Some Giuliani family members had ties to mob, new book says

NEW YORK - A biography of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani claims several family members had mob ties and that his father fired at a man during a Brooklyn shootout.

The book also says the law-and-order mayor once slugged a guy who ogled his date.

"Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani" was written by Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett. Portions were printed in this week's Voice.

Those portions said Giuliani's father, Harold, served 18 months in prison for holding up a milkman at gunpoint in the 1930s, a decade before his son was born.

The 50 pages released Wednesday by the publisher, Basic Books, contain new allegations. The book comes out next week.

"I think I'll stand on my record as having prosecuted or put in prison more members of the Mafia than probably any U.S. attorney in history, having been threatened with death by them at least three times - four times seriously going back to when I was an assistant U.S. attorney," the mayor said.

The mayor did not dispute claims made by the book.

The book says that while members of Giuliani's family had links with the Mafia, there is no evidence that the future mayor had such ties.

In the early '60s, according to the book, Giuliani's father, uncle and cousin took part in a gunfight on a Brooklyn street.

Barrett said the uncle, Leo D'Avanzo, was a mob-connected loan shark. He, his son Lewis and the mayor's father had gone looking for a mobster with whom they were having a loan-sharking dispute, the book said. There apparently were no injuries in the ensuing gunfire, the book said.

But a few years later, Lewis D'Avanzo was not so lucky. Barrett says he was a mob associate who specialized in stolen vehicles, and FBI documents link him to several murders. He was killed by FBI agents in Brooklyn in 1977. Rudolph Giuliani at the time was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan and had not seen the cousin in years.

Barrett's book claims that while the mayor has boasted of graduating from Manhattan College "magna cum laude," high honors, he graduated with lower honors and even got a C in calculus.

Kathy Livermore, Giuliani's girlfriend during college, said her former steady once slugged someone in her defense. "The guy either said something, or made a remark or whistled and Rudy just turned right around and punched him. His friends pulled him off the guy. They said, `Don't do that, what's the matter with you?' "

Harold Giuliani died at 73 of prostate cancer, the same disease that forced the mayor to drop his bid for the Senate.