Before becoming mayor, Giuliani was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Deputy US Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. He frog-marched dodgy bankers on trading floors, to the delight of everyone but Wall Street and political libertarians. As mayor, Giuliani ran the city as only a former prosecutor could. He demanded loyalty and did not dissolve disagreements. Andrew Kirtzman’s first biography was called Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City. In his second, the author describes an “authoritarian” mayor. According to her sister, the mayor’s mother, Helen Giuliani, “liked” Mussolini. Her husband, Harold, was a henchman and leg breaker for the mob and spent time in prison at Sing Sing. Under Giuliani, New Yorkers felt safer than they would have under Bill de Blasio or, now, Eric Adams. But Giuliani exuded contempt for the city’s minorities and lacked the temperament, capacity for consensus and deep pockets of Michael Bloomberg, his billionaire successor. Too often, Giuliani just acted like a thug. After 9/11, he ran for president, made money as a lawyer, and then became a fancy Trump. Now, thanks to his work to promote the former president’s big lie about voter fraud, he is being targeted by prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, and his law license has been suspended. Consider a villainous Inspector Clouseau. Giuliani transformed into a thug, a villainous Inspector Clouseau Obviously, Giuliani is aware of his decline. On the other hand, he has said: “I don’t care about my heritage. I’ll be dead.” This passage leads to Kirtzman’s introduction. As a reporter at NY1, Time Warner’s 24-hour local cable news channel, Kirtzman covered Giuliani from the campaign trail to the town hall. On September 11, 2001, he was there with the mayor in Lower Manhattan. He watched Giuliani’s steps, his mistakes, and his spectacular downfall. Kirtzman’s new subtitle, The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, says it all. The book is masterful and fascinating. Surrounded by over 40 pages of endnotes. The author and David Holley, his researcher, have done a great job. They record what made the man tick and what led to his fall from grace. Kirzman’s review is full of bittersweet impressions and references to Giuliani’s achievements. On election night 2020 and beyond, the former mayor helped Trump defy the will of the people. The social fabric was theirs to set on fire and shred. Giuliani’s self-righteousness praised Trump’s refusal to concede defeat. The soon-to-be former president offered Giuliani another chance to take center stage. If Trump didn’t name him secretary of state, he could at least play presidential lawyer. Kirtzman’s book ranks with other seminal biographies such as Rudy! by the late and great investigative reporter Wayne Barrett and the more favorable The Prince of the City by Fred Siegel, an urban historian and Giuliani adviser. Kirzman gets Judith Nathan, Giuliani’s third ex-wife, to really clean up the dirt. He says Giuliani’s crushing failure in the 2008 presidential primary left him broke and holding the bottle. Credits Trump for providing sanctuary. “We moved to Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” she says. As Kirtzman says, Giuliani “dreamed of being president from a young age. [but] blew his big moment when it arrived.” In the horrific aftermath, he talked to therapists, but, to quote Nathan, “he always fell flat on his face somewhere.” The couple have separated but their animosity continues to smolder. Characteristically, Giuliani has given a different explanation for his stumbles and falls. He played baseball as a youth and developed “catcher’s knee.” Does anyone really believe Giuliani was ever a budding Yogi Berra? Anthony Carbonetti, Giuliani’s chief of staff at City Hall, is also a family friend. He also spoke to Kirtzman, targeting Nathan while delivering a backhanded defense of his former boss. He told Nathan to “get the hell out” of Giuliani’s life. To Kirtzman, he says, “If you spent too much time with this woman, you would drink too much.” Giuliani holds a press conference in November 2020. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images Carbonetti became a conduit between Trump and Giuliani… and, along with other members of Giuliani’s entourage, lobbied for Qatar. As Kirtzman makes clear, Giuliani was never zealous. For Trump, he sought to become a second Roy Cohn, Trump’s all-time favorite lawyer. From looking for dirt on Ukraine to falsely blaming Dominion Voting Systems for Trump’s defeat, Giuliani has done it all. His capacity for self-deprecation was bottomless. In the aftermath of the January 6 riot, Maria Ryan, an associate of Giuliani, asked for a pardon and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also tried to pay him. It failed. Giuliani forgot that even when Cohn was in the hospital, dying of AIDS, Trump sidelined him. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,” Cohn said. “Donald pisses the ice water.” Giuliani has testified before a Fulton County grand jury and a House committee on Jan. 6. He is a defendant in defamation lawsuits brought by Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting machine company. In Trumpworld, Maga stands for Make America Great Again. It can also mean “Making lawyers become lawyers”. Kirtzman’s biography sums things up. Still, two years after the 2020 election he refused to concede, Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. “Giuliani, on the other hand, [is] end by any means possible.”
