Click Here to return to the
Blue Collar Politics Blog.To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Crime Runs In Giuliani Family
by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
July 4, 2000This has not been a great year for Rudy Giuliani. He dumped his second wife on live television, announced that he had prostate cancer and then dropped out of the race for the Senate. His serial adultery was bitterly commented on by his wife and documented in excruciating detail by the entire U.S. media. His administration has been scarred by corruption, cronyism and influence peddling scandals involving building inspectors, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) and welfare contracts.
He continued a unique record of losing Federal lawsuits over his habitual violation of the First Amendment. His controvercontroversial policing policies-the main source of his reputation-were declared racist by the Federal governmgovernment. After the recent Central Park incidincident involving officers ignoring more than fifty women being sexually assaulted in broad daylight, the NYPD has been shown to routinely ignore reports of serious crimes and to falsify crime statistics in order to advance the Giuliani reputation. What more bad news could happen to Rudy Giuliani?Apparently, a lot more. The Mayor's fondness for doing impersonations of gangsters may be other than just a rather tired joke. In an article from a forthcoming book about Giuliani by Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett, reported on in the 7/4/2000 NY Times, Post, Newsday and the Associated Press, it is revealed that the Mayor's father confessed to and was convicted of armed robbery in 1934 and did time in Sing Sing, an upstate New York penitentiary. The article goes on to describe how the senior Giuliani later worked as a low-level enforcer for a mob-connected loan shark, enthusiastically beating those who were delinquent in forking over their money with a baseball bat.
Amateur psychologists are going to have a field day with this one. As the saying goes, like father like son. Writing about the elder Giuliani a shrink described him thus in the prison records: -This aggressivity is pathological in nature. He is egocentric to an extent where he has failed to consider the feelings and rights of others- which could just about sum up the entire seven years of the Giuliani administration.
You would not need a degree to theorize that the son of such a man might try to compensate by creating a reputation for himself as a relentless enemy of criminals everywhere. Is that the real explanation?
The main problem with depending on a psychological evaluation of Giuliani to explain the past seven years of NYC history is that it ignores some very crucial facts, chief among them being the intimate relationship of the right-wing think tank The Manhattan Institute to his administration. As the Mayor, his former press secretary and alleged mistress Cristene Lategano-and the Manhattan Institute itself-have made clear on numerous occasions, Giuliani obtained most of his policy ideas directly from the Manhattan Institute. These included ending welfare, advocating mandatory DNA tests for everyone, arresting hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino New Yorkers in order to send them a message and privatizing parks, streets, schools, hospitals, EMS and even the police.
The racially-targeted brutality, Constitutional violations and black bag operations which the Mayor favors are directly derived from the Institute, which was started in 1978 by William Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA chief. These policies in turn were directly derived from the CIA interacting with thousands of top level Nazis, who developed these techniques to deal with left-wing political opponents and with racial minorities they had targeted for annihilation across Europe. The CIA and Casey himself were instrumental in bringing thousands of top Nazi experts on espionage, propaganda, militarization of police, political assassination and terrorizing civilian populations into the US after WWII as part of the anti-Communist furor of the early Cold War years.
On occasion Giuliani unintentionally exposes the ideological source of his policies, as when he told community gardeners whose plots of trees and flowers he was having bulldozed in the middle of the night that, "the era of communism is over". The Nazis and their millions of collaborators across Europe claimed that the evils of Communism justified the atrocities they were committing-exactly the reasoning far-right factions in our own government have used to justify selling cocaine in order to finance and arm the Contras and other Latin American para-military death squads.
In a speech FBI director Louis Freeh gave to the latest class of recruits on 6/29/2000, and which went mysteriously unreported by the New York media [see Washington Post excerpt below], he said that Constitutional violations by police officials in Germany made the Holocaust possible. While Freeh was doing a little spin-control for the agency-which in recent years has been accused of similar Constitutional violations-his speech could have been directly addressed to and about Giuliani.
In the wake of the Central Park sexual assaults, which probably did more to deconstruct the myth of a safer New York than any incident in the past seven years, Giuliani has decided to let the cops take the fall for him and inept NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir. Nine officers and a number of high-ranking supervisors are being blamed in an official NYPD report for failing to respond to reports of the ongoing attacks. Police union officials are calling the report a witchunt and politically-motivated but have yet to tell the real story-that they were ordered to hold back in order to avoid any police-brutality claims that might further contribute to the Giuliani reputation for racism.
Most media commentators have gotten this story wrong. Popular theories suggest that NYC cops have become intimidated by all the protests against police brutality and are now afraid to arrest anyone with dark skin for fear that they will be sued or even criminally charged. All you need to debunk this theory is a night in Central Booking, aka The Tombs, where 95-99% of the arrestees are Black or Latino.
In reality the NYPD was never criticized by activists for cracking down on actual criminals. The chorus of complaints, lawsuits and criminal charges stemmed from hundreds of thousands of false arrests, a concerted policy of racial profiling and from fatal shootings and a sexual torture by the police of unarmed Black males who were not even suspects in a crime.
Under Giuliani NYPD strategy has been motivated solely by politics and by a demand for statistics useful to the Mayor in his quest for higher office. That quest was best served by ignoring, under-reporting and downplaying difficult to solve crimes-the ones people actually care about such as murder, car break-ins, assault, rape and robbery (which take a lot of resources to investigate and prosecute)-and instead focusing on very low level or non-crimes such as marijuana smoking, squeegeeing a car window or vending. The result is that Giuliani gets credit for low crime statistics that simultaneously occurred in every State in the U.S. and gets to point to the immense number of arrests in NYC as the local cause of crime dropping.
That the vast majority of these arrests are not even prosecuted is usually ignored. These arrests-which cost the City hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements for the handful of defendants who bother to sue-do however accomplish a very important goal. They give the opportunity to create a police file on virtually every minority male in the City. Having such a file is an inestimable asset in creating a police state intended to target that same population. And that, rather than the Mayor's unquestionable racism, cruelty and downright meanness, is why these policies have been instituted and are still being carried out each and every day and will likely continue when Giuliani is no longer Mayor.
Blaming activists is an excellent technique lifted directly from the Nazis themselves, who blamed Jews, Marxists and others they planned to target for extermination for every real and imaginary problem in European society.
The Mayor-who has bragged on his radio show that his job in the Reagan Justice Department centered on compiling crime statistics-has a whole arsenal of imaginative techniques for making crime stats go down. One of the best is apparently having only three 911 emergency operators who speak Spanish, the language of two million New Yorkers or 27% of the population.
A story in the 7/2/2000 Daily News reported that Spanish speaking callers are kept waiting on the line while their calls are rerouted to operators scattered across the country-none of whom have any knowledge of NYC geography or cultural norms. Isn't this just a cost-cutting technique, you might ask?
Not really. The cost for the Spanish language translating service the City has contracted to handle the calls comes to almost $135 an hour or a total of $581,035. According to the Daily News article the City could have hired 15 bilingual operators and given them full benefits for the same amount.
Other similar articles have found that Spanish speaking callers to NYC precincts are often taunted or just hung up on by the police. Like his selective enforcement policies-selective crime reporting and selectively answering 911 calls unquestionably lowers crime statistics if not actual crime.
It will be interesting to see if the revelation of his father being a violent convicted felon will put a crimp in the ../giuliani/Bush plan to appoint the Mayor U.S. Attorney General when and if GW wins the presidential election. Maybe once he has had everyone in America falsely arrested at least once, Giuliani can take a much needed rest. He deserves it. He's the hardest working man in the police state.
Post 7/4/2000
RUDY'S DAD A SING SING CON?
Mayor Giuliani's dad did time in Sing Sing for armed robbery - and later earned cash throttling deadbeats for mob-connected loan sharks....according to an explosive excerpt from Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani by Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett. "This aggressivity is pathological in nature,"a prison psychologist wrote about the elder Giuliani, according to the excerpt posted on the Voice Web site yesterday. "He is egocentric to an extent where he has failed to consider the feelings and rights of others," the psychologist wrote.
...He was an unemployed plumber's assistant when he spent a year and a half in Sing Sing after pleading guilty to holding up a milkman with an accomplice in 1934. Harold Hall told cops Giuliani cornered him in a Manhattan building, shoved a gun in his stomach and demanded his entire stash of $128.82. Nabbed right away, Giuliani gave cops a fake age, address and name - Joseph Starrett, which is still the name on the court files, the book says...
The book says brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo and a mobbed-up associate ran a lucrative numbers-running and loan-sharking business out of the bar - with Harold Giuliani's help. "That was the gist of Harold's job: enforce Leo's law through threats or violence. He shoved people against walls, broke legs, smashed kneecaps, crunched noses. He gave nearby Kings County Hospital a lot of business," Barrett wrote..."It brings up very painful memories," the mayor said after he was diagnosed [with cancer]. "And, you know, I miss my father every day of my life. And he's a very, very important reason for why I'm standing here as the mayor of New York."AP/Washington Post Friday, June 30, 2000
FBI Trains New Agents on Holocaust
WASHINGTON -- The FBI has begun teaching its new agents how a failure by police to protect citizen rights helped produce the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews, as well as other minorities and political dissidents were murdered by the Nazis...The training segment for agents-to-be at the FBI Academy began last month and was announced Friday by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh; Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. The trainees are given a guided tour of the Holocaust Museum here and instruction about Adolf Hitler's use of the police in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s to round up Jews, political opponents and other targeted groups....Bloomfield, the museum director, said, "Much of the Holocaust was perpetrated or supported by trained professionals who were 'doing their job."
Boston Sunday Globe 2/22/98
"The Manhattan Institute clearly has become the force, and there is no progressive force to counter it. There isn't even a debate."
"The mayor has a very close working relationship with the Manhattan Institute," Giuliani's communications director, Crystine Lategano, said...Another sign of how much New York has changed: The most influential source of political ideas is a conservative think tank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher's mentor and Ronald Reagan's spymaster (William Casey)."NY Times 5/12/97
Turning Intellect Into Influence Promoting Its Ideas, the Manhattan Institute Has Nudged New York Rightward
Currently housed...on the second floor of a building near Grand Central Terminal, the institute was founded by William Casey, who then went off to head the Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan Administration....Mr. Giuliani and his campaign staff began meeting with institute members in 1992, and since that time have absorbed many of its ideas, particularly on such issues as the city's tax structure, economic development, education policy, policing and quality of life.Note: For a fascinating study of how and why the CIA brought thousands of top level Nazis to the U.S. and installed them throughout the government read Blowback by Christopher Simpson, the first full account of America's recruitment of Nazis, and it's disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy-Weidenfeld and Nicolson publishers, 1988.
Daily News 7/2/2000
Tangled Lifeline for 911 Callers
By DAVE SALTONSTALL Spanish speakers wait twice as long to get hotline help
It might be a fire, a choking baby or a gun-toting robber, but Spanish-speaking New Yorkers who call 911 in an emergency have to spend almost twice as much time on the phone to get help as English speakers. The reason? Only two of New York City's 74 on-duty 911 operators on average - or 3% - speak Spanish, police say, despite a city population of almost 2 million Hispanics. So the NYPD spends precious time transferring some 179 Spanish-speaking 911 callers every day to a California translation company, Language Line Services, which in turn patches operators and callers to interpreters as far away as Utah and Florida...."Sometimes you get people who are dying on the phone, or even giving birth," said Liliana Holdsworth, an interpreter for the Monterey, Calif.-based Language Line, which the city uses to translate all non-English 911 calls
Medical experts, citing recent studies showing that minutes can mean the difference between life and death, particularly in cases of heart attack or stroke, were flabbergasted to learn of the city's roundabout way of handling so many Spanish calls...no big city with a Hispanic population approaching New York's - about 27% at last count - appears to contract out so many Spanish 911 calls...In all, the city paid $581,035 last year to Language Line Services to translate 65,320 Spanish 911 calls - at a rate of $135 an hour, according to documents obtained by The News...For the same $581,035, the city could have hired 15 new bilingual 911 operators or police communications specialists, who - would cost the city about $39,000 a year, including benefits.To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.Blue Collar Pundit Essays
Searching for the Breach in
Alice’s Looking Glass WorldMy America
Oh Say, Can You See?
FREEDOM!
War isn't Hell!
God is Starting to Scare Me!
It's All Part of the Plan!
Turning the World Wide Web Into
a Tower of Politically Sanitized BabelAnd by clicking here, you'll see an old suggestion (May 2003) of how Democrats could/should have protested the Republican convention and G.W. Bush.
This site is under construction
Contact: Jack Ballinger at: Pundit@BlueCollarPolitics.com
For a great source of general tenant information,
visit the Tenant Net Home Page |©2005 Baltech Productions. All rights reserved.
