Actor James Dean died at age 24 at the height of his stardom. He will forever live on as the youthful and handsome Rebel Without a Cause.
Had New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani dropped off the world stage after his role as “America’s Mayor” in 2001, he would still be a hero. Time Magazine made him “Person of the Year.” Queen Elizabeth made him an honorary knight. He was in demand everywhere as he traveled the world as a virtual head of state and international celebrity.
As the former mayor — he was term limited — he used his reputation as the former crime-busting United States attorney to return to the practice of law. He started a management and security consulting firm called Giuliani Partners. The money rolled in as did the expenses.
It would be another year before investigators discovered that failures of the Giuliani administration in terms of police emergency response equipment and coordination of radio channels between the fire and police department and the location of the emergency command center added to the confusion on 9/11. The failure of coordination cost the lives of at least 125 firefighters and untold others. But that was something that Giuliani never faced up to.
By 2002, he earned an estimated eight million dollars a year in speaking fees. In 2004 his spinoff firm, Giuliani Capital Advisors, made $84.7 million dollars. By 2007 he was personally worth an estimated 30 million dollars. He owned six homes, including a nine-room co-op on the Upper East Side, a house in the Hampton and 11 country club memberships.
Heading into the 2008 presidential campaign, Giuliani was ranked the most popular politician in the country and was 18 points ahead in the polls. By the 2008 Florida primaries he had spent 60 million dollars on his campaign while incurring a campaign debt and all he had to show for it was one delegate. His presidential campaign became a footnote in history. His upward spiral took a serious downturn.
Fast forward to 2022. In wake of his bromance with Donald Trump, the former mayor is on the verge of bankruptcy. Divorced from his third wife, he now hosts a podcast where he hawks collectible coins, health products and cigars, which is ironic since in his heyday he was spending $12,000 a month to satisfy his personal collection of stogies. He also sells video messages on Cameo for 400 dollars apiece, when he’s not dressed up in a rooster costume as he was last April when he appeared on “The Masked Singer.”
To complicate his finances, he faces a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for spreading falsehoods about their voting machines, which he claimed were invented in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez to steal elections — all of which was untrue. He also is the target of several investigations for interfering with the 2020 Presidential elections and is not entirely in the clear as to his involvement in the January 6th uprising.
His law license has been suspended in both New York State and the District of Columbia. Several of the universities that granted him honorary degrees have rescinded them.
All of this is set forth in Andrew Kirtzman’s biography, Giuliani — The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor (Simon and Shuster, New York 2022). The theme can be summed up in a single quote from Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank: Rudy Giuliani is a horrible human being.
As Kirtzman points out, being mayor of the Big Apple has been a dead-end job politically. No New York mayor has ever been elected president. The last New York Mayor to win higher office was John T. Hoffman, who, back in 1868, was elected governor. Mayors such as John Lindsey who ran for president in 1972, and most recently Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, all came to realize that it’s hard to get non-New Yorkers to vote for them.
Giuliani’s is a rags to riches to rags story of a scrappy kid from the Flatbush neighborhood of New York who started out as a Democrat and dreamed of being the first Italian-American president. The sad part is that with a few less personality flaws, bottles of Scotch and bad marriages, he could have done it.
Factors that contributed to his downfall were problems with alcohol abuse, womanizing, bouts with depression and hooking up with nefarious people whom he should never have trusted. And then there was the entourage of hangers-on who sucked at his financial tit until the money was gone. For a former prosecutor, it is amazing that Giuliani was not able to see through some of the scam artists that joined his inner circle.
While Giuliani stayed loyal to some people — to a fault — he had no qualms about kicking other loyal staffers to the curb. Some had literally picked him up when he had fallen in a drunken stupor and others spent time and effort helping him cover up his extramarital machinations.
His three marriages, the first to his second cousin, all ended in messy divorces. His second wife learned about the forthcoming divorce when she saw his press conference on TV. She ultimately had him kicked out of the marital home, which happened to be Gracie Mansion — the mayor’s official residence. This was while he was publicly wining and dining the next Mrs. Giuliani — a pattern that would follow in future relationships.
In what seems like a last-ditch effort for fame, Giuliani hitched his wagon to Donald Trump’s star in 2016. But like so many others, Giuliani didn’t realize that there is a one-way sign on Trump’s loyalty street. After all the work he did as the president’s personal lawyer, he, like other lawyers, was stiffed when Trump didn’t pay his bill. Since turnaround is fair play, in return Trump got a lot of bad advice from Rudy, which historians and legal scholars point to as contributing factors to Trump’s two impeachments.
Giuliani was one of the founding fathers of the “stop the steal movement” and did everything he could to attempt to turn around the election results in 2020.
Few people in the Black community, especially the families of Patrick Dorismund and Amadou Diallo, who were killed by New York police under Giuliani’s watch, feel any sorrow in his downfall. He attacked Dorismund’s criminal records, when the truth was that Dorismund was never convicted of anything more than a disorderly conduct. Diallo was killed in a hail of gunfire when officers fired 41 shots at the unarmed victim, which the mayor saw no problem with.
And let’s not forget that during Giuliani’s watch the stop-and-frisk policy he set up between January 1998 and March 1999 was pure and simple racial profiling. New York police frisked an astonishing 175,000 people, half of whom were Black. It was so bad that a Black man who worked for the mayor had to be given a special badge to show to the police since he had been stopped so many times for “appearing suspicious.”
In one of his moments of glory, Giuliani once threw a fit when the private jet he rented didn’t have cashmere blankets. I doubt that federal and state penal institutions have many such luxuries — hopefully, he’ll soon find out.
As my late friend Mansfield Frazier, who had experience in the criminal justice system, used to say, looks like old Rudy has gone from lobster bisque to bologna sandwiches. And frankly, based on Kirtzman’s accounts, it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she serves on the Board of the Ohio History Connection, is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission and past president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.
3 Responses to “BOOK REVIEW: “The Fall of Rudy Giuliani” by C. Ellen Connally”
Mel Maurer
A great review of a far from great or grace man. He’s a despicable person and prbably just had much better advisors when he was Mayor. I like the James Dean reference too.
Shirley saffold
Excellent article. Great and new information. I will get this book
Vincent Holland
I loved the review. He was never seen in a positive light by my friends in NYC. They often mentioned his lack of ethics, stop-and-frisk and his overt racism in his running of NYC.