The Rudy chronicles: In the Giuliani years, the good, bad and ugly had a field day in N.Y.
At that moment, Giuliani was Winston Churchill standing in the rubble of a blitzed London, circa 1940. He was John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall. He was the picture of grace and resolve — a friend, a father, a chaplain, a field marshal.
"I'll never forget that moment for as long as I live," said newlywed Diane Gorumba, 23, who asked the mayor to give her away after death claimed her father, grandfather and brother last year. "It started out that he was doing me a favor, but after what happened, it was like he did it for the entire city of New York."
As New York faces the end of Giuliani's eight years as mayor, it is inevitable many will always view him through the prism of Sept. 11 and its wrenching aftermath. All the man's talents and quirks seemed to combine to match the city's needs.
But Giuliani's legacy will most certainly cast a much more complicated image than the white-hot glare of the past two months. His numbers in the past eight years guarantee it.
Since Giuliani first took to the podium outside City Hall on a wintry morning in 1994, overall crime in the city has dropped by 52 percent and homicides by 68 percent, levels not seen since a ride on the subway cost 20 cents.
The number of New Yorkers on welfare — in 1994, one of every seven — has been more than halved.
A new Administration for Children's Services has found homes for more than 27,000 children, a dramatic increase over prior years, while the once endless street-reconstruction projects of yesteryear are wrapped up on schedule 85 percent of the time.
And, at least before Sept. 11, private-sector jobs, tourism and property values were booming as some 23 separate taxes were being reduced or eliminated and city coffers were brimming with surpluses.
"I think the first thing he did is make New York believe in itself again," said Peter Powers, a former deputy mayor and one of Giuliani's closest friends. "When he ran, people always said, 'Why would you want to be mayor? New York City is ungovernable.' But he never believed that — and I don't think anyone believes that today."
But many would say the same qualities that made these achievements possible for Giuliani — his single-minded determination, his love of confrontation, his unyielding faith in his own moral center — also will cast a shadow.
His critics see a mayor who always was more interested in forging new programs than new relationships. They see a mayor who instead of disagreeing with critics often chose to disparage them and who could banish friends and potential allies from his inner circle at the slightest sign of criticism.
And while Giuliani's statistics may be impressive, others choose to talk about the record number of homeless families and individuals now in city shelters — 28,989 at last count, 12,000 of them children — and the deep rifts between the police and minority communities, and the steep decline of affordable housing during his tenure.
Many view the Giuliani era as almost tragic, given the tempered way he handled the events of Sept. 11. Why is it only now, they ask, in the final moments of his tenure, that the city sees a mayor so capable of embracing and unifying all segments of a torn metropolis?
"I think he has been a good mayor, generally speaking, but I think he probably missed the opportunity to be a great mayor because of his insensitivity to the very nature of our city," said the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and one of the few African-American leaders to have defended the mayor at times over the years.
It was Butts who in April 1999 hugged Giuliani at an interfaith service at St. Patrick's Cathedral that was called to heal wounds over the police shooting of unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo.
From the start, a clear vision
It helps to recall the city he inherited on that morning in 1994 as he stood before City Hall and gave his first inauguration speech.
It's a moment that might be best remembered for the antics of Giuliani's son, Andrew, then 8, who clowned for the cameras so exuberantly that "Saturday Night Live" turned it into a skit.
What's remarkable about the speech is how much of Giuliani's vision was laid down then. "Change in many forms is coming to our city," Giuliani promised, ticking off stricter law enforcement, a crackdown on quality-of-life crimes and handguns, and new programs that make more "realistic" the help offered to the poor.
Each proclamation he capped with a Caesar-like flourish: "It should be so, and it will be."
It soon became clear, however, that Giuliani wasn't much interested in continuing the old debates surrounding street crime, welfare and the other problems afflicting the city.
He wanted to change the debate altogether, a goal he knew would force him into the cross hairs of what he derided as the city's largely Democratic "intellectual establishment." It was a battle Giuliani undertook almost gleefully.
As he told The New York Times in late 1995, "New York is a great intellectual center that has become one of the most backward parts of America — unwilling to think a new thought."
It was an "establishment" that often included the press, a group that Giuliani never warmed to and often tried to contain — physically, by keeping street reporters in barricaded pens, and otherwise by controlling the release of even minor information from City Hall. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
But after eight years, most would agree Giuliani largely changed the way New Yorkers view their city.
He proved New York could be governed.
He made the city a place where parking your car on the street is no longer an invitation to robbery and where the trash gets picked up when it is supposed to, at least most of the time.
Personal problems
Along the way, he provided more than a little drama.
After he announced his separation from his wife of 16 years on TV last year, for instance, Donna Hanover took to the air and acknowledged it had been "difficult to participate in Rudy's public life because of his relationship with one staff member."
The comment was a clear reference to Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas, Giuliani's former press secretary who, by then married and out of City Hall, quickly denied any suggestion of an affair.
It was only two weeks earlier that Giuliani had announced he had prostate cancer, an illness that — combined with his messy personal life — would ultimately force him to drop out of his Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Just how messy his private life had become would be made more apparent when Giuliani became embroiled in divorce proceedings so bitter that his lawyer once admonished Hanover to "stop howling like a stuck pig."
Then emissaries of the mayor revealed he had become impotent, an announcement aimed at reducing the status of Judith Nathan from girlfriend to just friend in the eyes of the divorce judge. "They really have a very profound relationship," said one Giuliani pal at the time.
'Broken-windows' theory
No initiative of Giuliani's underscored his profound understanding of human motivation more fully than his crime policies, which began with a then-revolutionary theory called "broken windows."
The idea, first put forward by UCLA political-science professor James Wilson and Rutgers University Professor George Kelling, suggested that if a single window is broken on a building, others will likely follow, eventually creating the impression that no one in the neighborhood cares about maintaining order.
The trick was preventing that first broken window and making sure police cracked down on other small crimes to keep bigger ones at bay.
To move from theory to practice, however, required a revamped police force, one much more attuned to local hot spots and much more aggressive at rooting out low-level criminals.
Thus was born Compstat, the brainchild of former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his homburg-wearing deputy, Jack Maple, a former Transit Police detective.
Using 55-foot-long maps, Bratton and Maple pioneered the practice of tracking crimes using color-coded pushpins and then flooding hot zones with additional cops.
The system drove down crime dramatically when Bratton headed the Transit Police from 1990 to 1992 but was never computerized and pushed citywide until Giuliani brought Bratton back in 1994 as commissioner of the New York Police Department.
By 1996, when Giuliani forced Bratton out in a typical tiff over the commissioner's increasingly national profile, homicide had plummeted 50 percent and overall crime 39 percent.
"The administration understood that root causes and explanations for crime were all well and good, but people needed safety and they needed to get it done through the Police Department," said Peter Reinharz, chief of the city's Family Court division.
Vanquishing the mob
In addition to street crime, the law-and-order Giuliani set his sights on organized crime, winning battles for the city that have since paid millions in dividends.
Using the city's little-known licensing laws, the former U.S. prosecutor took on commercial garbage haulers and the Fulton Fish Market, both notoriously mob-run outfits.
"In each of those areas, there was literally a mob tax," said Randy Mastro, a former chief of staff for Giuliani. "But the mayor said, 'We as a city are not going to do business with organized-crime associates, and we are not going to give you a license if you are an organized-crime associate.' "
It worked. The fish market was soon rid of the mob, and the corrupt carting industry was soon wiped clean. The result was a 40 percent decline in the city's $1.5 billion waste-hauling costs within the first two years, a savings of $600 million between 1996 and 1998.
Today, crime reduction focuses and enlarges many of Giuliani's greatest accomplishments, from the booming tourist trade that it ushered in to the simple peace of mind that follows many new subway riders down to the platform.
Yet it also is the source of a widespread resentment toward Giuliani that burns bright in many minority neighborhoods, where the mayor's crackdown on crime often took the form of random stop-and-frisk searches.
Some would argue that overly aggressive policing created the environment that led to the torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn stationhouse in August 1997.
Experts such as Kelling blame many of the tensions after that attack on another fundamental policing choice made by Giuliani: the widespread use of special units to attack certain crimes.
It was the street-crime unit, for instance, that focused on getting guns off the street. At its height, the 380-officer unit made up just 1 percent of the department but accounted for 40 percent of its gun arrests.
But the unit's officers also stopped and frisked more than 45,000 people in two years, of whom 9,500 were arrested.
And on Feb. 4, 1999, members of the street-crime unit fired 41 bullets at an unarmed African immigrant named Amadou Diallo, triggering what may have been the most turbulent phase of Giuliani's reign. More than 1,100 protesters were arrested outside police headquarters in the weeks after, including many top city leaders.
It also was a specialized narcotics squad that shot Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard who was killed after scuffling with police outside a midtown bar in March 2000.
Burning bridges
It was at turbulent moments such as the Diallo and Dorismond crises that Giuliani's failure to build bridges became most apparent. There were times City Hall seemed under siege, an impression not helped by Giuliani's decision to barricade the surrounding park and bar protesters from the building's steps.
This was the my-way-or-the-highway mayor who had to be forced into meeting with black elected officials at the height of the Diallo furor.
His network of allies was often so thin that if his own appointees or a handful of friends couldn't help, he was boxed in, left to rail against his critics.
This was never clearer than during his dealings with city schools: he single-handedly drove out two school chancellors, Ramone Cortines and Rudy Crew, by relentlessly attacking their visions for public schools.
"As great as his legacy is in public safety, it is as lacking in public education," said Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers and a frequent thorn in Giuliani's side.
It remains one of the great ironies of Giuliani's tenure that even though he always heralded the city's police and firefighters, many rank-and-file workers remain deeply bitter about his tenure.
His reviled "zeroes for heroes" contract in the mid-1990s — during which police and firefighters got no raises for two years and small increases in later years — remains a galling footnote for many of the city's Finest and Bravest.
And despite flush times, the city's police, firefighters and teachers have all been without a contract for more than a year.
"He did a great job in fighting crime and making New York City a better place, but he gave nothing to the working people, the people who made it happen," said Tom Manley, the sergeant at arms for the 8,900-member Uniformed Firefighters Association.
The legacy
So how will Giuliani be remembered? In truth, most New York City mayors, if they are remembered at all, get distilled to a single, defining moment.
For Fiorello LaGuardia, it was reading the comics over the radio to a city darkened by newspaper strikes. The dapper John Lindsay walking through Harlem the night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, keeping the peace in an edgy city.
For Giuliani, maybe it's the wedding. Or maybe it is the Rudy taking command amid the swirling chaos of Sept. 11. Or perhaps we are left with just a feeling of calm amid the storm, of bravery amid fear.
In that way, Giuliani is not unlike the firefighters he has often extolled. His uncle was a member of the department, as he reminded those assembled at a bittersweet promotions ceremony for firefighters that he attended the same day he walked Gorumba down the aisle.
He spoke of how his uncle was thrown from his rig as he raced to an alarm, breaking both legs and seriously injuring his back.
"My mother would take me to visit him almost every day at Kings County Hospital," Giuliani recalled. "He was in tremendous pain, but one of my earliest memories was his talking about wanting to go back to work. It was the thing that got him through, the thing that sustained him.
"He would talk about how he loved his job. And even as a 5- and 6-year-old, I could figure it out. Here was a man who had broken both of his legs and maybe his back, and he wanted to go back to the work he loved. And he did.
"And he was one of my early heroes."