AP IMPACT: Giuliani Secretive As Mayor

[morr...@mailinator.com]

AP IMPACT: Giuliani Secretive As Mayor

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD - 1 day ago

When a mayor of New York leaves office, little goes out the door but
memories -- unless he's Rudy Giuliani. Government rules discourage the
city's most powerful officeholder from departing with more than token
gifts collected on the job.

Ed Koch, mayor from 1978 to 1989, recalls keeping some neckties. His
successor, David Dinkins, walked away with knickknacks from his desk,
including a crystal tennis ball and a collection of photographs
documenting his meetings with celebrities and business icons.

When Giuliani stepped down, he needed a warehouse.

Under an unprecedented agreement that didn't become public until after
he left office, Giuliani secreted out of City Hall the written,
photographic and electronic record of his eight years in office -- more
than 2,000 boxes.

Along with his own files, the trove included the official records of
Giuliani's deputy mayors, his chief of staff, his travel office and
Gracie Mansion -- the mayor's residence that became a legal battlefront
during his caustic divorce.

The mayor made famous -- and very wealthy -- in the aftermath of the
9/11 terrorist attacks has long described his City Hall as an open
book.

In a Republican presidential candidates' debate last week, Giuliani
asserted: "My government in New York City was so transparent that they
knew every single thing I did almost every time I did it. ... I can't
think of a public figure that's had a more transparent life than I've
had."

But the public record, as reviewed by The Associated Press, shows a
City Hall that had a reputation of resistance -- even hostility --
toward open government, the First Amendment and the public's access to
simple facts and figures.

"He ran a government as closed as he could make it," said attorney
Floyd Abrams, a widely recognized First Amendment authority who faced
off against city lawyers when Giuliani sought to shut the Brooklyn
Museum of Art because the mayor considered a painting sacrilegious.

Giuliani's decision to commandeer his historical records in late 2001,
as he prepared to leave office, was just one of many episodes during
his term, both in and out of the courtroom, that demonstrate his
efforts to control, withhold or massage information to advance his
agenda and hobble critics.

The litany of questions Giuliani has faced in recent weeks about
undisclosed business clients and furtive billing practices for police
security during trysts with then-girlfriend Judith Nathan are
reminiscent of the dozens of lawsuits filed by news organizations to
obtain public records, of the numerous state Freedom of Information
Law requests that nonprofits like the Coalition for the Homeless were
forced to file, of access to City Hall steps denied to protesters.

At times, the number of working water fountains in city parks was hard
to ascertain without making a formal request. Under Giuliani, it
became more difficult to determine the number of complaints filed
against the city's home care program, the number of firearms
discharged by police and the number of inspectors in the housing and
buildings departments. Even details about the city's recycling program
were hard to come by.

In a statement issued through the campaign, former Deputy Mayor Randy
Mastro said Giuliani "ran an open and transparent administration,"
made himself available to the press daily, frequently participated in
town hall meetings and released information about city services and
the budget on a regular basis.

"Indeed, there was probably no elected official in this country who
made himself as available to the press and public as Rudy Giuliani did
when he was mayor of New York City," Mastro said. "Nitpicking aside,
Rudy Giuliani ran a government based on the need for openness and
transparency. These are basic principles Rudy will govern by and
enforce from the top down as president of the United States."

Since 9/11, Giuliani has frequently cited security concerns as a
rationale for secrecy. But history shows that he operated a secretive
administration long before the jetliners knifed into the World Trade
Center towers.

"Mayor Giuliani was in many respects a good mayor, but in regard to
First Amendment-related matters, he is surely the worst in living
memory," Abrams said in an interview.

More than two dozen lawsuits were filed during Giuliani's mayoralty
accusing his administration of stifling free speech or blocking access
to public records. The city lost most of the lawsuits, including
fights against the state comptroller, the city public advocate and the
city's Independent Budget Office. Giuliani often blamed such battles
on political enemies.

In his time in office, determining how many police were on the beat
became more difficult to ascertain. Critics of the mayor were
sometimes denied use of public property to hold events.

Advocacy and oversight groups long accustomed to easily obtaining
information about city services and finances -- the Citizens Budget
Commission and the Women's City Club among them -- were required to
file freedom of information requests for documents, often resulting in
months of delays and added legal costs.

In a slap at Giuliani's City Hall, a judge in one such case wrote
bluntly, "The law provides for maximum access, not maximum
withholding."

Attorney Eve Burton, who represented the New York Daily News during
much of the Giuliani era, said the newspaper submitted more than 100
filings in six years related to information or access requests,
appeals or lawsuits involving the administration. In one case, she
said, the city refused to turn over the names of people who held gun
permits -- unquestionably public information -- until threatened with a
lawsuit.

"It is an unblemished record for secrecy," said Burton, now general
counsel at the Hearst Corp.

Giuliani depicted himself as a round-the-clock mayor, but his
whereabouts were often fiercely shielded by his staff, particularly in
the later years of his mayoralty when he was cheating on his wife with
Nathan, using decoy vehicles and surrounding himself with a Secret
Service-esque security team that traveled in a caravans of SUVs.

His personal life became a public riddle. In mid-2001, Giuliani fled
the mayor's residence and began bunking with friends, a gay couple --
an arrangement eventually disclosed by the Daily News.

In May 2001, in the midst of the mayor's divorce proceedings, one of
Giuliani's top lawyers seized from a city library a document with
blueprints to Gracie Mansion and blocked access to another copy. At
the time, the mayor and his wife were arguing in court over whether
Nathan should be barred from the official residence. Giuliani's office
said the blueprints could pose a danger in the wrong hands, but the
Police Department later ruled that the document was no security threat
and it was placed back in public circulation.

In the name of heightened security, Giuliani all but cut off public
access to the steps of City Hall, long a civic soapbox. New security
cameras scanned anyone entering or leaving the building and kept watch
on the grounds. Rules were eased somewhat after a judge found that the
city had unfairly restricted access.

When Village Voice reporter Tom Robbins sought expense records for a
city housing agency headed by the son of one of Giuliani's closest
political advisers, he was told they had been lost. Finally released
to the Voice more than a year later, after Giuliani left office, the
documents led to an investigation that ended with the guilty plea of
Russell Harding, who embezzled more than $400,000 in city funds to
finance a personal spending spree and download child pornography onto
his computer.

AIDS demonstrators were forced to hold a City Hall protest in a steel
pen, as police sharpshooters patrolled the roof, an NYPD helicopter
thumped overhead, and dozens of police kept watch on foot and
motorcycles. Giuliani called the extraordinary security justified.

Giuliani's spiriting away of his mayoral records was particularly
grating to many.

The traditional home of mayoral records dating to the mid-19th century
is New York's municipal archives, a public storehouse where documents
are sorted and indexed for the benefit of posterity.

But in a break from predecessors, and some argue the law, Giuliani in
his final days in office shipped more than 2,000 boxes of
correspondence, appointment books, audiotapes, e-mails, telephone
logs, briefing memos, private schedules and thousands of videotapes
and photos to a storage facility in Queens.

The materials were placed in the custody of a private, nonprofit group
allied with Giuliani, under an agreement between the city and the
Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs, which, at the time, had
no board and no permanent site.

After the arrangement became public, Giuliani promised that once the
records were placed in the hands of a private archivist, they would be
"more accessible rather than less." In fact, some records from prior
mayors remain uncataloged in boxes, in large part because no other
mayor has financed a private effort to catalog the materials.

But his assurances did little to ease the anxiety of historians and
open-government advocates who wondered if his goal was to reshape --
rather than protect -- history.

Or worse, erase it -- especially with a run for the presidency looming.

The records "were the property of the city. They were not his to
take," said Robert Freeman, one of the most widely respected advocates
for open government in the country, who heads New York State's
Committee on Open Government.

Over time, the records were microfilmed and returned to the city
archives. Giuliani aides have bristled at suggestions that documents
were withheld, scrubbed of embarrassing details or destroyed.

But "there will always be questions," Freeman added.

The administration of Giuliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, is
confident the records were returned. City archivists echo that
assessment but, when questioned, acknowledge the situation is less
than definitive.

When asked if everything that left City Hall with the mayor had been
returned, archives director Leonora Gidlund said, "That's not a
question I can answer. I wasn't physically there."

In 2003, New York City enacted a law forbidding sitting mayors from
hiring private firms to archive their papers.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Michael R. Blood covered Giuliani from 1996 to 2001.