Our full Giuliani file is here
Progressive Review - 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.".
Giuliani 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 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.
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.
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