RUDY BEFORE THE MYTHOLOGY

Razzle Dazzle

Rudy Before The Mythology

By RICHARD STEIER

The most compelling testimony against Rudy Giuliani in Kevin Keating's new documentary, "Giuliani Time," comes not from the longtime adversaries or political rivals who spoke to the filmmaker but rather from those once closely associated with his mayoralty.

They fall into two categories: those who parted company with Mr. Giuliani over conflicts that were as much personal as professional, and those who remained loyal to him but serve as unwitting evidence of his flaws as a leader.

Mr. Keating, a veteran documentary filmmaker, has said that he originally intended the work to be a look at how the former Mayor repressed civil liberties during his eight years in office but that he now hopes it will compromise his chances of being elected President. Mr. Giuliani declined to be interviewed for the film, leaving his boosters at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank that gained currency while he was in office, to carry the torch for him.

Crime Drop Gets Shortchanged

Though his fans have their say, and some critics give the former Mayor his due, the film doesn't come close to being objective or balanced.

THE OTHER SIDE OF GIULIANI: A documentary that focuses on Mayor Giuliani's eight years in office tries to counter the image of a cool, determined leader that emerged beginning on Sept. 11 by showing the more venal aspects of his personality, and how they created a meaner atmosphere in the city even as he made it safer and more prosperous. Mr. Giuliani's signature achievement - his major reduction in crime - is given concrete form only in images of a Disneyfied Times Square, with no focus on once-blighted neighborhoods of the city that became places people might willingly choose to settle in, or parks once controlled by gangs and drug dealers that were reclaimed on behalf of the law-abiding residents of their communities.

His cool, reassuring response in the wake of 9/11 occupies just a few minutes of the nearly two-hour documentary. Excerpts of his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, including Rudy's probably apocryphal "Thank God George Bush is President" utterance to Bernie Kerik as people leaped to their deaths from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, are shown before the opening credits roll. At the conclusion of the movie, Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice reporter who authored the remarkable 2000 investigative biography of Mr. Giuliani, described his emergence from political torpor this way: "Suddenly he had a focus. He was America's hero. Where he goes from here is anybody's guess."

BILL BRATTON: Rudy wanted all the credit. Mr. Keating strives to tell where Rudy had been prior to 9/11, and why his actions prior to that fateful day argue against his being viewed as Presidential timber.

He is helped in this effort by the contrast between Bill Bratton, Mr. Giuliani's first Police Commissioner, whom he forced from office for no discernible reason other than that Mr. Bratton was getting too much of the credit for the city's early success in combating crime, and Howard Safir, whom the Mayor installed as Mr. Bratton's replacement.

One obvious difference between the two Commissioners is that Mr. Bratton, who now is Chief of Police in Los Angeles, is comfortable dealing with the media where Mr. Safir was markedly clumsy in all the public aspects of his job. The one common thread of their tenures - which the film does not make clear enough - is that they were working from the same blueprint: more aggressive use of the police with an eye to the "broken windows" theory of crime that small offenses left unattended give rise to larger infractions.

RUDY CREW: Familiarity bred contempt.

Ignores Crown Heights' Effect

Nor does Mr. Keating touch on the reason New Yorkers, who tend to be more liberal and more concerned about civil liberties than other Americans, initially welcomed the more aggressive police tactics unconditionally. He has former Mayor David Dinkins, who defeated Mr. Giuliani in 1989 and then was unseated by him four years later, note that crime had declined in each of the final three years of his administration after a first year in which Time Magazine had run a cover story suggesting that "The Big Apple" was rotting amid a series of high-profile murders, many of young children.

This is meant to rebut the perception - stoked to a fare-thee-well by Mr. Giuliani and his supporters - that it wasn't until he took charge that the city began to win its battle against rampant lawlessness.

Mr. Keating does not show any footage of one reason that perception took hold among the public - the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the delayed police response to them, which a state panel later found resulted from the decision of top Dinkins aides not to have cops use force to retake the neighborhood. It was not until after Mr. Dinkins himself had rocks and bottles thrown at him while visiting the family of the 7-year-old black boy whose death when he was run down by a Hasidic driver had ignited the hostilities two days earlier that the order was given to have the police assert themselves.

Lesser of Two Drawbacks

The concerns sparked by the Dinkins administration's slow response to lawlessness in that case more than offset the queasiness some New Yorkers felt about Mr. Giuliani's conduct a year later, following a mini-riot by protesting cops at City Hall, something Mr. Keating chronicles at some length. He shows Mr. Giuliani, standing on a flatbed truck a block away after hundreds of out-of-control, in many cases overserved off-duty officers had tried to storm City Hall, denouncing the incumbent Mayor with an epithet and telling the protesters, "The reason the morale of the Police Department is so low is one reason: David Dinkins."

The documentary also shows Mr. Giuliani telling a New York Times interviewer, "What [Mr. Dinkins] is doing to the Police Department is pretty close to criminal." The interview highlights the cartoonish side of Mr. Giuliani's political persona: he shrugs off the interviewer's question about whether Mr. Dinkins hadn't tried to be tough on crime by noting that he opposed the death penalty, as if the two positions were mutually exclusive.

George Kelling, the social scientist who popularized the "broken windows" theory, tells Mr. Keating that he pushed Mr. Giuliani to hire Mr. Bratton, who as Chief of the Transit Police a few years earlier had significantly brought down crime in the subways.

A Matter of Perception

Mr. Bratton acknowledges that crime was already falling under Mr. Dinkins and his Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly. What hadn't been turned around, he said, were the quality-of-life offenses "that reminded people of crime," from the squeegee men who flocked to crowded intersections to the aggressive begging that could be seen on the streets and in the subways.

Discussing Mr. Giuliani's early tenure and the Compstat system of targeting problem spots for crime and demanding results from police commanders that was implemented by his longtime sidekick, the late Jack Maple, Mr. Bratton told Mr. Keating, "The Mayor consciously set out to break the back of the NYPD to make it subservient to him."

He also remarked, "It's amazing how much we accomplished, because we don't like each other."

Mr. Giuliani's determination to view Mr. Bratton as a competitor for credit, rather than someone whose appointment reflected well on him, created a problem when Mr. Safir succeeded him as Police Commissioner. Seeking to further cut crime to show that Mr. Bratton wasn't indispensable, the administration stepped up its use of stop-and-frisks in high-crime neighborhoods, more often than not areas where most residents were minorities. This exacerbated tensions between police and residents, many of whom were being confronted, sometimes rudely, for reasons that had nothing to do with any reasonable suspicion that they might be engaged in improper activity.

Overreaching With SCU

A Street Crime Unit which had proven effective in taking guns off the street during Mr. Bratton's tenure more than tripled in size under Mr. Safir, despite the warning of the unit's commander that such an expansion meant that SCU members would no longer be as carefully selected and trained. This overreaching came home to roost with the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, a Bronx man who was mistaken for a rape suspect by four SCU cops who were working their first tour of duty together and doing it without a supervisor present.

A tragic shooting that was the product of both bad police work and the foolhardy decision at the top of the NYPD to relax the supervision of the SCU in order to expand it created a major political problem for Mr. Giuliani. In contrast to 9/11, when he rose to the occasion and offered real leadership, he sank into demagoguery as his Police Department and his dealings with the minority community came under fire.

He denounced daily protests outside 1 Police Plaza that were aimed at him at least as much as at the four SCU cops, and when prominent New Yorkers, including elected officials and labor leaders, began being arrested as part of the protests, Mr. Keating shows him responding, "It's gotten silly, already."

"Silly" was a word he frequently used to deride legitimate questions from reporters about matters he didn't want to discuss. In this context, it suggested a real insensitivity to minority grievances with his administration that had crystallized with the firing of 41 shots by cops at an unarmed man.

A Blast From Crew

At this point, Mr. Giuliani's once-warm relationship with his Schools Chancellor, Rudy Crew, had begun to sour because of a disagreement about the Mayor's call for the use of vouchers that would allow parents to send their children to private schools.

Mr. Crew told Mr. Keating that Mr. Giuliani's reaction to the Diallo case was a point of no return in their dealings. He said he told the Mayor, "Right now you're looking really mean and vicious."

"This is when," Mr. Crew stated in the film, "I finally understood there is something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity. He is barren about the subject of race."

The documentary features one scene 2-1/2 months after the Diallo shooting of Mr. Safir at a City Council hearing. Council Member Ronnie Eldridge asks him whether the NYPD can effectively fight crime without violating civil liberties, and the Police Commissioner responds, "Was that, when did I stop beating my wife?"

The response was par for the course for the thin-skinned Mr. Safir. Less than a month earlier, he had showed how tone-deaf he was when he declined a request to testify before the Council about the Louima case on the grounds that he was too busy, only to be spotted on TV the night before the scheduled hearing at the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. (People in the administration with a surer sense of public relations got Mr. Safir back to New York on a red-eye flight in time to make the hearing.)

'Had to Cross Line'

Mr. Keating uses quotes from officials who would have been expected to support Mr. Giuliani to illustrate how far past the point of reasonable his policing tactics had become. Bruce Robertson, a former Patrolmen's Benevolent Association official, is seen telling a Council hearing, "You have to be crossing that line, you have to be close to that line, when you do that number of stop-and-frisks."

Mr. Kelling, the man who made "broken windows" the bywords of the administration's policing strategy, stated that in bringing stricter law-enforcement to minority communities where crime was a particular problem, "In a democratic society, you cannot try and do it by terror."

Mr. Bratton said of his former boss, "He does rule by intimidation, by fear."

One theme running through the documentary is that Mr. Giuliani got more credit than he deserved for the decline in crime, and never properly rewarded the cops who both made it work and took heat in some communities for the stepped-up enforcement.

Hogging the Credit

Mr. Bratton pointed out that a majority of the new cops who were authorized to be hired under the "Safe Streets, Safe City" program approved early in Mr. Dinkins's tenure were not actually brought on until Mr. Giuliani took office. Mr. Barrett noted that crime declined in virtually every city in the country during the 1990s, suggesting that New York mirrored a national trend and outperformed the rest of the country because of the greater influx of cops than in other localities.

Mr. Keating also shows PBA President Pat Lynch, at a January 2001 contract rally outside City Hall, roaring, "We brought crime down in double digits, and how were we rewarded? With double zeroes," a reference to a 1997 arbitration award in which Mr. Giuliani ensured that the PBA was saddled with the same two-year wage freeze as other municipal unions.

The filmmaker is hardly the first to make the case that our former Mayor was much stronger on public relations than he was on substance, and that he was not averse to lying if it helped make his case. He focuses on Mr. Giuliani's role, as Associate Attorney General in the Reagan Administration, in detaining and then deporting Haitians who came to the United States by boat claiming they were victims of political repression under the murderous Duvalier regime.

'Pitiless Policies'

The late Arthur Helton of the Council on Foreign Relations described Mr. Giuliani as "the key and principal implementer on immigration control" for Mr. Reagan. "The policies were pitiless," he said. "We created the detention system only for the Haitian boat people."

The film then shows Mr. Giuliani testifying at a hearing in Miami that there is "no political repression in Haiti." He tells a TV interviewer that the Papal Nuncio in Haiti had told him the refugees were not fleeing political persecution; Mr. Keating adds a quote he attributes to that Papal Nuncio: "I made no such statement."

As Mr. Barrett noted, Mr. Giuliani's willingness to do the Reagan Administration's dirty work led to his being chosen as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, the prestige outpost for Federal prosecutors. He took full advantage of that role, making a number of significant cases against leading Mafia figures and personally winning conviction of Bronx Democratic County Leader Stanley Friedman for his role in the Parking Violations Bureau scandal.

'He Damaged the Mob'

Calling him one of the most important prosecutors ever of white-collar crime, Mr. Barrett said, "I think he did enormous damage to the mob."

For all his achievements in the law-enforcement area both before and after he reached City Hall, however, there is little to like about Mr. Giuliani's record on education and social services.

Mr. Crew's comments are particularly damning, even though the clashes that led to their estrangement are well-known, because he is the only one of Mr. Giuliani's three Chancellors who at one point had a strong working relationship with the Mayor. An early look at the style that prompted Ed Koch to title a book "Giuliani, Nasty Man" was offered by the Mayor's campaign of bullying and insults that finally drove Ramon Cortines to resign. Mr. Giuliani made clear virtually from the time that Harold Levy replaced Mr. Crew that he considered him little more than a tool of the United Federation of Teachers.

The film provides an early glimpse of Mr. Giuliani's attitude toward public education with a pre-mayoral interview in which he talks about his own childhood in Garden City. "My father would sometimes threaten me with putting me in public school if my behavior didn't improve," said Mr. Giuliani, who attended Catholic schools right through getting his undergraduate degree at Manhattan College.

Mr. Crew said that when he was first appointed, Mr. Giuliani expressed no interest in voucher programs, the implication being that he championed them only because he was looking to appeal to potential Republican contributors around the country as he prepared for his aborted 2000 run for U.S. Senate.

Deaf to Progress

"What you are talking about is the redistribution of resources ... [which will] dilute the dollars," Mr. Crew said of the practice of siphoning education money from the public schools to give parents vouchers that would help pay for private-school tuition. He said Mr. Giuliani was doing so in spite of signs that minority children throughout the city were beginning to make progress in districts where they had long struggled.

"I don't think Rudy could hear that stuff," his former Chancellor said.

The film also focuses on the failure of Mr. Giuliani's welfare-to-work program to move public assistance recipients from dependency to long-term employment. Mr. Barrett called the Work Experience Program an effort "designed to force people off the rolls, not to really prepare them for work."

A lawsuit that coincidentally was settled by the Bloomberg administration on May 12, the day "Giuliani Time" premiered, underscores the film's suggestion that the former Mayor had contempt for welfare recipients. The Giuliani administration unsuccessfully sought to have the claim of female WEP workers that they were sexually harassed by their supervisors dismissed on the grounds that the women were not really employees and therefore were not entitled to Federal protection from job discrimination of that sort. If Mr. Giuliani does in fact run for President, publicizing what even by political standards was a despicable legal tactic would dovetail nicely with a recounting of his public flogging of Donna Hanover prior to their divorce to create a well-earned gender gap for him.

The film offers a brief defense of the WEP initiative's apparent dead end from Mr. Giuliani's workfare architect, ex-Human Resources Administration Commissioner Jason Turner, who stated, "It's work that sets you free." The comment might make Mr. Giuliani wince as an unpleasant reminder of his first, unsuccessful campaign for Mayor. That was when a story, apparently generated by then-U.S. Sen. Al D'Amato in an effort to undermine him, hit the papers about an incident during Rudy's tenure as U.S. Attorney when a Holocaust survivor was interrogated about criminal activity in a room with a blackboard on which was written, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The words are German for "Work Brings Freedom" and were carved on the gates of Auschwitz.

Meet the New Patronage

There are other moments of irony to be found in the documentary. One is a clip of a 1989 campaign speech in which Mr. Giuliani, launching a fusillade at the corruption that marred then-Mayor Koch's third term in office, declared, "On the day that I become Mayor, the old political system that is dragging the city down is out."

Standing directly behind him was Ray Harding, the head of the state Liberal Party, who played a key role in electing him in 1993 and remained an adviser throughout his tenure. Mr. Harding had always made endorsement decisions based on jobs for his supporters rather than ideology, but his role as Father Patronage took on literal meaning when two of his sons got high-ranking positions in Mr. Giuliani's administration. One of them was later convicted of stealing more than $400,000 from the Housing Development Corporation virtually from the day in 1998 that Mr. Giuliani appointed him notwithstanding his lack of both a college degree and a background in housing.

A clip from the night of his re-election in November 1997 shows one of his few prominent black supporters, District Council 37 Local 372 President Charlie Hughes, standing right behind Mr. Giuliani. Three months later, Mr. Hughes was bounced from his position for placing his local $10 million in debt, and he eventually went to prison for embezzling more than $2 million in members' dues money.

'Disrespects the Law'

In the time between his first tenure in the Justice Department during the Nixon Administration and his return there when Ronald Reagan became President, Mr. Giuliani's legal practice included working as a specialist in First Amendment law for newspapers, including the Daily News. But as Mayor, he was sued nearly two dozen times on First Amendment grounds and lost almost all of the cases, prompting Mr. Barrett to state, "I believe he runs an administration that shows an astounding disrespect for the law."

For Mr. Giuliani, losing the lawsuits was an acceptable cost of doing business if his actions deterred potential critics from taking him on in the future. In the same way, improper prison strip-searches that cost his administration $50 million served a purpose of intimidating political protesters who hadn't bargained for an experience that went well beyond the traditional practice of releasing them with just desk appearance tickets.

Evan Mandery, the campaign manager for Mr. Giuliani's 1997 re-election opponent, Ruth Messinger, cited a New York Post editorial written in the wake of the charge by Abner Louima - which he later retracted - that one of the cops who brutalized him at the 70th Precinct had told him that "It's Giuliani time." The Post stated that if "Giuliani time" meant a small increase in brutality and a large reduction in crime, it was in favor of the concept. Mr. Mandery said he believed Mr. Giuliani counted on a majority of the voting public to adopt that same rationale.

Mr. Keating, by taking his title from a statement that turned out to be an invention, signals his intention not to be even-handed or offer a definitive look at Mr. Giuliani. The documentary's value lies in reminding those who by Sept. 10 had grown weary of Mr. Giuliani's governing style and his personality why they felt that way, before his ability to use his considerable talents at a time when they were most needed created a myth that has since overshadowed the more complicated realities of his career.