Driving Rudy

RUDY GIULIANI named Bernard Kerik as police commissioner of New York City, and he almost got Kerik appointed head of the US Department of Homeland Security. So Kerik's 16-count indictment on federal fraud and corruption charges has raised understandable doubts about Giuliani's judgment - particularly about whether the former mayor allowed personal loyalty to trump considerations of merit.

Giuliani, now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, will have to give better answers than he has so far about why he failed to look more closely into Kerik's background.

As mayor, Giuliani made Kerik, a detective who had been his driver, first the city's Correction Department head and then its police commissioner. After leaving office, Giuliani brought him into his consulting business and persuaded President Bush to appoint him chief of homeland security. That nomination imploded after it was revealed Kerik had not paid taxes for his family's nanny.

Other allegations of misconduct soon followed. Kerik has already pleaded guilty to state misdemeanor charges for accepting free renovations on his Bronx apartment from a company that was suspected of having ties to organized crime and was trying to get a license from the city. Giuliani acknowledges having been briefed about Kerik's involvement with the company before naming him police commissioner, but it is unclear what the mayor had learned.

If Kerik's ascent casts doubt on Giuliani's management style, so does the mayor's treatment of William Bratton, one of Kerik's predecessors as commissioner. Giuliani deserves credit for hiring Bratton, a former Boston police commissioner who introduced some of the policing innovations that helped to reduce crime rates in New York. But Giuliani ousted Bratton, one of the country's most competent police officials, after 27 months when he began to see the commissioner gaining credit for the improvement in the city's quality of life. "Some of the motivation to move me off the stage," Bratton told The Boston Globe's Brian Mooney recently, "was to remove that competition for media and public credit."

This tale of the two commissioners suggests not just that Giuliani was careless in examining the qualifications of a loyal protégé who did not deserve his trust, but also that the mayor deep-sixed a successful subordinate whose achievements cast him in the shadows. Before the first presidential caucuses and primaries, Giuliani has some explaining to do.