Governor Spitzer may have identified himself as a steamroller in his attempts to accomplish certain executive tasks, but he's got nothing on the former federal prosecutor and Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. The NY Times has a colorful profile of the the former Mayor as a man who used his offices as bludgeons, crushing anyone who crossed him.
When a chauffeur called into the Mayor's weekly radio show in 1997, saying that the cops had established a sting operation near the Bronx Zoo, police came days later to arrest him and mentioning charges of sodomy. “Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.” It eventually ended in a nearly $300,000 settlement with the city for police harassment, but Schilalaci suffered a nervous breakdown.
After public disputes with former Mayors, Giuliani had portraits of Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins removed from the walls of City Hall. Even Koch, who is historically portrayed as one of the most good-natured of politicians, recently wrote a book about Giuliani titled "Nasty Man." Koch jokes (kind of) that Giuliani was ready to throw his portrait onto a bonfire, along with the First Amendment to the Constitution.
And in a bit of procedural nastiness, Mayor Giuliani formed a Charter Revision Committee in 1999 to prevent then-Public Advocate Mark Green from succeeding him as Mayor if he was elected to the U.S. Senate. (A bout with cancer caused Giuliani to bow out of that race.) The candidate's now banking on a political remission in the Florida primary – a state with a high population of retired New Yorkers – to salvage his sputtering presidential campaign; senior citizens in the Sunshine State had better vote Rudy or suffer the consequences – we're pretty sure sodomy's illegal there, too.
Speaking of sodomy, what are your memories of the Giuliani administration?
