9 minute read
RUDY GIULIANI
Advertisement
September 19, 2022 City & State New York
21 A new book explores what happened to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s onceremarkable place in history.
THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICA’S MAYOR
An excerpt about how Rudy Giuliani developed a close friendship with Donald Trump.
By Andrew Kirtzman
IN THIS NEW BOOK by Andrew Kirtzman titled, “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” he explores the great heights and depths of the former New York City mayor’s career. Released on Sept. 13 from Simon & Schuster, Kirtzman, a member of City & State’s advisory board, chronicles Rudy Giuliani’s strongarm tactics in the early days of being mayor, his marriages, his embrace of right-wing politics – and Donald Trump – plus how he rallied the country after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His fall from respectability in recent years has largely been tied to his connection to Trump, which is the subject of this excerpt from Kirtzman’s book. Naturally, it centers on a key real estate deal and a budding mutually beneficial relationship.
“Tonight: Donald Trump! Need we say more?”
Larry King, CNN’s craggy prime-time interviewer, sat face-to-face with New York’s dashing celebrity developer on the evening of October 7, 1999. Trump was there to announce that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. It was a publicity stunt – it would be sixteen years before he got serious about running – but the ratings were always good for him, and King treated it as if it were a historic event.
“Most people who form exploratory committees, that’s that major step toward going,” King said, egging him on.
Trump played coy. “Well, it’s a step.”
“I don’t think I can say it’s a major step. …”
“And the decision by sometime in January?”
“Two, three months in there, right?”
“I would say about that, yes, Larry.”
It was a mindless conversation. Only when the subject veered off topic did the developer say anything revealing.
“What do you make of the Hillary-Giuliani – I know you’re a big fan of Giuliani,” King asked.
“I am, and I like her very much, but I think Rudy – and as I said before, he’s been the greatest mayor in the history of the city of New York. … [He] really helped the city, and he’s been a great mayor. Maybe some people don’t like him and some people love him totally.
“I happen to be in love,” he said.
He caught himself and tried to backtrack on the comment, but it was a telling moment. Trump rarely gushed about anyone besides himself, but there was something about Rudy Giuliani that made him swoon.
The mayor and he were rarely seen together, but their behind-the-scenes dealings were far more frequent than most people knew. It was a relationship based on a symbiotic mix of friendship, respect, and self-interest, a dynamic that would last a lifetime.
Trump had endless needs of city government. He was a developer whose business thrived on subsidies and tax breaks, and depended upon agencies for variances, permits, and other approvals. It was in his interest to cultivate the mayor and his aides. Giuliani, for his part, gained from his campaign contributions, advocacy, and assorted benefits of being on Donald Trump’s good side, including sky-high praise on national prime-time television interviews.
But the relationship wasn’t purely transactional; each saw much to admire in the other. They were old-school, outer-borough brawlers who took pleasure in bludgeoning their opponents. Both valued loyalty above competence, with the sky the limit for those who passed the test. They were forever striving to prove their loyalty to each other.
Trump World Tower, across the street from the U.N. complex, was allowed to be built in large part because of Trump and Giuliani’s alliance.
The bond was on display in October 1998, when Trump broke ground on Trump World Tower, a development slated to rise across from the United Nations building on Manhattan’s East Side – “the tallest and most luxurious residential tower in the world,” he boasted.
The plans were comically out of scale with the neighborhood, a $360 million, 750,000-square-foot bronze-colored glass edifice rising seventy-two stories (he exaggerated and claimed it was ninety stories). It was three hundred feet higher than the U.N. building, then the tallest building in the area.
Trump quietly purchased air rights from the owners of surrounding buildings, which sidestepped the need for height variances, and allowed him to avoid onerous zoning hurdles. He simply applied for a building permit, which the city’s Buildings Department summarily granted.
Community members, blindsided, went ballistic. For half a century, developers had honored the city’s 1947 agreement with the U.N. restricting the size of new developments in the vicinity. Trump claimed “most people” believed the agreement was never consummated.
As he began selling apartments for more than a million dollars each with barely a beam planted in the ground, protests flooded City Hall from well-to-do neighbors, many of whose views of the East River stood to be ruined by his trophy building. No less than Walter Cronkite wrote a complaining letter to Giuliani on May 25, 1999, on behalf of the Beekman Hill Association, a community group. He urgently requested a meeting to discuss what he called the “peculiar” Buildings Department decision. A week later, the mayor received a similar letter from Citicorp’s legendary CEO, Walter Wriston.
A few weeks went by seemingly without a response from the mayor. Cronkite, angered, fired off another letter to him, complaining about his lack of responsiveness to their complaints about Trump’s “monstrous building.”
“I am disappointed to learn that you apparently have turned a deaf ear to the rather distinguished hundreds of citizens (and the even more numerous citizens of no public distinction) who are protesting the 90-story Trump residential Tower he is rushing to build at 47th and First,” wrote the most trusted man in America.
U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan weighed in with his own letter, insisting that the mayor revisit the Building Department’s decision.
It wasn’t just irate neighbors who were disturbed by the city’s green light. The chairman of the City Planning Commission, Joe Rose, sent an internal memo to Deputy Mayor Randy Levine stating that he was “not comfortable” with some of the Building Department’s conclusions that led to the approval. Lacking the power to cancel the permit, Rose moved to overhaul the zoning code’s height regulations so that no one could pull a Trumpstyle maneuver again.
Giuliani ignored the objections. Cornered at an event by a community leader, he demurred, calling the matter “a very complicated legal question.”
Many of the project’s opponents were more respected, accomplished, and powerful than Donald Trump, giants of New York who weren’t accustomed to the kind of shoddy treatment they were receiving from the mayor. But he seemed happy to treat them with disrespect. His treatment of Trump was another story.
Eight days after Cronkite sent his irate second letter, the mayor walked through the grand, solid-bronze doors of the venerable Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue for the funeral of Fred Trump,
JOSHUA ROBERTS/GETTY IMAGES Donald’s father. He marched up the center aisle’s red carpet, past dozens of pews filled with hundreds of members of the city’s corporate and political elite, stepped up to the dais, and turned to the audience. Fred’s casket, covered in white roses, was a few feet away.
Donald, who told a biographer that he considered it a sign of weakness for a man to cry, listened quietly as the mayor praised the family patriarch, describing Fred, once more feared and loathed than his son, as a hero who contributed incalculably to the city’s greatness.
Such acts of kindness and respect flew back and forth between the mayor and Trump. The developer maintained a back channel to the administration through Deputy Mayor Randy Levine, a skilled troubleshooter for the mayor and a diehard Republican. Trump provided him with a steady stream of Senate campaign intelligence, keeping him abreast of which members of the establishment were raising money for Clinton. Most were intimate affairs charging invitees as much as $25,000 a pop, such as developer Larry Silverstein’s fundraising dinner aboard his yacht (“Rubber soled shoes please”). Trump typically scrawled a note on the invitations, and directed them to “Randy L.”
He also kept an eye on Giuliani’s adversaries. When Ed Koch held a party for his book attacking the mayor, Giuliani: Nasty Man, Trump forwarded the invite to Levine, with a note reading “Randy L Not nice!” The information was of minor value, but it was Trump’s signal of fidelity to the mayor.
Interspersed with the gestures of his support were notes about the U.N. project. When an executive at Rose Associates, a real estate conglomerate, wrote a letter to shareholders of a nearby building urging them to oppose the tower, Trump forwarded it to Levine, questioning Joe Rose’s impartiality as city planning commissioner. “Randy – this is Joe Rose’s family company – what do you think – ?”
When a friend sent Trump a letter claiming that most people he’d spoken with supported the tower, Trump mailed it to Levine. “Randy – Most People are Strongly in Favor,” he scrawled in black marker. When the billionaire David Koch, who opposed the project, ran into local opposition for attempting to expand his Palm Beach mansion, Trump sent Levine a Palm Beach Daily News story about it, ridiculing Koch’s hypocrisy.
Trump’s adversaries were apoplectic over Giuliani’s refusal to speak with them. Former Diners Club chairman Seymour Flug was reduced to ambushing Giuliani on a street corner as he was exiting his SUV and handing the mayor a letter of opposition to the tower.
Trump was too smart to work Giuliani overtly, but he reached out when something was guaranteed to please him. When New York Observer columnist Joe Conason speculated that Trump was surreptitiously working to land Giuliani the Independence Party’s support for his Senate race, Trump sent the column to Giuliani (“It is always a pleasure to hear from you,” the mayor replied).
His correspondences – half intended to help Giuliani, half intended to help himself – continued unabated through the duration of the fight over the tower. As Cronkite and company waited for a phone call from the mayor that never came, Trump was nuzzling his face into Giuliani’s breasts in their Inner Circle video.
On August 7, 2000, Trump’s mother, Mary, died. Giuliani attended the wake and once again spoke at the funeral of a Trump parent.
Three months later, Trump’s opponents exhausted their legal efforts to stop the tower, and he proceeded to build the tallest residential building in the world, as promised. Flug reacted with disgust.
“Every time a New Yorker, or anyone else, for that matter, passes by this monstrosity,” he told a reporter, “they should think of Mayor Giuliani and Mr. Trump.” ■
