Fourth in a series of occasional articles examining the 2008 candidates for president.
NEW YORK - Amid the chaos and death after the jets slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Mayor Rudy Giuliani made his famous trek northward through the choking dust of lower Manhattan, accompanied by two dozen top aides, in search of a place to set up a command center.
For many of those with Giuliani, the long march six years ago that transformed Giuliani into an iconic figure began years earlier. Most had worked on his political campaigns; one was an assistant when Giuliani was a gung-ho federal prosecutor, another a former law partner, and still another the grandson of a boyhood friend of Giuliani's father. At least seven would follow him to Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm he set up when he left City Hall.
As a group, they symbolized a guiding principle for Giuliani. "Loyalty is the vital issue," he says in his 2002 bestseller "Leadership," in which he describes his staff as "my second family."
A man who has spent most of his adulthood in public life, Giuliani, now 63, has retained a tight team of loyalists, some dating to his boyhood. Many were at his side on Sept. 11, 2001, when the terrorist attacks transformed him into the face of New York and its horror, humanity, grief, and resilience.
But loyalty has another side, and Giuliani has cast out some who crossed him or no longer served his interests.
Now, as he campaigns for president, Giuliani, more than any other candidate, is measured in part by the public drama of his intense personal, political, and professional relationships - the friendships, marriages, and alliances that he nurtured and sometimes discarded. The choices he made at critical moments in these relationships helped define him as a person and a leader.
Like a protagonist in one of his beloved operas, Giuliani has long been a commanding presence, both lionized and loathed.
His policies are widely credited with reducing crime and taxes, and cleaning up the city. But for many New Yorkers, he also left the imprint of an outsize personality that rankled as often as it soothed.
Giuliani's certitude, his relentless, even ferocious pursuit of goals, and hard-shell imperviousness to frequent criticism are marks of a man who at a young age saw himself as a leader.
As he says in his 2002 book: "All my life, I have been thinking about how to be a leader."
BE YOUR OWN MAN
The values that define Rudolph William Louis Giuliani were instilled in childhood. He was raised in Brooklyn's East Flatbush section, the only child of working-class parents, both children of Italian immigrants. They lived in a two-family rowhouse, where his father taught him to box, a useful skill for a diehard Yankees fan who lived near Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers.
Giuliani describes his father, Harold, as a tough, tenacious man who was a major influence on him, drilling basic precepts into his son: Be your own man, never steal or cheat, and it's better to be respected than loved. His mother, the former Helen D'Avanzo, instilled in him a love of books. She wanted to be a teacher, Giuliani says, but the Great Depression and the death of her father forced her to take up other work to support the family.
"Instead of a class to teach, she made me her special student," Giuliani says in his book.
Though he was an only child, Giuliani grew up amid an extended family of relatives. He often refers to the fact that four uncles were police officers and another was a firefighter, implanting in him a respect for those on the front lines of public safety and law enforcement.
But the family also had a dark side that for most of Giuliani's career remained secret. His father, who held a variety of jobs, had been imprisoned for armed robbery of a milkman in 1934, a decade before Rudy's birth, and had been a collector and enforcer for the bookmaking and loan-sharking business of another Giuliani uncle, who, along with some Giuliani cousins, was involved in organized crime.
They were among many revelations unearthed in 2000 by Village Voice writer Wayne Barrett in "Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani."
Interviewed after the book was published, Giuliani said: "Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected, and some of it I absolutely did not know." He did not elaborate but continues to express fondness and admiration for his father.
Giuliani told a television interviewer that his parents left Brooklyn, when he was 7, "to keep me away from some of the things that I guess my father was worried about." The family moved with his grandmother to a suburban home in Garden City South, on Long Island, and later to a larger house in North Bellmore.
As a boy, Giuliani attended Catholic grammar schools before commuting to Brooklyn for Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a rigorous, then all-male school for the sons of working- and middle-class Catholic families in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Long Island suburbs. There, Giuliani began lifelong friendships with two classmates, Alan J. Placa and Peter J. Powers. They shared Giuliani's "sense of morality and righteousness," Barrett's book says, and spent long hours with Giuliani discussing philosophy, religion, and politics.
Even as a teenager, Powers said in an interview, Giuliani exhibited a rare ability to command attention. "People would listen to him," Powers recalled.
When Giuliani started an opera club in high school, Powers joined, not because he liked opera but because his friend persuaded him.
"It was an early sign that he was able to persuade people to do something different," said Powers, whom Giuliani has called his best friend. "He has always had an enthusiasm for organizing things."
Giuliani, in his book, describes his own interest in opera as serendipitous. As a sophomore out to buy a rock 'n' roll record, Giuliani said, he was persuaded by a store clerk to get Verdi's "La Traviata," the tragic story of a courtesan's love affair. He became hooked.
The three friends went on to attend Manhattan College in the Bronx, which, like Bishop Loughlin, was run by the order of De La Salle Christian Brothers, a worldwide order with an educational mission. While students there, Giuliani and Placa dreamed of becoming professional philosophers, "renting ourselves out as rhetorical opponents by the hour."
From Manhattan College, Powers and Giuliani went on to New York University Law School, where Giuliani graduated magna cum laude in 1968. Placa chose a different path, going into the priesthood.
Before entering the seminary, Placa had dated one of Giuliani's second cousins, Regina Peruggi. Later, Giuliani began dating her himself. She had been part of his extended family; their parents had nearby summer vacation homes on Long Island when they were teenagers.
They soon married, with Placa serving as best man.
While Regina pursued a career in social work, Giuliani earned a coveted clerkship with Judge Lloyd F. MacMahon of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. McMahon was a demanding mentor whose letter to Giuliani's draft board won him an occupational deferment that spared him from being drafted during the Vietnam War. When the draft lottery was instituted the next year, Giuliani's birth date came up number 308 - too high to be drafted.
During this period, Giuliani's political views were evolving. In high school he had admired John F. Kennedy, and in college he worked on Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 Senate campaign in New York. In 1972 he voted Democrat, choosing George S. McGovern ("only because I knew he was going to lose," he says in his book) over Richard M. Nixon.
But he and the parties were changing, and he later switched to independent and then to Republican a month after Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, shortly before Giuliani was appointed to a key job in the administration.
'A DYNAMO'
Giuliani was drawn to become a prosecutor, at least in part, he has acknowledged, because of his father's criminal background.
In 1970 he joined the staff of the US attorney's office in Manhattan, an elite corps of hard-charging and ambitious lawyers who prosecuted high-profile cases involving organized crime and political corruption.
For 14 of the next 18 years, Giuliani was either a prosecutor or administrator in the US Department of Justice. He moved up the ranks quickly - chief of the district's narcotics unit at age 29, youngest US associate attorney general in Washington at 36, youngest US attorney for the southern district of New York at 39.
As associate attorney general, the number three post at the Justice Department under Reagan, he oversaw all 94 US attorney offices and federal law enforcement agencies. Ted Olson, who was an assistant attorney general at the time and later became solicitor general, said Giuliani "was a dynamo . . . [who] inspired great loyalty and teamwork and got things done."
When the US attorney's job in New York opened in early 1983, Giuliani jumped at the chance of a homecoming and taking command of the most prestigious group of prosecutors in the country.
He assembled a team, key members of which would become part of the nucleus of his political operation, among them Dennison "Denny" Young Jr., Randy M. Mastro, and Kenneth A. Caruso.
By the time he became US attorney, Giuliani had gotten divorced from Regina and was living in Washington with Donna Hanover, a television journalist he had met while on a business trip to Miami. They were quickly engaged and married the next year in a church ceremony made possible by an annulment granted by the Catholic Church of his first marriage on grounds that he and Regina had failed to obtain a dispensation that the church would have required because of their blood relationship. Giuliani has said he believed they were third cousins.
The annulment was secured with the help of Placa, who had become an official of the Long Island Diocese. It was one of many important roles that Placa would play at key moments in Giuliani's life. He was best man at Giuliani's first wedding, officiant at Giuliani's wedding to Hanover, and baptizer of the couple's two children. He also officiated at the funerals of Giuliani's parents.
TRANSITION TO POLITICS
Giuliani's prodigious work ethic and love of the spotlight made him the nation's best-known crimebuster. During the five and a half years he served as US attorney, his office brought one high-profile case after another - forcing Wall Street moneymen to do the "perp walk," decapitating the leadership of New York's five Mafia families, convicting politicians on the take and drug lords. It was during his successful prosecution of Stanley Friedman, the powerful Bronx Democratic boss, in a major 1986 municipal corruption case that Giuliani said he began thinking about running for mayor.
He boasted of 4,152 convictions, an 88 percent conviction rate.
It was the kind of record that could launch a political career.
When Giuliani, running on both the Republican and Liberal party lines, made his first run for mayor in 1989, he prevailed upon Powers, a tax lawyer and accountant who had no political experience, to manage his foundering campaign.
"I had more confidence in Peter than he had in himself," Giuliani says in his book. Giuliani finished strong but lost a tough, bitter fight to David N. Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president who had knocked off three-term incumbent Edward I. Koch in the Democratic primary. The margin was 47,000 votes of 1.9 million cast, or 2.5 percent.
Powers recalled that while in college he had run for student council president and lost, with Giuliani managing the campaign.
"I guess I got even in 1989," Powers joked.
After the 1989 race, Giuliani retreated to practice law at a New York firm and began plotting a rematch. In 1993, with Powers again managing his campaign, Giuliani prevailed in another rugged, close fight - the first Republican to win City Hall in 20 years in a city where Democrats outnumbered Republicans 5 to 1.
When he was sworn in as New York City's 107th mayor on Jan. 2, 1994, Giuliani set an ambitious agenda to end what he called in his inaugural address the era of fear and doubt in the city.
"As of this moment, the expressions of cynicism, New York is not governable, not manageable, not worth it . . . all of these are declared politically incorrect," he said.
Giuliani became an action figure, racing to the scene of emergencies and disasters. He worked long hours, slept little, demanded results from his managers, and took the political heat when his initiatives came under fire, which was often.
At the center of his team were old loyalists from the US attorney's office. Young served as counselor; Mastro as chief of staff; and a former Justice Department aide, Randy Levine, as labor commissioner. Powers was his top deputy mayor.
"It was never about doing the popular thing," Mastro said. "It was about doing the right thing."
Giuliani also brought to City Hall a mix of outsiders eager to shake up the bureaucracy. He was determined to bind his staff, both insiders and outsiders, into a loyal team.
His top staff gathered every morning at 8 to, in Giuliani's words, "get control of the day."
Joseph Lhota, an investment banker who rose through the ranks to become Giuliani's top deputy mayor, described it as "almost an enforced debating society."
"All the issues were put on the table, and people would fight it out," Lhota recalled. "The unique thing about it was, what we talked about in that room stayed in that room. Maybe that was about loyalty."
Giuliani, aides recall, was fanatical about unauthorized leaks to the news media, and his office maintained tight-fisted control of information - which began to cause problems for some of the high-profile outsiders.
Former Boston police commissioner William J. Bratton, whose love of the limelight rivaled the mayor's, became Giuliani's first police commissioner in 1994 and launched the successful assault on crime that is a cornerstone of Giuliani's presidential candidacy.
Bratton used CompStat, an innovative system of computerized statistics and mapping, to identify and locate patterns of criminal activity, then held local commanders accountable for attacking the problems. It was so successful that Giuliani adapted the management tool for other agencies.
Crime had begun to drop during the final years of the term of Giuliani's predecessor, Dinkins, who pushed for a local income tax surcharge to pay for 6,000 more police officers. Most were sworn in under Giuliani, who got credit for the hires.
Under Bratton, the drop in serious crimes accelerated, plunging 27 percent the first two years, according to the FBI Crime Index (Overall, crime fell 60 percent over Giuliani's eight years at City Hall - two and a half times the national drop of 24 percent.)
Local and national media lavished attention on Bratton. In 1996 he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. His popularity exceeded the mayor's in polls. By Bratton's account, that's when Giuliani began to turn on him.
Increasingly, Giuliani and his inner circle, which Bratton described as "cultlike," asserted more control over NYPD personnel and policy matters. Giuliani's aides raised ethical questions about Bratton's book contract and junkets with local business figures, and peddled unflattering stories to newspapers, Bratton says in his 1998 book, "Turnaround." Initiatives and appointments became bottled up in the mayor's office, he said.
Bratton became increasingly wary after witnessing what he described as Giuliani's staff hounding the schools chancellor, Ramon Cortines, from office.
"These were prosecutors; they were familiar with creating damage through investigation," he wrote of what he called "death by a thousand cuts" from Giuliani's aides. "I had seen them do it at the US attorney's office."
Bratton resigned after 27 months on the job.
"Some of the motivation to move me off the stage was to remove that competition for media and public credit," Bratton, now police chief in Los Angeles, said in an interview. They have had sporadic contact, with Giuliani initiating cordial meetings with Bratton during two visits to LA earlier this year.
"He and I will always be joined at the hip when it comes to crime reduction," Bratton said.
Giuliani, in an interview, said he didn't think he or his staff undermined Bratton, but he noted they "both had very, very strong styles" and that, ultimately, the mayor was responsible for the police department.
Nonetheless, some analysts believe that forcing out Bratton was a bad move. Fred Siegel, Giuliani's former campaign adviser and author of a flattering account of his mayoralty, called it "the single biggest mistake Giuliani ever made."
Bratton's successor as police commissioner, Howard Safir, faced firestorms of criticism when police shot to death two unarmed black men, a year apart, a result, critics said, of the aggressive police presence.
"Bratton would have handled the crises of the second term much better," Siegel said.
THE FLIP SIDE OF LOYALTY
Bratton was never personally close to Giuliani before the falling out, but Rudolph F. Crew, who succeeded Cortines as schools chancellor, became a friend before his ouster. With Giuliani's endorsement, he had been recruited from Tacoma, Wash., to improve New York's unwieldy 1.1-million pupil school system.
For three years, Giuliani and Crew shared drinks at the mayoral residence of Gracie Mansion, enjoyed what Giuliani calls the "exquisite vice" of smoking cigars at Giuliani's favorite cigar bar, and took in Yankee games in the Bronx.
The friendship unraveled when Giuliani, gearing up in 1999 to run for an open US Senate seat, reversed his longstanding opposition to school vouchers, embracing a pilot program to use public funds to pay tuition at private and religious schools. Giuliani's advisers convinced him the issue would play well with the state's large Catholic population, particularly upstate.
"The whole system should be blown up," Giuliani said of the New York public schools as he pushed for vouchers. Crew saw it as a double-cross and told a newspaper he was prepared to resign.
"It was predicated on nothing more than a shift of political winds," Crew, now superintendent of the Miami-Dade County public schools, said in an interview. "I was not willing to capitulate just because he had a change of heart. If you dared not to drink the Kool-Aid and you said 'no,' the consequence of that was you were . . . never to be seen or heard from again."
As with Bratton, damaging stories about Crew began to appear in the newspapers. Student test scores dipped, and with a Board of Education vote looming on his contract renewal, two reports appeared that were critical of the schools. Two days before Christmas in 1999, a one-vote majority of the board fired Crew with Giuliani's blessing. "Change is good," Giuliani said after the vote.
A SECOND TERM
Giuliani, who was reelected by a landslide in 1997, quarreled often with the news media during his second term as he wrestled with the city's enormous bureaucracy and enacted unprecedented cuts in taxes, welfare, and crime.
His endorsement of police "stop and frisk" policies, crackdowns on jaywalkers, and roustings of homeless people provoked outcries. The city's liberal establishment was in a perpetual state of outrage, as were leaders of the city's African-American community, nearly all of whom found the mayor's office closed to them.
Giuliani's administration battled repeatedly with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which, by its count, was involved in 34 First Amendment cases during Giuliani's tenure, prevailing in 26. Giuliani fought to limit artists, protesters, porn shops, labor demonstrations, street preachers, and sidewalk vendors. In one case, the court blocked him from banning advertisements on city buses that said New York magazine was "Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for."
Siegel, a history professor at The Cooper Union, is critical of Giuliani's second term.
"He doesn't adjust to success," he said. "Giuliani is not a man for all seasons. He's a man for crisis; a man for hard times."
LOWEST POINT
The low point came in early 2000. In March a police officer shot to death an unarmed black man named Patrick Dorismond after he was solicited to buy drugs in a sting operation. To back up his cops, Giuliani ordered the release of Dorismond's criminal record, mostly minor offenses, including a 13-year-old juvenile case that had been sealed by the court.
"The media would not want a picture presented of an altar boy, when in fact maybe it isn't an altar boy," Giuliani said. Criticism rained down on the mayor for attacking the dead man's reputation.
The following month, Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the disease that had killed his father 19 years earlier.
Two weeks later he told reporters that he was leaving his wife - without letting her know in advance that he was going to announce it. He also confirmed that he was involved with another woman, Judith Nathan, a divorced pharmaceutical sales manager with whom he had been appearing in public.
The marriage to Hanover had been rocky for several years after reports that Giuliani and a female aide were having an affair, which both denied.
Giuliani, who underwent radiation treatment for his cancer, then dropped out of the Senate race against Hillary Clinton. In October, he sued for divorce on grounds of "cruel and inhuman punishment." His wife later countersued, alleging "open and notorious adultery."
In 2001, with his marriage broken and relations with his children strained, Giuliani left Gracie Mansion and moved in with a friend and fund-raiser and his male partner.
He was living there on September 11, the day that began the resurrection of Giuliani's image.
AMERICA'S MAYOR
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Giuliani was having breakfast at a midtown hotel when he was informed that a plane had hit a tower at the World Trade Center.
When he and his security detail arrived at the burning complex, he was met by Bernard B. Kerik, his third police commissioner.
No figure is more closely identified with "America's Mayor" and 9/11 than Kerik, who was with Giuliani the entire day.
Kerik recalled Giuliani's cool-headedness amid the terror.
"We were walking on Church Street when Giuliani turns to [an aide] and says: 'I need a pool camera now. Get me as many reporters as you can,' " Kerik said in a recent interview. "I realized he needed to get a message to the American people that, as bad as it was, it would be OK. They would be looking for leadership and guidance in the crisis, and he was there."
Kerik exemplified Giuliani's loyalty credo. In 2000, Giuliani tapped his former campaign driver and bodyguard to lead the nation's largest police force. In his book, Giuliani calls Kerik "an unconventional choice" made on the basis of "chemistry and feel."
Like Giuliani, Kerik is a vivid personality with a compelling biography. Abandoned as a child - he said he later learned his mother was a prostitute who was murdered - Kerik was a highly decorated NYPD detective with a Rambo-like reputation before rocketing to the top of Giuliani's administration.
After the terrorist attacks, Kerik was among the two-dozen aides who scrambled away from the collapsing twin towers to reestablish the city government in a safe location. The group also included Young, Lhota, two other deputy mayors, and many department heads. Together they began the difficult, months-long work of coordinating security, traffic, and recovery from an attack that could have brought New York City to its knees.
INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY
By the time he left office at the end of 2001, Giuliani was an international celebrity. Time magazine had named him Person of the Year, and Queen Elizabeth had dubbed him an honorary knight. After his $6.8 million divorce settlement with Hanover in 2002, he married Nathan in 2003 in a civil ceremony at Gracie Mansion performed by his successor, Michael Bloomberg.
As mayor, his salary was $195,000. Almost overnight, he became fabulously rich, with a $3-million book deal, a $100,000 speechmaking fee, and a lucrative multifaceted consulting business, Giuliani Partners. As a celebrity rainmaker and lawyer, his income last year exceeded $17 million.
His consulting partners included seven of those who were with him on 9/11, and in 2002 Alan Placa, his boyhood pal, went to work at the firm.
Placa was suspended from the priesthood that year after allegations surfaced that he had sexually abused boys in the late 1970s. Later a grand jury report accused him of devising policies that protected pedophile priests.
Giuliani stuck by his friend. Asked about the allegations, Giuliani told the Globe: "I know Alan so well that I have great confidence in him."
Kerik too joined the firm as head of its security arm, but his relationship with Giuliani unraveled in late 2004, after President George W. Bush, at Giuliani's urging, nominated Kerik to be secretary of homeland security.
Kerik soon withdrew his name, maintaining he had failed to pay taxes for a former nanny. But a barrage of news stories revealed more sinister problems, among them allegations that Kerik had accepted $165,000 in home renovations from a company suspected of having mob ties that was seeking to do business with the city, and that Kerik had used for extramarital trysts an apartment set aside for use by Ground Zero cleanup officials.
Within days Kerik resigned from the Giuliani firm. Last year he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor ethics charges, with a $221,000 fine. He is now waiting to see if he will be indicted by a federal grand jury probing tax fraud and other charges stemming from the original investigation by the Bronx district attorney.
"There were things about Bernie's past that I didn't know," Giuliani told the Globe. "Had I known them I probably would have made a different decision, but the reality is, thank God, it worked out really well for the city that he was a very, very effective police commissioner."
Kerik, in an interview, declined to discuss his legal problems. His lawyer, Ken Breen, said Kerik rejected a plea offer from the feds earlier this year because he has paid his taxes and has done nothing wrong.
Of his relationship with Giuliani, who is godfather to two of his children, Kerik said they are not in communication.
"For the time being, it's in both of our interests to stay separate and apart," said Kerik, who has been doing security consulting for King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Are he and Giuliani still friends?
"I would imagine, yeah," Kerik said.
Nearly six years after he left office, Giuliani's mayoral legacy is still the subject of debate. Critics accuse him of cashing in on the 9/11 tragedy and of failures before and after the attacks. One of those errors, his critics allege, caused the famous march with his aides away from the collapsing towers that day to find a new command center site.
The city's costly high-tech emergency center, in a mid-size building in the World Trade complex, was abandoned when the jets hit the taller towers nearby. Giuliani had approved the WTC site, even though it had been the target in 1993 of terrorist bombers. He wanted the center within walking distance of City Hall, not a more secure Brooklyn location that had been recommended.
His admirers respond that he cut crime, welfare, and taxes, miraculously bringing New York City back from the brink.
"He punctured numerous liberal balloons," Siegel says.
His critics maintain that his heavy-handed style ignored minorities and civil liberties and tore the city's social fabric.
"He was a very Nixonian, divisive figure," says Mark Green, a liberal Democrat who served as the city's public advocate during the Giuliani years.
"You've got to balance both sides of him," says Peter F. Vallone Sr., a centrist Democrat who was speaker of the 51-member New York City Council during Giuliani's eight years as mayor. "You don't just have a raving lunatic. You also have a compassionate, intelligent administrator who brought together a city that at the time could not have survived after 9/11."
"You hate him or you love him," says Vallone, who wrangled with Giuliani on many issues but counts him as a friend.
"You love him or he hates you," counters Green.
"There are people who disagreed with some of the things I did," Giuliani said in an interview. "There are very few people who disagreed with the results, however."
"I took a city that was the crime capital of America, made it into the safest large city in America. I took a city where people were dispirited and turned it into a city where people have hope," Giuliani asserted.
"Did I make some mistakes? Of course. But what was the balance of mistakes and failures if I had that kind of transformation?"
