At this point, highlighting Rudy Giuliani’s many serious flaws almost seems gratuitous. His presidential campaign has become something of a laughing stock, exacerbated yesterday by a poll showing him running third in his own home state. It’s tempting to wait to kick the guy until after he’s off the ground.
But, even if we operate under the (probably safe) assumption that Giuliani’s campaign is toast, it’s probably still worth highlighting the fact that the nation dodged a bullet with the downfall of the one-time frontrunner.
The NYT has a fascinating item today, for example, highlighting the extraordinary lengths the former mayor would go to punish anyone, vindictively and aggressively, for even modest criticism of Giuliani.
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
That’s not even the most offensive example.
This is.
Mr. Giuliani’s war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic. Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group’s members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city’s homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had obtained that contract.
“That possibility could have happened,” Mr. Oesterreich told a federal judge.
Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Giuliani, said, “There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”
Giuliani, in all likelihood, won’t be president. Consider it a disaster averted.