Rudy Giuliani worked as a private attorney as well as for the United States Department of Justice. In 1993, he ran as the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City. He served two terms in office, adopting a harsh stance on crime while becoming a contentious figure due to his handling of police abuses and racial concerns in cases.
In 2008, he ran unsuccessfully for his party’s presidential nomination. Giuliani was also honored for his focused leadership in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Later, he founded his own security consulting firm and worked with Donald Trump throughout his presidential campaign in 2016, before joining the president’s legal team.
Early Life
Rudolph William Louis Giuliani was born on May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York, to a big Italian-American family of cops and firefighters. “I grew up with uniforms all around me and their stories of heroism,” Giuliani says. Helen Giuliani, his mother, was a clever and serious secretary, and his father, Harold Giuliani, managed a tavern and worked for a brother’s mob-connected loan sharking operation.
Although Giuliani did not discover the complete story until he was an adult, his father was jailed in 1934 for robbing a milkman at gunpoint and served a year and a half in prison. “I knew he had gotten into trouble as a young man, but I never knew exactly what it was,” Giuliani said. Nonetheless, Harold Giuliani was a wonderful parent who was keen that his kid not repeat his mistakes.
When Giuliani was seven years old, his father relocated the family from Brooklyn to Long Island to keep his son away from the family’s mob-connected kin, and he instilled in him a great respect for authority, order, and personal property. “My father compensated through me,” Giuliani explained later. “In a very exaggerated way, he made sure that I didn’t repeat his mistakes in my life — which I thank him for, because it worked out.”
Giuliani went to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and was not only a good student but also an enthusiastic member and leader in student politics. After graduating in 1961, he went on to Manhattan College in the Bronx, where he graduated in 1965. Giuliani decided to become a lawyer after being inspired by his father’s incessant lectures on the significance of order and authority in society. He attended New York University Law School.
For the first time as a student, Giuliani excelled at NYU, graduating magna cum laude in 1968 and securing a coveted clerkship with Judge Lloyd MacMahon, a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. After being encouraged by Judge MacMahon, Giuliani relocated to Washington, D.C. to work for the United States Attorney’s Office. At the age of 29, he obtained his first major advancement when he was named attorney in charge of the police misconduct prosecutions emerging from the high-profile Knapp Commission.
Early Political Career
Giuliani left the US Attorney’s Office in 1977 to work in private practice in New York for four years with the firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler. Then, in 1981, he went to Washington to serve as President Ronald Reagan’s assistant attorney general, the Justice Department’s No. 3 position. Two years later, in 1983, Giuliani was named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, beginning his lifetime war against New York City’s endemic drug, violence, and organized crime problems.
During his six years as United States Attorney, Giuliani worked relentlessly to imprison drug dealers, prosecute white-collar criminals, and dismantle organized crime and government corruption. Giuliani’s 4,152 convictions (versus only 25 reversals) place him among the most effective United States Attorneys in American history. As a U.S. attorney, Giuliani also gained a reputation as a publicity seeker, publicly handcuffing mob bosses and corporate figures on trumped-up accusations just to quietly drop the charges later.
New York City Mayor
In 1989, Giuliani ran as a Republican for mayor of New York City against Democrat David Dinkins. Dinkins became the city’s first Black mayor after losing by a razor-thin margin in one of the closest mayoral elections in New York City history. Giuliani challenged Dinkins again four years later, in 1993.
With over one million New Yorkers on poverty, crime rates increasing, and an ever-worsening crack cocaine epidemic ravaging neighborhoods, the mild-mannered Dinkins had fallen out of favor, and a tough-on-crime prosecutor appeared to be precisely what the city needed, according to many. On January 1, 1994, Giuliani was elected as the 107th mayor of New York City.
Comparing himself to Winston Churchill’s leadership of London during the Blitz of 1940, Giuliani set out to solve New York’s issues with a zeal that bordered on brutality. During his first two years in office, his measures contributed to a one-third reduction in major crime and a half-cut in the city’s murder rate.
Police shootings plummeted by 40%, while occurrences of violence in city cells, which had seemed intractable, virtually vanished by the conclusion of his first term, plummeting by 95%. Giuliani’s highly successful “welfare-to-work” initiative assisted over 600,000 New Yorkers in finding jobs and achieving self-sufficiency.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a mayor committed to radically alter the way city politics functioned, Giuliani garnered nearly as many detractors as supporters. Minority leaders despised him for his emphasis on racial profiling in law enforcement, while liberals chastised him for failing to repair the city’s dysfunctional public education system.
“Civility” campaigns against jaywalking, street sellers, and public sponsorship of controversial art sparked popular outrage, and Giuliani even made headlines for threatening to kick the United Nations out of the city over unpaid parking charges.
In 1997, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the same condition that had killed his father, and began treatment, which sapped him of his customary strength. Although he was re-elected by a landslide that same year, by 2000, as his second term was coming to a conclusion, Giuliani’s popularity had plummeted dramatically, owing in part to what was perceived as the police’s racialized treatment of crime, which included stop and frisk methods.
Several high-profile instances emerged during this period: Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was attacked and cruelly tortured by a group of police officers in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct in August 1997. Then, in 1999, authorities fired at Amadou Diallo dozens of times outside his door while he was attempting to reach his money. Patrick Dorismond, another unarmed man, was slain by police outside a club in 2000.
September 11 Attacks
A catastrophe that horrified the globe and came to define Giuliani’s public career catapulted him into the international spotlight. Terrorists from al-Qaeda hijacked two commercial passenger jetliners and slammed them into the World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Both towers collapsed within hours of each other, killing 2,752 people. Many people were inspired by Giuliani’s leadership throughout the city’s crises.
Giuliani, who arrived on the site minutes after the second jet disaster, supervised rescue operations that saved up to 20,000 lives and emerged as the national voice of comfort and sorrow. “Tomorrow, New York will be here,” a solemn but determined Giuliani declared to the city, the nation, and the globe. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before… I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and to the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us.”
Nonetheless, years after leaving office, Giuliani was chastised for failing to ensure worker safety at the site of the 9/11 assault, often known as Ground Zero. Thousands of recovery workers have endured long-term health difficulties as a result of the Ground Zero cleaning, with reports indicating that the managerial emphasis was on efficiency and finishing jobs fast rather than adhering to government safety procedures. More than 10,000 workers eventually sued the city, resulting in a $600 million group settlement in 2010.
Politics and Business Ties
Giuliani will be remembered as one of New York City’s most iconic mayors, thanks in large part to his leadership in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He departed office on December 31, 2001, and was succeeded by Michael Bloomberg, whose election was virtually certain the moment Giuliani endorsed him.
In 2002, the former mayor founded the commercial firm Giuliani Partners, which has now grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with global links. However, the corporation has also drawn scrutiny and criticism for less-than-savory dealings, such as security/police training and real estate purchases for Qatar, an oil-rich Middle Eastern country suspected of having ties to terrorist organizations. Purdue Pharma, a business that paid $2 million in DEA fines for deceiving the public about opioid addictions, was a significant client of Giuliani Partners.
He competed for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and was an early favorite, but his campaign failed to gain traction, and he pulled out after coming third in the Florida primary. Giuliani supported Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.
Trump Ally and Lawyer
During reality show presenter and business executive Donald Trump‘s successful 2016 presidential campaign, Giuliani became a loud and occasionally caustic spokesperson. Following the election, the Trump supporter was thought to be in the running for a Cabinet job, but questions arose about the former mayor’s paid speeches and his company’s commercial relationships.
Giuliani did not join the Trump administration, but he did join the president’s legal team in April 2018, during the almost year-long special counsel inquiry into Russian meddling. With Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, under investigation and the team in need of a recharge, Giuliani added experience with special counsel Robert Mueller and a desire to expedite an inquiry that “needs a little push.” That same day, Giuliani’s legal company, Greenberg Traurig, announced that he would be on leave, and on May 10, Giuliani resigned from the business to focus solely on his work for Trump.
Giuliani instantly sent the media into a frenzy when he claimed that Trump was aware of Cohen’s alleged hush payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, despite the White House’s protestations. He then made several statements that raised eyebrows, including his unfounded claim that Mueller’s investigation would conclude on September 1 and his insistence that the president possessed “broad powers” that allowed him to both end the special counsel investigation and potentially pardon himself of any wrongdoing.
Giuliani addressed the start of Iranian protests and the Trump administration’s objective for regime change in a July 2018 speech to the National Council of Resistance of Iran. “Just a few months ago, the president of the United States — about whom there’s a lot of controversy, whether he should tweet or not — took out his little phone and he tweeted, and he supported the protesters, like Ronald Reagan did for the protesters in Poland when Solidarity marched against Communism,” he said. “What happened over there?” Communism was defeated. Poland is a free country. The Iron Curtain disintegrated. And the Berlin Wall was demolished. That will happen right now.”
Involvement in Ukraine
House Democrats initiated an investigation in September 2019 into whether Trump and Giuliani attempted to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 presidential contender Joe Biden. Giuliani admitted to meeting with Ukrainian officials, but only at the request of the US State Department.
The next month, two of Giuliani’s allies, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were detained for breaking campaign funding regulations. It was stated that the two businessmen were involved in efforts to obtain material in Ukraine that would hamper Mueller’s inquiry as well as information that would be damaging to Biden’s presidential campaign.
Personal Life
Giuliani has had three marriages. He married his second cousin, Regina Peruggi, accidently in 1968, and the marriage was annulled in 1982. He married television personality Donna Hanover the same year. While Giuliani was mayor, Hanover and Giuliani became separated, and Giuliani moved out of the mayor’s house at Gracie Mansion, where Hanover and his children remained, to live in an apartment owned by two of his friends. (During a Giuliani TV press appearance, Hanover heard that her husband was planned to divorce her.)
While still mayor and still married to Hanover, Giuliani began an affair with Judith Nathan, who became an increasingly prominent and public figure in his life during the tragedy of his prostate cancer and the September 11 attacks. Giuliani and Hanover divorced in 2002, and in 2003, Giuliani married Nathan.
After 15 years of marriage, Judith filed for divorce in April 2018. “It is with great sadness that I inform you that Judith and I have decided to divorce.” “We hope to do this as amicably as possible, and that people will respect our children’s privacy at this time,” Giuliani said. Despite allegations that the proceedings were anything but cordial, the two parties negotiated a private settlement in December 2019.