Rudolph William Louis “Rudy” Giuliani III KBE (born May 28, 1948 in Brooklyn, New York) served as the Mayor of New York City from January 1, 1994 through December 31, 2001. He is currently Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Giuliani Partners LLC, which he founded in January 2002, and a name partner in the Houston-based law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.

He gained much attribution for strong leadership in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which garnered him admiration in New York, and elsewhere. As Mayor of New York City prior to the attacks of September 11, Giuliani’s legacy was fairly secure: first, NYC’s crime rate shrank remarkably during Giuliani’s tenure; second, by aggressively enforcing municipal ordinances against quality-of-life crimes such as double-parking, reckless roller-skating, and public spitting, he drastically reduced the thousand-and-one daily petty assaults on the average city dweller. All things considered, he restored order to a city that had been increasingly spinning out of control. However, his “tough-on-crime” policies have been alleged to have engendered several high-visibility scandals.

Giuliani is thought to be a potential presidential candidate in 2008. His name has consistently been near the top of early polls of potential Republican Party candidates for the 2008 election. Conservative commentator John Podhoretz, in his newly released book, “Can She Be Stopped?” about New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, names Giuliani as the best chance for the GOP to hang onto the White House in 2008.

Early Career

Giuliani was born in Brooklyn, New York to Harold Angelo Giuliani and Helen C. D’Avanzo, the children of Italian immigrants. He was raised in Garden City South on Long Island and attended Manhattan College before graduating from New York University School of Law magna cum laude in 1968. Upon graduation, he clerked for Judge Lloyd MacMahon, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.

In 1970, Giuliani joined the Office of the U.S. Attorney. In 1973, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and rose to serve as executive U.S. Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani was recruited to Washington D.C., where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General. His first high-profile prosecution was of Congressman Bert Podell, who was convicted of corruption. From 1977 to 1981, Giuliani practiced law at the Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler law firm.

In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General, placing him in the third-highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised all of the US Attorney Offices’ Federal law enforcement agencies, the Department of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service.

In 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It was in this position that he first gained national prominence by prosecuting numerous high-profile cases, including the successful prosecutions of Wall Street figures Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading.

Giuliani attracted some criticism for arranging very public arrests of people, then dropping charges for lack of evidence rather than going to trial. He also spearheaded the effort to jail drug dealers, combat organized crime, break the web of corruption in government, and prosecute white-collar criminals. He amassed a record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals.

It was in 1983 that Giuliani indicted Marc Rich on charges of tax evasion and making illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis. Rich fled the United States to avoid prosecution, and was controversially pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

Giuliani first ran for New York City Mayor in 1989. Democrat David Dinkins was elected by a margin of 47,080 votes in 1,899,845 votes cast, in the closest election in city history.

Mayoralty

The principal issues of the election of 1993 were crime and taxes. Giuliani also campaigned on what he perceived to be the unchecked expansion of the city’s budget and the lack of managerial competence of incumbent David Dinkins. While Dinkins had frequently and eloquently voiced his affection for New York City diversity while in office, his tenure bore witness to anti-Semitic rioting in Crown Heights, and an Al-Sharpton-led boycott of Korean businesses in Brooklyn, a juxtaposition his detractors could easily construe as well-meaning inefficacy.

Giuliani promised a return to social order, addressing day-to-day issues rather than past or imminent crises:

The “street tax” paid to drunk and drug-ridden panhandlers.

The squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light.

The trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers and open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets.

Giuliani’s message focused on an alleged breakdown of social and political order that Dinkins had been either unwilling or unable to effectively address: the rise in unemployment during an economic downturn (6.7% in 1989 to 11.1% in 1992), the rate of crime in NYC reaching an all-time peak, and the 1991 Crown Heights Riot, all were contrasted with Dinkins’s appeal to the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York ethnic diversity.

Giuliani won the election by a margin of 53,367 votes, with 49.25% of the electorate to the incumbents 46.42% share. He became the first Republican elected Mayor of New York City since John Lindsay won re-election in 1969.

Crime Control

In his first term as mayor, Giuliani, in conjunction with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, adopted an aggressive enforcement-deterrent strategy based on James Q. Wilson’s Broken Windows theory. This involved crackdowns on relatively minor offenses such as jaywalking, turnstile jumping, and aggressive “squeegeemen”, on the principle that this would send a message that order would be maintained, and that the city would be “cleaned up”. Critics alleged that Giuliani’s policies curtailed the civil liberties of innocent citizens.

Giuliani also directed the NYPD to aggressively pursue enterprises linked to organized crime, such as the Fulton Fish Market and the Javits Center on the West Side (Gambino crime family), in the breaking up of mob control of solid waste removal, the city was able to save city businesses over $600 million.

One of the first initiatives of Giuliani and Bratton was the institution of CompStat in 1994, a comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically and in terms of emerging criminal patterns, as well as charting officer performance by quantifying criminal apprehensions. CompStat was operationalized by the empowerment of precinct commanders, based on the assumption that local authorities could best institute crime reduction techniques specific to their experiential knowledge of their own localities. This system also enhanced the accountability of both the commanders and the officers themselves.

Media Management

Giuliani, after being elected, started a weekly call-in program on WABC radio. He avoided one-on-one interviews with the press, preferring to only speak to them at press conferences or on the steps of City Hall. Giuliani made frequent visits to The Late Show with David Letterman television show, sometimes appearing as a guest and sometimes participating in comedy segments. In one highly publicized appearance that took place shortly after his election, Giuliani filled a pothole in the street outside the Ed Sullivan theater.

In April 1999 Giuliani formed an exploratory committee for the U.S. Senate, seeking the Republican nomination to fill the seat vacated by the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His expected Democratic opponent was Hillary Rodham Clinton who later won the election. On May 19, 2000 before the primary, he withdrew because of prostate cancer.

Opposition to Brooklyn Museum Art Exhibit

In 1999 Giuliani threatened to cut off city funding for the Brooklyn Museum if the museum did not remove a number of works in an exhibit entitled “Sensational: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” One work in particular, The Holy Virgin Mary by Turner Prize winning-artist Chris Ofili, was targeted as being offensive to some in the Christian community in New York, leading the artist to comment that “This is all about control.”

In its defense, the museum filed a lawsuit, charging Giuliani with violating the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Religious groups such as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights supported the mayor’s actions, while it was condemned by groups such as the ACLU, objecting to the mayor’s censorship and interference with the first amendment rights of the museum. The museum’s lawsuit was successful; the mayor was ordered to resume funding, and the judge, Federal District Judge Nina Gershon, declared that [t]here is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy.

Role During 9/11 Attack

The defining episode in Giuliani’s career was his management of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He coordinated the response of various city departments while organizing the support of state and federal authorities for the World Trade Center site, for city-wide anti-terrorist measures, and for restoration of destroyed infrastructure. He made frequent appearances on radio and television to communicate critical information to the public authoritatively: for example, to indicate that tunnels would be closed as a precautionary measure, and that there was no reason to believe that the dispersion of chemical or biological weaponry into the air were a factor in the attack. He balanced the need to make hundreds of decisions directly and immediately, to delegate hundreds of others, and to visit the injured and console the families of the dead.

When Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal suggested that the attacks were an indication that the United States “should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause,” Giuliani met the assertion with defiance, declaring, “There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it… And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism. So I think not only are those statements wrong, they’re part of the problem.”

With that, New York City rejected the prince’s $10 million donation to disaster relief in the aftermath of the attack.

In the wake of the attacks, Giuliani was widely hailed for his decisive and undaunted leadership during the crisis. For this, he was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2001, and given an honorary knighthood by Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

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Giuliani in his public statements mirrored the emotions of New Yorkers at the time: shock, sadness, anger, resolution to rebuild, and the desire for justice to be done to those responsible. “Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” he said. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before…I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us.” Giuliani was widely praised for his strong leadership and close involvement with the rescue and recovery efforts.

Consulting

After leaving the mayor’s office, Giuliani built a security consulting business and gave speeches. On December 1, 2004 his consulting firm announced it purchased accounting firm Ernst & Young’s investment banking unit. The new investment bank will be known as Giuliani Capital Advisors LLC and will advise companies on acquisitions, restructuring, and other strategic issues.

2004

Giuliani, who campaigned on behalf of the re-election of George W. Bush in the 2004 election, was reportedly the top choice for Secretary of Homeland Security after the resignation of Tom Ridge. Giuliani turned down the offer and instead recommended his friend and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Kerik in his pre-announcement interviews with the White House failed to disclose facts in his past which were certain to disqualify him. After the formal announcement of Kerik’s nomination, information known for years to local reporters, but unreported, became widely known. The political fallout was damaging to the perception of competence in the White House vetting process and doubts as to the political judgment of Giuliani in recommending Kerik in the first place.

2005

On March 31, 2005, it was announced that Giuliani would join the firm of Bracewell & Patterson LLP (renamed Bracewell & Giuliani LLP) as a name partner and symbolic head of the expanding firm’s new New York office. Despite a busy schedule the former mayor is known to be highly active in the day to day business of the Texas-based law firm. While there was early speculation that the firm would merge with Giuliani Partners, this is a legal impossibility (As a matter of ethics, lawyers cannot share legal fees with non-lawyers). However, while the firm is completely independent of the consulting business, the two entities maintain a close strategic partnership.

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Biography Source: Wikipedia

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