers
meant he had a future. He had feared a ten-point loss, since public polls in the
final days had indicated a Dinkins surge. While other races, like one against Mario
Cuomo in 1990 or D' Amato in 1992, were being discussed, it was already almost
an assumption among the inner circle in the suite that he'd be back in a mayoral
contest again. Destiny had only been delayed, briefly and narrowly.

Downstairs, when he tried to concede, he came face to face with the anger his
hard dash to election day had unleashed. The clamor of booing and hissing that
greeted Dinkins's name was a legacy of his own campaign. But he was already
preparing for the next one. That was yesterday's baggage. He wanted everyone on
the same page. He began bellowing at his supporters until his voice broke. His face
contorted. His eyes popped. The press would say for years that he had told his own
people to "shut up." Again and again. But all he said was, "No, no, no ... Stop
that! Quiet! Quiet!" It wasn't that he was out of control. He was outraged that
they were out of his control.

He had already moved on and, as the years that lay ahead would prove, he was
impatient with anyone on his side who could not keep pace with his shifting political
moods.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Political Science

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests