Razzle Dazzle
SUNLIGHT CLOUDS RUDY IMAGE

By RICHARD STEIER

Rudy Giuliani is given his due for his performance on the morning of Sept. 11 by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins in their new book, "Grand Illusion": "Dodging debris, walking calmly uptown through air so filled with dust and ash that people could not see the pavement at their feet, he was the father figure the city needed on a day when every New Yorker felt a little lost and frightened."

But as the title suggests, the book is written in an attempt to scrape away the myth that has attached itself to Mr. Giuliani in the wake of his cool, concerned and perfectly calibrated response on that fateful day and the ones that immediately followed in order to show the ways in which he failed, both as the Twin Towers burned and in the years before that, to better prepare the city for disaster.

Helped Make Him a Star

There's a distinct irony to Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins playing this part. Two decades ago, the two men were involved in writing separate books that pulled the curtain from in front of Mayor Ed Koch to show the bad decisions he made that paved the way for the Parking Violations Bureau scandal. The hero of that drama was the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Rudy Giuliani, who personally prosecuted the big case in that scandal and was known for leaking choice tidbits to reporters like Mr. Barrett, then and now of the Village Voice, and Mr. Collins, who at the time was the City Hall bureau chief of United Press International. In 2000, Mr. Barrett wrote a searing investigative biography about Mr. Giuliani, its most tantalizing revelation being that his father, Harold, had been a convicted armed robber. The dominant thesis of that painstakingly researched book was that Rudy Giuliani's greatest skill was self-promotion, which he combined with a ruthless determination to beat down anyone whose actions or words might tarnish his carefully-honed image.

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss DECONSTRUCTING RUDY: Wayne Barrett (seated) and Dan Collins, pictured here at the Aug. 23 book party for "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," make the case that while the former Mayor was a calming, even heroic presence in the wake of the World Trade Center's destruction, he failed to adequately prepare city agencies for an effective, coordinated response to a terrorist attack.

"Grand Illusion," which is subtitled, "The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," picks up almost where the other book - which was published prior to the events that led the then-Mayor to, over a couple of weeks, publicly announce he had prostate cancer, that he was divorcing his wife to be with his girlfriend, and then drop out of a race for U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton - left off.

After that tumultuous spring of 2000, there was very little to mark the remainder of Mr. Giuliani's mayoralty until 9/11. Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins, citing extensive interviews with persons involved in the rescue efforts, the national probes of the city's response, and experts including Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, reach the conclusion that Mr. Giuliani parlayed his genuinely shining moments in front of the TV cameras into a persona that has obscured the numerous errors he made that could have saved lives, particularly among the 343 Fire Department members who perished.

Many of those mistakes were not born of venality, although the authors state that his petty vindictiveness figured heavily into the inability of the Port Authority to bring the Twin Towers into compliance with the city's Building Code. Along the same lines, they theorize that the failure to obtain new radios for firefighters after one model didn't function properly in the field may have resulted from his desire not to give satisfaction to then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi - who had sharply criticized the purchasing practice used for the defective radios.

Flaws As a Chief Executive

Rather, according to Mr. Collins and Mr. Barrett, those mistakes reflected an administration in which Mr. Giuliani chose commissioners based on loyalty rather than talent; in which his aversion to technology prevented him from addressing some of the problem spots that would haunt the city on 9/11; and in which this legendarily hands-on Mayor had difficulty focusing on issues that did not have immediate political significance.

They see the lack of communication between police and firefighters on Sept. 11 as more than a failure of the Fire Department's radio system. Rather, they argue, it was a subtle manifestation of the "battle of the badges," with separate command centers set up by each department and communication between them virtually nonexistent.

One reason for this, Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins write, is that the Office of Emergency Management, which Mr. Giuliani had created to gain better coordination between the Police and Fire Departments, was headed by an ineffectual yes-man, Richard Sheirer, who failed to assert any authority on 9/11. OEM, rather than functioning as an authoritative referee, was treated like a poor relative by the NYPD and FDNY.

The authors contend that one reason for this was that Howard Safir, the Giuliani crony who had lobbied for OEM's creation while he was Fire Commissioner because he believed it would reduce the clout of the Police Department, sought to undercut the agency soon after he replaced Bill Bratton as Police Commissioner.

RUDY GIULIANI: More hype than substance?

The man who replaced Mr. Safir, Bernard Kerik, shared his love of power and its trappings rather than a sense of how to actually deal with a crisis. Mr. Kerik, who had been a Third Grade Detective serving as Mr. Giuliani's campaign bodyguard during the 1993 mayoral race, the authors argue, reverted to that role on Sept. 11, more concerned with protecting the Mayor than with coordinating the NYPD's response at the Trade Center.

Never Relayed Exit Order

When the Mayor arrived at the Trade Center at 9:20 that morning, he asked FDNY Chief of Department Peter Ganci what he should tell people. He would later recall that Chief Ganci, who died at the scene, told him to instruct those trapped inside the complex, "The message has to be, 'Get in a stairway and come down. Do not stay there.'''

This message never reached 9/11 operators and Fire Dispatchers, however: they continued instructing those who called from the Twin Towers to stay where they were rather than seeking to make their way downstairs.

The authors write that "there's no indication that [Fire Commissioner Tom] Von Essen, any of the three Giuliani police commissioners, or the mayor ever so much as considered how to create an informed loop between 9-1-1 operators, fire dispatchers, and on-scene commanders prior to 9/11. During the Giuliani years, the city collected over $250 million in telephone surcharges to upgrade 9-1-1 but diverted the majority of that funding to other budgetary purposes, even in years of huge surpluses."

Terror Not on His Mind

They point out that just 10 months before he took office, a truck bomb had blown a large hole in the basement of the World Trade Center, but cite the statements of numerous former Giuliani administration officials, including Mr. Bratton, that terrorism never came up during their discussions with Mr. Giuliani about law-enforcement in the city and the challenges it faced.

Some of the most damning comments come from people like Mr. Bratton and ex- NYPD Chief of Department Lou Anemone, both of whom felt betrayed by the way in which Mr. Giuliani forced them from their jobs. But their claims are echoed by other officials who remained on friendly terms with the ex-Mayor.

Adam Walinsky, who was on Mr. Giuliani's transition team involved in picking candidates for Police, Fire and Correction Commissioner, said that the new Mayor never mentioned terrorism as an issue to be broached when interviewing candidates for those jobs.

"We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center," Mr. Anemone told the authors. "We never even had a drill or exercise there."

Focus on Selling Airports

When Mr. Giuliani focused on the Port Authority, he said, it was with an eye toward taking control of the city's airports and privatizing them.

Early in Mr. Giuliani's term, then-Port Authority Chairman Stanley Brezenoff offered a substantial increase in the rent the Port Authority was paying the city to operate the airports. This was rejected by John Dyson, the confrontational Deputy Mayor Mr. Giuliani used as his point man in the discussions; he demanded nearly twice the $55 million yearly rent payment Mr. Brezenoff had offered, and an additional $73 million in other annual payments.

No deal was ever reached, and the PA, which was then struggling financially, did not make the upgrades in building and fire safety that were recommended following the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Mr. Dyson, the authors note, reveled in the economic squeeze, saying years later, "It was getting harder and harder for them to finance themselves and we were getting closer and closer to taking the airports." While they haggled, the administration let languish a City Council bill that would have brought the Trade Center under the city Building and Fire codes. Russell Harding, the son of Liberal Party Chairman Ray Harding who would later embarrass his father and Mr. Giuliani by being sent to jail for looting $400,000 from the Housing Development Corporation after the Mayor tapped him to head it in 1998, saw the airport privatization as a long-term investment for Rudy, telling a friend by e-mail, " ... not only in the long run will the mayor profit from it ... but my dad already has with the contract" to represent the British firm bidding to operate Kennedy and La Guardia.

Mr. Giuliani's decision to create a special emergency command center to replace the one that operated out of 1 Police Plaza was largely a matter of ego and territory, the authors write. They say he resented having to go to Police Headquarters and then to have to defer to NYPD commanders, feelings that were shared by top Fire Department officials.

Wanted a Short Walk

When a recommendation was made to place the command center in the Metro Tech complex where new FDNY headquarters were being established, Mr. Giuliani was said to have objected because it wasn't within easy walking distance of City Hall. He wound up instead choosing the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, which met that criterion, and was operated by Larry Silverstein, who had become a major contributor to his campaigns. As the authors note, the building's being part of a complex that terrorists had already hit once and seemed determine to go after again made it precisely the wrong location, something that became abundantly clear when the planes struck the Twin Towers, rendering 7 World Trade unsafe well before it collapsed later that afternoon.

The defense of Mr. Giuliani and his spokeswoman would later be that no one could have predicted the events of Sept. 11. But as Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins write, Mr. Silverstein's own risk-assessment report a few months before 9/11 stated that an aircraft striking one of the towers was one of the "maximum foreseeable losses," and a congressional inquiry noted that there had been indications that terrorists might try to fly a plane into the complex.

Fire Radio Inertia

The problem with Fire Department radios, reported extensively in publications including this one, is expanded on in the book. It recounts the failure of the new Motorola digital radios in March 2001 that led the Fire Department to pull them from service and Mr. Hevesi to question the bidding process as rigged in Motorola's favor. Mr. Giuliani's slashing attacks on Mr. Hevesi - suggesting he was using a cheap trick to gain the endorsement of the Uniformed Fire Officers' Association in his race for Mayor - created the impression that the incumbent had something to hide. Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins suggest that it was subordinates with no close ties to Mr. Giuliani, in both the Fire Department and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, who had an unseemly loyalty to Motorola and sought to frustrate potential competitors.

A Sister At the Firm

The DoITT Associate Commissioner who dealt with radios, Deborah Barrell Spandorf, had a sister who was a lobbyist for Motorola and later married one of its top executives. Her sister later said she had no idea that Ms. Spandorf dealt with Motorola, but Ms. Spandorf never told her superiors about the family connection.

She was often depressed and sometimes absent from work for long stretches, with personal troubles apparently a factor. Three weeks after 9/11, Ms. Spandorf died of an apparent suicide; co-workers said that when she visited the emergency command center Mr. Giuliani set up on the west side of Manhattan following the Trade Center's destruction, she collapsed and had to be hospitalized.

One contractor for a Motorola competitor, GE Ericsson, had become so convinced that unreasonable design demands were being made by city officials when his company sought to win the contract that in 1997 he wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani detailing the double standard.

No Response From Rudy

He got no reply, and the authors note that Mr. Giuliani never bothered to make inquiries of his subordinates that might have led to changes being made. Instead, Motorola continued getting the contracts, and when its new digital radios failed, the FDNY went back to using the old Motorola analog models that hadn't functioned inside the Twin Towers in 1993 and didn't work again on Sept. 11.

The authors also contend that Mr. Giuliani bears some responsibility for the health problems of those who worked at the Trade Center site after Sept. 11, from city emergency workers to the construction crews that assisted in cutting through the metal that blocked access to those who were trapped beneath the rubble. They note that the Mayor joined with the Bush Administration in falsely reassuring those who lived and worked in the area that the air was safe to breathe because they believed it was vital to have the Wall Street area functioning again for both business and symbolic reasons.

A Toxic Cover-up

They state that lower Manhattan contained comparable or higher levels of asbestos as were found when Libby, Montana was designated a superfund site for Federal cleanup and that town was essentially shut down. They quote an industrial hygienist who studied conditions in the area saying, "We had been pushing to have it regarded as a Superfund site, but people in the political structure said 'we can't talk about it as hazardous.'''

When Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai Medical Center warned that exposure to the toxins in the dust and rubble could cause long-term health problems, Mr. Giuliani and his Health Commissioner, Dr. Neal Cohen, disputed that analysis.

Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins argue that the Mayor compounded the risk to the workers at the site by continuing to treat their work as a recovery operation long after it was certain that those still buried in the rubble were dead and work should have been changed into strictly a clean-up mode. They acknowledge the pressures that led him to do this - over the stated protests of Fire Commissioner Von Essen - in the form of insistence by individual firefighters and their unions that the search for the bodies of lost comrades continue.

A Sentimental Mistake

The authors imply that Mr. Giuliani, who grew up in an extended family of cops and firefighters, was driven by an impulse to be liked by them. But just as this prevented him from taking the tough actions that would have been needed years earlier to get the Police and Fire Departments to scrap their turf battles to achieve coordination in their disaster responses, it led him, Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins maintain, to make a sentimental decision that jeopardized the health of many of the people he was indulging.

Adulation flowed to Mr. Giuliani because of his public presence on 9/11 and in the days that followed. The authors contend, however, that rather than ennobling him and leading him to use his undeniable talents where they would do the greatest public good, Mr. Giuliani exploited the good feelings for him first in an attempt to enhance his political power - seeking to have his term as Mayor extended or have the law limiting him to just two terms repealed - and later to enrich himself and the firm he formed upon leaving government, Giuliani Partners.

Drug-Company Shill

They point to dubious work he did for multi-million-dollar fees on behalf of business interests, including a study for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in which his firm concluded that importing prescription drugs from Canada, where they were far cheaper, undermined America's safety and security. Mr. Kerik, then one of his senior partners, told a Federal task force that terrorists could send weapons of biological warfare across the border disguised as prescription drugs.

Mr. Giuliani commanded fees of $100,000 to give stock speeches, and made sure he got paid even when charitable appearances raised far less than that amount for the organization paying him. He continued piling up political chits and courting Republican voters across the nation, who were willing to overlook or else were unaware of his more-liberal views on matters like abortion and gay rights because of the aura surrounding him in the wake of 9/11.

A Mixed Legacy

Mr. Barrett and Mr. Collins insist that the image Mr. Giuliani was able to project doesn't square with the reality of how his government handled 9/11. They assess his contribution this way: "at a moment when the public needed a hero, Rudy Giuliani stepped forward."

Off the stage, away from the cameras, they conclude, it was a different matter: "Giuliani has never acknowledged a single failing in his own performance. Yet he did nothing before September 11 to alleviate the effects of a terror attack. He embodied his city's lack of preparation on West Street that morning. And he did not do anything later that matched the moments of grace and resolve he gave us the day we needed him most."

 

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