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 6:09 am

Part 1 of 2

Thirteen: A Season of Compromise: Preparing for 1993

DEFEAT WAS A STRANGER IN RUDY GIULIANI'S LIFE. FROM
Manhattan College, NYU and MacMahon to foley Square, Patterson
and Justice, he had rarely suffered a setback. He'd been embarrassed a bit by
Haiti, McDonnell Douglas, Myerson, Wigton and Tabor. But each had barely
provoked momentary reflection. The 1989 election, however, yanked him to a
halt, altered his career calendar and tested his gut.

Losing a terribly public slugfest-even by a margin he'd managed to miraculously
narrow-also left him, for the first time since he became associate attorney
general in 1981, just an ordinary man, albeit one still brimming with
extraordinary ambition. He was again, as he had been almost a decade earlier,
merely one of 62,000 lawyers in a city of clamoring courthouses. His return,
in his discount suits, to an obscure private practice made him more certain
than ever that it was not enough for him.

He went back to White & Case after the election, but lasted less than six
months, rarely appearing at his office but still drawing hundreds of thousands
in income. In January 1990, he bought a third apartment at 444 East 86th,
moving Helen downstairs to the 18th floor. Settling in for the most domestic
period of his and Donna's life, they knocked down the wall between their two
units on the 35th floor and turned the renovated apartment into a reasonably
spacious home for four. Rudy owned Helen's apartment alone, beginning a
separation in his and Donna's finances that would widen over the years. He
listed the apartment on his 1993 financial disclosure form, filed with the city,
as valued at between $100,000 and $250,000, putting his Citicorp mortgage in
the same range.

By May 1990, he left W&C for Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky, a twentytwo-
year-old upstart of a litigation-heavy firm that specialized in defending
asbestos companies. Once again, as he had with W&C, he convinced Anderson
Kill to take on his sidekick Denny Young as a full partner. John Gross, the for-
mer AUSA whose apartment Rudy had retreated to when he and Regina first separated
in 1974, was Giuliani's champion at the firm, convincing his partners that
Rudy was the right fit.

The firm's records indicate that Rudy brought only a couple of clients with him
and that, over the course of the next three years, added few to its list. His biggest
new client was AT&T, which hired him to defend the company against a racketeering
lawsuit brought by a Venezuelan communications company.

Drawing on his extensive RICO experience in the SDNY, he bottled the case up
on technical motions, preventing a trial on the issue of whether AT&T had driven
the Venezuelan firm "from the marketplace, misappropriating its technology and
proprietary business information." His opponent, Myles Tralins, a Miami attorney,
said Giuliani's "briefs and arguments were superbly prepared" and that
"avoiding a trial was a significant service to his client." An entry in Anderson's
client list also indicates that AT&T retained Giuliani in March 1992 with regards
to "legislation," though the entry doesn't indicate whether the bill it was interested
in was under consideration at a federal, state or city level.

Another Giuliani client was Towers Financial, a collection company controlled
by Steve Hoffenberg, who'd been accused by the Securities and Exchange
Commission of selling $34 million in unregistered securities in the 1980s and had
reached a civil settlement with the SEC. With ten separate entries for Towers matters
in the firm's client list, Hoffenberg was a major, Giuliani-generated, addition.
He also became an extraordinary headache.

An Anderson lawyer was sanctioned by a federal judge for filing a frivolous
lawsuit on behalf of Towers against Wang Laboratories and Giuliani had to personally
sign the settlement agreement. Worse yet, when Hoffenberg faced indictment
on a $460 million fraud charge in 1994, he offered to cooperate against an
Anderson attorney, who he charged had told him to lie under oath to federal prosecutors.
The false charge took a year and a half to disprove.

Hoffenberg was hardly Mr. Clean when Giuliani brought him to the firm.
Convicted as far back as 1971 of larceny, he also used a lawyer to register Towers
for public trading who was convicted of tax fraud. Yet Rudy had not only opened
the door for him at Anderson, he'd collected thousands in contributions from
Hoffenberg entities.

The SEC filed new scam charges against him in Giuliani's final weeks at the
firm. Ultimately, a federal judge sentenced Hoffenberg to twenty years in prison,
saying he'd destroyed "the savings and investments of thousands of people" and
blasting Towers as a pyramid scheme.

While Hoffenberg was a corporate client who proved to be a criminal, Rudy did
apparently do criminal law work for other clients. The firm's list says he represented
one client involved in an "FBI investigation" and another in a "grand jury investigation."
But surprisingly, with all the hoopla about his purported trial skills, he
never tried a civil or criminal case at Anderson or W&C. His only known trials as a
private attorney occurred way back at Patterson, and involved two libel matters.

In Giuliani's first full year at Anderson-1991-he made $578,000 in salary and
bonuses. That dropped to $294,000 in 1992, when his honeymoon at the firm began
to wear so thin some partners started openly griping about him. Ann Kramer
wrote a January 6, 1993 memo to another partner including Giuliani and Young
on a list of "attorneys who should be asked to leave."

A January 20 memo from Bob Horkovich, reviewing "the 1992 hours that each
attorney devoted to billable, pro bono" and other matters, ranked Giuliani and
Young lowest. It noted that Rudy was 1,740 hours under budget and Young 1,456.
An accompanying chart revealed that Giuliani had only billed for three hours in
the entire month of December, and a scant 177 hours that year, without a second
of recorded pro bono time. At $375 an hour, he was budgeted to generate over a
half million dollars, but instead came in dead last in the firm's workload scorecard.

Three days after the Horkovich memo, John Doyle, one of Giuliani's former
Southern District friends at the firm, reported at a meeting of its board of directors
that Giuliani and Young had reached an "agreement" with Anderson Kill "regarding
a departure date and leave of absence." March 31 was selected as the date
both would leave. While the firm's managing partners later claimed that they were
fully satisfied with Giuliani's performance, Eugene Anderson, the lead partner,
wrote a memo in the middle of the January 1993 skirmish acknowledging that
"the present distribution" of firm profits "overcompensates for 'political clout'."

By the time Rudy left Anderson, he'd been a private attorney at three firms, including
Patterson, for a combined eight years, all quite undistinguished. It was not
a question of ability; it was a question of focus. He'd proven, as both a young
AUSA and as U.S. Attorney, what a sharp legal 1 :ind he had. The work just didn't
turn him on. He said when he came to Anderson that he wanted to resume the
First Amendment practice he'd specialized in at Patterson and that he wanted to do
securities regulation compliance for foreign and U.S. companies. He left without
doing either.

Instead, Giuliani used the office as a campaign headquarters. He involved other
partners in the campaign, naming Gross his treasurer. When he put together a
skeletal staff, they worked out of a conference room at Anderson Kill through most
of 1992. From the moment he arrived at the firm, he was a mayor-in-exile, and he
spent more time plotting a democratic coup than collecting lucrative clients.

He flirted with a 1992 race against D'Amato, teasing reporters and his nemesis
now and then with public winks, but his eye was fixed on the vulnerable opponent
who'd barely beaten him. He became a magnet for anyone disaffected by anything
David Dinkins did, a political paramedic parked at City Hall to respond to a four-year
state of emergency, diagnosing the wounded and comforting the aggrieved. On the
electoral rebound himself, he positioned himself to rebound every missed Dinkins
shot. To win the inevitable second race, he would spare no effort or personal value.

The mistakes of 1989 convinced Rudy that he would have to step outside his reflecting
pool of confidants for policy and political advice. He recognized his own
need for municipal remedial education, so he designed an informal course on city
governance. He reached out to Ray Horton, the finance guru at the businessfunded
Citizens Budget Commission, Henry Stern, the ex-Parks Commissioner
who ran the city's leading good-government organization, and Robert Wagner Jr.,
the Koch deputy mayor raised in Gracie Mansion during his father's three terms.
He met with Rodger McFarlane, the gay activist and ally of Larry Kramer's, homeless
honcho Andrew Cuomo and teachers' union president Sandra Feldman, whose
election-day field operation had been so key to Dinkins's 1989 win.

Later on, he even secretly met with William Bratton, the future police commissioner
who was then head of the Boston police, and George Kelling, the criminologist
whose advocacy of quality-of-life arrests had largely been adopted by
Bratton. A tape of the March 25, 1993 interview with Bratton reveals the absence
of any clear Giuliani crime plan, with Rudy asking if it was" conceivable to assign
police officers to the task of restoring order on the streets," removing "the panhandlers
and squeegee operators." Giuliani also seemed concerned about what he
called "minority sensitivity and police brutality," asking if complaints had gone up
when Bratton launched a quality-of-life arrest offensive while he was the head of
New York's transit police in the early 1990s.

The guise for these sessions was an open ear. But Rudy was also hoping that
policy bridges might either neutralize potent enemies from 1989 like Cuomo and
Feldman or recruit new allies. Wagner did a pivotal commercial in the end, lending
Rudy the legitimacy of the state's most famous Democratic name other than
Roosevelt (his grandfather was U.S. senator and his father was mayor). Stern
posed as a civic critic, assailing the ethics of the Dinkins administration, then
quickly assumed his old Parks post when Rudy took office. Horton, the most
quoted overseer of city management for twenty years, praised Giuliani's campaign
white paper on fiscal policy, undercutting Dinkins's attempt to belittle it.

Rudy also attached himself to the Manhattan Institute, a think tank backed by
rich, right-wing foundations that was trying to achieve a new urban politics by
bankrolling thinkers and commentators who would popularize pieces of its ideology.
Rather than talk to poor people, Rudy decided to listen to the Institute talk
about them. He came away from periodic tough-love luncheons at the Institute's
midtown dining room with a welfare and homeless philosophy more focused on
dependency than decency, better suited for saving money than saving lives. These
trendy poverty lessons at least guaranteed Rudy wouldn't reappear in 1993 as a
Lindsay liberal, a hopeless niche anyway in a contest against a black mayor.

Though a tax-exempt nonprofit insulated from partisan politics, the Institute
was named on the seating list for Giuliani's first big fundraiser-held in May
1992-as responsible for sending ten people, mostly staff. In addition, some of the
heavy-pocketed Institute donors wound up buying tickets to the fundraiser, as
well as to those that followed. The $l,OOO-a-head grilled-chicken dinner at the
Sheraton, featuring Giuliani client Willie Mays and jazz xylophonist Lionel
Hampton as the only black men in the ballroom not carrying a tray, was an opportunity
for Giuliani to display for a thousand supporters his newfound municipal
competence. "New York City needs more than a symbolic mayor," he declared.
"New York needs a substantive mayor, a mayor dedicated to a fundamental restructuring
of our city."

William Weld, his Justice friend who was the new governor of Massachusetts,
appeared as both a speaker at the dinner and the embodiment of the candidate
Rudy wanted to be, a social moderate as pro-business as pro-choice, as fiscally firm
on finances as he was physically fierce on crime. The Weld model was also mildly
pro-gay, friendlier than the no-bereavement-leave Rudy of 1989, but restrained
enough to draw the line, as Rudy did, on issues like a new Board of Ed curriculum
that exposed grade school kids to lifestyle facts about gays.

A couple of months before the dinner, Giuliani boycotted the St. Patrick's Day
Parade, joining Dinkins and expressing outrage at the refusal of organizers to allow
gays to march as a banner-wielding contingent. Declaring that he didn't "buy the
notion that the parade is a religious event," Giuliani stayed away because the
Hibernians, the church-tied group that sponsors it, "didn't resolve the inclusion issue."
Not only did Giuliani announce his agreement with "the point that gays and
lesbians are making-that the parade is not private and is essentially a political parade"-
but he did precisely what Weld was doing in Massachusetts. Weld explained
his own boycott by calling Boston's gay ban "discriminatory" and "wrong."

Giuliani's ambivalence on gay issues was so strong, however, that he marched in
1993-just seven and a half months before the election-and criticized Dinkins,
who was still boycotting. When Dinkins tried to award the permit to a new group
that would've allowed a gay contingent to march, Giuliani said: "The legal rights
are clear. I'll give the mayor some free advice: Permits should be given to the
Hibernians because failing to do so violates their First Amendment rights." The
Civil Liberties Union agreed, and so did an Irish federal judge, leaving the parade
in the same hands that continued to bar the gay group.

Neither Rudy nor the media noted that the Hibernian parade chair went to the
organization's 1992 national convention and tried to bar from future parades the
unit of his own organization that had allowed gays to march with them in 1991,
calling them "the fag division." Weld also marched in 1993, but only because a
court in Boston had ruled against the gay ban.

Rudy's 1993 turnaround may in part have been prompted by Cardinal John
O'Connor's public comments when Dinkins and he boycotted. The cardinal
praised one city leader who showed, Council Speaker Peter Vallone, and said "we
will not forget" that he came, emphasizing that he would "personally remember."
An editorial in the archdiocesan newspaper, printed with the obvious imprimatur
of the cardinal, added that politicians who shunned the parade had "gone public
with their priorities," thus indicating that "the Irish and the Catholics are pretty
far down the list."

When Rudy also marched in a later St. Patrick's parade on Staten Island, he got
a hero's welcome to chants of "Save Us Rudy," "Dinkins Sucks" and "No Queers
Here." When asked about the bombast from his supporters, Giuliani said, "The
anger level, or the irrationality level, is not disproportionate on one side or another
of this thing. It's on both sides." His cosmic reference went well beyond gays
or blacks. It was an apparent commentary on the conflicting mindsets that were
increasingly cutting the city in half.

Giuliani's ambivalent groping on gay issues was mirrored on a host of fronts. Like
his oscillations on gay matters, his unpredictable repositioning on a variety of other
issues began in the early Dinkins days and continued right up to the election.

He refused, for example, until mid-September 1993 to say anything substantive
about homelessness, initially accepting and then declining a spring invitation to
speak at a housing conference with Dinkins. After making the homeless a "matter
of conscience" in 1989, he dramatically shifted gears in late 1993, announcing a
plan whose centerpiece was a tough new ninety-day limit on the shelter stays of
what he called the chronically homeless. He also said the city had to abandon its
long-standing commitment to a right to shelter, saying he would seek "legal relief"
from court orders won by Bob Hayes, the advocate who had walked him
through shelters four years earlier.

The plan was so transparently in violation of the consent decree Hayes won that
Giuliani never attempted to implement it when he became mayor. Its purpose,
however, was to show a willingness to flex municipal muscle at what the Post now
called the "intimidating" homeless, just as his 1989 embrace of the homeless was
designed to implant a charitable heart in a prosecutorial profile. With "liberals"
like Pete Hamill reflecting the changed public attitudes about the homeless in a
New York magazine cover story that advocated quarantining them in unutilized
military camps, Giuliani's plan also called for stepped-up police enforcement of
quality-of-life ordinances to get them off the streets. It referred to some homeless
as "menacing individuals."

Hidden beneath these headline-grabbing, tough-love initiatives were remnants
of the compassion that characterized his 1989 approach. He still promised that "a
cornerstone of the Giuliani policy" would be "substantially increasing drug treatment
availability" for the 50 percent of homeless singles he estimated were chemically
addicted. In separate comments unconnected to the homeless plan, he
continued to favor treatment on demand. He made similar, ambiguous commitments
to the mentally ill homeless, supporting their "right to receive treatment in
the community." Gone was the concept of small shelters in every neighborhood in
the city. Gone was the forceful commitment to permanent housing.

There was still, however, enough political uncertainty about how this "round-
'em-up-move-'em-out" Rudy floated politically that when advocates assailed the
approach, Giuliani softened. The Post accused him of "retreating within days" because
he started talking about "exceptions" to the ninety-day rule, and how people
might "have their stays 'extended.'''

Giuliani also adopted the harsh and hurtful rhetoric of Dinkins's severest critics
in a bitter dispute between blacks and Jews, only to try to moderate his language
in the final weeks of the campaign. He capitalized immediately on a 1991 riot in
the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, when a black mob killed an Orthodox
Jewish scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, and assaulted at least forty others over a threeday
period. The riot was triggered by the death of a seven-year-old black boy, who
was killed by a car traveling in a motorcade that carried the world leader of the
Lubavitcher sect, a large Orthodox community centered in the heart of the otherwise
black neighborhood.

Rudy joined the outcry against Dinkins, blasting police paralysis during the outbreak.
When the only youth indicted for Rosenbaum's murder was acquitted by a
largely black jury in October 1992, an angry crowd of Lubavitchers, led by
Rosenbaum's brother Norman, marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest at
City Hall, though Dinkins had nothing to do with the criminal case. Those most
outraged began calling the riot a "pogrom," Yiddish for Nazi-like, state-sponsoredor-
sanctioned violence against Jews and-Giuliani soon embraced the term.

Ultimately, by the summer of 1993, he said he would no longer use this incendiary
expression, even as he continued to bore in on Dinkins's provable Crown
Heights passivity. Rudy's reversal was prompted by a state finding that neither
Dinkins nor the police commissioner had issued any sort of a stand-down order
that led to the police inaction. But Rudy still wouldn't concede that "pogrom" was
excessive, saying only that he wouldn't initiate the use of it again. If asked, he
would continue to discuss its relevance to Crown Heights.

Backing away from this hyperbole was part of an on-again, off-again Giuliani
effort to make Crown Heights another competence issue, turning the hamstrung
cops into a management rather than a racial failure. Giuliani vacillated between attempts
to defuse the suggestion that Dinkins was more concerned about police violence
against black rioters than he was about terrorism against Jews in their
homes, and attempts to exploit that charge.

Even as Rudy soft-pedaled the use of "pogrom," he remained closely aligned
with the Lubavitcher plaintiffs and attorney who sued the city in 1992 and
charged that Dinkins consciously permitted blacks "to vent their rage at the expense
of the lives and property of Jews." He invoked this "pogrom" lawsuit in a
television ad, feeling no apparent need to distance himself from the smirking
lawyer who derisively asked Dinkins during a Gracie Mansion deposition if he
knew "what a yeshiva was."

Rudy's penchant for having it both ways was particularly acute whenever the
issue was black and white. He swung back and forth between explicit and coded appeals
to race, on one hand, and conscious retreats from it, on the other. In the space
of two weeks shortly before the election, he at first derided Dinkins for granting a
permit to Louis Farrakhan for a Yankee Stadium rally, but subsequently said: "I
would protect Farrakhan to the same extent as I'd protect someone that I agreed
with."

Giuliani's initial declaration that he "would not allow Farrakhan to use city
property" -comparing the planned rally to allowing "neo-Nazis or skinheads to
rent Yankee Stadium" -boomeranged in the press and polls. So with just four
days to go before the election, he said: "Farrakhan has a right, unfortunately, from
the point of view of the sensibilities of people, but fortunately for the First
Amendment, to express that viewpoint."

Other shifts were stretched out over the years of pre-election positioning. As far
back as the end of 1991, Giuliani did an extended interview on WNBC-TV and accused
Dinkins of "playing racial politics" to get himself "out of political difficulty,"
saying the mayor "was as responsible for creating ethnic or racial divisions" as the
people attacking him. Dinkins was hiding "behind black victimization too often,"
Giuliani charged, claiming that the mayor was "whining" that he was being "held to
a different standard" because he was black. Rudy said such victimization was "very
destructive-he did it when he was running; and he does it now."

By planting so early a seed that Dinkins was seeking special treatment-a kind
of affirmative action program for thin-skinned black mayors-Giuliani was laying
the groundwork for future, unbridled attacks. Yet by July 1993, he was claiming
that it was he who was being judged by an unfair double standard. "From a cold
political calculation," he told the Times, "you take the issue of race out of this and
I win by 15 to 20 points." Make this "a normal American election," he insisted
elsewhere, "and I win." He could not make up his mind if he wanted to paint himself
as a race victim, or his opponent as a race whiner. All he knew was that it
helped him to talk about race.

So he figured out a way to talk about race while pretending he wasn't. "I've got
to get this city to stop thinking in categories, to stop thinking in terms of black and
white and Hispanic, gay and heterosexual. I've got to get New York to stop thinking
about all this symbolism." When confronted with the fact that only two of his
thirty-seven campaign aides in 1993 were black, Giuliani's campaign spokesman
said "we don't believe" in keeping numbers like that and accused the Daily News
reporter who raised the issue, Paul Schwartzman, of being a "racial arsonist." The
Giuliani brass railed about Schwartzman to his bosses.

Rudy accused Dinkins of relying on "symbolic hiring and not on selecting people
of quality" in putting together his administration. He promised to find "people
of quality," adding that a government that is "a cross-section of the city" was
a "secondary" consideration. The candidate extended the same color-blind reasoning
to a Dinkins set-aside program for minority businesses, calling anything that
was race-based "terribly divisive."

Yet, when Giuliani appeared at a July 1992 Institute for Puerto Rican Policy forum,
he was quite willing to "think in categories," as well as to champion "symbolic
hiring," suggesting that the color-blind rhetoric only applied when he was
talking to white media about Dinkins's supposed favoritism in hiring blacks.

"I know that there are more than enough qualified people in the Latino community
to take over any of the positions in the government in New York City," he
said, suggesting, as he did more explicitly on other occasions, that Dinkins had not
appointed enough Latinos. "And it is the art and science of governing effectively
to find these people, empower them, put them in positions where they can truly
represent the community.

"I believe very, very much in role models. I believe that the young people have
to see people in significant positions in government in the City of New York that
they can look up to and they can identify with, whether they're Puerto Rican or
otherwise Latino, or Jewish or Italian or African American. The single most important
change the city has to make is people have to get appointed to public office
for the right reasons." Giuliani not only stressed this "view on appointments," as
he put it, to high-level positions-vowing "to share power in an appropriate
way"-but he berated Dinkins for "not recruiting cops at all in the Latino community."

This was another specially tailored Rudy Affirmative Action Programdesigned
solely for the community that could give him a decisive swing vote, and
it went unreported in the white press.

By the close of the campaign, any celebration of a consciously inclusive government
was forgotten and the chameleon candidate was instead insisting that all his
appointments would be based solely on merit, "irrespective of race, religion, ethnic
background and sexual orientation," just like his virtually all-white and allheterosexual
campaign staff. With less than a week until election day, Rudy took
to accusing Dinkins of hiring by race.

While 180-degree turns-on Saint Patty's, homelessness, Farrakhan, racial double
standards and inclusiveness-were easy pirouettes for the dexterous Rudy, he
seemed to only be able to flip in one direction, ever rightward. By the time he got
to election day, in fact, it was a wonder that the entire right side of his body wasn't
gripped by carpal tunnel syndrome, that cruel consequence of repetitive motion.

***

Giuliani flipflops were also occurring on the crassest of political levels, where
AI D' Amato still hovered. Rudy lived in fear of another D' Amato-inspired
Republican primary. Arnold Burns, the 1989 finance chairman for Rudy, talked
openly about how disastrous a repeat Lauder-like scenario would be, calling it a
"plague." D' Amato, of course, did all he could to suggest that another challenge
was in the offing.

A millionaire Republican businessman who'd long given to D' Amato, David
Cornstein, was floated as a possibility. He even paid for focus group research on
the race in the summer of 1992. Cornstein was also reported to have retained
Arthur Finkelstein, the D' Amato and Lauder campaign consultant, and was talking
to GOP leaders.

So was Andrew Stein, the City Council president whose rich father, Jerry
Finkelstein, was so close to D' Amato that the senator made him the first nonlawyer
to sit on his judicial screening panel. D' Amato allies talked of allowing
Stein to run in the Republican primary even though, as a Democrat, he would require
a waiver from three of the city's five GOP county leaders to do so. With the
Bronx's Guy Yelella and Brooklyn's Bob DiCarlo in his pocket, D' Amato was
within striking distance of the majority he needed for the waiver.

When Stein threw his biggest campaign bash in January 1992-hosting a
Waldorf grand ballroom extravaganza with Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli-a
D' Amato army attended. Yelella and DiCarlo were listed on the seating arrangement
at the same table as D' Amato clones like Charles Gargano, the senator's top
fundraiser. Also listed were Conservative Party county leaders Serph Maltese and
Jim Molinaro, who were D' Amato allies targeted for the same Stein waiver, making
him a possible Conservative candidate.

This group-as well as Stein's welcome at a Conservative Party cocktail party
honoring Lauder-was an announcement of D' Amato's threat to back Stein.
Freely talking about the possibility of running in a GOP primary, Stein also declared
early, like Lauder, that he would opt out of the expenditure and contribution
restrictions of the city's Campaign Finance Board system. That meant he was ineligible
for public matching funds, but could raise virtually limitless sums from
his family, and tons of tawdry tycoons tied to Finkelstein and D' Amato.

Rudy did not fear losing a GOP primary to Stein, but he couldn't afford another
spate of ugly primary ads. He feared another well-financed spring and summer
battering that might squeeze him ideologically and damage him personally, weakening
him for November.

What was most disconcerting to Giuliani early on was the courting of Guy
Molinari, the head of the 1989 campaign who controlled the only Republican borough,
Staten Island, like a fiefdom. His daughter Susan was the Island's representative
in the House, inheriting Guy's old seat, and both the GOP and Conservative
leaders from the county were close allies. Finkelstein was wooing the Molinaris
with donations. Guy Molinari could be heard offering tributes to Stein, one in a
late 1991 Times story that sounded like a virtual endorsement.

Molinari was even more important in 1993 than in 1989 because a referendum
on the possible secession of Staten Island from the city was scheduled to appear on
the same ballot as the mayoral election. That meant turnout in the city's whitest
borough-where secession had become a hot cause in the Dinkins years-would
be up dramatically.

Giuliani would milk the secession issue in 1993, using a previously undisclosed
letter Dinkins wrote to Mario Cuomo opposing the secession referendum. Dinkins
merely quoted from an Abraham Lincoln speech about the need to oppose a minority
breaking up the government "whenever they choose." Yet Rudy used the
invocation of Lincoln as evidence that Dinkins was trying "to put his opposition to
secession in racial terms," making "things worse." When Dinkins insisted he had
"never, ever come remotely close" to injecting race into the battle, Giuliani contended
that" comparing the Civil War South to Staten Island clearly raises it," justifying
his own fanning of the flames.

With just a little rhetorical kerosene and Molinari's organizational support,
Giuliani expected to get the margin he needed on Staten Island alone. Molinari's
message, when D' Amato boycotted the first big Giuliani fundraiser in May 1992,
was clear: "1 would hope that he and D' Amato can have some sort of detente," he
told the Times. "It's very important to both of them. I've been trying to negotiate
something myself, since I'm probably one of the few people who's very friendly
with both of them. But not too much luck so far."

Giuliani reminded reporters at the same fundraiser that D' Amato" supported
me about six weeks before the 1989 election and he did it on the telephone." This
comment was designed to respond to pressures on him, from Molinari and others,
to endorse D' Amato, who was facing a tough re-election challenge that November.
Refusing to say he would back D' Amato, Giuliani bristled over the heat he was
getting from GOP county leaders: "I've never been persuaded by threats, including
when the Mafia threatened to kill me," he declared.

One of those leaders, thirty-six-year-old DiCarlo, had taken over the Brooklyn
party in the fall of 1991. Financed by $30,000 in Lauder donations, he defeated a
slate of Giuliani allies in a county committee battle (DiCarlo had run Lauder's
campaign in Brooklyn in 1989). DiCarlo's ties to the D' Amato crew were so strong
that when he joined a small venture capital firm in September 1992, he listed
Lauder, Cornstein and Gargano as investors he was bringing into the business on
a schedule attached to his employment agreement.

A recent bankrupt with a spotty employment history, DiCarlo executed this
business agreement two days after he successfully beat back an attempt by
Giuliani backers on Brooklyn's GOP executive committee to engineer an early
mayoral endorsement. DiCarlo made it clear at the executive session that he
would only entertain an endorsement after Giuliani announced he would back
D'Amato. The Brooklyn leader's successful rebuff of the 1992 endorsement suddenly
became a key factor pushing Rudy toward a painful peace with the senator.

Giuliani had lost the frontline prosecutorial weapons he'd tried to use against
D' Amato-Lombardi and McGuire were gone. Otto Obermaier, not Benito
Romano, was riding herd at Foley Square. As late as 1992, a Giuliani loyalist in the
Southern District, David Lawrence, was trying to flip a felon who'd pled guilty,
Arnold Biegen, to use him against D' Amato. Biegen allegedly had information implicating
D' Amato in an attempt to get a top Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) Department official to lie before a federal grand jury.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:09 am

Part 2 of 2

Prior to Lawrence's efforts, Randy Mastro, one of Rudy's closest Southern
District friends, left private practice in early 1990 to become an aide to Arlin
Adams, the independent counsel named to investigate HUD. D' Amato had been
cited in many of the scandal stories involving the agency and Mastro freely told
friends, including Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Sydney Schanberg from
Newsday, that "the main reason" he was joining Adams was to probe D'Amato.
Larry Urgenson, a top Justice official in Washington who oversaw a myriad of
D' Amato investigations during that period, recalled that Mastro" came on very,
very strong," pushing a D' Amato agenda.

A Philadelphia lawyer, Adams turned out to be a do-next-to-nothing independent
counsel, making no major HUD cases-with the exception of the former
Interior Department secretary James Watt, who was allowed to plead guilty to reduced
charges in the mid-90s, ultimately serving only probation. Mastro was
quickly frustrated and left the office in six months.

While the case that started with Lombardi and McGuire-the tax indictment of
D' Amato treasurer Jack Libert-resulted in a quick acquittal on June 25, 1992,
brother Armand D' Amato was indicted by Brooklyn federal prosecutors that
March. Armand D' Amato's pending indictment, as well as a mixed bag of findings
on an array of ethics charges against the senator by the Senate Ethics Committee,
made Giuliani's endorsement even more important to the tarnished and embattled
senator.

Telling friends just a few days earlier that he would never endorse D' Amato,
Giuliani did it on October 13, less than three weeks before the election. He made the
announcement at his own headquarters, without any D' Amato photo-op, just as the
senator had in 1989. Two weeks after the endorsement, Lawrence filed a memo in
the Biegen case specifically citing the HUD allegation against D' Amato and noting
that Biegen's information on the subject was not "even sufficient to warrant this office
entering into a cooperation agreement with him." Coming shortly before the
election, Lawrence's memo rebutted news accounts damaging to D' Amato.

Rudy used the most transparent rationale for his decision to back the senator --
namely that D' Amato's Democratic opponent Bob Abrams had called D' Amato a
"fascist" at a Binghamton rally. Abrams's one-word temper tantrum had occurred
the night before the Columbus Day parade, so D' Amato, at times faking televised
tears, had walked around during the festivities handing out copies of the upstate
news story. Seizing on this comment as an anti-Italian slur, D' Amato said he saw
it "as a clear reference to Benito Mussolini," and threw a television commercial up
on the air about it.

Giuliani said he was so" disturbed" he called D' Amato as soon as he heard about
the remark and promised to endorse him the next day. "The use of the term fascist
was ethnically divisive and beyond the acceptable bounds of even the toughest
kind of negative campaigning," he said soberly. The day after D' Amato won
re-election, the Times ran a front-page gloat-quoting D' Amato's top campaign
advisers boasting about how they'd "turned" this foolish reference "into an anti-
Italian attack" and kept it alive" for a week and a half." The Times said the consultant
was "chuckling with professional pride" over the "sheer gall" of it. No one in
the press noted that the D' Amato camp's post-election bravado had exposed
Rudy's rationale as a joke.

Those who knew Giuliani and had shared confidences with him at Foley Square
or suffered with him through the Lauder and Simon Berger assaults of 1989 understood
how strongly he felt about D' Amato and how profound a surrender the
endorsement was. He was backing someone he had tried to indict, and he was doing
it with a six-year term in the U.S. Senate at stake. He was endorsing someone
who had maligned him, who had cost him the mayoralty, who had caused him and
his family wrenching pain.

It was not just a low point in his still-new political life. It was also a deeply personal
defeat that harked back to his days in Brooklyn, when his dad was proud and
tough and teaching him to box. Rudy was backing down in the middle rounds of a
fight, staying in his own corner with the bell clanging for all his world to hear.
When D' Amato narrowly won re-election, Giuliani was at the Hilton victory
party, his teeth flashing, greeting a ballroom crowd of fat-cat donors and political
heavyweights. He saw Mike Long, the Conservative Party honcho who'd spurned
him in 1989 and was acting as the emcee, and he and Long agreed to get together.

"I don't know if he wants to talk about the mayoral election or what," Long
said. "My thoughts? I'm open .... Hey four years is a long time. I'm not looking
to hurt anybody." Long said there was no question "the Republican Party would
like to see us endorse Rudy." But when Rudy later insisted on running on the
Liberal line, Long tried to be helpful by putting up a nominal candidate who barely
registered on the general election scorecard.

Bob DiCarlo pushed a Brooklyn GOP endorsement of Rudy through immediately,
claiming at his executive committee meeting that he had "made peace between
D' Amato and Giuliani." DiCarlo's investment "partner" Corn stein
disappeared. One Giuliani loyalist from Brooklyn who fought DiCarlo, Gerry
O'Brien, was pained when Rudy came to a 1993 campaign event and "swerved in
a wide berth" around four leaders who'd always been with him "as if we didn't exist,"
walking across the street "to join DiCarlo." Determined to play by D' Amato's
rules, Giuliani wound up running with DiCarlo, who used his control of the
Brooklyn party to designate himself as the Republican candidate for a State Senate
seat when the incumbent resigned in July 1993.

The Bronx's Yelella became an instant vice chair of a Giuliani fundraiser on
December 2 at the Sheraton, where all five GOP county leaders were, for the first
time, seated on the dais. Yelella would ultimately head Victory 93, an offshoot of
the State Republican Committee, which would raise and spend $1.4 million to aid
the Giuliani campaign. Another D' Amato devotee, State Chair Bill Powers, was
seated at the main table with Rudy at the December fundraiser, the first time he'd
appeared at a Giuliani event.

No one in the media remembered that Yelella owned the two-story building in
the Bronx that housed his and his father's law firm on the first floor and Stanley
Friedman's Democratic headquarters on the second, a concrete symbol of the collusion
between parties that permeated the borough's politics.

Few recalled that Giuliani had denounced Yelella in 1989 for appointing his seventy-
five-year-old father, Vincent, to the Board of Elections. Demanding "an explanation"
for what Giuliani charged was "a close friendship" between Vincent
Yelella and the Genovese crime family boss Rudy prosecuted, "Fat Tony" Salerno,
Giuliani recounted the senior Yelella's decades-long ties to mob figures. The Voice
had repeatedly referred to the two-member Yelella law firm as "in-house counsel
to the Genovese family," and reported that the junior Yelella had just used a major
mob figure to renovate his house. Rudy's knowledge of the Yelella history was
partly personal. Vincent Yelella had been the East Harlem GOP counterpart in the
1940s and 1950s to Democratic district leader Lou Carbonetti, who'd taken Harold
Giuliani under his wing and supplied Rudy with his first set of law books.

D' Amato's new alliance with Rudy killed the Stein GOP boomlet overnight. It
even helped convince Stein to pull out of the race altogether in May 1993. Lots of
factors led to Stein's withdrawal, but he would not have quit so quickly had
D' Amato stayed in his corner, cutting deals and raising big bucks.

D' Amato money also started flowing into unfamiliar Giuliani coffers. David
Corn stein, for example, who didn't give a nickel to Giuliani in 1989, donated the
legal maximum of $6,500 in 1993. The Mack family, whose real estate and entertainment
company had been a gargantuan source of contributions for D' Amato,
went from a paltry $1,000 donation to Giuliani in 1989 to $36,500 in 1993. Asked
if the family would've given to Giuliani if he hadn't endorsed D' Amato, Fred Mack
said: "I've got to really play dumb on that one." D' Amato would later claim that
he personally" raised" more than $50,000 for Giuliani, but D' Amato-connected
donors clearly gave more than that.

Strangely enough, Rudy's D' Amato endorsement also helped him with a powerful
Democrat, Ed Koch, who was so close to the senator that he joined D' Amato,
D' Amato's mother, Gargano and Finkelstein at a private dinner the night of the
1992 election. As late as June 27, 1991, Koch, who had already become a Dinkins
critic, told the Los Angeles Times: "1 don't think Giuliani has the kind of personality
that you want in a mayor. You don't want somebody who's a killer, even a legal
killer." Giuliani pursued Koch's endorsement at a half dozen lunches and
dinners before the popular ex-mayor, a columnist at the Daily News deeply affronted
by Dinkins's handling of Crown Heights, finally endorsed him. Had
Giuliani not backed the senator, Koch would've probably sat it out or aligned himself
with D'Amato's candidate.

Just as the war with D' Amato had undermined Rudy in 1989, peace appeared to
pave the way for a win the second time around. At the first meeting of his sevenmember
core campaign staff on November 9, 1992-held in his law office-Rudy
announced that his" endorsement of D' Amato bought him out of a Republican
primary and possible attacks from the right." According to a nine-page memo
summarizing notes taken at the meeting, Rudy said the endorsement "would position
him much better in 1993 than in 1989."

***

The collapse to D' Amato wasn't Rudy's only moral accommodation of the
new mayoral season. Four months before he endorsed the senator, he joined
Molinari in a bizarre crusade the borough president was leading against the
Southern District. As quixotic and unpredictable a public official as there is in the
city, Molinari, allied with police union chief Phil Caruso, was championing the
cause of an INS agent, Joe Occhipinti, who had been convicted by the SDNY on
seventeen counts of civil rights violations, principally against Dominicans.

After thirty-six witnesses testified against Occhipinti-from harassed merchants
to seven law enforcement officials (including an assistant district attorney
named John F. Kennedy Jr.)-he was sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison
for false reports, illegal searches and improper imprisonment. Occhipinti, who ran
an anti-drug operation in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan when
these abuses occurred in 1989 and 1990, began his prison term when he lost his
appeal unanimously at the Circuit Court in May 1992.

Rudy's old friend David Lawrence, the head of the SDNY public corruption
unit, had branded Occhipinti a "rogue agent" and authorized his prosecution.
Several SDNY agents who had worked for Rudy helped make the case, hardly
something one federal agent wants to do to another. Giuliani's old friend Dick
Thornburgh was the attorney general who had signed off on the indictment. Yet
the Police Benevolent Association's Caruso charged in a letter to Justice that
Occhipinti was" definitely the pawn of a conspiratorial plot perpetrated by known
drug dealers who wanted him out of the way," a view echoed by Molinari.

The onetime head of a New Jersey PBA local for federal agents, Occhipinti
tossed wild charges at Rudy's old office, saying at one point that the prosecutors
attended "sex and drug parties" with Dominican drug lords. According to a letter
written by the head of the Jersey PBA, Occhipinti had developed evidence "implicating
a former AUSA from SDNY of suspected drug trafficking activity."

For reasons that baffled Molinari supporters, including the editorial board of the
Staten Island Advance (which said Occhipinti "acted as if above the law"), the borough
president became so obsessed with the agent's case he quit as the head of
Bush's statewide re-election committee in June 1992. Molinari said he did it because
Justice Department officials had "refused to listen" to evidence clearing Occhipinti.

In fact, John Dunne, a top Justice official and former GOP state senator from
New York, said he'd had "repeated conversations with Molinari" but that Molinari
presented "nothing new." Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, still run
by the man who had broke red Giuliani's blind date with Donna, reviewed the case
and found nothing wrong with the department's handling of it.

Incredibly, that's when Giuliani, who had spent a lifetime dismissing this kind
of hysterical critique of federal prosecutions, entered the controversy. In early
July, Giuliani met with Steve Frankel, the attorney who had handled Occhipinti's
unsuccessful appeal. A former AUSA who'd worked with Rudy and remained a social
friend, Frankel was no longer representing Occhipinti, but was asked by
Molinari to meet with Rudy at Giuliani's office and explain the facts of the case to
him. Molinari attended the meeting too and, as Frankel recalled it, pressed
Giuliani to put together a case for a pardon. "Rudy wasn't actually doing this for
Joe," Frankel says. "He was probably doing it for Molinari. I think he liked Guy
Molinari." Frankel turned over briefs and other legal documents to Giuliani and
never heard another word about it.

Giuliani said publicly after the meeting that he was trying to help Occhipinti
get a hearing on new evidence that he was framed, though he indicated he was not
Occhipinti's attorney. The supposed evidence had been gathered by an unusual
group of investigators Molinari had put on his borough president's payroll.
Giuliani said he'd" studied" this evidence and was determined to get a "fair" assessment
of it. Suddenly on July 20, within days of Giuliani's meeting, Attorney
General William Barr asked the FBI to review Molinari's evidence.

An FBI report in December found that Molinari's materials included "fabricated
affidavits." Three of Molinari's new witnesses failed polygraphs. Audio cassettes of
recanting witnesses provided by Molinari probers were said to sound like scripted
statements. An FBI memo of September 17 reported "there appeared to be the possibility"
of a new" obstruction of justice case against Occhipinti." Molinari was so
overwrought during the FBI probe, he was calling reporters and telling them that
an FBI helicopter was circling Borough Hall.

Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger wrote Molinari that the FBI investigation
"provided no credible information upon which the Department of
Justice could base a position challenging the integrity or propriety of Mr.
Occhipinti's conviction." Molinari dismissed Terwilliger's findings as "garbage"
and called Giuliani's successor Otto Obermaier a "disgrace." Undeterred by the
Terwilliger letter and the FBI report, Molinari began personally lobbying the outgoing
president for an Occhipinti pardon. He even went to the White House on
January 6, 1993, pressing Bush on the issue.

On January 16-just four days before Bush left office-he commuted the rest
of Occhipinti's sentence. The agent was immediately released from prison and
flown to New York, where Molinari and Caruso greeted him at the airport. He'd
served only eight months of a sentence that was the lowest he could receive under
federal guidelines.

Four days after the commutation, according to an FBI memorandum, Justice
asked the Eastern District to investigate the new obstruction case against
Occhipinti and others, involving the phony Molinari evidence that Giuliani had
urged the department to review. The Justice letter was based on an October 26 report
by DOJ assistants fully available at the time of Bush's bizarre commutation.
The Eastern District closed the case in December 1993, with the FBI noting that
prosecution was declined because "the case would be difficult at best" and because
"it was best not to give subjects in this case a platform on which to gain publicity."

Giuliani bragged later that he "played a role in delivering" the commutation,
adding that he had "stated my position in writing to the Justice Department." He
did all this, he said, "seeking justice" in the case, not as the agent's lawyer.

Occhipinti says he knew Giuliani from their days in the Southern District and
went to Rudy when he was indicted. Giuliani referred him to a criminal attorney
he could not afford. Later, when he was in jail, "Rudy and Guy Molinari put forward
the paperwork to file for my executive clemency," which he said consisted of
"an application and whole variety of legal papers." He said Denny Young, who was
then Rudy's law partner, pitched in as well.

After the commutation, "I met several times" with Giuliani, Occhipinti says. He
told Giuliani that his Washington Heights sources had convinced him that illegal
Dominican votes had stolen the 1989 election from him, a view that Giuliani began
publicly expressing. "Rudy asked me if I would help him by lobbying on his
behalf, going around doing speaking engagements, explaining how powerful the
Dominican druglords were in New York." Occhipinti made many appearances for
Rudy "all around the city," he said, from January through September 1993, precisely
when the Eastern District probe was underway.

Occhipinti's ex-attorney Frankel said he was "pretty shocked" by the commutation.
Frankel acknowledges that when he prepared the appeal, he found "the evidence
pretty overwhelming." The appeal focused on a nervous breakdown
Occhipinti's prior attorney supposedly had during the trial. "They couldn't say he
was wrongly accused or wrongly convicted," Frankel said. "Rudy's a careful guy. I
don't know how much he'd put in writing on this case. I would have thought it was
about phone calls and meetings and rooms where no records are kept."

Frances Saurino, whose husband Ben was both one of the SNDY agents who investigated
the case and one of Rudy's longtime admirers in the office, wrote an oped
piece in the Staten Island Advance shortly after Occhipinti's release. "Molinari
and Giuliani, men who claim to be consummate respecters of the ideals of equal
justice and the rule of law, have resorted shamelessly to blatant political influence,"
she wrote. They have used "their substantial connections in Washington to
gain special favor for Occhipinti," insulting "all law enforcement officers who
work with honor, dedication and professionalism within the guidelines of their
mandate to enforce the law." Shame on them, she concluded.

Her sentiments were widely shared in Rudy's old office. But Giuliani knew his
Occhipinti actions had solidified his relationship with Molinari and Caruso, and in
his new life, that was all that mattered.

***

On September 16, 1992, ten thousand cops rallied, and then rioted, at City
Hall. It was not only a dark day for the Big Blue. It was a political disaster
for Rudy Giuliani, who joined Molinari and Caruso in speeches off a flatbed truck
that fueled an anger so racial the city shook.

Cops carried signs that said "Dump the Washroom Attendant," "Mayor, have
you hugged your dealer today" and "Dinkins, We Know Your True-Color- Yellow
Bellied." Drawings on their homemade posters depicted the mayor in a '60s Afro
with giant lips, or engaged in kinky sex acts. They broke through police barricades
and stormed the steps of City Hall, cheering "Take the Hall!" and banging on windows.
They blocked traffic for an hour on the nearby Brooklyn Bridge. They
climbed on top of the cars of city officials parked in the lot in front of it, jumping
up and down until they dented them. And they chanted "Rudy," "Rudy" in thunderous
rhythm, as he worked his way through the nearly all-white mob, beaming,
backslapping, posing for photos, pumping his fist.

WCBS- TV cameraman John Haygood was called a nigger. Una Clarke, a city
councilwoman from Brooklyn, was stopped by an off-duty cop with a beer in his
hand who said to his sidekick: "This nigger says she's a member of the City
Council." Another black councilwoman, Mary Pinkett, was stuck on the bridge,
her car rocked and shaken by cops. Fifty-three officers would wind up charged
with misconduct-eleven would go to an administrative trial and ten would be
convicted. Even Caruso would go to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly the next day
and apologize, conceding he had lost control of his own union's rally.

When Rudy spoke, surrounded on Murray Street by cops pouring in and out of
bars with open beer cans, the next mayor launchp.d into a litany of Dinkins's offenses
against the p,0lice. Dressed in a starched white shirt and tie with his sleeves
rolled up, Giuliani bellowed into a mike, standing next to a chain-locked dummy
in a police uniform. He put his glasses on, but rarely looked at the handwritten
scrawl gripped in his clenched right hand. He screamed "bullshit" twice in a condemnation
of Dinkins actions-saying later that he was only repeating Dinkins's
use of the word a few weeks earlier when he responded to a confrontational cop at
a precinct meeting. The expletive, captured by television cameras, provoked a tumultuous
response from the crowd, as did his laundry list of grievances.

The union wanted a rich new collective bargaining agreement, said Dinkins. They
were also mad that Dinkins opposed issuing 9mm guns to them, favored legislation
creating a Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) and used city funds to pay for
a funeral for a Dominican with a drug record who was killed by a cop a month earlier.
Giuliani railed against Dinkins on each issue--ealling the CCRB, for example, "a
board made up of civilians who know nothing about policing and who share the
same biases against police as the mayor." He vowed that when he was mayor, cops
would be given "the benefit of the doubt" in controversial incidents.

The protesters were also upset about a mayoral commission Dinkins had named
to investigate police corruption. It was the first such commission since the early
1970s-when the Knapp Commission helped give young Rudy his start. Filling
the air with more invective, Giuliani shouted that the commission was created "to
protect David Dinkins's political ass."

When the two-and-a-half-hour demonstration was over, and Rudy returned to
his office at Anderson Kill, he was ecstatic. He said he'd hit "a grand slam." After
a lifetime of imaginary at-bats in a Yankee uniform, he couldn't tell the difference
between clearing the bases and ending an inning. He would soon discover he'd hit
into his first triple play.

A Daily News editorial called his conduct "shameful," blasting his "pandering
rhetoric" for not including "a word of condemnation." Unlike Rudy, the police
commissioner "knows rabble when he sees it," said the News, saluting Kelly's "investigation
into the lawlessness." The Times said Giuliani now claims "implausibly"
that he was unaware "officers were out of control." It blasted Rudy's
"barnyard" performance and asked: "Where was his concern for the city? His decision
to address the police was reckless, as were some of his harsher comments."
David Garth, the political consultant who would a few months later take control of
the Giuliani campaign, said Giuliani looked more like "Hot Hand Rudy" on TV
than "Cool Hand Luke."

Even while Caruso apologized, Rudy went on the attack. Two days after the
madness, he said, "One of the reasons those police officers might have lost control
is that we have a mayor who invites riots." He again assailed Dinkins as a "hack."
The closest he came to remorse was a reference to his own family history: "1 had
four uncles who were cops. So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am."

Twelve days later the drumbeat of criticism was still music to his ears. He said
Kelly's report citing cop misconduct was an attempt to make them "scapegoats for
political gain." The real issue, as he saw it, was whether "the relatively minor occurrence
of racial epithets, if they occurred at all, has been made the focus of this
rally for political purposes." The Times concluded that Giuliani's continued attempts
to "gloss over the rioters' conduct" was a political calculation. He is "betting-
irresponsibly-that divisiveness will win votes."

It did solidify his blue-collar base. The PBA, which had backed Koch in the 1989
primary and stayed out of the general election, became his ready ally. It did not
formally endorse him, so it could spend thousands on his behalf outside the constraints
of the Campaign Finance Board. The union, whose executive board was
still all white, bought a stream of ads filled with vile anti-Dinkins assaults (one
Crown Heights ad carried the headline "Never Again," as if Dinkins were Hitler).

During the primary, it spent a reported $100,000 promoting Roy Innis, the
counterfeit civil rights leader and Giuliani friend who sat at the head table at
Rudy's December 1992 fundraiser and soon thereafter ran against Dinkins in the
Democratic primary. Afterwards, Dinkins filed a CFB complaint against the
union's continued duplicitous ad campaign, but could not prove what logic dictated:
Even though the ads never mentioned Rudy, the union expenditures were
clearly designed to benefit him.

The union also steered at least $24,650 to the campaign, some of it through its
political action committees and some through vendors who worked for it, ranging
from their lawyers to firms that service their annuity plan. The ads and donations
aside, an army of cops volunteered eventually for election day duties, manning the
polls for Rudy all across the city.

The Giuliani camp feared that this rally rant would haunt Rudy. The vulnerability
study commissioned by the 1993 campaign featured up front a section entitled
"The Human Scream Machine: The Cop Riot." The confidential study said
the "shrieking performance may be Giuliani's greatest political liability this year."
In smaller subheads, the report described his behavior as "disturbing" and "no
portrait of probity." The two quick lessons to be drawn from it, the study concluded:
"No shrieking. No swearing." The study went on:

When dealing with direct questions about the rally, Giuliani should acknowledge
and criticize the underlying racial nature of the protest. The
biggest problem most voters may have with Giuliani's participation in the
rally is his unwillingness to criticize those taking overtly racial pot-shots at
the Mayor. Giuliani has yet to admonish those who attacked the Mayor with
racist code words on signs and banners. Why not?

When answering Dinkins' attacks on this issue, Giuliani should never engage
in the kind of personal sniping at the Mayor that characterized his responses
last fall. Mean-spirited counter-charges will do nothing to disprove Dinkins's
assertion that Giuliani is an out-of-control hot-head incapable of governing
the city; they only reinforce what Dinkins is trying to prove.

Instead, Giuliani declared four days before the election: "I don't regret speaking
down there. I regret the fact that false statements have been made about this. The
fact is, there was no riot. There was misconduct. So that's a false statement." The
closest he ever came to admitting error was to say he "used unfortunate words,"
though he still maintained that the depiction of him was "mythology."

Not one news station ran the footage of his personal explosion during the campaign.
Not one newspaper ran a photo of his contorted face. Magically, Giuliani
succeeded in defining unedited pictures of his own biggest public performance as
partisan and negative. He tossed out crazy arguments to try to confuse the situation
factually. He claimed he was trying to cool things when he left the steps of
City Hall and moved to the nearby flatbed truck, taking thousands of cops with
him. How screaming vulgarities at a street running in beer could be construed as
a calming influence was never addressed.

A leading Times columnist, Sam Roberts, quoted him a week before the election
as saying he "didn't know what had happened earlier at the rally." But what everyone
reported was that the insanity went on before, during and after his sustained
visit. Rudy was right that the cops had overrun police barricades before he got
there, but the barricades and the cops who overran them were still in the same positions
when he arrived. If everything was quiet when he arrived, why was he saying
he cooled things by moving a few hundred feet away?

What was most ironic about this defense-though no one in the media noted
it-was that the same candidate who berated the mayor for not knowing how terrible
the violence was in Crown Heights was using his own ignorance as a defense
for participating in a rally that turned riotous.

The Dinkins campaign mysteriously waited until the last four days to go on the
air with their own cop rally commercial and a Giuliani ad immediately denounced
it as "downright lies" and "vicious" even though the Dinkins ad's only memorable
image was a straight shot of Rudy cursing.

The riot performance occurred shortly after Rudy joined the Occhipinti crusade
and shortly before he joined D'Amato's. It was a season of pre-electoral bottoming-
out, a succession of personal collapses. For another candidate in another time,
that single seismic moment at the rally would have finished a career. A black
politician at a police brutality rally where he and the crowd went bonkers
would've disqualified himself, at least in the view of editorial boards, from public
office.
Rudy learned he could not only stonewall his way past the critics; he could get
an uptick in his base for toughing it out, for snarling at anyone looking for a regret.
It was a lesson he would take with him the next time he went to City Hall.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:10 am

Part 1 of 2

Fourteen: Seizing City Hall

No ONE IN THE GIULIANI CAMP WOULD ADMIT IT, AND THE
candidate might not have even acknowledged it to himself. But Rudy
would not have run in 1993 if David Dinkins were white. Certainly Giuliani
challenged Dinkins because he thought Dinkins was beatable, not because
Dinkins was black. But Dinkins was only beatable, contrary to every historical
precedent, because he was black.

No mayor in the twentieth century who served a full term and ran for a second
has lost a general election. Mayors have only lost re-election attempts
three times-always, like Ed Koch, in Democratic primaries. Indeed, incumbency
is so hard to overcome that John Lindsay won a second term in 1969 after
losing the Republican primary. He ran in November on the Liberal line
alone.

The concentrated budget powers and daily media exposure of the mayor are
so extraordinary that four years is enough time for anyone to do enough favors
to put together a re-election majority.

No Republican since the party began in the middle of the nineteenth century
had ever defeated an incumbent Democratic mayor. The technical exception
was Fiorello La Guardia in 1933, who beat John O'Brien, a Democrat who
succeeded scandal-ridden Jimmy Walker after Walker was driven from office.
O'Brien, the corporation counsel under Walker, was hand-picked at a
Tammany Hall county committee meeting in Madison Square Garden and
served as mayor for a few months before losing to La Guardia. Even then, La
Guardia only beat this nominal incumbent because the Democratic vote was
split between O'Brien and another candidate backed by President Franklin
Roosevelt.

Republicans usually ran so badly in the city that Al D' Amato, a two-term
senator, got 38 percent of the city's vote in 1992. George Bush, a one-term
president, got a mere 23 percent the same year. Both were better-than-average
totals, achieved just months before Giuliani launched his mayoral bid. Gap
candidates for president, senator, governor or mayor who weren't incumbents
frequently garnered less than a fifth of the city's vote. The party was so moribund
it gave its line to Ed Koch in 1981 and got less than 10 percent of the vote against
him in 1985. Lindsay's 1965 win was the only Republican victory since La
Guardia, making the mayoralty almost as much a Democratic franchise as
McDonald's was a hamburger franchise.

Republicans did much better in state races, winning more Senate races, for example,
than Democrats over the past fifty years. If Rudy was looking for a
winnable launching pad, state attorney general, comptroller and governor, as well
as the Moynihan Senate seat, were all up in 1994, and elected incumbents would
certainly not be running for two of the four spots.

Registration changes suggested it might even be harder for Giuliani to win in
1993 than four years earlier. When Giuliani met with his campaign staff in
November 1992, according to the memo summarizing the meeting, his first question
was how registration had changed. "It was observed that between 1989 and
early 1992, registration had held up in African American and Latino assembly districts,
but had fallen in all white ADs," the memo read. "It was surmised that the
surge in registrations for the 1992 presidential elections was probably located in
areas most likely to have supported Clinton-Gore, namely African American,
Latino and white liberal areas."

Yet, even with the outmigration of older whites reflected in the assembly district
numbers noted at the Giuliani meeting, the racial dynamic of the city electorate
was still the opening that beckoned Rudy to run again. Since there is no
racial question on registration cards, it is impossible to factually break down city
registration by race. But the assembly district analysis done by Giuliani, coupled
with exit polls and other data, left no doubt that, while the majority of New
Yorkers were minority in 1993, the majority of registered voters was still decidedly
white. Even the Dinkins camp estimated registrants at 53 percent white;
while other analysts pinned it at 55 percent or more. The registrants who actually
turned out in 1993 would wind up 60 percent white.

To beat Dinkins, Rudy would have to run twelve points ahead of D' Amato's 1992
total. How could a mere lawyer who'd never been elected to any public office, and
whose last public service ended almost five years before the 1993 election, expect to
do that? What besides race could explain why, according to exit polls, 64 percent of
the city's white Democrats and 77 percent of all white voters would vote for him?
What else could explain why 59 percent of white Democrats voted for Giuliani in
1989-before Crown Heights or any of the other Dinkins failings occurred?

Rudy knew the racial numbers as well as he knew his conviction rate as U.S.
Attorney. In 1989, Giuliani expected to face Koch and got Dinkins. In 1993, he
passed on other opportunities, preferring to run for an office history said he could
not win. He did it because the vote he got four years earlier convinced him that all
he had to do was increase white turnout, or do marginally better among Latinos,
and he would win. He did it because he understood that race was creating an opportunity
to make history. The underlying dynamic was so apparent that a July
cover story in the Sunday Times Magazine dubbed it "New York's Race Race" and
predicted: "Even if Giuliani wins, he may be the last white man for years to lead
his city."

Once Rudy decided to challenge Dinkins though, he had to turn upside down
the racial calculus that was the secret rationale for victory. He had to make white
voters feel that their predisposition to vote for him was not a consequence of race,
nor should it be a source of guilt. So his campaign and the pundits who backed him
kept talking about the 95 percent of blacks expected to vote for Dinkins, equating
the Caucasian swing to Rudy with this countervailing tribal instinct. A Times column
so bought into this argument that it suggested whites were less tribal than
blacks, pointing out that Dinkins would get "more than 90 percent of the black
vote-a proportion that Mr. Giuliani does not come close to matching among
whites or even among Italian Americans."

What this facile reasoning ignored was that white Democrats, including the two
on the ballot with Dinkins in 1989, also typically got 90 percent or better of the
city's black vote. A black candidate like Dinkins might push the share up a measly
four or five points. It was white Democrats who were altering their voting patterns
and leaving their party in droves to vote for Rudy-even the much more
Republican Rudy who ran in 1993. Many of these voters were driven by race.

That's why Giuliani kept talking about it-from Farrakhan to affirmative action.
That's why Rudy ranted at the cop rally. That's why the commercial theme of
the campaign became "One City/One Standard"-which, coupled with the
Giuliani refrain on the campaign trail that "no one group can have all their
agenda"-was designed to convince anyone who wasn't black that Dinkins favored
his own.

The strategy, as that November 1992 memo made plain, pivoted around an effort
to maximize white turnout, to get the unmotivateds who vote in presidential
elections but sit out others to the polls. The Giuliani code about how he'd be an
"evenhanded" mayor was designed to convince the guy on the couch in Staten
Island or Queens who usually just stews and spews to realize Rudy was for him,
and to get up and do something about it.

Two Dinkins supporters gave Giuliani just the opening he needed in the final
weeks of the campaign to drive the race point home. A Brooklyn minister, William
Jones, got himself quoted in the dailies saying that Giuliani supporters included
certain "fascist elements" that were branding Dinkins a murderer over the
Rosenbaum slaying. Eric Adams, the leader of an organization representing black
cops, charged that Giuliani's running mate, City Comptroller candidate and former
congressman Herman Badillo, could not understand Latinos because he was
married to a non-Latino. Dinkins disavowed both statements-and neither Jones
nor Adams were in any way formally connected to his campaign-yet Giuliani
threw press conferences to denounce them and put his wife on the air for a thirtysecond
spot to defend him.

Dressed in a red plaid jacket and discreet gold earrings, Donna nodded and
looked directly into the camera, just as she did at WPIX:

"As a journalist, I thought I'd seen everything. I was wrong. I'm Donna, Rudy
Giuliani's wife. My husband was called a fascist by a group of ministers endorsing
David Dinkins. And while people who support the Mayor are called proud, people
who support my husband are called racist. This election shouldn't be about race, it
should be about competence. Of course I want people to vote for Rudy Giuliani.
But I want people to vote for Rudy because he's the best man for the job, not for
any other reason."

If the script had been a Hanover news story, the fact-checking department at her
former station would've killed it. A single minister, making a group endorsement,
talked about "elements" around Rudy. As the Times review of the commercial by
reporter Todd Purdum put it, "Jones did not call Giuliani a fascist." Neither had
anyone in the Dinkins campaign called Giuliani supporters "racist." Instead,
Dinkins had often said, as Purdum recounted, that it was an "expression of pride"
for either a black to vote for a black or an Italian for an Italian, saying it was only
when someone voted against a candidate because of his origins that racism was involved.

Badillo did another commercial on Adams's comments aired at the same time.
Badillo explicitly argued that Giuliani was the true victim-of guilty liberal voters
reluctant to oppose a black candidate.

Purdum's review of Donna's ad concluded that it "risks seeming disingenuous:
While ostensibly saying that race should not be an issue, it actually goes to great
lengths to highlight and trade on racially inflammatory remarks." Donna's "sorrowful
tone as she stands by her man," wrote Purdum, "puts a soft edge on a tough
message. It trades on Ms. Giuliani's reputation as a former news anchorwoman to
make its case in a Checkers meets Diane Sawyer vein." Rudy and company obviously
thought the ad worked so well they did a second with Donna a week laterthis
one responding to old hat and unfair charges against Giuliani on abortion.

In unusually strong commentary from the Times, an editorial blasted the initial
Donna and Badillo ads as an attempt to "make a campaign that stands to benefit
from racial fear appear to be the victim of those fears." Calling them "the politics
of disinformation played at a very dangerous level," the Times concluded: "Not
since the heyday of Lee Atwater have we seen such devious artistry when it comes
to stirring feelings of racial paranoia among whites."

Jones and Adams were easier targets than another Dinkins supporter who had
actually raised the subject of race with Dinkins at his side, Bill Clinton. At a late
September fundraiser, the president said that Dinkins deserved re-election on his
record, but was facing a tough campaign because "too many of us are still too unwilling
to vote for people who are different than we are."

"This is not as simple as overt racism," Clinton told a thousand cheering supporters
of Dinkins. "That is not anything I would charge to anybody who doesn't
vote for David Dinkins or Bill Clinton or anybody else. It's not that simple. It's
this deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out
across these lines."

The words were not in Clinton's prepared text though he went on for some time
about how troubling this phenomenon was. He said that on the flight from
Washington with the mayor on Air Force One, he'd begun to wonder why
Dinkins-who he saw as having reduced crime, hired cops and stabilized the city's
budget-should face a competitive race in a city that was five-to-one Democratic.
"It is the inability to take that sort of leap of faith, to believe that people who look
different than we are really are more like us than some people who look just like
us but don't share our values and our interests."

Giuliani never directly took these comments on, a tribute to Clinton's stunning
popularity in the city. His muted response was that he was "going to put the best
possible interpretation on it, which is that the President was showing his support
for David Dinkins," adding that "a president never really intends to create division."
Instead he seized on the Jones and Adams canards. He followed that with a
press conference blast about a year-old Amsterdam News editorial that he said
"compared me, Guy Molinari and Phil Caruso-all of whom have Italian
American last names-to fascists" (he did not mention that the Amsterdam endorsed
"fascist" D'Amato at around the same time).

Contrary to Clinton's idealized view, there were plenty of good reasons for
Dinkins to face a hearty challenge, and Rudy Giuliani was hardly wrong to give
him one.

Giuliani was genuinely outraged over Crown Heights and the polarizing incident
that preceded it-when Dinkins allowed black protesters to picket a Korean
grocery store in Brooklyn for weeks in violation of a court order. He believed he
could weld together a disintegrating social compact and that Dinkins could not. He
thought Dinkins ran an ineffectual government that only got itself organized
when Dinkins deputies were trying to steer a contract to a friend. He still talked,
years later, about how the 1989 election had been stolen from him by vote fraud
in black and Dominican districts, a conviction that fueled his desire to win a payback
election.

As compelling as Rudy and many other citizens of the city found the critique of
Dinkins to be, Clinton was right that no Republican would have had a chance to
beat a white mayor with his record, all the pluses and minuses considered. The city
had to nearly file Chapter 11 for Ed Koch to beat incumbent Abe Beame in a
Democratic primary in 1977. Robert Wagner only beat Mayor Vincent Impelliteri
in 1953-again in a Democratic primary-because screaming scandals convinced
New Yorkers that the mob had taken over his government. And in the only other
example of a defeated incumbent, Ed Koch simply overstayed his welcome, going
for a fourth term beleaguered by scandal and sapped of sound bites, losing to
Dinkins-in a Democratic primary one more time.

The 1993 ballot might as well have been black. Race was the rationale for the
campaign, the door-opener. And Rudy ran through it so fast all the city saw was a
white blur.

***

Once Rudy recognized that his old gang of friends wasn't going to get him
the mayoralty, it was only a matter of time before he wound up hiring Dave
Garth as his campaign consultant. Garth is City Hall. He had elected Lindsay and
Koch, winning five of the previous seven mayoral races. One of his losses was in
1989, when he nearly raised Koch from the dead and savaged Rudy Giuliani along
the way. While Rudy took what D' Amato said about him personally, his experience
as a lawyer taught him never to begrudge a mercenary advocate.

When Garth and Giuliani met on a television panel show in 1991, they found
themselves agreeing about the need for police reform and decided to get together
for dinner. Giuliani talked to Roger Ailes about a repeat performance, but Ailes,
who announced at a Giuliani fundraiser in December 1992 that if Rudy didn't win
the city was" going to turn into Detroit," suggested Garth instead.

At sixty-three, the bald, potbellied Garth reminded Rudy of his father: "He
makes me argue my case," said the candidate, who actually wound up spending
most of his time listening to Garth argue his. The decisive Garth expects candi-
dates to do what he demands. He dictates message and mediums, deciding where
what he wants said will be said. Garth thought, according to his aide Richard
Bryers, the 1989 campaign had "spun away from Giuliani's strengths to Dinkins's
strengths," aided by the Yusef Hawkins case. He wanted Rudy "projecting competence,"
carrying himself as if he were ready to make the city manageable again.
Bryers said Garth had no interest in "great gossip like the love letters" of 1989,
thought they "would not be decisive," and instead "believed Giuliani would win
by being tightly focused" on a few solid issues.

While Giuliani had a forbidding image from his prosecutor days, he was actually
accessible, expansive, even open. Garth would make him the tough candidate
and mayor he has become-tight-lipped, dismissive and commanding. Bryers,
who was the campaign's press secretary, explained in a later interview:
"Intelligence is a weakness for a candidate; it's a liability. You have to be very
repetitive. Intelligent people want to discuss issues, but that's not going to help
you. You need someone who's disciplined."

Until he met Garth, Rudy thought he had to at least try to answer reporters'
questions. Garth sent him off periodically with a script and Rudy's job was to see
to it that he said nothing to compete with the designated theme. While Garth certainly
did not invent this" candidate protection program" mode of campaigning,
he was skilled at enforcing it, and Rudy was one of its pioneers.

Answer no questions about the law practice, Garth ruled.

That's all Rudy's done the last four years? Too bad. It's nobody's business who
his clients were.

And the stories, by and large, went away.

The strategy-implemented by Bryers, who Garth brought in from
Pennsylvania and Washington partly because he neither had nor coveted any relationships
with New York reporters-was to mau-mau anyone with a question
Garth didn't like. Berate them. Accuse them of being biased. Go over their heads
to editors or owners. Stonewall or spit at them. Make access a favor and keep score.

Bryers assailed a Times reporter, David Margolick, who was doing a profile of
Rudy's legal career. WNBC- TV's Pablo Guzman was married to Giuliani's SDNY
press secretary, but when he tried to do a piece on Rudy's outlandish claims that
he was once the CEO of a Kentucky mining company, the Giuliani crew descended
on his bosses screaming. Newsday's City Hall bureau chief Michael Powell had to
take a screed so loud almost everyone in Room 9-the pressroom at City Hallheard
each barb.

An auto dealer who backed Rudy and advertised on the twenty-four-hour news
channel NY 1, pulled his ads for a while over the station's supposed anti-Giuliani
bias. Giuliani refused to participate in debates that included the Conservative
Party candidate and Dinkins refused to participate if he was excluded. 50 WCB5-
TV put Rudy on alone for an hour shortly before the election, a boon especially
unusual for a candidate never elected to any office. Both camps agreed to a
Newsday idea to submit ten questions apiece, with each side answering the other's
most pointed queries. When Garth got Dinkins's questions, the campaign reneged
and refused to answer any of them. Newsday printed Dinkins's answers to tough
questions, and Rudy got a walk.

The vulnerability study commissioned for the '93 campaign described Giuliani's
"habit" of answering reporters' questions "abrasively" or, on some occasions, "attacking
the interviewer." The study, which was finished by April, said these responses
"contribute to the impression some have of Giuliani as cold, hard, mean
and humorless." The recommendation was that Giuliani "make a conscious effort
to curtail this behavior to foster a more positive, friendly image." While Rudy did
keep this side of himself in check through much of the year, his press handlers
adopted it, but their coarseness was invisible to the public.

The press style of the campaign, it turned out, was merely an audition. That's
how the Giuliani team would eventually run City Hall, too, oblivious to the contrasting
public information obligations of a campaign marketing a candidate and a
government serving a city. Cristyne Lategano, Bryers's inexperienced assistant,
was hired in part to make sure a female press aide was highly visible with him on
the campaign trail (the all-boys team of 1989 had not done well among women at
the polls). When she became Rudy's press secretary after the election, Garth's approach
was virtually all she knew. As comfortable as Rudy already was with it, this
press style moved with them to City Hall from day one, where nothing like it had
ever before been attempted. It effectively became both his and Lategano's public
personalities.

This scheme would not have worked-in 1993 or thereafter-if the two prime
tabloid owners hadn't been so aboard with Rudy they accepted it. The tabloids
have the power to punish such arrogance in bold type. TV stations follow their
news lead. But Giuliani had uncritical support from the Post, reacquired by Rupert
Murdoch in early 1993, through the campaign and the first term. Daily News
owner Mort Zuckerman was also a Giuliani man. Zuckerman, who doubles as a
real estate developer, had made a $33.8 million deposit during the Koch administration
on the publicly owned and exquisitely-located Coliseum site, and the
Dinkins administration, together with state officials, were not disposed to letting
him keep it. He had failed to develop anything, and his deadline had long expired.
When Dinkins would not let him off the hook on the deposit, the News backed
Giuliani. Early in his first year, Giuliani bailed him out on half the deposit, helping
him keep more than $17 million.

In addition to media management, Garth also put together the fusion ticket that
proved crucial to the campaign. Giuliani had no running mates in 1989 because he
did not control the Republican line. To put together a ticket featuring Democrats
Badillo and Susan Alter, the candidate for Public Advocate, Rudy had to be able to
deliver the GOP line, which meant he had to be able to steer at least three county
leaders behind candidates of his choosing early in the election year. Once he made
peace with D' Amato, Rudy could do that.

Badillo, who'd known Garth for almost thirty years, was drawn to the ticket in
part because of his presence. The onetime borough president of the Bronx and the
city's best-known Latino politician, Badillo had been talking for months about
running for mayor himself. He'd done it four times before, but no one was taking
him seriously this time. He toyed for four months in early 1993 with a candidacy,
pulling out in late May. Badillo's law partner Rick Fischbein, according to Badillo,
negotiated the fusion deal with Garth, Giuliani and Peter Powers, meeting over a
couple of weeks, often at Fischbein's Park Avenue apartment. He wanted assurances
that the Giuliani campaign would help foot the costs of Badillo's run.

Dinkins could not offer Badillo a spot on his ticket since the incumbent comptroller
was a Democrat, Elizabeth Holtzman, who was supporting Dinkins. The
Badillo bargaining dragged on because Badillo was trying to get the Republican
and Liberal lines immediately, but to delay his endorsement of Giuliani until after
the Democratic primary for comptroller in September.

When he finally agreed to endorse Giuliani in May, he doomed any chance he
had to win the Democratic primary, meaning he was running solely to help Rudy.
Everyone understood, including the Dinkins camp, that an active Badillo, traveling
the city with Giuliani in the campaign van for months as he did, would move at
least several points of the Latino vote to Rudy.

Susan Alter was also a Garth concept. She would add a woman's touch to the
army of suits that seemed to always surround Giuliani. A city councilwoman from
Brooklyn, she had reform credentials and a perky intelligence. She was also an
Orthodox Jew with a rabbi emeritus for a husband. After Crown Heights, Giuliani
already had the Orthodox vote. Alter might boost turnout, especially of Orthodox
and other women.

It did not seem to bother Giuliani much that Alter was a carpetbagger. Her husband's
synagogue was in fashionable Lawrence, Long Island, and it provided her
husband with a rather lavish home. His voter and car registration listed Lawrence.
He'd recently applied for a public job in Brooklyn and listed Lawrence as his home.
The address she used in Brooklyn was in the heart of a black neighborhood and
her political opponents said she was rarely there.

After Rudy called her in mid-May to invite her to join his ticket, she considered
it for an hour or two, calling friends for advice. She was in Lawrence when she
made the calls, though it was a weekday and she claimed, whenever her Brooklyn
residency was questioned, that Lawrence was only an occasional weekend getaway.
That's where she decided to run for the office that is the charter-mandated successor
to mayor.

Three days after Alter's gala press conference with Rudy, Newsday reporters
found her at home in Lawrence on a Tuesday. She had spent the night there. As
columnist Gail Collins put it: "Yesterday Alter was spinning a story that had the
rabbi driving regularly from Long Island to Rockland County to Flatbush, just to
sleep in the politically appropriate bedroom. If any of this is the least bit true, the
husband deserves to be named American Automobile Association Man of the Year."

Alter wasn't the only carpetbagger encouraged by Rudy to join the 1993
campaign. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) head Roy Innis, who lived in
Westchester and maintained a legal city address, challenged Dinkins in the
Democratic primary. So close to Rudy he was listed at the head table of Giuliani's
December 1992 fundraiser, Innis announced his candidacy just a few months later.
Innis lent a black face to the Giuliani critique of the incumbent, assailing Dinkins
as soft on crime in preparation for the November run. Not only did Innis frequent
Giuliani fundraisers, Rudy went to CORE's annual gala before and during his
mayoralty, oblivious to the findings of two Anti-Defamation League directors that
Innis had an alleged anti-Semitic past.

What was most surprising about Badillo's alliance with Giuliani was that Mario
Cuomo did nothing to try to prevent it. Badillo was so close to the Cuomo administration
that the governor had appointed him chair of a pivotal state housing
board and recruited him to run for state comptroller on the 1986 ticket. Fischbein's
wife was also a Cuomo appointee on the board of another state housing agency
and, in December 1991, when Cuomo almost ran for president, Fischbein was one
of the key people setting up finance committees for him around the country.

"I have no advice for Herman and can't give him any instructions," Cuomo said,
a peculiar position for the titular head of the state party known to intervene in
anything that affected his own interests. "My prediction is he won't do it, but I
could be wrong-and if he does, it will hurt Dinkins." The Cuomo administration
awarded the Fischbein firm its first state bond business in 1993-a coveted plum it
was so ill equipped to perform that its handling of a $24 million hospital bond was
blasted in two internal memos written by state officials.

Image

Schools Chancellor
Rudy Crew was the
mayor's closest black
friend. He now feels
betrayed-personally
and professionally.
(10 Robert B. Levine)

Image

Ray Harding, the Liberal Party boss and wired lobbyist, exchanges victory kisses with Rudy at
a 1997 party, with master of ceremonies Charlie Hughes looking on. A top municipal labor
leader, Hughes later pled guilty to stealing $2 million from his members-thousands of
kitchen workers and hourly school aides. (10Frances M. Roberts)

Image

When Giuliani met "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the boy king of Haiti, he reached the
expedient conclusion that there was no political repression in a land where
thousands were executed. (© AP/Wide World)

Image

Posing before their 1986 "drug buy" in Washington Heights were Giuliani and AI D'Amato,
who was running for re-election. The press never found out, but three of their five buys
were bad. When their friendship fractured two years later, they fought like Hell's Angels rivals.
(© AP/Wide World)

Image

Denny Young and Giuliani announce their departure from the u.s. Attorney's office
in the Southern District of New York in January 1989. They joined white shoe firm
White & Case before Rudy's first run for mayor. (© AP/Wide World)

Image

Thirty-eight-year-old Rudy, the youngest associate attorney general in history, in a Miami
appearance in 1982, the same year he met Donna Hanover there. He's always done an
involuntary eye roll in public performances, particularly when making a strained explanation.
(©AP/Wide World)

Image

Classic car auto dealer Elliot Cuker was a client at
Patterson, Belknap in the late '70s who took on
Deepak Chopra proportions in Rudy's New Age life.
(© Bill Turnbull/Daily News)

Image

u.s. District Court Judge Lloyd MacMahon was, after Harold
Giuliani, the single most important mentor in Rudy's life. All
the judge and the father shared was an appetite for anger.
(© AP/Wide World)

Image

Cristyne Lategano, the twenty-eight-year-
old press secretary who became
the second most powerful person in
Rudy's government, was his indispensable
companion until she became very
dispensable. (© Richard B. Levine)

Image

Judith Nathan was the
other "path" Donna said
Rudy chose in the fall of
1999, with the Senate race
of the epoch staring him in
the face.
(© Helayne Seidman)

Image

Giuliani the Prosecutor nailed a corrupt city administration. As
mayor, he looked the other way while friends compromised his
government. (© Catherine Smith)

Image

Nine hundred people a day line up for food at the Holy Apostle soup kitchen in
Chelsea, with hunger skyrocketing in the Giuliani era. (© Catherine Smith)

Image

"Nice trench coat" was Rudy's only
comment when YPD commissioner
Bill Bratton was pictured on the cover
of Time magazine. It was code for "Get
out." Bratton was bounced a couple of
months later.
(© AP/Wide World)

Image

Former U.S. District Court
Judge and Deputy Attorney
General Harold "Ace" Tyler, a
wise early mentor, brought
Giuliani to Washington as his
aide in the '70s, then into his
law firm. Rudy shut him out
when he indicted former Miss
America Bess Myerson in the
'80s. (© Harvey Wang)

Cuomo certainly had the leverage to kill the Giuliani/Badillo fusion with a single
grumble. But he also had ties to Giuliani he hadn't had in 1989, and he faced a
tough re-election in 1994, unlike the far less competitive 1990 race. Ray Harding,
who delivered his Liberal line immediately to Alter and Badillo, and Garth, who
was already positioned to become Cuomo's top consultant in 1994, were clear conduits
between the Democratic governor and the Republican challenger. One indication
of how tight this circle of connections would become was that right after
Giuliani's election, Harding joined Badillo's law firm.

Badillo was actually the weakest indicator of the covert alliance between Cuomo
and Rudy. Two early Cuomo decisions also helped Giuliani. In 1990, Cuomo approved
the bill that would put the Staten Island secession referendum on the ballot
in 1993, when every politician in the state understood it would increase
turnout in the most anti-Dinkins borough. The Democrats in the State Assembly
passed the bill to help two Democratic Assembly members from the island, but
they expected the governor to veto it. The bill created a commission to complete a
time-consuming study of the implications of secession and to issue findings by the
time of the '93 election.

Cuomo, who was up for re-election in 1990, signed the bill with great fanfare at
a Staten Island ceremony. He and the legislature made sure that the referendum
wouldn't appear on the ballot when either of them was running again-in 1992 or
1994. Two weeks after the bill signing, Giuliani, who had been speaking at GOP
functions around the state, ended speculation that he might challenge Cuomo.
"I've got a law practice and other things I've got to do both personally and professionally,"
he said.

Early in 1993, Dinkins wrote Cuomo, trying belatedly to get the governor to delay
the referendum. Cuomo claimed he couldn't. To this day, Cuomo maintains he
approved the referendum" on the merits," pointing out that it "was not a bill I
proposed or moved" and blaming it on the Assembly. "It had nothing to do with
Rudy Giuliani," says Cuomo. Dinkins attributed his loss to secession and added: "I
figured the governor would never sign it."

Though Staten Islanders overwhelmingly approved secession, the issue disappeared
when Giuliani took office, confirming the racial impetus that in part drove
it. A legal opinion issued by Assembly attorneys indicated that the City Council
had to approve what's called a home rule message for secession to actually proceed-
exactly what Dinkins had contended for years to no avail. By the time the
assembly killed it, however, the issue had given Giuliani 26,000 more votes in
Staten Island than he got in 1989.

The other Cuomo actions that contributed to Dinkins's defeat revolved around
Crown Heights. In October 1992-a day after a jury acquitted the only man
charged in Yankel Rosenbaum's murder-Cuomo asked a top aide, Richard
Girgenti, to "conduct a comprehensive review of how the criminal justice system
functioned in this case." Girgenti drafted an executive order limiting the inquiry
to "the investigation and prosecution" of the murder and sent it to Cuomo on
November 16.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

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Part 2 of 2

But Girgenti's mandate was then changed to include "the August 1991 disturbance
in Crown Heights," as well as the response of the NYPD and the
Dinkins administration to the deadly riot. In between the original and final versions
of the order, Al D' Amato was re-elected, campaigning at Norman
Rosenbaum's side and collecting an astonishing 40 percent of the Jewish vote.
With the governor up for re-election in 1994, that vote set off alarms in Albany.
Cuomo now has no recollection of participating in any decision to broaden the
mandate, contending that it always made sense to examine the handling of the
riot. Yet Cuomo's initial public statements attributed Girgenti's assignment
solely to the acquittal, and the fact that federal prosecutors had not yet announced
their own investigation of the murder. He said nothing about investigating
the city's response to the riot.

When the Girgenti report was issued in mid-July, it found that Dinkins "did not
act in a timely and decisive manner in requiring the Police Department to quickly
restore peace and order to the community." Cuomo actually pushed television
news producers to put the release of the report on live, the only time he did so in
a dozen years as governor.

While the findings were meticulous, they were also selective. A Dinkins deputy
mayor who was also close to the governor, Milt Mollen, was spared even a line of
criticism. Others who weren't close to the governor were denounced as "simply
not credible" when queried about their similar failure to respond to warnings
from Jewish leaders about the lack of police action.

Though Girgenti would concede later that many of the same Jewish leaders
whose warnings Dinkins and his top staff downplayed also spoke to Cuomo,
Girgenti never questioned Cuomo about whether he relayed those concerns to the
mayor. Since the leaders were calling Cuomo to ask him to send the National
Guard to the neighborhood, they were obviously making precisely the same
points to him about the lack of NYPD response as they had to the mayor.

Worse, Girgenti investigated but never reported on a conversation between
Cuomo and Dinkins that had become the battle cry of Crown Heights, cited endlessly
by critics like Ed Koch. Cuomo told the Jewish Press in a taped interview:
"The mayor on the second day of the trouble in Crown Heights said that the night
before had been a sort of day of grace to the mob, and that wouldn't happen a second
day because it was abused and because there were crimes perpetrated that
were not prevented."

Though the governor's sound-bite prowess made this quote the central theme
of Dinkins detractors, Girgenti never mentioned it in his 360-page report. When
one reporter pressed Girgenti about it a week after the release of the report, he
said he'd personally visited the offices of the Jewish Press and determined that
"the Jewish Press quoted the governor correctly." He conceded, however, that he
also determined-by asking the mayor and "looking at the governor's notes"-
that no such conversation with Dinkins ever occurred. Girgenti said the governor
"took a lot of different conversations and news reports" and "reduced" them to
this one-day ventilation theme. Even the phrase "day of grace" had more of a
Catholic Cuomo than a Protestant Dinkins ring to it.

The Crown Heights plaintiffs and lawyer relied on this quote so strongly that
the federal judge who denied a motion to dismiss the suit cited it a dozen times,
saying it was the most compelling evidence supporting the claim.

Cuomo finally testified in this suit in 1995-nineteen days after he was out of
office and a year after Dinkins's departure. For the first time, he acknowledged that
he had not even spoken to Dinkins until the fourth day of the riot, when police finally
had taken control of the situation. "Mayor Dinkins never said that to me at
any time," the ex-governor declared, when asked about the day of grace. "No
agent of Mayor Dinkins, no deputy of Mayor Dinkins, no agent of the police contacted
me and said that the mayor had participated in or ordered a day of grace."

Had Mario Cuomo said the same words in 1993, he might have changed the result
of a close election. Instead he let Dinkins twist in the wind. Dinkins says now
that Cuomo's "attitude about Girgenti's report was that it could have been much
worse, like he had saved me from a worse report." He is baffled about why Cuomo
didn't deny the grace quote in 1993.

The Giuliani camp was awash in leaks about Girgenti's findings long before the
release, and when it came out, Rudy seized on it as the strongest indictment of his
opponent. The false quote and the skewed report-which, of course, ignored the
question of why Cuomo waited until the fourth day to call the mayor-damaged
Dinkins in 1993, while winning Orthodox allies for Cuomo in 1994.

While Cuomo's image as a national Democrat has been secure since his 1984
blockbuster convention speech, he played a bipartisan brand of politics within New
York that revolved around his own balance-of-power interests. Mild-mannered
Senator Pat Moynihan told the Times that Cuomo and D' Amato had a "mutual
non-aggression pact" for years. In the 1992 Senate race, for example, Cuomo, like
Giuliani, joined in the D' Amato "fascist" hoax, lending Democratic credibility to
the notion that Democratic nominee Bob Abrams's use of the term was an anti-
Italian slur. He was far closer to Senate GOP leader Ralph Marino than the
Democratic minority-so much so that Marino tried to block George Pataki's 1994
nomination to run against him.

Cuomo endorsed Dinkins for re-election, but his own social service commissioner
refused to criticize Giuliani's transparently illegal, ninety-day-shelterlimit,
homeless proposal, even suggesting it might be the kind of change that was
necessary. Giuliani presented the fifteen-page strategy paper in mid-September,
contending that it "fully incorporates and builds on the recommendations" of a
city commission appointed by Dinkins and chaired by Andrew Cuomo. In fact, its
most punitive elements were never contemplated by the Cuomo Commission report,
yet neither Andrew Cuomo, nor anyone in his father's administration,
pointed that out.

Andrew Cuomo had been a key to Dinkins's '89 win, suffocating the love-letter
story. But he'd since given Giuliani off-year lessons on homeless policy and, in
one taped session, the two swapped jokes and insights like old friends. He stayed
far away from the '93 race, having just been appointed the Clinton administration's
new Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undersecretary. Similarly,
the governor, who'd vigorously attacked Giuliani in 1989 and threatened Ray
Harding over the Liberal endorsement, limited himself in 1993 to occasional, longdistance
comments supportive of Dinkins. The only time Cuomo criticized
Giuliani was a muted and barely reported comment connecting Rudy disparagingly
to "the new federalism of Bush and Reagan."

The day after he won, Giuliani said he didn't anticipate any problems in dealing
with Cuomo, noting they had "mutual friends"-an apparent reference to Garth
and Harding-and that Cuomo had given him advice during the race on how to
make the transition from lawyer to candidate.

Bill Lynch, David Dinkins and others in the Dinkins inner circle were convinced
that the governor had two-timed them, nominally supporting Dinkins while simultaneously
making sure that a potential new Republican mayor wouldn't hurt
him in his Democratic base-particularly among Jews-in 1994. Brooklyn D.A.
Joe Hynes, a onetime appointee and ally of Cuomo's, titillated the audience at a
1993 roast with this tale: "Some years ago, the governor was brought in for a
physical and an interview by the draft board. His interviewer asked him if he
could kill someone if necessary. Mario thought for a moment, and then he said: 'I
don't know about strangers-but friends-DEFINITELY.'"

Garth, who was publicly named Cuomo's media strategist less than four months
after Rudy's election, was not only a key link for Giuliani with the governor, he
was critical to bringing Koch aboard. In April, Koch told a television interviewer
that he was "going to string out" his apparently inevitable endorsement of
Giuliani. "It's helpful," he said.

"To you or him?" he was asked.

"To me," he said.

Richard Bryers says now that they "were never unsure of Koch." His endorsement
didn't occur until mid-September, when Koch swallowed any distress he
might have had about the sex inquiry Giuliani's office had conducted of him years
earlier. Friends of Koch say that Giuliani assured the former mayor-shortly before
the endorsement-that he didn't know about the Tony Lombardi probe. These
friends say that Koch accepted that explanation initially, but began to doubt it, particularly
after watching Giuliani's hands-on management style-what Koch
would characterize as a one-man government.

When the Village Voice published a story in July 1995 revealing that federal
prosecutors in New Jersey who were "considering" indicting Lombardi had described
him in open court as a "spy" working inside the government, Koch was so
upset he called a friend at 7 A.M. and told him to go buy the paper. The story also
reported that Giuliani had just vouched for Lombardi in a sworn stipulation taken
by prosecutors at City Hall. Rudy conceded in that stipulation that Lombardi had
"attended meetings and planning sessions" with him. Koch was already distancing
himself from Giuliani on a variety of policy matters. He now had a personal
bone of contention: Giuliani may well have lied to him to secure his 1993 endorsement.

Though no longer at the IRS and no longer directly involved with Giuliani,
Lombardi still had an effect on the 1993 election. Before he left the government,
Lombardi launched the probe that would haunt and tarnish Dinkins. As soon as the
1989 campaign was over, in late November and early December of 1989, he played a
key role in jumpstarting an investigation of Dinkins's cable stock transfer and steering
it out of the Southern District and into the Eastern District. Uncertain of his status
in the office just taken over by Otto Obermaier, Lombardi pushed Eastern
District U.S. Attorney Andy Maloney to take over the case. Maloney did and his
eventual report raised questions about the authenticity of the letter transferring the
stock from Dinkins to his son. Lombardi also launched a preliminary tax inquiry of
the cable company's principal, Percy Sutton, a powerful Dinkins ally.

In addition to the post-election Lombardi role in the cable probe, David
Lawrence and Kevin Ford, the AUSA and the city investigator who had worked
with Lombardi on the Myerson and Nathan cases, also conducted damaging
probes of the Dinkins administration over the next four years.

Ford spearheaded a special investigation of asbestos inspections at the Board of
Education that forced a nearly month-long citywide delay in the opening of
schools in September 1993. While there was no doubt the inspections were faulty,
Ford, who oversaw asbestos and other environmental investigations for the
School Construction Authority (SCA) at the time, was informed of the false reports
long before he and others sounded the alarm that August. The Daily News
reported that Ford's unit knew for two years that the asbestos reports were "unreliable."
The SCA was so sure the reports were faulty, it began conducting its
own tests. Yet it told no one in law enforcement until the eve of the pre-election
school opening.

The asbestos crisis, angering the parents of a million school children, was seized
upon by the Giuliani campaign as another example of Dinkins mismanagement.
Confronted with the first citywide shutdown ever (except for strikes), Dinkins appeared
daily to be trying once again to grab hold of another self-made emergency.

Shortly after Giuliani became mayor, he named Ford deputy commissioner of
the Department of Investigation, an agency run by Giuliani's most trusted law enforcement
confidants. Ford quit DOl in 1998 to rejoin Lawrence, who was working
in the counsel's office at the prestigious Goldman, Sachs investment firm.

Lawrence stayed in the Southern District until mid-1993 and remained so
friendly with Rudy he attended a Rudy fundraiser in 1992 while heading the office's
public corruption unit. He and his wife are listed on the seating arrangement
for that fundraiser, though no contributions were recorded on the campaign filings.
At the same time as he was appearing at the fundraiser, Lawrence was conducting
numerous probes of Dinkins associates, including sending two major
Dinkins fundraisers, Arnold Biegen and Joe Barnes, to jail. Lawrence pushed
Biegen for information on both Dinkins and D' Amato.

Lawrence tried to flip Barnes and Biegen before and after guilty pleas, but eventually
recommended the thirty-five-month prison sentence imposed on Biegen,
who had been the treasurer of Dinkins's committee. In an October 1992 presentencing
letter to the judge, Lawrence wrote that Biegen "provided no meaningful
assistance to any federal investigation," dismissing Biegen's own claims to
have done so as "simply without basis."

Lawrence also probed the Dinkins administration's award of a multimilliondollar
sludge contract to a firm represented by Ron Brown, then Democratic
National Committee chair, and Harold Ickes, who was counsel to the Dinkins campaign.
In addition, Lawrence subpoenaed city records regarding a Corrections
Department contract won by a client of Sid Davidoff, the leading lobbyist of the
Dinkins era who was a constant target of Giuliani public attacks. The prosecutor
even investigated Laura Blackburne, the chair of the Housing Authority under
Dinkins who was forced to resign principally over revelations that she had spent
$3,000 on a pink leather sofa for her office.

None of the Lawrence cases ever gave Giuliani any campaign ammunition,
though Rudy certainly included Biegen, Blackburne, the stock transfer and other
publicized probes in the litany of ethics questions he cited surrounding the
Dinkins administration. But with competence the up-front issue of the campaign,
and race the subliminal one, Rudy spent little time with the corruption themes he
had ridden so hard in 1989.

***

Garth and the memories of 1989 combined to give Rudy a new campaign personality.
He began smiling like a trained seal, baring teeth with every handshake,
discovering what would prove over the years to be an inexhaustible supply
of surface friendliness. He put on sports glasses with wine-colored rims, and that
plus a slimmer build and a tighter haircut enhanced his image of energy and competence,
especially when compared with the sixty-six-year-old Dinkins. The
snappy "Rudy!" posters were said by Newsday's Mitch Gelman to "scream, rockstar-
like."

When Garth yelled at Rudy for dressing "like an undertaker," he found bright
colors in ties, and accepted" coaching" on when and where to roll up his sleeves.
Giuliani started the campaign by getting away from dark themes like crime, but in
the homestretch, his speeches were laced with references to "slaughter" and the
dramatic image of criminals "roaming unhindered" on the streets.

At $25,000 a month plus a percentage of the media buy, Garth was meeting
with Giuliani every night, usually around midnight, reviewing the day and planning
the next. Powers and Harding started most mornings with him. When
Giuliani got testy toward the end of a race that was closer than he anticipated,
Garth cooled him out by making a tough commercial that went after Dinkins's
weaknesses but keeping it in the can. Just the knowledge that he had such a
weapon in his arsenal calmed Rudy and helped keep him at least mildly positive in
the final days.

Garth also decided to involve Donna in the initial screening of all the commercials-
joining just Rudy and Powers, according to Bryers. In sharp contrast to
1989, Donna was all over the 1993 effort, campaigning with and without him,
meeting volunteers and attending executive staff meetings at the headquarters.
With only part-time, freelance, work at Fox's Channel 5, she was unencumbered
by restrictions like those imposed on her by WPIX.

Her total TV earnings in 1993 were $32,773 and they spent $23,848 on childcare,
suggesting how often Donna was out of the house for campaign, rather than
professional, reasons. Both Garth and her husband respected her media judgment,
as well as her sense of what would work with women voters. "She's my closest adviser,"
Rudy would say shortly after taking office. "She has a lot of understanding
of how the city works. She's good at assessing who's strong, who's weak."

Brad Holbrooke, her WPIX colleague, neighbor and friend, contrasted her 1989
and 1993 campaign roles: "A lot of people, some of the campaign advisers, laid
Giuliani's defeat at the feet of her unwillingness to campaign for him. That's not
my evaluation, but other people have said that he's not a warm and fuzzy guy, and
she could warm and fuzzy him up and she didn't because she wanted to maintain
that integrity as a journalist apart from the political fray. And I think in the next
campaign she did campaign for him fairly vigorously and a lot of people felt that
was a major improvement."

Toward the end of the campaign, Donna was hired by TV Food Network to be
co-anchor of Food News & Views-her first real broadcast job in almost three
years. Reese Schonfeld, the network president who'd known Donna and Rudy for
years, says he hired her because "she's terrific" and because he "thought it was unfortunate
that she was caught in a journalistic bind when your husband is a politician
and you can't be on the air." Schonfeld said he talked with John Corporon,
Donna's old WPIX boss, "about how she got screwed over by her association with
the mayor, or the mayoral candidate" in 1990. "He loved Donna. I loved Donna."

Donna taped a two-hour sneak preview "taste test" with Robin Leach prior to
the election, showcasing her skills at debriefing the personalities of the food and
nutrition businesses. She did not, however, assume her on-air responsibilities until1994.
But the job that evolved sounded much like the one she'd rejected when
she left WPIX. Joe Langhan, a network executive, described her daily routine:
"She'd come in around 4 P.M. with her escorts"-she had a city-paid staff of four
and Langhan said she'd "have at least two, sometimes three, with her." She'd immediately
"read the script, talk to the producer and look at the tapes." Then she'd
go on the air at 5:30, mostly just reading the news. What started as an hour-long
show was eventually reduced to half an hour, which she'd split with her co-anchor.
Though a free-lance, Donna still makes an annual six-figure salary at the network,
which blossomed into a cable colossus.

Holbrooke, who wound up working with her there as well, said her decision to
work at the network was a "testament to her ambition or to her love of television,"
since Donna "has never cooked a meal in her life." Holbrooke said "her
kitchen was full of law books and newspaper clippings-and I actually saw it-and
the stove was never turned on."

The great fear of 1989-the mysterious Regina Peruggi story-never even
threatened to return in 1993. In anticipation that it might, the campaign's vulnerability
study, which was authored by Lyons at Garth's suggestion, devoted a
lengthy analysis to the possibility that "the Dinkins campaign might leak negative
personal information" about the Peruggi marriage. It said that the marriage and
annulment raised" questions about a 'weirdness factor'" afflicting Giuliani's "personallife."
The study reviewed what it described as Giuliani's "wide array of conflicting
answers" about the marriage, which it said "brings the soundness of his
judgment into question-and the veracity of his answers."

A five-page recapitulation of Rudy's answers to prior questions identified "numerous
inconsistencies and questionable circumstances about how long the two
were married, whether Giuliani knew he was marrying his second cousin, whether
he dated other women while still married, and ultimately how consistent he has
been about his personal life." The study referred to Rudy's "raucous social life"
during the Peruggi marriage, adding that the media saw the marriage itself "as an
extremely bizarre event." It recommended that Giuliani "deflect as a shameless act
of negative campaigning any attempt to question the legitimacy of Giuliani's first
marriage or his fidelity." By assuming this "personal defense strategy," the study
concluded, "the campaign will find it exceedingly difficult to attack Dinkins with
personal charges," signaling the death of the love-letters assault.

Giuliani was so unnerved by this and other passages in the study that he had a
campaign aide sit down at the computers of the two authors and erase it from their
hard drives. The aide also confiscated discs. Copies were only given to Powers,
Garth and Giuliani, and it was never discussed again.

Some of its analysis of Giuliani weaknesses proved prophetic. In a section entitled
"arrogance," the study reported that critics charged he "doesn't listen to people,
doesn't take advice, attacks critics and is insensitive to those who do not share
his position on an issue." It concluded that "this charge is not without some justification."
The review of "ruthlessness"-after noting that he was viewed as "the
Machiavelli of the legal community" -found that there was "lots of evidence
demonstrating" that as a federal prosecutor he "certainly pushed the envelope of
the permissible."

"Rudy Giuliani has plenty of 'inoculating' to do on several fronts/' the authors
wrote in the introduction, specifying his "reputation for overzealousness/, the reversals
of his federal convictions, flip-flops and the cop rally. "This study is tough
and hard-hitting. It is not intended to shock or offend, but to prepare the candidate
and his staff for the kinds of no-holds-barred assault they should expect" from the
Dinkins camp.

The third paragraph of the five-inch-thick bound volume, though, sounded its
death knell. Rudy Giuliani was hardly prepared to look into a mirror that bared
everything from his hairline to his eyeroll. "The readers of this vulnerability
study are urged/' the preface read, "not to dismiss or take lightly any of the negatives
discussed in this document. Taken together, the negative issues presented in
this study offer a compelling argument against electing Giuliani mayor."

Though Mayor Rudy would bar Public Advocate Mark Green from making an
apolitical appearance in a city senior center in 1995, Candidate Rudy spent his final
day of the 1993 campaign shuttling between seven such centers. He swung
through all five boroughs, finishing that night, of course, in Staten Island with the
Molinaris.

His election-day operation-featuring thousands of off-duty cops, firemen and
correction officers, assigned to "monitor" black districts-was denounced by Dinkins
at a noon press conference as "an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and
dirty tricks." A poster that warned Dinkins supporters they might be arrested if they
voted was put up-particularly in Latino areas-by four men riding in a car registered
to a city cop. The poster-headlined "Re-Elect Mayor David Dinkins"-said
that federal agents and immigration authorities were at the polls ready "to arrest and
deport undocumented illegal voters." The Dinkins campaign, of course, said it had
nothing to do with the poster, a position echoed by both the PBA and Rudy.

In the campaign's closing days, Rudy put Helen D' Avanzo Giuliani into a commerciat
just as Al D' Amato had done with his mother. She said her son was a
"nice guy." When the firemen's union endorsed him, he mentioned Eddie
D' Avanzo in his speech, recalling how his fireman uncle was" seriously injured in
the line of duty" and calling him a "hero." His extended family-particularly
George Giordano, the son-in-law of William D' Avanzo and Olga Giuliani, and
Cathy Giuliani, the daughter-in-law of Uncle Rudy Giuliani-was very active in
the campaign, with Giordano accompanying him on many street appearances.

Lou Carbonetti, the son of Harold Giuliani's best friend who'd gone to Yankee
games with Rudy as a kid, and Lou's son Tony were on the campaign staff, with
Lou assigned to help his fellow graduate of East Harlem politics, Herman Badillo.
In fact, the fusion ticket debuted at a 116th Street rally at Badillo's suggestion, and
Rudy, Badillo and Carbonetti returned to Harold's old East Harlem haunts to
launch the campaign that would fulfill his dream.

Lou had also worked in the 1989 campaign, having visited Rudy at the u.s.
Attorney's office when he first heard Giuliani might run and offered his services
(he ran his own East Harlem Democratic club). Carbonetti recalls that he brought
a "beautifully framed photo" of Harold and his father when he saw Rudy-for the
first time in many years-and that Giuliani kept the photo and returned the
frame, saying he couldn't accept gifts.

With Donna, the kids, Giordano, Cathy Giuliani and Carbonetti around, the
campaign, whose first TV ad featured a relaxed Rudy doing his Brooklyn shtick
from native Brooklyn, had a comfortable, family, feeling to it. The ethos, though,
went beyond family. The Dinkins campaign charged that Rudy's "make-thingsthe-
way-they-were" appeal was a conscious effort to "manipulate nostalgia,"
aimed at the elderly in particular, with a not too subtle racial edge. The Sunday
Times Magazine described him on its cover, however, as "A Wonder Bread Son of
the '50s," buying into this purebred image as authentic: "It's as if his cultural and
psychic sensibilities froze about 1961, the year he left the tutelage of the Christian
Brothers at Bishop Loughlin."

"I used to hide my personal side," Giuliani said. "People thought I was a machine.
People want to get to know you, to get to feel you. I was holding part of myself
back" Nonetheless, he still refused reporters' requests during one campaign
swing to alter his route a few blocks and pose for photographs in front of 419
Hawthorne Street, concerned no doubt about the reception he might get on the
virtually all-black block

Joined on election morning by Donna, Andrew and three-year-old Caroline,
Rudy voted shortly before 9 A.M. A family campaign culminated in a family
scene. No one noticed that neither Rudy nor Donna had much of a voting history-
with both of them registering on January 1, 1984, and then missing the
1984 and 1988 presidential elections, as well as the 1986 gubernatorial and Senate
races and the 1985 mayoral race. Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Al D' Amato and
Mario Cuomo weren't enough of a lure to get them to the polls. Incredibly, neither
voted in the 1989 mayoral primary, when Rudy's name first appeared on the ballot,
running against Ron Lauder.

Rudy beat Dinkins by almost the same margin as he'd lost four years earlier,
completing a 50,000-vote circle. He managed to get to the top-one of the most
visible and powerful public positions in the nation, in control of its fifth largest
public budget-without ever serving in another elective position. No mayor had
done that since John O'Brien, the interim successor to Jimmy Walker who was
mayor in 1933 for a few months. Koch had served in Congress and the city council
for years; Dinkins had been borough president and an assemblyman. Giuliani
had discovered a new path to power, circumventing the clubhouse career ladder.

In addition to the 26,000-vote boost he got out of Staten Island, he carried
Queens by 17,000 more votes than he did in 1989. He also lost Brooklyn by
29,000 fewer votes and Manhattan by 22,000 fewer. Exit polls said 85 percent of
his vote was white, 9 percent Hispanic, 3 percent black and 3 percent other.
Catholic turnout was up to 72 percent, accounting for 59 percent of all Giuliani
voters. Dinkins voters were only 27 percent white. The city had split itself in two.

Rudy sat on a bed in his Hilton suite on the 44th floor, getting results from
aides and hugs from Donna. Cops and firemen filled the ballroom below, while the
balcony was crammed with bearded Orthodox Jews. It was as white and male a
crowd of 1,500 as had assembled to celebrate a New York electoral win in decades.
When Rudy finally spoke, he thanked the NYPD and the fire department for helping
him win. Bob Wagner Jr., whose father was the mayor who'd welcomed hundreds
of thousands of southern blacks to the city in the 1950s and early 1960s, was
so shaken by the homogeneity of the crowd and what it said about his divided city,
that he went home early and mourned. The man whose sweater-clad, cozy TV
commercial had reassured Democrats and helped elect Giuliani wasn't having second
thoughts about Rudy personally. It was just the aura of Rudy's narrow base,
he said later, that made him "uncomfortable."

Giuliani pledged that his administration would be "universal in its concerns,
sensitive to our diversity and evenhanded in every way possible." In a clear attempt
to reassure blacks who voted against him in large numbers, he promised:
"Nobody, no ethnic, religious or racial group, will escape my care, my concern and
my attention." The Times editorial said Giuliani might "never fully erase the
memory of his inflammatory speech" at the cop rally. But, it argued, "he could begin
to make amends by sending police a wholly different message: that he expects
them to match the same standards of probity and fairness that he demands from
the rest of the government."

Rudy was so excited all he got was an hour's sleep. Bryers went to get him at
4:30 in the morning; he was scheduled for four morning television appearances.
Donna sat in on everyone. At Koch's urging, he went to City Hall to embrace
Dinkins and signal a smooth transition and a unified city. He decided to visit all
five boroughs, a day-after pledge he'd made in 1989. "It was his idea," Bryers recalled.
"He wanted to convey that he was an agent of change." Cristyne Lategano
took the victory lap across the city with him, refueled by a bare two to three
hours' sleep.

They made it a point to go to Harlem first, where his five-vehicle caravan went
to a church whose pastor, the Reverend John Brandon, had done a TV commercial
for him. Brandon, who would be forced to resign shortly after Giuliani made him
youth commissioner because of tax problems, greeted him, as did housing advocate
Evelyn King, another endorser who would have to quit a Giuliani transition
post within months because she lobbied the commissioner she'd just helped appoint.
The only leader at the carefully orchestrated event who had not endorsed
Rudy was the Reverend Calvin Butts, Harlem's most prominent minister. Butts
would, by the end of Rudy's first term, become the first black leader to call him a
"racist." Promising the small group an inclusive administration, Giuliani said: "I
need to spend time with you."

The highlight of the daylong swing was ebullient celebrations in Borough Park,
where his Orthodox Jewish supporters "met him with all the passion and excitement
of a rock star," Bay Ridge and Staten Island, cornerstones of his Catholic base.

At forty-nine the youngest mayor since Lindsay, Rudy was a deep well of drive
and intellect. His win had renewed his confidence, revived his ambition. He knew
he could ride a crest-crime had already been dropping for thirty-five consecutive
months under Dinkins, as quiet as he and the media had kept it, and the job hemorrhage
that had so wounded the city was turning around, belatedly mimicking
national economic trends. He had faith in his ability to manage-his Justice
Department career convinced him of that-and he believed a well-run New York
could be a showcase for the Big Job. He had already broken every precedent by becoming
mayor; he was destined, he thought, to be the first to get beyond it, to win
a higher office when his two terms were done.

A week after the election, he, Donna, the kids, Lategano, a babysitter, the security
detail and a group of transition aides went to Palmas Del Mar, a 2,750-acre resort
in Puerto Rico for a four-day vacation, accompanied by a half dozen reporters.
Every day, he tried a different sport-tennis, basketball, a driving range. He
walked the white-sand beach in a loping, oversized, striped sportshirt and baseball
cap, with the press at his side. He didn't take either off when he waded into the water.
The hairdo that often seemed pasted to his head never got wet. His pale skin
hid from the rays and did not change color. He looked chunky and ponderous.

He did daily press briefings, detailing the transition that was going on back in
the city. At one, he returned to the ethics theme he'd emphasized in 1989 and
down played in '93, promising an independent Department of Investigation, a vow
that even his most ardent admirers would later see as a joke. He talked repeatedly
about the search for a new police commissioner, which had already become the
most important decision facing him.

Donna was with him at the photo-ops, briefly joining the basketball game. She
never took a public swim either, appearing silently at his side in knee-length
shorts and flowery blouses. They got a two-bedroom villa with a kitchen (she
brought a housekeeper with them) and stayed out of sight most of the week, except
for the scheduled press availabilities. Despite the presence of four transition
aides and constant calls to New York, Rudy said he was trying to have "as close to
100 percent vacation as possible."

The resort was so spread out the Giulianis traveled around it in gas-powered
golf carts, security detail behind. The first day, while Rudy answered press questions
in the hotel lobby, everyone suddenly noticed the cart weaving recklessly off
into the sun, ramming into a curb, with only seven-year-old Andrew at the wheel.
When Rudy hit the golf range, a reporter celebrated each of the long balls he drove
into the trees by naming them after each one of his courtroom grand slams
("Friedman!" "Boesky!" "Biaggi!" Milken!!!") and Rudy howled.

No one knew it, but this would be the last Giuliani family vacation. Donna
would go to Disneyworld in 1996 with the kids, but without the man who had proposed
to her there. In 1998, she'd take the kids to Ireland without him, the sort of
vacation no New York politician would miss except for deeply personal reasons.
She would take them to Paris too-in April 1999, just days before her and Rudy's
fifteenth anniversary. But he would stay in the city. The official explanation, when
the Post asked in 1999, was that he was too busy to travel. In fact, right after his
re-election in 1997, he'd launch a national speaking tour that would take him to
twenty states in a matter of months. If a family that plays together stays together,
Rudy wasn't playing.

The power and the limelight would, as soon as he moved into City Hall, become
his life. He would adapt immediately to his new, almost kingly, status, with a realm
envied by politicians everywhere and virtually unchecked by any countervailing
force, legislative or otherwise. He would relish his role as commander-in-chief,
with an army of 40,000, the nation's second largest militia, and it would so consume
his attention he would approve detective promotions. Every important word
of his would be televised, every mood analyzed. He could not enter a room again
in his vast city without every eye following him. Their whispers were about him.
Their hands reached for his. That would become all the intimacy he needed, and
for a while he found it affirming, elevating.

He no longer feared being ordinary or wanted what was commonplace. From
November 2, 1993, on, history was his only companion, greatness his only goal.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:19 am

Part 1 of 2

Fifteen: Metamorphosis of a Mayoralty

RUDY'S FIRST YEAR AS MAYOR SHOWCASED THE AMBIGUITIES OF HIS
five-year pursuit of the office. Just as his two campaigns had oscillated
wildly from political pole to pole, 1994 would be a year of uncertain searching,
guided by neither party nor ideology.

He knew he wanted to make a focused fight against crime the bedrock of his
administration. That pushed him to go ahead with the hiring of a new class of
2,400 recruits and to name a wildcard police commissioner, Boston's Bill
Bratton, whose ego was as' unmistakably large as the mayor's. Rudy's adamant
insulation of the NYPD from budget cuts in the face of a $2.3 billion gap-resisting
the sage urgings of the Times and two comptrollers that he achieve
modest savings by substituting cheaper civilians for deskbound cops-made
his priorities and resolve unmistakable. So did his willingness to buck his own
party and campaign in Minnesota at Bill Clinton's side for the passage of the
federal crime bill.

He knew he wanted to launch a tax cut program, undaunted by the size of
the gap, and he did it by picking his prime target wisely: an onerous hotel tax
that he saw as discouraging tourism yet delivering little real revenue in a $32
billion budget. Cutting a symbolic tax even slightly (from 6 percent to 5) while
simultaneously slashing the city workforce by nearly 7,000 jobs-primarily
by offering a lucrative severance package to induce employees to leave-sent a
signal to business that the new mayor meant business. He would later claim
that his tax cut and fiscal plan spurred the city's economic revival, but in fact,
private-sector employment grew in Dinkins's final two years and was up
21,000 in early 1994, even before Giuliani proposed his budget.

By exempting police and fire from the severance package and initial cuts, he
concentrated the real damage on the Human Resources Administration
(HRA), the Health & Hospitals Corporation (HHC) and the Board of
Education, bureaucratic behemoths whose overwhelmingly black and Latino users
had little to do with his election.

The fiscal iron wall he built around the fire department suggested a partially political
motive, since there was no policy rationale for it and the fire union had been
even more helpful to his campaign than Phil Caruso's PBA. He denounced Fred
Siegel, one of his former Manhattan Institute gurus, for suggesting that millions
could be saved if firemen were rescheduled so that fewer worked day shifts, when
fires occurred infrequently. In any event, the mayor made his hard choices with
relish, almost savoring the howls they provoked.

He knew also that he wanted to establish a new public culture, embodying a
toughness that would not blink in moments of crisis. His first opportunity came
just ten days into his term, when police and the Nation of Islam wound up in a
late-night standoff at a Harlem mosque.

Cops had been summoned to the scene by a bogus 911 armed robbery call, made
by drug dealers angry at Louis Farrakhan's followers for driving them off the
block The first officers on the scene tried to push back the Black Muslim guards
and instead were thrown out, losing a gun and a radio in the scuffle. Bratton and
Giuliani instantly defended the cops in phone call interviews with reporters,
though neither was on the scene. While Bratton's two top black aides tried to negotiate
with mosque leaders, Giuliani kept calling the new commissioner and demanding
action.

"You have stolen police property. Why aren't you going in?" Giuliani asked, according
to Bratton years later.

"1 want arrests!" demanded the mayor, who was trying, says Bratton, to show
"how he was going to be different from Dinkins." Bratton warned of "the potential
to have this escalate," and insisted on allowing" the negotiation process to
work" It did. Cops were allowed in to search the premises and recover the gun and
radio. Months later, the Muslims who fought the cops were arrested.

When the Reverend Al Sharpton, the portly prince of provocation who had tormented
both of Giuliani's predecessors, tried to join a subsequent meeting at the
NYPD involving the Muslims and Bratton, he was stopped at the door. The mayor
said he wouldn't meet with Sharpton either, even warning black elected officials
who criticized police handling of the melee: "They're going to have to learn how
to discipline themselves in the way in which they speak" If New Yorkers "can't
stand up for those police officers despite the color of our skin" -he declared, noting
that the nose of one female cop was broken at the mosque-"this city's in
more trouble than I think people believed it was."

The combination of the Sharpton rebuff and the vocal defense of the cops
sounded the bugle on a new day in New York

A day after the mosque incident, Rudy had his first controversial police shooting
to deal with-an unarmed seventeen-year-old killed by three police bullets in
a Brooklyn basement. The son of a prominent Muslim cleric, the boy also had a
drug conviction. The new mayor was in a rush to declare: "The officer reacted both
properly and bravely."

The controversy dissipated quickly, and no one noticed when the city subsequently
settled a lawsuit filed by the family, paying $318,000. An Amnesty
International report on the case in 1996-also ignored by the media-contended
that no cops were indicted because the Nyclad bullets were untraceable and it
couldn't be determined which cop's shots killed him. The family attorney says an
autopsy established that he was kneeling and raising his arms, "elbows bent and
palms forward," when killed.

While the settlement prevented any definitive review of the facts of the case,
what was important from Rudy's standpoint was that he had seized the first two
incidents of his mayoralty to draw a line in the sand. The benefit of the doubt in
favor of the police that he had promised at the infamous 1992 cop rally was now
unambiguous policy.

Beyond these core, preconceived, principles of governance, first-year Rudy was
an open book. The issue that had underscored both of his campaigns and shaped
every modern mayoralty-race-would, predictably, arrive on his desk in so
many different forms, he had endless opportunities to define and redefine himself.

He recognized that defeating the first black mayor had created a chasm; he could
consciously try to close it or accept it as his inevitable fate. John Lindsay had
proven that being a Republican was no bar to also being a bridge to blacks. With
no black among the likely challengers he would face in four years, the power of
the mayoralty gave him the chance to change minority minds. All he had to do
was decide he wanted to, then listen to those who could tell him how.

He recognized just as surely that there was no way to achieve his fundamental
immediate goal-cutting the citywide crime rate- without lowering it significantly
in minority communities. That's where most of the crime was. He could either
enlist those communities as partners in this crusade or make them its target.
He had to understand that any cop-is-always-right license to frisk, bust or shoot
would turn neighborhoods into suspects, crunching crime at the price of pride.

The government he put together demonstrated his indecision about which path
to take in his overall relations with minority communities. He named no black
deputy mayor. Since Abe Beame attempted in 1974 to appoint young David
Dinkins-an appointment nixed when Dinkins admitted in the screening process
that he hadn't filed his taxes-the city had always had a black deputy mayor. As
poisoned as Ed Koch's relations were with the black community, he named a suc-
cession of black deputies. Not only did Rudy decide not to, he simultaneously
hired a thirty-member executive staff at City Hall that included only two blacks,
one a holdover from Dinkins who supervised AIDS programs.

He ridiculed the liaison offices Dinkins had set up to service each ethnic community
and said he disbanded them, while in truth installing his campaign aide
Bruce Teitelbaum as a liaison to one, the Orthodox Jewish community. The African
American/Caribbean, Latino and Asian Affairs offices were abolished.

On the other hand, he installed blacks at the helm of the Human Resources
Agency, the Health & Hospitals Corporation, the Department of Health, the
Department of Business Services, the Tax Commission, the Youth Bureau and the
Housing Preservation and Development Agency, as many key agencies as were
run by blacks under Dinkins.

He also appointed Latinos to head the Housing Authority, the Personnel
Department, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Corporation, the Department of Juvenile
Justice and the Department of Mental Health and Retardation, while naming one,
Ninfa Segarra, both a deputy mayor and one of his two representatives on the
Board of Education. Especially compared with what it would eventually become,
the administration began as a picture postcard of inclusiveness.

On the heels of this mixed appointment record, as well as the mosque and
Brooklyn shooting incidents, Rudy moved in late January 1994 to shut down a minority
set-aside program created under Dinkins and designed to deliver 20 percent
of city contracts to black, Latino, Asian and women vendors. While one element of
the program was under legal challenge, Giuliani gutted it without a hint of any reformed
replacement. The Times bellowed that his "wrongheaded and hardheaded"
decision to eliminate" one of the most socially beneficial and cost-effective programs
of its kind" might have been designed to "play to the exaggerated sense of
white embattlement that helped him as a candidate."

"The theory of it is to remedy past discrimination," Giuliani said. "Now you can
agree or disagree with whether that is necessary./I Obviously believing it wasn't,
the mayor and his chief of staff, Randy Mastro, promised that, without a program
of preference, the city would nonetheless award more minority contracts than with
it. They would never again-over the course of more than six years-provide any
comprehensive data on the percentage of contracts minority firms won. Rudy simultaneously
decided that the screening panel he had named to recommend new
family, criminal and civil court judges was no longer required to consider diversity
as a factor in making their selections.

John Dyson, the new deputy mayor for economic development, put the negatives
swirling around the administration in context with two disturbing com-
ments. In February, it was revealed that he'd written a memo to First Deputy
Mayor Peter Powers after a newspaper article questioned whether they could run
a diverse city. "Do not worry," he wrote. "Two white guys have been running this
city of immigrants for over 200 years." The seven-page memo, which started with
this sarcastic reference to the Daily News story about Giuliani and Powers, upset
an aide so much he stole it from a City Hall desk and delivered it to the paper.

Sent the day after he was hired in December, Dyson's memo did not evoke any
outrage from City Hall before or after it was leaked. "I think if you read it in context
and you don't want to get offended, you won't get offended. If you want to
get offended, you will," Giuliani deadpanned before storming out of a press conference
when questions about it persisted. In fact, the full context of the letter was
a laundry list of racially controversial proposals from the elimination of parole to
the appointment of "a revolutionary with a smile on his face" to upend "the goofy
welfare structure."

Just four months later, the irrepressible Dyson turned entertainer in a taped
newspaper interview, rebuking the Democratic comptroller, Alan Hevesi, for pushing
for the retention of a black-owned financial management firm. He told a reporter
that Hevesi "ought to know a bid from a watermelon." Mild-mannered
City Council Speaker Peter Vallone said it was" clearly a racist statement" and demanded
a retraction or removal.

The One City/One Standard mayor did more press conference jujitsu. He defended
Dyson when few doubted that similar acid spilled on an ethnic group that
had voted for him would have cost the miscreant his job, or, at minimum, elicited
a rebuke. "He was referring to a watermelon, which in and of itself doesn't suggest
a racial slur," said the mayor. "You can interpret it either way you want." Dyson
was, according to Giuliani, "a very straightforward, very direct, very honest person."
He was also extremely close to Liberal Party boss Ray Harding, having
largely financed Harding's recapture of the party in 1986.

"I apologize to those who took offense at it" was the best Dyson could do. A
multimillionaire who'd served as Power Authority chair under Mario Cuomo,
Dyson added: "I would use a different word. A bid and a baby carriage. A bid and
a fruit-pick one, a peach or a raspberry." The only explanation he offered for using
watermelon was that it was "an expression we happen to use in upstate New
York." Though he maintained a city apartment, Dyson actually lived in Millbrook,
a stylish town a couple hours to the north where his family owned a winery. He
helicoptered home most Fridays, the city's first carpetbagging deputy mayor.
Incredibly, he did not even bother to change his voting registration to the city
while deputy mayor.

The Times said Giuliani was "torn between an awareness of the importance of
good race relations" and a "mysterious urge" to stand by Dyson. In fact, he had
managed, halfway through his first year, to convey a tolerance for intolerance he
would never overcome. Yet no one around him seemed to recognize the lasting
impression these biting words were leaving.

Dyson also dropped a bomb at a City Council hearing in the spring of 1994,
casually mentioning that the city was going to use "home relief recipients at
Sanitation, Parks and Transportation to clean your districts better." Dyson's
timing could not have been worse since the mayor was then negotiating the
severance deal with the unions, who agreed, for the first time, to allow the city
to redeploy workers from agency to agency, filling holes left by departing employees.
The threatened use of welfare workers infuriated Stanley Hill, the
state's most powerful black labor leader and head of the largest municipal
union, who declared: "We've gone past slavery days. We don't operate that way
in New York City, we're a union town. Maybe he would like to clean the streets
for nothing."

Giuliani tried to retreat from Dyson on this one: "There is no plan. There is no
proposal. It's an idea. We will discuss it." That's also what he'd said when Dyson's
workfare vision first appeared in the infamous December memo.

Workfare would become a linchpin of Giuliani social policy up the road, but at
this moment, the mayor was so nervous about labor's opposition-the sanitation
union head called Dyson's proposal" a crazy idea" -that he backed off. "This is
precisely the area that creates questions about these programs," Giuliani said.

Instead of workfare and other radical alterations of city policy, the 1994 Rudy
was passive on public assistance policy, silently acquiescing to new record highs in
the city's caseload. Between July 1994 and January 1995, the average number of
recipients each month was 1,151,083, an increase of 47,933 over the same period
in Dinkins's final year.

It was also almost 100,000 more recipients than the number cited in Giuliani's
campaign position paper on economic recovery, issued to great fanfare in late
1993. That paper blamed soaring welfare rates on "a collapsing job market,"
adding that "many who struggled to maintain their independence and sense of
pride had to turn to welfare" during the recession of the early '90s. It was a supportive
depiction of recipients rarely heard in the Giuliani years to come.

But as late as February 1995, the administration was still projecting small increases
in the rolls for the coming months, leveling out only when "an increase in
available jobs" reached the bottom rung of the labor ladder. Giuliani's first executive
budget, released in May 1994 for the fiscal year that began July 1, actually
contained an increase of $33 million in city funds for public assistance-a 2.6 percent
hike. As antagonistic as the administration's relations with the welfare poor
would soon be-with chilling attempts to squeeze the rolls-it was hardly that
through 1994.

The administration's lobbying agenda in Washington that year also had a liberal
coloration on health care. In the 1994 Federal Program, its annual needs report to
Congress, the city weighed in on the comprehensive health care debate, calling for
"universal coverage" for the city's "1.3 million uninsured." Complete with a cover
letter from the mayor, the seventy-three-page program staunchly defended the
city's Medicaid and Medicare expenditures, rallying to the cause of everything
from teaching hospitals to nursing homes. It warned that Medicaid and Medicare
cuts "would ravage the city's hospitals." The city's 1994 budget added $190 million
for the city's share of Medicaid.

The homeless program announced in May abandoned the harsh rhetorical edge
of the campaign document. Its ninety-day limit was now an attempt to compel assessment
and appropriate placement of the addicted, mentally ill, alcoholic or
other chronic homeless singles, rather than a threat to throw them on the street.
It restored $52 million cut from the city's proposed capital plan for the development
of permanent supportive housing for singles and offered to convert one of
the worst large shelters into housing. There was no talk of clearing the streets of
the "menacing" homeless.

To be sure, advocates were still upset about the language of "mutual responsibility"
-the attempt to require the sheltered to accept individually drawn "living
plans" and to participate in programs addressing their particular needs. But the
worst that would happen to a homeless single who rejected the city's prescription
for him was that he might, theoretically, be charged rent for what Rudy called
"semiprivate accommodations"-a hollow bluff never really implemented. The
campaign promise to undo hard-won court decrees protecting the homeless was
temporarily over, the right to shelter was implicitly acknowledged and Rudy was
trying to implement a policy he described as "both compassionate and effective."

These approaches were hardly surprising in light of the social and political
views of much of the government he'd assembled. Joan Malin, for example, a softspoken
forty-three-year-old former Fulbright Scholar who'd worked in various
city social service agencies for nearly twenty years, was the new head of the
Department of Homeless Services. She had been deputy commissioner under
Dinkins, coordinating the city's efforts to get out of the business of directly running
shelters and contracting specialized shelter services out to a variety of nonprofits.
It was an initiative Rudy admired.

when Giuliani took office, she was running the agency while he searched for a
replacement. A major snowstorm hit and Rudy, in his emergency mode that would
suit him so well throughout his mayoralty, was rushing through round-the-clock
meetings assessing the city's response. Malin impressed him at a City Hall session
with a detailed accounting of how shelters were handling the frigid crowd.

Then she met alone with him at Gracie Mansion for an unusual job interview.
He did not ask her about her background, only about her policy views on moving
homeless singles out of general shelter beds and into treatment programs quickly,
as well as structuring a more reciprocal relationship with the client population.
Without the get-them-off-the-streets question ever coming up, she got the job.
Malin and the mayor got along so well they wrote the May homeless report together,
each with a pen in hand going over a DHS draft at City Hall, he in an armchair,
she on a couch. Giuliani was involved line by line in the plan. It was clear to
Malin that he had decided that homelessness would be one of a handful of issues
he believed he could have a measurable impact on in his first term.

The press coverage and advocates' reaction to the report infuriated him-with
everyone turning the carefully moderated language about accountability into a
threatening bark. But he continued to convey a sense of personal ownership about
the plan, and Malin immediately went to work on the least controversial aspects
of it, turning over a dozen shelters for singles to non profits, creating a menu of options
for placement.

Malin wasn't the only Dinkins holdover Rudy retained-so were his health and
mental health commissioners. Top former Koch aides included Paul Crotty, who'd
actually run Koch's campaign in 1989, and was named to the pivotal position of
corporation counsel, running the city's vast legal department. Crotty, a Democrat,
had clerked with Rudy for Lloyd MacMahon and attended his wedding to Regina
Peruggi, giving him Giuliani credentials as well. Another former Koch commissioner
Henry Stern, a Liberal who was back running Parks, earned his stripes with
Giuliani by turning the prominent civic organization he ran into an arm of the '93
campaign.

Giuliani's circle of top aides included two deputy mayors who were Democrats,
Dyson and Segarra, one who was a Liberal, Fran Reiter, and only one Republican,
Powers. His chief of staff, Mastro, was also a Democrat, as was his City Planning
Commission chair, Joe Rose. So was his patronage dispenser, appointments secretary
Tony Carbonetti, the twenty-five-year-old son of Lou Carbonetti Jr., who became
director of the Community Assistance Unit. Richard Schwartz, who had
been the key campaign issue staffer since 1992 and became Rudy's special policy
adviser, was also a Koch Democrat.

High-ranking Republican aides were counsel Denny Young and labor commissioner
Randy Levine, a Justice Department friend with ties to the state party. Budget
director Abe Lachman commuted from his Albany home, where he'd long been a top
finance aide to the Senate GOP majority. Bill Diamond, the general services commissioner,
and Joe Lhota at finance, were Republicans at key agencies, where contractual
and tax assessment decisions worth millions were made. Fred Cerullo, a
Republican city councilman from beloved Staten Island, got the highly visible consumer
affairs post. John Gross, his pal from the U.S. Attorney's office and Anderson
Kill, was the treasurer of his campaign committee and a political adviser.

Much of this key staff met-early in the administration-for a weekend retreat
at Gracie Mansion to hear Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, a new Democrat who'd
been reforming a stricken city, explain how it's done. The Big Three outside the
government-Donna, Harding and Garth-spoke frequently with one voice, and
only Donna was a Republican, having dumped her Democratic registration shortly
before marrying Rudy. Garth has been a registered independent since 1966, when
Lindsay first took office.

It certainly appeared to be a mixed enough team to include diverse opinions,
even if it did not include people of diverse origins. Yet an anonymous and annoyed
commissioner told Newsday: "Don't worry, the city is being run by Rudy, Peter
[Powers], Randy [Mastro] and Denny [Young]. They're getting to every issue one
by one." Everyone of the four horsemen but Powers had been a prosecutor, and all
were white males who'd lived within blocks of each other on the East Side of
Manhattan, suggesting a monolithic core concealed beneath a variegated veneer.
Whether it was one, four or a larger decision-making combine who were getting
to the issues, they did seem to be getting to them one-by-one. But with everything
about city policy so new to this inexperienced core team, even Rudy, at the outset,
was willing to listen.

The biggest decision of all, however, was a political, not a policy, one. Yet Rudy's
gubernatorial endorsement in 1994 would wind up shaping the mayor's policy
agenda for the rest of his first term.

***

Mario Cuomo has a way with words, no doubt. But when he was governor,
his favorite mode of political communication was the unspoken "understanding."
The master orator was also a master at weaving wordless webs of intrigue,
conniving alliances out of a mesh of humor, convenience and mutual
comfort. He may never have had an explicit deal with Rudy Giuliani. But they had
an "understanding" that began in 1993, when a Democratic governor helped defeat
a Democratic mayor, and culminated in 1994, when a Republican mayor jolted
the state with a Democratic gubernatorial endorsement.

An actual endorsement was more than" old baggy eyes" expected. He liked his
quids to come in the same form as his quos. He never endorsed Rudy Giuliani in
1993. In fact he endorsed David Dinkins, making each punch he threw Dinkins's
way all the more telling. He was after a nominally neutral Rudy, whose running
commentary on the 1994 race was an only slightly subliminal ad for him. A rousing
endorsement might be better, but that was too much to ask. This "understanding"
was channeled through the mediums of Garth and Harding, who had
themselves struggled through a decade and a half of intense and shifting relationships
with Albany's man of many moods.

The seduction of Rudy Giuliani started with Staten Island secession, Crown
Heights, homelessness tutoring by Andrew Cuomo and the Badillo candidacy. When
Rudy became mayor and proposed a 1 percent dip in the city's hotel tax, Cuomo
pushed a phasing out of the state's 5 percent version of the same tax. The combined
reduction preceded a tourism boom, and though Cuomo was first out of the starting
gate on it, he let Giuliani pose as the man whose policies were spurring the surge.

After the Democratic majority in the Assembly vowed to block Rudy's proposal
to fingerprint welfare recipients, Cuomo approved it administratively. Both
Cuomos-Mario and son Andrew, the HUD undersecretary-helped out on the
homeless, with state officials acquiescing to the new Giuliani homeless plan
though the Times had predicted combat, while Andrew brought an unexpected $73
million in extra housing aid for the homeless to a City Hall meeting with Rudy.
The governor also amended his executive budget to offer the city $130 million in
Medicaid assistance in response to a public Giuliani complaint-something the
Times noted Cuomo "never did" for Dinkins.

Governor Cuomo even went to City Hall to announce the Times Square deal
with the Disney Corporation, letting Giuliani take center stage for a turnaround
deal that had actually been arranged by Cuomo's and David Dinkins's staffs. At a
personal level, the governor routinely took Giuliani's calls whenever they came,
whereas he usually had an aide contact a Dinkins or Koch deputy to see what the
call was about before getting on the phone with Giuliani's predecessors.

But most importantly, the governor encouraged a state authority, the Municipal
Assistance Corporation, to provide the instant $200 million to finance the severance
program that salvaged the first Giuliani budget. Asked in Albany in March if
he might back Cuomo, Giuliani said: "Nothing is out of the question. Everything
is open for discussion." The MAC funding-indispensable to the closing of a
record-setting deficit that Rudy had inherited-was approved by the corporation's
reluctant nine-member board, most of which was appointed by Cuomo, shortly
before the May GOP state convention.

Rudy was Cuomo's covert ally at that convention, quietly working to get 25
percent of the delegates to vote for Herb London, the 1990 Conservative Party
candidate for governor who was positioning himself to challenge George Pataki in
an upcoming Republican primary. Pataki, then a little-known state senator handpicked
by Al D' Amato to run against Cuomo, was engaged in an all-out war to
block the 25 percent and avoid a primary with London. Yet the officially neutral
Giuliani got much of the Queens delegation to vote for London during the nailbiting,
three-hour roll-call vote.

Peter Powers called delegates the weekend before the convention, looking for
London votes though the anti-abortion and pro-gun professor was to the right of
pro-choice Pataki. London had little chance of defeating Cuomo, who'd routed him
in 1990, and the attempts to get him on the ballot by Giuliani and Senate
Republican leader Ralph Marino were widely seen as indirectly benefiting Cuomo.
London narrowly missed the qualifying threshold, thwarted by Pataki's top backer
and Rudy's longtime nemesis, D' Amato.

On July 1, 1994, Matilda Cuomo was Donna Hanover's guest on her Food
Network show. When Matilda finished describing her recipe for lamb shanks and
Mario's penchant for apple pie and cinnamon toast, she and Donna had a good talk
about child care, adoption policies and the good old governor. Reese Schonfeld,
Donna's boss at the network, later singled out that" exclusive" as the highlight of
Hanover's six-year stint on the show.

The seduction of Donna had actually started in early 1994 when Matilda visited
Gracie Mansion for two hours, chatting, as Hanover put it, "about how we, as First
Ladies, can work together." Donna eagerly enlisted in the Garth/Harding team,
pushing for a Cuomo endorsement early on and telling Republican friends of the
mayor that Pataki had "flipflopped on abortion." Rudy would later note in a preelection
speech that Donna told him she intended to vote for Cuomo long before
he made up his own mind.

"A large part of it," Giuliani said, "had to do with the Governor's very strong
record, 100 percent record, supporting women's rights, the rights of children and
the things that are necessary for women and children in our city and state."
Donna became an enthusiastic Cuomo campaigner, returning with Matilda to upstate
Utica, where Donna had launched her broadcasting career, and, the next day,
touring the mostly Italian Belmont section of the Bronx together. While no one,
including Donna, knew it at the time, the Cuomo endorsement turned out to be
her last hurrah. A key adviser in 1989 and 1993, she would never again play so influential
a role in a crucial career decision.

In early September, at a press conference endorsing London for comptroller and
another Republican for attorney general, Giuliani was asked if he would also soon
be endorsing Pataki. "Most likely that is what I will do," he said, predicting he'd
probably do it by the end of the month. A couple of weeks later, Cuomo went public
with his pressure: "The mayor's in a bind," he said in a press conference at City
Hall Park. "He has his own personal political problem, and he has the welfare of
the city. If he wants to help this city, then it would be very good for him to help
me." Cuomo noted that "the mayor himself has said over and over" that the governor
has been a friend to the city, adding that Pataki wasn't.

Cuomo says now-and Giuliani's public comments since confirm it-that he
never asked for an endorsement, just a wily wink. "I said to the Liberal Party," he
recalls, referring to Harding, "that the best position for Giuliani is to say 'I know
the governor has been good to us. I know Pataki says he'll be good to us. I believe
I should not choose between them. I will give the public the five major issues important
to the city. I will ask the public to consider the position of both on the following.'
I told the Liberal Party I would be satisfied with that, I wouldn't expect
anything more." What makes the "pass" Cuomo insists he gave Giuliani plausible
is that it was his own favorite trick-he did it with D' Amato, GOP comptroller
Ned Regan and the Republican Senate leadership that played ball with him.

On the Republican side of this tug-of-war, Randy Levine and John Gross, two of
Rudy's closest friends, were pulling hard for Pataki. Gross appeared three times on
Giuliani's October private schedules, far more than usual. Randy Levine's fax machine
at the Office of Collective Bargaining was flooded for weeks with communiques
to and from state GOP boss Bill Powers.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:20 am

Part 2 of 2

But Rudy's Republican advisers were up against a stiff financial wind. In
October, barely three months into the new fiscal year, the budget Rudy had pasted
together in May was coming apart. An $800 million deficit loomed-a result of
falling tax receipts, skyrocketing police and fire overtime and overly optimistic
economic forecasts. Rudy had to go back to MAC for a second round of funding to
finance another severance package, again designed to induce thousands of city
workers to quit. Just as in May, the only alternative to a state-financed severance
deal was mass layoffs, a disaster that had not occurred since the nea; bankruptcy
of the city in 1975. The Cuomo board agreed to a $230 million financing.

Ironically, Levine was negotiating a corresponding redeployment deal with the
unions-which also included health care givebacks-when he learned of Rudy's
endorsement decision. The night before, he and budget director Abe Lachman had
cornered the mayor at Gracie Mansion after a Sunday budget session. Levine left
thinking they'd talked him out of backing Cuomo, at least for the moment. But
unbeknownst to Levine, Rudy had talked with Garth five times that day, as he
wove through a schedule that took him to Mass in Queens with a GOP congressional
candidate, and included a stop at the honors convocation for Marymount
Manhattan College, whose president was Regina Peruggi. On the eve of his most
liberal political decision, he coincidentally touched base with his own liberal roots.

Levine got the word that Monday while at District Council 37, the largest municipal
union. He was teary-eyed, upset that his friend had made a decision that
might forever tarnish his Republican credentials. The union leaders erupted in
cheers. Giuliani had already scheduled a 5:20 P.M. press conference for later that
day, ostensibly to announce the budget deal, but instead, before a live television
audience, he crossed the Rubicon.

With a deer-in-the-headlights glaze, a somber Giuliani read from a prepared
text, his bowed head presenting a thinning comb-over to the phalanx of cameras.
Gone was his usual defiant certitude; he was drenched in sweat on a cool late
October evening. He could not flash his practiced toothy grin, the tension locked
his lips in a straight yet quivering line. He said Pataki was the personification of
the status quo, running a campaign" out of a political consultant's playbook." He
praised Cuomo as "his own man," assailing Pataki as "guided, scripted and directed
by others."

He revealed he'd decided to vote for Cuomo two weeks earlier because the governor
was better for the city. "But I weighed the option of remaining neutral and
not expressing an opinion on the race," he said, echoing the advice Cuomo would
later say he gave Harding. Specifying that he'd "talked to my wife," he said he'd
"finally decided over the weekend."

Bill Clinton was pictured on CNN raising his arms in celebration. He called
Giuliani from Air Force One and thanked him. Harding reached Cuomo on his car
phone shortly before the announcement to tell him it was coming. Cuomo listened
on the radio, parked outside a Fifth Avenue synagogue, and reveled. It was a
"surprise" gift, he insists, more than he sought. A Giuliani aide recalls seeing the
governor walk into City Hall one night in the middle of this period-so late it was
dark and quiet-and watching Rudy and Cuomo "hug like schoolboys."

Giuliani began campaigning for Cuomo with and without him. They did an appearance
on the Brooklyn waterfront together, boosting development projects
there. They went to the Liberal Party's annual dinner, a $500-a-seat celebration of
all that Harding had wrought. The boss sat beaming between the two on the
Sheraton dais, and Giuliani saluted Cuomo as "a man of conscience." They went to
Long Island together, where polls indicated Giuliani was popular. But Giuliani's
decision to do a Saturday swing through five upstate cities predictably
boomeranged. Republicans had already been saying that the endorsement "plays
into our hands upstate," where anti-New York City feelings abound.

So Rudy met protesters at every airport, often chanting "let's make a deal"-a
suggestion that would soon become the theme of a massive Pataki television blitz.
The ad charged that Cuomo "cut a deal with the mayor of New York to send our
tax dollars down to New York City to bail them out of their budget problems in
exchange for political support." Cuomo says now: "I spoke to Garth on the phone.
I said this is not a good thing for him to do. I said Rudy would be seen as the
mayor of New York. They would think I was going to give all the money to him."
Denying the apocryphal story that he charged up to Garth's office and screamed
about it, Cuomo said: "It was better for both of us that we weren't in the same
room together. I don't know what his motive was."

Rudy was riding so high after the endorsement-which was depicted as having
momentarily pushed Cuomo ahead of Pataki for the first time-that his upstate
tour was clearly designed to position him as kingmaker. He also began trying to
build an anti-Pataki Republican alliance, effectively recruiting the predisposed
London and going out to Nassau County to try to woo Tom Gulotta, the county
executive.

This strategy, too, boomeranged when Bernadette Castro of convertible-couch
fame, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, said Giuliani had invited her for a
Sunday schmooze on a Gracie Mansion couch, where he asked her to abandon
Pataki and endorse Cuomo. "I have to take George out," Castro said Rudy told her.
Giuliani said he wanted Pataki defeated, according to Castro, "because he feels that
if George is elected, he [the mayor] will be destroyed," ostensibly by a
Pataki/D' Amato cabal. The maneuvering with Castro and the alliance with
London-who issued a stinging statement demanding that Pataki "lead or get out
of the way"-cheapened the Giuliani endorsement.

Originally presented as a matter of principle, it quickly took on the appearance
of a power grab. Giuliani started predicting a "realignment" within the GOP after
the election that would obviously revolve around him: "I don't by any means intend
to play the only role. I don't think anyone person should control a political
party. I think that's part of the mistake that was made here," he said, taunting
D'Amato.

The Times concluded that a Cuomo win would make Giuliani" one of the most
popular Republican officials in the state with no clear party rival for the gubernatorial
nomination." It did not add the possibility of a third phase to the
Giuliani/Cuomo "understanding"-in 1998, the presumably departing, four-term,
governor would at least wink, and possibly nod, in a familiar direction.

Finally, on the Saturday before the election, Giuliani volunteered for surrogate
duty to lead the last-minute negative assault on the suddenly rebounding Pataki,
hosting an extraordinary press conference at City Hall. His fate was, by then, so
joined with Cuomo's that he behaved as if he was fighting for his own political
survival.

He appeared with the city's most liberal elected Democrat, Mark Green, the former
Naderite who had been Dinkins's consumer affairs commissioner. Crushed by
D' Amato in the 1986 election, Green's formal complaint about a legion of alleged
D' Amato transgressions had prompted a damaging formal Senate investigation of
the senator. Now the city's Public Advocate (and, according to the City Charter,
next in line of mayoral succession), Green brought evidence of a HUD deal between
Pataki and D' Amato to the press conference, waving several documents obtained
from the records of the Westchester town of Peeksville, where Pataki had
been mayor.

Rudy let himself go. All the pent-up memories of his 1988 and 1989 wars with
D' Amato-as well as the resentment he still felt about his forced endorsement of
D' Amato in 1992-rose to the prickly surface. The glib Green would prove a verbal
popgunner when compared to the artillery Giuliani was ready to fire. Pataki's
election, he said, would turn the state into "a government of D' Amato, for
D'Amato and by D'Amato." If the D'Amato/Pataki "crew ever get control," he
charged, "ethics will be trashed." No one at the press conference pointed out that
in September 1993, when Rudy was running for mayor with D' Amato's support
and the senator threw a Sheraton fundraiser in anticipation of a possible race
against Cuomo himself, Rudy sat on the dais in support.

Asked about Rudy's harsh attack on D' Amato, Cuomo retreated: "He has information
I don't have. He's very close to these people. He was out in a flak jacket
with D'Amato."

Ironically, Giuliani had "information" about Cuomo, too, dating back to his U.S.
Attorney days. A confidential FBI memo dated April 24, 1986 reported an "unsubstantiated"
tip a FBI special agent had "received" from Giuliani himself. The U.S.
Attorney had personally informed the agent that "a company called Comstock
Electric made a $25,000 campaign contribution to Mario Cuomo and, several days
later, was awarded a large contract" at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

The agent, who was then investigating bribery allegations at the convention
center, wrote that Giuliani indicated: "Comstock allegedly got the contract
through a minority front company called Luis Electric. After an unidentified gen-
eral foreman learned of the alleged payoff, he was killed." Giuliani gave the agent
the name of an individual "who may know about this incident or may have been
involved."

In fact, a Comstock general foreman working at the Javits Center was found in
a company van shot in the head in 1985. Comstock and Luis had $52 million in
Javits contracts, and Luis's owner was killed execution-style after the Giuliani
memo. No criminal case was ever made based on Rudy's "information."

Bob Grant, the right-wing radio talk-show host who became a friend of
Giuliani's while Rudy was u.s. Attorney and who said he "would have swum the
Hudson to learn something negative about Cuomo," contends that Rudy helped
him get dirt on the governor. "Once I heard from an inmate at the federal pen at
Fishkill who claimed to have some juicy information about Cuomo, and I asked
Rudy if he could get me in to see the guy. He made the phone calls and got me inside,
though it turned out to be a wild goose chase."

There were even tales about how Rudy's office had tried to flip a Cuomo bodyguard
when he was busted in the Southern District on gun-running charges. The
guard was questioned about any "information" he might have on the governor, according
to the Cuomo camp.

Obviously these tidbits couldn't compete with what Rudy knew about
D' Amato, but they indicated that Rudy had his own suspicions about Saint Mario.
He swallowed them. He also chucked the memories of George Pataki paying
homage in 1992 at a Giuliani fundraiser, brought there by Robert Costello, another
old friend of Rudy's from the Southern District days. Giuliani even disregarded
any sense of obligation to state Gap boss Powers, who raised over $1
million for the Victory 93 effort that helped elect Rudy.

The denunciations and threats from his own party ranged from D' Amato, who
said Rudy "didn't give a damn about the city or state," to Molinari, who "guaranteed"
a Gap primary challenge against Giuliani in 1997. "The only thing that
makes sense is that he becomes a Democrat," said Molinari. What particularly
galled Republicans was Rudy's attack on Pataki for having a "very, very strong
right-wing voting record" and being "pushed by the Conservative Party"-
though Giuliani himself was backing London, who fit that description far better.

Pataki won by four points, buoyed by the largest turnout of upstate outrage in
a state election ever. In a post-election appearance on Don Imus, D' Amato charged
that Giuliani had "betrayed a trust" and lied about his reasons for endorsing
Cuomo, saying he "got caught with his pants down," a phrase with a personal
family history for Rudy that D' Amato could not have known. Pataki wrote an autobiography
in 1998, saying that Giuliani's endorsement was"a knife in the back"
that left him "stunned," "speechless," and feeling "as if the wind had been knocked
out of me, after a sucker punch."

Rudy did not just endorse, "it was an all-out trashing of our effort," Pataki concluded,
carefully choosing Rudy's words. The new governor described the endorsement
as "too great an opportunity for the mayor to pass up," adding that
Rudy would be "to New York State what Michael Jordan had become to the
Chicago Bulls" if Cuomo had won. Pataki did not mention what those who knew
him and Rudy well agreed was a related, primary, motive-Giuliani feared that a
Republican governor would dwarf him.

When the Pataki autobiography was published in the middle of his re-election
campaign, all the key passages about Rudy that had appeared in the galleys were
deleted. Another detente had been arranged with D' Amato, who quietly backed
Rudy's re-election in 1997. The next year, Giuliani endorsed both the governor
and D' Amato, even doing a television commercial for Pataki. But the enmity remained
both mutual and transparent, with dozens of internecine wars over development
and other policy issues, ranging from a Manhattan stadium for the
Yankees to the naming of the West Side Highway after Joe DiMaggio.

***

In the days after Cuomo's loss, Rudy was at another high-stakes political crossroads.
Cuomo had won 72 percent of the city's vote, so if all Rudy had in mind
was being mayor of New York, his endorsement of the loser was still a winning
choice for him. But Giuliani saw himself as larger than that. Pataki's win was part
of a national GOP sweep, from statehouses across the country to both houses of
Congress for the first time in half a century. An ascendant Reagan right had
pushed a young Rudy to reregister in 1980. Koch's loss in the 1989 mayoral election
had shoved him rightward again, as had two runs against Dinkins. Now Newt
Gingrich and George Pataki were doing it once more, propelling him in the direction
of another personal sea change. He floundered for weeks, uncertain about his
own philosophical definition.

The Sunday after the election, he went to a Baptist church in Bedford-
Stuyvesant where black parishioners greeted him with unusual warmth. He talked
for twenty minutes, expressing no "regret" about his Cuomo endorsement. "Let's
try to forge new alliances," he said. "He wants to be heard in the black community
and to be understood," said the minister's brother. Rudy seemed, for just a moment,
as comfortable in Bed-Stuy as he usually was in Staten Island. He laughed
and hugged and kidded.

Two days earlier, he sat in the Museum Room at Gracie Mansion with Richard
Cohen, the Washington Post's syndicated columnist. They talked for two hoursthe
mayor sitting with the phone in his left hand awaiting a return call from
Pataki. He told Cohen about his upcoming visit to the church. They talked about
race and Republicans so much Cohen used him in a column the next week as a
model of conciliation. Giuliani's approval rating among blacks, he told Cohen, was
"somewhere in the 30 percent to 40 percent range, maybe even higher."

"He has been able to mold a multiracial coalition," wrote Cohen, "that should,
in the name of a better America, be the goal of the Republican party. Whatever his
reasons for endorsing a Democrat, Giuliani has something important to tell his
party. Too bad it doesn't call."

Giuliani faced a re-election campaign that would start in two short years. The
crime rate had just begun its descent and he did not know if it would continue and
re-elect him on its own. He had choices to make. If he enthused too vocally about
the Gingrich and Pataki gestalt, he'd wind up too far to the right to win in New
York City. If he did not perceptibly attach himself to some of it, however, he would
appear awkwardly out of step with the party and the times. He might even get the
Republican primary Molinari threatened. He could tumble off this highwire act in
either direction, depending on how firmly he planted one foot after another.

His now unambiguous abortion position was an accepted minority view within
the GOP. Before the 1997 election, he would also stake out stronger liberal positions
on two issues with powerful electoral constituencies in New York Citygay
and immigrant rights. If he was to do all that without alienating the party, he
had to come aboard on its core economic issues, each of which had a racial underside.

A New York mayor who cut welfare and expanded workfare could bond with
the new Washington and Albany gang. A New York mayor who echoed the national
and state party's insistence that less was more-a stop-sign open palm instead
of a gimme one-might be quite useful. A tough-love and law-and-order
mayor who tamed yet angered the tribe in the race capital of America would be
just the symbol the party wanted to whet the appetite of the emerging majority of
white voters that had just gone GOP in the midterm congressional election.

He could not be the coalition mayor Cohen thought he discovered and fit the
niche in the new Gingrich galaxy that beckoned. The national future he still envisioned
for himself required a makeover. The Contract for America timetable and
the resolve of the new governor to act quickly gave him little time to adjust-he
would have to react to their initiatives by early 1995. A Lindsay reprise, such as
the one Cohen celebrated, would only mean he'd have to leave his party up the
road, just as Lindsay had. The center had shifted, especially the one within his own
party, and he would either shift with it or risk irrelevance.

On January 18, he went to Yale for the Chubb Fellow address and laid out his
version of a new politics. He said cities" deserve some of the blame" for the way
they're perceived around the country. "We go to Washington almost as urban panhandlers,
asking for more money and more money and more money." Cities have
to "stand on their own more," he said, "which we are willing to do." In a March 31
speech at the National Press Club in Washington, he said: "The political revolution
in Washington has caused concern over the prospect of reduced federal aid for
cities. In fact, this correction in course can work in favor of the new urban agenda.
America's cities can deal with the prospect of less aid, provided they are given the
latitude to devise local solutions to local problems."

Giuliani said he "applauded" the block grants that would set annual lump-sum
limits on federal social service contributions to each state and eliminate individually
triggered entitlement spending on welfare and Medicaid. At the National
Press Club, he urged passage of a bill that" strips welfare of its entitlement status,
embraces reciprocity and workfare, and gives states and cities more flexibility to
decide how to impose time limits on welfare benefits."

Even a Democratic congressman who would ultimately endorse him in 1997,
Floyd Flake, said in the budget battles of 1995 that Rudy's determination "not to
offend Gingrich makes for an offense to the people he is representing in this city."
Ron Anderson, the top appropriations committee staffer to Syracuse's Republican
congressman Jim Walsh, said Giuliani "supported certain parts" of Gingrich budget
bills, adding that he "certainly wouldn't say the mayor opposes the cuts; he's
more silent on it."

The mayor's financial plan, issued in mid-February, boasted that it differed from
prior plans, including Giuliani's 1994 edition, because "the City is not seeking additional
State or Federal aid to help solve its problems." It is "instead," said the
plan, identifying savings "by reducing entitlement spending." Giuliani's lobbying
office in Washington only objected, albeit mildly, to cuts in one of the five, severely
slashed, education programs. It had opposed similar reductions virtually
across the board in 1994. The same switch occurred on cuts in emergency food assistance.
While Giuliani made an exception and actually sought an "increase in
funding" for AIDS, he made no objection to dramatic GOP-backed slashes in foster
care, food stamps, college assistance and transit.

He explained his support for capital gains and other Gingrich tax cuts that benefited
the rich by actually arguing that the city had "a disproportionate number of
people in the upper income categories." Reductions in their federal tax burden
would, he argued, "leave more money in our local economy," suggesting that he
believed that lower taxes for Donald Trump could compensate for less aid to Bed-
Stuy.

Giuliani cited his mayoral mentor Rendell from Philadelphia in the Yale speech,
as well as Chicago's Richard Daley Jr., both of whom had championed reform policies
similar to his. But Rendell was simultaneously denouncing the Gingrich revolution
as a "horror show" and "a freight train bearing down on us." Daley said
the block-grant approach, eliminating "the crucial safety net aspects of these entitlement
programs," had "the potential to divide our city."

Rudy was in fact separating himself so dramatically from the rest of urban
America that Norman Rice, the Seattle mayor who headed the U.S. Conference of
Mayors, said he couldn't get Giuliani or a surrogate to return a phone call. When
the conference did a survey of 145 mayors across the country about the Gingrich
plan, 96 percent said they believed it would have "negative effects on their cities
and residents." Giuliani did not respond. "I've tried to call him, I've tried to engage
him, but I haven't been successful. I can't understand why any city would be
silent."

Finally, in late October 1995, after ten months of pliant acquiescence, the mayor
said the Medicaid and Medicare cuts would be a "catastrophe" for the city. His
complaint followed Pataki's by days. But he went beyond Pataki. He spent a half
hour with Bill Clinton at the Waldorf-Astoria and stunned reporters, and even his
own budget staff, when he announced that he'd urged the president to veto the
Republican budget. His studied objection was to the suddenness of the cuts-saying
they should be "phased in" under a fairer formula. Giuliani nonetheless declined
a November invitation to join 20,000 protesters at a rally organized by the
Greater New York Hospital Association to cheer the veto and oppose the cuts.
Hillary Clinton came to New York to join it.

The suddenness of his swing-as late as October 15 the Times was calling him
"unusually muted" on the budget issues-suggested that he was moved mostly
by the hostility to the cuts reflected in New York polls and the powerful pull of the
health care lobby. Rudy had tried to ride it out, but caught in a dilemma that pitted
his national repositioning against his reelection imperatives, he had to oppose
at least one crucial area of cuts.

His reaction to Pataki's first budget was an even more jolting reversal than his
national passivity. Pataki vindicated everything Rudy had said when he endorsed
Cuomo, proposing a budget that cut $800 million in welfare and Medicaid payments
to the city. Brushing aside appeals from the Democratic majority in the
Assembly to join them in resisting the cuts, Giuliani proposed a financial plan that
sought $400 million more.

For the first time, a New York City mayor decided that a reduction in state entitlement
aid was a fiscal positive. It meant, from Rudy's perspective, that the city
could slice its own entitlement expenses since it was required to match state funding.
Rudy was literally discovering that less was more-less aid from the state for
the city's poor allowed the city to slash its own expenditures by similar amounts.
So a state budget that set time limits on benefits for adults without dependents on
home relief, or squeezed the amount of support payments, was suddenly seen by
City Hall as a budget-balancing boon.

The governor and mayor started talking about New York as if it were still the
welfare magnet it had been decades earlier. But the maximum monthly grant
made it the seventh most generous state, and if you took inflation into account, it
went to the middle of the pack. The Citizens Budget Commission-the business
group Rudy had depended on in 1993-ealculated that total welfare spending had
declined 17 percent in the prior two decades. Families on welfare were living way
below the poverty level.

When Rudy endorsed Cuomo, he said he was doing it because Cuomo, unlike
Pataki, understood "our quest for equity from Albany to recover some of the
deficit in the balance of payments," pointing out that the city pays much more in
state taxes than it gets back in state benefits. By aggressively pushing for cuts in
the chief source of state and federal funding flowing to the city-namely, social
service subsidies-Giuliani was deepening both of the deficits he had, until recently,
railed against.

In the same Cuomo endorsement and on the stump, Giuliani had attacked the
centerpiece of the Pataki campaign-a gouging promised tax cut. Suddenly, he was
backing it.

His budget was a color-coded stacked deck. Police, fire and sanitation took 1 percent
cuts while Medicaid, public assistance, foster care, day care and child protective
services plummeted 28 percent. City University, the blackest and brownest
major public university system in America, faced a Giuliani-proposed reduction of
17 percent. The Health & Hospitals Corporation, whose users and employees were
overwhelmingly minority, was slated to take a $100 million hit. Youth Services
was almost cut by half, while the Department of Aging took no cut at all. The
mayor tried to end the forty-seven-year history of city-subsidized transit passes
for 500,000 school kids, while preserving the reduced-fare subsidy for senior citizens.
For the second straight year, the Board of Education cuts were the most dev-
astating, even targeting the sports programs Candidate Giuliani used to talk about
expanding.

Though tuition at community colleges was twice the national average, Giuliani
backed a hike, saying it would be a good thing if it encouraged more students to
work, thereby "preparing them for the rest of their lives." His own, mostly jobless,
days at Manhattan College were apparently a faint memory, and he did not seem
to know that a third of CUNY students already worked full-time and another
third part-time. While college students would pay more, co-op and condo owners
would pay less in property taxes, as would developers and corporate tenants who
moved into a new tax-free zone downtown-all part of a second round of Giuliani
tax cuts.

In the midst of the debate over this budget, Rudy was reported to have told executives
at WNYC, the city-owned radio station, that it would be "a good thing"
for the city if the poor left. "That's not an unspoken part of our strategy," he was
quoted as saying, "that is our strategy." The mayor challenged the quote, insisting
that the departure of the poor might be the "natural consequence" of welfare,
Medicaid and other social service cuts, but not "the intention of our policy." He
readily acknowledged that he'd said such "mobility would be a good thing."

A top budget official said that if the cuts, combined with the high cost of living,
"leads people" to conclude that "they'd be better off getting welfare in other places
where the cost of living is lower, fine." The Post cited one of Rudy's" chief policy
architects" as saying that "the poor will eventually figure out that it's a lot easier
to be homeless where it's warm" and boasting that making the city inhospitable to
the poor was the best way "to clean it up."

The anomaly of a mayor talking openly about scattering to the wind the very
people he was elected to serve set off no spark in a desensitized time. While a single
commissioner in the bankrupt days of the Beame administration ignited a
fire storm with similar "planned shrinkage" rhetoric-and lost his job--triage was
now a one-day story. The first Republican/Liberal mayor since Lindsay was deconstructing
the support systems his predecessor had erected and no one with
power was howling. The lady in the harbor with the torch was shifting with the
current, lighting the way out of town now, and no one was insisting that the city's
"huddled masses" weren't cargo.

Rudy was becoming an explicit war-on-the-poor mayor, unrecognizable to
those who recalled the softer moments of his five-year campaign, or of his first
year in office. As tough as he liked to pose, he was bending to powerful exigencies.
Had Cuomo won, he would have been a starkly different mayor. Had the
Democrats won fourteen more House seats, the city might well have seen another
Rudy. If Cuomo were governor, he and Giuliani would probably have been aggressive
bipartisan allies in a public war against the Gingrich budget. That would
have driven Rudy even further away from his party. He was just that malleable.

Irving Howe, the historian, wrote once that Ed Koch came to the realization
during the Reagan years that "to remain a liberal would mean to pit himself,
maybe hopelessly, against the powers of Washington," and so the onetime
Mississippi civil rights marcher accommodated himself to the times. He eventually
came "to enjoy the violation he was staging of his earlier self." Koch was to
Reaganism, concluded Howe, what La Guardia "had been to Roosevelt's New
Deal-the municipal broker for the dominant social force in the country." While
Howe was writing about Koch before he completed his final-term reprievetransforming
blighted neighborhoods with the largest city housing program in
history-he did somehow anticipate the New Giuliani.

To secure his own reelection, he waited until the last minute in 1996 to halfheartedly
endorse Bob Dole, who would set a modern record with a dismal 17 percent
of the New York City vote. Rudy succeeded in doing it-and placating his
Republican enemies D' Amato and Pataki-while appearing so tepid he angered
few Democratic voters. The truth is that as much as he liked to describe himself as
above partisan politics, Mario Cuomo was the only major Democrat in a contested
race he ever endorsed, compared with dozens of GOP candidates in senatorial, congressional,
councilmanic and other elections. More important than endorsements,
though, were policies, and he resolved to make himself the embodiment, as Howe
would put it, of Republican urban policy.

From 1995 on, his mayoralty pivoted around a carefully crafted national portrait:
Rudy was the take-charge, no-nuance, antithesis of New York's lofty liberals.
His favorite numerical sound bite after the murder rate-recited, particularly after
his 1997 reelection, in studios and hotel ballrooms across America-was the
ever increasing tally of the departed dependent, the hundreds of thousands separated
from the welfare rolls. Neither the media nor the mayor had any idea where
these half million were now, or how they were living.

The mayor claimed, without citing a shred of evidence, that welfare's discards
were somehow miraculously independent. In truth, they were New York's "disappeared"
-a lost city no television camera could find. They stood in the longest
lines at soup kitchens since the 1920s, swept the streets in the orange-vested
workfare uniforms of the nation's last conscripted army, crowded shelters and outof-
the-way sidewalks in growing numbers, left town or hid in its invisible crevices.

If Giuliani was Howe's new urban broker, his role was that of welfare pioneer, a
born-again, big-city, preacher of the gospel of work. Roosevelt wanted to put a
chicken in every pot; Giuliani was determined to put a broom in every city-subsidized
hand. Taking a page from Gingrich, he was out to slay a dinosaur system of
dependence with a regimen of forced labor, creating overnight the largest sweepfor-
benefits workforce in modern American history. He also immediately moved
to shut down poor people's access to subsistence with a new battalion of city
sleuths, sworn to the sacred duty of penetrating the pretense of poverty and disqualifying
anyone who would fake it for benefits. Gingrich could only talk about
welfare reform; Clinton could only bow to the power of its constituency. Rudy
could do it.

He could do it in the largest laboratory in the country, with 1,150,000 recipients
awaiting re-education, a head count of opportunity that could make him the hero
of every smug, long-distance critic of welfare sloth.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:20 am

Part 1 of 2

Sixteen: Brutal Blindside: No Benefits, No Doubts

THE CHANGE IN RUDY GIULIANI CAUGHT HOMELESS COMMISSIONER
Joan Malin by surprise. As central as homeless issues had been in 1994,
when she and the mayor worked so closely together on a groundbreaking plan,
they were off the table by 1995. A political mood swing had occurred. Rudy's
social engineering focus had shifted. As the year wore on, he was less and less
interested in the complexities of the policies she was charged with implementing.
By his count, he had room on his plate for only one social initiative that
would leave a mark he could cite in a thirty-second commercial. He now knew
it would be welfare.

When the squeeze on public assistance recipients began-and adults without
dependents were the first forced off the rolls-Malin went to City Hall
with the predictable bad news: Homeless numbers were going up. Though the
word came down from the mayor not to talk about the hike in homelessness
and the connection to welfare policy, Malin was pushed by Steve DiBrienza,
the chair of the City Council's general welfare committee, and conceded it at a
public hearing. No one wrote the story anyway.

Between 1994 and 1996-when Malin finally stepped down in August-her
agency's spending plummeted 22 percent, while its average daily census of
families and singles grew from 23,337 to 24,609. As the Independent Budget
Office put it years later: "DHS [Department of Homeless Services] spending
reached its nadir in 1996 at the same time as shelter census peaked."

Massive cuts in the capital budget hit DHS, killing millions for homeless
housing. Average annual funding for housing construction dropped 34 percent
over the Giuliani years, and he spent only one in twenty capital dollars
on housing, compared to one in ten during the Dinkins years. While almost
two thousand new apartments for the homeless would be completed in
Giuliani and Malin's initial fiscal year, the total slid to a paltry 264 units in
the final budget of his first term. In Dinkins's last full fiscal year (1993), 3,225
units were produced.

In addition to the shelter and housing construction cuts, Rudy did nothing to
expand the drug treatment programs central to his homeless plan, abandoning any
pretense of achieving the treatment-on-demand promise of his two campaigns.
Instead he relied on the state to finance the only significant battery of programs
and, without any Giuliani protest about Pataki cuts, the number of residential beds
dropped over Rudy's first four years. Only 27 percent of the needed slots for outpatient
services were funded as of March 1999, a far cry from treatment on demand.
Admissions to outpatient programs were virtually unchanged from 1993
(10,117) to 1997 (10,624), while inpatient admissions fell 50 percent. So much for
the memory of Rudy's cousin, Joan D' Avanzo, whose death at an early age was an
argument for treatment.

The only policy attention Giuliani paid to treatment modalities was a visceral
condemnation of methadone, a chemical substitute for heroin embraced by the
National Institute of Health and used by 36,000 addicts in New York City. At a
1998 press conference, he suddenly vowed to end all methadone programs in the
city, though 92 percent of the funding for them was state and federal. Eliminating
the availability of this three-decades-old stabilizing agent would, of course, have
been the opposite of the option plan for the addicted homeless he had once proposed.

Assailing Clinton's drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, as "a disaster," he suggested
that those who supported methadone were part of "the politically correct
crowd that favor a lot of different kinds of drug experimentation." His antimethadone
rant led to such an outcry from everyone who knew anything about
drug treatment that he had to back off, a rare retreat.

The mayor who also vowed as a candidate that it wouldn't require a court order
to force him to care for the homeless got hit with one after another. His administration
was fined $5 million for forcing hundreds of homeless families awaiting
placement to sleep nightly in the offices of the Emergency Assistance Unit. In an
end run around court orders on the EAU, the city put families-for the first time
in years-in the old barracks-style shelters Rudy once deplored.

In another lawsuit, Bob Hayes returned to the judge who had issued the right
to shelter decision and won a January 1996 order forcing the city to open a new
twenty-four-hour shelter with 200 beds. His affidavit contended that approximately
170 men were being bused late each night to a Queens temporary facility
for a few hours sleep, awakened at 6 A.M., and bused back to 42nd Street, where
they were put back on the street to start the cycle again.

The mayor who had once envisioned hundreds of small shelters all over the city
instead sharply increased the number of homeless singles bused out of town to
upstate Camp La Guardia, a dilapidated former prison frequently filled near its
l,OOO-bed capacity. With shelters in the city housing up to 850 beds, he got Pataki
to dump a state requirement limiting them to 200 beds. He twice vetoed a City
Council bill sponsored by DiBrienza to impose 200-person limits on new shelters,
and when the council moved to override his veto, he served eviction papers on the
operators of a program for the mentally ill who were using a city-owned facility
in DiBrienza's district. He claimed, in a transparent threat, that he needed the facility
for shelter space if the councilman persisted on the bed-limit bill.

Malin also faced two new homeless strategies that came out of City Hall in
early 1996: massive police sweeps and strict shelter eligibility standards. Lou
Anemone, the NYPD's chief of the department, announced at a high-level, latespring
meeting that the police "were going to empty the streets." Prior to that, under
both Dinkins and Giuliani, the police had worked with DHS outreach teams to
break up large encampments of the homeless, but now the watchword was expansive
sweeps of most of Manhattan. Rudy sat in on the meeting, saying little while
Tony Coles, a former partner at Anderson Kill who was now deputy counsel at
City Hall, described the offensive. A few weeks after this secret meeting and the
launch of the initiative, Malin announced her resignation.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir, who'd succeeded Bratton that April, put out
a ten-page "reference guide" to "quality of life enforcement options" in July. It
spelled out a dozen infractions useful against the homeless. The DHS monthly
outreach report for July revealed that "the NYPD has begun a quality of life initiative
in Manhattan from Battery Park to HOth Street, river to river." An NYPD
memo described the purpose of this "major initiative" to be to "displace those who
engage in quality-of-life offenses" and "permanently correct those conditions
which give rise" to those offenses. Police would be enforcing violations from carrying
an open container of alcohol to "blocking sidewalks" to panhandling.

"In anticipation of the initiative, DHS Outreach staff started to inform clients
on the eastside of midtown," said the report. "Many clients without ID have been
taken to the police station. In some cases, the Sanitation Department or Parks
Department has taken their remaining postal carts and possessions after they have
been arrested." From then on, for months, the outreach reports referred to continuous
coordination with NYPD sweep activity until location after location was described
as cleared of all homeless.

At the same time, the administration revealed an eligibility review procedure
for shelter applicants designed to reduce the mounting population. Rudy an-
nounced that the city was no longer giving families who arrived at the EAD "the
benefit of the doubt" (only cops got that). "when you go and investigate, you find
that a large percentage of people that were coming to that unit were not homeless,"
he said. "They were just seeking other accommodations."

Starting just as Malin departed in August, investigative teams grilled applicants-
as well as visited relatives and prior addresses-to determine if they had
any other shelter options, "even for a short period." In the first six months, 2,400
families were rejected. Eighty percent of the rejected families who filed for a fair
hearing to appeal DHS's initial determination either won the appeal, if represented
by Legal Aid, or forced DHS to change its mind. Only 365 families had been rejected
for services by DHS in Rudy's first fiscal year. In his fifth fiscal year, 14,041
family applications for emergency shelter were denied, sometimes the same families
again and again. The shelter census, of course, temporarily dropped.

The use of what advocates called "the criminal investigation model" on homeless
pretenders was actually a strategy borrowed from Rudy's already up-and-running
welfare plan, the policy priority that displaced homelessness on his personal hit parade.
While thousands of service jobs were cut at HRA, the city moved to hire 1,500
poverty inspectors, who began using finger-imaging, financial checks, home visits
and hard-boiled interrogation to discourage or reject applicants.

Rejection rates immediately doubled, soaring from 27 percent in Rudy's first,
rather benign, year to 57 percent in 1998. With the mayor suddenly promising to
end welfare by 2000, the pressure on welfare centers got so intense, a Bronx intake
facility set a record between December 1998 and April 1999, turning away 90 percent
of the 3,000 people who came seeking benefits. Just 7 percent got assistance,
compared with 61 percent the prior year.

While in 1994 only 14 percent of the caseload filed for fair hearings-which
mostly involve appeals of denials of assistance-45 percent were appealing by
1999. Clients won nearly 90 percent of the cases throughout the Giuliani years.

Ray Horton, the Citizens Budget Commission president who'd met with
Candidate Rudy to advise him on policy three times between elections, issued a report
in 1997 that found that "the vast majority" of people removed from the rolls
were actually "entitled to benefits and had not committed fraud." Some were removed
simply because they weren't home when an "eligibility specialist" paid an
unannounced visit, or because of "administrative errors." Without challenging a
fact, City Hall dismissed the report as " political, " though Horton had actually
served on Giuliani's budget transition team.

Besides eligibility screening, the other Giuliani mechanism for slashing the
rolls was that old John Dyson favorite, workfare. Given mandatory jobs in city
agencies like Sanitation, Transportation, Parks and HRA, recipients were "sanctioned"
for minor infractions, losing all or part of their grants. A home relief recipient
could see his case closed for missing as little as a single hour of work.

In 1997, for example, 69 percent of the adults without dependents in the work
program were "sanctioned off the rolls," according to the Times. The 1997 sanction
rate for all public assistance clients was an astonishing 59 percent, leading observers
in and out of government to conclude that a primary purpose of the program
was to squeeze people off the rolls, even while City Hall babbled on about
the value of work. Compelling the truly able to perform useful public service was
one thing, but using picayune work requirements to deny those new to work any
benefits at all was another.

While an average of 32,000 did work in the program at any given time over the
next four years, few were able to move on to real jobs. Giuliani blocked any tracking
of the departed, citing, strangely enough, their privacy rights, though the city
was in a unique position to do simple social security number matches and determine
a rate of employment. City Hall consciously chose not to do such matches,
because the mayor and his top aides convinced themselves that such checks would
miss thousands of ex-recipients who found off-the-books jobs that wouldn't show
up in social security records. The administration hid behind an almost mystical
confidence in the absorbing power of the underground cash economy, assuming,
though never publicly stating, that it supplied the subsistence income the city was
now denying to hundreds of thousands.

The best HRA could come up with was a study by phone of 126 recipients who
left the rolls. The study claimed that 54 percent found jobs. But this slim sample included
only those individuals with the same phone number as when they were on
welfare-a weakness the survey acknowledged may have biased the results by only
eliciting responses from the stable sample. No one took the in-house spot survey
seriously, and a critical review by the state comptroller undercut its validity.

More realistically, the Times reported that at one "Job Center" -the euphemism
Rudy invented for former welfare centers-3.5 percent of 1,000 clients
were placed in jobs. Five percent of the first 5,000 recipients at Job Centers found
employment. Since the city manual for Job Center workers described employment
as a "secondary goal," these numbers were hardly surprising. The "primary" goal
of the centers was diverting people from applying for public assistance, and they
were so discouraging, applications dropped dramatically.

When Jason DeParle of the Sunday Times Magazine asked Giuliani which fig-
ures were more important-job placements or diversions-the mayor picked "decreasing
the numbers of people dependent on the government." DeParle concluded
that the left "made the mistake of assuming that a check" was all the poor needed.
"Now the right is on the verge of the same error, confusing the loss of an entitlement
with a social elixir." Swept up in his "exuberance" over the "reforms" in one
of his talks with DeParle, Rudy gave this advice to the poor: "If you can't get a job,
start a small business. Start a little candy store. Start a little newspaper stand. Start
a lemonade stand."

With Giuliani proclaiming in speeches all over the country that his welfare
schemes were "by far the best thing we're doing for the city," the drive to deny
benefits reached irrational and illegal dimensions. City University students on
welfare were given twenty-hour workfare assignments that made college impossible-
and 62 percent of the 27,000 students trying to lift themselves up by their
bootstraps either left college or got off public assistance.

A Republican senator from Staten Island, John Marchi, was so upset about the
impact of the Giuliani philosophy that "welfare is not a scholarship program," he
steered a bill through the legislature requiring HRA to try to give students oncampus
workfare assignments. But the administration largely ignored it, losing
lawsuits, including one that involved nineteen-year-old high school students who
were given workfare assignments that prevented them from finishing school.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, a federal judge and George Pataki's
Department of Social Services all found that Rudy's Job Centers were improperly
denying people food stamps. The state social service commissioner wrote a letter
describing city practices as a "mess" in "flagrant disregard" of food stamp rules.
Giuliani got so personally involved, he spent a Sunday morning at City Hall pouring
over federal regulations, reversed his HRA commissioner's public promise to
change practices, and began charging that food stamps had sometimes been used
"to buy drugs."

A half million people, many of them children, lost the stamps that filled their
stomachs, and Rudy dismissed the arguments of the program's defenders as "emotional."
Ironically, food stamps don't cost the city a cent and were originally a
Republican idea, promoted by that left-wing ideologue Giuliani supported for
president in 1996, Bob Dole. Nonetheless, Rudy was standing at the New York
border, blocking hundreds of millions of federal dollars from entering the city and,
not incidentally, making it more difficult for citizens of his own city to eat.

The courts also ruled that the city was improperly denying Medicaid benefits to
deserving families, presumably on the theory that the poor should be able to pur-
chase their own health care. In fact, in 1999, a federal court found a pattern-affecting
all public assistance-of misleading applicants, pressuring them into withdrawing
applications, refusing to accept applications, wrongful denials and failing
to give recipients their appeal rights. The state's highest appeals court also concluded
that the city was systematically frustrating the rights of people with
HIV / AIDS to get assistance.

Giuliani even lobbied in Albany for a bill that would impose what's called "fullfamily
sanctions" on any recipient who failed to meet a workfare or other welfare
requirement. Had it passed, entire households, including children, could be denied
benefits. The worst the Giuliani administration could legally do, absent that
change, was impound the adult share of a family's payments.

The brutality of all this was papered over in quotable bromides. Rudy talked
again and again about Harold Giuliani and their mutual respect for work, invoking
his father's recognition of value in the most menial labor. He said he was trying
to erase a "perverted social philosophy" that robbed the poor of their
ambition. How dead-end servile labor, or the use of work rules to end benefits, restored
ambition was left to the imagination.

In fact, the "ennobling experience" he offered 5,000 Work Employment Program
workers-until the city lost a court case- included sending them into vacant lots to
remove feces, animal carcasses and every other form of diseased waste without uniforms,
gloves, face masks or boots, plus denying them access to toilets and drinking
water. Horror stories also hit the papers of WEP workers forced to work despite serious
medical conditions who dropped dead-one on the Coney Island boardwalk,
another on his way from cleaning a park on a blistering summer day.

A madness had settled in. With each successful month of declining rolls,
Giuliani drew nearer to his moment in history, when he could say, as he did at the
dawn of a millennium, that he had ended welfare. It was, of course, as false a claim
as it was fearful a goal. There were still, despite all the torment, 622,128 people on
public assistance on January 1, most of them children. Rudy asserted that all ablebodied
adult recipients were in workfare or some other "work-engagement" activity,
a boast no one believed. Even HRA conceded that 60,000 able adults weren't
actually working or in training, counseling or treatment programs. They were
counted as "engaged" when they got a referral letter.

If Rudy was just going to manufacture success at the end, why the painful push
to get there?

The number. Every time he made a national appearance, HRA would give him a
new number. The off-the-dole odometer was constantly flipping upward. He didn't
have to share this one with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the Time magazine
coverboy, or anyone else at the NYPD. It was his and only his. People gasped when
they heard that 550,000 were gone, dumped, deleted. They looked at him with awe.
And he got that half smile on his lips, a curl of self-congratulation. The scope of it
was a measure of his greatness, and the scandal of it was mired in obscure detail. He
thought he could ride it to Washington.

***

Lillian Barrios-Paoli lived through this nightmare at Rudy's side. She was the
Joan Malin of HRA.

Mexican-born, she came to New York to get a ph.D. in urban anthropology,
becoming a citizen in 1978. She shuttled between city and nonprofit worlds,
usually in social service arenas, serving as Koch's commissioner of the
Department of Employment. When Giuliani took office, she became personnel
commissioner, then head of Housing Preservation and Development. Most of
what she knew about housing came from the fact that she'd personally directed
the construction of three homes of her own-from scratch. She had also been a
member of the board of Marymount Manhattan College through 1994, recruited
by her old friend, Regina Peruggi, and she saw the mayor there at major
college events.

Her management skills, Latino origins and team-player qualities won City
Hall's trust and, in January 1997, she took over HRA. Rudy declared her "one of
the most exceptional administrators in city government." By the time of her appointment,
the eligibility review and workfare programs were in full swing. Her
role-in an election year-was to put a gentler, kinder face on policies that were
giving Rudy some heat.

Much of her history, however, had been in job training. She thought recipients
would benefit from a mix of work and education. She said so at a City Council
hearing in April. It was heresy.

Tony Coles, who oversaw HRA from City Hall as if it was his own agency, laid
the company line on her again and again. "He insisted that they only learn to
work by working," she recalls. "He was adamantly opposed to placing them anywhere
but WEP. All they need is an alarm clock was his position." A high-pitched,
wide-eyed tax lawyer, forty-one-year-old Coles described himself as "the smartest
person in City Hall," a billing that could have cost him his job if the mayor ever
heard it. Coles, a registered independent, replaced Richard Schwartz as special adviser
to the mayor at the same time Paoli took over HRA.

When Paoli told Coles in one of their daily conversations that some recipients
needed language training, he responded: "What in? Swahili?" Paoli realized he
"didn't know the caseload at all," that he had no idea that thousands of clients
couldn't get jobs because they had limited English skills. Russians, Latinos,
Asians-it was a city of a hundred tongues and Coles was deaf to it.

They had many other issues. "We had ten million arguments about tracking,"
she says. "I told him we could not have a reasonable program unless we knew outcomes.
He said it was intrusive." Coles also told her that if clients refused to go to
WEP, their children should be removed, a precursor of the Giuliani plan for homeless
families that would not appear for two years.

Poverty was, to Coles, "something you willed yourself out of," Paoli says.
"People chose to be poor. They had to get up and say they didn't want to be poor
anymore. They had to find a way." While only Coles made these arguments to her,
her best sense was that he reflected Rudy's view. There were "deserving poor" in
the Coles/Giuliani view-the elderly, the handicapped, children. But jobless adults
without physical disabilities were their own worst enemy, and their own responsibility.
Despite unemployment rates during the Giuliani years that far exceeded
the national average, hovering around 10 percent in 1997, Coles maintained that
anyone could get a job who really wanted one.

By December-with Rudy re-elected and in search of his next conquest-he refocused
on welfare. That's when he decided to make the end-it-by-2000 pledge.
That's when he started talking to Jason Turner, the workfare wizard of Wisconsin.
Paoli got a call shortly before Christmas from City Hall. She had previously been
told she would not be one of the new term administrative changes, that she was
safe. But at a weekend meeting, there was a shift in attitude.

"You would be better off leaving HRA," Paoli says she was told. "The administration
thinks you should leave because it would want you to do draconian things
that you wouldn't have the stomach to do." It was handled so quickly and clumsily
that they gave her a post as president of one of the public hospitals and announced
it without telling the current president. He heard it on his car radio on
his way to the hospital Christmas party.

As traumatic as the offensive begun in 1995 was, the war on the welfare poor had
a new general with a reclusive and rigid personal air. A onetime Reagan and Bush
administration junior official, Turner had already converted the Giuliani creed into
a three-word slogan-" everyone can work." He was so midwestern he told PBS
halfway through his first year in New York that "work sets you free" without realizing
it was the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz, the quote on the blackboard in the
U.S. Attorney's office used against Giuliani in the 1989 campaign.

A year after Paoli's departure, Rudy told the Times that she and her African-
American predecessor at HRA, Marva Hammonds, "did not have the same strong
philosophical commitment I have."

"My philosophy has been," he said, "first make the changes and have them
moving in a very, very strong way-then announce them. At that point, there isn't
terribly much that people that oppose it can do."

In the closed circle of an administration that had no real experience with
poverty and listened to virtually no minority voices, the blessing of ignorance is
certitude, and the surest consequence of certitude is decisive action. Who gets hurt
in the outer reaches of a centralized media city is an abstraction, a rumor, a bias,
an antiquated ideology. His welfare charts on the other hand-with multicolored
lines diving by hundreds of thousands-were the hard stuff of practical life, the
only snapshot the broader world would see. A mayor could freeze the frame, define
the visible city, invent his own legend.

***

Giuliani's put-down of Hammonds and Paoli was his way of making it clear that
he, with the help of Richard Schwartz and Tony Coles, ran welfare policy for
years from City Hall. But it was also a public belittling of two of his most significant
minority appointments. Turner, who was praised by Giuliani in the same article and
clearly did share the "same philosophical commitment," ended a string of three consecutive
minority HRA commissioners, going back to Koch's day.

The implicit message of Paoli's good-bye call was that City Hall wasn't sure it
could count on any minority to do what had to be done at HRA. In fact, the ten or
so top staffers Turner brought to City Council hearings seldom included any
blacks-an astonishing new face on an agency that had blacks in leadership positions
four decades ago.

The ethnic transformation at HRA was part of a pattern. All but one of the
seven black commissioners named at the start of the administration were replaced
by white or Hispanic ones within three years. Two of the four Latino agency heads
selected in 1994 were replaced by whites (and one agency was eliminated).

When Ninfa Segarra, a figurehead as deputy mayor for six years, was finally
given a sinecure at CUNY, Coles took her job. Rudy Washington, a black contractor
whose small company had leased space from the city's Brooklyn Navy Yard
Corporation and left owing thousands in back rent payments, was elevated in 1996
from Business Services Commissioner to deputy mayor. Active in Giuliani's campaign
against Dinkins, Washington was a marginal adviser at City Hall, but his
imposing new title was apparently seen as sufficient inclusiveness to camouflage
the void of blacks at the top of agencies.

The only agencies run by a succession of Latino commissioners were the
Housing Authority and Juvenile Justice, and the only one headed by an unbroken
series of black appointments was Business Services. The only one of these agencies
with a substantial budget is the Housing Authority, though it is almost entirely
federally and state funded. A black commissioner followed Paoli at HPD when she
moved to HRA, so it has been run by either a black or Latino in the Giuliani years,
as has Health & Hospitals, whose initial black president was replaced by a Latino.

The rest of the city's dozens of agencies-including police, fire, sanitation, planning,
finance, budget, parks, environmental protection, correction, law and general
services-have been run by white commissioners throughout the administration.
The transportation commissioner is now a former top police commander who is
black.

The workforce underneath these commissioners also changed color. The percent
of workers who are black in mayoral agencies-excluding HHC, where thousands
more blacks lost jobs-declined from 37.2 percent at the very end of the Dinkins
administration to 34.7 percent in 1999. This 2A-point drop was a dramatic reversal
of a steady growth in the share of city jobs that went to blacks, particularly
since the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. Under Rudy, the percent dipped five of six
years, ending a decades-old tradition of more and more blacks using city jobs as an
entryway to the middle class.

The change in the mayor's personal office was dramatic. The number of blacks
whose City Hall positions were classified as administrators and managers dropped
from thirty in 1993 to thirteen in 1999, falling from 17 percent to 10 percent. The
total for all blacks on the mayor's staff dropped from 211 to 110, and the proportion
of City Hall jobs held by blacks plummeted 28.5 percent.

With the explosion of hiring in the NYPD, the number of white administrators
and managers increased by thirty-one in the six Giuliani years, while blacks went
up by six, their percent of the brass actually dropping a fraction of a percent. Even
after the NYPD's merger with the transit and housing police, the percent of its total
workforce that is African American, including civilians, crawled up a mere 1.8
percent by 1999. Since transit and housing had a far higher percent of black employees
than the NYPD, this minuscule increase is the best indicator of just how
white the new NYPD hires were.

Wilbur Chapman-the highest-ranking black in the NYPD under Giuliani, who
is now transportation commissioner-told the twenty-four-hour cable news channel,
NY1, in 1999 that the department missed a golden opportunity to change its
racial profile early in the Giuliani era in 1995. Chapman had run the most successful
minority recruitment drive in the history of the city in 1993, while
Dinkins was mayor. Of the 37,926 applicants who passed the 1993 police exam, a
quarter were black and a quarter Hispanic. Yet the department decided to junk that
civil service list and ordered another exam, hiring thousands of new cops from a
new, whiter, pool.

The fire department-whose administrative ranks grew under Giuliani by 111
percent-had exactly one black manager more in 1999 than in 1993. There were
fifty-three more white administrators and managers named in the same period,
dropping the black share of top jobs almost in half, from 15.3 percent to 8 percent.
Similarly, there were 100 more white uniformed fire supervisors and forty-nine
more white firefighters, while the number of black supervisors fell by nine and the
number of black firefighters by forty-two. Remarkably, over Giuliani's first six
years, both the paltry 2.5 percent of fire supervisors and 4.4 percent of firefighters
who were black declined by 0.4 percent. As impossible as it might have seemed,
the 94.4 percent white supervisory ranks and 90.9 percent white firefighter ranks
of 1993 actually got marginally whiter by 1999.

Almost 6,000 fewer blacks were employed at HRA's Department of Social
Services. Part of this job loss was due to the 1996 creation of the Administration for
Children's Services, a new agency overseeing child protection, foster care and related
services that employed 4,901 blacks in 1997, almost all of them transferred from
HRA. But the percent of blacks left in the shrunken HRA still dipped two percent.

At the Department for the Aging-a political jewel servicing high-voting seniors
at 335 centers-the number of white administrators grew by 160 percent,
while the paltry number of blacks (only five) remain unchanged. The black share
of high-level jobs at Juvenile Justice plunged by 30 percent, at the Taxi &
Limousine Commission by 71.4 percent and at the Department of Mental Health
by 24.7 percent. The percentage of blacks in the total workforce of some agencies
also plunged-at Consumer Affairs by 11 percent and at Transportation by 26 percent
(this was partly due to the transfer of the Parking Violations Bureau).

The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which is charged
with monitoring the city's equal employment program, saw a 62.5 percent drop in
the percent of administrators and managers who were black and a 49.3 percent decline
in all agency staff. There were 568 fewer blacks in the agency than when
Giuliani took office (this is adjusted to account for the merger in 1996 of the personnel
and general services agencies into DCAS).

Latinos fared better than blacks in most of these agencies, and their portion of the
total workforce grew by 1.8 percent, almost as much as the black share dropped. The
only agencies that saw a substantial boost in the share of managerial jobs going to
blacks were Business Services and Housing Preservation and Development, the two
agencies led by blacks through almost all of the Giuliani years. Agencies headed by
Latinos also saw a hike in managerial hires that were Latino.

The appointment, managerial and workforce numbers were, as Rudy saw it, a
result of color-blind hiring on a merit-only basis. Not once in six years did he express
a whiff of public concern about an inclusive government. Instead he defied
a charter mandate that he consult with the Equal Employment Practices
Commission, a quasi-independent body whose members he and the City Council
appoint to monitor minority hiring. He was supposed to confer with the EEPC
about the development of an Affirmative Employment Plan, which the charter
requires the city to maintain at all times. Giuliani quickly discarded the Dinkins
plan and took nearly his entire first term to replace it with an operative one of his
own.

Then he refused to call it an affirmative plan, contrary to the precise wording of
the charter, and instead labeled it an Equal Opportunity Employment Plan. A collection
of level-playing-field platitudes, the Giuliani plan did not even require advertising
job vacancies in minority newspapers. The EEPC, chaired by Charlie
Hughes, an African-American labor leader who endorsed Giuliani in 1997, mildly
criticized the plan, urging a change of name and other revisions. It also said the delays
had "negatively impacted on the administration of equal employment opportunity
programs in city government." Rudy brushed these objections aside.

He had swung back and forth on the question of affirmative action as a candidate
for mayor, but he now pretended, as he accommodated himself to many
mainstream Republican ideas, that an aversion to racially conscious hiring was a
matter of ideology to him. He did continue, especially through the 1997 election,
to take minimal steps to maintain ties to the Latino community, partly through
high-level appointments. But blacks were outsiders almost by definition, regarded
as an overreaching special interest. It was as if Rudy believed that any concession
to black concerns-from affirmative action to homelessness to welfare-would be
viewed as a sign of weakness by his core constituencies and, conversely, any resistance
would be seen as strength.

All his life he'd occupied a milky universe-raised in blanched Nassau suburbs,
educated at insular Loughlin and Manhattan, shuttling twice between the colorless
cubicles of the Justice Department in Washington and the U.S. Attorney's office in
Manhattan, practicing law at three premier law firms where not just the shoes
were white.

As a kid, he'd rooted for the all-white Yankees while Jackie Robinson crossed the
color line just a couple of miles from his home. His father and uncle sold the family
bar when the neighborhood changed, and Harold spun his favorite oven story
about blacks in his garden conversations with Lina Merli. His first wife left a longtroubled
marriage to spend the next twelve years with a black man, who expressed
a racial fear of Giuliani. He never lived, like so many white New Yorkers, on a
block alive with human diversity-preferring Woodside in Queens, West End
Avenue and the homogeneous East 80s.

He quarantined Haitians. He exploited race to win the mayoralty. Even when he
ran for re-election in 1997-opposed by a liberal Jewish woman, Ruth
Messinger-he tried to make her Dinkins's candidate, repeatedly trying to tarnish
her by tying her to the former mayor. And again, in the putative 2000 Senate race,
he tried to use race against Hillary Clinton-at first, suggesting she was a dupe of
the Dinkins crowd, then depicting her as a stand-in for Al Sharpton. Perhaps the
ugliest stunt in any of his campaigns was his appearance in 1997 on the steps of
City Hall with state prison guards from Attica-the site of the bloodiest massacre
of mostly black prisoners in American history. Already up by 18 points in the polls
over Messinger, he used a party thrown in her house decades earlier on behalf of
a released Attica inmate to try to paint her into a radical and racial corner.

He refused for the first five years of his mayoralty to meet with Carl McCall, the
state comptroller and the highest-ranking black official in the state. He stonewalled
Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields as well, the highest-ranking black in
city government, and refused to talk to the Council of Black Elected Officials, a
statewide coalition of legislators that represents 2.5 million people. Charlie Hughes,
the EEPC chair who did a television commercial for Rudy in 1997 and was his most
important black backer, now says that he never had a single private moment with
the mayor, dealing almost exclusively through emissaries.

Rudy's virtual elimination of the city's once half-billion-dollar subsidy of the
public hospital system has curtailed services and slashed jobs in an agency that
primarily serves blacks and Latinos. He browbeat the City University into adopting
a plan to end remediation programs, which John Morning, a black Pataki appointee
on CUNY's board, said would "significantly impact on minority access" to
college. Since the Giuliani plan continued remediation for students born in non-
English-speaking countries, blacks would be affected the worst, argued Morning.
(Morning has also been appointed to another public board by Giuliani.)

Giuliani said nothing during an on-air appearance with old friend Bob Grant
when the talk-show host with a talent for race-baiting referred to Harlem congressman
Charlie Rangel as a "pygmy." Asked by the Washington Post to defend
his record on minorities, he said: "They're alive, how about we start with that?"
(He later explained this comment as a reference to plunging homicide rates.) With
a $10 million kitty for his 1997 re-election campaign, he did not spend a cent on
black media, though he certainly targeted other ethnic communities.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:21 am

Part 2 of 2

Joseph Dolman, a Newsday columnist, asked La Guardia's biographer Thomas
Kessner, to compare the two mayors. Kessner told him La Guardia wasn't like
Giuliani. "He did not have a permanent disagreement with a whole part of the
city," Kessner said, referring to the divide that separated City Hall from New
York's millions of African Americans.

City Councilman Lloyd Henry, a soft-spoken black minister who remained neutral
in the 1997 election, recalls that during one long conversation with Giuliani
on a boat ride after an Ellis Island event and briefer exchanges at public events,
Rudy appeared "uncomfortable" and "bashful."

"I don't know if that's how he relates to people of his own pigmentation," said
the two-term, Caribbean-American councilman. ''I'm certainly not saying he's
prejudiced. But he's not compassionate enough about our problems. I think he's
fearful of being too identified with the black community. I don't know where that
fear comes from."

Even black Democrats who endorsed his re-election have been sharply critical of
him since-State Senator Ada Smith, for example, says his "relationship with the
black community is nonexistent." Arthur Bramwell, the only black Republican to
lead a county organization in the state, hosted fundraisers for Candidate Rudy in
his Brooklyn home in 1989. He now says: "I don't think he has any empathy for
blacks. He was brought up as a prosecutor. On that side of the fence, you have
everything going your way. This tends to give you an arrogance toward people in
general and toward certain people in particular. He thinks most criminals are
blacks. He doesn't know when to show respect." Bramwell said neither Giuliani
nor his aides" ever discussed any policy issues," adding that" they just set a firm
policy and expect everyone to follow."

Ed Koch weathered a dozen years of tortured relations with blacks. David
Dinkins was tormented by the Crown Heights riot, gutting his credibility with
Orthodox Jews in particular. John Lindsay was seen as the ally of anti-Semitic
blacks during a racially charged teachers strike in the late 1960s. Race politics is an
inescapable part of the landscape of New York.

But Giuliani's predecessors tried, often without success and sometimes halfheartedly,
to build bridges to communities they'd alienated. Rudy has just seethed.
He has welcomed opportunities to flex muscle, but never to reveal heart. He's mistaken
wounded anger for enmity, and let it become enmity. Maybe his own political
antennae told him reaching out would only hurt him. Whatever the motive,
the result is a fault line of mistrust. It's erupted whenever the cops who've made
Rudy a national hero got too aggressive.

***

Amadou Diallo was a West African immigrant shot at forty-one times in the
vestibule of his Bronx home by four cops, hit nineteen times. Reaching into
his pocket for his wallet was his fatal mistake.

Abner Louima was a Haitian sodomized with a stick in a precinct bathroom. His
intestines and bladder were punctured and he was dumped in a holding cell while
hemorrhaging blood. Cops mistook him for someone who had tried to punch one
of them outside a nightclub.

Anthony Baez was a Puerto Rican choked to death by a cop so brutal his commander
had earlier tried to get him off the street. Baez's mistake was an errant
football. These three cases would dominate the news though there were many
other shocking cases of police abuse in the Giuliani era, as there had been in New
York long before he was elected. The difference was how the mayor handled them.

Even Rudy's harshest critics praised his initial response to the Louima case. As
soon as he learned of it, he went to the hospital and promised the battered thirtythree-
year-old security guard to "make examples" of the officers who committed
these "reprehensible crimes." One cop was immediately arrested by Internal
Affairs. The mayor said charges against the cops "should result in the severest of
penalties, including substantial terms of imprisonment." Every supervisor at the
precinct, including the commander, was dumped.

But the brutal attack occurred in August 1997, on the eve of Rudy's re-election.
He'd seen how the August 1989 racial murder of Yusef Hawkins, which did not involve
police, had cost Ed Koch the mayoralty. So Rudy declared that the Louima crisis
was "a real opportunity, one that only gets presented to you for a period of time,
to permanently change the way in which the police department relates to the communities
in New York City." He named a twenty-eight-member task force to examine
systemic problems he'd never before acknowledged. He even appointed
"enemies" like New York Civil Liberties head Norman Siegel, a classmate of his at
NYU law school who had been blasting his police policies. Their report wasn't due
until after the election.

Five months into his new term, Rudy turned what Siegel called his "best 48
hours as mayor" into a hoax. He held a press conference to ridicule the one-inchthick
report of his own task force. Its recommendations "made very little sense,"
he said. The only one he'd bother to adopt was the suggestion that the title of the
NYPD's office of community affairs be switched to community relations. "That's
a good change," he wisecracked. The "real opportunity" he cited in '97 had become
a joke in '98.

Giuliani's response to the Baez case was just as political.

The twenty-nine-year-old was kicking a football around with his brothers in
front of the family home on a dead-end street on December 22, 1994. The ball accidentally
hit two parked patrol cars. Nine brutality charges had been leveled
against one of the cops on the scene, Frank Livoti. While only one of the complaints
had resulted in a finding against him, Livoti had been placed in the department's
special monitoring program for a while. His commander had asked that he
be assigned to a desk job or transferred out of the precinct, the only time he'd ever
made such a request.

But Rudy's favorite cop, Chief of Department Lou Anemone, the NYPD's highest-
ranking uniformed officer, put in writing that Livoti's transfer was not "practical"
because of his "PBA status." Livoti was a PBA delegate close to Phil Caruso,
the union boss who had helped elect Giuliani.

Several of the complaints against Livoti involved chokeholds, a banned arresting
technique. That's what he put on Baez. He knelt on Baez's back while handcuffing
him as Baez lay face-down on the ground. He ignored warnings from Baez's father
that the kid was a chronic asthmatic, keeping him in a prone position for ten minutes,
then dragging him into a cop car without attempting to resuscitate him. Baez
died an hour later in a hospital.

The mayor declined to comment. Six weeks after Baez's death, Anemone publicly
described Livoti as having "a distinguished career of service to the community,
doing the kind of work that the citizenry of the city and certainly this
country are looking for." Livoti, who was also facing an assault indictment in another
chokehold case, opted for a non-jury trial. Caruso made several appearances
at the trial, hugging and kissing his protege. Judge Gerald Sheindlin, now the star
of the TV show The People's Court, acquitted Livoti in October 1996. Rudy then
uttered his first words on the case, calling Sheindlin's ruling "a careful, wellthought-
out, legally reasoned opinion."

But SDNY U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White opened her own civil rights investigation
of the Baez incident. Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, the highest
ranking Latino in city politics and a Democratic candidate for mayor, began making
a major issue out of Livoti's protected status on the NYPD. So on February 21,
1997, Howard Safir dismissed the cop from the force. During a debate with his
Democrat opponent in October, Giuliani declared that the Livoti verdict was" a
failure of the criminal justice system."

Livoti was eventually convicted twice-in state court on the other chokehold
case in 1997 and in federal court on Baez in 1998. After Livoti was found guilty
of choking a teenager, Steven Resto, for running a red light in a go-cart before
the Baez incident, Baez's mother told reporters: "It would have made a big difference
if someone had listened to Resto in the beginning. My son would be
alive right now."

The federal judge who sentenced Livoti to seven and a half years said much the
same thing. She condemned the NYPD for "letting him remain on the streets
knowing a tragedy would occur." The judge said the department "should have
known he was dangerous" and that" senior police officials rejected repeated demands
to transfer him."

The city simultaneously settled a civil suit filed by the Baez family for $3 million,
the largest settlement in a cop case ever. Almost two years after the state
trial-when the state judge called the testimony of the cops with Livoti that night
"a nest of perjury"-Safir announced that he'd relieved three of them of their
guns and placed them on modified assignment. All had supported Livoti's bogus
story, and Safir had taken no action against them, even though they had testified
that a mystery black man had appeared at the scene, choked Baez and then disappeared.
It wasn't until a federal prosecutor called them" absolute liars" in his summation
at the second trial that Safir took action.

By the time Diallo was killed in February 1999, Rudy was an all-but-declared candidate
for the U.S. Senate. With Louima, he made election-year adjustments in his
benefit-of-the-doubt mantra to placate white liberals; with Baez, to placate
Hispanics. His response to Diallo was dictated by what would sell to his new
statewide constituency-white and conservative, much of it upstate and suburban
Republican. With a strong majority of the city's white cops living in the suburbs, the
Senate race, had Rudy stayed in it, would have been the first time they could have
voted for him.

Unarmed and never arrested-just like Baez and Louima-Diallo could not be
muddied up, as Giuliani and Safir routinely did with others shot by cops. That did
not stop the NYPD from trying-they ransacked his Bronx apartment looking for
any discrediting information. The city exploded in weeks of demonstrations, featuring
the arrests outside police headquarters of Dinkins, Rangel and even black
leaders who'd endorsed Giuliani, like Floyd Flake, the ex-congressman and minister.
The mayor said the shooting was a mere "tragedy," the demonstrations were
"silly" and the demonstrators were "the worst elements of society."

After he met with a delegation of African diplomats and leaders, one member of
the group told the press that Rudy had expressed sorrow over this "regrettable
mistake." His press secretary rushed to correct this interpretation, telling reporters
that Rudy had never called it a mistake, only a tragedy. None of the officers
was suspended, as two Louima cops had been. Though none answered the
NYPD's or DA's questions about the circumstances of the shooting, Rudy left the
unmistakable impression that he believed they'd behaved properly. He also did
chart presentations at City Hall and national television interviews claiming that
the city's police were "the most restrained" in America.

Within fourteen hours of the shooting, the mayor left town for Pennsylvania to
regale a banquet room of Republicans with the story of how he'd tamed New York.
Safir flew to Hollywood for the Oscars. Had he not been caught on camera gladhanding
stars, the commissioner would have got away with missing a City Council
hearing on the Diallo shooting that Monday, having phoned in a "schedule conflict"
excuse. Giuliani defended Safir's safari, saying: "Frankly, there is no crisis or
emergency going on and things have been proceeding quite normally."

When Safir returned, he decided it was perfect timing to announce, at a press
conference with the mayor, that the department was switching to hollow-point
bullets. These deadlier, new bullets corkscrew into a target and stay there, forcing
him or her to the ground quickly. The full-metal-jacket bullets used up to then
passed through a body without causing suspects to drop.

Police sources told the Post that Safir agreed to change bullets in the aftermath
of the Diallo incident. They said the theory was that the cops continued firing at
Diallo-two emptied their 16-shot Glocks-because he remained standing, effectively
pinned upward by the fusillade. That turned out to be precisely the defense
the cops used at their trial a year later-a strange coincidence since the department
said the cops had refused to answer questions. The bullet switch prompted
another outcry, and Rudy insisted it had been in the works for months.

Under sustained protest and editorial and City Council pressure, the mayor announced
a $15 million recruitment drive ostensibly to attract more minority cops.
The eventual television advertising buy, however, was more a salute to the NYPD
than a genuine recruitment effort-especially since next to no time was bought on
black media. The number of blacks in the next police class grew, but only modestly.
It fell a far cry short of the success of Dinkins's recruitment effort, which had produced
the minority-heavy list the Giuliani team spiked.

He and Safir also made cosmetic changes in the unit that the four cops who
killed Diallo belonged to-the Street Crime Unit (SCU). This elite undercover operation
was the model of aggression in the Giuliani age-making the lion's share
of gun arrests and boasting that they "owned the night" in the mostly minority
neighborhoods where they roamed. Only 3 percent of its members were black,
though Safir did add minority cops to it after Diallo.

Safir had tripled the size of the unit to 400 cops as soon as he took office, a move
that so rankled seD commander Richard Savage he quit, concerned about too little
training and too little supervision. In 1997 and 1998, the seD "tossed"-
meaning frisked--45,000 people, yet made only 9,500 arrests. Its arrest figures
actually dropped while its frisk reports soared. A Brooklyn grand jury declined to
indict two SeD cops in 1997 after they fired twenty-four times at an unarmed
black man sitting in his car, killing him. But the grand jury did issue a muted,
thoughtful, thirty-five-page critique of seD operations. To any caring police and
city administration, the report would have sounded an alarm.

Issued by a Democratic district attorney, Joe Hynes, who had all but endorsed
Giuliani, the report said there were "no formal criteria or testing" for joining the
unit but that the prime characteristic of recruits was" arrest activity, a willingness
to be proactive." It faulted the absence of specialized training. It said the cops on
the street "had too much discretion," a finding that anticipated Diallo, since the
cops involved, when they finally testified at trial, could only justify approaching
Diallo because he was "peering" side to side as he stood on his stoop.

Disturbed that one of the cops in the Brooklyn incident had emptied his Glock, the
grand jury found that "the goals of the NYPD with respect to controlling the number
of shots fired had not been achieved." Giuliani denounced Hynes for "engaging"
in "a political exercise." The grand jury's nine recommendations were junked.

When an appellate court moved the Diallo case to Albany, Rudy praised the decision,
agreeing that the cops could not get a fair trial in the city he governed and seizing
another opportunity to blast the protesters for poisoning the air. When the
upstate jury, which included four blacks, acquitted the officers on all counts, he announced
his own vindication. Yet polls said most white New Yorkers rejected the notion
that all the cops, including the two who emptied their Glocks, did nothing wrong.

Rudy went out of his way to undercut any possible federal charges, saying there
was no basis to second-guess the jury, though that was exactly what he'd urged
when the only defendant charged with the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum was acquitted.
He also unleashed his patented attack on those he said were consumed
with anti-cop bias, equating it, for the umpteenth time, with racism. The difference
between hating a people for who they are, and denouncing individual cops for
what they do, was apparently too subtle a thought for the ever-enlarging forehead
at City Hall.

In addition to the big three cases, Rudy twice assailed the parents of sixteen-
year-old unarmed black boys shot by the cops, even while their sons lay in hospital
beds in critical condition. Michael Jones was fired at seventeen times and hit six
times while riding his bike in his Brooklyn neighborhood with a large toy gun.
Giuliani said: "Adult supervision would have prevented the gun. It would have
also prevented him from being out at 2:30 in the morning for whatever purpose,
and I don't think the purpose for which he was out was a salutary one." There was
no evidence that Jones, who survived, was involved in any criminal activity.

Three months after Diallo, the mayor said much the same about the parents of
sixteen-year-old Dante Johnson, who was shot while running away from an SCU
cop at 12:30 in the morning. Giuliani and Safir mused about why Johnson's family
allowed him to roam the street after midnight and Giuliani concluded: "There
appear to be facts that would explain and justify what happened here, including
the actions of these men-what are they-16-year-olds at 12:30 in the morning?"
The cop grabbed Johnson through the window of his patrol car and shot him once
in the abdomen. The chase began, the cops claimed, because either Johnson or a
friend appeared to them to possibly be carrying a gun. Neither was.

As ugly as Rudy's responses to individual cases were, his policies were worse. A
city commission recommended the creation of a permanent independent monitor
to oversee police misconduct and the City Council passed a bill to do it twice.
Rudy's vetoes were overridden by the council, but he bottled the issue up in endless
court cases. The former prosecutor who made his "Prince of the City" reputation
by supposedly targeting bad cops declared: "A much better way to improve
the police department is to get it to investigate itself."

He also tried to gut the only oversight vehicle already in law: the Civilian
Complaint Review Board, which is charged with probing allegations against cops
filed by citizens. Created by Dinkins, the CCRB spurred the police riot Rudy
joined in 1992. Blacks and Latinos file three quarters of its complaints.
Nonetheless, the proportion of CCRB staff that is black declined by 49.9 percent
between 1995 and 1999.

Though complaints jumped 56 percent in Rudy's first four years, he proposed
cuts at the board in each of his first four budgets, totaling $2.4 million at a $5 million
agency. The council restored most of the board's funding. The mayor also derided
it for years, though he appointed successive former SDNY friends of his to
chair it.

After the Louima incident, Giuliani finally boosted its budget and toned down
his blasts. Complaints leveled off in recent years as well, though they are still far
higher than under Dinkins, when there was both more crime and more felony arrests.
In 1998, an NBC Dateline piece exposed how precincts repeatedly refused to
take CCRB complaints, or to give complainants forms to fill out. The data showed
much of the initial decline in complaints was at precincts, while those filed at the
CCRB continued to go up. Lawsuits filed against the department also climbed 52
percent from 1993 to 1999.

Most disturbing about Giuliani's CCRB record was how Safir handled the paltry
5 percent of complaints that are substantiated by the agency. According to a
New York Civil Liberties Union report, Safir "nullified" two thirds of the 635
CCRB cases he reviewed between January 1996 and July 1998, refusing to take
any action against the cops. But when a probe of the NYPD announced by u.s.
Attorney Zachary Carter zeroed in on the handling of these cases in 1998, Safir
imposed discipline in 58 percent of the ones he reviewed between July and
December of 1998.

Rudy, predictably, branded the federal probe political. He resisted efforts by
Public Advocate Mark Green to review Safir's handling of substantiated complaints,
losing a two-year court battle. He or Safir dismissed criticisms from
Amnesty International, an unofficial House Judiciary subcommittee and Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer.

The 178-page Spitzer report analyzed 175,000 stop-and-frisk reports and found
that, after adjusting for different crime rates among racial groups, Latinos were
stopped 39 percent more often than whites and blacks 23 percent more often. In
addition, 15 percent of black and Latino "tosses" did not meet the legal definition
of "reasonable suspicion"; another 25 percent of the reports did not contain
enough information to determine the constitutionality of the searches.

Not even the experience of his only black City Hall adviser, Deputy Mayor
Rudy Washington, affected the stonewall. Washington told Giuliani in the midst
of the Diallo protests that he, too, had been pulled over by a cop in 1998, while riding
with his wife in his chauffeur-driven city limo. When Washington asked why
they'd been stopped, the cop said: "Shut up. I don't need a reason to stop you."
When Washington persisted, the officer responded: "I ask the questions. Not you."
A high-ranking police official happened by, recognized Washington and asked
what was going on. The cop explained that Washington's car "looked very suspicious."
Washington told Giuliani the confrontation was so traumatic, his wife began
to cry.

Washington told the story-and others as well-in a roomful of Giuliani aides
and someone leaked it to the Times. A retired black police lieutenant who was a
close friend of Washington's, Woodrow Gist, told reporters that Washington told
him the story when it happened and that the deputy mayor had deliberately not
taken down the officer's name and badge number. "He just didn't want to get into
it with the Police Department, knowing how the mayor feels about the department,"
Gist explained. "He is a member of the administration. So he could not
raise it in the context of race."

Washington still didn't "want to get into it" when the story broke. He refused
to discuss the incident with the press. The most Giuliani would say was that it was
a "confidential" but "useful" bit of advice, and that he hoped police would treat
blacks "respectfully." He added that he also wanted others who "try to create an
exaggerated, false impression of the police" to deal with cops "in a more respectful
way."

Giuliani's only defense in the face of the evidence of police abuse was the numbers
he trotted out repeatedly, documenting a decline in fatal police shootings. He
preferred to talk about 1999, when only eleven people were killed in cop shootings,
the lowest since 1985. He ignored the 36 percent increase in cop killings in his first
three years, a reversal of the 44 percent drop in Dinkins's final three years. The
rise from twenty-two killings in 1993 to twenty-nine in 1994, twenty-six in 1995
and thirty in 1996 was particularly inexplicable since every other form of gun violence
was plummeting.

for two decades prior to Rudy's taking office, the number of people killed by the
NYPD "mirrored fairly closely the number of civilians killing each other," according
to John Jay College criminologist Andrew Karmon. That correlation came
completely apart in the first three Giuliani years. It was also out of synch in 1997
and 1998, when the rate of police shootings finally dropped-to twenty and nineteen,
only 13 percent less than in Dinkins's last year. Meanwhile, the murder rate
had dropped 67.4 percent during the same five-year period. And since Rudy was
only talking about police fatal shootings-excluding deaths like chokehold victim
Baez-the more relevant comparison would have been civilian handgun homicide,
which fell 81 percent. Even the 50 percent drop in fatal police shootings between
1993 and 1999 (from twenty-two to eleven) doesn't keep pace with either decline.

Similarly, there was a 52 percent drop in shots fired by perpetrators at cops between
1993 and 1997, but only a 12 percent decline in shots fired by cops. Shots
fired by cops exceeded the number in Dinkins's final year right up to 1997, even
though the "perps" were carrying and using guns less and less often every year. It
was as if the only guy firing away at the O.K. Corral was Wyatt Earp.

***

In March 2000, Patrick Dorismond, a twenty-six-year-old Haitian who, like
Louima, worked as a security guard, was killed by an undercover narcotics de-
tective. Giuliani's inflammatory exploitation of the case would disconcert his
strongest allies, even those on the editorial page of the New York Post.

Dorismond was standing outside a midtown bar with a friend looking for a cab
to go home to Brooklyn, where he lived with his girlfriend and their one-year-old
daughter. According to the police, a single cop approached Dorismond and asked:
"Hey, do you have some Krill?" Angered by the suggestion that he was a crack
dealer; Dorismond replied: "What are you doing asking me for that shit?" He and
the undercover then got into an exchange of as many as eight punches, with differing
accounts about who threw the first one. Two backup cops standing just a few
yards away rushed up to the altercation, and one of them shot Dorismond in the
chest. Police concede that when the altercation began, the undercover had not
identified himself as a cop, though they claim one of the three officers yelled "police"
just before the fatal shot was fired.

After initially assuming a wait-and-see public posture, Rudy launched into
daily assaults on the character of the dead man. He told Safir to release a sealed juvenile
record indicating that when Dorismond was thirteen, he was arrested for
robbery. While touring upstate Saint Patty's Day parades as part of his Senate
campaign, he recited other arrests on Dorismond's rap sheet, including attempted
robbery, assault and gun possession. Next the mayor unearthed a domestic violence
complaint filed by his girlfriend, who told cops he had punched her.

The facts slowly emerged: The juvenile case never got so much as a docket number,
meaning it was dropped before it ever went before a judge. No gun was found
in the alleged possession case, which involved a traffic dispute. He was never
charged with attempted robbery, just simple assault when he punched a youth for
cheating him out of some marijuana. Dorismond pled guilty in these cases to disorderly
conduct-a violation, not a crime. The cop who took the domestic violence
report noted on the form: "No injuries. No complaint of pain." The girlfriend
withdrew it.

Though Dorismond had never been convicted of any crime, much less an assault,
Rudy was still maintaining: "That he spent a good deal of his adult life
punching people is a fact." This record established, in the mayor's view,
Dorismond's "propensity" for violence. "He engaged in an assault and that's what
caused his death," said Giuliani.

The outrage reached a fever pitch. With no convictions, all of Dorismond's adult
record was also sealed. Giuliani explained that it was not illegal for him to break
the seal on any of it because Dorismond was dead. "Privacy interests and rights
expire with you," he declared. For the first time, the Post published two editorials
criticizing Safir and the mayor. Legal ethics experts, a state assembly committee
and editorial boards roundly denounced the release.

David Diaz, a veteran WCBS- TV reporter whose respected professionalism led
to his selection as the head of the Inner Circle (an association of city journalists),
put the question that was on everyone's mind to Giuliani at one of the Dorismond
press conferences. "Mister Mayor, how would you respond to the people who feel
that not only is the Police Department out of control, you're out of control, that
you are the lawless one in the city?" Diaz asked. "You set the tone. You disregard
court opinions when you don't like them. What is your answer to those who say
that Giuliani is out of control? Giuliani is the chief lawless one?"

"Oh come on," Giuliani said. "Let's move on to a serious question."

Diaz insisted: "Mr. Mayor, what is your answer to that question?"

"My answer is let's move to a serious subject."

The only defense the mayor offered was that he released the records on "sound
legal advice," declaring that he would defend his decision anywhere. But his corporation
counsel, Michael Hess, one of the good old boys from the Southern
District, testified before a State Assembly committee that the mayor neither
sought nor received an opinion. Safir suggested at the same hearing that an assistant
corporation counsel had given them an informal opinion in a similar 1996
case-but he offered no opinion letter or other evidence to support it.

In fact, the NYPD had also unveiled the sealed records of Michael Jones and
Dante Johnson, the sixteen-year-olds shot by cops and denounced by the mayor
for being out too late at night. In the Johnson case, Safir was personally quoted as
saying the kid was on probation at the time of the shooting, though that would
have been part of the sealed record if it were so. Johnson's lawyer contends he was
never on probation.

Giuliani was just as defensive about adopting any reforms that might be seen as
a concession that anything had gone wrong. City Council Speaker Peter Vallone
tried to use the Dorismond incident to get Giuliani to back the creation of an independent
monitoring board-the bill Rudy had vetoed twice and stymied in the
courts-but the mayor refused. In his rejection letter to Vallone, Rudy misspelled
Dorismond's name as Dorismand.

Rudy and Safir also resisted any material changes in narcotics undercover operations,
which had led to the deaths of four unarmed black men in four weeks
(counting two carrying toy guns killed right after Dorismond). The department
was putting 500 additional officers on the streets every day-paid for with $24
million in overtime-to raise drug arrest totals. But 75 percent of the new busts
were for misdemeanors and violations. Felony drug arrests were actually down 9
percent, while petty possession cases, mostly of marijuana, were up 68 percent.
Former Police Chief Bill Bratton wondered out loud why such a massive manhunt
for potheads was necessary if New York was as safe as Rudy perpetually announced.
The reasoning obviously had as much to do with keeping the lid on
crime stats until the expected Senate election was over as any real law enforcement
objective.

It certainly escaped few in the city's vast Haitian community that Dorismond
was the second Haitian involved in a celebrated Giuliani brutality case. Giuliani's
name was already a curse on Haitian radio, but the trashing of Dorismond raised
the anger to a new level. Unbeknownst to the mayor, Dorismond was the son of
the lead singer in one of Haiti's best-known bands during the 1950s and 1960s, a
twenty-piece ensemble that played to huge crowds all over the island.
Dorismond's brother Charles had become a hit reggae artist called Bigga Haitian.
The Dorismond name was so well known, Rudy again became a major news story
in the land he'd visited almost twenty years earlier.

Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of National Coalition for Haitian Rights, inadvertently
raised the specter of Rudy's nearly two-decade-old orchestration of
the detention and blockade of Haitians. "In a way, what Giuliani has been doing is
far worse than anything he has done, on this issue where he insists on demonizing
Patrick. This is the kind of thing that happens in Haiti, and it's absolutely outrageous."

"We are the sons and daughters of seekers of freedom," said Vladimir Rodney,
a lawyer and vice chairman of the Haitian-American Alliance, referring to the
Duvalier days a younger Giuliani had so warmly embraced. "The mayor has done
unspeakable harm to the bond of trust between the police and our communities."
In the protests that followed, signs and chants in Haitian Creole blasted the mayor,
some comparing him to a "loup garou," a Haitian demon who preys on the blood
of babies.

One of a group of Flatbush ministers who met with Safir during the controversy
was Monsignor Gregory Sansaricq, the pastor of a Catholic church near
Dorismond's home. He is related to Bernard Sansaricq, the Florida-based leader of
a failed Haitian insurrection who Giuliani agreed to prosecute during his 1982
visit with Baby Doc. The first child Monsignor Sansaricq ever baptized was one of
the children later killed when Papa Doc ordered the slaughter of fifteen members
of the Sansaricq family in 1964.

The monsignor remembers calling Giuliani at the Justice Department in the
early 1980s near Christmas. "I pleaded with him for a half hour to release some of
the detainees for Christmas," says Father Sansaricq. "It was a polite conversation,
but he said they didn't respect set procedures, they didn't use legal channels to emigrate.
I used the image of two houses next to each other. I told him if one was on
fire and people ran from that one to the other, no one could accuse them of breaking
in. He didn't move one inch."

The Flatbush ministers asked Safir for "a public apology to the Dorismond family
and the community at large," Sansaricq says, and Safir said he "could make no
apology because the case was under review." He also declined to make any public
gesture concerning the release of the record. "The mayor came into the meeting
when we were already about to leave," says the monsignor. "We politely continued
to leave."

The mourners at Dorismond's three-mile-long funeral procession-10,OOO
strong-sang the Haitian national anthem, and then turned tender, singing "J'ai
Besoin de Toi," or "I Need You." Clashes with police, many in riot gear, led to
twenty-seven arrests and twenty-three cop injuries. Giuliani visited the injured
cops at nearby hospitals, but stayed away from the funeral. His press secretary explained:
"In situations where the person involved may have been involved in a
crime, the mayor does not attend the funeraL" Several months later, he tried to
arrange a private meeting with the family, but they insisted on having their
lawyer present, and he demurred.

It was not just the echoes of Rudy's tortured history with Haitians that the
Dorismond case sounded. Patrick Dorismond grew up two blocks from 419
Hawthorne Street, where Rudy lived his first six years. Dorismond graduated
from Bishop Loughlin High School. "How much connection can you have?" asked
the Haitian priest who performed Dorismond's funeral. "Just different colors,
that's all."

Of course, the father who raised Rudy on Hawthorne Street had a bit of a
punching history himself, to say nothing of the documented pathology of aggression
found in court records. His angry outbursts were such a family legend Rudy
himself has acknowledged them. It was Harold Giuliani who wrapped boxing
gloves around Rudy's hands before his mother taught him how to read a word on
a dead man's rap sheet. And-unlike Dorismond-Harold, Leo D' Avanzo and
Lewis D' Avanzo had real criminal records, including a juvenile record in Harold's
case, available to credibly defame them if they ever mistook an undercover cop for
a thug.

Also swirling around Rudy-in the throes of the Dorismond controversy-was
his own, deeply personal, history with cops. "There's never been a mayor who understands
the psyche of the police department the way I do," he said in 1997. It
was a reference to the five uncles who were cops, including Vincent D' Avanzo,
busted himself, a front for a mobbed-up bar. It was also a reference to his lifetime
in law enforcement, especially the days when Bob Leuci and Bill Phillips taught
him how thin the blue line was between cop and criminal.

"People do act in conformity very often with their prior behavior," he said of
Dorismond at a Blue Room press conference, invoking and distorting his record.
He could just as easily have turned those words in on himself.

Battered from every direction, even the right, for his Dorismond actions, Rudy
decided to play psychiatrist. "There's a process called projection in psychology. It
means accusing someone of what you're doing," he said. His Democratic rival in
the Senate race, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was engaging in "projection," he
charged, when she said he was polarizing the city. He also psychoanalyzed why
the press refused "to face the facts" about Dorismond, noting that "people rarely
accept things that are going on in their unconscious."

On a strict diet for campaign purposes, his sallow face tightened in a grimace, as
his own unconscious roared in his ears.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:24 am

Part 1 of 2

Seventeen: These Statistics Are a Crime

IF YOU BELIEVE CRIME HAS BEEN REDUCED," CANDIDATE RUDY
declared three weeks before the 1993 election, "you are living in nevernever
land." Without offering evidence or explanation, Giuliani ridiculed FBI
stats that revealed a 16 percent drop over David Dinkins's final three years:
"He declares victory on crime, and people laugh at him."

The Times did a single front-page story on the decline. It ran just as the dip
started, in April 1991, and never mentioned Dinkins's name. The headline announced:
"Even Criminals Credit Police." When the FBI released its national
numbers in October 1993, the Times ran a scant 400-word story on page 42
and led with state figures. In the second paragraph, the story noted that the
"largest drop occurred in New York City."

The only other Times reference to the numbers in 1993 was in an April campaign
story, devoted to Dinkins's frustration at getting opinion makers to acknowledge
that crime had plummeted in all seven FBI categories "for the first
time in 36 years." The reporter, James McKinley, closed his analytical piece
with a definitive declaration: "Mr. Dinkins will never be able to prove his policies
have curbed crime." Between Dinkins's first year (1990) and his last
(1993), murder fell 13.7 percent, robbery 14.6 percent, burglary 17.6 percent
and auto theft 23.8 percent-yet no one noticed.

As muted as the Times was, the tabloids were even quieter, especially the
Post, whose "David: Do Something" banner headline during an upsurge of
murders in 1990 forced Dinkins to win state legislative approval for a tax surcharge
that would finance the hiring of more than 6,000 new cops.

The reluctance to credit Dinkins for the crime reduction was hardly unusual.
Neither the media nor the public had ever regarded crime stats as the
measure of a mayor. When the murder rate first broke a thousand in 1969,
John Lindsay was re-elected, with the endorsement of the Times and most of the
city establishment. The Democrat who opposed him tried to make an issue out of
the 1968 jump in the murder rate-still a record 32 percent-and was widely dismissed
as a demagogue.

Rupert Murdoch's Post literally drafted Ed Koch for governor in 1982 despite
three consecutive years of escalating murder culminating in a 1981 historic high
of 1,832, which came after drastic police cutbacks. The Times backed Koch in 1981,
1982 and 1989 amid horrific homicide surges. It did the same in 1985, following a
two-year drop of significant proportions, and never cited the improving numbers
in their endorsement. Until Rudy Giuliani, mayors were neither blamed nor
praised for cyclical shifts in death data.

when the city's overall crime index increased at a rate 60 percent higher than
the nation's in 1980, Phil McGuire, who was the NYPD's chief crime analyst then
and now, said: "No one really knows why crime in the aggregate goes up or
down." The Times matter-of-factly reported that the city "generally reflects and
MAGNIFIES the national crime trends." It barely noted at the bottom of the story
that the department had lost 9,000 cops since the fiscal crisis of 1975 and was at a
longtime low of 22,000.

Lee Jones, who was Dinkins's press secretary, said: "We only had one press conference
announcing crime statistics that involved the mayor. We thought if a
politician stood next to a set of numbers, the credibility of the politician attached
to those numbers. Then the people who liked David believed the numbers, and the
people who didn't like him didn't believe them. We didn't want the figures in any
way tainted by a politician."

Dinkins's biggest political mistake may well have been delaying the hiring of
2,100 new cops at the start of 1993, citing budget considerations. Combined with
the 3,000 he'd already hired, the. swearing-in of that new class could have given
him just the spotlight he needed to claim credit for the sustained reversal of crime
trends that had gone steadily upward for seven years prior to 1991. Instead,
Giuliani got credit for that deferred class and the one paid for by his own first budget,
totaling 4,200 new cops in his first year. Over his years as mayor, the NYPD
grew from 29,000 to over 40,000, partially because of the surcharge Dinkins engineered
and partially because of new hires Giuliani financed himself in 1998.
Merging the Housing and Transit police with the NYPD was also a giant factor.

Giuliani had a meager crime program as a candidate. He blasted the reduction in
drug arrests and promised more. He said he'd put more cops on foot patrol and
make more gun arrests. He talked about drug- and gun-free zones near schools.
He vowed to let cops carry 9-mm guns. He supported the death penalty and opposed
parole.

Beyond hiring Bill Bratton as police commissioner, Giuliani also had a meager
program as mayor. Bratton wrote in his 1998 book Turnaround that two of
Giuliani's transition aides "presented us with a 16-item list of campaign promises"
before the new government took office. Bratton politely said he'd "handle some of
the requests," though he also told them he had his own" series of initiatives"
planned. In an interview now, Bratton sneers at the list and calls it "a joke."

When Bratton sent his first written strategy over to City Hall-a war on
guns-"they nitpicked it endlessly." Getting City Hall approval "for each successive
strategy," Bratton concluded, "was a tortuous process and to the best of my
recollection never added anything substantive to the documents." John Miller, the
WNBC- TV reporter who became Bratton's press aide, says the mayor and his
aides "had no idea of a plan." Bratton says: "Giuliani provided authorization. He
had no input whatsoever. The ideas came from within the Police Department. I'd
be hardpressed to cite a single strategy other than domestic violence that originated
with his office." Bratton and Miller agree that all Giuliani did at the outset
was repeatedly ask Bratton-who had achieved substantial crime reductions as the
head of the Transit Police in the early 1990s-"can you do in the street what you
did in the subways?"

In his book, Bratton adds that at some of the later joint meetings, "the mayor's
staff actually spoke of themselves as the principal authors" of some of the strategies.
"We had sweat blood developing these strategies; now they were drinking it,"
contends Bratton, whose top advisers, John Timoney and Jack Maple, were heard
to wisecrack, "When Rudy was a kid, did he ever once get to school with his lunch
money?" Instead of generating ideas, City Hall was branded "the black hole of law
enforcement" by Bratton because it dawdled with so many suggested initiatives
that the NYPD began launching them before the mayor announced them.

Rudy did have a very clear idea, however, about how to control whatever media
credit might come with a crime reduction. When Miller released the stats for the
first five months, showing an estimated 11 percent drop, Denny Young ordered
him to "stop doing that." City Hall would "decide when the numbers would be released,"
Miller was told. "Hold them back for a big announcement."

Giuliani wasn't quoted until the final paragraph of the Times's page one story
on the first stats. "I have never been one who strongly relies on statistics as a way
of measuring what you're doing," dead-panned the man who had ended the publication
of annual reports in the Southern District. "Obviously, you prefer the
trend in the direction of declining crime, but I don't want the department to be
overly focused on statistics."

This ruckus over press was foreshadowed by a showdown at the end of
Bratton's first week on the job. He recounts how Deputy Mayor Peter Powers and
Young, who was named Giuliani's counsel, raked him over the coals at a Sunday
night meeting in January because of a front-page profile of him that appeared in
the Daily News.

"I've known Rudy since we were kids, okay?" Powers said. "I'm his best friend,
and I couldn't get away with this. If you can't work that way, he'll get someone
else." Young added: "WE will control how these stories go out. The mayor has an
agenda and it's very important that everybody stay on message and that the message
come from the mayor."

City Hall's fixation on crime credit would ultimately force Bratton's resignation
in 1996, but only after combat so intense that Rudy once summoned Miller to
Gracie Mansion to dress him down for announcing a major bust without putting
the mayor before the klieg lights. Actually, Miller had beeped Press Secretary
Cristyne Lategano, who was with him at a Yankee game, and she hadn't responded.
But he dared not defend himself by attempting to put the blame on
Lategano. Rudy concluded: "1 have the distinct impression that someone over
there is putting someone else's agenda ahead of mine."

From the first numbers on, it was clear that the downturn begun under Dinkins
was only going to get deeper, just like it was in cities across the country. That's
why Giuliani was so desperate to seem personally in charge of it. Bratton had instituted
sweeping management reforms that neither he nor Giuliani anticipated
when they took office. The principal innovation called Compstat-or computer
statistics meetings--evolved by the spring of 1994 from a new focus on weekly
crime figures. Eventually, Compstat sessions occurred in the command center at
NYPD headquarters, usually attended by 200 top precinct and executive staff from
Bratton to detective squad commanders, all in full dress with polished brass.

Grilled by Maple, Timoney and other chiefs, precinct captains for the first time
had to come up with concrete strategies to combat specific crimes spotted on pin
maps within their jurisdiction. By 1995, huge, eight-foot-by-eight-foot computer
monitors mounted on the walls could, as Bratton put it, "call up each map, each
crime" and make "crime clusters visual." Commanders were held accountable for
the numbers and every precinct had its day in the sun at least once a month.
"Compstat was police Darwinism; the fittest survived and thrived," said Bratton.

This mechanism made the numbers the heart of the department, dictating deployment
and tactics. Though Rudy observed only three Compstat sessions him-
self (according to Bratton), it also quickly became the heart of his government,
talked about everywhere but duplicated nowhere. His Cabinet sessions at City
Hall were hardly a facsimile, with him dominating a scattered, cheerleading talkaround.
"Compstat was going on well before Rudy was even involved," Bratton
says now, adding that the sessions Rudy attended were" a learning experience for
him." Giuliani knew nothing about the organizational technique until he saw it in
practice, insists the commissioner who pioneered it.

The second major strategy was what Giuliani took to calling "zero tolerance"
for quality-of-life violations. Bratton had pioneered the concept without ever using
the terminology, which he says "implies zealotry and a lack of cop discretion."
Working with criminologist George Kelling while running the Transit Police from
1990 to 1992, Bratton began busting fare-beaters, graffiti artists and panhandlers.
Prosecuting minor offenses had, in his view, transformed the culture of subway
life, convincing criminals to take their act elsewhere.

That's what he painstakingly explained to Giuliani in their off-the-record sessions
at the start of the 1993 campaign. "He didn't understand quality of life,"
Bratton recalls, "but he was a sponge." By then the police chief in Boston, Bratton
sneaked into town at Giuliani's request and met with him at Anderson Kill for two
hours. Rudy pressed him to discuss his Transit Authority strategies. "He caught
the wave," says Bratton. "He understood the frustration about fear of crime. He
understood that Republicans needed to do something about it."

Rudy also met with Kelling, and his campaign borrowed Bratton's monologue
and Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory, which holds that just as unrepaired
windows signal the abandonment of a building, untended disorderly behavior,
no matter how minor, can lead to more serious disorder and crime. That was the
basis of Giuliani's 1993 rhetorical assault on squeegees-the swarming crew of
windshield-wiping vagabonds who were posting themselves at major intersections
around the city in search of pocket change. Bratton came up with a battery
of enforcement priorities-focusing on public drunkenness, harassment, menacing,
urination and disorderly conduct and pushing street cops to trivialize
nothing.

Third was a punishing plan to bolster drug and gun arrests, neither of which
was an FBI index crime. The thought was that taking users, dealers and weapons
off the street would reduce the pool of scavenging and frequently armed criminals,
thereby driving downward the seven index crimes of murder, rape, aggravated
assault, robbery, burglary, larceny and auto theft. The trick was that if drug
and gun numbers went up, it wouldn't push the index up. The drug arrest part of
this strategy was a Giuliani refrain from the 1989 campaign-indeed he'd tried to
do it as US. Attorney-while the gun emphasis was principally another Bratton
innovation.

These strategies became the foundation of Bratton and Giuliani's simultaneous
claim that they had, as a New York magazine cover story put it in 1995, "ended
crime as we know it." Despite the statistical success, celebrated on page one of the
Times three times in 1995 alone, Giuliani dumped Bratton when polls showed that
60 percent of New Yorkers credited him, while only 18 percent cited the mayor, for
the two-year, 26.3 percent drop in felonies. The fatal triumph was when Time magazine
put Bratton in a trenchcoat on its cover in January 1996. Leaking damaging
stories to tabloids and blocking key promotions and approval of his book contract,
the mayor pushed Bratton toward the door.

Calling it a "death by a thousand cuts," Bratton at first resisted quitting, confident
that firing him "would have been seen as remarkably petty." But having
watched Giuliani browbeat Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines into leaving, he
concluded that it was not the mayor's practice to let opponents depart with honor.
Stories were dropped banging Bratton for taking trips paid for by millionaire
friends. A book contract he signed was handled by City Hall as if it belonged on
the crime blotter and referred to counsel for scandal review. "1 observed the slow
strangulation of my ability to run the organization. He created a situation in
which I had no choice but to resign," concluded Bratton, ironically the man most
responsible for handing Giuliani the record that has made him a national hero.

Though the mayor went through the motions of considering Bratton's designated
successor, John Timoney, as a replacement, he'd offered the job to Howard
Safir well before Bratton had even resigned. Safir was the fire commissioner, a
friend of Giuliani's since their joint days in the Justice Department in the 1980s
when Safir ran the witness protection program for the US. Marshals. Though he'd
never been a cop, the somber, jut-jawed, fifty-four-year-old was prepared to look
like one, standing erect beside the mayor at what must have been an all-time municipal
record for joint mayor/commissioner press conferences. According to
Bratton, Giuliani even took charge of the seating chart at Safir's April 1996 inauguration.

Routinely depicted as a cardboard cutout of a commissioner, he wound up in a
media frenzy about one of his own trips. In March 1999, he was dubbed "Oscar
Howard" after he took a private jet junket to Hollywood for the Academy Awards
even though he was scheduled to testify before a City Council committee about
the police slaying of Amadou Diallo. The city's Conflict of Interest board, chaired
by ex-US. Attorney Benito Romano, has been looking into charges about that
trip-a gift from a Manhattan millionaire that included four nights at a Beverly
Hills hotel-for more than a year. The board is also examining Safir's use of two
detectives to investigate the other driver in a car accident involving his wife, and
the use of eight to chauffeur guests at his daughter's wedding.

Giuliani, however, has been far less troubled by Safir's trips and other indiscretions
than the ones he tried to pin on Bratton. After all, a 1999 poll reversed the
numbers that cost Bratton his job: 63 percent saw Safir as a "figurehead," with
only 21 percent identifying him as his "own man." The overwhelming majority
said Giuliani ran the NYPD.

Safir cannot lay claim to a major innovative strategy of his own, though he did
continue Compstat and other Bratton tactics. Asked by the Times in 1999 to list
what programs he'd "be remembered for," the commissioner mentioned his "call
for taking DNA samples from everyone arrested" and "the installation of security
cameras" in a few city housing projects.

The only other achievement was Safir's claim that he'd "expanded anti-drug
initiatives," which, by definition, is not an innovation he launched. He did implement
a modified version of Bratton's Operation Juggernaut, a late 1994 idea of
Maple's that was to put 5,000 cops into a Normandy-like citywide anti-drug unit
targeting street dealers everywhere, starting in Queens and redeploying again and
again until the city was swamped with narcos. When the Daily News published an
exclusive on its front page headlined "Bratton's Juggernaut," Giuliani reversed
field on a concept he'd initially embraced.

Instead of going after dealers, the mayor was suddenly far more intent on pursuing
leakers. "I want the people responsible found," he told Miller, a prime suspect
himself. "And I want them dealt with." The plan stalled for more than a year
when it finally began in Bratton's final days, redesigned as the Brooklyn North
Drug Initiative. Even Bratton says Safir effectively orchestrated it after his departure,
producing instant plunges in shooting and other statistics-" an effect, but
for politics, that we would have had eighteen months earlier." But Bratton blasts
Safir for "not replicating" the program across the city, and felony drug arrests, after
three years of increases, dropped in 1997 by 10 percent even with all the additional
manpower (they have rebounded a bit since).

The FBI index continued to decline in 1996, the last full year of statistics before
Rudy's re-election campaign, implicitly indicating that it was Rudy, not Bratton,
who was driving the numbers. That is precisely what Safir's empty suit was meant
to suggest. By the 1997 campaign, Giuliani's TV ads were proclaiming, over blackand-
white footage of a burnt-out neighborhood followed by color shots of happy
children in a Brooklyn playground: "In less than four years, murders in Bushwick
have fallen 55 percent. Overall, crime in Bushwick is down 50 percent. Some still
want to turn the clock back. With Rudy Giuliani, Bushwick and neighborhoods
across the boroughs will keep moving forward. And we're a whole lot safer for it."

Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, the Democrat who ran against
him, wrote a 1996 letter to the city's two most powerful Democrats, Council
Speaker Peter Vallone and Comptroller Alan Hevesi, asking them to examine the
crime data. She did it after a Bronx captain close to the departed Timoney was deposed
by Safir for doctoring numbers, but neither Vallone nor Hevesi did a thing.
The chairman of the council's public safety committee, Sheldon Leffler, said he
tried to hold a hearing on the stats, but quit when the NYPD wouldn't cooperate.
Hevesi released an audit exposing NYPD mismanagement in 1998, but its focus
was on the uneconomical use of cops to perform civilian functions. In it, he detailed
nearly three years of stonewalling NYPD resistance to the study.

State Comptroller Carl McCall, another Democrat, launched an audit of the
crime statistics, as well as performance probes of four other agencies. Giuliani had
McCall's auditors thrown out of city agencies. He defied subpoenas. McCall sued
and won at a lower court level, but Giuliani, even after losing a unanimous appellate
decision as well, insisted on taking the case all the way up to the state's highest
court, where he again lost unanimously in April 1999. Rudy promptly
announced that he expected the court to rule as it did. Despite the losses, Giuliani
succeeded in preventing a police probe for two and a half years. Then McCall dallied
for ten months, waiting until February 2000 to finally launch it.

Ironically, Giuliani's position in the litigation against McCall was that the state
comptroller was usurping Hevesi's charter-mandated function, even while the
NYPD was vigorously blocking Hevesi, too. The end result was just what Rudy
wanted: accountability to no one. The crime stats have never been examined by
anyone outside 1 Police Plaza and City Hall.

Rudy questioned these numbers himself in 1993, and that was before four commanders
in the Giuliani era had to be disciplined or fired for doctoring them.
When the first full-year figures for 1994 were released, the mayor observed:
"Nobody can be sure exactly what is going on," adding that he and Bratton could
only lay claim to "about half" the drop in rates. No such caution has guided his
comments for years. Instead the stats are worn like a badge-in Giuliani appearances
all over America. The front-page Times story Dinkins never got has been
printed twelve times in Giuliani tenure.

The manipulation of this data, as well as the attempt to steer observers away
from any analysis that might cast doubt on Giuliani's role in the decline, has become
a municipal science:

Total Index

The FBI just receives the data on the seven index crimes from local law enforcement
agencies. It does not generate or confirm it. Yet most people think the numbers
carry an FBI imprimatur.

In fact, the crime composite is a statistical nightmare. Murder your mom with a
sledgehammer and it counts as one crime on the index. Take a twenty out of her
purse and it counts the same. In fact, just try to take a twenty out of her purse, get
spooked and run away without the twenty. A botched attempt at a crime counts
the same.

That means a deep drop in any city's numbers could be deceiving. Thirteen percent
of the total decline in the New York City crime rate between 1993 and 1997
was due to larcenies under $50; seventeen percent, larcenies under $200. Less than
half of one percent was attributable to murder. Larceny in New York City fell 16.5
times the rate of decline in all cities over 100,000 in population, while its murder
rate sunk at 2.3 times the average. Criminologists estimate that "no contact" occurs
between thief and victim in 95 percent of all larcenies, so it is the least threatening
crime.

Yet who can doubt that the overall decline in the first Giuliani term was outstanding?
There was a 40.5 percent reduction in the index, better than in any of the
other twenty-four cities with a population of 500,000 or more. Instead of just saying
that, Giuliani started claiming-in a June 2, 1997 Good Morning America appearance,
for example-that New York City was "the safest major city in the U.S.,"
adding "and those are the FBI statistics." That's the definition of gilding a lily.

If you were a piece of property, New York City was the second safest of the top
twenty-five cities in 1997. If you were a person, it was thirteenth. It dropped to
fourteenth in 1998, the latest available national breakdown of rates per 100,000
population. Since property crimes-burglary, larceny and auto theft-overwhelmingly
outnumber violent crimes, New York City's overall rate did rank second
lowest, right behind San Jose, California (population 861,000). But New York
City was still eighth in murder, seventeenth in robbery and thirteenth in assault
in 1998. Among violent crimes, the city's only number two ranking was in rape,
the smallest category by far. It's only number one ranking was larceny. But visions
of secure $20 bills inside mom's purse were not exactly what the term "safest city"
conjured up.

Ahead of all but forty-one cities out of the 201 with populations over 100,000-
at the 80th percentile-wasn't a solid enough statistic for Rudy either. Even second
of twenty-five wasn't. So his operations staff came up with a chart of their own, using
FBI figures, ranking New York City first of the nine cities with populations over
a million. As handy a sound bite as the chart for 1997 was, two of the cities-
Philadelphia and Chicago-couldn't be counted because of incomplete data. Five
had lower rates of violent crime, a comparison Giuliani's chart never mentioned.

The FBI, by the way, doesn't do any of these rankings themselves. They warn
against them in the report that contains the numbers, saying "direct comparisons
should be guarded against" because "dissimilarities" between cities "may bias the
results."

Murder

Giuliani launched his 1997 re-election campaign by making a January 1 five-borough
tour celebrating what he said was the first time in thirty years that the murder
rate had fallen below a thousand. The Post ran a murder odometer throughout
December 1996, culminating with the NYPD claim that only 983 homicides occurred.
No one reported it when the Department of Health released its annual
Vital Statistics report after the election, indicating that Medical Examiner Charles
Hirsch, a mayoral appointee, actually found that there were 1,018 murders in 1996
(even the police later raised their total to 987). Since the difference of thirty-five
between the initial NYPD total and the medical examiner's was only six greater
than the year before, it was perfectly predictable when Giuliani was touting the
number that the magical 1,000 barrier would remain intact in 1996.

The homicide rate is widely regarded as the least subjective of the otherwise
soft crime numbers. Yet, one of the ways the city rate was artificially lowered in
the past was to classify hundreds of probable homicides as "injury undetermined
whether accidentally or purposefully inflicted." This means that the medical examiner
could not determine if the death was an accident, a suicide or a homicidethe
three categories of what are called deaths by external circumstances.

When Hirsch took over in Ed Koch's last year (1989), he was outraged at the extraordinary
number of undetermined external deaths. Created as a new category in
the 1960s, annual undetermineds grew to over 1,000 in the early 1970s and averaged
over 700 in the 1980s, a far higher rate than elsewhere in the country. Hirsch immediately
hired physician assistants as medico/legal investigators to make hard determinations.
The number of mystery deaths plummeted as if on command, from
727 in 1988 to 186 in 1989. It went from two a day to one every two days.

Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for Hirsch, says: "Up to 1989, we didn't have
anybody doing scene investigations. We had to depend on the police and there was
an insufficient investigation of cases. Dr. Hirsch reached an agreement with City
Hall when he was hired that he would be able to hire these investigators. We
started out with eight. Now we have twenty-four. That's exactly why the number
of undetermineds came down." After Hirsch closed the loophole, the murder rate
seemed to soar in 1990, presenting David Dinkins with consecutive years of 2,000
plus murders.

The electorate was so alarmed by what appeared to be a city draped in blood, it
handed the reins over to Rudy. But in fact, the real murder rate had exceeded 2,000
through most of the 1980s when everyone thought it was averaging around 1,750.
The homicide share of an annual total of 700 undetermineds certainly topped the
250 more homicides required to reach 2,000.

As surely as undetermineds skewed Koch's and Dinkins's murder rates in opposite
ways, they have had only a marginal effect on Giuliani's. The number is
slightly lower under Giuliani than under Dinkins, but external deaths across the
board are down. The percentage of external deaths that are undetermined has
risen in the Giuliani era. It averaged 3.4 percent under Dinkins, and 4.9 percent in
the first four Giuliani years. If the percent of undetermineds had remained flat under
the two mayors, there would have been a total of 183 fewer undetermineds between
1993 and 1997. If most of those were murders, it would temper New York
City's rate of decline, bringing it closer to the rate for a number of major cities.

The other category of external deaths that has, on at least one occasion, been a
repository for a misclassified homicide is "other accidents." In 1996, Doris Roditi,
a seventy-five-year-old resident of the Upper East Side, was beaten to death near
her ATM, but for three weeks the case was listed by the NYPD as an accidental
fall. The police changed their finding when the holdup team that killed her was
caught mugging another elderly woman near the same ATM. Roditi's ATM card
was found on one of the perpetrators.

Dr. Andrew Levine, who did the initial evaluation of Roditi in the Lenox Hill
Hospital emergency room, said: "It's kind of a stretch to think it was an accident,
but the police didn't do a full medical exam. It definitely looked like she was beaten
up." Roditi's attorney Richard Bernstein said "her purse was missing and she had
no identification on her." Yet the police who traced her through her apartment key
did not figure out that she'd been robbed. Nor did they determine that thousands
were taken from her ATM. Bernstein's secretary asked police why they assumed it
was an accident, especially in view of Roditi's many broken bones, and "they said
it was because her bones were frail."

While two categories of accident (auto and home) dropped slowly in the Giuliani
years, "other accidents" like Roditi's, which occur on sidewalks and in other public
places, grew in 1994 and 1995 by sixty-eight, or 19 percent. This growth followed
years of a precipitous slide, with the 1993 number a third of what it was when
Dinkins took office. The total did dip in Giuliani's third year, but rose in 1997 and
fell again in 1998. "Other accidents" is the only form of external death to wind up
higher in 1997 than 1993. Its share of all external deaths grew by 4 percent. Since
the medical examiner barred a review of death certificates in this category, it is impossible
to determine whether there are other cases like Roditi's (the ME had listed
Roditi's case as "pending" until the ATM card was discovered). So even in the murder
count, there is a subtle interplay of factors confounding the results.

The real issue, though, with the murder rate is what caused the 66 percent drop
between 1993 and 1998? Drug dependence deaths decreased by 24 percent in the
same five years, drug overdose poisonings by 71 percent. AIDS deaths dropped by
68 percent, AIDS cases by 65 percent. The infant mortality rate fell by 38 percent,
and teenage births by 15 percent. Did Rudy do all of this? Did Jack Maple or Bill
Bratton? The crack and AIDS chaos of the 1980s was replaced in the 1990s by a
new culture that took firm hold in poor and minority communities. The worst part
of the Giuliani expropriation of all credit for the crime turnaround is that communities
get none.

When murder soars, the police aren't blamed. Ray Kelly, on his final day as
Dinkins's police commissioner in 1993, attributed the crime wave in a rambling
CNN interview "to family values ... young people out there on the street with no
supervision ... the out of wedlock birthrate." No one in the city administration or
the media reverses that diagnosis when crime plummets, even when every other
social indicator points to a transformation of the culture of poverty.

What's the evidence that Rudy's crime strategies were the primary agent of
change? The NYPD breaks murders down into two categories-those visible to
police-that is, streets, stoops, parks-and those not visible to police, inside
houses, office buildings, and so on. If a greater police presence caused the murder
decline, incidents visible to cops would have dropped at a far faster rate than those
not visible. Instead this figure has fluctuated from Giuliani year to year without
any clear pattern.

Year / Decline in Visible Murders / Decline in Not-Visible Murders

1994 / 29% / 4%
1995 / 22% / 28%
1996 / 8% / 28%
1997 / 29% / 8%
1998 / 15% / 22%


Not-visible murders fell faster than visible ones three out of five years and at a
slightly faster overall pace.

The only police strategy cited as a plausible explanation for how it pushed murder
down is the guns offensive boldly announced in early 1994 as Crime Strategy
#1. The Giuliani theory is that aggressive policing caused criminals to stop carrying
guns and, as Rudy put it in a 1999 congressional appearance, "led to a reduction
in handgun-related homicides." Yet felony arrests for possession of dangerous
weapons averaged 7,388 for the final three Dinkins years, peaking in 1991 at
7,820. Under Giuliani, the same arrests averaged 4,885 from 1994 through 1998.

The Giuliani team has explained its own declining weapon arrests by contending
that criminals got the message after an initial wave of busts, leading to a reduction
in subsequent arrests. But arrests dropped from the moment Giuliani took office,
falling by 6 percent in 1994, the first Giuliani year. In the second year, they fell 25
percent. By 1999, felony weapon arrests were a third of what they were in Dinkins's
last year. In fact gun seizures, according to NYPD records, dove 9 percent in 1994.

If weapons arrests and seizures changed criminal behavior, these numbers document
that the busts happened on another mayor's watch, namely the mayor
whose anti-crime record Candidate Rudy called a joke. That's the same mayor who
got the surcharge financing that put 6,000 extra cops on Rudy's payroll. In fact, as
little as it is known, murders fell by 299 (or 265, according to the medical examiner)
in the same final years of Dinkins that weapon arrests peaked and new cops
were hired. Sure, the tally tumbled at a far faster pace in the first two Giuliani
years, but if either mayor deserves credit, which should get more? David Dinkins,
during whose term a seven-year trend of upward murder figures was finally reversed?
Or Rudy, who presided over the deepening of an already downward trend?

The truth is the murder plunge is not provably connected to either mayor's gun
strategies. Neither is there any evidence that quality-of-life arrests had an appreciable
impact on murder. Even Jack Maple, in his book The Crime Fighter, has debunked
the Giuliani-promulgated notion that bolstered quality-of-life busts for urination or
panhandling convinced serious criminals to go straight "because they picked up on
the prevailing civility vibe." As Maple put it: "Rapists and killers don't head for another
town when they see that graffiti is disappearing from the subways."

While increased drug arrests under Bratton (far less under Safir) may have had
a minimal impact on murder numbers, the causal connection between a drug bust
and reducing homicides is far more tenuous than the link between arrests for a
loaded gun and killings. Either correlation is guesswork, but if the choice is between
the effect of gun or drug arrests, the weapons numbers of the Dinkins era
were undoubtedly more telling than the drug numbers of Giuliani time.

This is especially true since arrests of dealers increased between 1993 and 1997
by 15.8 percent, while arrests for use or possession rose an astonishing 138 percent.
Similarly felony drug arrests rose 6.8 percent and misdemeanor busts 140.7
percent. With 88 percent of the upsurge due to possession and use arrests, the
NYPD offensive was hardly focusing on the drug universe most likely to commit
murder.

The final Giuliani argument is that better-deployed cops, with assignments determined
by Compstat pin maps, have lowered murder and other crime rates.
Bratton concedes that Compstat "didn't really get going" until the late summer of
1994. Like any other management innovation, it must have tal en additional
months for it to begin to impact on crimefighting in seventy-six precincts. Yet the
biggest drop in murder--400 by the medical examiner's number~-occurred in
1994. How could Compstat have caused it?

Contrary to Giuliani mythology about his supposedly fine-tuned military machine,
the department's performance slipped since 1993 when judged by prime efficiency
standards used prior to Rudy-the percent of cops on patrol and response
time to emergencies. Even with thousands of additional cops, the average number
of cops on daily patrol at the end of Giuliani's first term was no more than when
Dinkins left office, making Giuliani's percent decidedly less.

Response time rose by two minutes during the first term-a 24 percent hike
that has gotten even worse since. The number of emergencies simultaneously fell
by 34 percent.

Only 27 percent of felony arrests in 1998 led to indictments, the lowest in
decades. In Dinkins's last year, the rate was 38 percent. Criminologist Michael
Jacobson, who was a commissioner under both mayors, sees the drop as "evidence
of a diminution in the seriousness of the felony arrests."

By 1999, only 58 percent of the force was assigned to precincts, with a 14 percent
increase in uniformed executive management positions since April 1997 and
a 15 percent jump in cops doing administrative work at headquarters. Overtime is
setting breathtaking records.

This mess is why Rudy resorts to the FBI stats as the sole measure of the department's
effectiveness. But that's hardly the story in other cities where murder
is way down.

The Time magazine story that cost Bill Bratton his job ranked Seattle ahead of
New York City in the rate of homicide decline, so Newsday's Lenny Levitt called
Seattle's police department to ask them how they did it. While Giuliani and
Bratton went to blows over credit, Seattle said: "In all honesty, we don't know
why. It's too soon to tell whether it's a trend or a fluke." When murders hit a ten-
year low in Orange County, the sheriff's office said: "As much as I'd like to give
law enforcement the credit, I know there's a million other contributing factors. II In
San Diego, where dramatic crime drops have occurred despite the lowest ratio of
cops per capita (a third of New York's), the police chief says: liThe problem with
claiming better policing is responsible is that someday crime is going to go up
again, and I wouldn't want to be on the other side of that question."

The other factors that Rudy mugged a city, and now much of a state and nation,
into ignoring range from the collapse of crack to the toughening of federal gun
laws. Criminologists point to the fivefold increase of the state prison population
since the introduction of the harsh Rockefeller drug laws-a boom that long predates
Rudy. The record-shattering economic growth and job market had its effect.
The downward drift of alcohol consumption rates-a bitter companion to violence-
are featured in Justice Department studies.

Outside of New York, law enforcement officials praise trauma units for lowering
murder rates, citing the 1990s explosion of lifesaving emergency techniques
that have led to survival rates for shooting victims as high as 90 percent. Auto and
home accidental deaths in New York City dropped a combined 28 percent from
1993 through 1998, a success story Rudy has yet to appropriate. With the particular
success of trauma care in New York City, the murder plunge may be more an
episode from ER than NYPD Blue.

Instead of making his personal focus on crime and organizational improvements
like Compstat one limited cause among many for the drop in murders, Giuliani
has given himself superhero status, as if he and his army caused killers to stop in
their tracks. Instead of approaching the stats as flawed and cyclical measurements
that undoubtedly overstate the downturn, he prattles on about them on every national
television appearance, in his campaign ads and whenever he has a major
budget, management or State of the City speech to give.

The problems with the data beyond murder, however, are far worse.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:26 am

Part 2 of 2

Larceny

Auto and Auto-Part Theft


These two crimes account for 42 percent of the total decline in the first four years.
New York City's 60,197 drop in auto thefts between '93 and '97 exceeded the decline
in the rest of the twenty-five largest cities combined by almost 12,000 stolen
cars. The rate of auto theft per 100,000 population plummeted in New York three
times faster than in these other cities.

The theft of parts and accessories-which is a category of larceny-dove 85.5
percent, from 48,722 in 1993 to 7,078 in 1997. Fifty-four percent of the overall decline
in larceny-which is broken down into nine categories ranging from purse
snatching to shoplifting-was due to this unprecedented, 41,644 drop, in cases involving
the theft of vehicular parts. In Safir's first year, 1996, this category decreased
by 16,163 or over 70 percent.

While Safir has claimed that auto-theft decline "has all been a part of aggressive
law enforcement efforts," the only strategic change was a heightened NYPD pursuit
of chopshops. It has never offered any numbers, however, documenting an increase
in chopshop arrests. In any event, a 1989 Justice Department survey
estimated that chops hops only accounted for 10 to 16 percent of car thefts, and
since then, the department, and other law enforcement officials, have indicated
that these operations are becoming increasingly obsolete.

The only auto theft initiative was announced in 1995, and stolen vehicles had
already dropped by 17,044 or 15 percent in 1994, the second deepest reduction of
any Giuliani year. In fact, motor vehicle theft was diving by 34,664 in Dinkins's final
three years, far faster than any other crime.

The decreases had virtually nothing to do with policing since the NYPD reports
that, from the beginning of Giuliani's first term, the only index crime that witnessed
a minuscule upward trend in the ratio of arrests to complaints is auto theft.
While the ratio doubled for murder, and nearly did the same for other index
crimes, it was flat for auto theft. For every 100 auto thefts in 1993, seven arrests
were made. For every 100 in 1997, nine arrests were made, by far the lowest ratio
and lowest rate of increase for any index crime. (This does not necessarily mean
the arrests were for crimes committed in the same year.)

The arrest ratio for auto theft (0.09) remained precisely the same for the last
four available Giuliani years (1995-98). The actual number of arrests fell every
Giuliani year, declining by 46.7 percent between '93 and '98. Arrests for felony
possession of stolen property-a charge frequently filed against chopshops-also
fell every year, dipping 34.5 percent.

Larceny arrests-for auto parts and every other category-increased a paltry 2
percent over the same five years. Despite a drop in larceny offenses that outpaced
every other large and medium-sized city in the country, the city's ratio of arrests
to complaints remained the lowest of any index crime other than auto theft (15 arrests
per 100 occurrences). If cops weren't causing the downturn in auto or auto
part theft, what did account for it?

One explanation is a dramatic improvement and proliferation of effective auto se-
curity systems, the sales of which particularly boomed in areas like New York City
with high long-term rates of auto theft. New York is also one of the few states that
has mandated insurance discounts for the installation of these devices, and industry
analysts confirm that sales of these systems have risen disproportionately in areas of
the country like New York City where auto theft has been historically high. Studies
indicate that when auto-makers add engine-immobilizing systems to cars, theft falls
as much as two-thirds from one model year to the next.

Another reason is the passage of federal auto theft bills in 1992, 1994 and 1996.
Among many changes, the legislation put in place the National Motor Vehicle
Title Information System and the National Stolen Auto Part Information System.
These bills made dealing in stolen parts a federal crime, and reinforced requirements
that went into effect into 1987 requiring the Vehicle Idenitification Number
(VIN) marking of fourteen major parts. A 1998 Justice Department evaluation of
the effect of these legal changes indicates that cars with marked parts had "lower
theft rates as strong as 20 percent." By 1996, the department concluded, auto theft
investigators thought marking was having a significant impact on part and auto
theft, "with the greatest effect on chopshop operators." New York City was historically
the chopshop capital of American car theft.

Technology, too, has been pushing the theft of parts down. By the mid-1990s,
cars were increasingly equipped with radios that were inoperable if stolen. Other
frequently stolen parts, like an accessible computer chip once often stolen from
General Motors cars, disappeared in new models. Many of the new security systems
that made auto theft more difficult also made part theft tougher. While
higher drug arrests, for example, might have removed potential amateur car
thieves from the street, no other Giuliani-era action is cited by insurers as in any
way contributing to the auto and part drop, which drove the overall reduction in
index crimes.

Theft from an Auto

A second category of larceny involving stolen packages, suitcases or clothes from
a vehicle has followed an entirely different pattern than the theft of parts or cars.
Its small 12 percent drop in the same four-year period when part theft fell 85 percent
reinforces the inference that security systems and part marking, not police
tactics, are the primary agents of change.

The theft of loose items in a car dropped from 55,865 to 49,302 between 1993
and 1997, a decline of only 6,563 compared to the virtual elimination of vehicular
part theft. Thieves are only slightly less likely to steal a camera from a car than
they were before Giuliani, believing apparently that they can get away quickly
with a salable item. Radios that won't work if stolen, parts with VIN numbers,
screaming alarms and the rest of the security revolution have combined to make
package theft the most attractive remaining option for street thieves.

The relative stability of this figure compared with the theft of parts is also attributable
to insurance and police reporting practices. Insurers are far less likely to
require a police report to cover the cost of a stolen part. But they always require a
police report for a stolen package. The insurer has no evidence other than a client's
written claim to the police that a camera was stolen. When an airbag is stolen,
however, the repair shop bills for installing a new one. The bill is all the paper
needed for payment.

The NYPD has increasingly required people reporting a stolen part to go to the
precinct and fill out a report. It does not usually send cops to the car or home, nor
will it take the report over the phone. Since insurers do not routinely require a report,
victims don't bother to go to precincts. On the other hand, since insurers require
reports for stolen packages that are covered, victims make sure one is filed
even if they have to visit a precinct. Police will often come to a vehicle if a valuable
package is taken and write a report. Insurance requirements appear to have more to
do with the level of these two index crimes than any Giuliani-era strategy.

Shoplifting and Coin Machines

The only specific form of larceny to increase between 1993 and 1997 was shoplifting,
which went up by 5,185 incidents or 33 percent. It is also the category least
susceptible to police adjustment since it is determined by complaints filed by businesses.
Just as with auto package theft, insurers require stores to file police reports
to make shoplifting claims, so the complaint figures come closer to reality. How
does Giuliani explain why shoplifting would explode when other forms of theft
whose measurement is more malleable to police are plummeting?

On the other hand, the larceny and full FBI index category of greatest decline,
decreasing even faster than auto parts, was theft from coin machines. Never a
large number, coin machine thefts practically disappeared during Rudy's first
term, nosediving 90 percent from 5,983 to 574. Not even Safir has claimed he's put
a cop by every Snickers bar dispenser.

Fred Miller, a security consultant with the National Automatic Merchandising
Association, says the 574 is "ridiculously low," adding that Giuliani's drop is "due
to underreporting or extremely conservative statistics." Miller also believes that
vending machine theft is down because of a number of security advances-pickresistant
locks inside and outside the machine, camera systems and pagers that activate
if a machine is opened. Frank McLoughlin, a Bell Atlantic executive, cited
four innovations that have made city payphones more secure-including new
electronic systems that warn the central office when a coin box is getting full and
when a phone has been broken into, as well as carbon-treated, specially reinforced
steel bars.

Public Buildings

In the same league as coin machine theft is larceny from public buildings-particularly,
in New York, office buildings. This is to be distinguished from burglary in
public buildings, which involves illegal entry. Larceny occurs during business
hours and the perpetrator is an employee, a messenger or a visitor who entered
legally. Building larcenies fell 11,750 or 23 percent between '93 and '97. The slide
was so large it accounted for 15 percent of the entire larceny drop. Like Snickers
bars, not even Safir claims the NYPD has been guarding every loose laptop on the
25th floor.

Mike Julian, an ex-NYPD commander under Dinkins and Giuliani now in building
security, says the reduction in these thefts is largely due to new procedures in
most office buildings, requiring outsiders to get sign-in lobby clearance before
boarding elevators, as well as surveillance techniques throughout buildings. He also
said he knew of attempts to increase restaurant and midtown building collars, but
the overall ratio of larceny arrests to complaints has remained so low throughout
the Giuliani years, crimebusting couldn't have much to do with the drop.

If these four categories are added together-auto, parts and accessories, coin
machine and building theft-they account for nearly half (48.8 percent) of the total
decline in index crime during the first Giuliani term. In the rest of New York
State, the decrease in these four categories accounts for only 34 percent of the
drop. Technology, insurance requirements or reporting changes are responsible for
most of this reduction.

Burglary

Attempted Force


The one number in the index that screams "manipulation" is the stunning decline
of this form of burglary-one of the three categories of burglary that appear in
the FBI breakdown. The other two categories are forcible entry and no-force burglaries.
The first category dropped during Rudy's initial term and the second
rose-both within the range of possibility. But attempted-force burglaries virtually
disappeared. The NYPD's top statistical analyst, Anthony Voelker, told the
Times in 1982 that the city's statistics were honest, but spelled out how easy it
would be to change them: "You just don't count attempted burglaries or attempted
robberies and your burglary and robbery numbers will look much lower."

Essentially a victimless crime since no entry is made and no property stolen,
burglary attempts fell from 17,223 in 1993 to 1,813 in 1997, an 89 percent plummet
exceeded by only one other category of crime-coin machine theft.

What is even more astounding is that the figure rose under Bratton and then, in
Safir's first year (1996), sank from 30,602 to 4,131. This 86.5 percent dive in a single
year is unparalleled in any other New York City crime category. Policing can't
begin to explain so dramatic a descent since there was only a 5 percent increase in
burglary arrests over these four years, and the ratio of arrests to complaints went
from eight per 100 incidents to sixteen. The number of additional arrests is so
small-414--it can't possibly have deterred that many putative burglars.

The 15,414-incident drop in this category over four years is so out of line that
it more than triples the combined 4,525 decline in the other twenty-two major
cities combined. Attempted-force burglaries tumbled in New York City by a rate
of 209.7 per 100,000 population, while they dipped in the other cities by 22.9. New
York City went from the city with the highest rate to one of the four lowest. The
fall-off in the percentage of attempts was seven times more in New York City than
in any of the top cities.

In the rest of New York State, attempted burglaries held virtually steady at 7
percent of all burglaries for four years. In New York City, where the percentage of
attempted burglaries had fluctuated little for several prior years, it suddenly went
from 17 percent in 1993 to 41 percent in 1995 to 3 percent in 1997.

The police tactics that changed this number involved reporting procedures-it
is a paperwork, not a crimefighting, triumph. Victims of attempted break-ins were
increasingly told they had to come to the precinct to report it, where lines or obnoxious
clerks awaited them. With nothing stolen, no police report was necessary
for insurance reasons, so few made the trip.

The data also indicates that many burglaries were downgraded to felony possession
of burglary tools, a charge that does not count in the index. At a time when
burglaries were falling 46 percent, burglary-tool arrests exploded 1,050 percent,
from 735 in '93 to 8,449 in '97. This leap includes a one-year bounce-Safir's
1996-of 3,130 cases. Before this unprecedented burst, burglary-tool arrests averaged
743 during Dinkins's last three years. The total for this usually rare crime in
the rest of the state fell from 350 in '93 to 286 in '97.

The near-disappearance of attempted-force burglary in New York City was responsible
for 34 percent of the burglary and 5.5 percent of the total index decline.
The 26,471 plunge in 1996 accounted for 45 percent of the entire drop in the index
that year. Without it, Safir and Giuliani would have been stuck with running
in Rudy's re-election on a meager 7.3 percent decrease, instead of the announced
13.3 percent drop. Since Bratton's overall rate of decline the year before was 16.6
percent, a decline less than half that size would have invited damaging press and
public questions about the effect of Bratton's forced exit.

Public Buildings

Burglaries of all types that occurred in nonresidential buildings during the business
day dropped from 9,607 to 800. This 92 percent reduction was almost double
the rate of decline for residential burglary during the day and nearly triple the
rate of decline for nighttime burglary in residential or nonresidential buildings.
Daytime nonresidential burglary elsewhere in the state slipped a mere 7 percent
in the same period.

This wholesale burglary drop in public buildings is similar to the larceny
downturn in the same locations. (Larceny involves legal entry, burglary illegal entry.)
The combination suggests that some of the nonresidential burglary reduction
was prompted by the factors cited by former commander Julian for the drop in
building larceny-namely, sign-ins and surveillance cameras. Sophisticated security
systems in homes and offices have boomed in New York City in the last few
years as well, making all forms of burglary more difficult.

Image

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In any event, no one at City Hall or the NYPD has claimed to have introduced a
policing strategy responsible for the public building decrease, which lowered the total
index by 3.6 percent. When that part of the index decline is added to the percent
prompted by the slashing of attempted-force burglaries and the four questionable
categories of larceny, 57.9 percent of Giuliani's much-ballyhooed plunge is either up
in the air or primarily attributable to causes that have little to do with effective police
work. (This figure is adjusted to account for the overlay between the two subcategories
of burglary included-attempted-force and public-building burglaries.)

Assault

Downgrading


Why would arrests for the index crime of aggravated assault, a Class B felony, increase
by 16 percent over the course of the same four Giuliani years that arrests
for third-degree assault, a non-index Class A misdemeanor, shot up by 82.7 percent?
Why would arrests for simple or second-degree assault-a Class D felony
that does not appear on the FBI index either-grow by 60 percent? Since the gravity
of injury is the primary difference between these three forms of assault, were
arrested assailants just getting gentler-committing assaults that "inflicted" less
"bodily harm"? The sharp upturn of these lesser categories of assault-which depend
on a cop's reading of the circumstances and the statutes-indicates an attempt
to classify assaults downward.

Strong-Arm Assaults

The precipitous drop in this type of aggravated assault-which involves the use of
fists and feet-also suggests a conscious pattern of downgrading. Between '93 and
'97, these physical-force assaults fell by 5,009, according to the FBI index breakdown.
This 61 percent decline was exceeded only by the slide in handgun attacks
among the five kinds of aggravated assault.

Strong-arm attacks bottomed out in Safir's infamous 1996, when they hit a low
of 1,877 cases, a better than four-fold drop in Giuliani's first three years. These
weaponless attacks were 13 percent of all assaults when Giuliani took office and
still 10 percent in 1995. But in 1996, they plummeted to 4 percent. The absence of
a weapon in these assaults gives police the maximum discretion in reporting them.
Many may well have wound up classified as simple or third-degree assaults.

Similarly, cops also have more discretion when an assault occurs on a street, as
opposed to a residence or public building, where complaints are frequently more
formal and taken in front of witnesses. Assaults on streets and other undefined locations
accounted for 89 percent of the drop, while assaults in residences barely
decreased at all (from 19,838 to 18,739 in four years). In fact, assaults in residences
rose from 32 percent of all index assaults in '93 to 42 percent by '96.

The proportion of the decline in index assaults attributable to the two categories
most susceptible to ambiguous classification-strong-arm and street-dovetails
with the inexplicably disproportionate rise in non-index felony assault arrests.
The only explanation for these simultaneous trends is an effort to artificially shift
assaults out of index classifications and into categories no one in the media ever
notices.

Robbery

Convenience Stores vs. Streets


The largest increase in index crime by far over these four years was in store
holdups, which went up an astronomical 518 percent, from 174 to 1,076. The
Giuliani administration has never discussed this figure, which is based on calls,
alarms and complaints from the looted businesses. Like the rising number of
shoplifting cases, store holdups minimize departmental reporting discretion.

Maximum discretion on robbery incidents, like assaults, occurs on streets/highways
and in alleys, where robberies have declined by 23,227 or 46 percent. These
street muggings account for 56 percent of the total drop in robbery. Robberies at
banks and residences decreased at a slower pace, though gas station holdups fell by
59 percent in 1997.

Also like assault, the police have more reporting discretion when a robbery is committed
without a weapon. Strong-arm robberies, too, have fallen disproportionately,
accounting for 51 percent of the drop in the five categories of robbery. Moving from
37 percent of all robberies to 24 percent, the drop in the city's number of robberies
that are committed by physical force alone is three times greater than the average of
the twenty-two top cities. Only one other city, Memphis, had a 13 percent slide.

A large part of the robbery downturn consists of street muggings without a
weapon-the most easily fudged stickup. Since attempted robbery and attempted
assault are not broken down in publicly disclosed data, unlike burglary, it is impossible
to tell how much of the strong-arm and street reductions in either category
are merely attempts, where nothing was actually taken.

***

Other than rape, the decline of every index crime is suspect. Sometimes the
issue is a calculated misappropriation of credit, as in motor-vehicle or coinmachine
theft. Sometimes, it's a resistant reporting protocol, as with attempted
force burglary or auto part theft. In other categories, particularly murder, the incongruous
magic-bullet theory is transparently designed to credit a lone achiever.

Assault has become an all-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder happenstance, public
buildings a videotaped sanctuary of private security. Unarmed robbers are suddenly
almost extinct, and burglars who almost never commit a burglary prowl the
streets in historic numbers equipped with the tools of an abandoned trade.

This combination has turned Rudy's self-proclaimed triumph into a dark doubt.
Clearly, no one in polished brass has stepped forward to confess to participating in
a conspiracy of feigned crimelessness. But the numbers do indeed speak for themselves.
They are being misused.

The hocus-pocus started with squeegees. Candidate Rudy promised to wash
them out of our hair. While they seemed everywhere, an NYPD report found that
there were only seventy-five of them in 1993, planted like Calvin Klein billboards
in unavoidable locations. So Ray Kelly, the police commissioner who worked for
Dinkins, heard Giuliani's campaign cry and drove the squeegees off the streets before
Rudy raised his own Windex-free right hand on inaugural day.

The whole world, years later, thinks Rudy did it-the predictable result of endless
repetition. But Bill Bratton himself conceded in his 1998 book that by the time
he arrived at police headquarters, the squeegees were gone, noting that "ironically
Giuliani and I got the credit for the initiative." Only politics, Bratton concluded,
"prevented David Dinkins and Ray Kelly from receiving their due."

Mike Julian, the top commander under Dinkins who devised the squeegee
strategies and stayed under Bratton, says he heard Giuliani salute himself for
stopping squeegees at a 1995 event and approached Cristyne Lategano. "I told her
you ought to drop that. I said Dinkins did it and that the records are there. I said
they didn't need to do this, they had their own record. She seemed to agree."

Two days before Christmas in 1997, recently re-elected Rudy, gloating at a press
conference, was asked about squeegees: "That one started with me," he declared. "I
remember when I called Bill Bratton and told him to do it. I don't even think he
was aware of the squeegee operators when I told him about it." Squeegees were
the debut of the real Crime Strategy #1: Make Rudy Marshal Dillon.

Graffiti was another Giuliani fantasy. In a 1999 keynote address at the Heritage
Foundation in Washington, Giuliani said that he'd recently been watching a tape
of the John Huston movie Prizzi's Honor, and noticed, "at one point in the film, a
subway traveling on an elevated part of the tracks" that was covered with graffiti.
"When I saw it, I was sitting at home. I said to myself, 'Subway trains don't look
like that anymore.' And then I said, 'Oh yeah, you did that.'" A year earlier, on the
Today Show, he proudly proclaimed: "We've reduced graffiti by 90-95 percent."

Actually, a state agency, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, runs the subway
system. Its web site lists May 12, 1989 as the date of one of three "key events" in
subway history-the day the last graffiti-covered train was taken out of service.
Rudy was just about to announce his first failed run for the mayoralty and the
MTA had just put 1,775 new cars and 2,810 refurbished cars into service. What
kept the graffiti off the cars was the much-publicized campaign of the then new
Transit Authority police chief, Bill Bratton, whose pioneering quality-of-life campaign
in the subways between 1990 and 1992 was what attracted Rudy to him in
the first place.

Between the Bratton graffiti busts and a new MTA effort to wash trains with
new, powerful, cleaning solutions within hours of any new graffiti-all instituted
while Rudy was at Anderson Kill taking lessons on how to be a mayor-the system
was widely celebrated as graffiti-free when the Democratic convention came
to New York in 1992. "Did I get off the plane in Toronto or what?" asked Bill Geist
on CBS.

In fact, by the time Rudy was striking his Mr. Clean pose at the Heritage
Foundation, the MTA was sadly declaring that nearly all of the system's 5,800 cars
were afflicted with scratchitti-the etching of nicknames into subway windows
and walls, using everything from razor blades to keys. On many cars, every window
is defiled. It got so bad that the agency stopped measuring scratched graffiti
on passenger environment surveys. Why keep writing 100 percent each quarter?
The mayor might not have noticed scratchitti since the only time he actually sees
a subway, by his own admission, is on a VCR.

The single most damaging shot at the Giuliani crime fa\ade was fired in March
2000 by Fox Butterfield, the Times's trenchant crime reporter who did a story that
showed that other big cities, unlike New York, had managed to record "as big or
even larger drops in violence while employing strategies that have ended up improving
race relations." Citing San Diego and Boston as "national models of policing,"
Butterfield found "a sense of sadness" about the "great opportunity
squandered" in Giuliani land.

Rana Sampson, a former NYPD sergeant who is director of public safety for the
University of San Diego, told Butterfield: "New York has paid a huge price." Jeremy
Travis, a former NYPD deputy commissioner who runs the National Institute of
Justice, said the challenge was to bring crime down while enhancing public confidence
in police. "That is what dropped out of the picture in New York" he said.

Butterfield-in this and other pieces over the years-has been an exception in
the coverage of the New York crime phenomenon. Despite the frequent transparency
of Giuliani's media manipulation of this data, his self-serving bluster on
crime has worked. Even his critics have ceded him credit for the cut without demanding
a logical explanation of just how his strategies produced these results.
Ruth Messinger, his 1997 opponent, paid homage on crime, mostly to try to establish
her own reasonableness. She knew that to do otherwise-in the face of a
media mountain of tributes-would be to quarrel with common wisdom. When
Hillary Clinton squared off against him in early 2000, she seemed to take the
same tack.

Rudy's zero tolerance on crime for auditors, citizen groups or reporters with
questioning minds has helped him keep his secret. He has spent millions on commercials-
in the 1997 election and more recently during his brief Senate campaign-
convincing everyone in the city or state with a television set that he killed
crime. His partisan and ideological fans have celebrated him for it. None of that
will make it so.
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