Rudy's Rules

Forty years ago, Rudolph Giuliani declared his intention to be the first Italian Catholic president of the United States. If we have learned any lesson from his life since then, it is that it's dangerous to laugh at what he says. Now, just a year before the 2000 primary season, New York's high-riding mayor is a frequently mentioned candidate for the Republican nomination for the White House. It's easy to scoff. After all, he's pro-choice and favors gun control and homosexual rights—and he once married his second cousin. But Giuliani, whose ambition is as raw and unrelenting as the city he governs, has never bowed to conventional wisdom. How else could a Republican rise to power in a city where Democrats rule by a five-to-one margin? And who would have thought that anyone could make Times Square a destination for families looking for good, clean fun? Part of the pleasure of watching Giuliani in action is wondering where his inner turmoil will send him next. He is a man to watch—and while you do, remember this: He knows how you should behave, and his ambition has always been to make people behave. To New Yorkers, Giuliani is Mother Superior with a nightstick, famous for his snarling tirades against beggars, cabdrivers and critics of his policies. On the road, he is the seductive Rudy Lite, charming unchallenging audiences with raspy-voiced mobster imitations (The Godfather is his favorite film) and boasting about New York's economic revival, the 70 percent decline in murders and how The Lion King has replaced hookers and dope dealers as the main attraction on 42nd Street. The story of New York's renaissance has been suggested in headlines such as America's Safest City and Comeback City, and Giuliani is often hailed as a miracle worker. But New Yorkers see a city where, despite many improvements, life remains difficult for the poor and the middle class, with crumbling schools, filthy subways and sky-high rents. New Yorkers also see a mayor who believes that his way is the only way, who woos friends by making enemies, who once defined freedom as "the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it." In New York, lawful authority is otherwise known as Rudy's Rules. He is a man of many contradictions: a Republican who grew up worshiping the Kennedys, a scolding advocate of civility who delights in verbally bludgeoning foes, a self-professed reformer who pads the city's payroll with cronies and relatives, a self-proclaimed antipolitician who has been stoking political dreams since high school, an often dour suit who never looked happier than the night he dressed for a charity show as Marilyn Monroe, complete with blonde wig, tight dress and cigar. Giuliani has been remarkably consistent across his 54 years: smart, shrewd and ferociously devoted to his own rise. If that means betraying his political (continued on page 106)Rudolph Giuliani(continued from page 89) party, so be it, as he did when he endorsed New York Governor Mario Cuomo for reelection in 1994 over his own party's nominee, George Pataki. If that means trashing someone who does not agree with him, so much the better. When General Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug czar, questioned Giuliani's opposition to using methadone to treat heroin addicts, the mayor called the war hero "a disaster."

More than anything, Giuliani thrives on conflict, on the opportunity to lay an opponent flat. Enemies give him a purpose, a reason to stand apart, whether they were the booze-happy fraternity brothers he rebuked in college, or the mobsters he busted as a federal prosecutor, or the rhythms, traditions and pathologies of the city he has lorded over since 1994.

Giuliani is a ubiquitous presence in New York, bouncing from one press conference to the next, from fires to cop shootings to ribbon cuttings, while the city's four newspapers and seven TV stations inhale his every word. Hardly a news cycle passes without the mayor hailing himself for, say, the reduction in crime ("You don't have conditions of safety like that anywhere in America"), bureaucratic reform ("New York City has shrunk its government sooner and faster than anyplace in the country") or his administrative prowess ("I'm hoping to set a record for having performed more weddings as mayor of New York City than any other mayor").

At monthly town hall meetings, New Yorkers rail at him about everything from slow bus service to welfare cuts. "When students read history books 20 and 30 years from now, they're going to say I took a city of dependency and made it into a city of workers!" he shouts at a crowd in Brooklyn, sweat brimming beneath his comb-over.

When he's booed, Giuliani lectures audiences for their poor manners. Such outbursts set a "terrible example" for children, he says, his tremulous voice touched by a faint lisp. Touchy? He ordered city buses to stop displaying a playful New York magazine ad that read: "Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for."

Giuliani is so intent on being the only voice of his administration that he bars aides from speaking publicly without his permission. Nor are they encouraged to question his directives, even privately, even for no other purpose than to prepare him, say, for a press conference.

In 1994 the newly elected Giuliani appointed William Bratton as police commissioner. Crime had already begun to decline in New York, but the improvement accelerated and became big news. Bratton enjoyed good press, in part because he often dropped in at Elaine's, the media watering hole, for a late supper. Soon enough, newspapers reported that the two men were feuding and that Giuliani was angry that Bratton was getting credit for the more cheerful crime statistics. In January 1996 Bratton appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a development that reportedly enraged the jealous Giuliani. A few months later Bratton resigned. "It's a big stage, but he doesn't want anyone else on it," Bratton says. "One person is coming out for the curtain call, and that's Rudy."

When he was mayor, Ed Koch gleefully reduced foes to pulp, but the city's reputation for raucous debate thrived. Koch praises the mayor for slashing crime, but he says Giuliani's venom keeps him from greatness. "He can't help himself," Koch says. "Character is fate, and Rudy's character requires that he go for the jugular and destroy his critics."

Giuliani seems to enjoy his role as Goliath. He slapped taxi drivers with new rules and stiffer penalties for reckless driving, erected pedestrian barricades in midtown to prevent jaywalking (a New York rite of passage) and rewrote zoning laws to push topless bars and X-rated video stores into desolate neighborhoods. At one point or another, he seems to have enraged every part of the city—except the very rich and powerful.

Corporations such as Condé Nast and Reuters, for example, were tempted with millions in tax benefits to not leave town. When George Steinbrenner threatened to pull the Yankees out of the Bronx, Giuliani offered to build a new stadium in Manhattan, then fought to quash a referendum in which New Yorkers would vote their preference on where the team would play.

"I don't see him taking on anyone but weak people," said writer Jimmy Breslin. "He takes on small things and says they're big things. Has he ever had a mean word for Steinbrenner? No! He's a mean little man."

Giuliani relied on his wife, Donna Hanover, a local TV news anchor, to swear to his humanity. But Hanover's testimonials ended during his first term amid reports he was having an affair with Cristyne Lategano, his 32-year-old press secretary. For months the mayor's sex life was the subject of gossip within New York political circles, but did not become public until the 1997 campaign, when an article in Vanity Fair reported that his relationship with Lategano was damaging his marriage.

Giuliani denied the story and insisted that his marriage was his own business. Voters apparently agreed, and Giuliani's private life remains a puzzle that would no doubt prompt questions in a national campaign.

These days, Giuliani attempts to soften his image by talking about his golf game, gushing over the Yankees and reading children's books to kids (he even had a kid's book ghostwritten under his name).

Inevitably, the scowl returns. Last summer, New Yorkers learned that Giuliani was planning to build a $15 million emergency shelter—Rudy's Bunker, the newspapers called it—that would feature bombproof walls, a hotline to the White House and a foldout couch for the mayor. One critic said the bunker represented Giuliani's hopes, not his fears. "Nuts," Koch called him, while a newspaper cartoonist drew Eva Braun flashing Rudy a sieg heil.

He makes no apologies. "Everything good has come out of turmoil," Giuliani likes to say. "I'm the mayor of a city, not, like, a feel-good society."

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One morning last July, a senior advisor to Giuliani saw the mayor eyeing him from a ballroom stage where he was about to make a speech. "Get away, he's looking at us," the aide mumbled to this writer. "If he sees me talking to you, he'll fire me."

Giuliani, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has always been guarded about discussing himself. He demands the same secrecy from his inner circle, a white male–dominated band of former prosecutors, campaign aides and childhood friends. Even those who wanted to praise him declined to talk on the record for fear of incurring his wrath.

Giuliani inherited his swagger and bombast from his father, Harold, a Brooklyn tavern owner who was not afraid to use a baseball bat to keep rowdy customers in line.

In Dodgers-crazed Brooklyn, where the family lived before moving to Long Island, Harold raved about the Yankees and enjoyed dressing young Rudy (continued on page 150)Rudolph Giuliani(continued from page 106) in a miniature Yankees uniform and sending him outside where he was taunted by neighborhood kids. "To my father, it was a joke," Giuliani has recalled. "But to me it was like being a martyr. 'I'm not going to give up my religion.'"

Rudy's zealousness flourished during the late Fifties at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn.

While his classmates bopped to Elvis, Giuliani started an opera club. Friends asked their parents for cars at graduation; Giuliani requested an oversized desk and a high-backed leather chair. He spent hours debating philosophy, religion and politics.

Giuliani graduated from high school mulling the priesthood, an interest he dropped several years later because he could not fathom a life of celibacy. His classmates knew where he was headed. In its senior poll, Bishop Loughlin's class of 1961 elected Giuliani class politician.

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At Manhattan College he majored in political philosophy and sparkled in his government classes.

He lost a close election for junior class president to Jim Farrell and displayed the fury for which he is now known, and which may be a burden if and when he encounters the daily indignities of a national campaign. "His eyes looked like the fires of hell," says classmate Bernie McElhone, who saw Giuliani after the results were announced. "He was enormously, gargantuanly pissed off."

Apparently, Giuliani never got over it. Farrell, a lawyer at Colgate Palmolive, has run into Giuliani over the years. At a 1994 St. Patrick's Day luncheon just after Rudy became mayor, Farrell was urged to greet the mayor at the dais. "I reached up my hand," Farrell recalls, "and Giuliani looked at me like, 'Who the fuck are you?'" Then, Farrell says, the mayor turned away.

If defeat provoked Giuliani's rage in college, it also shaped his ability to rebound. In his freshman year, Manhattan's elite fraternity, Alpha Sigma Beta, rejected him after he complained about hazing rituals that required pledges to waddle like ducks across campus. Giuliani joined Phi Rho Pi, Manhattan's least popular fraternity, stocked it with friends and transformed it into his own campus power base—and an arena for conflict.

Phi Rho Pi was split between those who favored wild drinking parties and those who preferred sedate affairs. Tigers and Pussies, they called themselves. "Rudy was one of the Pussies," says Sal Scarpato, a retired California businessman who, as a Tiger, lost a race for frat president to Giuliani.

At frat meetings, Giuliani enraged the Tigers by citing Robert's Rules of Order to end debates. During one angry exchange, Scarpato hurled a soda bottle at Rudy's head (he missed) and they ended up slugging each other in a nearby park. Another time, Scarpato made a lewd comment about Kathy Livermore, Giuliani's girlfriend. "We had to drag Rudy down because he was going to kill Sal," says Tony Mauro, a frat member.

Giuliani met Kathy one college summer while working at a bank (he had previously sold vacuum cleaners). She was blonde, blue-eyed and leggy—a dead ringer for Julie Christie—and they dated for two years. Kathy often listened while Rudy practiced political speeches from behind his oversized desk at home. While friends considered careers in law and medicine, Giuliani, according to Livermore, liked to say, "Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian Catholic president of the United States." She and friends laughed because Giuliani was so earnest. "We'd joke about it, 'Oh there's Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian Catholic president of the United States.' He said it enough that it was part of him. He didn't say things lightly."

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In 1965, Giuliani enrolled at New York University Law School and immersed himself in his books and made Law Review.

"He was antiwar, he defended Stokely Carmichael and he hated Nixon," says Republican Congressman Peter King of New York, who was an intern with Giuliani at Richard Nixon's Wall Street law firm in 1967. "I once told him Goldwater could have beaten JFK, and he burst out, 'What the hell are you talking about?' When he argued, there was no steady increase in the hostility. But suddenly, he'd be yelling and his eyes would pop out."

In 1968, Giuliani married Regina Peruggi, his second cousin. They had been close since childhood. "It seemed a little strange to me. I mean, they were related," says his aunt, Anna Davanzo.

Their childless marriage was often strained, Giuliani has said, because of his devotion to his work. After a long separation, they were divorced in 1982. That same year he met Donna Hanover and, after a six-week courtship, Giuliani proposed to her at Walt Disney World. Their wish for a Catholic wedding required that he get his first marriage annulled—an often difficult process. Giuliani succeeded by citing a technicality. He claimed he had failed to obtain the proper church dispensation required when second cousins marry and, as a result, the 14-year marriage had never been valid. "I was under the impression that we were third cousins because I had never calculated the lines of consanguinity," is how Giuliani explained it to The New York Times in 1997. He and Hanover were married in 1984.

While Peruggi refuses to talk about the mayor, her brother and friends have said Giuliani always knew he and Regina were second cousins but feigned ignorance to get the annulment. In any case, his apparent oversight seems at odds with his eye for detail and zeal for following the rules.

After graduating from NYU in 1968, he joined the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's Southern District. He became a star with a reputation for aggressiveness. He busted veteran Brooklyn Congressman Bertram Podell for conspiracy and conducted such a rattling cross-examination that Podell accidentally poked out a lens of his glasses. After a recess, Podell pleaded guilty.

After voting for George McGovern in 1972, he became an Independent, then registered as a Republican in 1980. He left the Democrats, he has explained, not to ingratiate himself with the GOP but because he believed that the Democrats were moving too far to the left. In 1981 Giuliani was appointed number three man in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department.

He captured national attention in 1982 when he argued the administration's case for denying political asylum to thousands of Haitians fleeing Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship. "The situation of political repression does not exist, at least in general, in Haiti," he said in a statement widely criticized by human rights activists.

At the height of his power in Washington, he announced that he wanted to run the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's Southern District. The move was a step down (even his mother objected), but Giuliani said he missed being a prosecutor. He also knew that returning to Gotham was a first step toward entering politics.

Giuliani's tenure as U.S. Attorney in the mid-Eighties was marked by unprecedented successes and amazing misfires. RUDY became a fixture in tabloid headlines, as Giuliani busted Mafia bosses and Wall Street traders, tax cheats and politicians. "The way you end corruption," he told a reporter, "is to scare the daylights out of people."

One of Giuliani's most publicly cruel moments came when he ordered three Wall Street traders to be handcuffed at their offices on insider trading charges in 1987. The cases against two of the men were eventually dropped; the third pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. "It was completely unjustifiable," says Stanley Arkin, a lawyer for one of the traders. "Generally, you arrest people that way if you're afraid they're violent or they're going to flee. There was no law enforcement reason other than to make a display of his prosecutorial power."

By then, Giuliani was poised for his next step. He ran for mayor in 1989, narrowly losing to David Dinkins, who cast him as a ruthless prosecutor. In his second mayoral race in 1993, Giuliani reassured voters that he was a tough guy, but he was also a husband, a father and a Yankees fan. He won by fewer than 40,000 votes.

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The darker shades of Giuliani's persona rarely reach people who live west of the Hudson, where the mayor plans more forays to establish a benign image as New York's good cop, one of those likable, rough-edged New Yorkers from Law and Order and NYPD Blue. Sipowicz without the gun. Tough but tender.

Giuliani's 13 appearances on David Letterman since 1993 have included his unveiling of "We can kick your city's ass" as New York City's slogan. National audiences also saw the mayor on Seinfeld and Cosby, and saw him dress up as an old Italian woman on Saturday Night Live.

"There's a great curiosity about Rudy Giuliani," says Ed Rollins, now a GOP consultant who believes Giuliani's best next step is to run for Pat Moynihan's senate seat in 2000. "With a couple of years in Washington, there's no limit to how far he could go."

For all of Giuliani's successes, many New Yorkers recoil at the thought of his seeking national office. In one poll, 53 percent said they would not vote for him for president. Former Giuliani aides share the dread. "Do I want him near the button?" asks a former staffer. He bursts into laughter. "Fuck no. Reality is reality. The guy likes to fight too much."

Can he remain a tirade addict and still not scare people? Consider the case of James Schillaci, a Bronx limousine driver who is evidence that sometimes the mayor tramples even his most ardent supporters.

Schillaci provoked the mayor's ire by videotaping police officers writing bogus traffic tickets near his home. On the day in August 1997 when his claims were published in the Daily News, two cops arrived unannounced at Schillaci's apartment to arrest him for not paying 13-year-old traffic tickets. Schillaci was handcuffed and driven to court, where a judge quickly threw out the case.

Giuliani's aides then claimed that Schillaci was a convicted sodomist, only to amend their statements the next day because he had only been accused of sodomy. They also released his arrest record, which included 11 convictions (the most recent was 15 years old).

Of course, not one iota of Schillaci's past—not even the fact that he once was commended for helping catch two arsonists—was considered relevant to his well-documented case against the police. But Giuliani was more than willing to tar Schillaci to score points with the cops. "Just because you call yourself a whistle-blower doesn't mean you are," the mayor said. "I can see behind things because I have a respect for our police officers."

So did Schillaci, which is why he once voted for Giuliani. He also didn't want David Dinkins to become mayor. "Why? Because he's black. I know it doesn't sound good, but that is how I felt." Schillaci's clash with Giuliani may have produced at least one positive result. "Rudy cured me of my prejudice," Schillaci says. "Now I can see voting for a black guy because I know I can be screwed by a white guy."

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On a warm night last summer, Giuliani traveled to Staten Island, the city's most conservative borough, where some 200 residents greeted him with a standing ovation.

Mitchell Diggs, 30, business manager for the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, was among the few blacks in the audience. With crime down, Diggs asked Giuliani how the city would help future generations avoid violence. "What," Diggs asked, "are we going to do for those gentlemen to give them jobs?"

In Mitchell Diggs, the mayor found his chance to be himself.

"Just in asking the question, you're missing the point," Giuliani said. "The City of New York does not bring up children! Parents do!" As the crowd applauded, the mayor raised the subject of child abuse, an issue seemingly unrelated to Diggs' query. "The reason a child is abused," Giuliani exclaimed, jabbing his forefinger in Diggs' direction,"is not because of a social worker, it's not because of a teacher and it's not because of a police officer. It's because some adult"—the mayor was shouting now—"some mother, some father or some boyfriend of the mother who shouldn't be living in the apartment in the first place beats the hell out of the kid!"

By lecture's end, the crowd was roaring. Diggs might also have applauded, for he too believes in the concept of personal responsibility. But he was trying to understand why Giuliani was shouting at him.

The mayor, it seems, knows no other way—until, that is, he leaves New York for the national stage and transforms himself into Rudy Lite. It remains to be seen what America west of the Hudson will make of the two personalities.

His wife's testimonials ended amid reports of an affair with his 32-year-old press secretary.

"We had to drag Rudy down because he was going to kill Sal," says Tony Mauro, a frat member