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 6:28 am

Part 1 of 2

Eighteen: Soap Opera Schools

SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR RUDY CREW WAS, FOR A MOMENT, THE PERFECT
match for his namesake and champion.

An imposing bear of a black man, he was lucid and lettered, smoothly comfortable
in a white world, privately engaging and publicly discreet, resolute yet
accommodating. Born in upstate Poughkeepsie, he lost his mother at two and
was raised by an exacting father who played jazz clarinet, worked three jobs,
put him in Catholic school and opened his ears to the sounds of Ellington and
Coltrane.

By the time Crew married his Italian-American high school sweetheart in
his early twenties, he had already adopted her family as his own second family.
Even after their twenty-year marriage ended, he thought of their four children
as half-Italian and himself as part-paisan. Two of his three closest aides as
chancellor were Italian-American women-deputy chancellor Judith Rizzo
and press secretary Chiara Coletti.

Though Crew was hardly the mayor's first choice in October 1995, Giuliani
had helped make him the $245,OOO-a-year chancellor, moving him from the
65,OOO-kidTacoma, Washington system to the pinnacle of his profession, running
schools with 1.1 million young lives on the line. With a Ph.D. from the
University of Massachusetts and a charisma that turned on urban kids, Crew
had the street swagger to go with his shades and black leather jacket and the
sophistication to awe a tuxedo-clad business dinner at the Waldorf.

In addition to Tacoma, the forty-five-year-old, velvet-toned Crew had been
superintendent in Sacramento and deputy superintendent in Boston. He
brought a couple of top aides from Boston to New York, making the schools a
second Bostonian outpost, akin to Bratton's NYPD, in the Giuliani realm.

The seven-member Board of Education actually hired Crew and only two
were Giuliani appointees (the rest were named by borough presidents). But
Giuliani controlled the board's budgetary purse strings. He'd driven Crew's
predecessor, Ramon Cortines, out of town. And when the board temporarily picked
a replacement for Cortines the mayor didn't like, Giuliani used his mayoral clout
to get the appointment rescinded overnight. Crew knew he could only succeed if
Rudy Giuliani let him. He also knew Rudy would only let him if he liked him.

Cortines was an object lesson in what happens to a chancellor Giuliani doesn't
like.

Cortines was named to the job in a four-to-three vote in the summer of 1993,
while Giuliani and Dinkins were in the middle of their second campaign. The socalled
Gang of Four that voted for him was, strangely enough, aligned with
Candidate Rudy. Dinkins's two appointees voted against Cortines. Two of
Cortines's backers-Staten Island's Mike Petrides, an appointee of Guy Molinari,
and Ninfa Segarra-were active in Giuliani's campaign.

The Gang got its name when it forced Chancellor Joseph Fernandez out of his
job, joining Cardinal John O'Connor and Giuliani in blasting Fernandez for introducing
a curriculum designed to teach tolerance for gays to kids as young as first
and second graders. Since the board president in 1989, Robert Wagner Jr., gave
Candidate Giuliani veto power over Fernandez's appointment, he was the first
chancellor hired with Rudy's approval to be forced from office by Rudy or his allies.

Cortines's selection by the same foursome-led by Petrides, who was playing a
managing role in the Giuliani campaign-deflected any criticism that the dismissal
of Fernandez was anti-gay. Cortines came to New York from San Francisco,
where he'd been outed as gay by a local magazine. When Cortines got to New
York, ACT-Up demanded that he announce his sexual orientation. Single and
sixty-two years old, Cortines refused and the issue disappeared.

But after Rudy was elected and intermediary Petrides resigned due to illness,
Cortines could never get comfortable with the Giuliani team at City Hall. He had
an intensely private correctness about him, a stiffness that did not mix well with
the locker-room style of Giuliani's old-boys network. Giuliani's early budget woes
led him to target the Board a month after his 1994 inauguration, demanding cuts
Cortines was institutionally obligated to resist. Rudy took the resistance as personal.
A Mexican-American born in Texas who'd run three substantial school systems
in California, Cortines was offended when the mayor kept insisting he cut
2,500 jobs. Cortines insisted Giuliani did not have the authority to specify what
cuts would have the least damaging effect on the system. That was his right.

So he was summoned alone in April to Gracie Mansion for a late-night emergency
meeting, kept waiting for an hour and then threatened. Surrounded by several
aides, Giuliani demanded Cortines fire his top press and finance staffers. The
mayor said he was going to name Herman Badillo, his former running mate, as a
fiscal monitor over the schools. Cortines waited a day or so and quit. Only the intervention
of Mario Cuomo, who was still in the process of building his relationship
with Giuliani, resolved the dispute. Cortines agreed to stay, Badillo took his
post and an armistice was reached. Within days of Cuomo's defeat, however, war
broke out again.

That December, Rudy began what the Times called "a vitriolic public campaign"
to force Cortines to quit. Some of it was budgetary, with the mayor announcing a
second year of slashing cuts. Some was of it was serious policy differences, with
Rudy pressing to get the NYPD to control school security. But the undercurrent
was decidedly personal.

Cortines "spent yesterday whining," Giuliani told reporters in June, "which he
does all the time and you fall for it." He branded Cortines "the little victim." His
admonition that Cortines should not "be so precious"-a reference to what
Giuliani called Cortines's hypersensitivity to criticism-was a strange choice of
language. It had a gay-baiting tone to it that may not have been intended, but was
widely suspected.

The mayor made several significant gay appointments at the start of his administration,
like Taxi & Limousine chairman Chris Lynn. His policies over the years
became increasingly pro-gay, such as his 1997 extension of medical benefits to the
gay partners of city workers. But there had not been any high-level gay involvement
in his campaign or at City Hall. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Sydney
Schanberg reported top aides to Giuliani were telling reporters that Cortines was
peculiar. "He is not married, they say. He has no children, his lifestyle is reclusive."
The columnist quoted one aide as saying: "This guy is weird. Would you
want him alone with your family?"

When Cortines quit a second time-on June ll,1995-he told the Times that he
believed Giuliani" simply disliked" him. "I won't discuss that"-he said, refusing
to elaborate about the perceived animus-"I will never discuss that." Shortly before
he left town in October, Cortines allowed aNew York magazine reporter to
join him and Ed Koch, a Cortines friend and ally, at a midtown restaurant for
lunch. Asked if the epithets Rudy tossed at him injected sexual orientation into
the debate, Cortines said: "I don't know if that's it. You know, I've dealt with innuendo
all my life." Koch, who'd had his own experience with Giuliani innuendo
and was just beginning to slam him, said that "forcing Ray's resignation" was "the
worst thing Rudy did as mayor."

What happened in the aftermath of Cortines's resignation was also an object
lesson for Crew.

The board began interviewing candidates and settled on a first choice, Bernard
Gifford, a black former vice chancellor with impressive corporate consulting credentials.
Giuliani insisted Gifford support his call for line-item mayoral budget
control and an NYPD takeover of school security. Gifford withdrew.

Then in September, the mayor made his own public pick-Leon Goldstein, the
president of a CUNY community college awash with Democratic patronage hires,
including the wives of two assembly speakers and the spouses of five other powerful
Brooklyn pols. A sixty-three-year-old shmoozer and showman, Goldstein's
academic background was in hotel management. The only CUNY president without
a Ph.D., he had been rejected five prior times in chancellor searches at the
board and CUNY. Goldstein's candidacy was quickly attacked in a swath of scandal
stories, yet Rudy stood by him. The leak of a confidential report to the board-replete
with charges against Goldstein-finally forced him to withdraw.

Rightly or wrongly, Rudy blamed the leak on an aide to board president Carol
Gresser. She had been an ally of his going back to the 1993 dismissal of Fernandez,
but their disagreement on Gifford and Goldstein changed all that. When Gresser
next championed a Long Island Hispanic, Daniel Domenech, getting four votes for
him at a Friday meeting in early October, the mayor leaned on one member of
Gresser's majority, Jerry Cammarata. The Staten Island appointee of Guy Molinari,
Cammarata collapsed after a Gracie Mansion visit and switched his vote twentyfour
hours later, sinking Domenech. "The press will be on me for a couple of days,"
Cammarata explained to Domenech, "but the mayor will be after me forever."

Cammarata was a character right out of the Molinari circus, changing his party
registration four times in eight years. He ran for a district school board on Staten
Island in 1993 on a church-backed slate, proclaiming that he would ensure that
parochial schools, where his three kids went, were safe from gun-toting public
school kids. Then he was ejected on election day from a public school polling site
after police discovered he was carrying a licensed .38 caliber pistol.

He also lay claim to three Guinness Book world records. He sang for forty-eight
straight hours at Nathan's Famous hot dog stand in Coney Island, seventy-five
hours while sitting in a bathtub perched atop a flatbed truck riding all over the city
and ninety-six hours in a subway songfest celebrating Richard Nixon's resignation.
It was unclear if Guinness was keeping track of breakneck conversions by
public officials who couldn't take the heat.

Chancellor for a day, Domenech was actually the third Latino forced from the
post by the Giuliani team in two years. Unlike Fernandez and Cortines, however,
Domenech had not come to power with Giuliani's support. In promoting
Goldstein and blocking Domenech, Giuliani forged an alliance with Brooklyn
board member Bill Thompson, the only black on the board and a supporter of a
candidate waiting in the wings, Rudy Crew.

Gresser had leaned toward Crew before the Goldstein and Domenech battles,
but Crew demurred, only willing to take the job with Giuliani's endorsement. "If
you didn't have both people on board," he said later, "it was going to be near impossible
to do the job, let alone get it." So Crew flew to the city without anyone in
the press knowing, quietly meeting with Giuliani at the mansion. He wanted
Giuliani to hear three things: "I'm a Democrat. I'm a black man. And I'm not
afraid of you. That's what I am about."

Crew wanted to establish from the outset that he "would not work in an atmosphere
of fear" and the Cortines experience taught him that he had to make
that explicit. He and the mayor also talked policy, even getting to the issue that
would be their eventual undoing: vouchers. "I spoke plainly about my history of
opposition to them at our very first meeting," he recalls. "And he said he wasn't
interested in them either." Giuliani and Crew also agreed that the system needed
to be shaken up, reformed, challenged.

With two years to go before re-election, the mayor had what he thought he
needed: a black chancellor with a commanding presence and resume who could
serve as a prophylactic in 1997, protecting him against criticism on school performance.
A professional and personal relationship began at that first meeting and
lasted three years, until the mayor's changing political ambitions killed it. Though
Giuliani would lay claim in the good years to having installed Crew, the truth is
he turned to him only after a series of false starts.

Giuliani was as uncertain about what to do with the school system as he was
about who should head it. He knew he wanted cops in the schools-tackling crime
was always his first instinct. He knew he could rail about administrative bloat day
in and day out, demanding dramatic reductions to the salute of every editorial
page. That was it; that was his education program.

He could count on the fact that no one would notice-while he ranted for six
years about board bureaucracy-that the number of police department managers
grew by 79 percent, and fire department managers by 120 percent between 1993
and 1999. Neither would anyone note a 46 percent jump in administrators and
managers in all the mayoral agencies directly under Giuliani's control, with an astounding
943 percent jump at the city's law department.

As limited as his school repertoire was, he never talked 1'0 Crew or Cortines about
teaching and learning-only governance and budget. "He thought schools were a
series of episodes, Round I, Round II," Crew says now. "He had no pedagogical commitment,
no educational philosophy, no grounding in a belief system." Without any
real ideas about how to make schools work, Giuliani was unsure if he'd ever be able
to conjure statistics out of the system salable in a thirty-second campaign commercial.
He wound up wandering from one side of school issues to the other:

Candidate Rudy championed the breakup of the central board, the establishment
of borough boards and" forceful" actions to "assure that responsibility for
educational policy is established at the community school board level." As mayor,
he dropped the idea of borough boards and backed a new state law that vastly diminished
the powers of community boards, centralizing power.

Candidate Rudy assailed Dinkins for responding to the "chaos" of the system
by simply demanding "that he should have control" of the board. "The truth is
that there is much that a mayor can do with the current arrangement that has not
been done," Giuliani contended in a nineteen-page issue paper. Though he accused
Dinkins of seeking" dictatorial power" over the board, Mayor Rudy adopted the
same position on mayoral control, portraying himself in recent years as an outsider
and critic, unaccountable for its failings.

Candidate Rudy favored "increasing the opportunity for choice" within the
public school system; Mayor Rudy became a champion of private and parochial
school vouchers.

Candidate Rudy bemoaned chancellor turnover, saying the city's only response
to school failings "has been to change centralized leadership." Each new chancellor,
he said, "has been brought to the job with great fanfare and a hope that their
particular style or initiative will be able to turn the system around." But these
leaders" of the slow, overburdened system have not been able to improve the system's
performance in any measurable way." He even objected when Dinkins interceded
in the chancellor selection process in 1993, contending a mayor should
only comment when the board came up with a candidate.

With that much equivocation, and the baggage of Giuliani's two years of school
wars, the mayor needed Crew almost as much as Crew needed him. Crew understood
that and, from the beginning, he demonstrated a political agility in leveraging
their mutual needs that none of Giuliani's other top appointees, including
media master Bratton, could equal.

Crew immediately replaced the finance deputy Giuliani had pushed Cortines to
fire with the analyst in the mayor's office who monitored the board's budget. Crew
set up weekly meetings at City Hall with the mayor. He produced a mind-numbing,
forty-one-volume set of books detailing how the board spent every cent, winning
the mayor's praise for laying bare the labyrinth. He navigated the turbulent NYPDtakeover
waters masterfully, attributing his hesitancy to the board, most of whose
members were opposed. But he kept an open mind and quietly negotiated a deal the
mayor could buy, taking three years to do it.

He also joined Giuliani in a 1996 coup to topple Gresser as board chair. Giuliani
complained about her to Crew, calling her "a housewife who lacked the intellectual
weight to warrant conversations." The mayor put the four board votes together
over the July 4 weekend, while Gresser was in Maine, preparing for her newborn
granddaughter's arrival from the hospital. Crew dropped one negative quote on
her in a June interview and stayed out of the way when the ax fell, letting Giuliani
take center stage alone.

Most importantly, Crew reinforced the critical political alliances Giuliani had
with the United Federation of Teachers and District Council 37, establishing excellent
ties of his own with the two unions that represented most board employees.

Giuliani was particularly conscious of the power of the 90,OOO-member UFT; its
phone bank and field operation had played a key role in his 1989 defeat. Their neutrality
in the 1993 election-combined with their million-dollar "apolitical" ad
campaign assailing Dinkins-helped Giuliani win. Giuliani attempted to ingratiate
himself with UFT president Sandra Feldman early on, going to a rare private dinner
at her home on December 2, 1994, along with Peter Powers and his wife
Kathleen, who worked at the board.

When Ray Cortines suggested reducing such UFT perks as sabbaticals and
preparation periods to close the board's 1995 budget gap, Feldman went ballistic
and Labor Commissioner Randy Levine called Cortines aides to oppose the
workrule savings.

Giuliani simultaneously supported state legislation authorizing early retirement
bonuses for teachers in 1995 and 1996 even though his campaign issue paper
criticized Dinkins's 1991 bonuses for inducing the most experienced teachers
to leave prematurely. The UFT loved the incentives, and 18,000 teachers walked
out of classrooms. Ultimately the union sat out the 1997 election, a boon to a
mayor whose school cuts set records. Neutrality was the best Feldman could do
with a membership that predominantly opposed the mayor. But when Feldman
was the honoree of an American Jewish Congress luncheon in the middle of the
campaign, Giuliani's Democratic foe, Ruth Messinger, was barred from attending.
An AJC member armed with an invitation, the embarrassed Messinger was cornered
by reporters in the lobby while Feldman and Crew chowed down inside.

DC 37's Local 372, which represents 19,000 kitchen workers, school aides and
other paraprofessional staff, was also a significant player in city politics. Their
president, Charlie Hughes, was so anxious to establish an early rapport with the
administration he contributed the maximum permissible under city law to the
Giuliani '97 committee by 1995 ($7,500), and raised thousands more.

He then started contributing to the Liberal Party, donating $17,500 in 1996 and
1997. In the same time period, Hughes bought seven tickets for the Giuliani committee's
$2,500-a-plate Lincoln Center fund-raiser for an identical total of
$17,500. Seven tickets were attributed to him on the committee's seating list for
the event, but no contributions from him or anyone else from the union were filed
for that time period. He now acknowledges that he "made out the checks to the
Liberal Party" to go to the Giuliani committee dinner. "I'm sure that's the way it
was," he said in a recent interview. Since these donations would far exceed city
limits, the solicitation of such end-run contributions by the Giuliani campaign
would be a clear violation of law.

In addition to financial support, Hughes became such a linchpin of the re-election
effort that he anchored a Democrats-for-Rudy television commercial and City Hall
rally. Not only did he deliver the endorsement of his local, he played a pivotal role
in getting DC 37, the largest municipal union with 120,000 members, to back Rudy.
All Rudy Crew remembers is that the mayor made it clear that he "liked Hughes
very much," that he thought Hughes was "a good labor leader."

Hughes backed Rudy primarily because of a sweetheart deal the mayor had
arranged that simultaneously pleased Feldman. In contract negotiations with the
UFT, Giuliani agreed to relieve teachers of cafeteria and hallway monitoring duties,
giving them an extra, free, forty-five-minute, period a day. Teachers were theoretically
supposed to use this period for professional or curriculum development
or tutoring (they already had up to two preparation periods a day). This bonanza
for teachers was widely denounced by business groups and editorial pages as a
productivity loss.

The mayor initially proposed replacing teachers with workfare workers, but he
shifted, with Crew's encouragement, to the increased use of Hughes's 6,600 school
aides as monitors. The decision meant additional hours for the aides, who made
less than $10 an hour and earned an average of $10,000 a year. Giuliani then
upped the ante by agreeing to create a new supervisory title for school aides that
paid as much as $3 an hour more.

The union newspaper reported that "the path" to "the first promotional title
ever created" for school aides "was cleared" in late 1996 "in informal discussions
Hughes held with Giuliani and Crew." Hughes negotiated specific terms with
Crew's counsel in early 1997 and a thousand aides were expected to be upgraded.
Hughes's extra-legal donations to the Liberal Party dovetailed with the timing of
the new title decisions. Hughes says now that the decision to "not use welfare
mothers" and promote school aides was "why I endorsed him." Board officials estimate
that covering the lost teacher-monitoring period costs the school system
$90 million a year.

This double whammy for the unions almost came unglued when the UFT rank
and file voted down the contract in December 1995, shortly after Crew's arrival.
The rejection was inspired by Giuliani's announcement of a $35,000 raise for himself
and substantial raises for his top staff at the same time that he was publicly
celebrating Feldman's agreement to a two-year wage freeze for teachers. (They got
11 percent raises in the final three years of the pact.)

Harry Spence, Crew's deputy who was participating in the second round of negotiations
necessitated by the rejection of the initial deal, says that he and Feldman
agreed to drop the new free-period provision. The union hoped to use the savings
that would accrue from restoring the teacher's cafeteria and hallway assignments to
sweeten nonsalary benefits. But, Spence says, Giuliani "adamantly refused," insisting
on giving teachers a free period their union was no longer demanding.

Spence believes Hughes was the reason. The free period remained in the otherwise
slightly revised contract and the UFT membership ratified the deal in a second
vote in 1996.

Citing the UFT's extra forty-five minutes and similar losses in the new fire
union contract-including the requirement of a fifth man on every truck and an
extra week of vacation-CBC's Ray Horton said Rudy was "bugling a full retreat"
on the labor front. Instead of paying higher wages for more work, Horton pointed
out, these contracts "would pay more for less," giving "new meaning to the concept
of productivity bargaining." The unions were backing Giuliani because they'd
learned "to dance with the highest bidder," Horton charged. While Giuliani's array
of five-year labor contracts counterbalanced double zeroes in the first two years
with substantial raises thereafter, Horton charged that the mayor protected entirely
the fine-print "bureaucratic entitlements," like sabbaticals and wash-up time
for cops, that affect the way services are delivered.

Unbeknownst to Horton or the press, Hughes also won a secret 3 percent raise
in a side agreement. "When everyone else got zero in the first year," says Hughes,
"we got a 3 percent shot out of a severance-related benefit fund."

Crew had again learned from the Cortines example. In his departing interview
with Koch, Cortines blasted Giuliani for caving to the unions. "He obviously
doesn't want to stand up" to them, said the outgoing chancellor, who was forced
out just as contract negotiations with the UFT began. "Instead of educating kids,"
Cortines charged, using the same terminology that would later become a Giuliani
mantra, "we've become an employment agency." Still at his ex-linebacker weight,
Crew was hardly one, like Cortines, to tilt at windmills. Mayors had long dominated
board contract talks, and Crew knew the unions were more important to
the mayor than his own continued tenure.

But facilitating the mayor's labor relationships wasn't the only useful role Crew
played. When reading scores rose 3.6 percent in June 1997, a pleased Giuliani used
it as the focus of his first campaign commercial. The ad was a preemptive strike, designed
to undercut Messinger's core issue. Proclaiming reading scores "up in every
district" and calling it "the highest one-year increase in the past decade," the commercial
showed Giuliani reading to a culturally diverse group of schoolchildren. It
also cited a new $125 million Project Read program Giuliani had just funded in his
new budget and claimed the administration "was rebuilding and renovating our
schools."

The truth was that reading scores were down since Rudy became mayor. The
1996 scores were 5.9 percent lower than in 1995. Even Crew's mini-spurt was partially
attributable to a decision to exclude a large number of non-English-speaking
kids from the reading exam. Project Read was part of the first new infusion of city
funding since Rudy became mayor. But he'd cut the projected school budget by
$1.3 billion in his first three years and was the only mayor to ever go to Albany
and ask for less state operating aid. He'd also just put $275 million in new capital
construction money into the budget, hardly compensating for reductions totaling
$4.8 billion in the capital plans of the first three years.

Newsday's commentary on the ad stated matter-of-factly: "Giuliani restricted
the flow of money to the schools more severely than any mayor since the city's
fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, forcing many schools to reduce services." Crew, understandably,
said nothing. A month later, Giuliani put this radio ad on the air.
"When a mother comes up to me and says, 'Thank you, Rudy, for fighting back to
save our schools,' I tell her you should thank another Rudy-Schools Chancellor
Rudy Crew." With Messinger saying she could work with Crew but remaining
noncommittal about retaining him, the chancellor had become a campaign issue,
one Giuliani thought helped him.

When Messinger finally did her own first media buy in late August, it was, predictably,
an ad aimed at Giuliani's education record. It depicted Messinger as a former
teacher and public school parent and it hammered at the cuts, overcrowding
and lower test scores. The footage was of kids taking class in a school bathroom.
One kid appeared to be sitting on a urinal. Just like Giuliani's commercial, the ad
was staged and shot in a private school, since it is illegal to film one in a public
school. As soon as it hit the screen, the chancellor hit the ceiling.

The letter he wrote Messinger and released to the Times accused her of "denigrating
the public school system for political gain." He called the urinal scene
fraudulent. "I am shocked that you would recruit children to take part in such sordid
duplicity," he wrote. "You seem determined to mislead the public and demoralize
our children with lies about their public schools."

Crew was both angry-offended, recalls an aide, at the picture of "a little black
boy sitting on the loo"-and delighted. He knew he could turn what Messinger
hoped would be her best press day into her worst. Cristyne Lategano, the mayor's
press secretary, called when the letter went public, "mad with glee," according to
Crew's press secretary Chiara Coletti. With 91,000 more kids than classroom
space, the system did, according to Crew's office, put some kids in converted bathrooms,
closets, hallways and locker rooms. "The question," as the Times put it,
"was whether students were learning in operational bathrooms," or ones with the
urinals removed.

As fine a distinction as this was, the Times published an editorial blasting
Messinger for "manufacturing an illustration of school overcrowding that is worse
than anything in the city's system." Crew's tough letter was the obvious hook for
the editorial angst, but a news story a few pages away was headlined "Schools
Often Turn Bathrooms into Classrooms." A television reporter went to a school in
the Bronx and, though barred from entering, interviewed a teacher who said she
had to teach over the sound of flushing toilets in a bathroom classroom. The
Messinger campaign released photos from the UFT newspaper of a classroom with
a table placed against a bank of urinals, students around the table, and the urinal
tops being used as a bookshelf. It accused Crew of "appalling political partisanship."

When Crew orchestrated a relatively smooth school opening in September
(overcrowding had caused a mess in 1996), the mayor declared: "There hasn't been
a chancellor making this kind of progress in at least the last decade."

The Giuliani campaign aired a rebuttal commercial praising Crew and highlighting
Project Read again, as well as $25 million in new school arts funding
Giuliani had put in the '97 budget. From Crew's point of view, these expensive
new initiatives, as well as the first overall increase in the board's budget in years,
more than justified his indirect aid to the Giuliani campaign. "They could call me
an Uncle Tom," he said later. "I'd take all of that for the arts money and the reading
money. If I was going to get blasted for looking appropriately deferential to the
mayor of the city, that's not a problem for me."

In the final weeks of the campaign, Crew's press office barred the media from
Joseph Pulitzer Junior High School, where Messinger was invited to speak to a
seventh grade class. Ironically, Candidate Rudy had appeared at the same school in
1993. Messinger's campaign claimed that Giuliani had been allowed to bring cameras
and reporters to fifteen public school appearances in the prior twelve months;
Crew's office quibbled about the numbers. At the first mayoral debate in mid-
October, each candidate had only a couple of questions they could direct at the
other. In a final bow to the wedge issue Crew had become, Giuliani used one of his
to ask if Messinger would keep him as chancellor. Messinger squirmed and said
she'd have to talk to Crew first.

Polls showed that voters thought the schools were sliding, yet Crew got a fiveto-
one favorable response. Giuliani wanted some of that to rub off on him. Crew's
aggressive advocacy had already turned Giuliani's prime weakness into a mixed
bag at worst.

***

What no one who knew Rudy Giuliani could have anticipated was how well
he and Crew would get along personally.

They became such fast friends Giuliani would call Crew at 2 A.M. just to chat.
They did scotch and cigars together dozens of times, at the mansion and at an East
58th Street cigar bar owned by Elliot Cuker, one of Giuliani's closest friends. They
stunned their respective staffs on April 1, 1997, when they played an April Fool's
joke and switched roles, Crew showing up at City Hall and Giuliani at the Board
of Ed. They went to Yankee games, often with Andrew. They could make each
other roar with laughter-and not just with Messinger swipes-amid serious talk
about futures, families and fears.

Giuliani liked to talk about his great man theories of history, moving from La
Guardia to Roosevelt. Crew said Giuliani read often about great men, and spoke
comfortably about his sense of historic destiny. "Courageous and bold" was
Giuliani's definition of greatness. "His sense of leadership was to take a position
and hold it," recalls Crew. "The tighter and longer and more tenaciously you held
a position, the greater a leader you were."

Crew and he also compared notes "easily and regularly" on "exacting" fathers,
both of whom were dead. Giuliani told Crew that he had worked in his dad's bar
"for a bit of time, maybe a summer, and watched his father and uncle rough a
drunk up and throw him out." The way Giuliani told the story left Crew feeling it
was "a sad commentary" on Giuliani's yen for "bravado."

"Stern" was the fatherly adjective each favored. Crew also told Giuliani about
his longtime Italian father-in-law, also dead: "He was a guy from Brooklyn, in
construction, a World War II vet, who moved to Poughkeepsie but was a real New
Yorker. I told Rudy about how he handled the hard parts of an interracial marriage-
the intimacy, the growth. He understood the strength and the character I
was talking about."

Their love of the Yankees was a bond too. Crew's father had been a fevered
Dodger fan, drawn by Jackie Robinson, but when the club left for L.A., the love
died. A baseball and football player as a teenager, Crew saved boxtops to try to
qualify as a Yankee bat boy. He loved Elston Howard, the first black Yankee. When
his long reach helped him beat eleven-year-old Andrew to a foul ball at a playoff
game, a cop on the security detail said he had to give it to the kid. "No way I'm
giving this up," he laughed, and the mayor, sitting one seat away, laughed approvingly
with him.

"In the core of his being," Crew says, "there's a person who's very easy to get
to know. There's a youngness, a boyishness to him. It got to be a guys-night-out
thing, with gestures of youth. I decided to deal with it as authentically and honestly
as I could. I would give whatever I got. Not just in terms of friendship. If it
was a fight he wanted, which he sometimes did, I gave it back. If it was a hard reform
agenda, I'd give it back."

Since Crew had met Andrew, he wanted to make sure Giuliani met his brood.
"My kids were frightened for me," he remembers. Giuliani's press clips scared
them. "They thought there was a storm hanging over me all the time." So Crew
took his kids to City Hall for pictures with Giuliani, and they got a little more
comfortable.

"I didn't want to cower. It's not in my makeup. So over wine, I would tell him
so-and-so is afraid of you and he would ask why. We had lots of conversations
about the fears he creates. In a moment of vulnerability, he said he really didn't
want to be feared. He had a rationale about why fear was not a good organizational
trait.

"But I came away with the sense that this is a man who really respects power.
He understands it. He loves to use it and deal with those who have it. He loves individual
bravado. He wants to see if anybody else has it in him. It is his emotional
drug of choice. He pushes. He tries to break others. It is as natural as drinking water
to him."

They were dog lovers as well-Giuliani had Goalie as his constant mansion companion
and Crew had Chance. Both were retrievers, one golden and the other
Labrador. Music was another common thread: Crew was as obsessed with jazz as the
mayor was with opera. Crew played his favorites so loudly at the board that aides
had to ask him to lower it, while Giuliani has been known to spontaneously plunge
into an aria. Neither could ever get the other to appreciate their special sounds.

Giuliani called Crew "a regular guy" in press interviews, a clear contrast with
how he felt about Cortines, and wrapped his arm around him warmly when they
met at public events. The mayor also made a big display of giving Crew a box of
Dominican cigars with a red bow on top for his birthday in 1996, and took a trip
with him to the black rodeo.

When an article appeared in Vanity Fair in early 1997 charging that Giuliani
was having an affair with his press aide, Cristyne Lategano, Crew was sympathetic,
deploring the media's preoccupations. He called Giuliani and Lategano, who
had sometimes joined the boys-night-out cavorting, and said "hang on to your
hats, don't let life turn you sour."

Crew had remarried in 1992, and he and his wife Kathy, a forty-five-year-old
mother of three grown children, were living in the Brooklyn brownstone near the
board that chancellors get gratis. He took Kathy to Gracie Mansion for dinner
shortly after his arrival in 1995 and met Donna, who hosted the dinner for ten or
so. When problems later developed in Crew's marriage, he and the mayor quietly
mused over their troubled marriages to California blondes.

"We did talk about these issues," he recalls. "Public life is so different in New
York. You pay an enormous price. I did discuss my own domestic situation."
Giuliani was guarded, but the scene at the mansion spoke volumes. Crew was
there at least twenty times, he estimates, often until the early hours of the morning.
He never saw Donna other than at the first formal dinner, when she and her
husband barely spoke. The Giuliani marriage was, he quickly recognized, "difficult
space" and he "respected" that by staying away from it.

The mayor and he usually sat on the patio or in a small green room off the patio,
where they could open a window and smoke cigars. They were not allowed to
smoke in the more spacious sitting room, what Crew observed as the "only
oblique reference" to the fact that Giuliani was living with someone else and had
to accommodate to her rules. With Giuliani outside the mansion another thirty
times or so, he observed "no cell phone or other contacts with Donna."

***

The underpinning of the Giuliani/Crew relationship, though, was always mutual
need, crystallizing in the 1997 election. Crew was no rubber stamp for
Giuliani-he had, for example, stopped the NYPD from collecting junior high
school and high school yearbooks and using prom photos as if they were
mugshots, banning a practice Giuliani publicly championed.

The mayor tolerated Crew's independence because it worked for him-it was
one of the reasons the Messinger attack was treated with credibility. He also
couldn't afford a confrontation with Crew on the heels of the Cortines, Gresser
and other board messes. But as much as their agendas and personalities meshed
for the first two years, Crew told his top staff he anticipated "big problems" after
the election.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:28 am

Part 2 of 2

Crew saw Giuliani as the definition of single-minded. Until he was re-elected,
winning big was his solitary synapse, literally the only thing on his mind. Every
muscle movement was an electoral exercise. When Giuliani was certain what his
goal was, he could subordinate everything in life to achieving it. But when he didn't
know what his next move was, he flailed at the air, loose, disembodied, dangerous.
For a year after his win, until Pat Moynihan announced he wasn't running for his
Senate seat again, term-limited Rudy had no plan for himself. Likewise, he had no
plan for the city.

He got into pointless wars-with jaywalkers, street vendors, community gardeners
and taxi drivers. He threw up barricades on sidewalks and bridges, as well
as around City Hall Park-trying to change the way pedestrians crossed streets,
cabbies protested and citizens visited the seat of their government. The bridge
blockade stopped a convoy of striking cabbies from entering the city at all, having
been branded a "terrorist threat" by sidekick Safir. The cabbies were trying to
protest the same sort of onerous rule-changes that had 350 licensed sidewalk vendors
suddenly barred from blocks and blocks of midtown and the financial district.

When he wasn't bulldozing community gardens, he was losing case after case in
federal court over his refusal to grant permits to gather or march to demonstrators
he didn't like. The crudest was his refusal to allow World AIDS Day mourners to
read the names of the newly dead in City Hall Park. The 150 demonstrators who
showed were led through metal detectors into a parking lot surrounded by a
newly installed chain-link fence. Sharpshooters were positioned on the roof of
City Hall to monitor them.

He visited twenty states between December 1997 and December 1998 and became
Mayor MIA, sporting transparently premature presidential or vice presidential
ambitions. Chicken dinners in Arizona assumed the role in his life that broken
water mains once had. He set up three fundraising committees-one useful if he
ran for governor, one for senator and one a federal PAC that was seed money for
this mystery national run. All his crazed quality-of-life initiatives-especially
against jaywalkers and cabbies-got him taming-the-beast time on network news.
That seemed to be the point.

A new Yankee Stadium on the West Side of Manhattan became the fixation of
the first year of Rudy's second term and millions were spent studying it. To stop a
referendum on the stadium he knew he'd lose, he named a commission to revise
the City Charter, which legally displaced any other referendum. Then he named a
second commission in 1999, though charter revisions usually occur every decade
or so. Neither commission came up with a single meaningful change, and in 1999,
the Giuliani proposals lost three to one.

It was a mix of government by groping and government by tantrum. Crew
sensed that it was only a matter of time before this runaway train ran into the
schoolhouse. "I knew Rudy needed to set his sights on something else and I knew
he'd try to do so almost immediately after the election," Crew remembers, unsure
at first what the electoral goal would be. "He was either going to completely embrace
this work and this 80 percent minority system or he was going to distance
himself from it. And he was going to make that determination on the basis of
whether it was performing well enough to earn him acclaim and whether or not
we still had a good relationship and I was ready to do his water carrying."

With Giuliani unfocused and traveling so much, he had less time for Crew in
1998, though they certainly did continue to get together, closing the year with a
particularly warm Christmas dinner and exchange of gifts. The mayor was particularly
pleased because Crew had just turned over school security to the NYPD in
December, allowing Giuliani to finally fulfill a five-year-old campaign promise.
The reading scores also went up two points in June, a two-year hike of 5.9 percent,
the largest sustained hike since 1980 and 1981. The moment was, however, the
calm before the storm.

***

Giuliani certainly found out during a 1996 contretemps over Catholic school
scholarships that vouchers were a matter of principle to Crew. The chancellor
was sandbagged on the scholarship issue, questioned about it during a live television
interview in September, shortly after a disastrously overcrowded school
opening. The reporter, Marcia Kramer, cited a so-far unreported offer from the
Cardinal to enroll a thousand low-achieving public school kids in the parochial
schools. Giuliani had spoken with Cardinal O'Connor about the idea the same
morning as the Crew interview, and given Kramer quotes supporting the concept
as "generous" without saying a word to Crew.

The chancellor kept his coolon the air, calling it an "interesting offer," but cautioning:
"I think we've got to be a little bit careful about the glitz of all of this." He
said he had a meeting scheduled with the Cardinal, which in fact had been set
without any knowledge of the scholarship offer. He said they'd talk about it. Then
he went right to the phone. Days of jockeying with the mayor followed, including
a thirty-five-minute face-to-face at City Hall.

The mayor implored him to help. "I need you to go along with this one. You
have no idea what the church does for the city. You have no idea what they do for
me," he said. The mayor had already gone public with quotes lambasting any educator
who might oppose public funding of the tuition payments for these thousand
kids as "afraid of success" and a captive of special interests. "He could put on
this prosecutoriallook that said I will snuff you out," Crew says. "I never got that
look. The closest I came was over the Catholic schools.

"He said it was a little experiment and I shouldn't overreact. I called the archdiocese's
school director, Catherine Hickey, and asked what kind of a program had
been negotiated. She said, 'What negotiations? There is no program. It just appeared
in the news.' I confronted Rudy and said there is no there there. It's political
hooey. He said we have to work it out. He spoke about the political importance
of the church. I sensed he almost had a deal, a quid pro quo. He would provide resources
and they would lean in his direction. I told him I was going public with the
fact that there's no plan."

When Giuliani found out how implacably opposed Crew was, he shifted and acknowledged
that public funding would be unconstitutional. "You cannot use public
funds to subsidize religious education," he said. He still called on Crew to help
place students in the privately funded program. Crew thought of his father, who
taught him to never be afraid of people who yell and scream. "Just yell and scream
back," he said. "I knew there was nothing behind the curtain but a Victrola."

Crew declared he would not help identify the 5 percent lowest-performing students,
recruit children or administer the program. "Our function, our role, our devotion,
is to public school children, and it will never waver," he told reporters,
adding that his advice to parents considering Catholic schools was "you should
stick with us." Giuliani backed off, but it was hardly the mayor's only attempt to
do a deal with the Cardinal.

"I got a call once from Rudy about textbooks," recalls Crew. "He said the
Cardinal had called him. He wanted me to go beyond the state textbook allocation
to help the Catholic schools. I tried to figure out how close to the line he was asking
me to walk. As long as our kids weren't hurt, I would try to help. But where it
didn't make sense, where it would gut the public school system, where it was
malevolent redistribution, he knew where I stood." In 1997, Crew did agree to allocate
an extra $14.7 million to private and parochial schools for textbooks, after
adding over $2 million in 1996.

As helpful as he was on textbooks, Crew's implacable opposition to the scholarship
plan should have been enough to convince the mayor that he would also
stoutly resist any voucher scheme. In fact, before Giuliani's two-day dalliance
with the facsimile of publicly funded scholarships in 1996, Candidate Rudy and
Mayor Rudy had also repeatedly opposed vouchers. In 1993 he told Sandra
Feldman that "as a lawyer, he believed vouchers were unconstitutional." In a May
1995 appearance at a UFT conference, he said vouchers "would bleed the public
schools of needed funds" and be "a terrible mistake." In a Wharton Club speech in
August 1995 he declared: "Vouchers would weaken, if not create the collapse of
the New York City public school system."

Despite all that, with a Senate race looking more and more plausible, Giuliani
decided to include vouchers in his January 1999 State of the City speech. He told
Crew it was going to be vouchers with a wink. "Don't worry about it," Giuliani
said. "It's just a political thing, a campaign thing. I'm not going to do anything.
Don't take it seriously." Crew agreed to maintain his public posture of opposition,
but to "keep a low profile."

Ironically, in Giuliani's hour-long speech, he inadvertently referred to the very
reason why he should not have taken the risk of starting down the voucher path.
"The present board, the chancellor, City Hall, and the whole operation works
together better than it has in over a decade," he said. "The reason that happened is
because very good, strong personal relationships have developed, and an understanding
that if we don't figure out a way to get along, then we hurt the kids."

He promised to "continue" those strong relationships, saying that the changes
Crew had achieved were "absolutely remarkable." Then he dropped his Parental
Choice Program bombshell, an experiment allowing parents in one, low-performing,
district to buy access to a private or parochial education with a publicly funded
voucher. "I hope people who for all different reasons oppose this-some on a matter
of principle, some for other reasons-I wish they would just suspend judgment
on it for a few years."

Giuliani praised the Schools Choice Scholarship Program, which he had launched
in 1996 independently of the board after Crew opposed the Cardinal's proposal. The
mayor believed that the 46,000 kids who'd filed applications for tuition assistance
under the privately financed program justified a public voucher experiment.
Consultants retained by the program had identified reading and math upticks in two
of the three grades where scholarship children were placed. But their study also
found that the biggest gains were in attendance at religious services. While Giuliani
saluted the program as a successful precursor of vouchers, boosting attendance at
Mass was hardly what Crew saw as a constitutional way of spending tax dollars.

Crew, Coletti and Rizzo were at City Hall for the speech. As Crew and the
mayor had pre-arranged, the chancellor made muted, critical comments to the
press. The three went to Sammy's Noodle Shop in Greenwich Village for a late
lunch afterwards. They agreed that Giuliani had been supportive of Crew in the
speech, incorporating many of his suggestions. They thought his voucher proposal
was so vague and tentative it was more an idea than a plan, just as he had
promised. They thought a confrontation could still be avoided.

The next night, Giuliani and Crew did one of their still regular "social" dinners.
Giuliani spent much of the mid-January evening talking about bilingual education,
half suggesting that he had a strategy to junk it. He had alluded in the State
of the City speech to "a group of other changes that will emerge as we move along
throughout the year." A silent Crew listened as Giuliani auditioned another one.

The two did another night out the next weekend, this time at Cuker's bar. An
uneasy wisp hung in the air, but it was still all smiles. It would be the last boysnight-
out for the two Rudys. Crew and his oldest son Rudy Jr. did return to the
cigar bar the following Sunday for a Super Bowl evening, but Giuliani was surrounded
by top aides, from Cristyne Lategano to Tony Coles, and they had no opportunity
for real conversation.

In early February, when Amadou Diallo was killed, the mayor was suddenly ensnarled
in the worst sustained media crisis of his administration, with daily pickets
and mass arrests arousing intense national interest. His handling of the police
shooting was infuriating to most black New Yorkers and Rudy Crew was no exception.
He offered to talk. He told Giuliani advisers that the mayor was "looking
callous and uncaring." Giuliani was refusing to meet with the most prominent city
and state blacks and Crew, who viewed himself as Giuliani's closest black confidant,
wanted the mayor to reach out. But Giuliani did not respond to Crew's entreaties.
No cigar, no night at Cuker's, not even a return phone call. Crew was
mystified.

Then the mayor sent a budget modification to the council with $4.5 million in
it for voucher funding in the fiscal year that was already half over. His February
financial plan, which contained the outlines for the new budget year that began
July I, called for $12 million to launch the voucher plan. For the first time,
Giuliani's budget office did not tell Crew's budget office about a line item until it
was in print, according to Harry Spence. What really drove the chancellor batty,
though, was when the Times's Dan Barry reported on March 3 that mayoral aide
Tony Coles was "intensely" lobbying nonmayoral members of the board to get
them to back the plan, another unprecedented secret maneuver.

Crew was in California when Coletti reached him with the news. He had been
hearing rumblings about a lobbying effort, even learning that Coles had told one
borough president that Crew wasn't really opposed to the voucher experiment.
But Coles had now publicly acknowledged the effort. He saw this end-run around
him to gain board approval for a plan Giuliani told him was merely a campaign
stunt as a duplicitous violation of their understanding. He called the mayor's office
immediately, but Giuliani was in the air, on his way back from an out-of-state
fundraising swing.

Coletti was getting press calls from everywhere. One call was particularly imperative-
from Karen Hunter, an editorial writer from the Daily News. Though
the paper was a constant thorn in the chancellor's side, he had an excellent relationship
with Hunter, who was working on an editorial against vouchers. He decided
to talk to her.

He told her the mayor had given him no warning about his voucher lobbying.
"What will you do if he pushes it down your throat?" Hunter asked. "Nobody
pushes anything down my throat," said Crew. "I wouldn't stay here if that happens,"
he heard himself say without ever planning to say it. "Always in your life
you come to the proverbial hill to die on. This is mine." He called vouchers" doing
something for some at the expense of many."

When Giuliani landed, the chancellor reached him in the GMC Suburban that
took him all over the city. Why? Crew demanded.

"I thought for the purposes of debate, we'd have an experiment," the mayor
replied. "Don't turn a deaf ear."

"That's fine for an intellectual exercise, but this is real," said Crew. "You never
told me you were going to do this. We've had this conversation about this type of
program before. I want you to know that I've already talked to the Daily News
about this and I told them I would quit over this."

"You didn't do that, did you? You don't mean it, do you?"

"I do," said Crew. "I'm not playing any artful games." Crew felt he had always
been straight with Giuliani, "not bullshitty or guileful."

Giuliani called the News. The anti-voucher editorial was temporarily killed. The
quotes from Crew were turned over to the news desk and became a story instead of
an editorial. The Times learned about the threat to quit too, and threw it on the front
page. An escalating cycle of news stories began. Crew, who was suffering with an ear
infection after a conference, stayed in California an extra day, ill and flustered.

The Times reported that Giuliani met the next day at an undisclosed midtown
Manhattan location with the new board member from Queens who had replaced
Carol Gresser, and with Queens borough president Claire Schulman, a Democrat
who had endorsed the mayor for re-election in 1997. Assured of the votes of Jerry
Cammarata and his own two appointees, Giuliani was looking for a fourth vote for
vouchers.

"The damage was already done," Crew now realizes. "That was the turning
point. I had dared to say no on his national issue. The questions about my charac-
ter started right away. At first, it was just, 'Was I a prima donna?' His choice was
to embrace us or distance himself. From that moment on, I knew what he would
do." When Crew told him of his fixed determination to fight the proposal, Giuliani
moved into submarine mode. "To him, I was Arafat. I was Bratton. I was Al
Sharpton," Crew says in retrospect.

Giuliani certainly wasn't going to let it look that way. He was already taking a
beating in the press for forcing Crew toward the door. Crew extended an olive
branch, telling reporters he would not quit if Giuliani ran the voucher program
out of City Hall and his board was not "contaminated" by it. He still promised to
"rail against it." At a meeting in the mayor's office, Crew reminded Giuliani of his
prior statements on vouchers. "I just changed my mind," the mayor explained.
"The change in the schools isn't happening fast enough." Crew thought the comment
was "a sucker punch." Giuliani was the kind of guy, Crew was suddenly suspecting,
"who could go to a Yankee game with you one night and cause you to lose
your job the next." These abrupt swings were a personal perversion of his, Crew
thought. "Some people see it as venal, scorpion-like. I just think of it as perverse."

The board met privately with Crew and pushed a voucher vote off the table. The
City Council and State Assembly Democrats vowed to kill it. Crew began to think
he could lie back and let Giuliani's ploy die its own natural death.

Then, in late April, Giuliani formally proposed his executive budget. He wanted
council approval to spend $7,000 a year per capita to send 3,000 kids from one
school district to private or religious schools. Since Crew was opposed, he offered
to run the program out of City Hall, draining as much as $24 million out of the
board's budget in addition to the program's $12 million operating cost. The Times
called it "another badge" for Giuliani to wear" on the national stage."

Though it was only two days after the massacre at Columbine High School in
Colorado, Giuliani also said at the budget briefing that "the whole school system
should be blown up" because it was "dysfunctional." He announced the withholding
of $6 billion in city funding for the board's construction budget, charging that
"there was money going to boroughs that didn't need that much money" because
Crew and the board majority "had to get the vote of that borough" to pass the
plan. In fact, Giuliani was demanding a shift in capital funds to Queens, the borough
whose vote he needed-to pass vouchers, dump Crew or make any other
changes he might want.

When the blow-up speech provoked a press outcry, he turned the heat up another
notch. He said he could not "be held accountable" for the state of the city
schools because "you don't give me enough control of it." He called for the abolition
of the board, demanding that he be allowed to run the schools. The mayor
who'd campaigned for re-election seventeen months earlier citing school improvements
he claimed to have caused, was obviously preparing for a Senate race of obfuscation.

Crew released a blistering letter, faxed to hundreds of opinion makers, accusing
Giuliani of "reckless" and "destructive" remarks about the school system. He
called the voucher plan "an attempt to dismantle" public schools. "When the
mayor declares that the whole system should be blown up, he tells 1.1 million
children and thousands of parents, teachers and administrators that they are wasting
their time in schools that he has suddenly dismissed as no good and beyond
redemption."

Giuliani then refused to answer questions about whether he wanted Crew to
remain, saying only that the chancellor should "present an agenda of reform and
not just defend the status quo." When Crew had assailed Ruth Messinger in 1997,
Giuliani had happily declared: "You create an unfair depiction of the system he's
running, he's going to fight you." Having done it himself and provoked a similar
Crew retort, he decided to ignore a week of Crew phone messages. A Daily News
poll showed most New Yorkers solidly behind Crew in the head-to-head with the
mayor, with 54 percent saying Giuliani was proposing vouchers to help his Senate
campaign, while only 30 percent thought he was "serious" about improving
schools.

"When Rudy sees a need to take someone out," Crew says now, "he has a machine,
a roomful of henchmen, nicking away at you, leaking crazy stories, usually
to the Post. He is not bound by the truth. I have studied animal life and their
predator/prey relations are more graceful than this. You either capitulate to it or
you die politically." The death by a thousand cuts that Bratton had described was
under way again.

In May, Giuliani put the votes together on the board to defeat the Crew capital
plan the mayor had called "realistic" in January. The TV station New York One reported
that mayoral insiders were calling Crew a "complete moron" on the budget.

The Post ran a story written by a City Hall reporter that derided Crew for taking
thirteen work-related trips in twelve weeks-mostly to education conferences
around the country. Starting back in March, the story said, an administration official
had begun talking about Crew's "love of California," as if he was always there.

The mayor hosted his first big Senate fund-raiser and the guest speaker was Jeb
Bush, the Florida governor who'd just steered a voucher plan through the state
legislature. Tony Coles traveled to Chicago, where the Board of Education had
been abolished, even though Giuliani had pointedly contended in his State of the
City speech that New York's system was performing better than Chicago's.

When the reading scores dropped five points in June, and math scores ten, Crew
was left twisting in the wind. Giuliani said he was "very alarmed and concerned."
Positioning himself anew as more critic than culprit, he called for radical reform
with himself in charge. He stopped short of directly blaming the chancellor he'd
saluted for more than three years. Crew has "done a very good job within a system
that is totally nonfunctional," he said.

A month later, a new state test found only a third of the city's kids meeting language
arts standards, a devastating blow that sent Giuliani running as far away
from the system as he could get. The combination of scores made it a political imperative
for Giuliani to pin responsibility for this failure elsewhere.

The board appointed a subcommittee headed by Jerry Cammarata, the Staten
Island member close to Giuliani, to evaluate Crew's performance. The chancellor's
five-year contract was up for review in December and Cammarata was open about
his intention of doing a tough, comprehensive assessment.

In mid-June, Hillary Clinton, who was then contemplating a Senate run, visited
a couple of Manhattan schools, one with Crew. Giuliani blasted both of them. "Did
I think that the appearance of the chancellor and the First Lady was basically a politically
motivated event? The answer is yes." It was actually the second time Crew
had appeared in a school with Clinton. On April30-just days after Crew released
his stinging letter-Clinton was a volunteer principal for a day. Crew and Clinton
wound up in a Times photo at the end-of-the-day session for all volunteer principals.
Giuliani was invited but didn't show.

"When Hillary was invited to visit a school by the principal," Crew recalls,
"Cammarata prepared a memo demanding to know who gave the principal the authority
to invite her and whether the superintendent knew. I called the mayor directly.
I told him this is the First Lady of the United States of America and that I
could not bar her. This was not Ruth Messinger. He told me she was using her
White House status to leverage her campaign. I told him I am not saying no."

Crew says he also got livid calls from Tony Coles about a third Clinton appearance
at a school and that Ninfa Segarra, one of Giuliani's board appointees, told
him over dinner just how upset the mayor was over his principal-for-a-day picture
with Giuliani's putative opponent.

The worst of it hit on August 3. Giuliani sent Crew a "Dear Chancellor" letter:
"1 am concerned that you have canceled our last six regularly scheduled meetings
on education. Whatever may be your reasons for canceling these meetings, I hope
you will be able to put them aside so that we can continue to work together to reform
our school system." It was leaked to the Post and News, together with a blind
quote from a mayoral aide: "It seems he's got one foot out the door."

Coletti responded by pointing out that Crew's top deputies Spence and Rizzo
were on vacation in July, saying "the chancellor really feels he needs one of them
with him." With memories of Cortines dancing in his head, Crew wasn't about to
meet with Giuliani alone anymore. The other reason he wasn't meeting-which
Coletti did not mention-was the death of his first wife, Angela.

"I had four kids all over the country," Crew remembers. "I had to go out to
California, where she died of breast cancer, and go through one funeral. Then
bring her body back to Poughkeepsie and do another. The day of the Post story I
was delivering a eulogy for her upstate. The people at the Italian Center in
Poughkeepsie didn't want anyone to see the story. The whole thing told me a lot
about this man. This is a maniac. On the day I was burying my wife, I have these
people concocting this world of treachery."

Someone at the funeral incensed about the mayor's potshot called the Post. The
Post called Crew's office. Coletti pleaded with the reporter not to write anything
about Angela's death since Crew regarded it as a private family matter. Notice of
the death had appeared in the Poughkeepsie paper, though, so the Post saw it as a
legitimate story. It went with a single line buried in an account of the continued
strain between Giuliani and Crew that made no explicit reference to the hurtful
timing of the mayor's letter.

City Hall claimed in quiet conversations that it knew nothing about Angela's
death when the letter was released. With two Giuliani-appointed board members
on the same floor as Crew, his aides doubted it. From Crew's standpoint, it didn't
matter. He thought the letter and release were horrid acts no matter what Giuliani
knew-"a phone call would've sufficed." When Giuliani's secretary called and
asked if they could send flowers, Crew told them "not to send a thing."

What was also simmering just beneath the surface was the suspicion in Crew
quarters that Giuliani's "henchmen" were leaking stories about his current wife,
Kathy. "I was getting calls right and left about Crew's marriage being in trouble,"
Coletti recalls. "Reporters said it was coming out of City Hall. The contention was
that it was affecting his stability." Crew's missing wedding band was noticed by a
gossip columnist who never went to the board. The Daily News got Kathy on the
unlisted number at the brownstone, then they reached Rudy Jr. at his corporate
job. Everyone was upset.

"There were inquiries about Kathy and myself that occurred close to some of
this stuff," says Crew. "It was off limits, personal stuff, rumor and innuendo. The
staff kept most of it away from me."

A week after Giuliani's letter, he and Crew got together at City Hall.
Surrounded by aides, they talked for forty-five minutes about summer school and
the planned September opening. The mayor was less antagonistic than he had
been at the last meeting in June. "As opposed to a more friendly relationship,"
Crew told reporters afterward, "this is much more businesslike, operational, and
that's fine."

A second meeting occurred on August 24. Crew suspected something was up
when he got a call that morning at home from Giuliani's gadfly friend, Elliot
Cuker. "Has the mayor called you?" asked Cuker. "He wants to get it to be right.
The mayor thinks the world of you." Crew remembers telling Cuker that he was
not afraid of the mayor and that he would not" cower" -terms that had become
second nature to him during this war. When the meeting at City Hall ended a few
hours later, Giuliani asked his and Crew's staff to leave his office. Crew had unsuccessfully
sought a private moment with the mayor when their relationship fell
apart over the blow-up speech, but Giuliani had rebuffed him. Now the two old
friends were alone again, for the first time in many months.

''I'm sorry to hear about your wife," Giuliani said. He walked over to Crew, who
was standing, wary, drained. He wrapped his arms around the chancellor and
hugged him. "1 miss you," he said. "1 want things to be the way they were." Crew
felt his own body stiffen involuntarily. "1 miss you too," he replied, uncertain
about what to say or do. "This is very sudden." He wanted to get ahold of himself,
to think this through.

The anger about everything-from vouchers to the funeral-stewed inside of
him. So did the suspicion that Giuliani had used the confidences they'd shared
about his marriage to stir the pot. "1 would not be surprised if they tried to plant
the stories," he says. "It had something to do with why 1 stiffened. These were examples
of how low they would go to get the goods on you. There was nothing they
wouldn't do."

"We need to bury the hatchet," said the mayor. "Call and we'll set up a dinner."
Crew says he had his secretary call four times and mark each attempt in her book.
He never got a date. "Rudy was playing a game," he now thinks. "He is the quintessential
artful dodger, saying one thing and doing another. None of it was true."

Three days after the meeting, Crew disclosed to the Times that he was considering
an offer from the University of Washington to head a new research institute.
He talked about "the very slippery slope" of the political landscape in New
York. He said the last two meetings with Giuliani had been "refreshingly harmonious,"
and that he certainly wanted to stay through the end of the next
school year.

But Crew had come to believe that the only way he could make himself acceptable
to Giuliani again was in a Stepin Fetchit prone position. "1 don't like to fight,"
he said afterward. "I like to fix things. There was no guile in my relationship with
him. I didn't go after press. He knew I wasn't there to make a name. But he never
understood who I was.

"If Rosa Parks could do what she did, if my people were hosed and spit on so I
could walk in the front door of City Hall, did he really think I would get there and
surrender? Didn't he know from whence my heart was speaking? He thought I
was engaging in some political gibberish, that I would change under fire. He never
knew me. He doesn't understand issues of race and class." All of the combat and
intrigue had left Crew so uncertain he wavered, Hamlet-like, about staying or going,
sending out such mixed signals even his supporters were dismayed.

On December 23, 1999, exactly a year after the two Rudys had exchanged
Christmas presents over dinner, Rudy Giuliani put four votes together to fire
Rudy Crew. Two investigative reports that the Times called "damaging but flimsy"
had been issued shortly before the vote-one about inflated attendance was released
by the governor; the other about cheating on standardized tests had been
rushed out by an investigations commissioner appointed by Giuliani. A frazzled
Crew had embarrassed himself by saying a Republican city councilman who called
for his resignation was "too short," at five foot six inches, to criticize him. The
chancellor contended he was saying the newly elected councilman was "too short"
on experience.

The vote took ten minutes. Crew stayed with his children at the brownstone, a
spokeswoman saying he preferred to be "lynched in absentia." Giuliani claimed
the board members made up their own minds, but that he talked with them and
wholeheartedly agreed. "There was no willingness to try to take on the kind of reform
that was necessary," he said. "I don't see how they would come to any other
decision." Dan Barry, the Times reporter who'd chronicled the demise of the
friendship, concluded that the mayor "became fed up with the long-playing Crew
psychodrama and let it be known that the chancellor's ouster would make a fine
Christmas present."

Steve Sanders, the chair of the Assembly's education committee, called the mayor
at the last moment to try to convince him to pull back, but the mayor didn't return
the call. Sanders did reach Randy Levine, who had become a deputy mayor, and
Levine reportedly tried to persuade Giuliani to stop it. "People were trying to calm
him down," a source told Barry, "but he was gone on this one."

Crew said: "I could tell that the same storm that brought me here was brewing
to take me away." In his later retrospective, all he could see was the mayor's flashpoint
temper. "There is a very, very powerful pathology operating inside this
man," Crew says now. "I don't believe he's driven by race. I believe there is an
anger he feels about some piece of his life that just takes over."

"Change is good," said the mayor.

"I think they should try to get someone new-quick-so all the boys and girls
don't stop learning," said Clifford Hall, eight, a Brooklyn third grader quoted in
the Times. "Some people might not know a lot of math or how to spell if they
don't get somebody soon."

***

In fact, City Hall had no game plan. Crew left overnight and the board had to
rush to find an interim successor, who would be offered a six-month contract
while the board searched for a permanent successor. Giuliani tried unsuccessfully
to block the appointment of Harold Levy, but he got the job anyway. The Queens
member who'd voted with Giuliani to oust Crew resisted him to go with Levy, a
businessman who sat on the State Board of Regents and enjoyed powerful support
from state assembly Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver. Giuliani then refused for
months to talk to the new chancellor and turned his State of the City speech into
a demand that the board sell its headquarters building-a new version of the old
blow-up rhetoric.

A nationwide chancellor search early this year netted a paltry number of applicants.
The newspaper spin was that others hesitated to apply because Levy might
want the long-term appointment and have an inside track. The other possibility
was that the Legend of Rudy was scaring prominent applicants away.

The system was meanwhile spinning out of control. As a bone to Giuliani in the
throes of the spring combat, Crew had agreed to accelerate his schedule for getting
rid of social promotion, the time-honored practice of passing below-standard kids.
For the first time since taking office, Giuliani started pushing extremely hard on
promotional practices when the voucher issue stalemated in May. It was clear the
City Council would kill vouchers, leaving Giuliani still in need of an education initiative
he could point to in the Senate campaign.

Flunking thousands of minority kids had just the right pizzazz. If done rightusing
more than test scores to select the kids and offering the chosen ones lots of
well-planned remediation-Crew believed enforcing new standards could be as
educational as it was punitive. But the Giuliani push forced him to rapidly put a
program in place for the summer of 1999. Using only the scores, 35,000 kids at
three grade levels were required to take classes in schools without air conditioning
during one of the hottest summers in city history. Only 14,000 passed the exam
when the summer was done, dooming the rest to repeat their grade, at least theoretically.

But then, in September, the board's testing company admitted they'd made a
mistake in grading the tests. They'd sent 8,668 kids who'd actually passed to the
summer session. "This is a good thing that happened. If I were a parent," said
Giuliani, apparently forgetting he was one, "I'd say thank you ... they got more
education."

Crew's successor Levy spent most of his first weeks in office preparing for the
chaotic summer of 2000, when as many as 250,000 kids may have to take class,
with social promotion eliminated systemwide. He wound up locked in a constant
war of words with Giuliani about how to recruit the teaching staff for this massive
undertaking. Giuliani insisted that his latest education innovation-merit paybe
introduced as part of the summer program. He wanted bonuses to go to the
teachers whose kids increased their scores.

This position, of course, pitted him against his onetime friends at the UFT.
They'd already broken with him over vouchers and were openly aligned with
Hillary Clinton. That made them fodder for his mill. He derided incentive deals
Levy structured to try to induce teachers to work. He went out of his way to assail
the union as a bar to reform. No one could tell how it would all turn out, but
the system was in unmistakable disarray: no real relationship between the mayor
and the chancellor, maybe no headquarters, an end to social promotion and recurring
cycles of tumult.

Six and a half years into Giuliani's reign, reading scores were up by a single point
or down by three points, depending on how you tabulate the mistake-ridden 1999
scores. Math scores were down three points. School overcrowding worsened by 6
percent in elementary schools. Attendance was down in junior highs. Without the
luck of a national wave to ride, as on the crime front, the magical mayor had no
numbers to bandy about as evidence of his educational genius. All he had was Alibi
High.

He'd huffed and he'd puffed, even threatening to blow the house down. But,
with the capital budget cuts, there weren't even any bricks left for a sturdier one.
His classroom fairy tale certainly had no storybook ending.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:29 am

Part 1 of 2

Nineteen: Sex and the City

DONNA HANOVER WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO ACTUALLY RUN FOR FIRST
lady. The mayoral spouses of the last half-century-Susan Wagner, Mary
Lindsay, Mary Beame and Joyce Dinkins-were housewives without careers or
public profiles of their own. Donna, on the other hand, had been a broadcast
journalist for nearly two decades by the time she arrived at Gracie Mansion. As
consumed with winning the mayoralty as Rudy was, she'd merged her career
ambitions with his, confident that they'd hit grand heights together.

So she became a strategic and humanizing presence in the 1989 and 1993
campaigns, appearing in four television commercials and narrating some of
them. She was one of the inner circle of five that reviewed all of the commercials,
and, by her own account, she helped "write speeches and raise money."
Key campaign aides in 1989 and 1993 described her as the quickest route to
Rudy's saner side, a media-wise and forceful counselor.

Visible almost daily at the campaign headquarters, particularly in 1993, she
saved him from his own clumsy indecision on abortion, convincing enough
women in a stridently pro-choice town that she would not let him waver in office
as he had on his way to it. "I think I was helpful in attracting women to the
campaign," she said, understating her role the day after the win. Moderately
modern in outlook, effusive yet smart in person, and accomplished by all but
the loftiest professional standards, she was just what this hardened son of the
fifties needed to make himself marketable.

"I can't think of an important decision I've made that I haven't talked about
with Donna," Giuliani told New York magazine three months after moving
into Gracie Mansion in 1994. "She has a remarkable understanding of history
and politics." In a People magazine interview published in June, he called her
"my closest adviser."

Rudy was not just talking about campaign decisions. He might well have
never become U.S. Attorney had it not been for her, urging him to leave
Washington out of what she saw then as mutual career interests in New York. She
trained him in camera management while he was US. Attorney, teaching him the
art of the sound bite, and what to do with his hands, his eyes and his smile.

Her extraordinary pilgrimages to New Haven for the Friedman trial in 1986,
shoeless and red-eyed, were a measure of her understanding that this world-iswatching
case was indispensable to their next joint step. She talked on those train
trips with a reporter about her own ambitions for Rudy, and the breathlessness of
it told him she saw no limits to where they could go. The mansion that beckoned
wasn't just Gracie. She asked the reporter what he thought Rudy should run for
and he said her husband should remain US. Attorney, contending Giuliani could
do more good there than anywhere, as a forcefield of deterrence that would make
every corrupt pol, Wall Street trader or mobster think twice. Her eyes went blank,
the conversation ebbed, the bubble she strains to carry inside her burst.

Donna and Rudy understood that if she was to successfully rub off on him,
lightening his public gravity, they would have to put their private life on display.
They did it self-consciously. He was certainly the first US. Attorney in New York
photographed on his bed with his wife, both of them playfully hugging in Yankee
caps for a magazine photographer. They told reporters they danced to Frank
Sinatra records alone on New Year's Eve. Donna detailed nuances of their earliest
exchanges in Miami. Rudy recounted how he conceived the commission case in a
private moment with her in their Washington townhouse. They dropped gossip
items each time they set a wedding date in 1983 and 1984. Two days before
Andrew's fourth birthday in 1990, Donna told the Daily News he would be getting
glow-in-the-dark sheets. Their staged kisses-for still photographers and
Inside Edition-were full mouth.

In a 1993 campaign interview with Newsday, Donna announced: "My husband
is the most virile man." She added that he was "so strong and wonderful," as well
as "the most good-looking man in the city as far as I'm concerned." In case the
reader still hadn't gotten the point, she concluded: "I love him just the way he is."
The gush machine went on to ask the reporter: "I'd love to have you put something
in about how wonderful my mother-in-law is as a babysitter. I do have a
wonderful mother-in-law."

In the 1989 campaign, she told reporters that they went out of their way to keep
the family together on holidays, recounting how Rudy came to WPIX with
Andrew if she had to work. "We go to the same events," she said, "incorporating
our family life with our professional lives."

When Giuliani considered running for the US. Senate in December 1987,
Donna openly discussed the impact of a Senate seat on their family. She told the
Times it might require too prolonged a separation, given her job in New York.
"That's definitely one of the major things on both of our minds," she said. "How
much it would mean him being away from us. We waited a long time to have this
little boy." (Andrew was born two years after their 1984 marriage.) She said she
would ultimately support a race "if he says, 'You and Andrew are #1 in my life.'"

Rudy and Donna's public intimacy did not end when they won. The inaugural
was a giant family affair, with her parents, Bob and Gwen Kofnovec, flying in from
California to take second row center seats next to Uncle Rudy Giuliani and wife
Viola, right behind Governor and Matilda Cuomo. Grandpa Bob advertised his
Texas roots by donning a white cowboy hat on the walk up Broadway, lugging
four-year-old Caroline in his arms.

Seven-year-old Andrew stole the show by joining Rudy at the podium throughout
the inaugural address, waving, yawning, echoing his father's words, even
punching his fist in the air for emphasis. Donna, from her seat, tried at one point
to stop Andrew from moving around the lectern, demanding that he "stay there."
But he ignored her, carrying on so outrageously he made himself an instant David
Letterman celebrity. When Rudy appeared on the show afterwards, Letterman
deadpanned: "We wanted to have his son Andrew, but tonight Andrew is with
Koppel on Nightline."

Donna stood with her husband and two children when he took the oath of office,
just as she had during the two private ceremonies that preceded it. In an unusually
emotional display, Rudy saluted her in his inaugural address, calling
Donna "my wife, my partner, my inspiration and my lover." Donna, he said, "is
one of three people I believe most responsible for my standing here." He named
Peter Powers and Dave Garth as the other two.

Rudy and Donna touched affectionately all day, he grabbing her shoulder at
times and she reaching backwards to clasp his hand. Just like on their wedding day,
they cut a giant cake together with a single knife, this one embroidered with the
city seal and consumed by a few of the five thousand who gathered at a Pepsi party
afterwards.

"I made two resolutions," he said on New Year's Day at City Hall. "One was to
be the very best mayor I could be. And the other was to be the very best father and
husband I could be." The inaugural stretched out over two ceremonial days, with
Rudy and Donna inseparable, traveling to every borough, visiting precincts and
firehouses with boxes of chocolate chip cookies. Giuliani's signed, three-paragraph
message on the first page of the inaugural program began: "Donna and I are humbled
by the faith you have placed in us." The rest of the message was a series of
plural pledges.

Monsignor Alan Placa, who married them and baptized their children, said they
were resolved to create a "Fortress Giuliani" within the two-story, creamy yellow
Gracie Mansion that replicated as nearly as possible their modest, joined apartments
on East 86th Street. To furnish this real home within so public a space, Donna said
they brought with them only their own old furniture, which she described as "what
Rudy had when we were married, and what I had, modified by Toys 'R Us."

She told an interviewer that April: "When Rudy was elected, I said I want to
raise a family, but I want to have an impact." She announced that "one of the reasons"
she became a journalist was because she "always wanted to know what was
going on on the inside." Now, she smiled, she was "as on the inside as you can be."
So she made sure she was included in high-level discussions at City Hall and the
mansion, declaring she would be the mayor's "adviser and confidant." Likening
First Lady to being the wife of a CEO, she described herself as "the person who
says 'I love you very dearly but you're not right about that.'"

She allowed a Daily News reporter to accompany her for a month in the spring
of 1994-0n everything from a stint at her Food Network job to a Harlem Week
visit-and she was still telling chirpy Andrew jokes four months after the inaugural.
Described by the News as "a 90s incarnation of a 50s wife and mom," she
raved about the compatibility of her french fries and focaccia cable life and her role
as First Lady. "It's a perfect working mother's job. I can do a first-lady breakfast
and a first-lady lunch and then either go and put my kids to bed or do another
first-lady event."

In addition to a vast mansion staff, she hired four personal assistants at a public
cost of $127,000 a year, headed by a press secretary and another assistant who told
a reporter she advised Hanover" on confidential issues." After a couple years of
raises for all four, they were up to $167,000. This staff-far more than any prior
First Lady's-was put on a city payroll that was shrinking in the first two Giuliani
years faster than at any time since the near bankruptcy of the mid-70s.

Fiscal woes were also not allowed to intrude on happy time at the repainted
riverfront mansion, where most of the colors in the living quarters were instantly
changed to lighter shades on sunny Donna's orders. Donna started fundraising for
major renovations at the mansion from the moment she moved in, raising
$421,630 in 1994 from private donors, and spending almost all of it to strip the
chimneys down to the original brick, replace railings and carpets and acquire antiques.
It was twice what David and Joyce Dinkins had spent in four years, and the
most raised for the mansion since a major 1984 renovation. At the same time, the
NYPD installed a high-tech $150,000 security system, even though the mansion
was surrounded by fences and had twenty-four-hour police details.

Donna's "Cool Schools" project-with her presenting a $2,500 check, a wall
clock and t-shirts each month to two good public schools-was announced at the
same time that her husband was unveiling the worst school budget cuts in decades.
While Rudy became the first mayor in history to ask Albany for less school aid,
and his deputy mayor Fran Reiter endorsed federal education slashes championed
by congressional Republicans, Hanover bustled around the city to create what she
called a "positive perception" about working schools.

She also tried to meld her professional and mayoral lives. Asked by a reporter
which name she used, Donna responded: "I can never remember how I left the
dry-cleaning. Since I got married, I've used all combinations of the names. Donna
Hanover is my professional name. The mortgage is Donna Hanover Giuliani; the
taxes, Donna Hanover Giuliani .... I would prefer Donna Hanover Giuliani, although
in a professional capacity, I would continue to use Donna Hanover. I'm
comfortable with any combination."

The mayor was drawn into her business life in minor and major ways. When
she did a cameo appearance in the movie The Paper, Rudy rushed back from his
first Washington visit as mayor to attend the March 15 premiere with Donna (he
left midway through because a cop was shot). He was also attentive to her TV Food
Network (TVFN) friends. In fact, the fledgling network's association with the new
First Family played a behind-the-cameras role in its gaining a channel in New
York City-another example, just like WPIX, of how Donna's ties to Rudy influenced
her career.

On February 28, two months after the inaugural, Giuliani took the unusual step
of attending what his private schedule called "the management luncheon" of the
network, though mayors rarely appear at corporate events for start-up companies.
TVFN debuted in some markets on November 23, 1993, but it was unable to find
even temporary space on the congested New York City cable dial until February 1,
1994. All it could get then, however, was a channel that NBC's America's Talking
was slated to take over that July. Shortly after TVFN lost its NBC channel, Reese
Schonfeld, its founder and CEO, brought his family to the mansion for a private
Thursday dinner with the Giuliani family. It was Schonfeld who had hired Donna.
In addition to the dinner, Schonfeld, who says he's been close to the Giulianis for
years, recalls a Sunday lunch at the mansion. He insists it was all family chitchat
at the gatherings.

Schonfeld acknowledges, however, that he was then frantically searching for a
spot on the dial. He says a Manhattan channel is worth "five channels in any other
market because that's where the advertisers are." While Schonfeld says his fledgling
network was entitled from the beginning to a New York channel as a result of com-
plicated national cable transmission agreements, he was unsure how he would get
one when he hired Donna in the summer of 1993. While he denies it was a factor in
her hiring, TVFN may well have seen Donna's identification with the network as a
potential asset in gaining NYC access should her husband win the mayoralty.

Time Warner controlled the Manhattan dial-but its city-awarded franchise
was regulated by a Giuliani agency and up for renewal in Giuliani's first term.
Donna's presence at TVFN certainly couldn't have hurt with T/W, whose president,
Dick Parsons, was a close friend of Giuliani's going back to their joint days at
Patterson, Belknap, as well as a top campaign and transition aide to the new mayor.
T/W facilitated the network's temporary use of the NBC station, as did Roger
Ailes, the former Giuliani campaign manager who was then running America's
Talking.

When the NBC option ran out, though, T/W could not deliver a permanent
channel. Dick Aurelio, the T/W executive who ran the city franchise, says now
that media companies "were standing in line to get on our system." Aurelio and
Fred Dressler, another T/W executive who negotiated with Schonfeld, say that
TVFN had no transmission rights to a channel that put them ahead of others on
the waiting line.

Schonfeld's first meeting with Aurelio was a 1994 breakfast at Michael's
Restaurant on the East Side, arranged by none other than the mayor's media consultant,
David Garth. Garth called Aurelio to set up the breakfast and, as Aurelio
remembers it, he told Garth on the phone that he didn't think there was anything
he could do to help Schonfeld get a channel. It was Garth, says Aurelio, who
broached the notion of TVFN "getting one of the city public-access channels" at
the breakfast. "The impression I had was that Garth was wearing a Giuliani hat,"
said Aurelio, a onetime deputy mayor in the Lindsay administration. Aurelio had
last seen his old friend Garth at a 1993 dinner, when Garth blasted him about
T/W's campaign coverage of his client, Candidate Rudy.

"Garth never said explicitly that he was doing this for Giuliani," Aurelio says.
"But I definitely had the impression that he was. It was implicit that the mayor
was involved. I just assumed I was getting more pressure from the Giuliani people."
Aurelio says he told Schonfeld and Garth it would be "political dynamite"
because of Donna's ties to the network. He also warned that use of a public access
channel for commercial purposes posed a possible legal problem. In fact, when
Giuliani tried a few years later to deliver a city channel to Fox, another Donna employer,
a federal judge barred it.

Schonfeld acknowledges Garth's role in pushing Aurelio and seeking a city
channel, saying Garth and he live in the same West Side building and that Garth
did it as a personal favor. Told that Aurelio saw it as pressure from Giuliani,
Schonfeld said: "He couldn't have read it more incorrectly." With Aurelio unable
to deliver a city channel, Schonfeld says Garth talked directly to Rudy. "The
mayor said there was no way he could help us, particularly because Donna worked
at the network," Schonfeld recalls.

Schonfeld says T/W had meanwhile put him together with a channel controlled
by a New Jersey public television station, NJN. The best T/W could do, though,
was get the Food Network on from midnight to 3 P.M., when NJN aired no programming.
Donna's show, as Schonfeld recalls it, was a prime-time newscast outside
New York City, but on at the crack of dawn in the city. So Schonfeld launched
a protracted political campaign in New Jersey" to find the right person" to sell him
NJN's New York rights.

Since it was a state-owned channel and Christie Whitman was governor,
Schonfeld wound up meeting with Candy Straight, a top Whitman fund-raiser
and lobbyist. Straight, who sat on an NJN board, had also been involved in both
Giuliani campaigns, donating $6,500 to the 1993 effort. Straight was such a close
friend of Donna's that Donna had attended her private birthday party. "1 can't tell
you if I did or didn't talk to Donna about Straight," says Schonfeld. "1 can't remember
if Schonfeld mentioned Donna," adds Straight, who concedes she "certainly
knew Donna was on the network." Straight steered him to other insiders
close to the governor, Schonfeld says, and he eventually got the support of the
Whitman-appointed chair of the state Public Broadcasting Authority, Joseph
Montuoro, another GOP fund-raiser.

Schonfeld acknowledges he bought the valuable channel's air time for eight
years without any competitive bidding for a piddling $4.3 million. He maintains
that no one else could have purchased the channel since T/w had assigned it to the
network; NJN echoed Schonfeld in their own statement. But Aurelio says "anybody
could have made that deal" and that he had "no idea" why the state didn't
auction it. Aurelio recalls receiving a letter from Whitman's office authorizing the
sale to TVFN. "There might have been some particular influence," says Aurelio. As
soon as Schonfeld closed the Jersey deal, he left as managing partner, having created
what is now a cable colossus.

The Food Network job--Donna's first in three years-started the turnaround in
her financial condition. Her 1994 income of $114,659-most of it from the network-
more than tripled her 1993 freelance earnings of $32,773. With most living
expenses covered by the city, she was, for the first time in her life, free to salt
away a substantial percent of what would prove to be a mounting yearly income.
Donna's total Food Network earnings alone through 1999 were $720,321.

Not only was 1994 a good year for Donna financially, it was a good year for her
and her husband personally, at least most of it was. Rudy and she hosted dozens of
the private dinner parties she loved, turning the official dining room, with its table
for twenty-two, ornate off-center fireplace and finely detailed wallpaper of French
monuments, into a buzzing hive of high-energy networking. Donna estimated
that they were doing "one or two dinner parties a week," as well as lithe usual four
or five receptions."

Most of the receptions occurred in the mansion ballroom, which seats 120 under
high ceilings, with tall, gaping windows, Greek columns, candle chandeliers
and a rare, ornamented mahogany commode. When it was warmer, the receptions
spilled out, past the aqua-green shutters, onto the northeast porch and the back
lawn, from which the Giulianis and their guests could catch a panoramic view of
the Triborough Bridge, connecting Manhattan in a string of lights with Queens
and the Bronx. The lawn, bordered by a high wooden fence and thick shrubs, is
part of the eleven-acre Carl Schurz Park, all compacted landfill overhanging the
FDR Drive. Rudy and Donna could stand in their backyard and hear and feel the
humming city they were such a part of beneath their feet.

In addition to a rather mundane and messy office for four in .the basement,
Donna had her own sitting room on the main floor, off the southwest corner of the
ballroom. It was named the Susan Wagner room in honor of Robert Wagner's
wife, and it was modeled after a tearoom in a little girl's dollhouse. Opposite the
portrait of Susan Wagner, one of a doting Donna was hung. Donna gave interviews
here, lots of them in 1994. She entertained friends in one-on-ones and small
groups. Rudy had his den nearby, with a large leather couch and a pillow embroidered
with the phrase: "It ain't easy being king."

Rudy's private schedule the first year revealed a remarkable number-at least
for him-of family dinners and other family time, particularly on Sunday. On
February IS, Donna's birthday, the schedule commanded that Rudy "depart City
Hall for Gracie Mansion at 6:15 SHARP! "-the only such invocation that year.
The rest of the night is marked "personal time." He helped fix a dinner for two
that night and they danced to Johnny Mathis, with the kids secreted upstairs.

On Rudy's birthday in May, the words "DAY on" dominate the calendar, the
only time they appear in 1994. On their anniversary in April, the calendar indicates
a 7 P.M. City Hall departure for the mansion and "personal time," an atypical
early end to his day. Each was an earmark of Giuliani's attempt to get some
balance between family and a job so vital it consumed him.

In their private time at the fourteen-room mansion, they managed to make the
main floor-which is open to tourists one day a week-a homey and natural set-
ting. Donna told stories of family runs through it, sometimes after Goalie, the lab
they bought when they moved in. But the private second floor, up a curving staircase
or an elevator in Rudy's den, was a sanctuary, and joyously their own in the
early months. It was the first time in twenty years-since John and Mary
Lindsay-that a family with children occupied the mansion, and the creaky wood
floors seemed to celebrate.

Donna was on such a roll she was celebrating as well-most effusively in an interview
with Town & Country, done in the early fall for their Christmas edition.
She spread eight years of family Christmas cards out on a table, every year since
Andrew's birth-revealing" changing hairlines and hairstyles."

She talked about how their festivities always start with the night before the
Thanksgiving Parade, "when we take the children to West 77th Street to watch the
balloons being blown up." She said they'd take the Rockefeller Center window
walk, have Helen over for Christmas Eve memories about "life in her old
Brooklyn neighborhood," watch It's a Wonderful Life for the hundredth time and
trim the tree with, among other things, a Virgin Island seashell she and Rudy had
saved from a trip years before.

"There is a sense of continuity, of history having happened, of it happening
right now," she said. "We wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

Donna Hanover, then forty-four, married ten years, a Donna Reed throwback
from a Jimmy Stewart dream, finally back before the cameras she'd sought since
high school in Sunnyvale, had no idea that her world was unraveling as she spoke.
The winter chill that soon entered their lives seemed, at first, like a passing phase.
Donna and the friends close to her and her husband thought it would bow to the
warming bonds of young children and a dozen years of intimate entanglement.
But when mutual withdrawal hardened into habit, she knew that the comfort she
felt all around her that day in Town & Country would never return.

***

The twenty-eight-year-old woman who was named City Hall's youngest press
secretary in history understood that getting a top job was often a result of a
strong underling relationship with a superior, in Rudy's world and in many others.
Cristyne Lategano, a sneaker saleswoman at Super Runners on the Upper East
Side just a couple of years earlier, made herself an appendage of Rudy's through a
long campaign of forced smiles and callused handshakes. She matched his energy
and his desire, looking for votes on park benches and sidewalks from one end of
the city to the other, and one side of the clock to the other. She proved to him that404 RUDY!
she cared, and he rewarded her with a powerful position whose traditional standards
she could not meet.

Those who worked with her in the 1993 campaign and in the years that followed
at City Hall said Lategano never wrote a press release. She and the mayor, always
at each other's side, edited drafts of some releases together, but no one knew if she
could actually compose the stock-in-trade of her profession. She was so ill at ease
with reporters that she announced her discomfort at a press conference in 1995, declaring
"1 usually don't talk to you guys and I try not to, as you know."

A Rutgers graduate with less than two years of experience in press relations before
joining the Giuliani campaign in the spring of 1993, Lategano had worked on
the congressional staff of a Republican congresswoman from Maryland, and the
New Jersey campaign staff of George Bush's 1992 re-election committee. One prochoice
press release bearing her name was repudiated by the national Bush campaign,
which was publicly baffled by the issuance of a statement that it said
"appears to be contrary to the president's position."

Garth and Giuliani decided they needed a female press aide to accompany the
candidate on his constant swings through the city. Rudy was too often surrounded
by white males, they reasoned. Lategano's resume came in over the transom and
she impressed Garth aide Richard Bryers, the press secretary, who passed her
name on to Peter Powers, the campaign manager. It was a demanding, yet lowpaying,
position made for a young single with discipline and discretion.

A marathoner and vegetarian, Lategano mixed an airy confidence with a sweet
shyness. When she pulled her long, reddish brown hair back, her lean and open
face might've reminded Rudy of a young Regina. Her clunky, muscular legs dominated
her waistless body, and she could be heard pounding her way in high heels
or flats from far off-assertive, emphatic.

Her other asset was that she, like Bryers, knew no one in the New York press
corps. Since the campaign press strategy was a straight-arm to the mouth of any
overly inquisitive reporter, her out-of-town ignorance made her a perfect buffer,
un conflicted by any media relationships.

The Daily News reported that during her first interview with Giuliani, she impressed
him with her firm grip on Yankee baseball trivia. "She is a real Yankee
fan," the mayor said later, "and I can usually tell the difference." That wasn't their
only common bond. She was born in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island as a kid,
graduating from Lynbrook High School, where Harold Giuliani had once tended
the grounds. Indeed her best-known public propensity-a stonewalling antipathy
to reporters-was merely a reflection of Rudy, one of countless ways she molded
herself in his image.

The night of the 1993 win, she was with Rudy and Donna at hotel victory parties
until the early hours of the morning, and when Rudy finally followed Donna
to bed for a couple hours' sleep before the morning rush of interviews, he was
heard calling her "Crissie." Few challenges can compete with campaigns as a bonding
experience-the intensity of it merged these two, already sympatico, personalities,
long before anything deeper may have started.

In her first months as press secretary, she took a beating. She had no experience
managing anyone, yet she suddenly had to oversee a City Hall press and research
staff, as well as public information offices in dozens of agencies. Reporters were in
a constant state of fevered dismay; with deadlines breathing down their necks they
couldn't get answers to basic questions.

She embarrassed herself in May by calling reporters to tell them the new administration
had evidence of gross mismanagement by Dinkins's just-departed
Youth Services commissioner, Richard Murphy. The false alarm, ultimately refuted
by Giuliani's own Department of Investigations, was transparently designed
to deflect attention from charges against the agency's new commissioner that were
just coming to light. Murphy had to wait a year for his exoneration, while
Giuliani's appointee had to resign immediately.

She was caught bragging about how she got a Times editorial killed. Even her
apartment became a minor scandal, when Newsday revealed that she was one of
several top campaign and administration aides who'd gotten discounted apartments
from top Giuliani fund-raiser William Koeppel, a real estate developer.

John Miller, Bratton's press aide, became a close friend of hers in 1994 and recalls
her frequent teary days. Once that fall, Miller, Lategano and Jack Maple went
to lunch at a coffee shop neat the Hall and "she broke down, complaining that
everyone had lined up against her." She said her opponents within the Giuliani inner
circle-which included Garth and Powers-thought "she couldn't do anything
right."

Garth said flat out in subsequent interviews: "I did not think she was qualified
to be the press secretary, and my opinion hasn't changed." He kept interviewing
candidates to replace her or serve over her head in a new position of communications
director, and Giuliani kept rejecting the recommendations. Garth grew so
frustrated, he broke with Giuliani by that fall, declaring later: "I don't want to
work anywhere I'm not comfortable."

With an office to run, Lategano refused to give up her old campaign role as
Giuliani companion, traveling with him almost everywhere in the specially
equipped white Chevy Suburban wagon. That kind of schedule, often including
parts of a weekend, crushed her social life. She'd dated another campaign aide, Ron
Giller, during the 1993 race and into the first year. She was enchanted by City
Planning Commission chair Joe Rose, the son of a millionaire developer with
golden-boy charm. She also went out early in the first year with Michael Lewittes,
a Daily News gossip columnist.

Everyone thought she was dating Miller, too, but the TV hunk, who usually
juggles a very full dance card, insists the relationship hovered between a friendship
and a romance, without ever becoming a romance. Ironically, Cristyne
"started going to Elaine's with me," recalls Miller, "and then without me." Denny
Young once told Miller to "stay out of Elaine's because this is a blue-collar administration"
and the mayor doesn't want his top people depicted in the press as
part of "some cafe society." Giuliani, of course, later made Bratton's visits to the
Upper East Side watering hole a count in the indictment against him.

Miller trained for the November 6, 1994 New York City marathon with
Cristyne. It was his first race, and she was already a seasoned runner. "She worked
me like a dog," said Miller, acknowledging that they spent so much time together,
doing Central Park "in the middle of the night," that it was widely assumed they
were dating. The day of the race, with both Miller and Rose running, the mayor
fired the starting cannon from a naval station in Staten Island and was then helicoptered
to Brooklyn and driven to the finish line. Around 12:45 P.M., he and the
race organizer, Allan Steinfeld, started holding opposite ends of the tape-first for
the men's winner and then for the women's. There was a twenty-minute-or-so
respite between the end of the race and the awards presentation, which also featured
the mayor. Usually, says Steinfeld, the mayor leaves after the awards are
done.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:29 am

Part 2 of 2

But Giuliani waited for Lategano. She did the race in four hours and twenty-six
minutes, meaning she came in at 3:16, almost two hours after the female winner.
Giuliani was supposed to be appearing with Donna at a hotel press conference and
rally for Mario Cuomo. Billed as a "unity" event precisely because of Giuliani's
cross-party endorsement, the event was the culmination of the campaign, with the
election just a day away. It was on his schedule for 3:15 P.M., but he was still waiting
for Cristyne at the finish line then. He left for the rally after greeting her, and
before Miller dragged himself over the line. (Rose never finished.)

Miller, once the acknowledged top TV crime reporter in New York and a friend
of Giuliani's from his U.S. Attorney days, had already been through a spat with
Rudy involving Lategano. When the mayor read a news story indicating that a parade
to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the NYPD was to be held on Bratton's
birthday-a pure scheduling accident, according to Bratton-he canceled it. Then
Lategano dropped a couple of hostile quotes on Bratton in a news story. Miller ob-
jected to the comments in a conversation with Lategano, saying Giuliani "didn't
have to squeeze" Bratton like that. A protective Giuliani called Miller, screamed at
him for reprimanding Lategano and hung up on him.

A couple of weeks after the marathon, Miller found himself in another bitter
exchange with the mayor, this time over a Sunday Daily News headline:
"Bratton's Juggernaut." The December 11 story announced a major new drug initiative
and Giuliani was incensed about "the leak," demanding that he wanted "the
people responsible found and dealt with." No one doubted that if the headline read
"Rudy's Juggernaut," it would have been toasted. The mayor killed the plan and
zeroed in on Miller as a prime suspect.

Then, on December 23, the blond, curly-headed, six-foot-tall Miller was standing
in the marble-pillared rotunda at City Hall when Lategano spied him on her
way out of the press office. She ran to him, leaped in the air and wrapped her legs
and arms around his $2,000 suit. He spun her around. To Miller, it was a zestful,
Christmas-break farewell. The mayor, however, was just a few steps behind
Lategano. He stood and watched. Joe Rose was also, coincidentally, in the hallway,
having strolled over, like Miller, from his nearby office. "The mayor scowled and
walked past them without a word," said Kevin Davitt, an aide to Rose and witness
to the spectacle.

Cristyne gave Miller a Hermes tie for Christmas. "She said she'd given it to
Rudy first," Miller recounted, "but he said he couldn't accept a gift from an underling."
She asked Miller to "try not to let him see you wearing the tie."

Miller says that after the Christmas/New Year's break, he got a phone call from
Denny Young, the consigliere, as mob reporter Miller calls him. "Don't call
Cristyne again," were his instructions. A few days passed and Miller was preparing
to handle press inquiries on a major new NYPD initiative. He left Lategano a
message and got another call from Young. "I thought I told you not to call
Cristyne," Miller recalls Young saying. "Well, this was a purely press business
matter. I didn't realize I wasn't to call her on a press advisory." In that case, said
Young, it's okay to call her. But five minutes later, he got another call from Young:
"No," said the lawyer attached to the mayor's hip, "I was wrong about that. Don't
call her about anything."

The stunned Miller kept his distance, smelling a final confrontation in the air.
He couldn't sort out all the motives-was this jealousy or pique over the Bratton
publicity machine? In February, the Hall suddenly insisted that Miller's entire
public information staff be replaced. It was such a challenge to Bratton's authority
that he and the rest of his top staff huddled and talked about quitting en masse.
Miller slipped out of the meeting and fell on his own sword, announcing his res-
ignation to a group of reporters and a live NYI audience. "Now loyalty is important,"
he said.

Loyalty runs up. I'm loyal to the mayor, I'm loyal to the police commissioner
... but there were loyal Nazis too. Loyalty runs down too and I'm loyal to
my people .... Now they want to find places for everybody to go. So what do
they say, the captain is supposed to go down with the ship, right?

Somebody in this administration said, trying to summarize the company
line, "We want to have more control over the information." The information
that we put out here is not information that we are supposed to "control." It's
not the mayor's information, it's the public's information. That's why they
call this Public Information.

Miller convulsed in televised tears.

Giuliani returned fire: "It seems to me that John had difficulty accomplishing
what is a very difficult management task. Some people are very good at one thing,
they're not very good at another." He dismissed the media furor, saying that it was
certainly "not a tumultuous day in New York City when the deputy commissioner
for public relations of the NYPD resigns."

"Big deal," he wisecracked. Giuliani sacked the press heads of four other city
agencies and fired three dozen press aides the same day, consolidating a scaleddown
press operation under the tight control of Lategano. The dismissals and dramatic
Miller resignation were an object lesson. Anyone "off-message," as City
Hall put it, would soon be off-premises, and the message was only four letters
long: RUDY. Though the Bratton team would hang on for another year, their fate
was decided in the Miller fracas, and no one was ever able to separate the personal
and policy causes that drove Rudy to make that war.

While simultaneously using a mutual friend to discreetly assure Miller that she
was not behind the attacks on him, Lategano went after the Bratton press machine.
"Public relations was put before any kind of substance," she said. "When
you put glamour over fighting crime, it leads to serious problems. This is a reality
check. We're here to fight crime, not to be Hollywood stars. This is real-life cops,
not NYPD Blue." Her willingness to implicitly attack Miller drew her even closer
to the mayor, who told reporters: "I think she put it quite accurately."

In March, Lenny A1civar, the deputy press secretary, began organizing a thirtieth
birthday party for Lategano. He called former beau Michael Lewittes, who
helped with names of friends unknown to the City Hall crowd. The party was set
for Sunday evening, March 19, the day before her birthday. The mayor, who'd encouraged
Alcivar to put it together, asked him the Friday before how it was going.
He wanted Alcivar to read him the guest list. He told Alcivar he wanted Lewittes
and Joe Rose" disinvited."

Alcivar protested that Lewittes had helped him organize the party, but the
mayor was insistent. He even checked again with Alcivar to see if he'd followed
the instructions. Rose, who was known to beep Lategano in the early-morning
hours, and Lewittes were told not to come. No one, of course, considered inviting
Lategano's near-dear friend John Miller.

The mayor's private calendar that Sunday included a 6 P.M., pre-party, "communications
meeting" at City Hall, attended by Lategano and a dozen other top
aides, most of whom were shoehorned into the party at Jim McMullen's restaurant.
The schedule has him leaving City Hall at 8 P.M. and going to a "private
meeting" thereafter. It's an unusual entry since it says nothing about the location
and purpose of the meeting and lists no departing time. In fact, contrary to the
overwhelming majority of calendar listings in this time period and the security
protocol, there is no indication that the mayor ever departed for or arrived at the
mansion.

Giuliani was with Lategano the next Sunday as well-the day he and Donna
had agreed would be a family day. Newsday spotted him and Cris "pawing
through the racks at the Ann Taylor and Laura Ashley stores on East 57th Street."
A saleswoman at one store was quoted in the gossip item: "She picked out a couple
of skirts and asked him what he thought. And the mayor would say 'Oh, that
looks fine.'" The subsequent explanation offered by City Hall was that the mayor
was due at an Orthodox Jewish function that evening and Cristyne's short skirt
would've been inappropriate.

What no one knew was that immediately prior to leaving City Hall for the midtown
event-which was just fifteen blocks from Lategano's 73rd Street apartment-
the mayor had held another Sunday afternoon "communications meeting"
at City Hall. The room was filled with alternatives to Lategano who could have accompanied
him to the National Council of Young Israel dinner, including Bruce
Teitelbaum, Giuliani's liaison to the Jewish community.

On March 31, Giuliani announced a $25,000 raise for Lategano, from $77,000 to
$103,000, and a promotion to a new title at City Hall, director of communications.
Powers and Garth had suggested the title as a way of installing someone with
management ability over Lategano. Instead, she got the title herself, and won subsequent
raises all the way up to $141,000 in 1999. When she got the promotion,
the Times quoted from a three-day-old directive sent by the budget office to all
agency heads. It said that "increased responsibilities, reorganization or reassignment
does not necessarily justify a level change, promotion or salary adjustment."
Cristyne actually explained that the funding for her raise came out of the savings
from the dismissal of Miller and many others in press offices.

In May, Cristyne moved downstairs to an office right next to Rudy's. Her new
office was a converted conference room that was being used by another top aide,
who moved elsewhere. She quickly filled her large office with framed magazine
covers of Rudy and a photo of her with Barbara Bush. Rudy had an office on the
main floor that was used primarily for ceremonial purposes. He spent most of his
time down a hidden circular stairwell that led only to the joined, two-office complex
he and Cris now shared. To get there, even top staff had to be cleared through
Giuliani's secretary on the main floor. There was a shower and a bathroom, a
kitchenette, two desks and two sofas, a conference table, VCR and two television
sets in the suite, a cozy setting for the constant companions.

Between the time they spent in the basement offices and on the road in "the ice
cream truck," as the Suburban was called, Lategano and Giuliani were rarely apart.
Gossip items had them at late-night dinners. When he put on weight, she put on
weight. When he got into cigars, she was seen taking a puff from one of his.
They'd ride in the van eating from the same slice of pizza and drinking from the
same diet drink. They wore similar double-breasted pinstripe suits. She'd fix his tie
before a TV or major public appearance and he'd ask: "How do I look?" He'd make
a scrunched-up face and she'd mirror it, saying: "Oh, you look like a bunny rabbit."
They'd both wind up with bunny-rabbit faces that broke into smiles.

The 1994 New York marathon was her last. She trained for the 1995 marathon
but didn't run. By 1996, she was still a jogger, but no longer had the energy or the
inclination for the rigorous preparation that was once the inner discipline of her
life. She also stopped dating anyone regularly, making herself available to him any
hour of any day he wanted. She embraced opera and red meat. Friends who visited
her bare-walled apartment-just a short walk from the mansion-said it "didn't
look lived in." When around him, she even took to wearing a custom-made police
badge bearing four stars as a sign of her precocious power.

Her body language at evening events was wifelike. She'd get "all glammed up,"
as an aide described it, and" carry a little purse and cell phone, with no schedules,
speeches, memos or briefcase" (another staffer, Manny Papir, usually carried the
work). During the day, she had a tote bag full of paper. But at night, she was frequently
empty-handed, as if out on a date. He'd pick her up at the crack of dawn
and drop her off in the dead of night. When they walked together, they'd lean close
to each other, whispering and often touching. Neither she nor the mayor took vacations,
except for an occasional Lategano visit with her parents in South Carolina.
They were so often together late at night that they were noticed by the press arriving
in the same car at a 1 A.M. building collapse, the twenty-four-hour mayor
and his twenty-four-hour accessory.

***

The whispers were getting so loud Donna could hear them. She had joined
Powers and Garth at some point in urging that an experienced press manager
be installed above Lategano. Instead, Cristyne was elevated to communications director.
If Donna had once been his "closest adviser," Lategano was now. Rudy was
even increasingly on the road on Sundays-his promised family day-and
Cristyne was almost always with him.

While his 1994 private schedule demanded he head home at 6:15 SHARP! on
Donna's February birthday, he went to a Waldorf-Astoria dinner for the
Manhattan Republican Committee on her 1995 birthday. The schedule had him
arriving at 7:15 P.M. and staying at the dinner until 8 P.M., when he was supposed
to depart for the mansion. That would have him home about two hours later than
1994, but one GOP partygoer remembers him staying at the dinner even later.

The day before Donna's birthday, Valentine's Day, lists Cristyne covering eight
events with Giuliani, an hour of "personal time" at City Hall and an evening at a
Citizens Union dinner. Just as the schedule specified no departing or arriving time
for Gracie Mansion on Lategano's birthday, it had none on Valentine's Day either.
Both were highly unusual omissions. In 1994, on the other hand, he was listed as
leaving City Hall at 7 P.M. on Valentine's Day for "personal time" at the mansion.

Their eleventh anniversary fell on an April Saturday in 1995, yet Giuliani had
a nearly full day of outside events, mostly with Cristyne, ending in the Bronx at a
banquet sponsored by an Hispanic minister who'd backed him in 1993, the
Reverend Ruben Diaz. He did bring Caroline on a Central Park Easter egg hunt
that morning-it was the day before Easter-returning her to the mansion before
heading out again.

The events surrounding the anniversary suggest it was a particularly critical
moment. The day before, his schedule listed a two-hour, mid-afternoon, meeting
with Elliot Cuker, who functioned as a go-between with Donna. The two
Saturdays after the anniversary, he trekked out to Long Island to meet with his old
friend Monsignor Placa. Cristyne was listed as with him for mayoral appearances
before and after his first trip to Placa, and before his second, but she is not listed as
accompanying him there. It was the only time in a year and a half of schedules
that such sustained meetings with Cuker and Placa were listed.

In June, the tensions exploded when Giuliani disappeared for most of Father's
Day. He did one press event that morning and when reporters asked what else he
had planned for the day, he said he was going back to the mansion to play ball with
Andrew. One reporter went back to City Hall, however, and saw Rudy and
Cristyne arrive and head to the downstairs suite. Three hours later, they were still
there. Bruce Teitelbaum, another mayoral aide, was upstairs in an office and the
reporter later asked if he knew what Lategano and the mayor were doing.
Teitelbaum put his hand up as if to bar the question, smiled, and said: "I don't
know." The reporter finally left.

An enraged Donna finally drove there, demanding to see her husband.
According to a news account published two years later, she was kept in a side office
by Rudy aides. When he finally came upstairs to leave, the husband and wife
who had so publicly announced their affection and interdependence sixteen
months earlier on the same City Hall steps came apart as a couple.

Life in the mansion turned frigid. Donna issued edicts that Giuliani dared not
defy. Cristyne was never to appear at an event that the mayor and Donna attended
together. Kim Serafin and others from the press office substituted for her; they
told staffers they were instructed to replace Lategano at Hanover events. Informed
at the last minute that Hanover was attending an August speech Giuliani was delivering
at the Wharton Club, Lategano left the van in a rush. Eventually this rule
of avoidance became a virtual nullity since there were so few joint appearances.

In late September, New York magazine's Craig Horowitz wrote a cover story
headlined: "Thirty-year-old Cristyne Lategano Has Suddenly Become the Second
Most Powerful Person in NYC. And the Most Controversial. What Does Rudy See
in Her?" The article asserted that she'd surpassed Peter Powers as the "ultimate
insider" in the administration, and raised the question of "an extra-professional
relationship."

What Horowitz could not know at the time was that Powers was so frustrated
by Lategano's incendiary influence on his lifelong friend that he, too, like Garth,
Miller and Bratton, would wind up leaving the administration in part because of
her. Ironically, Lategano managed in short order to drive a wedge between Giuliani
and all three of the people he'd cited at the inaugural as "most responsible" for
making him mayor.

Horowitz spent more space rebutting any hint of an affair than he did supporting
it, but the piece, undoubtedly read by everyone Donna knew, cast a cloud that
hung over the mansion for years. City Hall charged that any suggestion of a rela-
tionship was sexist because Lategano was merely doing her job. But, in fact, no
press secretary had ever "followed the body" like Cristyne. Usually, a changing
guard of lower-level press aides accompanied a mayor, while the chief sat in the
Hall, much like an editor in a newsroom.

When Lategano was hospitalized with chest pains in November, Giuliani raced
to the hospital and remained at her side for hours. The next morning, he was hospitalized
himself. He needed stitches to close an inch-long cut in his forehead. His
aides said he cut his head on a shower door because he was exhausted from a lack
of sleep.

In addition to the ban on Cristyne at joint Donna/Rudy events, Hanover also
insisted that Cristyne no longer interact with her children. When Rudy and
Cristyne went to a Yankee game from City Hall or another location, Andrew frequently
went too, driven by his own police detail. Andrew, Rudy and others, usually
Elliot Cuker and Manny Papir, would sit in the box seats near the Yankee
dugout, but Cristyne religiously located herself elsewhere in the stadium, out of
Andrew's sight. (The only exception members of the entourage could remember
was the final game of the 1996 World Series; Cristyne was allowed in the box.)

When the games were over, Rudy would tell someone to get Cris on the phone
and they'd talk. Sometimes Giuliani would go home with Andrew. On other occasions,
especially if it was an afternoon game, Lategano and Giuliani would leave
together, letting the detail bring Andrew back to the mansion.

Likewise, the days of rolling in the grass behind the mansion with Giuliani's
kids were over for Cristyne. In fact, by 1996, the once regular receptions at the
mansion, with Donna introducing Rudy to the assembled, had tapered off so dramatically
everyone on staff noticed. Donna rarely attended Rudy's receptions at
all. Sometimes Rudy would speak and leave, and then Donna would appear, speak
and leave.

For a while, Cristyne stayed clear of the mansion as much as possible, especially
if Donna was there. Marty Rosenblatt, a former aide to Mario Cuomo, was recruited
to run Giuliani's research operation in mid-1996 and was supposed to meet
Lategano early one morning. Lategano told him she "couldn't go to the mansion,"
so she asked him to meet her at a diner a couple blocks away from it. They had
breakfast and then the mayor arrived in the van at the diner to pick her up.

Cristyne came to some of the mansion receptions, but remained in the den, usually
with other mayoral aides. She might come out near the end, saying hello to
those she knew. The staff saw it as a conscious effort on her part not to appear to
be the hostess, a First Lady in Waiting. The private dinners at the table of twentytwo
also dwindled dramatically.

The Donna who was indifferent about which last name she used was gone too.
She changed it on their tax returns. She changed it as a director of the Gracie
Mansion Conservancy, the private entity that maintained the mansion. Her staff
called reporters to insist on the use of Hanover. She corrected anyone who addressed
her as Mrs. Giuliani, snapping at a nurse who made that mistake on a visit
to a hospital emergency room with Andrew. Her California- and Texas-based
family stopped contributing to Giuliani's campaign committee. The Kofnovecs had
made fifteen contributions since 1989, totaling $685, but they never made another
donation after June 1994.

Donna took the kids on vacation over the next few years to Paris, Ireland,
Disneyland, Yellowstone, her family home in California and Memphis while Rudy
stayed in New York. He pretended his city business prevented a vacation, but
when he fashioned himself a national figure after the 1997 reelection, he flew to
twenty states in a year, without ever bringing his family. Donna went to Memphis
in 1996 to shoot her first major movie. She played Ruth Stapleton, the evangelist
and sister of President Carter, in the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. The kids
hung out on the set, toured Graceland and visited the motel where Martin Luther
King was shot.

When the movie was screened in December, and George magazine threw a dinner
honoring Hanover for her widely praised portrayal of Stapleton, Giuliani was
nowhere to be seen. "He wanted the focus of the evening to be on her professional
life" was City Hall's explanation. He apparently didn't feel the same way in 1994
when he went to the screening for The Paper, though she only made a cameo appearance
in the picture. Donna spoke briefly at the George dinner, thanking her
agent and press secretary for "helping me get through these last two difficult
years."

In the same time frame in 1996, Donna and the kids rode on a float in the
Yankee World Series parade, but decidedly not the float Rudy was on. She skipped
the annual Christmas party for city workers though her name appeared on the invitation.
When she also missed the annual Christmas party at the mansion for the
media, Cristyne took her place at the mike. Finally, at the end of a year that clearly
was a turning point, Donna gave a carefully calculated December interview to
Elizabeth Bumiller of the Times that was widely seen as a formal announcement
of the separation anyone could see.

"We had Thanksgiving together," she said, as if it were an indication that they
still were still a couple. "But as professionals, we are pursuing separate careers."
Hanover's spokeswoman told Bumiller that she was "moving away from attending
political events."

For the first time, she boycotted the 1997 Inner Circle dinner. She'd played a
role in all three of the annual skits that the city's journalistic community sponsored,
but in '97, she started a four-year run of loud absences. She was so removed
from the government by then that when a friend on the city payroll called to talk
about difficulties at her agency, Hanover said there was nothing she could do. She
"withdrew from anyone who had anything to do with the administration," said
the friend, whom Donna had helped get her city job. She also announced that she
would not participate in the mayor's campaign, including his television ads.

In mid-May, she attended the screening of Night Falls on Manhattan, a film directed
by Sidney Lumet, whose Prince of the City had helped put Rudy on the map
nearly two decades earlier. Hanover played a newscaster in the movie, and Cuker
had a small part as well. She went with Cuker, who was her acting coach and
Rudy's speech coach. Giuliani had issued a proclamation declaring it Sidney Lumet
Day. He was scheduled to hand the scroll over to Lumet at the post-screening party
that night. A couple of hours before the event, Giuliani confirmed his attendance
and said he was staying for dinner. But moments before he was scheduled to arrive,
his office called and said he couldn't come. Hanover went home after the screening,
missing the party, too. In their apparent anxiety to avoid each other, they'd both
skipped the gala.

The biggest bombshell was a Vanity Fair piece in August. Two deputy mayors
called the magazine repeatedly to try to bottle it up-one was "crazed, rude and
bullying," according to editor Graydon Carter. But the nine-page story ran anyway.
It charged that the mayor and Lategano had begun an affair in October 1994
during one of three trips out of town and that an extra pair of footsteps-identified
by Giuliani as Lategano's-had been overheard by the security detail in his
mansion bedroom one afternoon. It also quoted an aide who claimed the two
"touched in a way you wouldn't normally touch a co-worker." The story was assailed
by City Hall and much of the press for relying on anonymous sources. The
administration quickly pointed out that two of the three trips weren't overnight,
as the article contended.

The mayor ranted at press conference after press conference. He said it was
"trash," "garbage" and filled with "vicious" falsehoods strung together with "malicious"
intent. There was, in Lategano's view, "no need to comment on malicious
works of fiction." While Giuliani said the article was "untrue," neither he nor
Lategano ever specifically denied that they were having an affair. Since some of
the supporting facts cited by the magazine were demonstrably wrong, Giuliani's
insistence that the story was" false" was in fact merely a finely parsed commentary
on the details rather than a flat rejection of the substance of the story.
Nonetheless, reporters took the bait and reported that the two had denied the affair.

In a peculiar form of indirect confirmation of the charges, police brass immediately
summoned members of the mayor's security detail to a meeting and instructed
them to respect the mayor's confidentiality or face severe penalties.

What gave the story legs that have lasted for years, however, was Donna's reaction.
She refused repeatedly to deny the allegations in the story, which revolved
around the dissolution of her own marriage. She issued a statement on her personal
Gracie Mansion stationery, citing her charitable work and concluding:
"Above all, my family is deeply important to me and will remain so in the years
ahead." The night the story broke, Rudy hosted an outdoor barbecue for City Hall
interns at the mansion. Donna stayed inside; Cristyne outside. At a moment when
a simple joint appearance of any type would have calmed the rumors, Donna went
her own way, stalked for days by reporters.

"My private life is my private life," said the mayor who'd investigated Ed
Koch's and David Dinkins's. He denounced NY1 reporter Dominick Carter for
"embarrassing" himself and "showing that you have no decency" because he persisted
in asking about the allegations. In the weeks before the Vanity Fair story,
he'd anticipated it in comments to the Times's Maureen Dowd. "Exploiting my
private life is something I've never done," he said, turning ten years of publicized
bliss upside down.

One citizen caller got through on Giuliani's weekly WABC radio show and
raised a subject that had only been mentioned in a single graph in a Post column
by Jack Newfield-the 1989 attempted leak of the Dinkins love letters. "How can
you be mad when people are looking at your affair," asked "Jesse" from the West
Side, "in view of your own attempted sex smear." Faced publicly for the first and
only time with this bit of forgotten history, Giuliani dodged the subject: "Jesse,
I've said everything I'm going to say about these allegations. They're scurrilous,
and it sounds like you are, too."

As the days wore on, Linda Yglesias of the Dallas Morning News finally got an
interview with Donna. Given a clear opportunity to denounce the story for its reliance
on anonymous sources, Donna declined. "I haven't really considered how I
would look at the story as a journalist," Hanover said. "I'm looking at the story as
a mother, for the most part." She said she'd made sure the children were "in a situation
where they hadn't seen a newspaper, TY"-clearly far out of the city.
Hanover wouldn't say whether she loved her husband. "I'm not going to comment
on the mayor." She vowed: "My children and I will continue to live at Gracie
Mansion with Rudy as a family, after the election, if he wins."

The furor died down and Donna's disappearance from the re-election effort was
again barely noted in the media. Giuliani circled the city in the final days of the '97
campaign in an open-ended bus, accompanied by an entourage including Lategano
and Annemarie McAvoy, the Republican candidate for comptroller who'd never
run for anything, would lose by more than fifty points and wasn't even known on
her Queens block. Rudy would raise the hand of his nominal running mate in triumph,
and reporters moving through the crowds saw people pointing and saying
to one another: "There's Donna." Light-haired and vivacious, McAvoy was the
perfect stand-in.

Election night, Donna and the kids, ever present four years earlier, were
nowhere to be found. They had kissed for the cameras at the 1993 victory party.
When she voted in 1997, she refused to tell reporters whom she voted for. Shortly
before the second inaugural, City Hall revealed that the couple was taking an
overnight trip to an undisclosed location. The only public concession that came out
of this mystery mission was the announcement that Donna would in fact appear
at the inaugural.

Though people were covered in blankets on an icy January day, Donna sat center
stage in a skimpy green leather outfit with sheer stockings. She pressed her
aides on the platform to check her lipstick and her hair. An intense treadmill workout
schedule in the small gym she'd equipped at the mansion had left her looking
lean and attractive. The massive media attention for this ever auditioning actress
and television personality may have been more of a lure to come than whatever
Rudy said to her. There were no more full-mouth kisses, however. All she offered
Rudy was a cheek. In sharp contrast with his 1993 deeply personal salute, he
thanked Donna, "who does so much to help our city, particularly our schools and
our children." The Kofnovecs were nowhere to be found.

For a 1997 profile in Vogue, she did six sit-down interviews with writer
Jonathan Van Meter. She only mentioned Giuliani three times, referring to him
twice as the mayor and once by name. "Do you care to address the constant rumors
about your marriage being in trouble?" he asked. "No," she said. Pressed
over coffee about what it was like to be First Lady-the complications, the conflicts
of interest, the strangeness of the role, she said: "1 don't really think of myself as
the first lady of New York."
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:30 am

Part 1 of 2

Twenty: More Sex and the City

DONNA'S INAUGURAL APPEARANCE WAS HER LAST AT CITY HALL.
There were only a couple of reported sightings of her with her husband
over the next two and a half years. She laid such claim to the rest of her family,
however, that the mayor's press office was instructed to refer all questions
about Goalie to Donna's press secretary on the theory that he was Andrew's
dog. One former staffer recalled that when the press office accidentally answered
a question once about the Labrador, Donna called to complain. "I signed
the adoption papers," she reportedly pointed out. Similarly, no pictures taken
of the children by city photographers could be released without her approval.
Her attitude was so proprietary, staffers observed, it was as if she had won sole
custody of the children in an unacknowledged yet binding agreement.

Though Caroline spent part of "Take Your Daughter to Work" Day with the
mayor in April 1994 and 1995, she has not appeared at City Hall for that event
in years. When the beloved Yankees were knocked out of the playoffs in 1997
in a decisive game in Cleveland, Rudy watched it at a midtown bar with
Lategano and other hangers-on, rather than at home with Andrew. While
Rudy staged touch football games on Superbowl Sunday in the early days at
the mansion, he had to move the gang, minus Andrew, to Cuker's cigar bar in
the later years. Howard Safir had to sub for the mayor at a more unusual
"family" event, delivering a speech at a January 1999 authors' affair at the
Four Seasons attended by both Donna and Regina Peruggi, who was by then
the president of Marymount Manhattan College.

In 1998, when Giuliani did his national Republican tour of twenty states, an
aide said flatly that Hanover talked to one member of his City Hall staff "more
than she did to Rudy." Friends like Herman and Gail Badillo, who were close
to Rudy and Donna, sidestepped Gracie Mansion events rather than choose between
private affairs hosted by one or the other.

In February 1999, Donna granted another interview to the Times's Bumiller
and, when asked if she was committed to her marriage, replied: ''I'm committed to
my family." Bumiller wrote that during the hour-long interview, she was "warm
when the subject was her career and children" but "icy when the questions turned
to her husband." She did not make it clear, Bumiller observed, that "her future
necessarily included Mr. Giuliani," noting only that she planned on staying in
New York when he left office.

"Oh, I never moved out of Gracie Mansion" was her way of dismissing years of
speculation about her living arrangements. In fact, for years she had not slept in
the specially equipped master bedroom where Rudy had to stay for security reasons.
Sources familiar with her mansion life say she frequently used the apartment
in the attic that Ed Koch built for his chef. She was also spending large blocks
of time out of the mansion altogether, principally in California.

Finally, in May 1999, the ice mansion began to heat up, with the first public indications
that Donna and Rudy might have discovered some new common ground.
Cristyne Lategano was a big part of the reason. Shortly after Giuliani announced
the formation of the finance committee for his Senate run in April, City Hall was
filled with rumors about Lategano's possible departure. The Daily News reported
that she was seeking a job with George W. Bush's exploratory committee.
Lategano was said to have talked with Roger Ailes, who already employed Donna
at Fox Television. Howard Rubenstein, the city's most powerful publicist, called
and offered her a job.

Wise heads were nodding that Rudy had finally come to his senses and would
not go into the most important campaign of his life-a run against Hillary
Clinton-with Cristyne at his side, a public reminder of his gravest personal
weakness.

The Daily News did a gossip item in October 1998 that had Rudy "cursing"
Lategano out at an East Side morning breakfast spot so loudly three witnesses reported
it. The two were seen less and less often at the restaurants around
Lategano's 250 East 73rd Street apartment. The owner of Simon's, a nearby noodle
house, said that the couple used to stay late there, talking" for three hours, past
closing time," but that the last time she saw them was on March 7, 1999. A picture
of Rudy inscribed "food is delicious" appeared on the restaurant's window, signed
the date of their last visit.

They'd also dined at Cafe Greco "half a dozen times," Baraonda, Cafe Tosca and
EJ's Luncheonette, all close to Lategano's apartment. The manager at the luncheonette
said they'd come there "at least once a month," freely describing "the
chemistry" between them. "They sat with their faces very close," he said. But the
frequency of their appearances at each of these places plummeted that spring. No
one at any of the neighborhood restaurants had ever seen her there with any
other man and, in fact, since the demise of Miller et al. in 1995, those who knew
her at City Hall said she didn't date anyone for years.

On May 23, shortly before Rudy's fifty-fifth birthday, Adam Safir, the son of
the police commissioner, got married at Gracie Mansion. Under a tent on the back
lawn, Rudy and Donna went from table to table together, "very much the host and
hostess," according to one guest. The band went through a series of medleys, starting
with the '50s and working up to the '90s and they danced again and again.

"They went from the jitterbug and the twist all the way up to hip-hop," the
Post reported, quoting an unnamed partygoer. "They were jumping up and down
like monkeys." Rudy, whose dancing feet have won praise from partners since college,
was in a dapper dinner jacket. Donna was "very glamorous in a strappy black
dress slit up the side," according to another friend, who said: "She was happy. He
was happy. Everyone was happy."

Monday, the blind quoters planted items in both tabloids-an extraordinarily
rare occasion when competing gossip pages were led by the same story. They even
used the same" cheek-to-cheek" image. The Post suggested the politics of its
sourcing by concluding that the "rekindling of the marital fires" might be connected
to Lategano's rumored departure for Bushland, and then denouncing as
"unsubstantiated" and" scurrilous scuttlebutt" any suggestion that "Lategano was
having an affair with the mayor." Saying there was" even less reason" now to believe
the "rehashed rumor," the Post predicted that Rudy and Donna were "just a
step away from full-blown canoodling."

Donna back-pedaled when she saw the stories, as if everything was moving a bit
too fast for her-with the public reconciliation getting far ahead of a private one
that, in her view, had just started. Her press office called the papers and warned
about over-interpreting a spin on the dance floor. But privately, she was calling old
friends and expressing "hope" that "things might work out" for the first time in
years. In the weeks that followed the wedding, Rudy and Donna did family dinners
and barbecues, sharing what Hanover's spokeswoman called "lots of private
moments."

Donna did not attend Rudy's birthday fund-raiser that immediately followed
the wedding, but she did put together a family gathering at the mansion. And
when Lategano came to the mayor's bash at the Sheraton-his annual major
fundraiser-she came late and alone, joining a table of friends off to the side. She
did not even attend the private cocktail party before the dinner, held in an upstairs
penthouse for the heavy hitters. She used to dominate these events-handling in-
troductions, fending off prying reporters, orchestrating the seating and the program-
just as Donna had hosted Rudy's major fundraising dinners in the early
'90s.

But this time, Cristyne and the mayor did not speak to each other all evening,
and she left as alone as she arrived. Three days later, she took a break from City
Hall for a South Carolina visit with her parents. At thirty-four years of age, with
her friends married and pregnant, Lategano was getting restless. She was also getting
dumped. Her father told the Daily News in an early June phone interview
from South Carolina that she was learning how to play golf. She came back to the
Hall ever so briefly in mid-June and announced she was going on an indefinite
leave of absence, returning to South Carolina for a long stretch on the links.

Ironically, Rudy also began explaining his noticeably reduced Friday and weekend
schedules by telling reporters, through his press office, that he had a "new
love": golf. He was said to be teaching young Andrew the game as well.

"Donna put her foot down," one Rudy insider told the News, saying she
wouldn't stand by Candidate Giuliani even "tacitly" if Lategano remained "a
daily presence of innuendo." Lategano said she'd be back in September, citing an
illness in her family as the reason for the protracted departure, but the mayor
was doling out quotes that sounded like a delicate farewell.

He offered" a spirited defense" of Lategano's press strategies in one interview,
calling the reporter back a second time to add a single specific: that she had come
up with the idea of renaming the Interborough Parkway after Hall of Fame
Dodger Jackie Robinson. Ironically, the dedication ceremony for the newly named
highway, with the mayor and Lategano joined by Robinson's granddaughter in a
major news event, occurred on April 15, 1997, Rudy and Donna's thirteenth anniversary.

As soon as Lategano was out the door, albeit she thought temporarily, she got
the Bratton treatment. The Sunday Times Magazine collected blind anti-Lategano
quotes at City Hall as if the glossy was printed on flypaper. Jim Traub wrote that
the jettisoned Madame DeFarge, as Bratton called her, was "considered transparently
opportunistic rather than bright." Traub quoted two "senior" aides to
Giuliani who said things like: "She would froth him up." Reading the August 1
story with her new golf clubs and newer boyfriend, Lategano surely recognized
the sanctioned assassinations she'd once performed on others.

Though she never responded in print, she ranted about Traub's piece to a Yale
student editor, David Altschuler, during a campus visit a couple of months later,
calling the anonymous sources "cowards" who should have "the decency" to tell
her "to my face" what they had told the Times. The queen of malicious whispers
was suddenly squealing about them. After Traub's story, everyone understood that
Lategano would never be back. City Hall watchers certainly expected that her departure
would foreshadow Donna's return, but it never happened.

As mysteriously as the two had warmed up in May, they'd cooled down by
early fall. In fact, there were no post-wedding sightings of the two-cheek-tocheek
or jaw-to-jaw. In October 1999, A&E announced that Hanover would host a
new weekend series, House Beautiful, produced by Hearst Entertainment. Billed
as "an insider's tour of the world's most fascinating homes," it promised shows on
"romantic living," which would offer "tips on creating a romantic home through
sensual style, inviting bedrooms and bathrooms to indulge in." Hanover was
adding this new A&E show to a repertoire that already included the Food
Network, Fox feature reporting, tiny movie and TV roles and a potpourri of special
corporate appearances she makes through agencies.

The A&E tapings, however, were frequently shot at a studio in Pasadena,
California. It was just one of several reasons that she was spending more and more
time in California, even taking courses there with her old friend from the
Pittsburgh Evening Magazine, Art Greenwald. "She's here in L.A. quite a bit for
acting," says Greenwald. "She's been coming to my writers/actors workshop. It's a
closed group of professional writers and actors, with the writers presenting their
work, the actors performing it, and the group critiquing it."

Donna spent Oscars week in L.A. this year, for example, staying at her parents'
house in Santa Clarita. For the first time, Rudy's and Donna's tax returns for 1999
contained four different California forms, including filings for investment earnings
for Andrew and Caroline. In a complicated maneuver, they claimed a real estate
write-off on a California form. Some of the filings were merely an indication
of California nonresident earnings, but the "passive activity loss" filings on property
suggested a new property tie to Donna's home state.

Long before the spring thaw of 1999, Donna had settled into a comfortable life
of her own, centered around a career that was nonetheless indisputably connected
to her husband's prominence. When their brief fling was over, she simply returned
to her separate yet rewarding world. In 1998, Hanover's earnings had hit a high of
$354,447, a 1,006 percent increase over what she made the year before Rudy became
mayor. Over the course of the first six years of the mayoralty, she earned
over $1,370,000, more than twice Rudy's income.

Her biggest paycheck was always the Food Network's, rising to $157,264 in
1998. Next was Fox's New York Channel 5, where she was hired in February 1995
as a street reporter for Good Day New York, the popular morning news show. Her
1998 income there was $123,250. The Fox job had all the earmarks of a political
hire. When she got it, she hadn't worked as an anchor for almost five years and
hadn't held a street reporting job for thirteen years. Yet, at forty-five, here she
was, back in a daily news format. It wasn't a question of competence-she quickly
demonstrated a mildly appealing on-air feature and interview style. It was a question
of opportunity, and few in the business doubted that her husband's very large
profile had helped create the opportunity.

Fox's owner Rupert Murdoch was a major Giuliani booster who would benefit
twice from lucrative tax abatements granted by the Giuliani administration. In
late 1996, Giuliani went so far out of line to try to force Time Warner to give Fox's
twenty-four-hour cable news show a channel in New York he was rebuked by a
federal judge. It was a repeat of the Food Network scenario, only this time Rudy
did, ever so briefly, put Donna's employer on a city-owned public access channel.
After the city lost the court case, T/W's Dick Parsons gave Fox its channel anyway,
fearful that Giuliani would delay the renewal of its New York franchise.

Hanover's Fox income quadrupled after the fight with T/W. She earned $31,000
there in 1995 and $123,000 in her peak year, 1998. Her 1996 income-the year
Giuliani went to bat for Fox-soared to $94,000. Even her Larry Flynt movie debut
had a mayoral connection-director Milos Forman said he met her at a Gracie
Mansion dinner and decided to offer her the part.

In addition to the interplay between Donna's broadcast career and the mayoralty,
her growing real estate income was also linked to it. The two apartments
she and Rudy jointly own on the 35th floor of 444 East 86th have been sublet
since the beginning of 1994. They reported earning $58,050 in rental income from
the apartments in 1999, a 95 percent increase over their 1994 rental earnings.
With depreciation, mortgage, maintenance and other costs, Rudy and Donna have
been able to report a tax loss on the apartments almost every year. They have also
made more than $157,000 in total mortgage payments over the six years, substantially
reducing their principal while the value of their asset grew.

The reason they were able to sublet this long, however, was because the co-op
board voted to exempt them from the four-year limit on subletting. Other cooperators
in the building faced an automatic initial limit of two years, which the
board could, at maximum, extend for a third or fourth year. The Giulianis, on the
other hand, were allowed to exceed that limit by as much as four years-an enormous
financial benefit granted, understandably, because of Rudy's public service.
The property expenses reported in their tax returns made no reference to the sublet
fees that other cooperators must pay the co-op, ranging up to 20 percent in the
fourth year, suggesting that the building's board also waived those fees.

The third Giuliani apartment in the building-Helen's on the eighteenth
floor-is a mystery. Rudy listed it in his financial disclosure forms from 1993
through 1996 as a property he owned alone, while simultaneously listing the
other two apartments on the same page of the form as owned by Hanover and
himself. In 1997, however, he suddenly listed it as jointly owned with Hanover. He
reported no earnings on his tax returns or in his disclosure forms for granting an
interest in the apartment to Hanover, who had an implicit spousal claim to it anyway.

So it would appear that he transferred title to the apartment to the two of them
sometime in 1997. The forms continued to list it as a joint asset in 1998 and 1999.
The apartment was valued on the disclosure forms at $100,000 to $250,000, but
cooperators in the building say that apartments in the same line are currently going
for as much as $290,000.

The transfer of the apartment was not the only personal financial change that
occurred in 1997. A Merrill Lynch margin account-reported as both a $20,000 to
$60,000 asset and a debt jointly held with Donna-was listed in Giuliani's disclosure
forms continuously prior to 1997. It disappeared from Rudy's forms in 1997.
Giuliani's disclosure forms only cover his own and joint assets or obligations.

The Merrill account did continue to appear, however, on the joint tax returns
filed by Donna and Rudy, albeit listed as assigned to an unspecified "nominee"
(perhaps the children). The switch in this account, plus the apparent restructuring
of their interests in Helen's apartment, suggests that Donna and Rudy redefined
their financial relationship at some point during 1997. With the appearance of the
Vanity Fair article, 1997 was also a decisive moment in their personal relationship.
In any event, the woman who came to Gracie Mansion as an unemployed former
broadcaster with freelance earnings of $32,000 a year is undoubtedly now a
millionaire, with a substantial investment portfolio. Her publicly subsidized personal
staff of four-abetted by chefs, maids and a vast mansion staff-serve her
every need, and her personal police detail scoots her around the city in tinted-glass
limos. Her friends at the Food Network say she is often accompanied by several
staffers and cops when she reports for her brief reading gig at TVFN. Her children
receive similar police and mansion attention.

While many tabloid readers have wondered out loud for years why she has
stayed in a transparently dead marriage, the answer may well have been in the
fine print. The financial largesse of her mayoral years, as well as the incomparable
lifestyle of the mansion for her and her children, have at least helped make the
personal pain bearable.

Donna, however, wasn't the only woman in Rudy's life to prosper. Not only did
the on-leave Cristyne Lategano get four months at full pay from the city-using
accrued time until October 1999-City Hall gave her an $8,780 raise in July
though she was already on leave. Then the mayor's allies on the board of the city's
Convention & Visitors Bureau, which obtains nearly half its financing from the
city, created a grand opening for her. A year and a half earlier, the board had installed
former deputy mayor Fran Reiter as president. Reiter had just successfully
managed Rudy's re-election campaign and her appointment was criticized as
politicizing the historically independent tourism bureau.

From the moment Reiter arrived at the bureau, she made her intentions to run
for mayor clear to everyone around her. In April 1999, she announced that she was
forming an exploratory committee to consider a possible 2001 run and changed
her registration from Liberal to Democrat, so she could run in the Democratic primary.
The board took no action, however, until July, when Lategano was on leave
and looking for a place to land. Then they told Reiter she had to make up her
mind: stay at the bureau or run for mayor. A severance package that included full
pay for the remainder of her contract and totaled approximately $300,000 helped
persuade her to go quietly.

Then, with deputy mayor Randy Levine on the search panel, the board settled
on Lategano for president. Crain's, the city's weekly business magazine, reported
that Lategano was "the nation's only CVB head without a day of professional experience
in the tourism industry." Usually a s~rong Giuliani supporter, a Crain's
editorial said the appointment "embarrasses the city" and urged her to "withdraw
her candidacy." It noted that no one dared "speak up against Ms. Lategano" because
they would be "labeled enemies by the mayor," adding that "would-be critics"
in the industry" fear that city agencies will find ways to make their businesses
suffer." The mayor publicly praised the board.

Dan Barry, the Times's bureau chief, wrote that Lategano's only experience in the
tourism business was "tirelessly promoting the premise that Mr. Giuliani singlehandedly
returned luster to a tarnished metropolis." Incredibly enough, Cristyne
said she knew business travelers' needs because she'd once lived out of a suitcase as
a GOP advance person.

The bureau divulged Lategano's $150,000 starting salary, but refused to reveal
the term of her contract or whether salary hikes were built into it. One board
member says she has a three-year contract, which could entitle her to a Reiter-like
buyout. Lategano ducked New York press questions out of habit, but told
Altschuler, the Yale student editor, that she" cut the salary" herself because she
"didn't want to be making more than the mayor." The mayor then made $160,000,
but his salary has since been hiked to $195,000.

The junking of a national search and selection of Lategano was an outrage so
transparent that only a cowed city elite would've stood for it. Jennifer Raab and
William Diamond, two far more seasoned Giuliani commissioners, were among
the bypassed applicants. But other than in Crain's, it was barely a one-day story.

When Lategano started at the tourism bureau in the fall of 1999, Giuliani tried
to justify the appointment by crediting her with inventing the media strategies that
had made him "the best-known mayor in the world." The mayor who wouldn't
share any crime-reduction praise with Bratton said it was Cristyne's idea to endrun
the print media and communicate directly to voters via Air Rudy. Just in time
for the planned Senate race against Hillary Clinton, he'd found a hiding place for
his gravest personal scandal. Freed from the Stockholm syndrome of life in the van,
Lategano flourished, marrying a golf writer in a South Carolina ceremony in
February 2000. Rudy did not attend the wedding.

"I think his time is best spent in New York, or wherever he needs to be," said
Lategano. The day before the wedding, the News published photos showing the
mayor with and without his wedding band, noting that he hadn't worn it since the
start of the new millennium. In the past, the mayor had so determinedly worn the
ring that when he jammed his ring finger, he switched it to his right hand. Giuliani
refused to comment, but the ring did not reappear.

Though Donna still wore her ring, she was just as busily sending out signals of
separation.

Just before Christmas in 1999, she made a rare public appearance at a Madison
Avenue shopping fair where 160 stores agreed to donate 20 percent of the day's
sales to the Children's Aid Society, a charity she supported every year. She bought
a socklike change purse at Mac Kenzie-Childs and nude-colored lip liner at
Versace. But the News reported that she opted not to stop at the men's floor. "I'll
skip that and head back downstairs," she quipped. When a Chicago tourist approached
and said: "Mrs. Giuliani, I love your husband," she replied: "Hanover,
Hanover." Though the irony went unreported by the media, the mayor held a
press conference at the same shopping fair a few hours later.

When Donna got her first major soap opera role in January 2000 and reporters
called, she talked about how she, Andrew and Caroline watched tapes of her various
performances, never mentioning her husband. On Valentine's Day, she appeared
at a charity fundraising gala with New York's other First Lady, Libby
Pataki, but she and Libby left before the speeches. Libby met her husband at Jean
Georges, where they shared a Valentine's dinner; Donna exited "because she
planned to be home with her children for a family dinner," her spokeswoman said.
There was no mention of Rudy, even though this was the night before Donna's
fiftieth birthday.

A month later, Donna did a surprise interview with Heidi Evans that the Daily
News plastered all over its Sunday edition. It was another carefully coded bit of
self-promotion and half-hearted disclosure. In between all the career chatter, she
made it clear that if Rudy won the Senate seat, neither she nor the children were
moving to Washington with him. She tried to soft-pedal that unilateral declaration
by pointing out that many New Yorkers who "work in Washington leave
their families in New York." But the message was clear: Donna planned on moving
back to East 86th Street.

Asked if she had any regrets about life at the mansion, she paused, giggled and
said: "Why don't we move on to something else." She did the same when Evans
raised the Senate race and Hillary. Evans noted that a precondition to the interview
was that "the R word (Rudy), the M word (marriage), and the H word
(Hillary)" were not to be mentioned. Apparently, neither was the T word (truth).
Evans had nonetheless cajoled the post-Senate-race separation comment out her,
accompanied by cold stares from Donna, who was clearly annoyed that she'd gone
beyond the ground rules.

The day the story appeared, Rudy was in Buffalo, doing his third straight day of
Saint Patty's Day parades. He met with Buffalo's Catholic bishop privately. He
shook hands on the parade route for hours, baring his inexhaustible smile all the
time. Not even the public announcement of his separation from his children could
crack the facade.

***

Judith Nathan is a registered nurse who doesn't see patients. All she needs is a
phone and a computer and she can work at home alone, with her rhinestonecollared
cocker spaniel, Matilda. Her work for Bristol-Myers Squibb is more a
billing and sales operation than an ER. While she lived at 136 East 55th Street between
1995 and 1999, her leased four-door Chevy Lumina was usually filled with
boxes of pharmaceutical samples, and she'd do business meetings with purchasers
around a coffee table in the lobby of her fourteenth-story residential tower. She
was one of 7,000 "drug reps" that Bristol leased cars for across the country from
Wheels Inc., a national chain.

Divorced and well-heeled, Nathan lived with her daughter Whitney and her
boyfriend Manos Zacharioudakis, a psychologist at Brooklyn's Woodhull Hospital.
Located off Third Avenue, their building was home to a notable collection of residents.
Lew Rudin, a developer who chaired the influential Association for a Better
New York, owned the building and occupied the penthouse. Bill Fugazy, the legendary
limo king and lobbyist, lived there too, as did Madeline Cuomo, the eldest
daughter of New York's ex-governor.

The building was right around the corner from P.J. Clarke's, the onetime trendy
bar and restaurant, and Nathan liked to get a drink there. She also enjoyed
Coopers Classic Cars and Cigar Bar, the usually desolate East 58th Street bar
owned by Elliot Cuker, just six blocks from her home. She was just a short walk
away from Equinox, her snooty fitness center where she worked out regularly.

Zacharioudakis says their relationship "ran out of steam" in February and
March of 1999. With nowhere to move, the forty-four-year-old Nathan stayed
with Zacharioudakis until June, though they rarely spoke and retreated to separate
ends of the two-bedroom unit. "She started living kind of the single life again that
spring," recalls her ex-boyfriend, who was nine years her junior. "We were essentially
living separate lives. We would not really interact more than a half hour a
day, usually around six P.M., and then she'd go out."

A doorman noticed a black Suburban with dark windows would drop her off at
the corner of Lexington and 55th, but never directly in front of the building. "It
looked like a government vehicle," he said. Once after the doorman saw her get
out of Suburban, he asked Nathan if that was an important client. "She seemed
embarrassed and said: 'Something like that.'" The doorman recalls that as she
withdrew from Zacharioudakis's life that June, she began staying "at a family
member's place" in Manhattan, returning periodically to "pick up more and more
of her stuff."

She also started that spring spending long weekends at her condo facing the bay
in Noyack, a tiny hamlet in South Hampton. She drove out without
Zacharioudakis, who had regularly accompanied her there during the years of
their romance. After Whitney finished school on June 13, Nathan stayed much
more often in the Hamptons duplex at 400 Noyack Road that she had bought in
1997 for $155,000.

With front and back decks and bedrooms and baths on both floors, the apartment
was filled with wicker chairs, paintings and small carpets tossed on tile
floors. Zacharioudakis said Nathan was part Greek, part Anglo on her mother's
side and, despite a maiden name of Stish, Italian on her father's side. Though usu-
ally slathered in strong sunblock, Nathan loved the nearby beach and pool, as well
as days of summer tennis, bridge and backgammon. Her on-the-phone job allowed
her to work from the condo some weeks and see the new man in her life most
weekends.

Everyone of his visits was a bit of a scene.

There was certainly nothing secluded about the condo, one of six apartments located
in a gray-wood-siding townhouse on a main road dotted with marinas and
single-family housing developments. There were four townhouses in the development,
built in 1988 and called The Narrows. The thirty apartments circled a common
parking lot. That meant that every time Nathan's new "very good friend"
pulled into the lot, accompanied by an SUV or Town Car entourage of six or seven
cops and backup cops, there were enough neighbors watching to fill future tabloid
and divorce transcript pages with damning eyewitness accounts.

Many of the units, of course, were the summer getaways of city residents who
rarely got to see up close so many of their tax dollars at work. The Post would later
put the public price tag in overtime and hotel accommodations at $3,000 a day. It
should hardly have surprised that some would gossip about it back home. Yet
Rudy Giuliani seemed to believe that the two-hour ride allowed him to take
overnight risks he certainly did not take on East 73rd Street, where Cristyne
Lategano lived. He started coming in May, the very month of his cheek-to-cheek
"reconciliation" with Donna, and he did not stop his regular visits until
September. There were even occasional sightings as late as October. Golf with
Andrew was the alibi used at City Hall to explain to reporters why he had no
weekend schedule; no one but Donna knows what the alibi at home was.

The mayor who'd recruited and dispatched an army of welfare investigators
into the homes of thousands, searching for undeclared companions, did not care
how public his extra-familial sojourns were becoming. They made some minimal
efforts to hide-he and Nathan would eat on the empty, enclosed patio of a
Southampton restaurant, holding hands; she would go to the local deli for takeout
lunch with him waiting in the car; the shades on her condo would be drawn day
and night. But word about his Southampton life drifted back to the city by late
summer. Even reporters began hearing about it.

He was already in the throes of the biggest news story and political challenge of
his life, yet he would still do what he wanted. He had a chance to put his family
back together and counterpose Hillary Clinton with a wife and children at his side,
yet he would still do what he wanted. He faced the extraordinary demands of running
the city and what promised to be a $40 million campaign, yet he was instead
doing what he wanted, all the while complaining to confidants about how much
time she required. What he wanted was Nathan, a woman with a nursing nature
and an East Side veneer of sophistication.

Born Judith Stish and raised Catholic in the coal-mining town of Hazelton,
Pennsylvania, Nathan got her nursing license in 1974, shortly after high school.
Her family name is really Sticia and her great aunt, Mildred Stish Anella, says they
come from Monte Calvo near Milan. In his own way, Rudy was coming home: Judi
Nathan's roots were more northern Italian than his own Tuscany background.

In 1979, she married Bruce Nathan, a sales rep for an architectural group in
Charlotte, North Carolina, where Judi was working for U.S. Surgical. After six
years in Atlanta, they moved to Manhattan in 1987 with their two-year-old,
adopted, daughter. "When I met Judi," Bruce Nathan says, "she stopped working."
She didn't have a job, he says, until they moved to Los Angeles in 1991, when she
worked "for a few weeks at an art gallery" and for a couple of months selling surgical
supplies again, as she had in North Carolina more than a decade earlier.
Asked what she did during the day, her ex-husband said: "I don't know. As time
went on, she became involved in Junior Leaguey things."

Divorce papers indicate that in March 1992, Judi suddenly left L.A. with her
daughter, returning briefly first to her parents' home in Hazelton, then to a friend's
apartment in New York later that year. She later moved into the Monterey, a new,
massive, S02-unit, rental building at 17S East 96th Street and finally got a New
York nursing license.

Bruce Nathan called her a "social climber" in the divorce papers, saying her
"main goal in life was being involved with whatever was 'the in thing' at the moment."
She "thought nothing," he charged, "of playing bridge two to three nights
a week, clubbing at bars one night a week with single friends, going to movies,
shows, etc.," all to the alleged detriment of their daughter. An executive with a
flooring company now, he also accused her of "anti-Semitic abuse," calling him "a
rich little Kike, Jewish boy" and "Jew Boy." In his affidavit, he called her "a manipulator,
pathological liar and exaggerator."

When she countered this mishmash of allegations with charges of physical abuse
he later denied, a judge ordered a detailed shared-custody program, though still
granting Judi primary custody. She had filed an affidavit from a teacher at Whitney's
school that directly countered her husband's claim that he regularly took Whitney
to school; the teacher said Judi was "always" the one who did it. He wasn't apparently
as far off on her social habits, however-Zacharioudakis, doormen and neighbors
on the East Side confirmed her more recent out-on-the-town habits.

Neither glamorous nor dowdy, Nathan had a wide-eyed, easily dazzled look, always
bejeweled with pendants and pearls around her neck and bracelets on both
arms. "She was married to a rich man and living the high life for many years,"
Zacharioudakis observed. "She had a lot of expensive jewelry from those years."
Bruce Nathan, however, insists he is not the "millionaire" Zacharioudakis says he
is, though he says "she lived a nice life" when they were married. Though he did
not dispute her contention in the divorce papers that they had several luxury cars
and a $75,000 yacht in Southampton, he says he pays only $1,600 a month in al-
imony now.

She kept toned with gym workouts and a calorie-counter in her head, and was
often seen going in and out of East 55th Street in jogging outfits. When she wore
glasses, she seemed professorial. Her mix of moderately priced fashion and wildly
expensive accessories-like a $4,900 Hermes handbag-suggested shifting shopping
moods and resources. "She can buy the $2,000 purse," says Zacharioudakis,
"or the $20 purse if it's stylish and tasteful. She would shop as much in
Bloomingdale's as she would in Daffy's"-a discount department store, which, like
Bloomies, was close to the East 55th Street apartment.

Her allure for Rudy was all in her gaze. When she went to a press conference at
City Hall in late December, she never took her eyes off him, magnetized by a performance
that day that swung from joking self-assurance to a mastery of a complex
variety of issues. Politics was suddenly fascinating to her.

A registered Republican in New York since 1988, she didn't vote in any of
Rudy's three mayoral races, missing presidential elections as well. Her cousin,
Tom Stish, also raised in Hazelton, was the area's Democratic state legislator until
he switched to Republican in 1994, giving the GOP a one-vote majority in the
state House of Representatives (he was later defeated for re-election). She rarely
watched TV news and preferred the business section of the Times to the metro section.
Her idea of a good book was a murder mystery set in the Hamptons.
Zacharioudakis said she and he "wouldn't get into extensive discussions about politics"
and after five years of dating or living with her, he couldn't say if she was
, conservative or liberal. "I think she's a Republican," he said.

When she was sued in 1994 for hitting a pedestrian on a Brooklyn street while
driving her rental car, she insisted in a deposition that no accident had occurred,
She claimed the injured man, a thirty-one-year-old black messenger named Gary
Wilson, actually "jumped" up on her hood, throwing himself against her windshield
while she was making a slow, left-hand turn. She also said he was playing a
Walkman so loudly she could hear the music and that, while he sat on the ground
after the accident, she yanked it off his ears "because he smelled like alcohol."
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:30 am

Part 2 of 2

Taken semi-conscious to a hospital with a fractured head and other injuries,
Wilson said he had his Walkman headset under his jacket because it was raining
when he was hit while crossing the intersection with the "Walk" sign. Four years
after Nathan's deposition, in January 2000, Wilson won a $100,000 settlement, according
to his attorney.

Zacharioudakis says the first he heard about her meeting the mayor was around
February-he will not say where they met, but others have indicated it was at
Cuker's bar. She next came home from a March or April fundraising event she
went to with her daughter-probably at Spence, the elite private school Whitney
attends-and said she'd seen Giuliani again. This time, she produced a photo. "It
was her, Whitney and the mayor in the middle, a blue and white awning in the
back. They were both smiling," said Zacharioudakis. By then, he and she were" essentially
over."

It was during this early spring period that the Suburban started dropping
Nathan off. Rudy was spotted in 1999 having a three P.M. lunch with a group of
men and women at Shun Lee Palace, an upscale Chinese restaurant across the
street from her building that Nathan frequented. He went to The Old Stand, a bar
at the corner, for a soda, alone in August, sipped it for a few minutes as if waiting
for someone and then left. The owner of Yorke Fashion Comfort Center, next door
to 136 East 55th, said he saw Rudy crossing the street one day and walking into
the Moscow Restaurant and Cabaret, which is directly opposite Zacharioudakis's
building. A sales rep at nearby Bloomingdale's recalls Rudy coming in in the
spring of 2000 "to buy a fragrance." It was quite a public crossroads for rendezvous-
in fact, Ray Harding's law firm was at precisely the same Third Avenue
intersection.

"We still lived together after it ended, but it was formally over in June,"
Zacharioudakis. "They probably began spending much more time together in the
summer." She didn't move the bulk of "her stuff out until September 1," when she
got a new apartment on East 94th Street. Her daughter started ninth grade on
September 8. She had to be back in the city most of the time by then, though the
two still took their separate cars to Noyack for occasional weekends into October.

That's when Rudy had to figure out how to integrate her in his Manhattan life.
She was certainly not one to be stuffed in a closet. At first, people at City Hall
were told that the increasingly visible Nathan was visiting Denny Young.

Louisa Young, the mother of Denny's two children and wife for two decades,
had filed for divorce on August 16. She finally recognized that alter-ego Denny,
who had been at Rudy's side for almost seventeen years as executive assistant, law
partner and counsel, was "married" to him. Though the divorce would not be
granted until the spring of 2000, Denny was available that summer to chaperone
Rudy's new friend.

She began appearing at City Hall in August, attended the dedication of City
Hall Park in early October and a Yankee victory party at the mansion in
November. She and Young went to the December press conference together.

In addition to Young, she was described as a friend of Kate Anson, a fortyish,
longtime City Hall aide who would later catch the bouquet at Lategano's wedding.
At some points, Nathan was even passed off as a member of the mayor's security
detail (impersonating a police officer is a crime). Judi and Rudy became such regulars
at Cuker's, they found their own special space-a curtained-off, six-byeight-
foot, reservable room complete with TV and dark, u-shaped, leather couch
fitted against the wall-for sipping diet sodas. Cuker called it the Romeo y Julieta
Room. If they came in a larger group, they sat out at one of the glass tables in the
bar amid old movie portraits of Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant,
unwinding in a cloud of smoke.

Her appearances at the emergency command center the night of the
Millennium, one Town Hall meeting after another, the State of the City speech,
the Saint Patrick's Day parade and on upstate campaign swings began to set every
insider tongue in the city flapping by March. When she showed up seated next to
him at the Inner Circle on March 10, almost as many eyes followed her every
move as followed Hillary's. The annual political lampoon hosted by the city's press
corps was the first time the two met as Senate rivals, but Clinton and Rudy
weren't the only headliners.

Donna had quietly accepted the failure of the short-lived May reconciliation,
saying later that whatever hope she had had for it ended in the fall. The years,
however, had so disconnected her from Rudy's real life that she did not know
about Nathan until the early months of 2000. She may have known the symptoms
but not the name. Within days of the Inner Circle spectacle though-which had
mouths flapping everywhere-she gave her separation interview to the News's
Heidi Evans. While much of the interview reinforced the chill in the marriage that
the city anticipated, Donna couldn't resist one contrary tidbit, perhaps meant as a
taunt tossed at her new rival. Asked if Rudy had given her a fiftieth-birthday present
in February, she looked at her aide with a "Should P" smile, and said he had.

"I guess I can say. A necklace and earrings," she said. "Carolee [an upscale costume
jeweler] is the designer. Sort of a silver-tone chain with pearls and earrings
to match."

On April 20, Donna announced that she'd agreed to join Kirstie Alley and
Hazelle Goodman in a two-week run of the off-Broadway hit The Vagina
Monologues, a spicy show written by a close friend and supporter of Hillary
Clinton's. The announcement was widely perceived as a slap in the mayor's face,
with Post columnists printing salacious slices from the play. Friends of the mayor
would later tell reporters that for months early in 2000, Rudy was asking Donna
to talk about a legal separation and she was refusing. One said he started asking as
far back as the spring of 1999. If the protracted Cold War over Lategano had been
tortuous, the new one seemed about to get hot.

***

A week before Donna announced her off-Broadway debut, Rudy learned he
had a high prostate-specific antigen count. Nineteen years earlier, he had
watched his father die of prostate cancer. He did not tell Donna, or almost anyone
else, about the test results, which were part of a routine physical. The doctors put
him on antibiotics before giving him a second PSA test. "It all sort of started
there," he later said. "Just the contemplation of it "-for the two weeks that followed-"
makes you think about what's important in life." The second test was
just as alarming so Giuliani checked in at Mount Sinai Hospital for a biopsy on
April 26 at 7 A.M.

David Seifman, the Post's bureau chief at City Hall, was standing at the hospital
door at dawn. He is said to be able to hear a deputy mayor inhale from his desk
on the opposite side of City Hall's Rotunda. Seifman's source got the time right
but didn't know why the mayor was going to the hospital. The veteran newsman
waited until the mayor emerged three hours later and did a quick story that reported
the visit without mentioning the cause. Giuliani decided, however, that
Seifman's presence meant he had to go public the next day. He had kept his secret
so close to the vest even his top aides didn't know what was going on. Now, to prepare
for his press conference, he widened his circle of advisers. As soon as he did
that, the Times and NY1 had the scoop.

Rudy's prostate cancer diagnosis was on the air before he could do his morning
press briefing. It was an extraordinary performance, with adversarial Rudy open,
warm, responsive and authentic. He said he'd told his wife the night before and the
children early that morning. He choked up only when he recalled his father's
death. He said he needed time to assess his treatment options-which were basically
radiation or surgery. He had no idea how it would affect the Senate run. In
the Blue Room, for once, the profound had replaced the petty.

There's little doubt that Judi Nathan knew long before Donna. In fact, she went
to the hospital with Rudy for the prostate tests. Zacharioudakis says that Nathan
"has very extensive training in terms of treatment and medication," particularly
with regard to cancer care. "She will nurse him in more ways than one."

The day after Rudy's stunning announcement, he went to upstate Saratoga
Springs for a campaign appearance. Nathan was with him. He introduced her to
several people at the county's Republican Women's Club, and everyone "just assumed
she was a member of his City Hall staff or someone from the campaign."
He taped a commercial at the event, where he got a standing ovation and cries of
"Rudy, Rudy" from the thousand people in attendance.

"We should be for real," he told the crowd in the sound bite featured in the major
media buy. "We should be honest with each other." The Saratoga event ended
around 8:30 P.M., and even though Giuliani was due in Buffalo the next morning
for breakfast with GOP leaders, he and Nathan went back to New York.

That night, a Friday, they were seen eating mussels in marinara sauce at 11:30
P.M. in a rear alcove of an East Side restaurant located in between Gracie Mansion
and Nathan's new 94th Street apartment. The inevitable SUV and two cars were
parked outside. That Sunday, they returned for another dinner.

Ironically, the restaurant, Cronies, is directly across the street from Elaine's, the
too-chic joint Giuliani had railed against when he forced Bill Bratton out of his administration.
"He went to Elaine's too much," Giuliani told Esquire in 1997. "I
thought the emphasis on the heavy nightlife, the drinking, did not give the kind
of image to the police department that it needed. You lead by example or you don't
really lead." In fact, Bratton was a bigger Diet Coke man than Rudy.

Roger Friedman, a Fox online gossip writer, was eating at Elaine's that Friday
and a friend told him the mayor's detail was parked in front of Cronies and that he
was inside-very definitely not alone. Jammed with its usual media crowd,
Elaine's dispatched one curious customer after another across the street. As brazen
as the Inner Circle joint appearance had been, at least Rudy and Judi hadn't gone
alone. Dining opposite Elaine's-which apparently they'd done often-was a demand
for coverage.

Friedman told Mitchell Fink, a Daily News gossip and a friend, about the sighting
on Saturday. On Monday, he told another friend and gossip Richard Johnson,
the crown prince of Page Six in the Post. Friedman says that at around 4 P.M.,
Johnson told him that his editors wouldn't publish the item. Fink sent a reporter
to Cronies on Monday, got confirmation and a no-comment from City Hall, and
wrote an item for Tuesday, May 2, that neither named nor described her. Friedman
wrote a story, too, and his Fox editor said, according to Friedman, that they were
"definitely going ahead with it." Fink agreed to cite the Friedman story, which was
precisely why Friedman was so willing to share his scoop.

But around 8 P.M., Friedman's vibrating cell phone started hopping around in
his pocket. "It was my copy editor asking if I knew that they had decided not to do
it. There was some discussion up the line and they weren't going to do it. I just
laughed."

The Post had been sitting on photos of Rudy, Judi and Whitney walking out of another
East Side restaurant, Hanratty's, on April 22. They had an "apolitical" tipster
who told them the two regularly ate there, just a few blocks from Nathan's apartment.
A freelance photographer was sent there on April 15-Rudy and Donna's anniversary-
but never saw them. When he was sent again the next Saturday, he got
brunch shots and rushed them to the paper. The editor took his negatives, but
printed nothing. For eight days, no one at the paper even asked the City Hall staff to
10 the woman in the pictures, though the editors only had a first name.

When the Post got Friedman's tip, they knew that Giuliani had gone to Cronies
with Nathan fully aware that the Post had already photographed them at
Hanratty's the week before. Rudy was doing everything but hire publicist Howard
Rubenstein to get his relationship into the headlines, and no one would publish it.
Friedman had egged the Post on by telling them the News was. He'd let the News
know the Post had a picture shot elsewhere, pushing them. And still, all that ran
was the tiny, blind Fink item.

It was enough, unleashing the Post and Fox. Johnson got a name and the old
East 55th address, then sent a reporter with the photo to confirm it. The story the
Post ran on Wednesday carried two large pictures underneath a "mystery brunch
pal" headline. Friedman finally got his story online. When the Post pictures appeared,
Giuliani declared: "She's a good friend, a very good friend." A Rudy "confidant"
was freely telling reporters: "They're an item. They seem to be very
affectionate. They're very open about it." There was no mistaking Rudy's eagerness
to affirm the relationship. It was only six days after the prostate announcement,
and Rudy had already topped himself.

The press conference was quickly eclipsed, however, by the death later that
Wednesday of Cardinal O'Connor. The next day's tabloids still did page after page
of stories about Nathan, inside an outside wrap of cardinal plaudits and obits.
Donna was silent, with a spokeswoman repeating the five-year-old mantra about
how she was with the kids. A media firestorm started and Donna, rattled and embittered,
picked an awkward moment to respond. Her aides started calling a favored
reporter or two on Friday and whispering that Donna would have something to say
on Saturday at 12:30 P.M. outside St. Patrick's Cathedral on her way to the wake. By
Saturday, it was a media mob and Donna's wake sideshow would earn the published
ire of Church officials.

She carefully chose the tense of her verbs, saying she would "be supportive of
Rudy in his fight against this illness, as this marriage and this man have been very
precious to me." She also issued an ominous warning: "The well-being and safety
of Andrew and Caroline will be my primary concern in any decisions that have to
be made, as has always been the case." Though her aide told reporters she would
answer questions, she took none. Standing in a black dress, with black high heels,
she was so shaken, dead silence followed her canned statement. Reporters dared
not intrude with shouted questions.

That morning's Post reported that Nathan, too, had taken a trip to St. Pat's. She
was marching a few feet behind the mayor up Fifth Avenue at the St. Patty's Day
parade just a month and a half earlier. But the Donna declaration was not just a response
to Nathan.

She had pulled out of The Vagina Monologues five days after he announced his
cancer, citing "personal family circumstances" and promising to do the show in the
future. A Post columnist branded the statement she issued "the coldest get-well
card ever mass-faxed around town," noting that she never mentioned cancer or
Rudy. The column was an indication that her "aloof" posture was clouding her
"wronged" public image. She was also incensed that Rudy had announced he
would be going alone to the cardinal's funeral on Monday, locking her out of an
event commemorating the life of the priest who had often counseled them, particularly
her, in an effort to keep the marriage together.

Rudy sat with George and Libby Pataki, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al and Tipper
Gore, George W. and Laura Bush, a lonely figure at the front of the cathedral and
the crossroads of his life. His mortality, marriage and manhood flashed before him
in the solitude of a funeral Mass.

The next day was a horror. Post reporters toured the homes of Stish family members
in Pennsylvania, asking great-aunts about Nathan's affair with the mayor. They
rebuked her. Rudy looked so weak at a public appearance he had to promise the audience
he wouldn't collapse. He claimed he was taking an antibiotic to counteract an
infection caused by the biopsy. His security detail was so upset that unbeknownst to
the press, they summoned an ambulance he rejected. The press stakeout of Nathan
lost her. She wasn't at East 94th Street or Southampton for twenty-four hours. The
mayor was missing part of the time too. It was a day of decision.

A pallid Giuliani, accompanied by Young, Cuker and other top advisers, turned
Wednesday morning's routine press briefing at a Bryant Park event into the news
shriek of the week. His eyes fixed on his feet, his shoulders slumped forward, his
voice a whisper, he announced: "For quite some time it's probably been apparent
that Donna and I lead, in many ways, independent and separate lives. It's been a
very painful road and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to formalize that in an agreement
that protects our children and protects Donna." He said he wanted "a separation
agreement; it's not a divorce."

His immediate motivation for announcing the separation, he claimed, was "the
tremendous invasion of privacy that's taken place in everyone's life, my family's,
Judith Nathan's family." Since there hadn't really been any new reporting on his
own family, he was clearly referring to the press swarm in Hazelton and at 94th
Street. Asked about the effect on the Senate race, he detoured into an extraordinary
salute to Nathan, calling her "a very, very fine person" who's been a "very
good friend" before his illness and since, saying "I rely on her and she helps me a
great deal."

''I'm going to need her more now than maybe 1 did before," he declared. Asked
if she'd been more supportive than Hanover, he wouldn't answer. He called Donna
a "wonderful woman and mother" and left it there.

He had not told Donna he planned this announcement and she was not watching
the televised stunner. A friend called her to tell her it was on. Her press aide's
talks with a reporter early that day indicated that nothing special was expected.
When Rudy was finished, Donna's office promised a quick press conference, and
then pushed it back again and again. Finally, just before the afternoon deadline,
she walked out to the mikes in front of Gracie Mansion. Her tightly written statement
delivered directly to the cameras, just as she had taught Rudy years earlier,
was as strong a summation as Rudy had ever delivered at any of his thirty-three
criminal trials:

Today's turn of events brings me great sadness. I had hoped we could keep
this marriage together.

For several years it was difficult to participate in Rudy's public life because
of his relationship with one staff member. Beginning last May, 1 made a major
effort to bring us back together. Rudy and 1 re-established some of our
personal intimacy through the fall. At that point he chose another path.

She said she and Rudy would now discuss a legal separation, but that for the next
few months at least, she and the kids would remain at the mansion for security
reasons.

Her spokeswoman said the staff member was Cristyne Lategano and the relationship
was intimate. So the cameras had one more head to hunt. Cristyne tried
a cute, smiling, dismissive retort, saying she "had no desire to speculate" about
why Donna Hanover issued her statement, called it "a difficult time" for them,
and put in a plug for Giuliani as one of "the greatest mayors in our city's history."

Reporters started shouting questions about the affair and she tried to leave the
room, but they blocked her way. She said something about standing by her prior
statements and they demanded she repeat them. New York's official welcome
wagon bulled her way out the door. The next day Rudy took an identical position,
as if it was one last release he and Crissy wrote while sharing a slice of pizza.

"I said everything I was going to say about that a long time ago," he ruled, lying
that he had "definitively" answered those questions when all he'd done in
1997 was rant and duck, assailing Vanity Fair without ever explicitly denying the
affair. He was back to his old habits of berating and demeaning reporters who were
asking questions now not about his private life, but about what went on between
the two most powerful people in the government.

The city was in an emotional tizzy. But Rudy wasn't through.

Donna retreated to Los Angeles with the kids for the Mother's Day weekend.
She, her parents and the kids did a family shot for the staked-out reporters-her
dad again in the cowboy hat he wore at the inaugural. Caroline looked more like
her grandmother than Rudy. The kids were Kofnovecs. Her parents gasped in
shock to reporters. Donna doled out quotes to reporters, taped two A&E segments
and kept the kids out of school for half the week.

Her first night in L.A., a Friday, Rudy's office did a media alert, making sure the
press would be out to cover the First Official Mayoral Date. The Daily News said
it with the headline: "Walkin' My Baby Back Home." He met Nathan at an East
Side eatery, dined with her and three City Hall aides, including Anson, the winner
of the Lategano bouquet sweepstakes. Then he took a ten-block stroll to her building
with her, the entourage and the security detail. Engulfed by cameras and reporters,
Nathan beamed and so did Rudy. "It's a great night," the mayor declared.
Customers in outdoor cafes cheered as they passed. She gave him a good night kiss
at the door, indistinguishable from the ones she planted on his aides. He walked to
the mansion, with the shame of his separation press conference already history.

Donna was picking up Andrew at the airport just as Rudy and Judi sat next to
each other at Tony's Di Napoli. The stroll was a stab at her heart. She and Rudy
used to love long walks, often on East Side streets. "Pray for me," he said to the
last reporter with him on the walk to the mansion. He was referring to his health.
The city was wondering about his soul.

***

There was certainly something familiar about the saga of Judi Nathan. For
most of the '70s, Rudy's opening line with women was that he was separated,
and no one could tell when he was and when he wasn't. As a young assistant in the
Southern District, he dated openly and even started the unannounced nocturnal
visits at a paralegal's apartment. "Can I come up?" was his clandestine slogan.
Later, his friends at Patterson, Belknap thought he was leading the bachelor life in
1977-three years before it actually began.

Regina Peruggi remained with him until February 1980, but their co-op apartment
on West End Avenue was just a precursor to Gracie Mansion, a life of icy, unfinished
sentences and human walls. When Rudy became mayor and Regina was
president of Marymount Manhattan, a small East Side Catholic college, he cochaired
and appeared at its biggest fundraising event every year, stirring contributions
from donors who funded his own campaigns. Whether it was his intent or not,
his help might well have sealed lips that once threatened his career with secrets.

Rudy began introducing Donna as his fiancee in Mayor June 1982, while he
was still very much married to Regina. Rudy declared his love long distance, proposed
in six weeks and was obsessed with Donna. Everything happened so fast she
gave up her Miami job and condo a bare three and a half months after they met.
Virtually the day she arrived in Washington, Rudy and Regina filed a separation
agreement in New York. Five months later they were divorced. of course then,
Donna was all googooeyed.

Reminiscent of those days, the tabloids reported that Nathan was wearing a
heart-shaped diamond on the ring finger of her left hand worth up to $20,000. The
Post noticed it first, saying that a "source close to Nathan" pointed it out and noted
that she's "done nothing to dispel the notion that it's an engagement ring." The
News reported that Nathan "has not been shy about flashing it around when she
walks her dog." The forays with Matilda had actually taken on the air of a paparazzi
performance and choosing to wear the ring on these excursions was an invitation
to questions that both Nathan and Giuliani then declined to answer. If the
ring was Rudy's, he was, as usual, just a step ahead of himself, pushing every envelope,
as if separations were merely a question of interpretation.

When Rudy ran for mayor in 1993, he had his aides researching the John
Lindsay campaign to see what political lessons might be transferable. He told them
that years earlier, while he lived on West End Avenue, he'd noticed Lindsay's city
limo parked repeatedly in front of his building. He asked and was told that Lindsay
had a mistress there. He was hardly shy about spooning up such salicious and unsupported
gossip, recounting the story with a smile, as if such adventures were
part of the allure of the mayoralty. If true, it would turn out to be the only part of
the Lindsay legacy his Republican successor imitated.

Rudy Crew, the schools chancellor who became his cigar-chomping buddy, recalls
one conversation in early 1999 at Cuker's bar when Giuliani cited Al
D' Amato approvingly. The senator had once told Giuliani that he ought to do a
statewide race because, as Giuliani told Crew, there'd be a babe in every town who
would want a piece of him. "I remember it was cold, a wild locker-room conversation,"
says Crew. "It was words to the effect of 'There's plenty to pick from, a lot
of action out there.'" Crew was actually dropped from the Cuker scene just as
Nathan became Giuliani's regular companion there-such was the fate of education
policy in Rudy's realm.

A public marriage on the rocks was a door-opener to Giuliani. He behaved as if
he believed that there was no point in being estranged if you couldn't also be
available. The man who was busily destroying social entitlements was developing
a very personal one of his own. And he was advertising it. There are even those
close to Rudy who said Nathan learned he was a virtually nightly visitor to
Cuker's and went there looking for him. Asked recently if Rudy was at Cuker's often
with his new girlfriend, a 5'9" honey-blond bartender in the spaghetti-string
tank top and tight-fitting black skirt said, "She's not his NEW girlfriend."

At the center of Rudy's social swirl was Cuker, who is said by Rudy confidants
to have made the introduction to Nathan, a charge he vaguely denies. Cuker, fiftysix,
has been a constant with Rudy since the IRS probe of the late 70s. Beyond the
four classic cars Cuker supplied him over the years, he was one of seven or eight
close friends who'd showed up in 1989 at the first meeting of the Giuliani campaign
committee. He'd given or raised $16,500 for Rudy's campaigns since.

Cuker had opened the cigar bar, right around the corner from the plaza Hotel on
East 58th Street, in late 1997, having gotten permission from the State Liquor
Authority to park one of his cars in the center of the bar, beneath suspended hubcaps
and available for sale. To make sure he got the unusual permit-a mix of matches,
booze and gas is hardly ordinary-he had hired a Republican attorney who used to
chair the city's Alcohol Control Board. With low ceilings, cement pillars, red-orange
lighting, triangular red stools and black-and-white photos of movie stars, the bar
had an old Hollywood garage look. Rudy made it his second home, or possibly his
first, holding forth there night after night. With no food other than pate and caviar,
all it offered was stogies and companionship.

The bar made Cuker an almost daily presence in Rudy's life, allowing him to
gradually fill the void left by Peter Powers, the lifelong best friend who had retreated
to private life in 1996. That's when Cuker became, as other Rudy friends
see it, a Svengali-like influence on the mayor, turning a '50s remnant into a New
Age pioneer. Cristyne hung out at the bar with Rudy early on, alone and in larger
groups. Her birthday party occurred there. Fran Reiter threw a Convention &
Visitors Bureau party there. The gang gathered there, just to be near their hero.
Cuker presided over a bar that became Rudy's playground, but attracted little
other business. By the fall of 1999, he was trying to sell it.

Cuker also started appearing more and more often at City Hall. Appointed the
chair of Giuliani's Film and Theatre Advisory Committee, the frustrated off-
Broadway actor won bit parts in three or four films after Rudy took office. He
wrote and directed all of Giuliani's garishly successful skits and dance routines for
the annual Inner Circle revue, a spoof thrown by the city press corps. He even
acted as master of ceremonies at Rudy's fundraising galas.

Cuker is so exotic (which is what his telephone book ad calls his cars) that he
has spelled his own name five different ways over the years, using Cooper, Cukor
and Cuker as last names and Elliot and Eliot as first names. He spouts psychobabble
acquired in over twenty-five years of therapy. He wears bow ties deliberately
untied most of the time because he "likes the look." He has a country house in
Putnam County a stone's throw from George Pataki's and acted as a go-between
with the governor for Rudy. He was Rudy's speech coach and Donna's acting
coach, serving as one of their mediators as well until news of his Nathan connection
reached Donna.

Divorced once, he lived with twenty-something Bernadette Hession, an Irish
immigrant who did the paperwork in his garage, until he fell in love with her even
younger sister, Noeline. He married the twenty-five-year-old at Gracie Mansion
in 1997 and she now works in the car company, which Dun & Bradstreet estimates
as a $6 million-a-year business. In July 1999, Cuker sold the garage and associated
Village property for $6.3 million to a developer who is building an eleven-story
tower on the land; he is reportedly opening a new garage nearby.

A social friend of Cuker's, who met Rudy through him, remembers sitting opposite
him in the garage office and gazing at a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot mural
of the dealer hanging behind his head. A photo of Cuker's wife staring at him
hangs in his bar-the only color shot on the wall. His business card also carries a
picture of him with a cigar in his mouth. Self-absorption as a religion was what he
sold to Rudy, who had only thought of it previously as a way of life.

"Look into your inner self, trust your heart, climb away from the real world and
into a spiritual world" was how one Rudy friend characterized the Cuker message.
He rationalized pleasure and indulgence as forms of expression, said another.
"Breathe-deeply" relaxing lessons with Rudy were so common Cuker began to
sound like a City Hall swimming coach. He told the Times that when he "put Rudy
in the parts" he played in the Inner Circle skits, "he gets a fuller sense of his complete
being than when he's in his business suits." And Rudy said: "Elliot gives me
ways of trying to discover the character. It's very much trying to discover your own
feelings about things. I used to think about acting that it was making something up,
as opposed to trying to find how you honestly and legitimately react to something."

Peter Powers, Randy Levine and many others in Rudy's buttoned-up crew began
to see Cuker as a dark cloud hanging over Rudy's life, but no one could break
his hold.

"We lost him," was what these friends whispered.

He had become a citizen of Cuker's world, rubbery and elusive, superior and
posturing. That world, Nathan and cancer would combine to unravel him.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:31 am

Part 1 of 2

Twenty One: Soiling Mr. Clean

THE ARROGANCE THAT IS LIKE BODY ODOR TO RUDY, REPELLENT TO
others but undetectable to him, is rooted, strangely enough, in his concept
of clean hands. He is never wrong, his swagger says, because he has spent
his life uncovering and combatting wrong, a knight besieged but undaunted by
the compromised, confused and corrupt. It is not just his eyes that do not
blink; it is his rectitude.

He used to talk about tracking a crooked cop who started each day at Mass
and took a bribe by afternoon. He told the story with a sneer that suggested
that no form of human duplicity could surprise him, and that the hypocrisy
of it bothered him more than the payoffs. As a young assistant in the
Southern District, he swept the floors for dead case files no one else would try
and found a way to get indignant about bootlegging in Harlem. It wasn't just
criminality that upset Prosecutor Rudy whenever he found it in public life or
on Wall Street; it was every form of insider trading, every tilt of the balance
of justice.

At the peak of the Koch scandal hysteria in December 1986-with Donald
Manes dead and Stanley Friedman convicted-Giuliani talked about "a certain
kind of frustration" he felt in the pursuit of municipal wrongdoing. "Much of
what you're looking at really isn't criminal," he said, "but raises questions about
how politics is practiced." He called this pattern of conduct-specifically citing
lobbyists who profited from public power-as the "noncriminal, unethical behavior"
of New York's political players. And later, when he was mayor-in-exile
during the Dinkins reign, he regularly derided the influence of power-broker
lobbyists like Sid Davidoff, promising to shut down the inside track.

Giuliani also waged war against "the corrosive effects of money on politics,"
appearing after his loss in 1989 before the Campaign Finance Board and recalling
his own role in creating the city's new system of restrictions on contributions
and expenditures:

As someone whose work as u.s. Attorney laid at least some of the foundation
to this law by the exposure of municipal corruption, I am a very, very strong
advocate of it. I believe that it is demonstrable that public officials in New
York City very, very often over the last 10 to 15 years were incapable of making
decisions in the public interest because of the huge amounts of money
donated by some.

And therefore, the title of the book that was written several years ago, City
for Sale, was certainly the reputation that New York City was obtaining, a city
that could be purchased. If you look at some of the history pre this new law, it
really isn't just an appearance problem. That's one part of it, that people are donating
$40,000 and $50,000, and that looks bad. So, also, you can see a pattern
of vote changing, benefits giving, zoning variances, there's a whole history out
there of an absolute impact on the way in which public decisions are made.

We have to explain to people that, in fact, their generally held notion that
you can buy and sell politicians actually does happen, has happened, and will
continue to happen if we don't have laws intervene to try and create limits.

These comments were not just an outgrowth of his 1980s probes of the Koch administration.
His 1974 prosecution of Congressman Bert Podell was a pioneering
effort to define both a political contribution and a legal fee as bribes.

He was just as hostile to patronage, promising in his first mayoral campaign "to
make certain the corrupting influence of patronage is removed from government
once and for all." Where government jobs "are turned over in blocks to political
leaders who have been in power for a long time," he said, obviously referring to
Stanley Friedman and Donald Manes, "that almost always leads to corruption."
He vowed: "There will be no patronage in my administration. Not under this
mayor's nose."

He loved to showcase his fine-tuned antenna for probity in personal settings.
For example, when Lou Carbonetti Jr., the East Harlem clubhouse clone of Harold
Giuliani's close friend, visited him at the u.s. Attorney's office in the late '80s and
offered him a framed picture of Harold Giuliani. Rudy took the picture and returned
the frame, too pure to accept a gift from the likes of Carbonetti. But when
he became mayor, he named Carbonetti a commissioner until news leaks about his
questionable past forced his resignation, whereupon Carbonetti miraculously rebounded
with a better-paying job at a city-assisted development entity. Rudy also
installed Carbonetti's twenty-five-year-old, college dropout, son as his patronage
chief at City Hall, eventually elevating him to chief of staff, and Carbonetti's exwife
in a six-figure post at the Housing Authority.

Similarly, when Cristyne Lategano gave him an expensive tie for Christmas, he
said he couldn't take a present from an employee. He then started a relationship
with her so close it shook his administration and his marriage. In four years, her
public salary nearly doubled. Then he rewarded her with a sinecure that was a
scandal.

He's raised almost $50 million in three mayoral races and the Senate race, all
the while claiming to have never solicited a giver one on one, which would certainly
make him an anomaly in American politics. Yet his campaigns have been financed
by the grifters and wire pullers who flock to him at his birthday
fundraisers, negotiate with his government by wink and nod and believe that the
maximum legal contribution is the minimum threshold for access. So long as
whatever quid pro quos that are involved weren't part of a conversation that included
him, Rudy could pretend they never happened.

The lines he's drawn in the sand, as he moved from prosecutor to politician,
have shifted with each gust of wind-if one's covered, he's just scratched out
another. Engulfed in City Hall by the very "noncriminal" conduct he once abhorred-
his friends leeching off his government as lobbyists and "consultants"-
he looked at no one else's hands but his own, still pale white underneath all that
dark hair. "As you get used to this job," he said in 1999, "you realize that some of
the things that would get you upset when you started don't really matter. The
only thing that still upsets me is when people question your integrity or your
honesty."

***

Ray Harding was broke on January 1, 1994. He owed the IRS a quarter of a million
dollars. He hadn't been a partner in a law firm for almost a decade. He
claimed to be a copyright specialist, but his only known litigation history was
knocking Liberal Party opponents off the ballot on obscure technicalities. One of
his sons, twenty-nine-year-old college dropout Russell, had a summer job with
EMI Records before joining the Giuliani campaign staff in 1993, where he was in
charge of sending surrogate speakers to lesser events. The other, thirty-six-yearold
Robert, told the Times his last job was as the Cuomo-appointed counsel to the
state's Facilities Development Corporation.

A couple of months into Rudy's first year, Fischbein & Badillo made Ray a partner.
The firm's lobbying clients with the city soared from three to seventy-two,
twenty more than the second-place finisher. His hourly rate climbed to $375.
When a flashflood of news stories hit the Harding firm in 1997, it adjusted its dis-
closure filings with the city, hiding clients with city business under a self-serving
redefinition of lobbying. Harding said he wouldn't lobby personally-whatever
that meant-but he'd actually said that in '94 when it all started. No one believed
F&B had really lost nearly half its lobbying clients when it filed for only forty-one
in 1998.

Both Harding sons were given jaunty new titles as soon as the administration
took office, with Robert eventually rising to deputy mayor, and Russell, to the
head of the city's Housing Development Corporation. Their combined salaries exceeded
their father's old IRS debt, hitting nearly $300,000. Both got chauffeurs. As
Times columnist Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out, Russell had fIno background in financing
housing" when he took over HDC, and Robert "had no background writing
budgets" when Giuliani put him in charge of the fifth largest in the country.
"Tammany had higher standards than this," said Richard Wade, the urban historian
who was once a Harding ally in the early days of the Liberal Party. "How
could you have a nationwide search and come up with the kids of Ray Harding?"

By 1997, Libs were named to twenty-three key city posts, controlling agencies
from Parks to Economic Development to the Board of Standards & Appeals, which
handles zoning variances. Twenty-four city officials listed as having been lobbied
by Harding's firm attended the Liberal Party's gala annual fund-raiser that year at
the Grand Hyatt, as did twenty-one members of the firm. Fran Reiter, the party's
ex-chair who was deputy mayor for most of the first term, was listed on F&B's disclosure
forms eleven times, and her office nineteen times-some measure of how
frequently the firm lobbied her.

In a dismaying paradox, F&B wound up representing all three of the clients
Giuliani had cross-examined Stanley Friedman about years earlier. As party boss
and predator lobbyist, Harding also embodied precisely what Friedman, who has
always maintained his innocence, conceded was his worst ethical failing. His
lawyers said in a pre-sentencing memo that Friedman had "exploited" a system
that permitted him to reap profits "from law clients who employed him to call
upon public officials whom he helped place in positions of public authority
through his political influence."

Harding's lobbying success was a model followed by others in the Giuliani orbit,
including the wife of his Senate campaign manager, Bruce Teitelbaum. When
Rudy endorsed Mario Cuomo in 1994, Teitelbaum, then the deputy chief of staff,
left City Hall to help in the Cuomo campaign. Liaison to the Jewish community
for Giuliani, Teitelbaum was dating Suri Kasirer, who held the same job for
Cuomo. After Cuomo's loss, Kasirer joined a lobbying firm with Democratic roots
but Giuliani connections.

Then she quietly formed her own firm, assembling at least two dozen clients,
many of whom were chasing city funding, contracts or permits. She did not file as
a lobbyist until the Daily News reported in 1998 that she had secretly arranged
high-level meetings for two powerful corporate clients. By then she was
Teitelbaum's wife and he was chief of staff, one of the most powerful enforcers inside
the government. In her first filing, she listed eleven clients paying her
$350,000. It soon grew to fourteen clients. By the time she filed, Teitelbaum was
moving across the street from City Hall to take over Rudy's political operations
and changing his registration to Republican. Ironically, Rudy had railed about the
impropriety of Dinkins lobbying king Sid Davidoff reportedly dating a City Hall
aide who handled a contract with a Davidoff client.

Randy Mastro returned in July 1998 to the same law firm he'd left when he
joined the administration in 1994, Gibson Dunn. He was then a junior partner in
the Los Angeles-based firm that once represented Ronald Reagan and included
William French Smith and others from the old Giuliani crowd at Justice. Mastro
came back as co-managing partner of a larger, 100-attorney, New York office. He
boasted to a friend that potential clients who wanted to do business with the city
were banging down his door, but he had to wait the one-year legal requirement
before he could represent them.

His firm had no lobbying clients through the first five years of the administration.
It filed for nine in 1999, with Mastro listed as a principal lobbyist for each. Much of
the lobbying was described as starting as soon as the first year elapsed. Candidate
Giuliani used to vow to stretch the conflict of interest bar to five years, but as mayor,
he dropped the idea. The Times reported that by the summer of 1999, Mastro had
"collected 50 clients and found time to vacation in Rio de Janeiro."

One focus of Mastro's work as deputy mayor had been spearheading the effort
to drive the mob out of the private carting business, which handles all commercial
trash in the city. He also created the Trade Waste Commission to regulate the industry.
The commission immediately licensed subsidiaries of national companies
like Waste Management (WM) to operate in the city, but delayed the licensing of
an estimated 200 small companies, many with no provable organized crime connection.
It also had to approve the merger of Waste Management with another
major operator, which made the company the dominant force in the New York
trash business.

When Mastro wound up representing Waste Management, an attorney for the
small operators called it "unseemly" and said that Mastro had "overwhelmingly
favored WM" in designing the system. With WM also winning an $86 million
contract to truck waste exports out of the city-the down payment on what will
become a billion-dollar garbage export policy also fashioned by the Giuliani administration-
reporters started writing about the apparent conflict.

Mastro responded by saying his firm had represented WM before he rejoined it.
But that explanation-in view of his previous association with Gibson Dunnraised
more appearance questions than it answered. He did not list WM as one of
his city lobbying clients, representing it instead in connection with a state agency.
WM's lobbyist with the city was Dennis Vacco, the former state attorney general
close to Giuliani who approved the settlement of a huge antitrust suit with WM
on his final day in office in 1998.

Peter Powers, the mayor's lifelong friend and former first deputy mayor, also
took on Waste Management as a client, though Powers insists he does no direct
city lobbying. A tax lawyer before going to City Hall in 1994, Powers did not return
to a law firm when he left the administration in 1996. After a three-year
stint with an investment company, he set up a one-man consulting business and
moved into space he rented from public relations czar Howard Rubenstein, the
most influential constant in New York politics over the last three decades. The
only other first deputy mayor of the '90s, Norman Steisel, the scandal magnet of
the Dinkins administration, had also moved into Rubenstein's office after leaving
City Hall.

Closely allied with Dinkins and weighed down with the baggage of ex-clients
like Stanley Friedman, Donald Manes and Leona Helmsley, Rubenstein was at first
warned by Deputy Mayor John Dyson that he was not welcome at Rudy's City
Hall. Then his blue-chip clients started calling the Hall on his behalf. He represented
Bill Koeppel, Giuliani's biggest donor and fund-raiser who offered apartments
to a dozen Giuliani staffers, including Lategano. He represented George
Steinbrenner, whose Yankees would spend two terms negotiating a stadium deal
with Giuliani. And in fact, by the time the first term was over, he also represented
John Dyson's upstate winery and got the center row seat at the second inaugural,
right behind Giuliani and Powers. He even took on Elliott Cuker as a client, handling
the opening of the infamous cigar bar, and offered Cristyne Lategano a job
when she needed a route out of City Hall.

Though Rubenstein had appeared before a special state ethics commission in the
throes of the municipal scandal of the '80s and vowed to never again combine his
dual role of lobbyist and fund-raiser, he was back doing both in the Golden
Giuliani era. Rubenstein's lobbying clients grew from six in 1995, when the early
hostility of the Giuliani administration was hurting him, to twenty-six in 1999,
though he still dismisses lobbying as a minor part of his firm's $30 million-a-year
business. He threw a $l,500-a-ticket party in his Fifth Avenue apartment for
Giuliani in 1998, raising $140,000. He said he and Powers were also "collaborating"
-with each recommending the other to clients.

Richard Schwartz vowed publicly when he left the city government to form
Opportunity America, a job placement company targeting welfare recipients, that
he wouldn't profit from the welfare-to-work program he helped create for
Giuliani. This year, however, Comptroller Alan Hevesi blocked a $104 million
HRA welfare-to-work contract for a Virginia firm, Maximus, that retained
Schwartz's company as a major subcontractor. Schwartz was scheduled to get 30
percent of Maximus's city fee.

Hevesi charged that city officials had granted the Maximus partners "huge preferred
treatment," with "conferences, meetings and exchanges" occurring between
HRA and the contractor four months before the initial open session with other
providers. HRA commissioner Jason Turner had used Maximus while running a
similar program in Wisconsin. A month before HRA solicited bids for the project,
Turner's father-in-law was hired in Wisconsin by Maximus's New York project director
at the suggestion of Turner's wife. Maximus also hired a longtime Turner
friend as a consultant and Turner let him function out of an office near his on
HRA's executive floor. Recommended to Maximus by Turner's deputy, the consultant
was actually allowed to sit in on agency meetings with potential Maximus rivals,
who did not know he worked for Maximus.

Randy Levine, who went from labor commissioner to a top job with major league
baseball and back to City Hall as deputy mayor for economic development, left the
administration in 2000 to become president of the Yankees. Drawing $900,000 in
deferred payments and a $l,OOO-a-month consulting fee from baseball between
June 1997 and May 1998 while deputy mayor, Levine signed a written agreement
with the city ethics board to have nothing to do with the city's dealings with the
Yankees and Mets. But he acknowledged telling Steinbrenner at a breakfast that
Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari wanted to discuss a minor league
stadium deal with him-one that will ultimately cost the city about $80 million.

Levine also initiated discussions and signed the closing documents for city assistance
for a forty-fom-story office tower that Mets owner Fred Wilpon was
building for Bear Stearns investment company in midtown. Though Wilpon, like
Steinbrenner, was on the baseball executive council that gave Levine his job and
his severance package, Levine saw no conflict in arranging $75 million in tax incentives
and $1.5 billion in low-interest, tax-exempt bonds for Wilpon's project.
Levine, who had a white phone on his City Hall desk directly connected to baseball's
switchboard, had represented Steinbrenner before Giuliani's election and
was personally close to Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball. His post-City
Hall Yankee job surely had more to do with those connections than any he had to
Rudy.

John Gross, who moved over to Levine's old law firm and was the treasurer of
all three of Rudy's mayoral election committees, earned Rudy the sole official
sanction of his public life, an extraordinary $242,930 fine from the Campaign
Finance Board in 1997. The only larger fine in agency history was levied against
David Dinkins at Giuliani's urging. Despite months of warning letters from the
CFB, Gross continued to stockpile hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions
in excess of the $7,700 limit by a person or entity. He ran up a tally of over
150 violations of the statute Rudy had proudly laid claim to prompting. Many of
these excessive contributions came from firms who had just done, or were seeking
to do, a deal with the Giuliani administration.

Giuliani squawked when the fine came down, and Gross vowed to appeal. Ken
Caruso, another old Justice Department ally who was now representing clients like
developer and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, was brought in to argue the
committee's case. Instead of appealing, however, Rudy began undercutting the
board, which was chaired by his own appointee, the Reverend Joseph O'Hare, the
president of Fordham. The administration refused to honor matching-fund checks
the CFB wrote to City Council candidates, frustrated the implementation of
legally adopted reforms, and even tried to move the offices to Brooklyn. Shortly
after taking office in 1994, Giuliani had declared that for the board to work it had
to "be and appear to be independent of political vindictiveness."

When Giuliani set up two federal and one state fundraising committees in 1998,
he put Gross in charge of all of them, a display of the contempt he felt for the CFB
findings against him. He also named Gross to run his Senate finance operation.
The state committee Giuliani formed in 1998-and the soft money Senate committee
he put together in 2000-were raising donations that dwarf CFB limits.
Since Giuliani is no longer running for city office, he has no legal obligation to
abide by those limits. But the logic of his own comments about the system in the
'80s and early '90s-that it was created to discourage the excessive donations that
compromise city officials-still applies.

As the first sitting mayor to run for higher office since the CFB was created,
Rudy's solicitation of contributions of as much as $50,000 from those doing business
with the city guts the very reform he championed. "It's like a return to the
Wild West days of the 1970s and the 1980s," said Gene Russianoff of the New
York Public Interest Research Group, after a Daily News analysis revealed that as
early as February 1999, Giuliani's new committees had already collected $1.2 million
from city vendors. The reformer Rudy saw the receipt of such big-buck dona-
tions as a sign of personal weakness. "It has to do with their wanting to spend
huge amounts of money because they really believe they are not adequate candidates,"
he said. "They feel they need a tremendous amount of money to package
themselves on television."

Gross, Caruso, Levine and Mastro were, of course, Giuliani friends from his
SDNY or Justice days, and one of the early common bonds between them was an
intolerance for the kind of insider collusion, embodied by either top-dollar donations
or cozy lobbying, that the Rudy team now accepted as endemic.

The mayor hardly seemed alarmed by any part of this pattern of conduct. When
Harding and Kasirer's lobbying reach was exposed in news accounts, Giuliani insisted
only that the two not individually appear on behalf of clients with members
of his administration, saying others from their firms could. He did nothing for
years at a time prior to the news stories to spotlight or curtail the invisible hand
of connected friends reaching into his administration. A few months after the
worst of the Harding stories appeared in 1997, Giuliani moved him into the campaign
headquarters, right next to his protegee Reiter, whom his firm had lobbied
so often.

Unlike the fine lines he once drew about taking a picture frame from a family
friend, Rudy was now willing to sketch facile lines to blur transparent conflicts of
interest. He called the charges of the incestuous intertwine ensnarling the HRA
welfare-to-work contract "all created stuff." When a State Supreme Court judge
ruled that Maximus's $104 million deal had been "corruptly" awarded, Rudy said:
"Democratic judge. Democratic decision. Jerky decision." His appeal to overturn it,
however, rested on whether Comptroller Hevesi had exceeded his authority, not
whether the contract was clean.

Rudy was just as willing to engage in the sort of patronage practices he once
called" a plague"-going far beyond the Carbonetti and Harding families, as well
as the two dozen Libs in high places. Halfway through the first year, Randy
Mastro dismissed patronage charges published by every city newspaper with the
claim that they'd only hired 500 from the 7,000 resumes sent their way. "Of
course we are hiring supporters," he said. "Who else would we appoint?"

Guy Yelella, the Bronx Republican county leader who Giuliani denounced as
mob-tied in 1989, recommended several top appointees as a member of Rudy's
transition team. Leonard Piccoli, one of Yelella's recommendations, was named the
head of a city hospital even though a damning audit had forced his resignation
from a similar position in the Koch era. Giuliani plunged ahead with the appointment
even after news stories revealed Piccoli had written a character reference on
behalf of a Luchese crime family capo convicted in an attempted murder case.
Only when it was revealed that wiretaps had picked Piccoli up having social conversations
with one of the city's most brutal gangsters did Giuliani relent on the
appointment. Though he lost on Piccoli, Velella did anoint the new commissioner
of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications
Technology.

The other Guy-Staten Island's Molinari-was given control of the sanitation
department. Claire Schulman, the Democratic borough president of Queens who
endorsed Giuliani, hand-picked the commissioner of the Department of
Environmental Protection. Tom Von Essen, the head of the fireman's union that
was key to Giuliani's election, was installed as fire commissioner. Bernie Kerik,
Rudy's driver and bodyguard in the 1993 campaign, was made corrections commissioner.
Neal Cohen, a Mastro in-law, became health commissioner. New
Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jules Polonetsky, who ran for public advocate on
Rudy's ticket in 1997, displaced old Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jose
Maldonado, who had turned down a Giuliani offer to run for the same post.

Diane McGrath McKechnie, a onetime Republican candidate for mayor, took
over the Taxi & Limousine Commission. One Republican city councilman after
another ran the Finance Department, and a third headed the powerful Economic
Development Corporation. Homeless Services was turned over to a Democrat
who'd changed his registration to Liberal. David Cornstein, who toyed with becoming
Al D' Amato's water-torture candidate against Rudy in '93, was installed
atop the Off-Track Betting Corporation. Though technically a gubernatorial appointment,
Herman Badillo, with Rudy's help, became chairman of the City
University Board of Trustees. Ken Caruso was named a director of the
Metropolitan Transit Authority.

The worst patronage decisions included the hiring of the sister of a top Pataki
aide at the same time that the city was negotiating a multibillion-dollar watershed
agreement with the aide, the blocked attempt to install the unqualified Leon
Goldstein as schools chancellor and the dumping of two Criminal Court judges in
favor of politically wired replacements. The judicial appointments prompted the final
public break between Giuliani and Ed Koch, who joined the state's chief judge,
Judith Kaye, in condemning them.

When a mayor with Rudy's track record as a prosecutor adapted so readily to
the patronage, lobbying and fundraising mores of the city's compromised political
culture, it lowered the ethical standards more than the acquiescence of another pol
might have. It infected the air at City Hall. No one in the Giuliani administration
was indicted, but then, neither had anyone in Dinkins' been. Giuliani the
Candidate had claimed there was an "ethos of corruption" at the core of the
Dinkins reign. But more of those close to the Giuliani administration committed
crimes than those in Dinkins's day-and sometimes the crimes were directly connected
to their business with the city.

Rudy's favorite union leader, Charlie Hughes, the man who introduced Rudy at
his re-election victory party, pled guilty to stealing $2 million from his union, even
billing tens of thousands of dollars of Victoria's Secrets lingerie to the union. He
was one of nineteen District Council 37 officials who pled guilty, many of whom
admitted they rigged the vote to get the five-year labor contract negotiated with
Levine and Giuliani approved by the membership. The fix was so apparent that
opposing union leaders publicly begged Giuliani's Department of Investigation to
look at it, but it wouldn't. When Hughes was indicted, Giuliani said: "I find it hard
to believe he might do anything allegedly dishonest."

Rudy's favorite fund-raiser, Bill Fugazy, the former limo king who was the master
of ceremonies at Giuliani's first major campaign event in 1989, pled guilty to
perjury in a bankruptcy proceeding in 1997. Though news accounts in 1996 had
already reported that the FBI had raided Fugazy's office, Giuliani appointed the
lobbyist who'd raised $40,000 for him to a prestigious immigration panel. He let
Fugazy remain on the panel after a federal prosecutor in New Jersey filed an affidavit
in a case against a lobbying client of Fugazy's charging that Fugazy had paid
$72,613 in "kickbacks" there.

Even after Fugazy pled guilty in the 1997 perjury case, Rudy kept him on the
panel and wrote a letter of support to the sentencing judge. Not even the testimony
of one of the government's most important witnesses against the mob stating
that Fugazy was a Genovese crime family associate could deter Giuliani.

Gregory Rigas, a construction contractor who raised $31,800 for Rudy and attended
a private dinner at Gracie Mansion with him in 1995, pled guilty a year later
to SONY charges of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud. He admitted that he inflated
costs on contracts the city awarded him even after the School Construction
Authority had barred him from bidding on its work, and after the feds informed
city investigators about the execution of a search warrant at his corporate offices.

In fact, two months before Rigas's dinner at the mansion a city investigator
wrote a widely circulated internal memo flatly stating that Rigas "will be charged
with serious crimes related to government contracting." A week after the dinner,
Rigas raised $10,000 from subcontractors for the Giuliani campaign, having already
contributed more than the maximum himself. Though Rigas pled guilty to
forcing subcontractors to make illegal contributions to Giuliani and other politicians,
Rudy's committee returned Rigas's donations after his guilty plea but kept
the subcontractor contributions.

The committee also kept $25,000 raised by apartment king William Koeppel in
1996 after he pled guilty to a scheme to force his tenants to make campaign contributions-
again to Giuliani-in exchange for apartment leases. Having raised
over $200,000 for the 1989 and 1993 campaigns, Koeppel was also named, like
Corn stein, to the board of the Off-Track Betting Corporation.

George Sarant, a major Giuliani donor and director of a Queens social service
agency awarded $43 million in HRA contracts, pled guilty to Southern District illegal
contribution charges in 1997. Very close to Giuliani's cousin Cathy, who
shuttled from one major patronage job in the administration to another, Sarant's
agency won the contracts even though it was not ranked first in an agency review
and was more expensive than other bidders. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White said
"there was insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges relating to
HRA's awarding of the contract," but that "irregularities in the administration of
the city's contracting process were uncovered." Though she referred the irregularities
to the city Department of Investigation, DOl never issued any findings.

While Giuliani's cop-union ally Phil Caruso was never convicted, the triumvirate
that surrounded him-two lawyers and one insurance broker-were nailed in
a 1998 SDNY racketeering case. Caruso was so tied to this trio that the law firm
hired him-though he wasn't a lawyer-as a $200,000-a-year consultant after he
left the union in 1995. They also hired his daughter and three children of Caruso
allies at the PBA. The union, the lawyers, an insurance firm owned by their wives,
and several other companies that serviced the PBA combined to give $25,000 to
Giuliani in 1993, all orchestrated through Caruso. The insurance company was
still giving $1,000 as late as 1996, right before the indictment.

It was just not possible that the moral radar and compass Rudy Giuliani carried
with him after fourteen years in law enforcement couldn't detect or deter the swirl
of alliances that was so visibly compromising his government. He had to have chosen
to discard his special, professionally honed, ethical intuition, as if it was now a
handicap in his new trade. He'd let himself become an overeager casualty of the
culture, worn down by too many sweaty handshakes in hotel ballrooms with men
on the make. When he began to think of Ray Harding as a true and valued friend,
for example, it was all too clear to those who had known him as a prosecutor that
he had lost his way in a mire, effectively abandoning his former self.

He had decided, as a matter of practical necessity, to trade in the integrity laser
beam of Saint Andrew's Place for the timeless sneer of the pack that perpetually
circled City Hall, which still sits directly in front of the Tweed Courthouse, that
enduring Corinthian symbol of past city corruption.

The SDNY was only a few hundred yards away from City Hall, but the walk
across Centre Street had transformed him.

He made City Hall more impregnable to the public than the Southern District
had been, with everything from sharpshooters on the roof to protest bans on the
steps, almost as if he was ashamed to let anyone see what was happening inside.
He replaced indictment press conferences with deal press conferences, hoarding
information with the same energy he had once dispensed it, and leaving reporters
to deconstruct his almost daily pattern of deception the same way defense attorneys
used to search for weaknesses in his briefs. He lost more pivotal lawsuits as
mayor-nineteen of the twenty-three decided, First Amendment, cases alonethan
he had lost key criminal cases as U.S. Attorney. Having learned in the
Southern District that even a quasi-independent investigations commissioner
could be a dagger in a mayor's back, he appointed ex-prosecutor friends Howard
Wilson and Ed Kuriansky, who ran DOl as if they were still his protective assistants.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:31 am

Part 2 of 2

John Feerick, the dean of the Fordham Law School who chaired a state integrity
commission that worked with Rudy's office in the 1980s, and the leaders of several
other good-government groups wrote him within days of his 1993 election, asking
that Giuliani" consider appointing a task force to review the adequacy of the city's
campaign finance, conflict of interest and ethics." Paul Crotty, the corporation
counsel, met with the groups, conveying what New York Public Interest Research
Group's Gene Russianoff described as the new administration's attitude that a
stringent ethics code "gets in the way of running an efficient government." No
further meetings were scheduled, and not a single serious reform was ever put in
place during six and a half Giuliani years.

All Rudy knew was that he wasn't on the take himself. He was earning far less
than he had at White & Case or Anderson Kill, a sacrifice he made to serve. He did
not cut deals himself either; he merely allowed them to happen. He wore his reputation
like an old suit, and few in the media or the public noticed it no longer fit.

***

When Rudy began positioning himself for a Senate run against Hillary
Clinton in early 1999, he also moved to complete his own ideological and
geopolitical reconfiguration. He knew from the start that he would have to run
against his own city-at least on some issues-to get the upstate votes a Republican
needed to win. A Democrat like Koch, who ran for governor in 1982, could not turn
on the city without diminishing his vote in the party's base. But Pataki had proven
just a few years earlier that a Republican whose upstate commercials were driven by
downstate animus could be carried to the Capitol by envy and hate. Rudy could not
go that far. After all, his prime political credential was the record he laid claim to in
the city. But he could send measured signals of his eagerness to bend to interests often
at odds with the very city he was still sworn to represent.

So he switched overnight on protection of the city's upstate watershed, yielding
to demands from upstate developers, town officials and legislators who wanted to
build to the reservoirs' edge. Robert Kennedy Jr., the state's most vigorous defender
of the New York City water supply system, rallied environmental groups
against the Giuliani move and he wavered.

Next, he did an about-face at a Binghamton barbecue by backing milk price supports.
Cheered by upstate dairy interests, he reversed his position on an Albany bill
he had previously said could add twenty-one cents to the cost of a gallon of milk. He
conceded consulting with an upstate GOP congressman before adopting a position
utterly antithetical to the needs of his constituents. He knew he would pay no political
price since Hillary Clinton had the same position-but she was not mayor of the
city whose residents would pay the bill.

Similarly, he settled a six-year-old lawsuit with an upstate county executive opposed
to the way the city ran its vast homeless shelter, Camp La Guardia, located
near Orange County malls. City lawyers and commissioners trekked to a peace parley
at the county GOP headquarters.

Even his handling of the Diallo and Dorismond police cases appeared more customized
for upstate and suburban voters than it was designed to balance equities
in a torn and troubled city. The contrast with his response to Louima-when he
was a city candidate-was stark. His support of the gargantuan capital-gains and
other tax cuts backed by House and Senate Republicans-which would gouge the
federal budget to the detriment of the city-was likewise in sharp contrast with
his belated endorsement in 1995 of a Clinton budget veto.

But the Senate race was not just a matter of adjusting to the exigencies of the
upstate/downstate rivalries, or even identifying with congressional GOP agenda.
It required a remaking of Rudy's core municipal appeal.

Just as he had switched his registration to Republican to join the Reagan revolution
in 1980, he was now altering his self-description to Republican so he could
fundraise and run in a state Republicans were increasingly able to carry. He had
begun the process before Senator Moynihan announced his retirement in
November 1998, as part of his national forays earlier that year. But to become his
party's uncontested Senate candidate, he would have to complete that circle.

He had gone to great lengths immediately prior to the 1997 campaign to strike
a nonpartisan pose, declaring as early as June 1996 that he "rarely thinks about
partisan politics" and observing that voters "have soured" on it. "I think they're
tired of the Republican notion that only Republicans have the answers to problems,"
he explained.

Shortly before his last-minute endorsement of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential
election, he told the Post's Jack Newfield that "most of Clinton's policies are
very similar to most of mine." The Daily News quoted him as saying that March:
"Whether you talk about President Clinton, Senator Dole.... The country would
be in very good hands in the hands of any of that group."

Revealing at one point that he was" open" to the idea of endorsing Clinton, he
explained: "When I ran for mayor both times, '89 and '93, I promised people that
I would be, if not bipartisan, at least open to the possibility of supporting
Democrats." Ray Harding corrected him: "It's not bipartisan. It's nonpartisan."
Rudy even expressed his pleasure when he wasn't invited to the Republican
National Convention in San Diego. "If I take three or four days off from city business,
I want to do it for a substantive purpose. It didn't seem to me any substantive
purpose could be served by going to the Republican convention."

Nonpartisanship became the theme of the 1997 re-election effort, when he garnered
the endorsement of dozens of prominent Democrats and the Central Labor
Council. He even found a Democratic assemblyman, Jules Polonetsky, to run with
him. It was a return to the 1994 Giuliani, when he endorsed Cuomo, and a reversal
of his 1995 spin in the direction of decidedly Republican social policy. The
whirling dervish's most recent, post-1997, shift, though, was more emphatically
partisan than any prior incarnation. He now knew, of course, that he would never
again have to run in so Democratic a town.

No longer concerned about spending what added up to weeks on the road and
appearing before mostly tiny Republican audiences all over the state and country,
Giuliani declared that the changes he'd supposedly wrought in New York were
"quintessential Republican programs." Proclaiming that "we darn well better have
a Republican president" and assailing Clinton as "the first president in a long time
that hands America over weaker than he found it."

As much as he tried to distance himself from the Reagan administration in his
initial runs for mayor, he traveled to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in
California in late 1999 to be feted as the annual winner of its acolyte prize. After
spending a day at the library, he said, he was reminded of "just how much this
country is in need" of Reagan-like leadership. He called his appearance there "a labor
of love." Since he'd previously claimed "I was never a partisan Republican; I
was not involved in the Reagan election campaign," his new posture was enough
to make New Yorkers wonder if their mayor, too, had Alzheimer's.

The Giuliani Senate committee was simultaneously sending anti-Hillary
fundraising letters, signed by Rudy, to conservatives around the country with the
same Reaganesque message. "The left-wing elite opposes me," he wrote, "because
I have shown that a Republican can win elections by wide margins even in a
Democratic stronghold like NYC with a bold unapologetic Ronald-Reagan-style
conservative agenda." In truth, he'd only won once by a wide margin, he'd run as
a Liberal and he'd never mentioned a Reagan agenda in any of three races. "I guess
what I'm most angry about is how the Clintons have attacked and belittled Ronald
Reagan and his legacy," the letter concluded.

Spending $5 million on direct mail appeals and using right-wing mail gurus like
Richard Viguerie, the new Rudy also became a religious zealot. He denounced the
Hillary "left-wing elite"-using derivatives of that put-down eighteen breathless
times in an eight-page letter-for opposing everything from school prayer to the
posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. He went on for two pages
about his attempt to block the showing of an exhibition at the city-funded
Brooklyn Museum of Art because it contained an arguably profane painting of the
Virgin Mary that incorporated elephant dung, denouncing Hillary's "free speech"
objections to his defunding of the exhibit as "hypocrisy." He accused Clinton of
"hostility toward America's religious traditions," depicting her as a soldier in "a
relentless 30-year war" against that "religious heritage."

New Yorkers discovered for the first time that Rudy favored school prayer and
the posting of the Ten Commandments only when a letter sent to a Virginia
Christian Coalition mailing list wound up in the hands of a city reporter. They also
found out that a mayor who ran as a cultural Catholic but never talked about religion
was suddenly telling social conservatives across the country: "I think
America needs more faith and more respect for religious traditions ... not less."
The letter made no reference to his abortion, gay rights and gun control viewsall
of which were anathema to the Viguerie pen pals. Neither did it mention that
he did not just defund the exhibit, he defunded the museum, potentially putting it
out of business, until he was blocked by a federal judge.

When the letter hit the press in February 2000, Rudy reacted to questions about
his churchgoing practices as if he'd been asked about his marriage or his wandering
ways, blowing them off as invasions of his privacy. Almost a year earlier, he
was asked if he "attended Mass regularly" by two conservative journalists, Karl
Zinsmeister and Bill Kauffman, of The American Enterprise magazine. Sitting in
Syracuse City Hall, accompanied only by Lategano, Giuliani was visibly taken
aback by the question.

"You know, I really don't think you should ask me questions about my religious
practices," he said. "No, I don't attend Mass regularly, but I go to Mass occasionally."
His tax returns suggest it's very occasional since he and Donna give a collective
$200 a year to Saint Monica's, the church near City Hall he was married in
and has identified as his family's parish. They give less, roughly $100 a year, to
Alan placa's church in Long Island. Occasionally they deduct for $100 contribu-
tions to another church or two and every year they give $1,000 to St. David's,
Andrew and Caroline's school. Their returns for several years in the 1980s claimed
no deductible church contributions.

Jack Tice, a retired detective and an usher at St. Monica's, said in October 1999,
just as Giuliani was sending the Christian Coalition letter, that the last time he
saw Giuliani and Andrew at mass was June or July, when they came without
Donna and Caroline. The time before that was Easter. The pastor, Monsignor
Thomas Modugno, was vague, saying the last time he saw the mayor or any members
of his family was "not long ago."

When Rudy ran for mayor in 1993, he told the Educational Priorities Panel in a
taped discussion: "I am a Catholic, but I would not consider myself a strict Catholic."
But when he ran again in 1997, he assailed his Jewish opponent, Ruth Messinger, for
skipping the Mass that preceded the Columbus Day Parade. "This is a community
she doesn't care much about," Giuliani said, refusing to specify what" community"
he meant. "She wasn't at the Mass today. She drops out of the parade at 70th
Street" -nine blocks short of the thirty-five-block parade. Likewise, his Senate campaign
was unmistakably predicated on chasing the Catholic vote-from his exploitation
of the Brooklyn Museum case to wrapping himself around a dying

***

The Catholic posturing was, of course, just one more piece of theater. Like his
ideological and partisan pretenses, it was all part of the sham drama of a life
he'd crafted for democratic consumption. But, after decades of reinvention, his
meticulous artifice disintegrated all at once-in two shocking weeks of spring 2000
bombshells, starting with his cancer disclosure of April 27, continuing to his "very
good friend" admission of May 3, and ending with his May 10 separation stunner.
A Senate campaign he'd launched with a defense of the Virgin Mary was suddenly
under siege by revelations that would have embarrassed Mary Magdalene.

In the immediate aftermath of these revelations, the media watch on Rudy's
Senate fate was cosmic. His every cancellation and nuance was deciphered, his
network of friends probed and decoded. He had press conferences to announce that
he had no announcement to make. Newsweek had a Senate withdrawal scoop he
debunked. Doctors were interviewed to see if reporters could forecast his political
choice by determining what his inevitable treatment conclusion would be. The
motives of those who whispered one course of action on the Senate race in his ear
were critiqued by everyone who offered opposing advice, and some of the mutual
inner-circle suspicions sneaked into news coverage.

Giuliani's closest friends tried to disarm the most lethal missile fired at him in
these explosive weeks-Donna's charge that his "relationship" with Cristyne
Lategano had locked her out of his public life. The advisers told reporters that
Hanover's press aide had described the relationship as "intimate" not "sexual," an
almost Clintonesque parsing of Hanover's unmistakable accusation. Having refused
to answer direct questions at her press conference, Lategano subsequently
took the offensive in a Times phone interview from Yankee Stadium, where she
was attending a game with her husband. She insisted that "the only relationship"
she "ever had with the mayor was a professional one." She said: "There is nothing
to prove other than a close personal friendship." As much as that sounds like a denial,
Lategano still did not flatly say that there was no sexual affair.

Lategano's no-tapes, no-pictures, no-stained dress assertion hardly rebutted
Donna. Was it the Giuliani/Lategano position that a wife who loved the limelight
and exulted in her First Ladydom hid in the mansion for almost five years on a
hunch? Were they arguing that when Hanover said she couldn't participate in
Rudy's public life because of Cristyne, she was merely contending that there was
only room for one in the backseat of the Suburban and that Lategano was too close
a buddy to the mayor? Were they suggesting that Hanover was speculating, or lying,
when she finally said the words she'd swallowed half a decade, pushed by her
husband's surprise separation announcement?

Try as the friends might, nothing could soften the sting of Donna's comments,
which left little doubt with all but the Kool-Aid brigade that the mayor had admitted
as much in a tense face-to-face with his wife years earlier. The desperate
search for a defense on the Lategano issue revealed just how deadly a charge the
Rudy team thought it was, as well as how pivotal it might become in framing
whatever the future might hold for Giuliani. The strategy was to try to keep the
media focus on cancer, rather than character, as the shaping factor in his decisionmaking
process.

The state GOP convention was May 30 and party leaders from Washington to
Albany were hungry for a resolution, with Congressman Rick Lazio waiting in the
wings and the clock ticking loudly. Rudy said he changed his mind again and
again, day after day, and those who talked to him agreed. On Monday, May 15, after
a weekend of powwows at City Hall, a decision seemed imminent. He called his
commissioners to a remote spot in Staten Island for a cabinet meeting, but when
they got there he had nothing to say, and the meeting ended in twenty minutes.
They left perplexed. The same day Governor Pataki announced he would "probably"
seek a third term, boxing Giuliani in, leaving him nowhere to go after his
mayoral reign ended.

By that Thursday, the common insider wisdom of a week earlier that he would
pull out had become the common insider wisdom that he wouldn't. He had a rally
planned before his appearance on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell, shot at the 92nd
Street Y. But a torrential electrical storm shook the city, and no announcement
came. He started the hour-long interview with Mitchell, saying he was still undecided
about running. He acknowledged that he'd "made a mistake" on the Patrick
Dorismond police brutality case, an admission so rare it stole the Post front page.
But he pointedly did not say it was wrong to release the dead man's criminal arrest
record.

"My thoughts were to try to get out all the facts that would show that the situation
might arguably be more justified than the way it was presented," he said.
"1 should have also conveyed the human feeling that I had of compassion and loss
for a mother. I think if I could do it over again, I would have tried to have balanced
it more. You don't get to do things over."

A questioner from the audience pushed him on how he could be a moral leader
in light of the revelations about his personal life. "1 would just ask people to take
a look at me and see I'm a human being," he replied. "I've never pretended to be a
religious leader." The contradiction between his Ten Commandments letter and
this response forced Mitchell to cite it, but Giuliani contended he had not posed as
one in the letter either, a rejoinder so disingenuous Mitchell visibly dismissed it.

When Rudy insisted that "even public officials are entitled to have some zone of
privacy," Mitchell asked if he hadn't violated that zone when he surprised his wife
with his separation announcement. "1 thought it was necessary to do that. I explained
why at the time, and I'm just not going to dwell on it," he insisted. He said
he hoped "that's the end of it," suggesting that his public problems with Donna
might already be over, as if he believed he could close the book in one week on a
marriage he'd spent a decade insinuating into the public consciousness.

It was in that moment that the stormy uncertainties hanging over his Senate
run appeared strong enough to kill it. Mitchell had spared him any reference to
Lategano, much less the comparatively benign Nathan, yet the mere mention of
Donna had brought him back to earth. No one would let him pretend that all of
this had not happened. In a momentous Senate race, he would face inevitable
questions he could not answer and, unlike Hillary, the questions would not involve
the conduct of his spouse.

Giuliani would later say that he got home that night so fired up by the national
spotlight of it all and so turned on by the jujitsu that he thought he'd stay in. He
would say he wrestled with it most of the night. He would claim that the only factor
he weighed in making his decision was what was best for his health. He had said
all along that he needed to make the medical decision first and the Senate decision
second, analyzing what the treatment he selected would let him do. But now he concluded
that the political decision was getting in the way of a medical judgment.

Men his age with this disease ordinarily have surgery-a virtually certain
cure-but surgery carried higher risks of incontinence and impotence. His advisers
preferred to tell reporters he worried about having to piss every ten minutes
on campaign swings, but impotence threatened his lifeblood and he resisted
surgery primarily because of it. With the weight of medical opinion leaning toward
surgery, he preferred radiation treatment, which was a far from certain cure
but involved lower risks of life-altering side effects. Of course radiation also was
the choice most compatible with staying in the Senate race, though City
Comptroller Alan Hevesi had weathered the same surgery four years earlier, at
precisely Rudy's age, and been back at work in four weeks.

There was every reason to believe that Rudy could run for Senate with either
treatment option, fully restored by September at the latest. State GOP leaders
were so confident he could win that they were willing to give him the nomination
even if he only ran a media campaign, making appearances around the state rarely
or not at all. The party brass that had boosted him most enthusiastically said privately
that if he used cancer to pull out, he was hiding behind it.

That night, as he mused in the mansion, Donna was home, just back with the
kids from California. She had spent part of the day talking to her newly retained
divorce lawyer, a woman with twenty-five years' experience whose partner represented
Christie Brinkley and Mia Farrow. The News had busily reported a story
about Donna's lawyer that Thursday that would become Friday's front page.
Hardly a good omen for the maritally impaired Rudy, the story said Hanover
would probably be able to stay in the mansion until he left office and that Nathan
could be barred from the mansion as "poisonous to the home environment." The
News also reported that Donna would likely be entitled to a goodly share of
Rudy's future earnings based on her role in creating his celebrity. Obviously, those
future earnings would be greatest if he was forced from public life.

Depositions up the road about Lategano were a possibility. His entire secret life,
involving more than Lategano and Nathan, could be laid bare long before the depositions.
Reporters were already calling women he'd known well and asking how
well. There might be leaks or more press conferences like the one on May 10 that
ended with Donna's statement that she would "have no further remarks TODAY"
Just as uncertain was how Nathan would handle it all. She wanted to be part of
his public life-a choice that forced much of these contretemps to the surface. She
had even appeared to relish some of the early publicity. But when the press went
to Hazelton, Pennsylvania -knocking on every door she'd opened as a kid-she'd
used her discomfort to push him to act. The separation announcement clarified
matters. But a Senate withdrawal would lower the spotlight even further. Were he
to run, she would be hounded. Were he not to run, she might even be able to share
his coming medical trauma with him.

So the day after the Mitchell interview, at the largest press conference of his life,
Rudy finally withdrew from the Senate race, calling it "a health decision." He decided,
he said, "to put my health first" and" devote the focus and attention that I
should to being able to figure out the best treatment-and not running for office."

Walking into the conference in an upstairs chamber of City Hall, he was immediately
preceded by Cuker, in a dark blue, open shirt, his emotions masked by his ever
present poker face. Nathan was watching a pained and stumbling Rudy on television
and the Post would report that she cried so much she traumatized an eye and had to
be taken to Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, where the mayor rushed afterwards.
This time, he called Donna before the conference, and told her of his decision.
He would have been kinder if he'd urged her not to watch it.

He mentioned "love" twelve times in a thirty-minute epiphany. He never used
it in connection with his family, which he did not mention until three-quarters of
the way through the conference. Instead he kept saying how" fortunate" he was to
"have very good friends"-that other new favorite word of his-and "people that
I love and that love me." He said he used to think that "the core of me was in politics"
but he now knew "it isn't." He talked about learning he wasn't "Superman,"
"confronting" his "mortality" and realizing he was "just a human being." When
asked if cancer had drawn him "closer to God," he made a joke of it, saying he
hoped God was closer to him. In fact, the two most common instinctual responses
to such crises-turning to family and church-had no apparent allure for him.

He nonetheless portrayed himself as a changed man who'd rediscovered what was
"important in life," and admitted for the second time in two days that he might have
made mistakes. The allusion was to minorities again. He said he was going to "try
very hard" to find ways to "overcome maybe some of the barriers that maybe I
placed there." He reminded everyone of his 1997 victory party and 1998 inaugural
pledges to reach out to the left-out and he renewed that forgotten pledge, saying he
wanted to make sure "every New Yorker feels I'm dedicated to them."

But when pressed by a reporter about how he intended to do that, he suddenly
blurred his message, insisting that he was "just not capable of doing it as a racial,
ethnic, religious thing" and contending that "there are people in all different
groups" who feel excluded. His contradictory impulses about the unmistakably
racial consequences of his reign meant he was still in denial-unwilling to genuinely
accept the existence of a problem he nonetheless wanted to appear to be
solving. Ironically, the budget he proposed at the same time that he learned of his
cancer killed a $750,000 program for prostate cancer screening for the poor despite
the largest surplus in city history and the fact that black men were much more
likely to get the disease than whites.

Neither of the two prominent New Yorkers who'd just weathered the same
health crisis-Hevesi and Giuliani hero Joe Torre-ever put in so maudlin and
self-indulgent a performance about it. What was particularly bizarre was that
Rudy's press conference just a few weeks earlier when he actually revealed his
cancer was such a sharp contrast. He did that one without a note of self-pity. It was
at a conference announcing a political decision-and simultaneously saying how
little politics mattered-that he wallowed, rambled, exposed himself. He was the
post-surgical Lyndon Johnson lifting his hospital shirt for the cameras. He was
Warren Beatty's Bulworth without either Halle Berry or a social reality check. He
was a Cuker character, breathing entirely too deeply.

Was he in mourning over the ending of a Senate run he was so ambiguous
about that he never announced for it and rarely campaigned?

Was he setting the stage for a grandiose comeback?

Was he trying to shift the media spotlight off the personal debacle he caused
and onto the one he was a victim of?

Was he in meltdown or just in love? Had he spent too much time on Cuker's
amateur couch?

All of the above.

A day later, he taped an exclusive Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert.
Again there was no mention of Lategano or Nathan. He hit his new "love" note
twelve times once more. Cancer was his claimed exclusive rationale for withdrawal,
reflection the exclusive mood on display. He was asked if he still believed
what his father had taught him-that respect was more important than love. And,
for the first time in his public life, he broke with Harold Giuliani.

"My dad taught me a lot of really good things, and he was a wonderful man, but
no-as I've told, you know, my son, daughter-no father is perfect. You know fathers-
fathers make mistakes and fathers are human beings, and I tend to think
now that love is more important than I thought it was."

It was just one paragraph, however, in a rewrite of the autobiography he'd spent
a lifetime concocting.

***

The shift on Harold still left a mountain of myths. In fact it's possible to
write a biography of Rudy Giuliani from news clips that's entirely fic-
tional. By gaining control of the information around him, and cowing those who
knew him, he has over the years manufactured a life story. His auto-novel would
sometimes be the opposite of what was real, sometimes merely a grossly exaggerated
version of it. But each step of the way, through a life of prominence and
impact, he had twisted the truth, melding it with his imagination and feeding his
illusions.

The father he celebrated so often was a pathological predator. His extended family
harbored a junkie, a crooked cop and a murky mob wing. He dissolved his first
marriage with a lie so he could appear Catholic when he remarried. The very personal
jewelry his first wife found in her bedroom wasn't hers.

His Perry Mason trial debut was staged shtick. His Prince of the City hero never
gave him a crooked cop. Unassisted by the canned assets of a government case, the
self-celebrated trial attorney tried a bare trickle of cases, all civil, in eight years on
the other side of a courtroom. Instead he turned a multimillion-dollar favor from
a judicial mentor into a claim that he was a successful corporate CEO.

The only black leader he bonded with in early life was the hemisphere's bloodiest
tyrant. His sworn testimony in a Florida courtroom was delusion in service of
the tyrant. As the most powerful figure in federal law enforcement, he stole
medals from honest prosecutors in Washington who had served justice.

The Commission memoir that made his mob reputation was plagiarized. He
mistook Jimmy Caan for Marlon Branda and convicted the wrong Godfather. He
hid the numbers that exposed his Southern District record as if they were embarrassing
relatives. The very impersonal, steel-silver, jewelry that honest stockbrokers
found on their wrists was his.

The IRS agent at his side was a sex spook. Possession of the stolen letters he
marketed to make himself mayor was a criminal misdemeanor. He planted probes
in his old office to cripple a political foe he then endorsed. He mistook a mayor for
a washroom attendant and led a rally that was a riot. His path to power was the
bias of birthright.

His single-standard city was a single-race city. The targeted homeless replaced
the punching bag of his childhood. The publicly dependent could be forced to stand
on their own feet, he said of half a million people, only if their stomachs were as
empty as their pockets. His crime stats were more P. T. Barnum than Marshall
Dillon, especially after he traded in a cover-boy commissioner for a clownish cipher.
His school strategy was more about establishing rhetorical distance than encouraging
reading improvement. The only black leader he bonded with later in life
would become the city's most bloodied chancellor. His ethical antennae couldn't
make it past the metal detectors he installed at City Hall plaza.

The first mistress displaced the First Lady. A second displaced the First Family.
New Age insights displaced '50s values. His children were ghosts in a haunted
public house, invisible to the city's families and reminders of a life that was. The
wife he once made speeches about delivered one of her own and in three sentences
crushed his character. For years, their joint demand for privacy was all they
shared-a cry made hollow by the punishing excursions he'd taken into the lives
of others. A man whose closest aides probed one Nathan's love life could not protect
the privacy of another. And now, with him and his wife turning their marriage
into public spectacle, all they shared was bitterness.

His family a fraud, his achievements a boast, his integrity a whim, his judgment
a memory, his health a fear, his beliefs a mirage, Rudy Giuliani hunkered forward,
the simulated smile as broad as the shoulders were bowed, still chasing a dream
worthy of his destiny. Beating Hillary, he believed, could have made him an instant
Washington power and led to her husband's job, the grail that had guided
him from the outset. He would have to find a new path, or seek a new grail. Donna
was gone, Garth was gone, Cristyne was gone, even Powers was barely a presence.
The pros like Mastro and Levine were off making money, with Harding also in
search of his next mayoral meal ticket. Helen was too ill and too old to notice.

Denny Young was still there, so constant and ego-less a companion that his
marriage was dead. But Denny was a silhouette. Elliot Cuker was there, too,
though the business wizard couldn't put enough smoke in the cigar bar to keep it
open. Judith Nathan was certainly there as well, and to be with her where no camera
could catch them on the eve of his fifty-sixth birthday, he'd watch a Yankee-
Red Sox game in a box at a sports bar rather than that old love shack of his, Yankee
Stadium. In the throes of his now-discarded Senate campaign, Cuker and Nathan
had become two of his key political advisers, despite the fact that Cuker wasn't
registered to vote and Nathan never voted. They could still be part of his clapping
kitchen cabinet when he moved, post-cancer, to carve out his future. Teitelbaum,
Tony Carbonetti and the other neophytes he had invented from whole cloth were
also still with him-but they were mere pieces he moved around the board.

He would submit to no discipline or definition. He would invent his own magical
message and take his own personal poll. It was his stage anyway, and he did not mind
being on it alone. That way he knew he was still in control. And control was what
mattered now, in a world where, more than ever, all he could really trust was himself.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:33 am

NOTES

Chapter 2


"He had no use for priests" (19): Quotes from Helen Giuliani, Rudy himself and
several other individuals identified in the preface were culled from unpublished interviews
conducted in 1988 and 1989.

William was Rudy's godfather (21): In addition to William, Vincent and Roberto,
Edward D' Avanzo was a transit cop until 1942, when he switched to the fire department.
Harold's brother, Rudolph Giuliani, entered the police force as a patrolman on
February 20, 1956.

whose family borrowed money from Leo (26): This source, referred to subsequently
as "Lewis's friend," provided critical details of the criminal histories of Leo and Lewis
D' Avanzo and Harold Giuliani, including the fact that Harold had done time at Sing
Sing. Court documents and other records confirmed more than a half dozen pieces of
critical information he supplied. None of his information proved to be incorrect. A close
friend of Lewis's, this source is also a felon whose convictions date back to the 1960s.

The Viscontis' candle business originally began as a small, family-run operation,
headquartered in the garage of Fanny's mother-in-law's house on Devoie Street in
Williamsburg.

Chapter 3

A man whose sporadic (64): Harold's new employer, however, like his old one in
Flatbush, Brooklyn, had its legal problems. Less than six months after Harold listed the
company as his employer on his Queens voter registration card, Teamster leader
Francis C. DeB rouse was convicted of using his position with the union to persuade two
companies to accept extermination contracts from Gotham Maintenance. The city's
Department of Investigation later found the Department of Real Estate had engaged in
questionable bidding procedures by giving Gotham its noncompetitive contracts.

Chapter 4

Bob Leuci said he would think about it (78): Robert Daley, Prince of the City
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 10-15.
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Re: Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 6:33 am

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'd like to thank the following people who made this book possible.

First are the people who financed it. John Donatich and Jack McKeown at
Basic demonstrated their faith in this project from the beginning. They put the
money on the table. David Schneiderman and Don Forst from the Village Voice
granted me a leave and a greatly reduced workload, subsidizing this book and
making me remember once again just how special a place the Voice is.

Bill Moyers and the Schumann Foundation, Neil Fabricant, and the
Community Service Society helped me raise the additional funding that paid
the salaries of Adam Fifield and Jennifer Warren, my two assistants on the
book. Kim Nauer at the Center for an Urban Future acted as the fiscal conduit
for these research grants and was an enormous help. Susan Lehman at Talk
magazine bought serial rights. Fran Goldin, my agent, took me on two great
rounds of sales pitches until we made a deal.

Second are the people who worked on it. I sang the praises of Adam Fifield
in the Preface. Jennifer Warren is another ex-intern who became an indispensable
research asset to this book. She worked with me for almost ten months, a
reporting rock who did document and database searches, interviews and analysis,
often deep into the night. She has a genius for organization and an enthusiasm
for reporting that make her own first book inevitable. Ephraim Smith
was the statistician whose volunteer work on the crime, Southern District and
minority employment data was vital to this book. Other researchers who made
major contributions were David Altschuler and Nicole Gesauldo, two interns
who worked tirelessly on time-off from their studies at Yale and Columbia.

Ruth Ford, a reporter for the Brooklyn Paper, did some fine spot research for
me on church-related issues. Chisun Lee, now a Voice staff writer, mastered all
the Times Square material while working as my intern last summer. Ex-intern
Rashmi Vasisht hunted court records. Lauren Dunn, a SUNY-Binghampton
student editor, did good work up there on Rudy's family roots. Brian Mealor,
Matt Leising and Lina Katz also helped.

Eddie Borges, another ex-intern, was my constant computer consultant,
raising me from the dinosaur dead and introducing me, during the course of
this book, to communication possibilities I instinctively resist as a threat.
Eddie, who works for the Hollywood Reporter, also did some reporting on
Donna Hanover for the book. Joseph Jesselli was the computer expert at the
Voice who also helped.

Liz Nagle, Richard Miller, Norman MacAfee, and John Donatich, who edited
the book, were the folks from Basic who did the impossible-turning out a
massive book on overdrive. Kevin Goering was the outside counsel who did a
thorough job of vetting it.

Third are the people who went beyond interviews and actually helped provide
access to records or sources, in no particular order: Vincent McGhee, Anna
D' Avanzo, Jack O'Leary, Elizabeth Lockwood, Jeff Harris, Charles Miller, Fred
Dicker, Danny DeFrancesco, Herman Badillo, Bill Stern, Gerson Borrero, David
Neustadt, Rachel Gordon, Harry Spence, Chiarra Coletti, Tom Robbins, Jack
Newfield, Jonathan Rosner, Dave Seifman, Bob Hardt, Michael Finnegan, Jon
Bowles, Patricia McCarthy, Michael Tomasky, Timothy Williams, Ken Cobb,
Bill Bastone, Ray Horton, Tom Touposis, Paul Schwartzman, Charlie Bagli,
Bruce Lambert, Irwin Stotsky, Ira Kurzban, Jean-Jean Pierre, Patrick Markee,
Liz Kruger, Brendan Sexton, Mary Brosnahan, Marcus Baram, Bill Lynch,
Marvin Smilon, Joe Conason, Ken Frydman, David Garth, John Corporon,
Reese Schonfeld, Harold Tyler, Bill Bratton, Mike Julien, Jay Tannenbaum,
Evan Halper, Dr. Tom Toia, Jack Bonomi, Lenny Levitt, Joe Calderone, Tom
Apple, Dave Lewis, Ian Michaels, Frank Barry, Dan Walfish and Frank Castro.

Fourth are the people who did excavating spadework in book or article form
that we relied on: Todd Purdum, Jennet Conant, Paul Schwartzman, Connie
Bruck, Micha~1 Powell, Jesse Drucker, Joe Calderone, Michael Wine rip, Barry
Bearak, Dave Lewis, Jim Traub, Rob Polner, Dan Janison, Jonathan Van Meter,
Linda Yglesias, John Leonard, Dave Saltonstall, Mitchell Fink, Richard
Johnson, George Rush, Joanna Molloy, Craig Horowitz, Heidi Evans, Gail
Sheehy, Josh Gitlin, Elizabeth Bumiller, Jason Deparle, David Seifman, David
Firestone, Martha Sherrill, Charlie Bagli, and Dan Barry. They consulted books
by Robert Daley, Gene Mustain, Jerry Capeci, James Stewart, Jim Traub,
Robert Orsi, Marilyn Thompson, Tom Puccio, Dan Collins, Bill Bratton, Jack
Maple, Evan Mandery, John Mollenkopf, Edward I. Koch, George Pataki, Kevin
McAuliffe, Jack Newfield, Jessie Kornbluth, William French Smith and
Elizabeth Abbott.

Fifth are the people who nurtured me and the gang. Frances McGettigan
Barrett is the best partner a frequently unshaven, unshowered, stressed-out,
embattled, aging writer could have. She's been with me for thirty-one years,
and I never appreciated her more. My son Mac took off for Colgate in the middle
of this project, and his excellent freshman year made this grueling workload
worth it. Kathy Powers was kind enough to lend me Adam Fifield for
months at a time, and her sacrifice was a generous contribution to the book.

My brother Larry Barrett and his wife, Eileen, put up Adam on his visits to
Washington. My mother Helen, my brothers Chris and Tim, my sisters
Loretta and Tia, as well as the rest of the family, were wonderfully forgiving
when this book prevented me from going home to Virginia for Christmas and
my father, Lawrence G. Barrett, died three weeks later. Now all I have to do is
figure out a way to forgive myself.

This book tested me physically (I should also thank my doctors, particularly
Dr. Edward Fitzpatrick) as well as creatively. My eyes, my leg and other body
parts gave way under the strain of endless consecutive days of work. The deadline
was immutable, and there's nothing like an immutable deadline to motivate
and discipline. The Lord, maybe as a favor to Dad, helped me to the finish
line. Thank Him, too.
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