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A crime buster, with his eye on the future
Giuliani plainly displayed rawness of his promise and drive as U.S. attorney
 Debbie Hodgson / ASSOCIATED PRESS U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani speaks to reporters at a news conference on Dec. 13, 1984. |
He was, to the popular eye, Eliot Ness reincarnated, an unsparing prosecutor for a crime-shadowed age. And when the United States attorney in Manhattan resigned in January 1989, he earned a tabloid salute:
“Good News for Bad Guys,” The Daily News proclaimed. “Crimebuster Giuliani Steps Down.”
Rudolph W. Giuliani waved his prosecutor’s scythe in the 1980s, and Wall Street barons, political bosses and Mafia dons seemed to fall in serried rows. He inspired cinematic characters, took ovations in restaurants and battled the Reagan administration officials who had appointed him.
Michael Dowd, a streetwise lawyer whose trial testimony about bribe-taking exposed the ethical rot afflicting New York politics, found shelter beneath Mr. Giuliani’s cloak. “No one was going to back him off,” Mr. Dowd said. “He was charismatic, relentless and endlessly loyal.”
There was, however, another side to the young prosecutor, a moralistic and carnivorously ambitious man who desired public office. Mr. Giuliani, who was 38 when he became United States attorney in 1983, threatened his targets with long prison sentences, and he infuriated judges with leaks of grand jury testimony to the press.
His agents handcuffed Wall Street arbitrageurs before prosecutors investigated them. Apology was weakness; skeptics were “jerks.”
Like a medieval crusader, he rarely flinched at hard tactics in pursuit of exalted goals.
In 1987, about 50 armed marshals raided and locked down the investment firm Princeton/Newport Partners. A federal appellate court overturned that racketeering conviction, but the firm remained shuttered. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said financier Jay Regan, a principal at Princeton/Newport. “It’s strange to be sacrificed on someone’s altar.”
There are three founding stones in the public career of Rudolph Giuliani: His performance during the terror attacks of 9/11; his image as a crime-fighting mayor of New York; and his nearly five-year tenure as United States attorney. It was in this earliest incarnation that Mr. Giuliani is most plainly seen in the rawness of his promise and drive.
Junkyard-dog toughness
He possessed a junkyard-dog toughness and moral clarity that left his deputies exhilarated. Action, he told them, was preferable to hesitation, and so they laid low the mob and pressed reform on Wall Street.
Mr. Giuliani called his lawyers “the Yankees,” and he had the swagger of a team manager. “If you had offered me one job in government, I would not have said mayor, I would not have said president, I would have said prosecutor,” Mr. Giuliani said in a recent interview. “It’s really an ideal job for an idealistic man; you never have to do the wrong thing.”
Mr. Giuliani armored himself with a tight band of lawyers and investigators, men known as the “Yes Rudys!” One of them tended to the prosecutor’s political future, another to the deputies, a third handled leaks to the press. They shared cigars and drinks in the evening.
The timing of his ascension was fortuitous. The F.B.I. had completed an investigation of the Mafia that would provide the grist for several major prosecutions. Federal prosecutors in Chicago passed along a tip about bribery in New York City that stood municipal government on its head. Federal investigators were already investigating Wall Street corruption.
And a decade earlier Congress had permitted the resumption of wiretaps and had passed an anti-racketeering law that allowed prosecutors to take aim at crime bosses and their wealth rather than fishing for flunkies.
Those who worked with Mr. Giuliani came away impressed by his intuitive grasp of his new arsenal.
“Rudy was a sponge, willing to sop up any idea, any new strategy,” said G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who crafted the anti-racketeering law as a consultant for the Senate Judiciary Committee. “He was very creative about wielding power.”
Mr. Giuliani married aggressiveness to moral absolutes, reflecting his steeping, he said, in the Catholic catechism. Asked about political corruption in 1987, he offered a wintry smile and said, “I don’t think there’s anybody much worse than a public official who sells his office, except maybe for a murderer.”
But many judges, lawyers and professors questioned Mr. Giuliani’s temperament and judgment, and their concerns linger. His pursuit of a political career while commanding the prosecutor’s stage stirred deep unease.
“We depend on prosecutors being capable of doubt and exercising discretion,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University and a former law school classmate of Mr. Giuliani’s. “You can’t push the throttle forward every time, and that’s what he did.”
Building a reputation
Mr. Giuliani was a husky young assistant federal prosecutor who was almost painfully hungry to make his mark in 1974. That was the year that he prosecuted United States Representative Bertram L. Podell of Brooklyn on conspiracy charges.
Mr. Giuliani described going at him like a boxer during the trial. “The next day, withering under continued cross-examination,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, “Leadership,” “he asked for a recess, during which his lawyer told us he had decided to plead guilty.”
The recollections of the congressman’s lawyers are less dramatic. They had already reached a tentative plea deal, they said, and were simply awaiting Justice Department sign-off when Mr. Giuliani began his cross-examination. The deal went through during a recess.
“With all due respect, Rudy is a good trial lawyer, but there was no awakening of the congressman’s spirit,” said James M. LaRossa, who represented Mr. Podell during the trial. “That story is out of whole cloth.”
Mr. Giuliani applied for a judgeship while in his early 30s, then catapulted, with the help of influential mentors, into the high reaches of Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. In 1983, he became the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, the most prestigious such posting in the nation.
The Justice Department “thought I was unhappy” about living and working in Washington, Mr. Giuliani recalled in the interview. “I said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. I could do things with that office that haven’t been done.’”
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Mr. Giuliani’s legal kingdom stretched from Manhattan to counties further north, and he insinuated himself into every corner of New York City. In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a poor neighborhood, Manhattan-based union leaders were shaking down East Brooklyn Churches, a group that was building affordable houses. The ministers appealed to the new prosecutor.
Mr. Giuliani began an investigation and obtained indictments.
“He made the unindicted machine hacks and graying Village progressives look like wax figures,” Michael Gecan, an organizer with the group, recalled in his book, “Going Public.”
Mr. Giuliani’s wife at the time, Donna Hanover, was a television anchor, and they cultivated reporters like gardeners tending flowers. He sat for interviews that ran for hours. Announcements were timed for the 6 o’clock news.
He became known in the press as “the New Untouchable,” the “priestly prosecutor.”
The coziness with the press chilled others. Nat Hentoff, a columnist for The Village Voice, said that Mr. Giuliani once listed for reporters the officials he was likely to indict. Wayne Barrett, author of “Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani,” said leaks came from those around Mr. Giuliani.
“Out of Rudy’s mouth? He was very careful,” Mr. Barrett said. “But people in his office would show you things that were completely illegal.”
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Walter Mack, chief of the office’s organized crime unit until Mr. Giuliani replaced him, watched camera crews troop by his office.
“There was a strong view that our office’s power was abused for political purposes,” said Mr. Mack, who, despite his history with Mr. Giuliani, supports his former boss’ presidential bid. “If you have in mind a career in politics, maybe self-abnegation has its limits.”
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