Growing Up Giuliani

On Sept. 16, 1992, the police in New York City held a rally that spun out of control. The cops wanted a new collective-bargaining agreement, and they were angry at Mayor David Dinkins for proposing a civilian review board and for refusing to issue patrolmen 9mm guns. More than a few of them tipsy or drunk, the cops jumped on cars near city hall and blocked traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. According to some witnesses, they waved placards crudely mocking Mayor Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, on racial grounds, while at the same time chanting "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" to welcome Rudy Giuliani, the crime-busting former U.S. attorney who had arrived in their midst to shore up his political base.

It is not clear Giuliani knew exactly what he was getting himself into—he later denied that he did—but video shows him wildly gesticulating and shouting a profanity-laced diatribe against Dinkins. The next day the New York newspapers were sharply critical of Giuliani (a Daily News editorial called his behavior "shameful"), and Dinkins, years later, accused him of trying to stir up "white cops to riot." At the time, Giuliani refused to back down or apologize for his remarks, saying only: "I had four uncles who were cops. So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am." Giuliani's performance that day lost African-American voters, some permanently, but it guaranteed the informal backing of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, which helped him get elected mayor in 1993.

Giuliani has long had a soft spot for cops—even, in some cases, for bad ones. On the one hand, Giuliani has been a crusader against outlaw policemen, as well as mobsters, pornographers, drug dealers, crooked businessmen and politicians and death-dealing jihadists. He now offers himself as the presidential candidate who would deliver us from evil, from terrorism abroad and corruption at home. On the other hand, he was the man who appointed Bernard Kerik, now under indictment for various federal crimes, including tax evasion, to be his police commissioner, and later pushed him to become the nation's secretary of Homeland Security. (Persistently accused of ties to mobbed-up businessmen, Kerik has always protested his innocence of any criminal wrongdoing, but he pleaded guilty in the Bronx last year to ethics violations while serving as Giuliani's corrections commissioner.) Giuliani is a dramatic—and self-dramatizing—moralist. But as an intelligent, sensitive man with a solid Roman Catholic education, he knows there is sometimes a fine or blurry line between saint and sinner. He has been able to reconcile the rigidities of doctrine with the vagaries of human nature. He has long believed in the power of redemption, and he puts great faith in the virtue of loyalty. He does not shy from confrontation, but seems to welcome and even create conflict, especially if there are cameras nearby. His theatricality can be excessive, and not just because he has been known to dress up in drag as a spoof. Kerik has written that when he was welcomed into Giuliani's inner circle—in a clearly staged ceremony, with a kiss on the cheek from each member—he felt like a "made man." Leaving aside Kerik's unfortunate Mafia analogy, there is an intensity and intimacy to Giuliani that can be unsettling. He has an authoritarian streak, as well as a penchant for secrecy and dependence on loyalists, that may remind voters of the current chief executive.

The real Rudy is probably as complex and certainly as passionate as the operatic Rudy who shows up at cop rallies. He can be hero or hypocrite or both at once; he has a ripe sense of his own, and his nation's, magnificence and destiny roughly on par with that of Winston Churchill's, whose works Giuliani recommended to his schoolmates, along with his favorite operas by Verdi. Just as Churchill's character was shaped by the myths of his forebears in his ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, seat of the Duke of Marlborough, Giuliani's was forged by the moral ambiguities of his upbringing and the eternal American melodrama of rising above one's past while honoring, or at least accepting, it. Giuliani was born into an immigrant enclave—mostly Italian-American, some Jewish—in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of looming dark churches and rows of modest brick and brownstone houses, far from the Manhattan skyline. Four of Giuliani's uncles were, indeed, policemen, as were four of his cousins. But another uncle was Leo D'Avanzo, a loan shark and a bookie with mob connections, who operated out of a bar named after another uncle—Vincent D'Avanzo, a policeman who acted as a frontman for the bar. Rudy's cousin, Leo's son Lewis (a.k.a. "Steve the Blond"), was a ruthless hood who later did time for armed hijacking and selling stolen cars.

The proximity of good and bad, even in Giuliani's own family, seems to have given rise to his inflexible public code but more relaxed personal one—a bifurcation that will only become more important in the next 10 weeks or so, as generally conservative Republican primary voters decide whether to trust this unconventional figure with their nomination. (When asked about the reporting in this story, Giuliani deputy communications director Maria Comella declined to comment.)

Working behind the bar at Vincent's for long stretches of time was Rudy's father, Harold. According to Wayne Barrett's biography "Rudy!," indispensable to all Giuliani profiles, Harold kept a revolver and a baseball bat with him in case the customers became too rowdy. Barrett writes that Harold Giuliani moonlighted as the "muscle" for his brother-in-law, using the bat and his fists to collect debts. A would-be boxer who was hampered by nearsightedness, Harold served more than a year in Sing Sing Prison for mugging the milkman.