Growing Up Giuliani

The best way to compete against the Ivy League hotshots vying for the position of assistant U.S. attorney was to clerk first for a federal judge. Giuliani was hired by Lloyd MacMahon, known as a cranky coot who favored working-class go-getters from second- and third-tier law schools. Addressing lawyers in his courtroom as "morons" and "boobs," Judge MacMahon was not bashful on the bench. "Call your next liar," he once growled at a defense lawyer. His arbitrariness and high-handedness got him reversed so often in the court of appeals that he was pronounced one of the nation's "worst judges" in an American Lawyer magazine survey. But MacMahon fearlessly put away mobsters and communists, and he was a good mentor to Giuliani. When Giuliani's draft deferment ran out in 1969, the judge intervened personally to get his clerk another deferment. (Giuliani had dropped out of Air Force ROTC, citing a slight hearing impediment, and told colleagues that Vietnam did not meet the Catholic definition of a "just war.") Then MacMahon helped get Giuliani his dream job as an "AUSA," a junior prosecutor in the most prestigious of all U.S. attorney's offices, the Southern District of New York—Manhattan.

In the early '70s New York City was in the midst of its worst police scandal in decades. The Knapp Commission, appointed by Mayor John Lindsay, had unearthed scores of cops on the take, accepting bribes and selling drugs, sometimes stealing cash off corpses. In 1972 the French Connection case broke—somehow, nearly 400 pounds of heroin had vanished from the police property clerk's room. Giuliani's involvement in the case is revealing of his character as shaped by his family roots.

Giuliani was working with a dirty cop who had turned informant. Having grown up in a household of cops, Giuliani was comfortable with New York's Finest, even when they weren't. Unlike FBI agents, who could be cautious and bureaucratic, New York City police officers were willing to take risks. If that meant bending the rules to meet the necessities of the street, then so be it.

Bob Leuci had done more than bend the rules. As a member of an elite group of 60 detectives known as the Special Investigative Unit (SIU), Leuci had taken money from dope dealers, done some illegal wiretapping and routinely paid informants with seized drugs. In the midst of the Knapp Commission probe, "Babyface," as he was called, decided to cooperate with the Feds, wearing a wire as he went undercover to meet with corrupt law-enforcement officials and lawyers. The French Connection case had broken, and prosecutors suspected that Leuci knew more than he was telling. It was up to Giuliani to get him to talk.

By befriending Leuci and winning his trust, by swearing never to abandon him, Giuliani succeeded. Leuci had not been involved in the French Connection case, but he was able to finger a new slew of "bad guys." Tom Puccio, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, would later say that he and Giuliani had played "bad cop/good cop" with Leuci, but Giuliani seemingly refused to look cynically at his role. He knew that a judge had once called SIU detectives "princes of the city," and to Giuliani, Leuci was still a prince—albeit a fallen one. Giuliani, Leuci said, believed in redemption.

Giuliani understood that it was "something like penance in the Roman Catholic Church—it was part of that 'I did something bad, now I need to do something good'," Leuci tells NEWSWEEK. "Rudy recognized that whole Catholic guilt stuff. I think he was smart enough to know he could play to it." Leuci was suicidal at the time and he later said that if Giuliani had pushed too hard, he would have killed himself. Instead, Giuliani befriended Leuci, talking about family, about how much he honored his father. It has never been entirely clear how much Giuliani knew about the shady past of his dad and other family members, but Giuliani was able to convey empathy and understanding about moral ambiguity. At the same time, Leuci says, "I wouldn't want Rudy as an enemy, I'll tell you that. He's not a guy that rests."