Rudy Lied to a Grand Jury and his
Best Friend has been Indicted!!!
And How is President Bush Connected?!!!
This article has been prepared from excerpts from a New
York Times article wriiten by Michael Powell and other sources
We are astounded! Almost everyone connected in some
way to the Bush administration is also in trouble with the Law. The Republican
Congress prior to last year when the Democrats took over ran the Government like their own
personal cash register and took money when they pleased.
A large number of Republican Senators and Congressmen are
guilty of Adultry. The majority of the Republican Candidates for president have been
married several times and started seeing their spouses while still married. We are
getting the impressions that most Republican politicians have the morals of an alley
cat!!!
It looks like Rudy Giuliani is even worse. He seems
to be in several ways in bed with the New York Mob. He has committed Adultry not
once but numerous times. He has allegedly lied to a Grand Jury. He seems to be
a clone of George Bush where loyalty takes the place of common sense.
Now we have the case of his best friend - Bernard Kerik.
In December 2004, President Bush nominated Mr. Kerik, a
former New York police commissioner, to head the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Seven days later, Mr. Kerik withdrew as a nominee.
A cascade of questions followed about his judgment as a
public official, not least that he had inappropriately lobbied city officials on behalf of
Interstate Industrial, a construction firm suspected of links to organized crime. Mr.
Giuliani defended Mr. Kerik, a friend and business partner, whom he had recommended to the
Bush administration. But he also tried to shield himself from accusations that he had
ignored Mr. Kerik’s failings.
“I was not informed of it,” Mr. Giuliani said
then, when asked if he had been warned about Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Interstate
before appointing him to the police post in 2000.
Mr. Giuliani amended that statement last year in
testimony to a state grand jury. He acknowledged that the city investigations
commissioner, Edward J. Kuriansky, had told him that he had been briefed at least once.
The former mayor said, though, that neither he nor any of his aides could recall being
briefed about Mr. Kerik’s involvement with the company.
But a review of Mr. Kuriansky’s diaries, and
investigators’ notes from a 2004 interview with him, now indicate that such a session
indeed took place. What is more, Mr. Kuriansky also recalled briefing one of Mr.
Giuliani’s closest aides, Dennison Young Jr., about Mr. Kerik’s entanglements
with the company just days before the police appointment, according to the diaries he
compiled at the time and his later recollection to the investigators.
The additional evidence raises questions not only about
the precision of Mr. Giuliani’s recollection, but also about how a man who proclaims
his ability to pick leaders came to overlook a jumble of disturbing information about Mr.
Kerik, even as he pushed him for two crucial government positions.
“Rudy can fall for people big time, and sometimes
qualifications are secondary to loyalty,” said Fran Reiter, a former Giuliani deputy
mayor who now supports Hillary Clinton. “If he gets it in his head he trusts you, he
is extremely loyal.”
Mr. Giuliani has routinely met loyalty with loyalty,
standing by political allies and friends in their darkest hours. Giuliani Partners, for
example, his consulting firm, employs a high school friend, Msgr. Alan Placa, despite
allegations that he sexually molested young men years ago.
Mr. Giuliani has said he believes in his friend, who has
denied the allegations.
In Mr. Kerik’s case, by the time Mr. Giuliani
recommended him for the federal job, his administration knew that Mr. Kerik had acted on
behalf of Interstate Industrial. It also knew that he had drawn criticism for a range of
other incidents, from sending detectives to search for his lover’s cellphone to using
officers to research his autobiography.
Mr. Kerik, who declined to speak about his troubles, has
been indicted on a range of federal felony charges, including tax evasion and bribery,
stemming in part from his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment
paid for by Interstate. In June 2006, he pleaded guilty in the Bronx to state
misdemeanor charges relating to the same renovations.
UPDATE: Nov. 9: One of Rudy
Giuliani's closest allies turns himself into authorities after being indicted on federal
felony charges.
Ex-NYC police commissioner pleads not guilty
Kerik faces federal corruption charges; embarrassment
for Giuliani
WHITE PLAINS, N. Y. - Fri., Nov. 9, 2007 NBC's Michelle
Franzen reports: Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded not guilty
Friday to federal corruption charges.
Kerik, the police commissioner under then-Mayor Rudy
Giuliani and a failed nominee for homeland security secretary, was indicted by a federal
grand jury Thursday on 16 counts including conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and lying to
the IRS. Authorities say that over a six-year period, from 1999 through 2004, Kerik failed
to report more than $500,000 in income.
He
surrendered earlier Friday to the FBI in suburban White Plains, where he was fingerprinted
and processed before his court appearance.
Kerik's case could prove to be an ongoing embarrassment for
Giuliani, a Republican presidential candidate.
During a presidential campaign stop Thursday in Dubuque, Iowa, Giuliani was asked whether
he still stood by Kerik. He sidestepped that question and said the issue had to be decided
by the courts.
"A
lot of public comment about it is inconsistent with its getting resolved in the right way
in the courts," Giuliani said.
The
ex-mayor frequently says that he made a mistake in recommending Kerik to be Homeland
Security chief, but that might not be enough to avoid the political damage of a drawn-out
criminal case involving his one-time protege.
A former
undercover police officer with a bodybuilder's physique and a knack for charming people in
high places, Kerik has been hit with a string of revelations about personal and
professional improprieties.
His
nomination was confronted with news reports about stock-option windfalls, his connections
with people suspected of doing business with the mob and overlapping extramarital affairs
with two women: Judith Regan, the publisher of his memoir, and a city correction officer.
The liaisons reportedly occurred in an apartment near ground zero that had been set aside
for rescue workers.
Kerik, 51,
who married his current wife in 1998 and has two children with her, apparently became
close with Regan while writing "The Lost Son," in which he described being
abandoned by his prostitute mother.
Meteoric Rise
Kerik rose from cop to Giuliani's correction commissioner in the late 1990s. From there,
he became police commissioner and later went to work in Iraq rebuilding the country's
police force.
Then came
the failed Homeland Security nomination. Democrats who opposed the nomination focused on
Kerik's recent windfall from exercising stock options in a stun-gun company that did
business with the department. His take: $6.2 million.
Days after
Bush introduced Kerik as his nominee, Kerik announced he was withdrawing his name because
of tax issues involving his former nanny. But by then, state investigators were already
aware of the expensive renovations done to his Bronx apartment in 1999, including built-in
cabinets and a rotunda with a marble entryway. They alleged the work was paid for by
Mafia-connected builders who sought his help winning city contracts.
Giuliani
was forced to testify before a state grand jury in a case that resulted in Kerik pleading
guilty last year to accepting illegal gifts while on the city payroll. The plea spared
Kerik jail time and preserved his new career as a security consultant, but his name was
quietly removed from a downtown jail named in his honor.
The state
case is not over: Two brothers who run the construction firm have pleaded not guilty to
charges they lied to the grand jury about their relationship with Kerik.
In the
past 18 months, a federal grand jury took up the tax case, quizzing another parade of
witnesses. They included a commercial real estate developer who picked up the
$9,000-a-month tab for a luxury Upper East Side apartment that Kerik lived in around the
time he left the police department in 2001.
The
federal case also involved allegations that former Westchester County District Attorney
Jeanine Pirro tried to recruit Kerik to eavesdrop on her husband, whom she suspected of
having an affair, in 2005. But authorities have indicated that no charges would arise from
the encounter.
Earlier
this year, Kerik had committed to work as a national security adviser in Guyana and
Trinidad, but had to pull out. The president of Guyana said he did not want either country
"tainted" by the corruption allegations in the United States.
Mr. Giuliani, who declined to comment, still vigorously
defends Mr. Kerik’s performance as police commissioner. He told the grand jury that
Mr. Kuriansky concluded that nothing in Mr. Kerik’s background, including his ties to
Interstate, precluded his appointment as police commissioner.
But Mr. Giuliani now acknowledges that he should have
re-examined his friend before recommending him to the White House and that his
recommendation had indeed been a mistake.
In 2000, more than half the mayor’s cabinet had
opposed Mr. Kerik’s appointment to be police commissioner. His detractors had noted,
among other concerns, that Mr. Kerik did not have a college degree, a department
requirement at the time for captains and above.
Mr. Giuliani waved off the dissenters. “I believe
that the skill I have developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great
people,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, “Leadership.” 
“Too many leaders overlook candidates with unusual
résumés because of a failure of nerve,” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “By the time I
appointed Bernie Kerik, I had hired so many people that I was immune to such
criticisms.”
Kerik's Rise to Power
The men who would become patron and protégé first met
at a fund-raiser in 1990 in New Jersey honoring a slain New York City police officer.
Mr. Kerik was a comic book hero come to life, a decorated
undercover detective with a ponytail and earrings, thick biceps and a taste for
four-letter words as nouns, verbs and adjectives. He cultivated relationships with
powerful people, including an influential sheriff who five years earlier had made him the
youngest jail warden in the history of Passaic County, N.J.
When Mr. Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, Mr. Kerik
organized his security detail of off-duty officers, reserving the weekend shift for
himself.
When Mr. Giuliani became mayor, he gave Mr. Kerik a job
in the Correction Department. A year later, the mayor asked him to drop by Gracie Mansion.
The two men sat upstairs and shared a bottle of red wine,
a gift to the mayor from Nelson Mandela. Mr. Giuliani said he planned to appoint Mr. Kerik
as first deputy correction commissioner.
Mr. Kerik, who wrote of this in his autobiography,
“The Lost Son,” was taken aback; he was a year removed from being a police
detective.
“Mayor, I appreciate your confidence in me, I really
do,” he said. “But I ran a jail. One jail. Rikers is like 10 jails.”
Just do it, the mayor replied.
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.”
Mr. Kerik was named correction commissioner in 1997. He
brooked no slacking. He startled sleepy wardens by walking cellblocks at 2 a.m. Violence
plummeted, and he basked in good press.
Behind the scenes Mr. Kerik ruled like a feudal lord,
many former employees have said. He had taken up with a woman who was a correction
officer; he was accused of directing officers to staff his wedding. He befriended the
agency’s inspector general, whose watchdog responsibilities require keeping an
arm’s-length relationship, and the investigator attended his wedding.
As the years passed, one of his top deputies was
convicted of taking $142,000 from a Correction Department charity that Mr. Kerik headed.
Another deputy, Anthony S. Serra, became a warden at Rikers Island even after he was
accused of coercing officers to work on Republican campaigns. He was later convicted of
forcing staff members to do campaign work and dispatching officers to renovate his upstate
home.
Kerik and Guiliani's Ties to
Organized Crime
Mr. Kerik earned $150,500 as commissioner but pleaded
poverty. He turned to Lawrence V. Ray, a friend of a few years, who had an engaging manner
and a big bankroll.
In 1998, Mr. Ray was the best man at Mr. Kerik’s
wedding — and paid for much of the event. Weeks later, Mr. Kerik recommended Mr. Ray
for a $100,000 job with Interstate Industrial Corporation, a New Jersey-based construction
firm with tens of millions of dollars in city contracts.
Two years earlier, the owners, Peter and Frank DiTommaso,
had paid more than $1 million to buy a transfer station from Edward Garafola, a mob
soldier, and hoped to obtain a city operating license. But city investigators had found
that the company employed mob figures and used mob-controlled trucking firms.
The DiTommasos, who adamantly and repeatedly have denied
any ties to organized crime, hoped Mr. Ray could help resolve their problem with the
Giuliani administration. Soon after being hired, Mr. Ray took Frank DiTommaso to meet with
his friend the correction commissioner.
Mr. DiTommaso recalled the moment for city investigators:
“Mr. Ray walked into the office, unannounced, just walked right in; Mr. Kerik got up
and came around the desk and give him a big hug and a kiss.”
Within months, Interstate had hired Mr. Kerik’s
brother and the commissioner had begun lobbying behind the scenes for Interstate.
One night in July 1999, he sat in Walker’s, a bar in
downtown Manhattan, defending Interstate to Raymond V. Casey, a cousin of Mayor Giuliani
who was chief of enforcement for the city commission that was reviewing Interstate’s
license application. Later that year Mr. Kerik telephoned an assistant commissioner at the
Department of Investigation to say that Interstate’s owners, as far as he knew, were
clean of mob taint, according to a person familiar with her account.
And that September he had city detectives investigating
the company meet Mr. Ray in his city office, a location that underlined for the men that
the company had powerful friends.
The lobbying stopped on March 2, 2000, when Mr. Ray and
Mr. Garafola, the mob soldier, were indicted on federal charges in an unrelated stock
scheme. Top Giuliani officials suspended Interstate’s $85 million in city contracts.
Three weeks later, Mr. Kerik sat down for a nearly
two-hour interview with top officials at the Department of Investigation. He talked about
his relationship with Mr. Ray and the DiTommasos, about the hiring of his brother and the
meeting at Walker’s.
He neglected to mention a key fact: Interstate was paying
for $165,000 worth of renovations on his new apartment in the Bronx.
Mr. Giuliani’s Choice
That July, Police Commissioner Howard Safir said he
intended to resign. Mr. Giuliani narrowed the field of candidates to two: Chief of
Department Joseph P. Dunne and Mr. Kerik, the correction commissioner, who had spent eight
years as a police officer.
Mr. Kuriansky, the investigation commissioner, oversaw
the background checks. The agency is designed to be semi-independent, but Mr. Giuliani had
torn down that wall, senior investigators said, appointing friends like Mr. Kuriansky as
commissioner and having them attend his morning meetings.
Mr. Kuriansky, a former special prosecutor, knew that Mr.
Kerik had intervened on behalf of a firm suspected of mob ties and that the
commissioner’s brother and best friend worked for the company.
But he did not know that Interstate had paid to renovate
Mr. Kerik’s apartment. And records indicate Mr. Kuriansky did not think the known
record was enough to disqualify Mr. Kerik.
On July 27 that year, according to Mr. Kuriansky’s
diaries and his later recollection, he briefed the mayor and Mr. Young, Mr.
Giuliani’s close aide, on Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Mr. Ray and Interstate.
Handwritten notes, taken by a city investigator during a
December 2004 interview with Mr. Kuriansky, described his recollection: “Meet with RG
& DY, discuss BK background review, Ray issue.”
Mr. Kuriansky’s diaries say he conducted a similar
briefing for Mr. Young on Aug. 14, 2000, five days before Mr. Kerik’s appointment.
Later, in his conversation with city investigators, Mr. Kuriansky summed up what he had
related to Mr. Young: “Ray connection to BK, Ray was best man, brother worked at IS -
all reported to DY.”
Mr. Young, through a spokeswoman, declined to be
interviewed.
Last year before the grand jury, Mr. Giuliani said that
he recalled receiving a briefing on Mr. Kerik’s background, but that neither he nor
his aides remembered delving into Interstate or Mr. Ray. Even Mr. Kuriansky had trouble
recalling the briefings, he said.
Mr. Kuriansky died in July. He refused numerous interview
requests before his death and never explained why he did not seem more troubled by Mr.
Kerik’s entanglements with Interstate, which seem to violate city conflict of
interest rules.
On Aug. 19, 2000, Mr. Giuliani decided the job was Mr.
Kerik’s, saying that he saw a fiercely loyal man with natural leadership ability. One
Giuliani aide who attended some of the meetings on the choice said he never knew of Mr.
Kuriansky’s findings and does not believe the mayor would have overlooked such a
problem.
“Had any of us known of Bernie’s relationship
to Interstate, it would have demolished him as a candidate,” said the former
official. “It’s kind of mind-boggling.”
Trouble in Paradise
Mr. Kerik’s 16-month tenure as police commissioner
generally drew plaudits. Crime fell, relations with black leaders improved and Mr.
Kerik’s ties to Mr. Giuliani grew tighter, to the point where he named the mayor the
godfather of his daughter.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Kerik surrounded himself with
police and correction buddies. When his book publisher and lover, Judith
Regan, believed someone had stolen her cellphone and a piece of her jewelry, a Kerik
aide dispatched elite homicide detectives to question suspects.
In researching his book, Mr. Kerik sent officers to
investigate his mother’s death, an abuse for which the city’s Conflict of
Interest Board later fined him $2,500.
None of the ethics problems seriously damaged Mr. Kerik,
though, and when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, Mr. Kerik won public acclaim,
largely because he displayed steady resolve at Mr. Giuliani’s side.
Three years later, after his federal nomination was
withdrawn, it was discovered that he had used an apartment originally set aside for weary
rescue workers at ground zero as a nest for an extramarital affair with Ms. Regan.
After Mr. Giuliani left office in 2002, Mr. Kerik joined
him at his new consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. In 2003, President Bush sent Mr. Kerik
to Iraq to reorganize the Iraqi police force. In Baghdad, he signed autographs, surrounded
himself with South African bodyguards, slept during the day and joined Iraqi paramilitary
units on corruption raids late into the night. He decided to leave suddenly after three
months.
He campaigned hard for President Bush’s re-election
the next year, bonding with the president on the campaign trail and speaking at the
Republican National Convention in New York.
After the election, Mr. Bush sought a director of
homeland security. Mr. Giuliani was among the people who promoted Mr. Kerik for the job,
and even helped him prepare for the interviews.
By this time, Mr. Kerik’s former warden, Mr. Serra,
had been indicted. Another top aide, Frederick J. Patrick, had been sentenced to prison
and had been told to reimburse $142,000 taken from the foundation he ran with Mr. Kerik.
And newspapers had written of Mr. Kerik’s efforts to protect a correction aide
accused of beating his lover.
But if Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Bush took notice, the issues
did not give them pause.
“He was a champion of him,” Andrew
Card, chief of staff to Mr. Bush at the time, recently recalled of Mr. Giuliani.
“It wasn’t an arm-twisting session. It was more of a character reference.”
Mr. Kerik’s tenure as a nominee lasted one week. He
withdrew when he and Mr. Giuliani said they discovered that his nanny was in the country
illegally and that he had failed to pay taxes for her.
Worse news was coming. Newspapers reported that Mr. Kerik
had accepted undisclosed cash gifts from Mr. Ray and lobbied for Interstate. At the time,
Mr. Giuliani said he was not inclined to second-guess his choice of Mr. Kerik as police
commissioner.
“Sometimes you look back on some of these choices
and you made the wrong one,” he said. “In this case, he turned out to be the
right one.”
Less than two years later, though, Mr. Giuliani would
find himself being grilled about that choice. On April 20, 2006, before a state grand
jury, a prosecutor in the Bronx district attorney’s office peppered Mr. Giuliani, one
of the most powerful prosecutors in the late 20th century, about his apparent lack of
memory.
Would you have considered it unusual and significant, the
prosecutor asked, if as mayor in 2000 you had been told that a close friend of your
correction commissioner had been indicted in a federal case with organized crime figures?
“It’s really a hypothetical question,” Mr.
Giuliani replied. “I mean, sure, it would have been unusual, sure.”
There was nothing hypothetical about the question. The
prosecutor was merely laying out the facts established by the Department of Investigation
in the months before Mr. Giuliani appointed Mr. Kerik police commissioner.
Yesterday, Mr. Kerik’s lawyer met with federal
prosecutors in New York in an effort to stave off indictment. In a recent interview, Mr.
Kerik said that he had been steering clear of Mr. Giuliani, lest his troubles hurt his
friend, although they did cross paths at the Sept. 11 ceremony at ground zero this fall.
“We have not communicated in months, at all, at
all,” he said. “When the last time is, I could not even tell you.”
(Uh Huh!)
Return to Main Giuliani
Page
Rudy Giuliani and That Regan Woman!
Rudy Giuliani's Ties to Fox News
Rudy Giuliani Lies like Bush
Rudy Giuliani and
World War III
See Rudy's Real Qualifications Here
See Rudy's Lie About Cutting Taxes
Rudy Has lost it and is Mentally Ill and on Drugs!!!
Rudy Faces Federal
Investigation About 9/11 Radios and Why They Didn't Work
Rudy Giuliani Lied to
a Grand Joury and Bernard Kerik is Indicted
Rudy's New Best Friend
- Pat Robertson
Election 2008: Rudy Giuliani in the news
