He busted the Mob
What kind of president would Giuliani be?
Look at his legal career, associates say

By Joelle Farrell
Monitor staff

December 26. 2007

http://www.concordmonitor.com

Before he was elected mayor of New York City in 1992 and before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made him a national symbol, Rudy Giuliani had cemented his reputation as a crusading prosecutor who took on the Mafia and won. During his tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani managed an office that sent three of the five leading members of the five Mafia families to prison for 100 years, fulfilling his promise that "the Mafia will be crushed."

At a time when the country was struggling free of a recession, with crime and crack cocaine use growing in many cities, Giuliani became "a high-profile, white-hatted gangbuster in an age when the public yearns for someone to prove that crime doesn't pay," Richard Stengel wrote in Time.

Giuliani has spent the bulk of his public life prosecuting criminals, and had he not moved into politics, he would have been best remembered for helping to gut the Mafia's operations in New York. He presided over two large criminal cases and one civil case intended to shake the Mafia's hold over the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the nation's largest union.

"He's the most prominent organized crime prosecutor in this century," said Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who drafted the anti-racketeering law that Giuliani and his associates used to prosecute the Mafia.

"It was huge - this was one of the greatest cases of American law enforcement history," said James Jacobs, a law professor at New York University who wrote Busting the Mob. "Giuliani didn't get enough credit for this, even when he was mayor."

The characteristics that made Giuliani a successful prosecutor - his doggedness, his black-and-white vision of right and wrong, his willingness to step on toes to achieve the end result - influence the way he operates in politics. If you want to know what kind of president Giuliani might make, look at his legal career, several former associates said.

"The qualities of leadership, integrity, informing themselves about the facts before making a decision - sometimes that's a real premium in Washington," said Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI who was a federal prosecutor under Giuliani and now works for his campaign. "Not to be afraid to make the right decision, and not afraid to make the decision even if it may have unpleasant consequences."

"He's strong-willed, a strong leader with definite ideas with how he wishes to proceed," said Walter Mack, a lawyer who headed the Southern District's organized crime division under Giuliani. "He's high energy, high ethics, high integrity, very intelligent and perceptive."

And while he has succeeded in politics, Giuliani said his heart lies in prosecuting. "If you had offered me one job in government, I would not have said mayor, I would not have said president," Giuliani

told The New York Times recently. "I would have said prosecutor. It's really an ideal job for an idealistic man: You never have to do the wrong thing."

Young lion

In 1983, Giuliani, 38, was the youngest associate attorney general in history. He had been appointed to the third-highest position in the Department of Justice under President Reagan, where he supervised all of the U.S. attorney offices' federal law enforcement agencies, the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. Marshals.

By then, he'd already worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the prestigious Southern District of New York. When the top job at the office opened up, Giuliani decided to return to New York.

While some saw the move as a step down in his career, Giuliani saw it as an opportunity to shine, according to Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett's book, Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani. And his connections in Washington, D.C., paid off when he needed last-minute approvals for wiretaps and other investigative techniques.

Giuliani asked his assistant attorneys to focus on four areas of crime: public corruption, white-collar crime, drugs and organized crime. Giuliani used his position as a bully pulpit - he courted the press, speaking in sound bites and frequently holding press conferences. To the annoyance of defense attorneys and some judges, he leaked secret grand jury reports to the press, according to The New York Times and other New York newspapers. He also popularized the "perp walk" - leading a handcuffed defendant in front of reporters and photographers. He used the technique to shame white-collar criminals, and it became the subject of many articles in law review journals.

The gusto with which he pursued cases against drug-dealers, stockbrokers and made men earned him comparisons to Eliot Ness, who helped prosecute Al Capone, and Tom Dewey, who relentlessly prosecuted New York mobsters in the early 20th century. Giuliani expected much of himself and his attorneys, and his energy infused the office.

"He is so smart and so driven," said Randy Mastro, a federal prosecutor in the Southern District who became Giuliani's deputy mayor. "He's a guy who really does go 24/7, maybe needed three or four hours of sleep. It was not unusual to get calls in the middle of the night."

Under Giuliani, the Southern District secured 4,152 convictions, with only 25 reversals. The office prosecuted three of the largest tax-fraud cases in U.S. history and prosecuted more insider-trading cases in one year than at any time in history.

Wielding RICO

But it was the prosecutions of "La Cosa Nostra" - literally "our thing" or "our work" in Italian - that shined the national spotlight on Giuliani.

The grandson of Italian immigrants had a special aversion to a group that bullied businesses and besmirched the reputation of Italian immigrants. The Mafia had a stranglehold on several New York City industries, including waste hauling and construction. Mafia associates bragged that not a yard of concrete was laid in the city without their approval. And a Mafia-run cartel inflated trash removal costs by as much as 40 percent; New York City schools, hospitals, and businesses were paying three times more for waste removal than businesses in Los Angeles or Chicago, according to The New York Times.

Before Giuliani took office, law enforcement officials had made significant gains in the fight against organized crime. Most of the Mafia's top leaders in all the major cities had been indicted or convicted.

But even with its bosses imprisoned, the Mafia continued to operate. The FBI had conducted aggressive wiretapping and undercover operations and were sitting on a pile of evidence when Giuliani took office.

The RICO Act - the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act - was designed as a tool for prosecuting the mob, Blakey said. Before it was written in 1970, Mafia members were prosecuted like anyone else: one charge at a time, without regard to a criminal enterprise that drove the criminal activity.

"You couldn't say the word 'Mafia' in court; you'd get a mistrial," Blakey said.

The RICO statute allowed prosecutors to seek longer prison sentences by showing the existence of a criminal enterprise linked to the individual crimes the Mafia perpetrated. It also allowed them to prosecute those who act to further the enterprise, not just those who commit the crimes.

While the act had been used with some success, Blakey felt it could be applied more aggressively. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he visited U.S. attorneys in New York and other cities where organized crime existed, but had little success getting through to them. People saw him as an academic out of touch with the way prosecuting worked in the real world, he said,

But Giuliani welcomed him, asking him to hold meetings with his assistant attorneys to explain the law, he said.

"Giuliani had an open mind; he was willing to press the envelope," Blakey said. "Prosecutors are very conservative. They don't like to do new things, and Giuliani was different. He was willing to do something if he thought it would make a difference."

Giuliani said he "dreamed up" the idea to use the RICO Act to prosecute the Mafia leadership after he read the memoir of mobster Joe Bonanno. All five Mafia families in New York were linked by a commission that oversaw and controlled the operations.

Giuliani's predecessor in the U.S. attorney's office, John Martin, disputes this. In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, he said the seeds for the commission prosecution were discussed between prosecutors and FBI officials a full year before Giuliani took office. And much of the wiretapping and undercover operations that built the evidence Giuliani used were gathered before he got there.

Giuliani is credited with pioneering the use of the RICO Act in civil cases, and he used it to break the Mafia's control of the Teamsters. Given the Teamsters' influence on politics, it was an unpopular move. The Teamsters had endorsed President Reagan. In the late 1980s, 245 members of Congress signed a petition urging Giuliani not to bring the Teamsters case, said Mastro, the lead prosecutor on the case.

But Giuliani wasn't swayed.

"If he believed it was the right decision, he would make the call without worrying about politics," Freeh said. "He was completely apolitical, and that's what we want our U.S. attorneys to be."

The lawsuit brought a historic settlement requiring the nation's largest union to hold elections with secret ballots and be overseen by three court-appointed watchdogs in order to rid the union of the Mafia's influence.

Regardless of whether he invented the techniques, Giuliani used the RICO Act in ways other prosecutors hadn't. And he helped shepherd the cases already in play when he took office.

The 'pizza connection'

Before the prosecution of the New York Mafia leaders, Giuliani took part in a case known as the "pizza connection," which involved an international heroin ring housed in U.S. pizza shops in New York and other cities. In April 1984, federal agents arrested 31 suspects charged with smuggling at least 330 pounds of heroin worth $1.65 billion into the United States over the course of five years.

Although the case was prosecuted in New York, evidence and witnesses were scattered across the world. The heroin came from Afghanistan. The Sicilian Mafia led the operation, and the top suspect, Gaetano Badalamenti, was arrested in Madrid.

Freeh had been working on the case for at least a year before Giuliani took office. But Freeh was a junior prosecutor then, and he sought Giuliani's advice.

Giuliani helped Freeh negotiate the extradition of Badalamenti.

"Rudy got on the plane with me, he got into the weeds of the case," Freeh said in an interview this month. "The visit so impressed the Italians, they saw us coming over to help, not just asking for things."

Freeh added, "It was logical that that we would want to align ourselves with the Italian police, but that had never been done before. . . . That relationship exists today almost uniquely. There is no other country with which we had the same intimate law enforcement and prosecutorial relationship."

Giuliani offered protection to Italian witnesses, and his cooperation with Italian authorities yielded a breakthrough later that year: Law enforcement officials uncovered an arm of the Sicilian Mafia operating in the U.S. independently of American organized crime.

The pizza connection trial stretched on for 17 months, which was at the time the longest criminal trial in federal court in history. Freeh secured 18 convictions with one acquittal.

U.S. Attorney General William French Smith called the pizza connection "the single most devastating assault on the Mafia in its entire history," according to news accounts.

But Blakey said Giuliani's best move against the Mafia was still to come.

"The pizza connection is retail," he said. "The commission is wholesale."

The commission

Like the pizza connection, the roots of the commission case existed before Giuliani took office. Ronald Goldstock, head of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, met with Giuliani soon after he took office to tell him about recordings he'd collecting from a bugging device installed in a reputed mobster's car, according to Barrett, author of the Giuliani biography. Goldstock, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told Giuliani that the mobster referred to a Mafia "commission." The FBI had also planted a bug in the home of Paul Castellano, who ran the commission, according to Barrett.

Giuliani dedicated many of his assistants to review FBI surveillance and comb through Senate hearings to find more mention of a commission.

Giuliani and his assistants compiled a chart that laid out the leadership of the five families of New York: the Colombo family, headed by Carmine Persico; the Gambino family, the largest family, led by Castellano; the Luchese family, led by Antonio "Tony Ducks" Corallo; the Bonanno family, led by Philip "Rusty" Rastelli; and the Genovese family, led by Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno.

Armed with surveillance tapes and testimony from witnesses and former Mafia members who worked with prosecutors, Giuliani indicted the commission members.

"You didn't just take out the head of the hierarchy, you took out the whole family," Mastro said.

On Feb. 25, 1985, 50 major Mob leaders were arrested and brought before cameras at the Southern District offices on Foley Square. Castellano, the most powerful boss hauled in that night, was brought to an office that overlooked the square, where Giuliani was talking to reporters.

"Isn't that Giuliani?" Castellano asked the FBI agents, according to Barrett's book.

"Well, if you've got to get f---ed, it might as well be by a paisan," Castellano said.

Giuliani had worked for 27 days with little sleep to seal up the commission case. On Feb. 26, Giuliani held a press conference announcing the arrests. He brought charts that showed the family structure. At least 100 reporters packed the room, and Giuliani delivered a line that would stick with him throughout his career.

"This is a great day for law enforcement, but a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia," Giuliani said.

The commission had allegedly discussed whether or not to kill Giuliani, according to testimony in the October trial of a retired FBI supervisor.

"Giuliani won by one vote," Mastro said.

Mack said that while all prosecutors face threats when prosecuting high-level cases, the Mafia typically avoids killing law enforcement officials, preferring not to draw attention to its operations.

Giuliani allegedly faced numerous threats on his life when he was forming the case against the mob, but he doesn't often speak publicly about them

After a town hall meeting in Durham last month, Giuliani talked about one "hit" that had been put out on him.

"One of the big embarrassments that I had in my life was when I began as a United States attorney, there was an $800,000 contract to kill me," he told reporters. "And when I left, somebody put out a contract for only $400,000. And I thought that I had lost value over a period of time."

Handing off

U.S. attorneys typically have too many responsibilities overseeing the office's cases and managing the attorneys to spend much time prosecuting cases themselves. Giuliani supervised 130 attorneys, but he still managed to try several cases, including six appeals, according to his book, Leadership. He also intended to try the commission case himself.

But when a more difficult case involving public corruption developed, Giuliani decided to leave the commission case to a young assistant, Michael Chertoff, who is now the U.S. secretary of homeland security.

Chertoff won eight convictions, putting three of the bosses away for 100 years: Salerno, Corallo and Persico. Castellano never made it through the trial: He was gunned down in front of a steakhouse. Rastelli was convicted and imprisoned on an earlier charge. Several under-bosses were also convicted in the commission case.

Giuliani was close to the commission case, but the evidence was strong (much of it was on tape). The corruption case, a racketeering case against Bronx Democratic boss Stanley Friedman, had an accomplice as a key witness, a tougher sell to a jury and therefore a harder conviction, Giuliani wrote in Leadership. He thought his skills as a trial lawyer were of better use in that case.

"Part of any leader's responsibility is recognizing his limitations," Giuliani wrote. "But another part is trusting those who work for you. Wonderful as it would have been to try both cases, it would have been devastating - not just for me, but for the people of the Southern District of New York - to lose either because I couldn't dedicate my best effort."

Giuliani prosecuted the case against Friedman and four co-defendants for a racketeering scheme to win a $22.7 million Parking Violations Bureau contract for hand-held computers. Friedman was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

It was during the Friedman case that Giuliani said he first thought to run for office.

"It occurred to me that I could do even more to fight public corruption if I were mayor," he wrote.







This ALIPAC member has posted this entity be it editorial opinion, news article, column, or web creation as information for the General Population (public) only. It is not intended as an endorsement for this candidate by this poster. Its use here has not been anticipated to be used as, or used to discredit any candidate mentioned herewith.