One of Rudy Giuliani’s favorite lines is that his top rivals — from McCain to Clinton to Obama — lack executive experience, and “never ran a business.” That stands in contrast to the former mayor, of course, who created a lucrative consulting business after grudgingly leaving office in 2001, called “Giuliani Partners,” which has helped to make Giuliani a wealthy man over the last few years.
But this successful consulting venture is one of the least-scrutinized aspects of the former mayor’s record. Giuliani rarely mentions the business (or his work within the business) on the stump or in the debates, and there’s been very little examination of Giuliani’s post-2001 career in the media.
The Chicago Tribune’s Andrew Zajac and Evan Osnos, to their credit, dig into Giuliani Partners today.
Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort.
Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government.
Giuliani’s participation as a security consultant in the Singapore gambling venture illustrates the challenge he faces while attempting to win the Republican presidential nomination with a law-and-order message while maintaining a far-flung, international business portfolio, an unknown portion of which remains in the shadows.
Somehow, Giuliani has been a leading presidential candidate for more than a year, and has gotten away with keeping a confidential client list, and shielding his lucrative business dealings from public scrutiny altogether.
That seems, well, crazy.
Ordinarily, politically-ambitious leaders build multimillion-dollar businesses and then seek political office on the strength of his or her business acumen. Giuliani, obviously, has done the opposite, parlaying his mayoral experience into building a secret client list, and then seeking the presidency without mentioning his business background at all.
The Tribune’s focus is on one particularly controversial client that Giuliani has been loath to talk about.
Giuliani’s public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore hosted by Mark Advent, CEO of Eighth Wonder LLC, a Las Vegas development company heading one of three consortia competing to build the Sentosa Integrated Resort.
Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, a division of Giuliani Partners, was to provide security on a celebrity-studded, multibillion-dollar project featuring participation by soccer legend Pele, chef Alain Ducasse, New Age guru Deepak Chopra and designer Vera Wang, according to Advent.
Advent estimated that he spent more than $30 million to assemble and present his plans to Singaporean authorities.
He declined to disclose the fees paid to Giuliani, but described them as “fair and priceless.”
Paul Kiel helped to summarize why Giuliani’s work on behalf of Eighth Wonder in Singapore could be problematic.
Giuliani Partners was working for Eighth Wonder, one of the companies making the resort bid — and Eighth Wonder partnered with another company (called Melco) to make that bid. It turns out that the former CEO of that company, Stanley Ho, is “a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government.” A mobbed-up casino mogul is the shorter version of that description. The company is currently run by his son.
Now, Giuliani didn’t work directly for Ho, and the spokeswoman for his firm called the link between Stanley Ho and the Eighth Wonder partnership “a stretch.” And surely, if his business ties become an issue in the campaign, there will be other relationships that will prove more troublesome. But it just goes to show what little people know about how he’s made his money for the past five years.
Quite right. And given that we know Giuliani has ridiculously low standards about his close associates, the fact that he insists on keeping his client list confidential is hardly reassuring.