The Giuliani story in brief

Giuliani made his buddy Bernie Kerick commissioner of police even though, as reporter Wayne Barrett noted, "you take a guy who was really only in the NYPD for seven years. He had the scantest police background. He never passed an exam in the NYPD. He was twenty-four credits shy of a college degree, and a college degree is required of lieutenants. He was competing with-for the police commissioner's job - a thirty-seven-year veteran who had gone completely up the ranks to the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, and Rudy picks his buddy Bernie."

Giuliani named Kerick despite a wealth of available cautions, as reported by Bill Van Auken in World Socialist: "The city's Department of Investigations had uncovered his ties to the mob-linked firm during its investigations of the company and they were aired again in the routine probe of Kerik when he was nominated to head the police department. And one of the principal officials Kerik was lobbying on the company's behalf was the head of the city's Trade Waste Commission, who just happened to be Giuliani's cousin.. . . In the aftermath of September 11, it emerged that Kerik had taken over an apartment overlooking the rubble of ground zero meant to serve as a rest area for rescue and recovery workers. Instead, he appropriated it to carry on two simultaneous extramarital affairs, one with a female jail guard and the other with his millionaire publisher.".

Insisted that his emergency command center be in the World Trade Center and not in Brooklyn as his emergency director strongly advised. He also ignored the advise of his police comissioner, Howard Safer, who said that putting it in the WTC was putting it at "Ground Zero" because of the previous attack on the center.

Heavily pushed his buddy, Bernie Kerick, to be Secretary of Homeland Security,. Kerick subsequently withdrew and not long after was indicted. According to one press account, "While some aides had uncovered information about Kerik's links to mob-connected individuals, Alberto Gonzales, then the president's counsel and later US attorney general, overrode their concerns and recommended his appointment to the Homeland Security post."

POLITICAL WIRE - The New York Times looked at Rudy Giuliani's claim to have spent more time at Ground Zero than some of the 9/11 rescue workers and finds he spent "a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble" Meanwhile, Salon shows how Giuliani used his time: "By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 60 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16."

MICHAEL WOLFF, VANITY FAIR - Given their parents' marital discord and the mayor's nonstop parenting of the city, [Giuliani's children] were often left in the care of the police. Caroline, 18, and Andrew, 21 - were on a police diet, too. To keep them happy and quiet, the police stuffed them full of food. Father and children are now estranged .

ANTHONY DePALMA, WASHINGTON POST -  Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani's administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for [WTC] workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators. At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

WASHINGTON POST - Giuliani, grounded in the intricately connected world of New York politics, has been more than adept at making the system work for his clients. They have included a pharmaceutical company that, with Giuliani's help, resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with only a fine; a confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to ensure his security company could do business with the federal government; and the horse racing industry, eager to recover public confidence after a betting scandal. Clients of Giuliani Partners are required to sign confidentiality agreements, so they do not comment about the work they receive or how much they are paying for it.

ABC NEWS BLOTTER - Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller Oxycontin. Federal officials say the company, Purdue Frederick, helped to trigger a nationwide epidemic of addiction to the time-release painkiller by failing to give early warnings that it could be abused. Prosecutors say "in the process scores died." Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.

Giuliani's father served time in prison for robbery and later worked as a collector for the mayor's mob-tied uncle - Village Voice

PATRICIA HURTADO, NEWSDAY, 2005 - A former top Giuliani administration official insisted mental illness made him do "all these wacky things" -- like embezzling hundreds of thousands of city dollars -- but a federal judge Thursday didn't buy it, sentencing him to 63 months behind bars. Russell Harding, 40, former president of the New York City Housing Development Corp., pleaded guilty in March to stealing more than $400,000 for his personal use and possessing child pornography.

TOM ROBBINS, VILLAGE VOICE, 2004 - Lou Carbonetti, Rudy Giuliani's childhood pal and failed patronage appointee, stood repentant before a Manhattan criminal judge last week to confess three counts of perjury. It was his fourth scandal in less than a decade and his first conviction, making his the toughest hard-luck story in an administration with an otherwise charmed life. Carbonetti, 56, admitted to Acting Supreme Court Justice Brenda Soloff that he had lied when he told the city's Department of Investigation last year that while serving as director of the Fulton Mall Improvement Association in downtown Brooklyn - a post he owed to his friend, the former mayor - he'd never been hired as a consultant to drum up business for Techsolve, a Long Island-based computer firm.

WAYNE BARRETT, VILLAGE VOICE, 2002 - Inside the Fortress [storage area] are the records of the eight years of Rudy Giuliani's City Hall, transferred there . Included are the ex-mayor's appointment books, cabinet meeting audiotapes, e-mails, telephone logs, advance and briefing memos, correspondence, transition materials, and private schedules, as well as his departmental, travel, event, subject, and Gracie Mansion files. In addition to the mayor's records, those of his chief of staff and every deputy mayor, together with their chiefs of staff, have all been secured at the warehouse, which charges $3430 per month for the use of 1000 square feet. Even Giuliani's "World Trade Center files" and "Millennium Project files," together with 6000 files of photographs, 1000 audiotapes, and 15,000 videotapes, are stored there. Virtually everything at the Fortress is public property, hijacked by the mayor in a secret agreement signed by George Rios, the city records commissioner he appointed.

DAVID SALTONSTALL, NY DAILY NEWS Rudy Giuliani never shrank from defending his image as mayor, but as a businessman he's gone a step further - even trademarking his own name, the Daily News has learned. The unusual step, revealed in a recent Giuliani company contract obtained by The News, states under the heading "Use of Mr. Giuliani's Name" that the "trade names and trademarks 'Rudolph Giuliani,' or 'Giuliani Partners LLC' . . . shall not be used . . . without prior written consent." Doing anything that "tarnishes, degrades, disparages or reflects adversely on the Giuliani" name, it adds, will be grounds for terminating the contract.

AMERICAN PROSPECT - Some of the 9-11 family leaders who have raised the most troubling issues about the city's preparations have vowed to stalk him in the primary states. Their focus is on firefighters whose lifeline link to unheard evacuation orders was the same radio that failed in the same towers during the first terrorist bombing in February 1993. They can't understand why the city never performed an interagency drill in the towers, had no plan or command-and-control protocol for a floor-consuming high-rise fire, and was indifferent, even after the 1993 warning, to rooftop, elevator, and handicapped rescues.

MARCIA KRAMER, WCBS-TV - CBS 2 News has obtained documents revealing that Lower Manhattan was reopened a few weeks following the attack even though the air was not safe. The two devastating memos, written by the U.S. and local governments, show they knew. They knew the toxic soup created at ground zero was a deadly health hazard. Yet they sent workers into the pit and people back into their homes. One of the memos, from the New York City health department, dated Oct. 6, 2001, noted: "The mayor's office is under pressure from building owners ... in the Red Zone to open more of the city." The memo said the Department of Environmental Protection was "uncomfortable" with opening the areas but, "The mayor's office was directing the Office of Emergency Management to open the target areas next week.". . .

NEWS DAY reported a study that showed that the average decline in lung function experienced by Ground Zero workers was equivalent to 12 years of aging.

UPI, APRIL 3, 1982: The third-ranking official of the Justice Department says he is convinced that there is "no political repression" in Haiti. Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani, testifying Thursday at a hearing of a class-action lawsuit seeking the release of 2,100 refugees in Government detention camps, said that repression in Haiti "simply does not exist now" and that refugees had nothing to fear from the Government of Jean-Claude Duvalier.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLPH GIULIANI

"Freedom is about authority." Mayor Giuliani, NY Times 3/17/94

"You don't have a right not to be identified". Giuliani- NY Times 12/17/98

"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal." - Giuliani appeal brief 's argument against street artists having First Amendment rights

"The whole school system should be blown up, and a new one put in its place. I feel like a prophet today." Giuliani-Daily News 4/23/99

"When they make the decision to shoot they have to shoot to kill". Mayor Giuliani on NYPD policy CBS News 9/2/99

ON GIULIANI VS. THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM - There is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor work of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy. -- Judge Nina Gershon, US District Court

Number of times the NY ACLU challenged Mayor Giuliani in court: 16 Number of cases it has won: 13 [WT]

SHAUN SUTNER, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE - Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani has close ties to a Catholic priest accused of sexually molesting boys and who also was the lawyer for a now-closed Whitinsville counseling house for troubled priests that has been described as the center of a pedophile sex ring. Monsignor Alan J. Placa, who works for Mr. Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, was legal adviser in the 1980s to the House of Affirmation, where priests accused of sexual abuse were sent for psychotherapy and other counseling services. The center closed in 1987 amid a financial scandal. Monsignor Placa, who while an active priest arranged the annulment of Mr. Giuliani's first marriage, baptized his two children and officiated at the funeral of his mother, is a childhood friend of Mr. Giuliani and they both attended Manhattanville College. He was stripped of his duties as a priest, but not defrocked, after Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, published a story in 2002 about young men who alleged that Monsignor Placa abused them in the 1970s. He has been on administrative leave since and has worked for Mr. Giuliani for the past five years.

WLTX - South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel has been suspended from office, following his indictment by a federal grand jury for distribution of cocaine. . . [Ravenel] serves as the state chairman for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Late Tuesday, Giuliani's campaign announced he stepped down from that role.

INTERESTING FRIENDS
OF RUDY GIULIANI

LOU CARBONETTI

TOM ROBBINS, VILLAGE VOICE, 2004 - Lou Carbonetti, Rudy Giuliani's childhood pal and failed patronage appointee, stood repentant before a Manhattan criminal judge last week to confess three counts of perjury. It was his fourth scandal in less than a decade and his first conviction, making his the toughest hard-luck story in an administration with an otherwise charmed life. Carbonetti, 56, admitted to Acting Supreme Court Justice Brenda Soloff that he had lied when he told the city's Department of Investigation last year that while serving as director of the Fulton Mall Improvement Association in downtown Brooklyn - a post he owed to his friend, the former mayor - he'd never been hired as a consultant to drum up business for Techsolve, a Long Island-based computer firm. The question was important because Carbonetti had awarded the firm a $25,000 contract to design the association's website. He'd lied as well when he said the firm never paid him any money. He'd lied again when the question was repeated in a slightly different form intended to cover all bases. . . In fact, as prosecutors revealed last week, the computer company and Carbonetti had signed a contract in March 2000, back when Carbonetti still had strong connections in City Hall. . . If the emblem of the Giuliani years seared in public consciousness remains the hard-charging, crime-busting mayor with the unfortunate combover, then its flip side is poor Lou Carbonetti, a schlepper whose repeated city appointments gave the lie to Giuliani's claims to have staffed his City Hall only with the best and the brightest. Time and again, the affable yet feckless Carbonetti was boosted aboard the mayor's political gravy train only to slide miserably back off again.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0406,robbins,50931,5.html

FAMILY TIES

VILLAGE VOICE 2000 - The Voice's revelation this month that Rudolph Giuliani's father served time in prison for robbery and later worked as a collector for the mayor's mob-tied uncle gave birth to a wide array of reactions. . . Wayne Barrett, the Voice senior editor who disclosed the information in Rudy! An Investigative Biography, a new book about the mayor, was simply capitalizing on the public's lust for "the allure and intrigue" of Mafia tales, said former governor Mario Cuomo. . . "Rudy Giuliani is being smeared with the dishonest blood of family members," wrote Stanley Crouch, also in the News.

The other, more muted response was one of consternation and anger at a mayor who had judged so many others so harshly. "I come from a family that is extremely proud of its Italian heritage," said Chiara Colletti, a vice president with a college testing organization and former spokeswoman for the Board of Education. "We are much more sensitive to Italian stereotyping than we ever let on. But what [the book] revealed is relevant to the life of a public figure because this is a person who casts judgments on others who are involved in crime, even exposing the pasts of others for his own convenience." Louis Mangone, an attorney active in Italian American affairs, remembered hearing the mayor extol his father's honesty at a gathering at the Columbus Club, the city's premier Italian gathering spot. Giuliani, whose prosecutions as a U.S. Attorney had been targeted at friends of many of those present, got a chilly reception. "You can't visit the sins of the father on the children; we know that very well. But he's been so sanctimonious on this very issue with others," said Mangone.

And then there was the response of Sal Mondrone, who so far has been unable to qualify for a waste-hauling license. "I was told by my lawyer I knew too many people," he said. "I think it's two standards here. [Giuliani's] father hung out with gangsters. His cousin had mob affiliations.". . . If anyone made the mayor's father a worthy subject for further exploration it was the mayor himself. He has cited his father's influence to every journalist undertaking a profile of him since he first made headlines as a prosecutor in the mid-1980s. As recently as this April, when he announced his prostate cancer, he described Harold Giuliani as "a very, very important reason for why I'm standing here as the mayor of New York City."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0029,robbins,16567,5.html

WAYNE BARRETT'S ARTICLE
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0027,barrett,16192,1.html

GIULIANI PARTNERS

DAVID SALTONSTALL, NY DAILY NEWS - In the five years that Giuliani has worked in the private sector, his clients have run the gamut, from gambling interests like the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which may further trouble Christian conservative voters, to large power-generators like the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which environmentalists regard as among the worst polluters in the nation. He has lent his name to every corner of the energy industry - representing nuclear, oil and natural gas concerns - and worked with the pharmaceutical industry to keep cheap prescription drugs from flowing into the U.S. from Canada. And that's just what is publicly known. Giuliani Partners and its subsidiaries are all privately held companies, and the former mayor has refused to release a full client

HAWKS ON HIS SHOULDER

ALTERNET - In a must-see, six-minute clip, Josh Marshall explains that Giuliani's foreign policy team is made up of "all the guys who were too nuts or too extreme to make the cut with George W. Bush."

For those who can't watch the video online, Josh identifies Giuliani's top four advisors:

Norman Podhoretz: The "Godfather of modernb neoconservatism," who believes America has to go to war with Iran as quickly as possible.

Daniel Pipes: A man who has "a long and distinguished career of advocating war against every Arab and Muslim country in the world." He's also called for racial profiling of Muslim government employees in the United States, who, in true McCarthyite fashion, he believes may be a secret threat to the country.

Thomas Joscelyn: Giuliani's terrorism advisor, Joscelyn has argued repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda, and now believes Iran is connected to al Qaeda.

Michael Rubin: Giuliani's Iran advisor, Rubin has been closely connected to Ahmad Chalibi, and signed on with Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans in 2002. Rubin, too, has been aggressively for an Iranian invasion.

A very scary bunch, indeed.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/65435/

KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPER'S - It's easy to see where Giuliani gets his ideas on foreign policy, given the team of foreign policy advisors he announced last month Norman Podhoretz's name attracted the most attention when the list was announced. . . Podhoretz portrays a military attack on Iran as not only the best option but the only option. There are a number of other notable hardliners advising Giuliani. Charles Hill of the Hoover Institution, the campaign's chief advisor, joined a number of leading neo-conservatives in signing a September 20, 2001 letter to President Bush that said that even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove [him] from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism." During a March 2003 debate at Yale, shortly before the Iraq war began, Hill said: "The U.S. has the power to do this operation swiftly, and it will be a war that will not do great damage to Iraq, to its installations, to its infrastructure, or to its people." . . . There's also Martin Kramer, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can basically be summarized as "What's Good for Israel," and former Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, whose career was best known for his loopy attacks on the United Nations and for being arrested for drunk driving after running a red light and driving down the wrong side of the road. I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani's crew. He dubbed the group "AIPAC's Dream Team." http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001048

KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPERS - Add another neoconservative adviser on the Middle East to an already impressive roster-Daniel Pipes signed on with Rudy Giuliani's campaign. . . I think it's fair to say that Pipes is even further out ideologically than Norman Podhoretz, another Giuliani adviser.

THE RUDY GIULIANI Presidential Committee has announced that former advisors to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Robert Conquest and Dr. Nile Gardiner are supporting Mayor Giuliani for President. Conquest will serve as a member of the Senior Foreign Policy Advisory Board and Gardiner, the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, will serve as a member of the European Advisory Board.

The other new addition to the Mayor's foreign policy team is National Review Senior Editor David Pryce-Jones, who joins as a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor. Reports the Angry Arab blog: "In the first edition of his lousy book, The Closed Circle, the book lists Turkey as an Arab country. So he knows the Middle East as much as Rudy."

Thatcher was the brains behind Ronald Reagan. True, Reagan was not as corrupt as Nixon or Clinton, nor as gleefully imperial as George Bush the Lesser, and the damage he did was largely unintentional, the fatal mischief of a small minded man granted too much power.

But the result was to begin the decline and fall of the first American republic by convincing its leaders, media, and citizens that the main thing they needed for happiness was a free, unfettered market accompanied by sufficient faux cowboy rhetoric. That there was never any empirical evidence for the absurd economic assumptions didn't matter; his charm sufficed where logic failed.

The result: a a middle class with substantially greater problems, a lower class far more ignored, an ecology far more damaged, a much larger gap between rich and poor and between CEO and employee, Medicare and Social Security in danger and a culture of greed and narcissism that has buried ideals of democracy, community, and cooperation.

MORE ON REAGAN
http://prorev.com/reagan.htm

RUSSELL HARDING

PATRICIA HURTADO, NEWSDAY, 2005 - A former top Giuliani administration official insisted mental illness made him do "all these wacky things" -- like embezzling hundreds of thousands of city dollars -- but a federal judge Thursday didn't buy it, sentencing him to 63 months behind bars. Russell Harding, 40, former president of the New York City Housing Development Corp., pleaded guilty in March to stealing more than $400,000 for his personal use and possessing child pornography. Prosecutors charged that Harding spent thousands on trips to Hong Kong, Las Vegas and Vancouver, a bachelor party dinner for a friend and spa treatments he listed as agency expenses. As part of the probe, the child porn was found on his computer. . .

http://www.armchairsubversive.com/Russell_Harding.htm

BERNIE KERIK

NY DAILY NEWS - Bernard Kerik's legal nightmare is about to get worse, with federal prosecutors expected to file charges against the former police commissioner that will likely include allegations of bribery, tax fraud and obstruction of justice, the Daily News has learned. The indictment, expected next month, could prove to be an embarrassing obstacle for Kerik's former mentor Rudy Giuliani, who is cruising at the top of the polls heading into the presidential primary gauntlet.

WASHINGTON POST - When former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged President Bush to make Bernard B. Kerik the next secretary of homeland security, White House aides knew Kerik as the take-charge top cop from Sept. 11, 2001. But it did not take them long to compile an extensive dossier of damaging information about the would-be Cabinet officer. They learned about questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption. Most disturbing, according to people close to the process, was Kerik's friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime. The businessman had told federal authorities that Kerik received gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations, from a New Jersey family with alleged Mafia ties. Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later. . . During an appearance in Florida last weekend, Giuliani told reporters that they had a right to question his judgment in putting Kerik in charge of the New York Police Department and recommending him to Bush. "I should have done a better job of investigating him, vetting him," Giuliani said. "It's my responsibility, and I've learned from it.". . . Aides said they now believe they were lulled by Kerik's swaggering Sept. 11 reputation, and were too passive in accommodating the president's desire for secrecy and speed and too willing to trust Giuliani's judgment. "There is no question the mayor's support for Kerik was important," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. . . A quick FBI search and research by the White House turned up a host of problems in the couple of weeks before the nomination was announced. According to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of White House policy against discussing personnel matters, Bush aides discovered that: - Kerik was fined $2,500 by New York City for using police detectives to help him with his autobiography. He was also a defendant in a civil lawsuit accusing him of retaliation against a corrections official who had disciplined a female prison guard with whom Kerik was having a relationship. . . - One of Kerik's former top deputies was convicted of stealing money from a foundation that Kerik ran while serving as Giuliani's corrections chief. The foundation was funded by rebates from tobacco companies selling cigarettes to prison inmates. - Kerik, who filed for bankruptcy as a police officer, became rich almost overnight after leaving office. Just before his nomination, he made a quick $6.2 million without investing a dime by exercising stock options from his service on the board of Taser International, a stun-gun firm seeking business with homeland security agencies. - Kerik's tenure in Iraq generated strong criticism of his management. Iraqi officials complained to U.S. authorities about $1.2 billion Kerik spent to train Iraqi police officers in Jordan, spending they called wasteful. Iraqis also questioned why Kerik spent tens of millions of dollars to buy weapons for Iraqi trainees when the U.S. military had confiscated plenty of such weapons after the invasion. . . The loudest alarm bell was Kerik's relationship with Lawrence Ray. The best man at Kerik's wedding in 1998, Ray went to work for a New Jersey construction company, Interstate Industrial Corp., that was seeking a big New York City contract and trying to overcome concerns inside Giuliani's administration that it had mob ties.

WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, NY TIMES - Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik's relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik's appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records. Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony. Mr. Giuliani's testimony amounts to a significantly new version of what information was probably before him in the summer of 2000 as he was debating Mr. Kerik's appointment as the city's top law enforcement officer. Mr. Giuliani had previously said that he had never been told of Mr. Kerik's entanglement with the company before promoting him to the police job or later supporting his failed bid to be the nation's homeland security secretary. In his testimony, given in April 2006, Mr. Giuliani indicated that he must have simply forgotten that he had been briefed on one or more occasions as part of the background investigation of Mr. Kerik before his appointment to the police post. He said he learned only in late 2004 that the briefing or briefings had occurred, after the city's investigation commissioner reviewed his own records from 2000. To this day, Mr. Giuliani testified, he has no specific recollection of any briefing or the details of what he was told. But he said he felt comforted because the chief investigator had cleared Mr. Kerik to be promoted. . . Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty last summer to improperly allowing the company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, or its subsidiaries, to do $165,000 worth of free renovations on his Bronx apartment in late 1999 and 2000. The company has denied paying for the work, and has disputed any association with organized crime. But the two brothers who run it have been indicted in the Bronx on charges they lied under oath about their dealings with Mr. Kerik. There is no evidence that Mr. Giuliani knew about the apartment renovation before promoting Mr. Kerik to police commissioner. But the top investigator who briefed Mr. Giuliani in 2000, the transcript shows, was aware that Mr. Kerik's brother and a close friend had been hired by an affiliate of the company, which for years had been struggling to secure a city license.

JOSH MARSHALL, TALKING POINTS MEMO - Mayor Rudy put a cop with numerous alleged mob ties in charge of the NYPD. And Kerik's main credential going in was that he'd been Rudy's driver. Here's a clip from a post I did on December 12th, 2004, cataloguing everything that had then come out at a relatively early stage in his ill-fated nomination to be Secretary of DHS:

||| They seem to be stipulating to their knowing about and being untroubled by a) Kerik's long-standing ties to an allegedly mobbed-up Jersey construction company [or] that Kerik received numerous unreported cash gifts from Lawrence Ray, an executive at said Jersey construction company (Ray was later indicted along with Edward Garafola, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's brother-in-law, and Daniel Persico, nephew of Colombo Family Godfather Carmine "The Snake" Persico and others on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle." b) that Riker's Island prison became a hotbed of political corruption and cronyism on his watch, c) that he is accused by nine employees of the hospital he worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss, d) that a warrant for his arrest (albeit in a civil case) was issued in New Jersey as recently as six years ago, e) that as recently as last week he was forced to testify in a civil suit in a case covering the period in which he was New York City correction commissioner, in which the plaintiff, "former deputy warden Eric DeRavin Icontends Kerik kept him from getting promoted because he had reprimanded the woman [Kerik was allegedly having an affair with], Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero," f) his rapid and unexplained departure from Baghdad.|||

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/012977.php

WIKPEDIA - Bernard Kerik was Police Commissioner of the City of New York (2000-2001). In December 2004, George W. Bush nominated Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security. A week later, Kerik withdrew his acceptance, explaining that he had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny; subsequently, numerous allegations surfaced which may have led to a difficult confirmation battle. . . Kerik was declared bankrupt in March 1988, but today he is a multimillionaire, the result of a lucrative partnership with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and a profitable relationship with a stun-gun manufacturer. His relationship since 2002 with Taser International, a Scottsdale, Arizona, manufacturer of stun guns, has by far been the biggest source of his newfound wealth, earning him more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits through stock options he was granted and then sold, mostly in November 2004. Kerik has been married three times. His present wife since November, 1998 is Syrian born Hala Matli (born 2/3/72). He has four children, his youngest, Celine Christina and Angelina Amber are both the God children of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. . . Kerik worked from 1982 to 1984 as chief of investigations for the security office at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, one of the kingdom's premier hospitals, where members of the royal family are treated. Six members of the hospital security staff, including Kerik, were fired and deported after an investigation in 1984 by the Saudi secret police. . . In May, 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kerik was appointed by the Bush Administration as the Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. . . Following his departure from the New York City Police Department, he was employed by Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm formed by the former Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. . . Shortly after withdrawal of the nomination, the press reported on several other incidents which might also have posed difficulties in gaining confirmation by the Senate. These include: questions regarding Kerik's sale of stock in Taser International shortly before the release of an Amnesty International report critical of the company's stun-gun product; a sexual harassment lawsuit; allegations of misuse of police personnel and property for personal benefit; connections with a construction company suspected of having ties to organized crime; and failure to comply with ethics rules on gifts. On June 30, 2006, after an eighteen month investigation conducted by the Bronx District Attorney's Office, Kerik pled guilty to two ethics violations (unclassified misdemeanors) and was ordered to pay $221,000 in fines at the 10-minute hearing. Kerik acknowledged that he failed to document a personal loan on his annual New York City Conflict of Interest Report (a violation of the NYC Administrative Code) and accepting a gift from a New Jersey construction firm (or ones of their subsidiaries) attempting to do business with the city, (a violation of the NYC Charter. . . Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg immediately removed Kerik's name from the Manhattan Detention Complex, a New York jail that had been renamed in Kerik's honor on Dec 21, 2001 by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Subsequently on July 20, 2006, the two New Jersey contractors were indicted on perjury charges, accused of lying to the Bronx grand jury in the Kerik investigation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kerik

ROBERT SCHEER, NATION, 2004 - How revealing that the nomination of Bernard Kerik as Homeland Security chief should be derailed not by the former New York City police commissioner's alleged violations of conflict-of-interest laws, mob connections and post-9/11 security industry profiteering but rather by his rueful admission that he paid no taxes for his "illegal immigrant" baby-sitter. . . Once his act went national, cracks in Kerik's facade started to look a lot worse. One of the most detailed exposes stressing Kerik's alleged ties to New York mobsters ran in the New York Daily News. Why didn't those in the administration who vetted Kerik for this job know any of this? Giuliani told Time magazine after Kerik's withdrawal that although he knew there were black marks on Kerik's record, "everything seemed pretty normal, at least by Washington or New York standards." Talk about your moral relativism! Or family values. On Monday, the NY Daily News reported that Kerik had juggled two extramarital affairs while police commissioner. Bottom line: A smart guy like Giuliani should have suspected something in 1998, when his wife and his deputy mayor attended Kerik's lavish wedding, which was dotted with mob-connected characters. This was two years before he appointed Kerik to head the New York City Police Department. To be fair, it would be only later that the Daily News reported the wedding was paid for with money from folks with city contracts and mob connections, some of whom were later indicted. But anyone knowledgeable about Kerik should have known that he could not afford his sumptuous lifestyle, given his bankruptcy and, according to Newsweek magazine, a contempt citation for failing to pay a debt in a business dealing. . . Why wouldn't Giuliani push his onetime chauffeur and now a senior vice president in his firm to be Homeland Security czar, overseeing twenty-two federal agencies with a combined budget of $37.7 billion? The war on terror is a mother lode to be mined by those who are connected. Come to think of it, Kerik shouldn't have been rejected by the Bushies. If they were honest, they would celebrate him as the prototypical GOP operator, playing the people for a profit.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041227/scheer1224

DEMOCRACY NOW, 2004 - Newsweek uncovered that an arrest warrant was issued for Kerik as recently as six years ago over a dispute involving unpaid bills. The 1998 warrant was issued as part of a series of lawsuits relating to unpaid bills on his condominium in New Jersey. The New York Daily News reports that Kerik had illegally accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts while a public official. A Daily News probe revealed that for many years, one of Kerik's main benefactors was Lawrence Ray. Ray was later indicted on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle." The Washington Post reports that nine employees of the hospital Kerik worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia accused him of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss. Questions have also been raised about Kerik's misuse of police power while the head of the New York police department. In one example, he was fined for using the services of three police officers to help research his autobiography "The Lost Son." He was also accused of sending homicide police officers to question Fox News journalists after the book's publisher, Judith Regan, lost a mobile phone after an interview at the Fox studios. It turned out to have just been misplaced.

OXYCONTIN

ABC NEWS BLOTTER - Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller Oxycontin. Federal officials say the company, Purdue Frederick, helped to trigger a nationwide epidemic of addiction to the time-release painkiller by failing to give early warnings that it could be abused. Prosecutors say "in the process scores died." Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company. According to the book "Painkiller," by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."

MONSIGNOR ALAN J. PLACA

SHAUN SUTNER, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE - Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani has close ties to a Catholic priest accused of sexually molesting boys and who also was the lawyer for a now-closed Whitinsville counseling house for troubled priests that has been described as the center of a pedophile sex ring. Monsignor Alan J. Placa, who works for Mr. Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, was legal adviser in the 1980s to the House of Affirmation, where priests accused of sexual abuse were sent for psychotherapy and other counseling services. The center closed in 1987 amid a financial scandal. Monsignor Placa, who while an active priest arranged the annulment of Mr. Giuliani's first marriage, baptized his two children and officiated at the funeral of his mother, is a childhood friend of Mr. Giuliani and they both attended Manhattanville College.

He was stripped of his duties as a priest, but not defrocked, after Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, published a story in 2002 about young men who alleged that Monsignor Placa abused them in the 1970s. He has been on administrative leave since and has worked for Mr. Giuliani for the past five years. Catholic activists who are fighting the church over the clergy sex abuse issue say Mr. Giuliani's association with the monsignor raises serious questions about the former New York mayor's candidacy.

THOMAS RAVENEL

WLTX - South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel has been suspended from office, following his indictment by a federal grand jury for distribution of cocaine. . . The indictments accuse Ravenel, 44, and Michael Miller, 25, of distributing less than 500 grams of cocaine starting in late 2005. They're officially indicted on charges of conspiracy to possess and intent to distribute. Officials say Ravenel bought the drugs from Miller to share with other people. U.S. Attorney Reggie Lloyd says Ravenel didn't sell any of the drugs. Lloyd says the investigation is just beginning. . . [Ravenel] serves as the state chairman for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Late Tuesday, Giuliani's campaign announced he stepped down from that role. Both men face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

http://www.wltx.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=50785

MICHAEL RUBIN

BODY POLITIK - Josh Marshall notes that Rudy Giuliani has hired "Michael Rubin as Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member." Rubin worked at "Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans" and "like the most interesting and frightening neos, Michael is that perfect mix of extreme factual knowledge and extreme lack of judgment, Prone to wild-eyed theories and fantasies of various sorts but all in the end leading inexorably toward catastrophic policy moves for the United States." Below is a sampling of Rubin's greatest hits:

- IRAQ: "The question with Iraq is not whether they were involved on Sept. 11. The question with Iraq is, do we think they have the capacity, the will and the means to create mass casualties in the United States. I think they do. . .

- The New York Times reports that Rubin advised The Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print American propaganda, on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq.

- IRAN: "U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq are diametrically opposed, and will continue to be until one side wins and the other loses." . . .

- "In the wake of Sadr's uprising, Washington is faced with the same choice: End Iran's infiltration through forceful action, or wish it away. How long can we afford to keep choosing the latter?" . . .

- ISLAMIC WORLD: "In the Islamic world, confrontation may work better than dialogue. . .

- REGIME CHANGE IN SYRIA: The Asia Times reported that Michael Rubin and the usual neo-con suspects "signed a report released three years ago that called for using military force to disarm Syria of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to end its military presence in Lebanon." . . . ]

DAVID VITTER

TOM BRUNE, NEWSDAY - Another key supporter of Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani suffered an embarrassment when he admitted last night the "serious sin" of at one time calling an escort service accused of being a prostitute ring. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who is Giuliani's most prominent Southern conservative supporter, was implicated when the so-called "D.C. Madam" disclosed that his telephone number was found among the telephone records of the escort service, Pamela Martin and Associates, in a period before he was elected to Senate in 2004. . . A staunch conservative, Vitter gave Giuliani's campaign an early boost when he endorsed the former New York City mayor in March.

2011

Guiliani's close ties to Murdoch

MARCH 2010

THE GUY WHO ALMOST RAN HOMELAND SECURITY GETS FOUR YEARS IN PRISON

NYC POLICE MEMO CONFIRMS THEY TOLD GIULIANI WTC WASN'T SAFE FOR EMERGENCY COMMAND CENTER

WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE LIVING WITH GIULIANI AS PRESIDENT

THE REAL RUDY GIULIANI: BY THOSE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW HIM

RUDY GIULIANI: A CAREER OF DECEPTION

GIULIANI STILL WORKING AT FIRM HE PROMISED TO LEAVE

SECRET 9/11 COMMISSION TESTIMONY REVEALS GIULIANI DISHONESTY

GIULIANI'S DIRTY MONEY

GIULIANI'S SICK RELATIONSHIP WITH BERNIE KERICK

WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE LIVING WITH GIULIANI AS PRESIDENT

GIULIANI'S DAUGHTER SUPPORTS OBAMA

GIULIANI HAD MORE EVENTS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE THAN ANY GOP CANDIDATE OTHER THAN ROMNEY

THE REAL RUDY GIULIANI: BY THOSE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW HIM

CO-CHAIR OF GIULIANI NEW HAMPSHIRE GROUP SAYS MUSLIMS SHOULD BE CHASED BACK TO THEIR CAVES

RUDY GIULIANI: A CAREER OF DECEPTION

GIULIANI STILL WORKING AT FIRM HE PROMISED TO LEAVE

SECRET 9/11 COMMISSION TESTIMONY REVEALS GIULIANI DISHONESTY

GIULIANI'S DIRTY MONEY

GIULIANI'S SICK RELATIONSHIP WITH BERNIE KERICK

DEMOCRATS ABOUT TO APPROVE LARGEST MILITARY BUDGET BILL IN HISTORY

WHAT THE MEDIA ISN'T TELLING YOU ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS

POLITICALLY TIED MEGACORP MAY SELL
TEN PERCENT INTEREST TO CHINESE

COUNTRY STARS ARE FAR FROM ALL REPUBLICAN

NY TIMES LOOKS BEHIND OBAMA'S SILENCE ON HIS BIG APPLE YEARS

GOP = GAYS OPERATING PRECARIOUSLY

E-VOTE CORP ZAPPED BY STATE OFFICIAL

PELOSI PLANS TO SPIN CONGRESS OUT OF DISASTER

JANUARY 2008

WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE LIVING WITH GIULIANI AS PRESIDENT

NY TIMES - In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani's radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: "GOTCHA!"

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci's doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci's decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.

Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.

"Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower," the mayor told reporters at the time. "Maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers."

Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. "It really damaged me," said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. "I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.". . .

After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group's application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers. . .

MORE

GIULIANI HAD MORE EVENTS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE THAN ANY GOP CANDIDATE OTHER THAN ROMNEY

THE REAL RUDY GIULIANI: BY THOSE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW HIM

CO-CHAIR OF GIULIANI NEW HAMPSHIRE GROUP SAYS MUSLIMS SHOULD BE CHASED BACK TO THEIR CAVES

DECEMBER 2007

MORE GIULIANI FUNNY MONEY

IS THIS THE WAY GIULIANI WOULD RUN THE FEDERAL BUDGET?

THE REAL GIULIANI ON 9/11

KERIK CASE COULD OPEN WINDOWS ON GIULIANI'S OTHER WORLD

A CAREER OF DECEPTION

SECRET 9/11 COMMISSION TESTIMONY REVEALS GIULIANI DISHONESTY

GIULIANI'S DIRTY MONEY

GIULIANI'S SICK RELATIONSHIP WITH BERNIE KERICK

THE RUDY & BERNIE SHOW

GIULIANI'S WAR ON BLACK PEOPLE

THE GIULIANI MYTH CONT'D

[From Democracy Now broadcast last November. Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice is the leading journalistic observer of Giuliani. Incidentally, Hillary Clinton supported Kerik's nomination]

JUAN GONZALEZ: The overall Kerik indictment, here is a man who basically owes his entire career to Rudy Giuliani and was on the verge of being named the head of Homeland Security of the entire country. The impact of that indictment on his judgment as a leader?

WAYNE BARRETT: Well, you know, you take a guy who was really only in the NYPD for seven years. He had the scantest police background. He never passed an exam in the NYPD. He was twenty-four credits shy of a college degree, and a college degree is required of lieutenants. He was competing with-for the police commissioner's job - a thirty-seven-year veteran who had gone completely up the ranks to the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, and Rudy picks his buddy Bernie.

And I think that says it all, because if you go from selecting Bill Bratton as the first police commissioner at the start of the administration to going to Bernie Kerik, I think that says something about the evolution of Rudy Giuliani's judgment and character as a public official. When he first comes into office, he hires a total police professional. He winds up firing him because the guy winds up on the cover of Time magazine before he does. And so, even though Bratton is the one who gives him all the police strategies that prove to be effective during the course of those years, he winds up with a complete crony, as you say, a complete creature, whose professional career is entirely attributable really to Rudolph Giuliani. . .

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Rudolph Giuliani's role in elevating-trying to get Bernard Kerik to become the Homeland Security commissioner.

WAYNE BARRETT: Well, I think, you know, if I was running the negative commercials for a candidate running against him, I'd just take that Washington Post story that came out when Bernie Kerik was nominated, and it said that Bush decided to pick Kerik after an impassioned phone call from Rudolph Giuliani. It was an impassioned phone call. "You've got to pick my guy!"

And, you know, it's one thing to make a mistake, as the mayor likes to put it-"Oh, I made a lot of decisions; this one was a mistake" - but the entire core of his presidential campaign, the rationale for it, is "I'm the best man to defend America." Well, he had one opportunity to prove that, unless you consider being down at Ground Zero an opportunity to prove that he's the man to defend America, but he had one opportunity to prove it, which was he got to select - the President of the United States was all ears to Rudy-he got to select the next Homeland Security secretary, and he came up with a bum.

You know, it's not just this federal case. He's already pled guilty to two state crimes in some of the same fact patterns. So, you know, while he is charged in this case and unconvicted, he has already pled guilty to two counts. . .

WAYNE BARRETT: I got a copy of the private testimony that Giuliani gave on April 20, 2004 [to the 9/11 commission]. Now, this private testimony is not supposed to be released until, coincidentally, December 2008. And in this private testimony, it's not just-

AMY GOODMAN: Who decides that?

WAYNE BARRETT: Well, this is a very mysterious thing, because the members of the commission never voted on this. Someone internally on the staff made the decision that not just Giuliani's testimony, but that all the testimony for Chapter 9, which is the testimony that relates to the city's response, would not be made public until December 2008. . . . Some testimony that involves classified information is sealed for twenty-five years. But no one could understand what the rationale was as to why you seal testimony that only relates to how the city responded to an emergency. There's certainly no classified - in fact, it says on the top of each page, "Commission-sensitive, but unclassified." That's what it says on the top of each page. . .

You know, we have this Iwo Jima moment of him walking through the canyons of Lower Manhattan. It is embedded in the consciousness of America. You know, it's him covered in soot, it's him pointing north, it's him standing up when the President couldn't be found. It is a powerful, powerful visual. And it filled a deep need that America still feels a need for, which is, did somebody defend us that day, the day we were attacked? So this thing-I mean, this is the cynical assumption of the Giuliani campaign, that that moment transcends every other negative, and that visual, which is essentially a hoax of a visual, because the only reason he was there was because he was silly enough to put the command center at the World Trade Center complex, maybe the stupidest thing he ever did.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.

WAYNE BARRETT: Well, you know, he was not heading to the scene of the attack that morning. This is his own account-read his own book. He was heading to the command center, which was located in the World Trade Center complex. That was his decision. Bernie Kerik was standing in front of 7 World Trade waiting for him at the command center. By the time he got there, the command center had been evacuated. And so, the decision that he made to put the command center there is ironically the reason why Americans and why the media, I think, bow to him in such a way.

And if we had a functioning command center, if it had been located in Brooklyn where Mike Bloomberg has located it, in downtown Brooklyn on almost precisely the same site that Jerry Hauer, the emergency management director under Giuliani, urged Giuliani to put it, in almost precisely the same location, if it had been there, we would have had a functioning command center, we might have had a functioning mayor that day, we might have had a functioning response to that that day. I quote James Farmer in the book, who was the principal author of Chapter 9 of the 9/11 Commission, who simply says that had we had a functioning command center that day, many first responder lives would have been saved. I quote many other people about that. But Rudy sat there.

Now, Howard Safer. . . was then the police commissioner. Howard Safer called locating the command center at 7 World Trade, putting it "at Ground Zero." And he said that in 1997, because it had already been bombed. And Rudy rejected Howard Safer's advice. He rejected Lou Anemone, who was the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the police department at the time, who had prepared a vulnerability study that put, not surprisingly, the World Trade Center complex at the very top. The mayor ignored all of that. He ignored Jerry Hauer, his own emergency management guy, who said, "Let's put it in Brooklyn." And he insisted that it had to be within walking distance of City Hall-no one can figure out the rationale-but it's also within camera distance of Midtown. You know, you don't understand it.

NOVEMBER 2007

In his autobiography, The Lost Son, Kerik includes a revealing account of a meeting in which Giuliani told him he was going to name him first deputy correction commissioner, a post for which the street cop felt himself woefully unprepared. After convincing him he could do the job, Giuliani led him downstairs to a dimly lit room where senior administration aides waited. Each embraced Kerik and kissed him on the cheek. "I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family," Mr. Kerik wrote. "I was being made." - World Socialist

THE RUDY & BERNIE SHOW

BILL VAN AUKEN, WORLD SOCIALIST - The relation between Kerik and Giuliani began when the latter was running for mayor against incumbent Democrat David Dinkins in 1993. A junior-ranking NYPD detective, Kerik was attracted to Giuliani's law-and-order program and became the Republican candidate's bodyguard and chauffeur.

In gratitude for Kerik's personal services and unquestioning loyalty, Giuliani appointed him to a sinecure in the city's jail system and then made him correction commissioner. In 2000, he appointed him police commissioner. The choice of a high school dropout to head the NYPD, the largest US police department, sparked significant controversy, given that mid-level police supervisors are required to hold a college degree.

That Giuliani did not know about his protege's corrupt practices is simply not credible. The city's Department of Investigations had uncovered his ties to the mob-linked firm during its investigations of the company and they were aired again in the routine probe of Kerik when he was nominated to head the police department. And one of the principal officials Kerik was lobbying on the company's behalf was the head of the city's Trade Waste Commission, who just happened to be Giuliani's cousin.

Moreover, the actions summarized in the federal indictment constitute only a part of the web of scandals surrounding the police commissioner. In the aftermath of September 11, for example, it emerged that Kerik had taken over an apartment overlooking the rubble of ground zero meant to serve as a rest area for rescue and recovery workers. Instead, he appropriated it to carry on two simultaneous extramarital affairs, one with a female jail guard and the other with his millionaire publisher. . .

In the case of the jail guard, the city was confronted with lawsuits brought by jail supervisors who said that they were retaliated against by Kerik for attempting to impose discipline on his girlfriend. And in the case of the publisher, Judith Regan, the police commissioner dragooned homicide detectives into police-state-style visits to the homes of junior level employees at Fox Television to interrogate them after Regan reported that her cell phone had gone missing during an appearance on the network.

Once Giuliani was forced from office by term limits - though not before trying to cancel the 2001 election on the grounds that only he was fit to lead the city after 9/11-he and Kerik both cashed in on their September 11 fame.

Giuliani proclaimed Kerik a "hero" of the terrorist attacks, though the police commissioner's function on that day was not that different than when the two first met-trailing the mayor north from ground zero as a kind of glorified bodyguard. Meanwhile, he left behind an emergency response that was in chaos, in which lack of coordination and failure of communication between the NYPD and the Fire Department has been singled out as a factor in the horrendous death toll among firefighters that day.

Kerik became a "security expert" in Giuliani's new consulting firm, while raking in millions of dollars serving on the board of Taser Inc., manufacturer of the electric stun gun, and acting as a spokesman for US drug companies trying to use a supposed security threat as a pretext for blocking cheap imports from Canada.

It was not just Giuliani who knew what Kerik was up to, but the Bush administration as well. While some aides had uncovered information about Kerik's links to mob-connected individuals, Alberto Gonzales, then the president's counsel and later US attorney general, overrode their concerns and recommended his appointment to the Homeland Security post.

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/keri-n10.shtml

OCTOBER 2007

GIULIANI'S WAR ON BLACK PEOPLE

MARGARET KIMBERLEY, BLACK AGENDA REPORT - Giuliani, a former prosecutor, took office and immediately began treating New Yorkers, particularly black New Yorkers, like criminals. He specialized in pleasing white people by beating up black people. Under his leadership the police were unleashed and given the right to arrest for petty offenses and even to kill when they felt the urge to do so.

When Haitian immigrant Patrick Dorismond was killed by a police officer, Giuliani illegally released his juvenile justice records to police. Adding insult to injury, he smeared the dead man by stating that he was "no altar boy." The Dorismond case was one of the tipping points that made even some white New Yorkers long for the day that Giuliani would be their former mayor. . .

Giuliani has credibility with most Republican voters because of his warmongering and inclination to inflict physical pain on dark people. . . He will remind white Republicans of the good old days when he cut the welfare rolls. He did so by breaking the law and denying benefits to eligible people, but no matter. He knows his audience. When they hear the word welfare they will salivate like Pavlovian dogs and decide that Rudy is their man.

SEPTEMBER 2007

GIULIANI ADVISOR ADVOCATES WAR CRIMES AGAINST PALESTINIANS

KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPERS - Daniel Pipes - who has signed on as a foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani's campaign-essentially argued for war crimes against Palestinians, and there was no cry of protest from the media or anywhere else. "Believing that if you don't win a war, you lose it, I have long encouraged the Israeli government to take more assertive measures in response to attacks," Pipes wrote on his blog on September 6:

"In a Jerusalem Post piece six years ago, "Preventing war: Israel's options," I called for shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority as well as a host of other measures, such as permitting no transportation in the PA of people or goods beyond basic necessities, implementing the death penalty against murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are launched. Then and now, such responses have two benefits: First, they send a strong deterrent signal 'Hit us and we will hit you back much harder' thereby reducing the number of attacks in the short term. Second, they impress Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state."

The Geneva Conventions label collective punishments as a war crime. "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed," according to Article 33. "Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001213

GIULIANI BEING HELPED BY ADVISOR TO MARGARET THATCHER WHO HELPED REAGAN START THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICA

THE RUDY GIULIANI Presidential Committee has announced that former advisors to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Robert Conquest and Dr. Nile Gardiner are supporting Mayor Giuliani for President. Conquest will serve as a member of the Senior Foreign Policy Advisory Board and Gardiner, the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, will serve as a member of the European Advisory Board.

The other new addition to the Mayor's foreign policy team is National Review Senior Editor David Pryce-Jones, who joins as a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor.
Reports the Angry Arab blog: "In the first edition of his lousy book, The Closed Circle, the book lists Turkey as an Arab country. So he knows the Middle East as much as Rudy."

Thatcher was the brains behind Ronald Reagan. True, Reagan was not as corrupt as Nixon or Clinton, nor as gleefully imperial as George Bush the Lesser, and the damage he did was largely unintentional, the fatal mischief of a small minded man granted too much power.

But the result was to begin the decline and fall of the first American republic by convincing its leaders, media, and citizens that the main thing they needed for happiness was a free, unfettered market accompanied by sufficient faux cowboy rhetoric. That there was never any empirical evidence for the absurd economic assumptions didn't matter; his charm sufficed where logic failed.

The result: a a middle class with substantially greater problems, a lower class far more ignored, an ecology far more damaged, a much larger gap between rich and poor and between CEO and employee, Medicare and Social Security in danger and a culture of greed and narcissism that has buried ideals of democracy, community, and cooperation.

MORE ON REAGAN
http://prorev.com/reagan.htm

GIULIANI'S EX-TOP ANTI-TERROR AIDE SAYS HE WOULD BE A 'TERRIBLE' PRESIDENT

PHILIP SHERWELL, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, UK - The former top antiterrorism aide to Rudolph Giuliani has launched a stinging critique of the former New York mayor over the September 11 atrocity, attacking a key pillar of his challenge for the White House. Jerome Hauer, New York's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000, said Mr Giuliani was closely involved in locating the city's crisis control room in the World Trade Centre complex, even though it was a known terrorist target after the 1993 truck bomb attack which killed six people at the site. . .

Mr Hauer, who now runs a consultancy firm, said that the former mayor vetoed his proposal to site the emergency command centre in Brooklyn as he wanted it to be within walking distance of his City Hall offices in Manhattan.

"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Mr Hauer told The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who micro-manages decision, he has a confrontational character trait and picks fights just to score points. He is the last thing this country needs as president right now."

Mr Hauer is a registered Democrat voter but his expertise was so highly rated by the Republican Bush administration that he was chosen in 2002 to co-ordinate America's public health preparation for future emergencies, including attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

AUGUST 2007

RIGHTWING WAR PUSHERS ADVISING GIULIANI

KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPER'S - It's easy to see where Giuliani gets his ideas on foreign policy, given the team of foreign policy advisors he announced last month Norman Podhoretz's name attracted the most attention when the list was announced. . . Podhoretz portrays a military attack on Iran as not only the best option but the only option.

There are a number of other notable hardliners advising Giuliani. Charles Hill of the Hoover Institution, the campaign's chief advisor, joined a number of leading neo-conservatives in signing a September 20, 2001 letter to President Bush that said that even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove [him] from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

During a March 2003 debate at Yale, shortly before the Iraq war began, Hill said: "The U.S. has the power to do this operation swiftly, and it will be a war that will not do great damage to Iraq, to its installations, to its infrastructure, or to its people." . . .

There's also Martin Kramer, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can basically be summarized as "What's Good for Israel," and former Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, whose career was best known for his loopy attacks on the United Nations and for being arrested for drunk driving after running a red light and driving down the wrong side of the road.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani's crew. He dubbed the group "AIPAC's Dream Team."

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001048

PS

KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPERS - Add another neoconservative adviser on the Middle East to an already impressive roster-Daniel Pipes signed on with Rudy Giuliani's campaign. . . I think it's fair to say that Pipes is even further out ideologically than Norman Podhoretz, another Giuliani adviser.

GIULIANI SPENT MORE TIME AT YANKEES' GAMES OR FLYING THAN AT GROUND ZERO

POLITICAL WIRE - The New York Times looked at Rudy Giuliani's claim to have spent more time at Ground Zero than some of the 9/11 rescue workers and finds he spent "a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts."

Meanwhile, Salon shows how Giuliani used his time: "By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 60 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers."

MAY 2007

THE HIDDEN STORY OF THE REAL RUDOLPH GIULIANI

MICHAEL WOLFF, VANITY FAIR - The explanation for what makes Rudy so compelling among people who know him best - including New York reporters who've covered him for a generation, and political pros who've worked for him - is simpler: he is nuts, actually mad. . . Every student of Rudy Giuliani - indeed, every New Yorker - has witnessed, and in many cases suffered, his periods of mania, political behavior that, in the end, can't have much of a rational explanation.

So, if you are not from New York, if you haven't had the pleasure of what Jack Newfield, that querulous old-school New York City columnist and reporter, called "the Full Rudy" - also the title of his 2002 book about the former mayor - you perhaps cannot appreciate our sense of emperor's-new-clothes incredulity. Despite what's in front of everybody's face - behavior that's not only in the public record but recapped on the front pages every day - becoming president could really happen for Rudy.

No, that is wrong: virtually every Full Rudy veteran expects the implosion to happen any second. It's in some bizarro parallel reality that the Rudy campaign achieves verisimilitude and even - strange, too, when you consider the cronies and hacks who surround him - appears, at times, adept. . .

Newfield, who died in 2004, desperately, and to little avail, tried in his short, apoplectic book to demonstrate the existence of a real Rudy as opposed to the post-9/11 heroic Rudy. "Are you crazy? He's just insane," Newfield kept yelling at me over lunch one day, when I was trying to come up with a strategic explanation for Rudy's wild swings of temperament, judgment, and sense of proportion. (Similarly, Newfield quotes the New York politician Basil Paterson as saying Giuliani has "a devil in him," and Giuliani's former school chancellor Rudy Crew as diagnosing a "very, very powerful pathology," and former New York congressman Rev. Floyd Flake as seeing in Rudy, simply, a deep "mean streak."). . .

Newsweek, in its Rudy cover story, made the case for transformation by polls - you are what an unexpected number of people are willing to believe you are, no matter how outside the realm of credibility and reason that might be. In both critiques, Rudy is far along in the process of making himself into a realistic presidential being, a legitimate, if curious, front-runner, a man for all seasons, a plausible model - this character famous for his dramatic mood swings - of steadfastness and determination. If he doesn't implode, then, in fact, he's sound. . .

The developing view among tolerant Republicans and receptive independents seems to be that what happened in New York concerning Rudy ought to stay in New York (except for 9/11, which is an officially nationalized experience, and the Disneyfication of Times Square, which plays in the heartland as well). Even that the city, because it was crazy (and nasty), full of not only criminals but the liberal elite, deserved Rudy. It was beast against beast.

His reign in New York - cutting his opponents dead while micro-managing or attacking the media as he sped off to cop shootings, fires, and water-main breaks - was all about his passions and personality. It was all dramatic persona, a governing style much closer to that of a banana-republic potentate than to your average city administrator's. . .

There were, memorably, his bitter fights with anybody in his administration who got more publicity than he did (especially his police commissioner William Bratton, whom he fired because Bratton got credit for the drop in crime); his refusal (more childish and foot-stamping than strictly racist) to meet with virtually any elected black official during his tenure (justified with a series of odd ruminations: "If you engage in dialogue with political leaders that pander . . . then you end up watering down your change so much that nothing changes"); his jihadish campaign against the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a painting that mocked the Virgin Mary; and his authoritarian campaign against jaywalkers (resulting in formidable street barricades).

His own children end up, too, as forlorn figures in his imperial city. Given their parents' marital discord and the mayor's nonstop parenting of the city, they were often left in the care of the police (at 37,000 strong, the N.Y.P.D., commanded by the mayor, is the largest force in the U.S.). A subject of both humor and concern among Rudy's closest aides, the children - Caroline, 18, and Andrew, 21 - were on a police diet, too. To keep them happy and quiet, the police stuffed them full of food. Father and children are now estranged - his son pointedly says he won't campaign for his father, because of his demanding golf-training schedule (he learned the game from a member of his police detail); his daughter seems disinclined to speak of her father at . . .

GIULIANI'S EX AIDE CAUSING HIM TROUBLE

NY TIMES - As Rudolph W. Giuliani runs for president, his image as a chief executive who steered New York through the disaster of Sept. 11 has become a pillar of his campaign. But one former member of his inner circle keeps surfacing to revisit that history in ways that are unflattering to Mr. Giuliani: Jerome M. Hauer, New York City's first emergency management director. In recent days, Mr. Hauer has challenged Mr. Giuliani's recollection that he had little role as mayor in placing the city's emergency command center at the ill-fated World Trade Center. Mr. Hauer has also disputed the claim by the Giuliani campaign that the mayor's wife, Judith Giuliani, had coordinated a help center for families after the attack. And he has contradicted Mr. Giuliani's assertions that the city's emergency response was well coordinated that day, a point he made most notably to the authors of "Grand Illusion," a book that depicts Mr. Giuliani's antiterrorism efforts as deeply flawed. Mr. Hauer does not disparage Mr. Giuliani's overall effort at emergency preparedness or appear to have actively sought out a role as a Giuliani scold. But he has emerged as one in several settings where his frank, often blunt, answers to questions have offered a rare view inside the often-insular Giuliani administration.

Mr. Hauer was once part of the coterie of high school chums, fellow former prosecutors and City Hall aides who remain the nucleus of Mr. Giuliani's tight-knit set of advisers. From that perch, he helped Mr. Giuliani confront some of New York City's most disquieting predicaments, like the West Nile virus and a potential millennium meltdown. . .

Mr. Hauer, for example, recalls a conversation he had with Mr. Giuliani in 2001 when he had decided to endorse a Democrat, Mark Green, for New York City mayor over Mr. Giuliani's own choice for a successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican. Mr. Hauer said Mr. Giuliani, upset, called up to say his disloyalty was unforgivable. "He was shouting, 'If you do this, you're done ... I'm going to end your career,' or something along those lines," Mr. Hauer said. . .

One of Mr. Hauer's first tasks was to find a home for an emergency command center to replace the inadequate facilities at police headquarters. Mr. Hauer suggested an office complex in downtown Brooklyn as a "good alternative" in a memorandum. But Mr. Hauer said the mayor insisted instead on a site within walking distance of City Hall. Given that concern and others, Mr. Hauer said he decided that offices on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, next to the twin towers and just a few blocks from City Hall, seemed the best choice. The site was immediately controversial because it was part of the trade center, which had already been the location of a truck bomb attack in 1993. City officials, though, including Mr. Hauer, have long defended their decision, even after the command center had to be evacuated during the 2001 terror attack.

HOW GIULIANI SCREWED UP THE 9/11 RECOVERY AND DAMAGED WORKERS' LIVES

ANTHONY DePALMA, WASHINGTON POST - An examination of Mr. Giuliani's handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center's ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani's administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers. . .

City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

The question of who, if anyone, is to blame for not adequately protecting the workers could finally be decided in United States District Court in Manhattan, where thousands of firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence. . .

INSIDE GIULIANI PARTNERS

WASHINGTON POST - Giuliani, grounded in the intricately connected world of New York politics, has been more than adept at making the system work for his clients. They have included a pharmaceutical company that, with Giuliani's help, resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with only a fine; a confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to ensure his security company could do business with the federal government; and the horse racing industry, eager to recover public confidence after a betting scandal.

Clients of Giuliani Partners are required to sign confidentiality agreements, so they do not comment about the work they receive or how much they are paying for it. Though now running for president, Giuliani refuses to identify his clients, disclose his compensation or reveal any details about Giuliani Partners. He also declined to be interviewed about the firm.

Because of this secrecy -- a request to visit his wood-paneled offices overlooking Times Square was turned down -- a complete picture of the firm and its business is difficult to obtain. . .

GIULIANI AND HIS FIRM REPRESENTED OXYCONTIN MAKER

ABC NEWS BLOTTER - Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller Oxycontin. Federal officials say the company, Purdue Frederick, helped to trigger a nationwide epidemic of addiction to the time-release painkiller by failing to give early warnings that it could be abused. Prosecutors say "in the process scores died."

Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.

According to the book "Painkiller," by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."

GIULIANI PLAYS DOWN VALUE OF HIS JEWELRY COLLECTION

APRIL 2007

GIULIANI SHOW TRUE NATURE; LAUNCHES MCCARTHYESQUE ATTACK ON DEMS

POLITICO - Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001. But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped. "If any Republican is elected president - - and I think obviously I would be the best at this - - we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it," Giuliani said.

The former New York City mayor, currently leading in all national polls for the Republican nomination for president, said Tuesday night that America would ultimately defeat terrorism no matter which party gains the White House. "But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?" Giuliani said. "If we are on defense (with a Democratic president,) we will have more losses and it will go on longer." "I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.". . .

Giuliani said terrorists "hate us and not because of anything bad we have done; it has nothing to do with Israel and Palestine. They hate us for the freedoms we have and the freedoms we want to share with the world."

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE GIULIANI ADMINISTRATION

BECKETT FUND - For several years, throughout 2000 and 2001, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City had a formal policy of allowing homeless people to sleep on the church's steps and on portions of the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue that are church property. The church operates a homeless shelter in the basement of the church, but it is limited to ten elderly men who receive counseling and whom the church tries to help move to permanent housing. As the pastor put it in a recent sermon, "We have ten homeless men who stay inside, but we've got about 25 or 30 who sleep outside the building . . . these homeless friends are part of our ministry . . . Outside on our signboard there's a sign that says This is God's House, All Are Welcome. All are welcome, and we mean it."

For a while, the City of New York tolerated the situation, but toward the end of 2001 [and the Giuliani administration], officials informed the church that allowing the homeless to sleep outside would no longer be tolerated. In December, they rousted the homeless people out of their sleep and cleared the steps and street. The church filed suit. . .

[The Bloomberg administration is still fighting a court ruling in favor of the church]

Follow up to my post on Rudy Guiliani just added to this board: A Beckett Fund link detailing the legal effort by New York City, beginning in 2001 when Guiliani left office, to bar the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church from allowing homeless people to sleep on its steps can be obtained by Google-searching: [ "This is God's House" Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church ]. A link on the resulting Beckett Fund page states that as of 2005 New York City was still fighting to overturn a court decision in favor of the church concerned.

http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/case/48.html?

THINGS THE MEDIA FORGOT TO TELL YOU ABOUT RUDY GIULIANI

VILLAGE VOICE 2000 - The Voice's revelation this month that Rudolph Giuliani's father served time in prison for robbery and later worked as a collector for the mayor's mob-tied uncle gave birth to a wide array of reactions. . . Wayne Barrett, the Voice senior editor who disclosed the information in Rudy! An Investigative Biography, a new book about the mayor, was simply capitalizing on the public's lust for "the allure and intrigue" of Mafia tales, said former governor Mario Cuomo. . .

"Rudy Giuliani is being smeared with the dishonest blood of family members," wrote Stanley Crouch, also in the News. The other, more muted response was one of consternation and anger at a mayor who had judged so many others so harshly.

"I come from a family that is extremely proud of its Italian heritage," said Chiara Colletti, a vice president with a college testing organization and former spokeswoman for the Board of Education. "We are much more sensitive to Italian stereotyping than we ever let on. But what [the book] revealed is relevant to the life of a public figure because this is a person who casts judgments on others who are involved in crime, even exposing the pasts of others for his own convenience."

Louis Mangone, an attorney active in Italian American affairs, remembered hearing the mayor extol his father's honesty at a gathering at the Columbus Club, the city's premier Italian gathering spot. Giuliani, whose prosecutions as a U.S. Attorney had been targeted at friends of many of those present, got a chilly reception. "You can't visit the sins of the father on the children; we know that very well. But he's been so sanctimonious on this very issue with others," said Mangone.

And then there was the response of Sal Mondrone, who so far has been unable to qualify for a waste-hauling license. "I was told by my lawyer I knew too many people," he said. "I think it's two standards here. [Giuliani's] father hung out with gangsters. His cousin had mob affiliations.". . .

If anyone made the mayor's father a worthy subject for further exploration it was the mayor himself. He has cited his father's influence to every journalist undertaking a profile of him since he first made headlines as a prosecutor in the mid-1980s. As recently as this April, when he announced his prostate cancer, he described Harold Giuliani as "a very, very important reason for why I'm standing here as the mayor of New York City."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0029,robbins,16567,5.html

WAYNE BARRETT'S ARTICLE
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0027,barrett,16192,1.html

PATRICIA HURTADO, NEWSDAY, 2005 - A former top Giuliani administration official insisted mental illness made him do "all these wacky things" -- like embezzling hundreds of thousands of city dollars -- but a federal judge Thursday didn't buy it, sentencing him to 63 months behind bars. Russell Harding, 40, former president of the New York City Housing Development Corp., pleaded guilty in March to stealing more than $400,000 for his personal use and possessing child pornography.

Prosecutors charged that Harding spent thousands on trips to Hong Kong, Las Vegas and Vancouver, a bachelor party dinner for a friend and spa treatments he listed as agency expenses. As part of the probe, the child porn was found on his computer. . .

http://www.armchairsubversive.com/Russell_Harding.htm

TOM ROBBINS, VILLAGE VOICE, 2004 - Lou Carbonetti, Rudy Giuliani's childhood pal and failed patronage appointee, stood repentant before a Manhattan criminal judge last week to confess three counts of perjury. It was his fourth scandal in less than a decade and his first conviction, making his the toughest hard-luck story in an administration with an otherwise charmed life. Carbonetti, 56, admitted to Acting Supreme Court Justice Brenda Soloff that he had lied when he told the city's Department of Investigation last year that while serving as director of the Fulton Mall Improvement Association in downtown Brooklyn - a post he owed to his friend, the former mayor - he'd never been hired as a consultant to drum up business for Techsolve, a Long Island-based computer firm. The question was important because Carbonetti had awarded the firm a $25,000 contract to design the association's website. He'd lied as well when he said the firm never paid him any money. He'd lied again when the question was repeated in a slightly different form intended to cover all bases. . .

In fact, as prosecutors revealed last week, the computer company and Carbonetti had signed a contract in March 2000, back when Carbonetti still had strong connections in City Hall. . .

If the emblem of the Giuliani years seared in public consciousness remains the hard-charging, crime-busting mayor with the unfortunate combover, then its flip side is poor Lou Carbonetti, a schlepper whose repeated city appointments gave the lie to Giuliani's claims to have staffed his City Hall only with the best and the brightest. Time and again, the affable yet feckless Carbonetti was boosted aboard the mayor's political gravy train only to slide miserably back off again.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0406,robbins,50931,5.html

WAYNE BARRETT, VILLAGE VOICE, 2002 - With facilities in three cities and an 18-year history, Fortress's packing, transport, storage, and management have earned it, according to the company's brochures, "the coveted Highly Protected Risk rating from the worldwide insurance industry." Inside the Fortress are the records of the eight years of Rudy Giuliani's City Hall, transferred there at the end of December. Included are the ex-mayor's appointment books, cabinet meeting audiotapes, e-mails, telephone logs, advance and briefing memos, correspondence, transition materials, and private schedules, as well as his departmental, travel, event, subject, and Gracie Mansion files. In addition to the mayor's records, those of his chief of staff and every deputy mayor, together with their chiefs of staff, have all been secured at the warehouse, which charges $3430 per month for the use of 1000 square feet.

Even Giuliani's "World Trade Center files" and "Millennium Project files," together with 6000 files of photographs, 1000 audiotapes, and 15,000 videotapes, are stored there. So are "200-250 feet of gifts such as plaques, awards, personalized clothing, and other items presented to the mayor and deputy mayors, as well as World Trade Center-related materials."

Virtually everything at the Fortress is public property, hijacked by the mayor in a secret agreement signed by George Rios, the city records commissioner he appointed. The agreement was executed amid a flourish of stadium and movie studio transactions for friends - on December 24, one of the final, busy days of an administration that departed with just as little regard for the law as when it governed. The 12-page contract was also signed by lawyer Saul Cohen, a longtime friend of Giuliani's, who lists himself as the president of the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs Inc., the institute incorporated on December 6 that now controls these records. The Voice obtained a copy of the agreement under the freedom-of-information laws after the Daily News reported the records transfer early this month.

Calling the "official papers" of Giuliani a matter of "great historical significance" and "unique value," the agreement acknowledges that "the documents are the property of the City" and that "under the City Charter," the Department of Records "is ultimately responsible for the preservation and organization" of these materials. Yet the contract conveys the records to a Giuliani nonprofit so new it has no board, no director, no site, and no identifiable archivist, permitting the center to catalog, organize, and "permanently" maintain them. . .

Rudy Giuliani has spent a lifetime dictating his own legend. When he was U.S. attorney in Manhattan, he abruptly ended the longtime practice of publishing annual reports, making reporters and others utterly dependent on his version of how productive the office was. And now, while peddling the story of his mayoralty for millions to publishers and moviemakers, he's gained exclusive control over a public record ordinarily available to all.

GIULIANI'S SEAMY BUDDY BERNIE KERIK CONT'D

WASHINGTON POST - When former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged President Bush to make Bernard B. Kerik the next secretary of homeland security, White House aides knew Kerik as the take-charge top cop from Sept. 11, 2001. But it did not take them long to compile an extensive dossier of damaging information about the would-be Cabinet officer. They learned about questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption. Most disturbing, according to people close to the process, was Kerik's friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime. The businessman had told federal authorities that Kerik received gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations, from a New Jersey family with alleged Mafia ties.

Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later. . .

During an appearance in Florida last weekend, Giuliani told reporters that they had a right to question his judgment in putting Kerik in charge of the New York Police Department and recommending him to Bush. "I should have done a better job of investigating him, vetting him," Giuliani said. "It's my responsibility, and I've learned from it.". . .

Aides said they now believe they were lulled by Kerik's swaggering Sept. 11 reputation, and were too passive in accommodating the president's desire for secrecy and speed and too willing to trust Giuliani's judgment.

"There is no question the mayor's support for Kerik was important," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. . .

A quick FBI search and research by the White House turned up a host of problems in the couple of weeks before the nomination was announced. According to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of White House policy against discussing personnel matters, Bush aides discovered that:

- Kerik was fined $2,500 by New York City for using police detectives to help him with his autobiography. He was also a defendant in a civil lawsuit accusing him of retaliation against a corrections official who had disciplined a female prison guard with whom Kerik was having a relationship. . .

- One of Kerik's former top deputies was convicted of stealing money from a foundation that Kerik ran while serving as Giuliani's corrections chief. The foundation was funded by rebates from tobacco companies selling cigarettes to prison inmates.

- Kerik, who filed for bankruptcy as a police officer, became rich almost overnight after leaving office. Just before his nomination, he made a quick $6.2 million without investing a dime by exercising stock options from his service on the board of Taser International, a stun-gun firm seeking business with homeland security agencies.

- Kerik's tenure in Iraq generated strong criticism of his management. Iraqi officials complained to U.S. authorities about $1.2 billion Kerik spent to train Iraqi police officers in Jordan, spending they called wasteful. Iraqis also questioned why Kerik spent tens of millions of dollars to buy weapons for Iraqi trainees when the U.S. military had confiscated plenty of such weapons after the invasion. . .

The loudest alarm bell was Kerik's relationship with Lawrence Ray. The best man at Kerik's wedding in 1998, Ray went to work for a New Jersey construction company, Interstate Industrial Corp., that was seeking a big New York City contract and trying to overcome concerns inside Giuliani's administration that it had mob ties.

GIULIANI WAS BRIEFED ON SUSPECTED MOB TIES BEFORE HE NAMED KERIK POLICE COMMISH

WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, NY TIMES - Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik's relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik's appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records.

Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony.

Mr. Giuliani's testimony amounts to a significantly new version of what information was probably before him in the summer of 2000 as he was debating Mr. Kerik's appointment as the city's top law enforcement officer. Mr. Giuliani had previously said that he had never been told of Mr. Kerik's entanglement with the company before promoting him to the police job or later supporting his failed bid to be the nation's homeland security secretary.

In his testimony, given in April 2006, Mr. Giuliani indicated that he must have simply forgotten that he had been briefed on one or more occasions as part of the background investigation of Mr. Kerik before his appointment to the police post.

He said he learned only in late 2004 that the briefing or briefings had occurred, after the city's investigation commissioner reviewed his own records from 2000. To this day, Mr. Giuliani testified, he has no specific recollection of any briefing or the details of what he was told. But he said he felt comforted because the chief investigator had cleared Mr. Kerik to be promoted. . .

Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty last summer to improperly allowing the company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, or its subsidiaries, to do $165,000 worth of free renovations on his Bronx apartment in late 1999 and 2000. The company has denied paying for the work, and has disputed any association with organized crime. But the two brothers who run it have been indicted in the Bronx on charges they lied under oath about their dealings with Mr. Kerik.

There is no evidence that Mr. Giuliani knew about the apartment renovation before promoting Mr. Kerik to police commissioner. But the top investigator who briefed Mr. Giuliani in 2000, the transcript shows, was aware that Mr. Kerik's brother and a close friend had been hired by an affiliate of the company, which for years had been struggling to secure a city license.

MARCH 2007

GIULIANI'S FRIEND, BERNIE KERIK

JOSH MARSHALL, TALKING POINTS MEMO - Mayor Rudy put a cop with numerous alleged mob ties in charge of the NYPD. And Kerik's main credential going in was that he'd been Rudy's driver. Here's a clip from a post I did on December 12th, 2004, cataloguing everything that had then come out at a relatively early stage in his ill-fated nomination to be Secretary of DHS:

||| They seem to be stipulating to their knowing about and being untroubled by

a) Kerik's long-standing ties to an allegedly mobbed-up Jersey construction company [or] that Kerik received numerous unreported cash gifts from Lawrence Ray, an executive at said Jersey construction company (Ray was later indicted along with Edward Garafola, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's brother-in-law, and Daniel Persico, nephew of Colombo Family Godfather Carmine "The Snake" Persico and others on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle."

b) that Riker's Island prison became a hotbed of political corruption and cronyism on his watch,

c) that he is accused by nine employees of the hospital he worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss,

d) that a warrant for his arrest (albeit in a civil case) was issued in New Jersey as recently as six years ago,

e) that as recently as last week he was forced to testify in a civil suit in a case covering the period in which he was New York City correction commissioner, in which the plaintiff, "former deputy warden Eric DeRavin III contends Kerik kept him from getting promoted because he had reprimanded the woman [Kerik was allegedly having an affair with], Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero,"

f) his rapid and unexplained departure from Baghdad.|||

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/012977.php

9/11 MAY HAVE BEEN GIULIANI'S BEST DAY

JONATHAN CAPEHART, WASHINGTON POST - When Giuliani was mayor, he brooked no criticism -- no matter how minor, no matter how constructive. Having been on the receiving end of one of Giuliani's withering verbal assaults, I know of what I speak.

The phone rang around 9 a.m. on Jan. 7, 1999. It was Giuliani's personal assistant, Beth Patrone. "Please hold for the mayor." He had never called me before. His skin-peeling tirades against reporters, politicians, community leaders, perceived enemies and those deemed too weak to fight City Hall were legendary. Now it was my turn. . .

For the next 10 minutes, Giuliani ripped me apart, calling my column "intellectually dishonest," among other things. He hung up when he couldn't find a favorable editorial that I'd written on his State of the City speech the previous year. But he called back, spouting off the headline and launching into another 10-minute monologue.

His press secretary, Sunny Mindel, called me afterward. "Consider yourself flattered," she said. "You're important enough to warrant a phone call. You got under his skin." I knew that I had accomplished no great feat. The mayor's skin is as thin as America's Next Top Model.

People disagreed with me all the time. I encouraged discussion and accepted that others had different viewpoints. But Giuliani's reaction was over the top. I tell this story because it points to other aspects of hizzoner's personality that were more troublesome.

Giuliani could be vindictive. He had no qualms about using government to settle a score. When the City Council overrode his veto of a bill to change the operations of homeless shelters in December 1998, Giuliani sought to evict five community service programs, including one that served 500 mentally ill people, in the district of the bill's chief sponsor, and to replace them with a homeless shelter.

What's more, he released a list of sites for other shelters that would be housed in the districts of council members who voted in favor of the override. (He backed down two months later, after much public outrage.)

Rather than take the high road earlier that year, Giuliani erupted when the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, a prominent Harlem minister who had endorsed Giuliani for reelection, said, "I don't believe he likes black people." In fact, Giuliani put a lockdown on city funding for projects affiliated with the politically connected cleric.

But it was his reaction to racially charged incidents involving the police that highlighted Giuliani's other affliction: tone-deafness.

Amadou Diallo was reaching for his wallet when undercover police officers gunned him down in a hail of 41 bullets in the vestibule of his apartment building in 1999. New Yorkers of all colors and political stripes trouped to police headquarters to be arrested in protest of not only the officers' actions but also of Giuliani's inability to grasp why everyone was appalled by what happened.

WHAT DID GIULIANI REALLY DO ON 9/11?

NEWSWEEK, 2006 - In their new book, "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," investigative reporters Dan Collins and Wayne Barrett argue that - far from being a heroic soldier in the war on terror - Giuliani failed to take adequate precautions before the attacks and was directly responsible for many of the city's failures to cope with the crisis. Newsweek's Jennifer Barrett spoke with coauthor Wayne Barrett (no relation), a senior editor at the Village Voice and also author of the 2000 book "Rudy! An Investigative Biography" . . . Excerpts:

WAYNE BARRETT: . . . Giuliani managed to convert that persona we all saw on 9/11 and appreciate [it] into a marketing device and turn himself into a legend as someone who understood the threat and really prepared the city. . . The dumbest decision he made was to put the [city's emergency] command center in the World Trade Center even though his principal security advisers urged him to put it elsewhere. His own emergency-management director, Jerry Hauer, wanted it to go where [current New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg has now put it: in Brooklyn . . . If he had, he could have managed the crisis much more capably . . .

Also there was his decision not to support Jerry Hauer when he tried to do what he was mandated to do - to create matrixes of which agencies were in charge of which responsibilities and develop protocols for anticipated incidents. The police department resisted every single protocol that Jerry suggested. [The police commissioner] refused to sign off on them, and Giuliani didn't make him. So there were no interagency protocols [on 9/11] for terror attacks or for a high-rise fire.

There's also a whole chapter about radios. It took until March of 2001 for the fire department to come up with new radios. And the radios failed in the first week and had to be withdrawn. But they could have been reconfigured to an analog mode, which would have made them [operable]. The company was willing to reconfigure them, but the lame-duck administration walked away from them instead and left the fire department with the same radios that had failed in 1993. In fact, there were memos we found all the way back to 1990 that said the radios would cost firefighters' lives. And yet they were still carrying those radios 11 years later. That is inexcusable policy. Also, they were not interoperable, so the fire department couldn't communicate with the police department [preventing commanders from warning firefighters inside the towers of the impending collapse on 9/11].

Giuliani took office in January 1994, not long after the [first] World Trade Center bombing. Wasn't there pressure on him to prevent another attack? Everyone agrees that the question of terrorism never came up in selection of a police commissioner, which began not long after the attack. A water main broke in the first month of [Giuliani's] administration, and he was more concerned with how the city responded to that. That's when he began to form the Office of Emergency Management-because he found out about the water main break on TV and he wanted to be notified about these things right away ... He wanted to position himself as a man to fix those sorts of problems. He was more concerned about how to handle water-main breaks than terror attacks. . .

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14776001/site/newsweek/

THE 9/10 AND THE 9/11 GIULIANI

STEPHEN RODRICK, NEW YORK MAGAZINE - A few hours before his speech, Giuliani inadvertently wanders into a sparsely populated press room. He looks older and wearier than the last time we saw him. There's the same dark suit, but the undertaker hunch is a bit more pronounced. When a reporter asks what he's doing here, Giuliani skips the friendly kibitzing. Instead he snaps, "I'm calling my wife. I need privacy." It's been said that 9/11 softened Rudy's edges. If there really is a kinder, gentler Giuliani, he's not showing it. . .

Now Rudy strides to the podium. The room rises. Suits at the cheap tables stand and a banker type sticks his fingers in his mouth and gives a loud whistle.

Applause reverberates off the chandeliers. Millionaires pump fists. Dowagers daub eyes. This is what they came to see! Seemingly every law-enforcement officer in Wilmington appears with a camera. Over and over, Giuliani grips and grins.

It may sound preposterous to a Rudy-savvy New Yorker. But in this ballroom full of lock-jawed Wasps, it sounds like presidential salvation. . .

On most issues, his spiel doesn't sound that different from those of McCain and Romney. But there's one exception. Over and over again, wherever he goes, America's Mayor evokes 9/11. And over and over again, wherever he goes, people cheer. Whenever Rudy talks about anything other than the September 11 terror attacks, he's just another Republican presidential hopeful with his particular set of strengths and weaknesses. When he talks about 9/11, he becomes something else: a national hero.

New Yorkers may find that hard to believe. Anyone who lived here at the time remembers the 9/10 Rudy: strong on crime and the economy, yes, but arrogant, bullying, and terrible on race and civil rights. And while it's impossible not to respect what Giuliani did for the city on 9/11 and in the days afterward, New Yorkers have experienced an inevitable September 11 fatigue. The 9/11 story has been told so many times that the Rudy-as-hero narrative, however moving, has lost much of its power. Except for those who have a personal connection to the tragedy, people have generally moved on. . .

The rest of America sees a far different Rudy. West of the Hudson, the 9/10 Rudy doesn't exist and never did. For them, September 11 was never so much a real day as a distant televised drama. It has more symbolic meaning than actual meaning: It's equal parts Pearl Harbor and resurrection. And guess who plays the role of national savior? Not George Bush. Not John McCain. Not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Once the rest of the country sees Giuliani up close, the conventional New York wisdom once held, his campaign will surely fold. So far, exactly the opposite has happened. . .

http://nymag.com/news/features/28517/index.html

FEBRUARY 2007

A REPORTER'S GUIDE TO RUDY GIULIANI

BOB GARFIELD, ON THE MEDIA - New York is still a newspaper town, and there is no shortage of pre-9/11 reporters who still have a lot of string on the pre-9/11 mayor. Ellis Henican is a longtime columnist for Newsday. He agrees the relationship between Giuliani and the local press was combative, but he says it was also - fun.

ELLIS HENICAN: He didn't like us. I mean, let's just start with that. He didn't like to be criticized. He took it all very personally. He was quick to anger, and he lashed out very quickly, all of which made things fun for the media who had to cover him.

BOB GARFIELD: Lashed out how?

ELLIS HENICAN: Well, he would complain. He would heckle you. He would question the intellectual honesty of your questions. In fact, the Room Nine press conferences in his era, the most frequent beginning of a sentence was, if you were going to be intellectually honest about that question, you would, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. It was a combative relationship. But in that combat, I think you learned a lot about who the guy was. He was someone who was very headstrong, who was not too big on nuance, who was smart and was a good arguer. And he might not be right, but he was never uncertain.

BOB GARFIELD: I'm just curious - most of America knows Rudy Giuliani as the sainted hero of 9/11. But the New York press, you know, had a very different take on him, at least through September 10th, 2001. What was the book on Giuliani?

ELLIS HENICAN: In the early years, I think people appreciated the fact that he brought a sense of civic order to the city and he rode that a while. But when he went to bed on September the 10th, 2001, he was just another tired mayor with a bad marriage. He had run out his string of charm in New York, and he had succeeded in his years in office in alienating, one by one, an awful lot of the constituencies that add up to this place called New York.

BOB GARFIELD: Is it your sense that the New York media as a group is sort of chomping at the bit to let the outside world know about their Rudy?

ELLIS HENICAN: I think we think we had some insights that the rest of the world maybe hasn't tuned into yet. When you're with Rudy outside of New York, he's treated like a rock star. They show up in huge crowds and they ask very respectful questions. You know, 16 years into this relationship with the guy that has kind of worn off in New York.

BOB GARFIELD: Part of running for office is managing the media. Now, Giuliani has taken some unorthodox steps in that direction in the past. [laughs]

ELLIS HENICAN: If you had to point to one symbol of the Rudy - media relationship when he was in City Hall, it was the crime scene media police pen. The cops would come immediately after something really bad had happened and put up these blue sawhorses. And it wouldn't be right outside the building where the guy was killed. They would be like four blocks away from the building where the guy was killed.

And they would do their best to hustle the media into that pen where you would have no connection to the story at all. It was especially maddening because you would see the delivery guy from the deli down the block coming back and forth at will-

[laughter]

- while the famously aggressive and demanding New York press corps is sitting inside this little cattle pen halfway across the borough of Brooklyn.

The trick, of course, was to start out at least by not taking out a press pass. Once you had that badge around your neck, some guy from DCPI, the Public Affairs Office at the Police Department, was sure to hustle you into the pen, and you were going to get nothing until you finally found a way out of there.

BOB GARFIELD: [laugh] This is going to be a colorful race, I gather. Are you just tingling with anticipation about, putting aside everything else, just the tabloid headlines ?

ELLIS HENICAN: God has never been kinder to New York newspaper columnists -

BOB GARFIELD: [laughs]

ELLIS HENICAN: - than it looks like he might be. And it's not just that Rudy and Hillary come from New York. I mean, that would be nice if that's all they were. But these are two large, divisive, almost cartoonish characters that you can't help but have a strong opinion about either one of them.

My goodness, if we wake up in the morning sometime in the summer of next year and this race is between Rudy and Hillary, I truly will think I have died and gone to heaven. Savor the moment. Never let it end.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/02/09/05

JANUARY 2007

GIULIANI HAS TRADEMARKED HIS OWN NAME

DAVID SALTONSTALL, NY DAILY NEWS Rudy Giuliani never shrank from defending his image as mayor, but as a businessman he's gone a step further - even trademarking his own name, the Daily News has learned. The unusual step, revealed in a recent Giuliani company contract obtained by The News, states under the heading "Use of Mr. Giuliani's Name" that the "trade names and trademarks 'Rudolph Giuliani,' or 'Giuliani Partners LLC' . . . shall not be used . . . without prior written consent." Doing anything that "tarnishes, degrades, disparages or reflects adversely on the Giuliani" name, it adds, will be grounds for terminating the contract.

As Giuliani now ponders a run for the White House, the document underscores what has become a central question of his candidacy - how will the former mayor's roster of mostly private business clients play when viewed through the harsh prism of presidential campaign politics?

It is clearly something the mayor's own people are worried about: In a list of potential "problems" written inside a Giuliani campaign dossier and obtained by The News last week from a source sympathetic to a rival campaign, the word "business" appears at the top of the list, above even his ex-wife, Donna Hanover. . .

In the five years that Giuliani has worked in the private sector, his clients have run the gamut, from gambling interests like the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which may further trouble Christian conservative voters, to large power-generators like the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which environmentalists regard as among the worst polluters in the nation. He has lent his name to every corner of the energy industry - representing nuclear, oil and natural gas concerns - and worked with the pharmaceutical industry to keep cheap prescription drugs from flowing into the U.S. from Canada.

And that's just what is publicly known.

Giuliani Partners and its subsidiaries are all privately held companies, and the former mayor has refused to release a full client list - making a clear analysis of his net worth impossible, and very likely raising disclosure questions, should he run for President. . .

His empire includes the flagship Giuliani Partners LLC, a corporate consulting firm, and Giuliani Safety & Security, which has provided security advice to everyone from the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County to the government-backed Asian Games in Qatar, a Middle East emirate.

In 2005, Giuliani also became a named partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, a Texas-based law firm with a large legal and lobbying arm, much of which is aimed at protecting coal- and oil-burning electrical plants from further government regulation, experts say.

"There were a lot of eyebrows raised in Washington when Mr. Giuliani decided to become a named partner, because Bracewell really does represent some of the most notorious polluters in the U.S.," said Natural Resources Defense Council clean air director John Walke. . .

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/486469p-409552c.html

SEPTEMBER 2006

THE GIULIANI FILE: GIULIANI'S PAL BERNARD KERIK

WIKPEDIA - Bernard Kerik was Police Commissioner of the City of New York (2000-2001). In December 2004, George W. Bush nominated Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security. A week later, Kerik withdrew his acceptance, explaining that he had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny; subsequently, numerous allegations surfaced which may have led to a difficult confirmation battle. . .

Kerik was declared bankrupt in March 1988, but today he is a multimillionaire, the result of a lucrative partnership with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and a profitable relationship with a stun-gun manufacturer. His relationship since 2002 with Taser International, a Scottsdale, Arizona, manufacturer of stun guns, has by far been the biggest source of his newfound wealth, earning him more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits through stock options he was granted and then sold, mostly in November 2004.

Kerik has been married three times. His present wife since November, 1998 is Syrian born Hala Matli (born 2/3/72). He has four children, his youngest, Celine Christina and Angelina Amber are both the God children of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. . .

Kerik worked from 1982 to 1984 as chief of investigations for the security office at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, one of the kingdom's premier hospitals, where members of the royal family are treated. Six members of the hospital security staff, including Kerik, were fired and deported after an investigation in 1984 by the Saudi secret police. . .

In May, 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kerik was appointed by the Bush Administration as the Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. . .

Following his departure from the New York City Police Department, he was employed by Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm formed by the former Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. . .

Shortly after withdrawal of the nomination, the press reported on several other incidents which might also have posed difficulties in gaining confirmation by the Senate. These include: questions regarding Kerik's sale of stock in Taser International shortly before the release of an Amnesty International report critical of the company's stun-gun product; a sexual harassment lawsuit; allegations of misuse of police personnel and property for personal benefit; connections with a construction company suspected of having ties to organized crime; and failure to comply with ethics rules on gifts.

On June 30, 2006, after an eighteen month investigation conducted by the Bronx District Attorney's Office, Kerik pled guilty to two ethics violations (unclassified misdemeanors) and was ordered to pay $221,000 in fines at the 10-minute hearing. Kerik acknowledged that he failed to document a personal loan on his annual New York City Conflict of Interest Report (a violation of the NYC Administrative Code) and accepting a gift from a New Jersey construction firm (or ones of their subsidiaries) attempting to do business with the city, (a violation of the NYC Charter. . . Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg immediately removed Kerik's name from the Manhattan Detention Complex, a New York jail that had been renamed in Kerik's honor on Dec 21, 2001 by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Subsequently on July 20, 2006, the two New Jersey contractors were indicted on perjury charges, accused of lying to the Bronx grand jury in the Kerik investigation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kerik

ROBERT SCHEER, NATION, 2004 - How revealing that the nomination of Bernard Kerik as Homeland Security chief should be derailed not by the former New York City police commissioner's alleged violations of conflict-of-interest laws, mob connections and post-9/11 security industry profiteering but rather by his rueful admission that he paid no taxes for his "illegal immigrant" baby-sitter. . .

Once his act went national, cracks in Kerik's facade started to look a lot worse. One of the most detailed exposes stressing Kerik's alleged ties to New York mobsters ran in the New York Daily News. Why didn't those in the administration who vetted Kerik for this job know any of this?

Giuliani told Time magazine after Kerik's withdrawal that although he knew there were black marks on Kerik's record, "everything seemed pretty normal, at least by Washington or New York standards." Talk about your moral relativism! Or family values. On Monday, the NY Daily News reported that Kerik had juggled two extramarital affairs while police commissioner.

Bottom line: A smart guy like Giuliani should have suspected something in 1998, when his wife and his deputy mayor attended Kerik's lavish wedding, which was dotted with mob-connected characters. This was two years before he appointed Kerik to head the New York City Police Department.

To be fair, it would be only later that the Daily News reported the wedding was paid for with money from folks with city contracts and mob connections, some of whom were later indicted. But anyone knowledgeable about Kerik should have known that he could not afford his sumptuous lifestyle, given his bankruptcy and, according to Newsweek magazine, a contempt citation for failing to pay a debt in a business dealing. . .

Why wouldn't Giuliani push his onetime chauffeur and now a senior vice president in his firm to be Homeland Security czar, overseeing twenty-two federal agencies with a combined budget of $37.7 billion? The war on terror is a mother lode to be mined by those who are connected. Come to think of it, Kerik shouldn't have been rejected by the Bushies. If they were honest, they would celebrate him as the prototypical GOP operator, playing the people for a profit.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041227/scheer1224

DEMOCRACY NOW, 2004 - Newsweek uncovered that an arrest warrant was issued for Kerik as recently as six years ago over a dispute involving unpaid bills. The 1998 warrant was issued as part of a series of lawsuits relating to unpaid bills on his condominium in New Jersey.

The New York Daily News reports that Kerik had illegally accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts while a public official. A Daily News probe revealed that for many years, one of Kerik's main benefactors was Lawrence Ray. Ray was later indicted on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle."

The Washington Post reports that nine employees of the hospital Kerik worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia accused him of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss.

Questions have also been raised about Kerik's misuse of police power while the head of the New York police department. In one example, he was fined for using the services of three police officers to help research his autobiography "The Lost Son." He was also accused of sending homicide police officers to question Fox News journalists after the book's publisher, Judith Regan, lost a mobile phone after an interview at the Fox studios. It turned out to have just been misplaced.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1457224

ANGRY FIREFIGHTERS COULD SWIFT BOAT GIULIANI

WAYNE BARRETT AND DAN COLLINS, PROSPECT - Rudy Giuliani's performance on 9-11 is legendary, but behind that image lies another less flattering reality: an eight-year history of error and negligence and a failure to plan ahead that caused critical errors -- and even cost the lives of firefighters and police officers. Some of the 9-11 family leaders who have raised the most troubling issues about the city's preparations have vowed to stalk him in the primary states. Their focus is on firefighters whose lifeline link to unheard evacuation orders was the same radio that failed in the same towers during the first terrorist bombing in February 1993. They can't understand why the city never performed an interagency drill in the towers, had no plan or command-and-control protocol for a floor-consuming high-rise fire, and was indifferent, even after the 1993 warning, to rooftop, elevator, and handicapped rescues.

The gross failures of building and fire-code enforcement, the stark ineptitude of the mayor's vaunted Office of Emergency Management, the tolerated insularity of Fire Department command, the stay-put death knell of the 911 operators and fire dispatchers -- they all continue to haunt the families. They hold Giuliani himself responsible for the decision that morning to split the police and fire command posts, when the first rule of emergency response is unified command. Their separation contributed to communication gaps that every official inquiry has said caused casualties.

INSIDE GIULIANI'S CONSULTING FIRM

ALTERNET - Even before he left office as New York City's mayor at the end of 2001, Rudolph Giuliani was telling reporters about Giuliani Partners, the management consulting firm he intended to open up with his old City Hall team. The partners were more of a Giuliani posse than a group of peers. Michael Hess, the former city corporation counsel, was named managing partner. Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen became a senior partner, as did Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, whose later nomination as head of Homeland Security would go down in flames after revelations that his concern for following the rules and avoiding ethical conflicts appeared close to nonexistent. . .

The most valuable commodity the new company had to sell was not management expertise but the aura of America's Mayor -- the man whose cool-headed 9/11 leadership had taken on mythic proportions. . .

The Partners also rekindled relationships with some old friends who played central roles in some of the biggest city failures on 9/11. Among them was a "strategic partnership" with CB Richard Ellis, the successor of the firm that had found the city the perfect location for a command center -- high above lower Manhattan in one of the World Trade Center towers. The announcement of the deal, in which Giuliani Partners would be advising Ellis on "location and site assessment" as well as on emergency preparedness and fire safety, was made without any discernible sense of irony.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/41443/

GIULIANI KNEW ABOUT GROUND ZERO TOXINS; OPENED AREA ANYWAY

MARCIA KRAMER, WCBS-TV - Stunning proof has been uncovered that the government knowingly put New Yorkers in harm's way after 9/11. CBS 2 News has obtained documents revealing that Lower Manhattan was reopened a few weeks following the attack even though the air was not safe. The two devastating memos, written by the U.S. and local governments, show they knew. They knew the toxic soup created at ground zero was a deadly health hazard. Yet they sent workers into the pit and people back into their homes.

One of the memos, from the New York City health department, dated Oct. 6, 2001, noted: "The mayor's office is under pressure from building owners ... in the Red Zone to open more of the city." The memo said the Department of Environmental Protection was "uncomfortable" with opening the areas but, "The mayor's office was directing the Office of Emergency Management to open the target areas next week.". . .

Another part of the memo noted: "The E.P.A. has been very slow to make data results available and to date has not sufficiently informed the public of air quality issues arising from this disaster."

"Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me," said health protestor Yuichi Tamamo. "For the last five years we've been saying air quality here has been horrible.". . .
Bruce Sprague, an E.P.A. official in the New York and New Jersey region during 9/11 admitted to CBS 2 News the agency was finding alarming air quality readings at Ground Zero and in the surrounding areas.

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_249164937.html

HOW BAD WAS IT?

NY SUN - Nearly 70% of rescue workers exposed to toxic dust at ground zero became ill as a result, a study released yesterday said, citing a correlation between respiratory illness and recovery work after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

NEWS DAY reported a study that showed that the average decline in lung function experienced by Ground Zero workers was equivalent to 12 years of aging.

MAY 2006

GIULIANI TIME

MICHAEL POWELL WASHINGTON POST - As documentaries go, "Giuliani Time" is not high art. It's more like a beware-a-gram for 280 million Americans who may be tempted to make the former New York mayor their next president. . . There's not much pretense of fairness to this long-winded documentary, but Rudy didn't waste time on fairness, either. He stomped into the municipal barn intent on gelding any who opposed him. He fired, he mimicked, he besmirched and he intimidated. He was the most operatic mayor New York had seen or heard since Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s. He wrested concessions from unions, he halved the welfare rolls, he persuaded publishers to remove reporters who displeased him. . .

Curiously, the movie suffers from not enough Rudy. The opera bouffe that was Rudy was always fascinating. He grooved on conflict -- it was his charm and his weakness. I wanted more of those news conferences where he lashed at "actually really jerky" questions before turning on his heel. Or the neighborhood meetings where he'd go pop-eyed and rhetorically slice open a schoolteacher who had the nerve to challenge Hizzoner on class size.

When "Giuliani Time" gives a glimpse of this Giuliani, it's mesmerizing. So, the smiling mayor fields a phone call during his weekly radio show. The caller is angry about city cuts to food stamps and Medicare aid for the disabled.

Hizzoner is a pit bull to the chase.

"Hey, John," Giuliani tells his caller, "what kind of hole are you in? There's something that's really wrong with you. . . . We'll send you psychiatric help because you really need it."

As it happens, the caller, John Hynes, needs real help. A disabled lawyer, he suffers from Parkinson's disease, and he's had his benefits cut off and he's running out of medicine.

Nothing chills the blood so thoroughly as the sight of a powerful man turned gleeful bully.

APRIL 2006

FILM TAKES ON GIULIANI MYTH

DAVID SALTONSTALL, NY DAILY NEWS - Rudy Giuliani better hope that a new documentary on his mayoralty, "Giuliani Time," never makes it to cineplexes in Iowa, New Hampshire and other presidential battlegrounds. The two-hour film, which debuts May 12, casts Giuliani not as the hero of 9/11 - the role that won him acclaim as America's Mayor - but rather as the iron-fisted ruler of a city where children went hungry, the poor were forgotten and many city cops were racists.

In short, "Giuliani Time" seeks to do for Giuliani what Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" did for President Bush - namely, shine an unsparing light on the darker corners of his life and career, just as he starts to run for President. . .

Perhaps the most startling comments come from former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani's who emerges as one of his toughest critics. "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity," says Crew, now the Miami-Dade schools superintendent. "He was barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race."

Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton adds his two cents, saying that "the great failing" of Giuliani was his inability "to put himself in [the] shoes" of the city's vast immigrant population.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/408248p-345436c.html

EARLIER STORIES

THE LIST
Top ways to get stopped and frisked in NYC
according to 50 black and white cops
interviewed by the Village Voice

1. Sagging, baggy trousers
2. A bandanna or an XXL hooded sweat shirt
3. A baseball cap worn at any angle, exposed plaid boxer shorts, or expensive, unlaced high-top sneakers.

VILLAGE VOICE

GIULIANI'S PAL BERNARD KERIK

WIKPEDIA - Bernard Kerik was Police Commissioner of the City of New York (2000-2001). In December 2004, George W. Bush nominated Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security. A week later, Kerik withdrew his acceptance, explaining that he had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny; subsequently, numerous allegations surfaced which may have led to a difficult confirmation battle. . .

Kerik was declared bankrupt in March 1988, but today he is a multimillionaire, the result of a lucrative partnership with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and a profitable relationship with a stun-gun manufacturer. His relationship since 2002 with Taser International, a Scottsdale, Arizona, manufacturer of stun guns, has by far been the biggest source of his newfound wealth, earning him more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits through stock options he was granted and then sold, mostly in November 2004.

Kerik has been married three times. His present wife since November, 1998 is Syrian born Hala Matli (born 2/3/72). He has four children, his youngest, Celine Christina and Angelina Amber are both the God children of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. . .

Kerik worked from 1982 to 1984 as chief of investigations for the security office at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, one of the kingdom's premier hospitals, where members of the royal family are treated. Six members of the hospital security staff, including Kerik, were fired and deported after an investigation in 1984 by the Saudi secret police. . .

In May, 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kerik was appointed by the Bush Administration as the Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. . .

Following his departure from the New York City Police Department, he was employed by Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm formed by the former Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. . .

Shortly after withdrawal of the nomination, the press reported on several other incidents which might also have posed difficulties in gaining confirmation by the Senate. These include: questions regarding Kerik's sale of stock in Taser International shortly before the release of an Amnesty International report critical of the company's stun-gun product; a sexual harassment lawsuit; allegations of misuse of police personnel and property for personal benefit; connections with a construction company suspected of having ties to organized crime; and failure to comply with ethics rules on gifts.

On June 30, 2006, after an eighteen month investigation conducted by the Bronx District Attorney's Office, Kerik pled guilty to two ethics violations (unclassified misdemeanors) and was ordered to pay $221,000 in fines at the 10-minute hearing. Kerik acknowledged that he failed to document a personal loan on his annual New York City Conflict of Interest Report (a violation of the NYC Administrative Code) and accepting a gift from a New Jersey construction firm (or ones of their subsidiaries) attempting to do business with the city, (a violation of the NYC Charter. . . Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg immediately removed Kerik's name from the Manhattan Detention Complex, a New York jail that had been renamed in Kerik's honor on Dec 21, 2001 by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Subsequently on July 20, 2006, the two New Jersey contractors were indicted on perjury charges, accused of lying to the Bronx grand jury in the Kerik investigation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kerik

ROBERT SCHEER, NATION, 2004 - How revealing that the nomination of Bernard Kerik as Homeland Security chief should be derailed not by the former New York City police commissioner's alleged violations of conflict-of-interest laws, mob connections and post-9/11 security industry profiteering but rather by his rueful admission that he paid no taxes for his "illegal immigrant" baby-sitter. . .

Once his act went national, cracks in Kerik's facade started to look a lot worse. One of the most detailed exposes stressing Kerik's alleged ties to New York mobsters ran in the New York Daily News. Why didn't those in the administration who vetted Kerik for this job know any of this?

Giuliani told Time magazine after Kerik's withdrawal that although he knew there were black marks on Kerik's record, "everything seemed pretty normal, at least by Washington or New York standards." Talk about your moral relativism! Or family values. On Monday, the NY Daily News reported that Kerik had juggled two extramarital affairs while police commissioner.

Bottom line: A smart guy like Giuliani should have suspected something in 1998, when his wife and his deputy mayor attended Kerik's lavish wedding, which was dotted with mob-connected characters. This was two years before he appointed Kerik to head the New York City Police Department.

To be fair, it would be only later that the Daily News reported the wedding was paid for with money from folks with city contracts and mob connections, some of whom were later indicted. But anyone knowledgeable about Kerik should have known that he could not afford his sumptuous lifestyle, given his bankruptcy and, according to Newsweek magazine, a contempt citation for failing to pay a debt in a business dealing. . .

Why wouldn't Giuliani push his onetime chauffeur and now a senior vice president in his firm to be Homeland Security czar, overseeing twenty-two federal agencies with a combined budget of $37.7 billion? The war on terror is a mother lode to be mined by those who are connected. Come to think of it, Kerik shouldn't have been rejected by the Bushies. If they were honest, they would celebrate him as the prototypical GOP operator, playing the people for a profit.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041227/scheer1224

DEMOCRACY NOW, 2004 - Newsweek uncovered that an arrest warrant was issued for Kerik as recently as six years ago over a dispute involving unpaid bills. The 1998 warrant was issued as part of a series of lawsuits relating to unpaid bills on his condominium in New Jersey.

The New York Daily News reports that Kerik had illegally accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts while a public official. A Daily News probe revealed that for many years, one of Kerik's main benefactors was Lawrence Ray. Ray was later indicted on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle."

The Washington Post reports that nine employees of the hospital Kerik worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia accused him of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss.

Questions have also been raised about Kerik's misuse of police power while the head of the New York police department. In one example, he was fined for using the services of three police officers to help research his autobiography "The Lost Son." He was also accused of sending homicide police officers to question Fox News journalists after the book's publisher, Judith Regan, lost a mobile phone after an interview at the Fox studios. It turned out to have just been misplaced.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1457224

THE GIULIANI FILE
http://prorev.com/rudy.htm

GIULIANI AT LARGE

REUTERS The Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday it was investigating reports that a radio producer was beaten by New York police officers Saturday while broadcasting live on a melee that broke out after the funeral of an unarmed black man shot dead by police. WBAI-Pacifica Radio producer Errol Maitland, 49, was still in the coronary intensive care unit of a Brooklyn hospital Tuesday after being admitted Saturday complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath after the incident and his arrest, colleagues said. They said Maitland spent 48 hours shackled to a hospital bed under police guard until Monday.

GIULIANI'S GOLDEN OLDIES

UPI, APRIL 3, 1982: The third-ranking official of the Justice Department says he is convinced that there is "no political repression" in Haiti. Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani, testifying Thursday at a hearing of a class-action lawsuit seeking the release of 2,100 refugees in Government detention camps, said that repression in Haiti "simply does not exist now" and that refugees had nothing to fear from the Government of Jean-Claude Duvalier.

THE PHILOSOPHY
OF RUDOLPH GIULIANI

"Freedom is about authority." Mayor Giuliani, NY Times 3/17/94

"You don't have a right not to be identified". Giuliani- NY Times 12/17/98 "Giuliani Backs DNA Testing of Newborns for Identification"

"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal." - Giuliani appeal brief 's argument against street artists having First Amendment rights, Giuliani v Lederman et al and Giuliani v Bery et al, filed with the US Supreme Court 2/24/97.

"Civilization has been about trying to find the right place to put excrement." Giuliani quoted in NY Times, 10/13/99

"The whole school system should be blown up, and a new one put in its place. I feel like a prophet today." Giuliani-Daily News 4/23/99

"When they make the decision to shoot they have to shoot to kill". Mayor Giuliani on NYPD policy CBS News 9/2/99

"Let's say somebody is acquitted, and it's one of those acquittals in which the person was guilty, but there is just not quite enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt," the Mayor said. "That might be a situation in which the car would still be forfeited." - Giuliani, NY Times 2/23/99 "Police Seize Three Cars in Crackdown"

"Streets do not exist in civilized cities for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping." Giuliani - Daily News 11/20/99

"The comparisons to Adolph Hitler and fascism have to stop". -Giuliani. NY Times 3/28/99

"If teachers want to put up the Ten Commandments, they should be allowed to do that," Giuliani 2/10/2000].

[Robert Lederman, Artists' Response to Illegal State Tactics]

GIULIANI STRIKES AGAIN

Rudolph Giuliani has declared that homeless people have no right to sleep on the streets. Police Commissioner Howard Safir plans to arrest homeless persons who refuse shelter. "Streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there," Giuliani said during his weekly radio call-in show. "Bedrooms are for sleeping." He added that the right to sleep on the streets "doesn't exist anywhere. The founding fathers never put that in the Constitution."

In fact, reports the New York Times, the city's shelter system is already short of regular bed assignments for those seeking shelter for the first time. Last month, there was an average of 7,100 persons in NYC shelters each night. The night before Giuliani issued his latest order, 34 men applying for shelter had to wait much of the night on chairs until taken to another shelter. They were then awakened at dawn, returned to the original shelter, and told to apply for a bed again.

Robert Lederman, the NYC artist activist, is after Mayor Giuliani over his plan to close 400 more blocks to street vendors. Lederman says, "Giuliani weakened the Mafia only to turn the City over to the BIDs, undemocratic, unconstitutional pseudo-governments that rule their territories very much like the Mafia previously did, extracting protection money in the form of an assessed tax that now amounts to more than 70 million dollars per year. While they falsely claim that vendors are congesting streets, the real agenda for the BIDs is a kind of ethnic cleansing of what they consider to be 'their' streets but which are in fact, the public's streets. Once the present population of vendors are forced out of business, the BIDs will install their own vendors complete with the billions of dollars of corporate/BID advertising that is the real economic prize behind this battle."

ARTISTS' RESPONSE TO ILLEGAL STATE TACTICS
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html

NYC police commissioner Howard Safir, in a race to out-ugly the mayor, took the lead this week when he not only said that the shooting of an unarmed 16-year-old boy by a cop was an accident but gratuitously added, "You can to wonder why they're running, why they're out at 12:30 at night hanging out with a group of people with criminal records." The Rev. Al Sharpton noted that "young people are out late at night in the Hamptons and no one questions what they're doing at 12:30 at night. . . He had a right to be on that street, he had a right not to be shot, he had a right not to be presumed a criminal."

GIULIANI, JEWS, ART & FASCISM

Sam Smith

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has accused artist Hans Haacke of "trivializing the Holocaust" by creating analogies between Mayor Giuliani and Adolph Hitler. Said Foxman, the work "denigrates the memory of six million Jews and others who were killed by the Nazis."

Foxman's contribution to the Giuliani campaign illustrates the growing confusion over the nature of fascism, spurred in no small part by a form of historical revisionism that essentially reduces the Second World War to a matter of anti-Semitism. In some ways this revisionism is more dangerous than the claim that the Holocaust never happened, since the denials are safely on the fringe while the myth that fascism is inexorably linked to anti-Semitism is widely held.

One of the reasons we have such difficulty perceiving our current conditions is our aversion to this single word: fascism. While there is no hesitation by politicians to draw parallels with the Holocaust to justify whatever foreign adventure appeals to them, or for the media to make similar analogies at the drop of swastika on a wall, we seem only able to understand -- or even mention -- the climax of fascism rather than its genesis. Why this reluctance? Perhaps it is because we are much closer to the latter than to the former.

In any case, it is one of the most dangerous forms of political myopia in which to indulge. Italians, who invented the term fascism, also called it the estato corporativo: the corporatist state. Orwell rightly described fascism as being an extension of capitalism. It is an economy in which the government serves the interests of oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have the powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizen.

The link between business and fascism was clear to German corporatists. Auschwitz was not just a way to get rid of Jews, it was also a major source of cheap labor. As Richard Rubenstein points out in The Cunning of History, "I.G. Farben's decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves." I.G. Farben invested over a billion dollars in today's money at Auschwitz and, thanks to the endless supply of labor, adopted a policy of deliberately working the Jewish slaves to death. In such ways do economics and freedom become intertwined. Those who think it can't happen here should consider that four days before Mussolini became premier, he met with a group of industrialists and assured them that his aim "was to reestablish discipline within the factories and that no outlandish experiments .... would be carried out." In Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross notes that Mussolini also won "the friendship, support or qualified approval" of the American ambassador, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Lamont, many newspapers and magazine publishers, the majority of business journals, and quite a sprinkling of liberals, including some associated with both the Nation and The New Republic. "

Orwell understood fascism. One of the characteristics of his inner party, the ten percent who controlled the rest, was that there was no sexual or racial discrimination. He understood that ethnic eradication, while characteristic of nazism, was not required for fascism. Even earlier, Aldous Huxley set up a similar non-discriminatory dystopia in Brave New World.

In fact, one of the characteristics of the modern propaganda state is the use of ethnic and sexual iconography to cover its tracks. Thus Richard Nixon was slurring Jews in Oval Office conversations even as he set a new record in their high-level appointments. And W.J. Clinton was called our first black president by Toni Morrison even as the government was sending young black males to prison in unprecedented numbers.

There is something else about fascism that we miss: it requires a modern, technocratic society. John Ralston Saul has written:

"The Holocaust was the result of a perfectly rational argument -- given what reason had become -- that was self-justifying and hermetically sealed. There is, therefore, nothing surprising about the fact that the meeting called to decide on "the final solution" was a gathering mainly of senior ministerial representatives. Technocrats. Nor is it surprising that [the] Wansee Conference lasted only an hour -- one meeting among many for those present -- and turned entirely on the modalities for administering the solutions .... The massacre was indeed 'managed,' even 'well managed.' It had the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study "

Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, says that in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals what struck him was not their abnormality, but that they used a language that denied choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."

Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache -- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"

Yet for all the words we have devoted to the Holocaust, go into almost any bookstore and you'll find far more works on how to manage, manipulate and control others - and how to use "office talk" -- than you will on how to practice the skills of a free citizen.

The most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by "an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy." In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between the Nazis and their opponents, of which we are being now reminded with recent questions about the role of the Vatican and the Swiss during WWII. For example, a Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944 and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?"

Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to the 'final solution' as long as the Germans did most of the work." For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand "as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past century killed somewhere between 100 and 150 million people? In World War I alone the death toll was around ten million. All this, including the Holocaust, was driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power of institutions over the individual that the latter would become what Erich Fromm called homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." Becoming, in fact, a part of the machinery -- willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.

Thus, with Auschwitz-like efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But the bureaucratic internal logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a person anymore.

Milton Mayer, a Jewish journalist, who wrote a book about ordinary Nazis, They Thought They Were Free, concluded:

Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany ~ It was what most Germans wanted -- or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it. I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusions. I felt -- and feel -- that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.

Giuliani's politics contain proto-fascist elements. We should not hide from this fact. The discussion of Giuliani and fascism is also pertinent for local historical reasons. During the rise of Mussolini, more than a few New York City Italians supported the fascist dictator. Of course, this same community produced such progressives as Fiorello La Guardia and Vito Marcantonio. This is a sensitive subject, witness the change from the New York City Historical Society's frank depiction of the intracultural struggle in its exhibit on Italians in NY to a post-exhibit mealy-mouthed summary on its web site which reads: "The 1933 election of reform candidate Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York reflected the strength of Italian voters. Like any community, however, Italian-Americans are not monolithic in their political views. The rise of European Fascism created significant political divisions among New York's Italian population. Yet, when called upon, civilians organized behind the war effort, staging countless rallies, war bond drives, Red Cross efforts and youth enlistment campaigns."

The Italian-American right is not the only story shoved down the memory hole. How many know, for example, that 21% of the initial votes for Republican mayor Fiorello LaGuardia came from the left-wing American Labor Party? Where would Giuliani have fallen in this political divide? Hardly on the side of LaGuardia.

These are matters worth discussing frankly. Let Giuliani explain how he differs with the fascist idea, and not hide behind Abraham Foxman's coat tails. Let's debate the fascistic side of both the Clintons and Giuliani. Or are we now a nation that permits "fuck" on cable TV but not "fascism" in an art museum? If so, we are finished, whatever we call it.

GIULIANI AT LARGE

REUTERS The Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday it was investigating reports that a radio producer was beaten by New York police officers Saturday while broadcasting live on a melee that broke out after the funeral of an unarmed black man shot dead by police. WBAI-Pacifica Radio producer Errol Maitland, 49, was still in the coronary intensive care unit of a Brooklyn hospital Tuesday after being admitted Saturday complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath after the incident and his arrest, colleagues said. They said Maitland spent 48 hours shackled to a hospital bed under police guard until Monday.

GIULIANI'S GESTAPO got a bit more then they bargained for when they pulled over a car and subjected four blacks to punches and kicks and having one of their windows smashed out. The four -- all Ivy League graduates -- have filed a civil rights suit for unlawful detention and excessive force. The police officers were part of the notorious Street Crime Unit responsible for the Amadou Diallo killing.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI has done battle with the evil forces of the city again - in this case 31 citizens whom he had arrested during protests aimed at saving Esperanza garden, one of hundreds of community plots that Giuliani has targeted for development. Said one resister, "Even if they raze this garden, we'll take it back. We'll take two for every one they destroy. Giuliani, Fooliani! We're going to haunt Giuliani like the Furies from Greek mythology." Said Ariane Burgess: "It took 22 years to create this beautiful space, and they completely destroy it in a couple of hours."

THE REVIEW LIST Wrongful police stops by Giuliani's police

-- Number of New Yorkers stopped and frisked during one recent period: 40,000 -- Number charged with a crime: 9,500. -- Percent of black and latino young men in NYC who say they have been stopped and frisked at least once: 81% -- Number of arrests in NYC last year: 345,000 -- Number of crimes in NYC last year: 327,000 -- Number of arrests thrown out by prosecutors before going to court: 18,000 -- Number of cases dismissed in court: 140,000 or 40% of all criminal cases going to court. -- Number of false arrests every day in NYC: 50

[NY Daily News; Nat Hentoff, Village Voice]

GIULIANI VS. THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

There is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor work of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy. -- Judge Nina Gershon, US District Court

The usual knee-jerk reaction of some judges -- NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Number of times the NY ACLU has challenged Mayor Giuliani in court: 16 Number of cases it has won: 13 [WT]

NEW YORK LAW JOURNAL MAY 20, 1999: The Giuliani Administration won a sweeping court victory yesterday upholding its get-tough policy of confiscating the cars of motorists arrested for drunk driving, which started in February. Acting Justice Michael Stallman broadly affirmed the statutory and constitutional underpinnings of the new seizure policy offered by the City Corporation Counsel's Office, finding that no hearing -- pre-or post-seizure -- is required under state or federal due process principles as long as a criminal case is pending. Similarly, on one of the thorniest legal issues presented by the new policy, he concluded, the car seizures did not run afoul of the federal constitutional ban on "excessive fines." Justice Stallman found that all of the objections ~~ dissolved under the common-sense observation that "the automobile of a drunk driver is the quintessential instrumentality of a crime -- the sine qua non without which the crime could not be committed

Rudolph Giuliani, not content with merely bossing New Yorkers around, has now declared that because his city devotes so much space to cultural attractions for the benefit of non-New Yorkers it is the duty of others -- specifically Virginia -- to provide space for the city's trash. Virginia governor James Gilmore wrote back, "I am offended by your suggestion that New York's substantial cultural achievements, such as they are, obligate Virginia and other states to accept your garbage. Let me assure you that the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York's dumping ground."

FRIENDS OF THE LONELY & BORED

Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras. -- NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, 27 July 1999.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS: The Surveillance Camera Players are not a professional theater troupe, nor are they producers of or actors in television shows; they are just a bunch of average Joes and Josephines who appreciate how boring it must be for law enforcement officers to watch the video images constantly being displayed on the closed-circuit television surveillance systems that perpetually monitor our behavior and appearance all over [NYC]. The only time these officers have any fun watching these monitors is when something illegal is going on. But the crime rate is down and the subways (which are filled with surveillance cameras) are the safest they have been in 30 years. Thus, for untold numbers of police surveillants, there is less and less to watch -- less and less to watch out for -- every day. And so we have both an opportunity and a problem here. The opportunity is to get those law enforcement officials watching something on TV that isn't all sex and violence; and the problem is that a bored surveillant is an inattentive surveillant, and an inattentive surveillant is a waste of space, time and money.

Members of the SCP have banded together to present a specially-designed series of famous dramatic works of the modern period for the entertainment, amusement and moral edification of the surveilling members of the law enforcement community. Because nothing prevents or relieves boredom so much as surprise, the SCP aim to present each of their spectacles at a different time and place. Neither the location nor the exact time of any of the SCP's performances will be given in advance . . .

At 12:30 PM on Tuesday 29 February 2000, the Surveillance Camera Players (Susan and Bill) performed You Are Being Watched For Your Own Safety in front of surveillance cameras at City Hall in Manhattan . . . For a variety of reasons, the response to this performance was the warmest the SCP has ever received. A group of men and women belonging to a butchers' union cheered and sang "God Bless America" while the performance was going on, and then -- erasing any suspicion that they were only pretending to be supportive -- eagerly took, read and kept copies of the SCP's flyer, and even agreed to be interviewed after the performance was over! . . . Indeed, right before the SCP performed, a man, seeing the crowd and the police, yelled out, over and over again, and apropos of nothing at all really, "Fascist Giuliani"

THE SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS