Razzle Dazzle
WTC Profits Without Honor

By RICHARD STEIER

Rudy Giuliani, whose campaign is predicated to such a degree on his performance following the destruction of the World Trade Center that the satirical magazine The Onion has written that he is running for President Of 9/11, has a problem.

On the one hand, he leads in national polls regarding the contest for the Republican nomination because many party members who disagree with him on social issues admire the way that he conducted himself on 9/11 and the days that followed.

On the other, the extent to which he has cashed in on that image has stirred resentment among the families of those who sacrificed far more on that date or as a result of the search for survivors and bodies that ensued, without reaping anything approaching the financial benefits that the former Mayor has accrued.

Sensitive Subject for Rudy

Mr. Giuliani assiduously avoids talking about how much he's prospered from speeches he's given in the years since, speeches that are in demand primarily because of his 9/11 persona. If he did entertain the subject, presumably he would argue that he shouldn't be chastised because doing good six years ago has allowed him to do well ever since.

TRAGEDY AS A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY: The extent to which former Police Commissioner Howard Safir (left) has profited financially by invoking 9/11 even though he left city government more than a year earlier has deepened the shadow over Rudy Giuliani's own prosperity from consulting work and speeches that were largely the result of the image he created in the aftermath of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately for the man known as America's Mayor in most precincts outside New York City, one of the men he chose for New York's top law-enforcement job is a convicted criminal who is at least as well-known for using an apartment near Ground Zero that was meant as a resting place for cops and firefighters to carry on affairs with two mistresses as for what he did on 9/11. And just when you figured Rudy could sink no lower by association than his relationship with Bernie Kerik, along comes his predecessor as Police Commissioner, Howard Safir, to remind us that we live in a land of infinite possibilities.

Mr. Kerik profited handsomely from his 9/11 connection before his past and the law caught up with him, but at least he was there at the Trade Center, even if he reverted to his old role as Mr. Giuliani's campaign bodyguard while leaving coordination of the NYPD's response that day to First Deputy Commissioner Joe Dunne.

Mr. Safir stepped down as Police Commissioner a year before Sept. 11 and was running a Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm at the time of the Trade Center bombings. But as the Daily News reported last week, his severance of city service has not stopped him from making millions of dollars tied to the fallout from 9/11.

While he was Police Commissioner, Mr. Safir helped select Bode Technology to handle DNA evidence the NYPD had compiled from a series of rape cases. Not long after leaving in August 2000, Mr. Safir became a consultant to a firm named ChoicePoint, which in April 2001 heeded his recommendation and bought Bode Technology.

Following 9/11, Bode got a contract from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to create DNA profiles from the human remains recovered at Ground Zero. News reporter Greg Smith found that by 2005, Bode had annual revenues of more than $35 million. Mr. Safir, according to the story, also cited the Sept. 11 attacks to market "skyscraper escape technology" in the form of a body harness called ResQline, and continued to endorse it even after a company salesman suffered a near-fatal fall when the line snapped, plunging him 40 feet to the ground and causing severe internal injuries.

When You're At the End of Your Rope

Prior to that accident, Mr. Smith reported, Mr. Safir told WNYC radio talk-show host Brian Lehrer that while the Fire Department - which he headed under Mr. Giuliani prior to becoming Police Commissioner in 1996 - had not approved ResQline as safe, some FDNY chiefs thought it could be used as "a last resort."

He didn't say whether those chiefs were holdovers from an administration that had opted to equip firefighters on 9/11 with the same hand-held radios that failed to function properly in the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombings.

But Mr. Safir, who downplayed his role promoting ResQline by telling the News, "My marketing role was primarily the marketing video I participated in," showed a certain kinship with Mr. Kerik in this regard. Our Boy Bernie, you may remember, helped promote Taser stun guns even when Amnesty International found that 70 persons had died after they were struck by them, salving any moral qualms he had with the $6 million he got from cashing in stock options from the firm.

Mr. Kerik has always had a reputation as a bit of a hustler. Mr. Safir was less colorful and more somber; it was said that he resembled the sheriff's deputy who was standing alongside Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby murdered him.

In his own, low-key way, however, he had a penchant for self-promotion that exceeded Mr. Kerik's and approached Mr. Giuliani's. In January 1997, a few months after becoming Police Commissioner, he appeared as himself on "NYPD Blue," telling Jimmy Smits as Det. Bobby Simone that his uncle was one of the Detectives who brought in Willie Sutton. It was as if Mr. Safir, who had told that anecdote to reporters numerous times in the past, believed that an incident involving a relative gave him his bona fides as a cop's cop.

Oscars Over Inquiry

But the beginning of the end of his tenure as Police Commissioner involved his fondness for glamour. In March 1999, after telling the City Council that he was too busy to testify at the first public inquiry into the slaying of Amadou Diallo by four Street Crime Unit cops a month earlier, Mr. Safir was spotted the night before the hearing glad-handing celebrities at the Oscar ceremonies in Los Angeles. Someone in the Giuliani administration with better judgment made sure Mr. Safir was on a red-eye flight back home in time to testify before the Council the following day, but the incident demonstrated his tin ear when it came to public perception.

Because Mr. Giuliani was seen as the real power in the NYPD, Mr. Safir was only a tangential target of the daily protests outside Police Headquarters following the Diallo shooting. But as Commissioner, he was the man responsible for signing off on the ill-fated decision to more than triple the size of the SCU - against the advice of its commander - because of its success in taking guns off the street. The massive build-up of the unit led to a less-careful selection process and gaps in training and supervision of its new members: the four SCU cops involved in the Diallo killing were working together for the first time that night and were patrolling without a supervisor.

Kicking Dirt on the Dead

But that was what Mr. Giuliani had wanted, and Mr. Safir was happy to oblige. A year later, when Patrick Dorismond was shot to death after a struggle with cops that began when he took exception to an undercover officer's question about where he might buy drugs, the dead man's sealed juvenile record was somehow released in an attempt to discredit him. Mr. Safir would have made that call, and undoubtedly did so because Mr. Giuliani wanted to deflect the media heat. He did something similar on a smaller scale a couple of years earlier: when a Bronx man exposed a speed trap cops had set up near the Bronx Zoo, the NYPD leaked false information that the whistleblower was a convicted sex offender.

Two overriding themes have animated Mr. Safir's conduct - and Mr. Giuliani's - during and after their time together in city government: image and money. The common perception of Rudy during his time in government was that he was driven by power and image and that money was not a major consideration for him. But money is what makes political campaigns go, and it also comes in handy in the world outside elected office.

During his two previous forays in the private sector - first when he left his post as U.S. Attorney in 1988 while preparing to run for Mayor and later, after losing the 1989 contest to David Dinkins - Mr. Giuliani was paid large sums by big law firms. During neither stop did his supposedly boundless work ethic prompt him to do that much to earn his money; he was too consumed with becoming Mayor to worry about that. Then again, neither did he offer to refund part of his salary at either firm in recognition of his not having his heart in the practice of law.

Contract is Fringe Benefit

In 1999, his administration awarded slightly more than $100 million in welfare-to-work job-training contracts to a Virginia-based firm named Maximus Inc. That firm then agreed to give 30 percent of its city work to Opportunity America, a company that had been recently started by Richard Schwartz, who as a senior aide to Mr. Giuliani developed his administration's workfare policies.

The following March, then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi refused to approve the contracts. A primary reason was that he discovered that Maximus had been given what amounted to a four-month head start over other firms when it was notified in February 1999 of the full breadth of the program at issue. The other firms actually did not learn full details until after bidding had concluded in June of that year.

One possibility was that Maximus had benefited from its past dealings with Mr. Giuliani's Human Resources Administration Commissioner, Jason Turner. The program figured to be an important feature of the Mayor's expected campaign for U.S. Senate the following year against Hillary Clinton. But there was also the issue of the $30 million that would be paid to Mr. Schwartz's firm. There seemed at least a possibility that if Mr. Giuliani did not win the Senate seat, Opportunity America might be happy to throw some legal business his way in gratitude for that huge chunk of change. (After a Manhattan judge found the administration "corrupted" the contract process, his ruling was overturned on appeal, but by then Maximus had disbanded its welfare-to-work operation.)

No Discounts for Charities

Any notion that Mr. Giuliani was beyond such crass or unethical financial transactions should have been dispelled by his business affairs since leaving office in 2002. As Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins noted in their 2006 book, "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," among the multi-million-dollar projects he handled was a study for pharmaceutical manufacturers purporting to show that importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada posed safety and national security risks. They also reported that even when Mr. Giuliani's speeches brought in less for charitable sponsors than his standard $100,000 fee, he offered no discounts.

As details accumulated about the extent to which our former Mayor has profited as a result of his glowing post-9/11 image, a backlash emerged among some of the families of those who died at the World Trade Center. They believed he had gotten too much of the credit and unwarranted rewards from a tragedy in which their loved ones had risked and lost more.

It was to quiet those rumblings as he strove to make himself - while early front-runner John McCain faltered and dropped to the back of the GOP pack - seem like the unstoppable choice for the Republican nomination that Mr. Giuliani overplayed the 9/11 card at a Reds/Dodgers ballgame in Cincinnati three weeks ago.

'I'm One of Them'

Trying to differentiate himself from some other officeholder "sitting in an ivory tower," the ex-Mayor told reporters, "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers ... I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them."

His remarks stirred an outcry from both those who worked at Ground Zero and a couple of prominent municipal union leaders.

Uniformed Fire Officers Association President Jack McDonnell remarked, "I think he's really grasping and trying to justify his previous attempts to portray himself as the hero of 9/11." And Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino pointed to the many recovery workers who have contracted serious illnesses that are believed linked to their time working on The Pile, saying that while Mr. Giuliani did "a fine job" in responding to 9/11's aftermath, "I don't think he rises to the level of being an equal with those men and women who were involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup."

At least as damaging to Mr. Giuliani as that rhetoric was that his comments spurred New York Times reporter Russ Buettner - whose investigative work at the Daily News exposed much of Mr. Kerik's improper behavior and paved the way for his criminal conviction 14 months ago - to examine records detailing Mr. Giuliani's whereabouts for a three-month period beginning six days after 9/11.

More of a Yankee

Mr. Buettner said the Mayor's own private schedules, giving him the benefit of the doubt on time spent at the site, indicated that he was at Ground Zero for a total of 29 hours between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16, 2001. That finding prompted Alex Koppelman at Salon.com to note that Mr. Giuliani spent twice that amount of time attending and traveling to every game of the World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks that fall, including the games played in Arizona.

The day after the criticism by union leaders, Mr. Giuliani sought to retrace his steps, coming as close as he ever does to an apology by saying on a nationally syndicated radio show that "I think I could have said it better" regarding his relationship with first-responders here. "I empathize with them, because I feel like I have that same risk [of contracting a Ground Zero-related illness] ... I wasn't trying to suggest a competition of any kind, which is the way it came across."

No Competition

But the comparison by Mr. Buettner of the hours spent at the site by Mr. Giuliani, compared to the long days logged by rescue and recovery workers - firefighters alone spent a minimum of a month of eight-hour shifts at Ground Zero, and the median time for the workers there was estimated to fall just short of 1,000 hours - made clear why he shied from framing it as a competition once called on his statement.

And then along came the News's story about Mr. Safir, still a blowhard after all these years and doing quite nicely as the result of an incident that occurred after he had left the Giuliani administration. Any chance that Mr. Giuliani might have had to distance himself from Mr. Safir by pointing out, for example, that the man he once referred to as "the greatest Police Commissioner in New York City history" has not had any direct dealings with him in eight years is undercut by his presidential campaign. Mr. Safir, as the News pointed out, is chairman of First Responders for Giuliani, which has sought to drum up political support from firefighters across the nation to counter the harsh condemnations of the ex-Mayor by the city's fire unions and many of their members.

Editing History

Mr. Giuliani of late has also met with his first Police Commissioner, current Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, in an attempt to remind the world of how well they worked together when he first took office. What he didn't mention was that he forced Mr. Bratton from his job because the Police Commissioner was getting a bit too much of the credit for the precipitous drop in crime during Mr. Giuliani's first term.

Anyone running against him could concoct a pretty good TV ad based on the ex-Mayor's three Police Commissioners. He tossed out the one who produced the biggest crime drop and preserved a solid reputation, and replaced him with a dolt and a crook, both of whom have shown they value money far more than honor.

That track record isn't much of a job recommendation for their old employer.