Inside the Mind of Rudolph Giuliani

What makes Rudy Giuliani tick? Just about everyone in New York has a strong opinion on the man and his years in the mayor's office, so the room was packed when Rudy G. book authors Wayne Barrett and Andrew Kirtzman appeared at an August 23rd New York Press Club panel discussion at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, moderated by New York Post City Hall bureau chief David Seifman.

It takes a lot to stump City Hall pros (from left to right) David Seifman, Wayne Barrett and Andrew Kirtzman, but even they had no answer to one question which kept popping up: namely, what's next for Rudy G.?

The books by Barrett and Kirtzman were in a race to the bookstores throughout the year 2000. It was "a friendly rivalry" between the two pros, according to Kirtzman, but a deadly serious one between the publishers, according to Barrett, who says "they were really out to kill each other!" The always-changing story of Rudy G. didn't make things any easier as the two reporters raced to the finish line with their manuscripts. Kirtzman recalls watching the sun come up as he finally wrote the last page of his book and went to bed, only to be awakened a few hours later with the news that Giuliani was pulling out of the race for the Senate. While Barrett and Kirtzman did draw on some of the same sources, they produced two very different books. Barrett, a former booster of Giuliani, especially in the days when Giuliani was U.S. Attorney for the

Southern District of New York, took a step back and used an investigative microscope to look at the life of Giuliani. Hundreds of interviews and countless hours of research later, "Rudy! An Investigative Biography" delivers a view of the personal and professional factors that created Giuliani the man and Giuliani the politician, comparing the myth and the reality.

Kirtzman's "Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City" limits its scope to Rudy's legacy as mayor but is no less exhaustive in its investigative approach. "I was out to find out things that the world didn't know about his mayoralty, not about his life," explains Kirtzman. 

Both authors unearthed quite a few things that the public had never heard about Giuliani. Barrett made headlines with revelations about Giuliani's father having done time at Sing Sing prison, and other Giuliani relatives having ties to organized crime, connections that were never acknowledged as Giuliani became a rising star at the U.S. Justice Department, a U.S. Attorney, and eventually mayor of New York.

Kirtzman zeroed in on the city government, the way it works, and the way it doesn't, and came up with eye-openers including new information on patronage in the Giuliani administration so hot that even Barrett calls it "dynamite."

Even so, there are more than a few sizzlers that didn't make it to print. "I held it all to a 2-source standard," says Kirtzman, who acknowledges hearing "a lot" about former Giuliani press secretary Cristyne Lategano, stories that were left on the cutting room floor when they couldn't be independently confirmed. "You have to try to be responsible to the people whose reputations you are about to harm."

"He believes himself to be a man of destiny - he was a man on a path which could have led to the presidency...Where is his judgement? If he kept his pants on for a year, he could have been in the Senate."   - Wayne Barrett, Village Voice reporter and author of "Rudy! An Investigative Biography"

Barrett also refused to include stories that came from just one source, regardless of how juicy or very probable they might be. "One tale after another, this guy (a key source on Giuliani's father) was right...But it was information that could only be verified by New York City police records, so, without the documents to support the allegations, although I believed them to be true, I didn't use it," recalls Barrett.

Getting the facts from Giuliani himself was out of the question, with the mayor refusing to cooperate with either author.

"I tried valiantly to get Rudy Giuliani to cooperate with me," says Kirtzman, who logged some "six months of conversations with deputy mayors who assured me that this would happen...Finally, I asked the press secretary - I could have saved a lot of time! - she said no."

Kirtzman went on to interview about 250 people in and around the mayor's circle, many speaking to him "in out-of-the-way restaurants," but in the end, New York 1's political reporter "got what (he) wanted."

Is it harder, or easier, to write a book when its subject refuses to speak to you?

"It surely limits the book when the subject won't talk to you," admits Barrett, who at the same time notes that Giuliani is someone he feels he knows "very well," having talked to him many times over the years, although "much less" in the past five years.

"I was a City Hall reporter during the Dinkins administration and watched Dinkins fail time and time again...then I watched Giuliani take over, master the agenda - better than the permanent government of people who had been there for so long...It's a very compelling story for a journalist."   - Andrew Kirtzman, New York 1 News reporter and author of "Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City"

"I felt I understood the guy very well from the get-go," says Barrett. "We have the same Catholic school background, we chased the same bad guys in the 80s." The Village Voice veteran wasn't surprised when the mayor nixed a request for an interview. "They wouldn't even give me copies of press releases," says Barrett. "The mayor has an aversion to the truth, especially when it comes to an assessment of anything he's done." "I did a book about (Donald) Trump - he didn't talk to me

either, in fact, he had me arrested," Barrett continued, observing that in some ways, the mayor's stance made it easier to write the book. "What would it contribute to spend 50 hours (in an interview of Giuliani), hours of misinformation?"

If Barrett had been allowed to interview Giuliani directly, race is the subject he would have wanted to discuss.

"Race is a deep theme of my book," says Barrett. "I don't think he ignored the black community, I think he punished it...He knocked hundreds of people off food stamps when (the program) wasn't costing the city a nickel. The cruelty! He said he didn't want to encourage dependence."

Kirtzman also says race would be the focus if he had the opportunity to freely question the mayor. "When he took office, there was a very short window in which he felt inclined to cross the bridge," observes Kirtzman, remembering Giuliani's visit to a black church and his joint news conference with David Dinkins.

Rudy Giuliani, in the very early days of his administration, fields questions about "quality of life." Photo credit: Dee Richard

"That lasted about two weeks...some of it had to do with (the Reverend Al) Sharpton and reaction to the black mosque incident, but he had a sense he was being double-crossed by black leaders," says Kirtzman, who believes Giuliani's greatest flaw is "his distrust of other people." Kirtzman nonetheless theorizes that Giuliani may have been "the right mayor, at the right time. Look at the conditions when he came in...rampant disorder...the social contract breaking down...people urinating in the streets: there was a sense that New York City was out of control, a sense that New York City was really going down the drain." "Rudy Giuliani put his finger on the pulse of what New Yorkers were really thinking," says Kirtzman, pointing to Giuliani's use of the Quality of Life Crime theme. "With his take-no-prisoners attitude, he carried it through and helped to revive this city."

But is he a great mayor? "You can't ignore a large group of people and be a great mayor," is the assessment from Kirtzman, who says Giuliani "slipped into arrogance."

It may have been something even worse, according to Barrett, who paints a picture of Giuliani as at best, a sort of straw man, and at worst, a fake, whose many inconsistencies show "the fundamental hypocrisy of the man - the law means nothing to him."

Barrett takes strong exception to the often-mentioned claim that Giuliani is responsible for a drop in the city's crime rate and contends it began to drop before Giuliani took office. "Crime declined by 16 percent in the last three years of the Dinkins administration," says Barrett. "I don't think either mayor is responsible (for the crime rate going down), but if you do, shouldn't it be the guy who was in (at the time)?" "The mayor took credit for things he didn't do," argues Barrett, noting that Giuliani furthermore "fired (police commissioner Bill) Bratton for getting too much credit."

Barrett also slams Giuliani's leadership of the police, comparing the "dereliction of duty" by police officers who did little to protect women being harassed at the Puerto Rican parade this year to police standing by in Crown Heights during the Dinkins administration as a mob killed Yankel Rosenbaum.

"If he's not the great mayor who reduced the crime statistics, then who is he?" asks Barrett. "This gets at the cornerstone of his legacy. If he's a mayor for the white people and has a problem with the largest minority group in New York, then he can't be a great mayor." 

Barrett readily acknowledges that "there are certainly very positive things that Rudy has done in his life. But those are overwhelmed" by the negatives, in Barrett's view. 

The next to weigh in on the matter may be Rudy himself. Word is he's considering joining the crowd and writing his own book on the subject.

Rudy, according to Rudy. We'll stay tuned for that one.

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