The New York Times does quite a job on Rudy’s former police commissioner, friend, business partner, and recommendee for the job of Secretary of Homeland Security, Bernard Kerik. The Times gets the dirt on Kerik’s scandals: mutually beneficial and illegal deals with Interstate (a company with mafia ties), repeated inappropriate use of police officers and others under his command, using an apartment donated for emergency worker housing to conduct an extramarital affair (MissLaura notes that Giuliani did something quite similar with his doomed-from-the-start emergency response center), and more. And, as Paul Curtis notes, the Times documents better than ever before the fact that Giuliani knew Kerik’s faults earlier than he says he did.
This all goes to deeper character issues, and a tendency to, while publicly hating on the mob, mimic it in his own management style. Rudy, the man who made his name prosecuting mob bosses, saw himself not just as a law man on a singular quest to bring them down (a la Eli Spitzer), but as a mafia man in his own right, determined to prove he was the most powerful of them all. (Think also here of his college career — rejected from the popular, cool frat, he joined the nerdy, law-abiding frat, and became its president. )
Kerik tells the story of his appointment to Commissioner:
Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani’s boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who was first deputy mayor, and other aides. One by one, they pulled Mr. Kerik close and kissed his cheek.
“I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family,” Mr. Kerik wrote. “I was being made.”
(Speaking of loyalty, that is, you may remember, the Mr. Powers with whom Giuliani ran some unsuccessful high school election races way back when.)
Update: Wayne Barrett reminds us that another man-about-the-news, Michael Mukasey, is currently representing Giuliani’s law firm in the federal probe of Kerik.
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