GIULIANI - THE KING OF MEAN! - NY Times
Freedom Fighter
By MICHAEL POWELL and RUSS BUETTNER
NY Times January 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/us/politics/22giuliani.html?ex=1201669200&en=7776bd8c9e76fa77&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch
without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an
instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.
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."
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more
than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged
toward ruthlessness and became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One
result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights
lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
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.
"There were constant loyalty tests: 'Will you shoot your brother?' " said
Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani.
"People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes."
Mr. Giuliani paid careful attention to the art of political payback. When
former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr.
Giuliani's foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the
ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall. Mr. Koch, who wrote a book titled
"Giuliani: Nasty Man," shrugs.
"David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn't cast our portraits onto a
bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily,"
Mr. Koch said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani retails his stories of childhood toughness, in standing up to
bullies who mocked his love of opera and bridled at his Yankee loyalties.
Years after leaving Manhattan College , he held a grudge against a man who
beat him in a class election. He urged his commissioners to walk out of City
Council hearings when questions turned hostile. But in his 2002 book
"Leadership," he said his instructions owed nothing to his temper.
"It wasn't my sensitivities I was worried about, but the tone of civility I
strived to establish throughout the city," he wrote. Mr. Giuliani declined
requests to be interviewed for this article.
He cowed many into silence. Silence ensured the flow of city money.
Andy Humm, a gay activist, worked for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which
pushed condom giveaways in public schools. When Mr. Giuliani supported a
parental opt-out, the institute's director counseled silence to avoid losing
city funds. "He said, 'We're going to say it's not good, but we're not going
to mention him,' " Mr. Humm said.
"We were muzzled, and it was a disgrace."
Picking His Fights
Mr. Giuliani says he prefers to brawl with imposing opponents. His father,
he wrote in "Leadership," would "always emphasize: never pick on someone
smaller than you. Never be a bully."
As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination,
challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd
council member. But the mayor's fist also fell on the less powerful. In
mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani's youth commissioner,
the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations
seemed in the offing.
At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani's press secretary dialed reporters and
served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins,
Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the
former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records
and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what
had happened to that money.
"My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the
corruption," Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.
None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no
politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr.
Murphy's professional life was wrecked.
"I was soiled merchandise - the taint just lingers," Mr. Murphy said in a
recent interview.
Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West
Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening
schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the
foundation - a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of
anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization - and the prospective
job disappeared.
"He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge," Mr. Murphy
said.
This theme repeats. Two private employers in New York City, neither of which
wanted to be identified because they feared retaliation should Mr. Giuliani
be elected president, said the mayor's office exerted pressure not to hire
former Dinkins officials. When Mr. Giuliani battled schools Chancellor Ramon
C. Cortines, he demanded that Mr. Cortines prove his loyalty by firing the
press spokesman, John Beckman.
Mr. Beckman's offense? He had worked in the Dinkins administration. "I found
it," Mr. Beckman said in an interview, "a really unfortunate example of how
to govern."
Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel's
office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and
taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students
served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.
In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times
criticizing Mr. Giuliani's record on police brutality. A week later, a city
official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school's clinical programs
and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the
official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship,
according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.
"It was ridiculously petty," Mr. Berger said.
N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after
that semester.
'Culture of Retaliation'
The Citizens Budget Commission has driven mayors of various ideological
stripes to distraction since it was founded in 1932. The business-backed
group bird-dogs the city's fiscal management with an unsparing eye. But its
analysts are fonts of creative thinking, and Mr. Giuliani asked Raymond
Horton, the group's president, to serve on his transition committee in 1993.
That comity was long gone by the autumn of 1997, when Mr. Giuliani faced
re-election. Ruth Messinger, the mayor's Democratic opponent, cited the
commission's work, and the mayor denounced the group, which had issued
critical reports on welfare reform, police inefficiency and the city budget.
So far, so typical for mayors and their relationship with the commission.
Mr. Koch once banned his officials from attending the group's annual
retreat. Another time, he attended and gave a speech excoriating the
commission.
But one of Mr. Giuliani's deputy mayors, Joseph Lhota, took an unprecedented
step. He called major securities firms that underwrite city bonds and
discouraged them from buying seats at the commission's annual fund-raising
dinner. Because Mr. Lhota played a key role in selecting the investment
firms that underwrote the bonds, his calls raised an ethical tempest.
Apologizing struck Mr. Giuliani as silly.
"We are sending exactly the right message," he said. "Their reports are
pretty useless; they are a dilettante organization."
Still, that dinner was a rousing success. "All mayors have thin skins, but
Rudy has the thinnest skin of all," Mr. Horton said.
Mr. Giuliani's war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic.
Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the
mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that
service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group's members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in
singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered
doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor
in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop
City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed
Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his
officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the
group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a
federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the
Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city's homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but
acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had
obtained that contract.
"That possibility could have happened," Mr. Oesterreich told a federal
judge.
The mayor's fingerprints could not be found on every decision. But his
enemies were widely known.
"The culture of retaliation was really quite remarkable," said Matthew D.
Brinckerhoff, the lawyer who represented Housing Works. "Up and down the
food chain, everyone knew what this guy demanded."
The Charter Fight
The mayor's wartime style of governance reached an exhaustion point in the
late 1990s. His poll numbers dipped, and the courts routinely ruled against
the city, upholding the New York Civil Liberties Union in 23 of its 27
free-speech challenges during Mr. Giuliani's mayoralty. After he left
office, the city agreed to pay $327,000 to a black police officer who was
fired because he had testified before the City Council about police
brutality toward blacks. The city also agreed to rescind the firing of the
caseworker who talked about a child's death.
In 1999, Mr. Giuliani explored a run for the United States Senate . If he
won that seat, he would leave the mayor's office a year early. The City
Charter dictated that Mark Green, the public advocate, would succeed him.
That prospect was intolerable to Mr. Giuliani. Few politicians crawled under
the mayor's skin as skillfully as Mr. Green. "Idiotic" and "inane" were some
of the kinder words that Mr. Giuliani sent winging toward the public
advocate, who delighted in verbally tweaking the mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani announced in June 1999 that a Charter Revision Commission,
stocked with his loyalists, would explore changing the line of mayoral
succession. Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Magazine that he might not
have initiated the charter review campaign if Mr. Green were not the public
advocate. Three former mayors declared themselves appalled; Mr. Koch fired
the loudest cannonade. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Mayor," he
said during a news conference.
Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., chairman of a Charter Revision Commission a
decade earlier, wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani warning that "targeting a
particular person" would "smack of personal politics and predilections.
"All this is not worthy of you, or our city," Mr. Schwarz wrote.
Mr. Mastro, who had left the administration, agreed to serve as the
commission chairman. He eventually announced that a proposal requiring a
special election within 60 days of a mayor's early departure would not take
effect until 2002, after both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Green had left office. A
civic group estimated that the commission spent more than a million dollars
of taxpayer money on commercials before a citywide referendum on the
proposal that was held in November 1999.
Voters defeated the measure, 76 percent to 24 percent. (In 2002, Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg advocated a similar charter revision that passed with
little controversy.)
Mr. Green had warned the mayor that rejection loomed.
"It was simple," Mr. Green said. "It was the mayor vindictively going after
an institutional critic for doing his job."
None of this left the mayor chastened. In March 2000, an undercover officer
killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police
mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released
Mr. Dorismond's juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to
remain sealed.
The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no "altar boy." Actually, he was. (Mr.
Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)
James Schillaci, the Bronx whistle-blower, recalled reading those comments
and shuddering at the memory. "The mayor tarred me up; you know what that
feels like?" he said. "I still have nightmares."
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Though sworn to uphold our Constitution, by the end of 2002 the courts had
found Giuliani in violation of the First Amendment TWENTY SEVEN TIMES. Mayor
David Dinkins, his predecessor in office, bravely stated that Giuliani is
" - a bully, mean-spirited, and he rules through fear and intimidation." New
York's previous mayor, Ed Koch, has said that Giuliani " - uses the levers
of power to punish." Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of
Giuliani, stated: "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's
humanity - - He was barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of
race." Giuliani's vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor,
Mayor Bloomberg: "You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani
administration], everybody, every story, everything was always couched in
terms of race" - quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair
magazine.
Among the many hypocrisies and arrogant abuses of power by "mayor morality"
was the assignment, at taxpayer expense, of several NYPD detectives as
round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS.
But the tyrant's own words say it best:
" - FREEDOM IS NOT A CONCEPT IN WHICH PEOPLE CAN DO ANYTHING
THEY WANT, BE ANYTHING THEY CAN BE. FREEDOM IS ABOUT AUTHORITY.
FREEDOM IS ABOUT THE WILLINGNESS OF EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING
TO CEDE TO LAWFUL AUTHORITY A GREAT DEAL OF DISCRETION ABOUT
WHAT YOU DO AND HOW YOU DO IT."
- Mayor Giuliani, quoted in the New York Times, March 17, 1994.
"State authority must provide for peace and order, and peace and order in
turn must conversely make possible the existence of state authority. Within
these two poles all life must now revolve...Ideas of 'freedom,' mostly of a
misunderstood nature, inject themselves into the state conceptions of these
circles." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Berlin, Monday, Aug. 20, 1934 -- Eighty-nine and nine-tenths percent of the
German voters endorsed in yesterday's plebiscite Chancellor Hitler's
assumption of greater power than has ever been possessed by any other ruler
in modern times. Nearly 10 per cent indicated their disapproval. The result
was expected.