Growing Up Giuliani

Loyalty has always been the greatest virtue to Giuliani, sometimes trumping all others. By loyalty, Giuliani's critics contend, he means "loyalty to Rudy." Disloyal subordinates learned this the hard way, even if they thought they were serving some higher master, like truth and justice. By the early '80s Giuliani had risen to claim a top job in the Reagan administrationJustice Department. At the time the department was investigating McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturer, for making foreign bribes. Without telling career prosecutors who had been working on the case for months, Giuliani met with McDonnell Douglas defense lawyers. The career prosecutors were upset that a top official had gone over their heads, and wrote a letter to Giuliani expressing "shock" and "dismay" and warning that his secret meeting with the defense could undermine the prosecution's case. The letter leaked. Giuliani summoned the prosecutors, Michael Lubin and George Mendelson, to his office—and exploded.

"As far as I'm concerned, we were watching a madman," Lubin told Jim Stewart for his book "The Prosecutors." "I've never heard or seen anything like it, even in the movies. He ranted and raved for a full twenty minutes." Giuliani, who later dropped criminal indictments against four McDonnell Douglas executives as part of a plea agreement in which the company paid $1.2 million in fines, dismissed Lubin and Mendelson as "jerks." With petty vindictiveness, he withdrew a special Justice Department commendation awarded the two prosecutors. (A later internal Justice review found no wrongdoing on Giuliani's part.)

Giuliani's critics have long complained that Giuliani surrounds himself with yes men, or "Yes Rudys," as they are called. Loyalty is not always a two-way street for Giuliani, either in his family or professional life. Giuliani's fraught relationship with former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato is a case in point.

In 1982, Associate Attorney General Giuliani traveled to Miami to handle a complex case concerning the legal status of boatloads of Haitian refuges. While he was in Miami he met a TV newscaster named Donna Hanover. Giuliani's first marriage was effectively over by then—Giuliani had married Regina Peruggi, his second cousin, in 1968, but they were bound for divorce. He was smitten by Hanover, who was as vivacious as Giuliani, and he wanted to follow her to New York, where she was looking for a TV job. But Giuliani's Justice job kept him in Washington, D.C.

D'Amato tells NEWSWEEK that Giuliani went to the New York senator to ask a big favor: would D'Amato nominate Giuliani to be U.S. attorney in New York? D'Amato was in an awkward position: the job is a plum, and a committee of top lawyers had already put forth another candidate. Still, D'Amato was impressed with Giuliani, and he felt a bond as a fellow Italian-American. He gave Giuliani the nod.

At first the two men were fast friends. They garnered headlines (and a certain amount of mockery) by donning shades and traveling to Harlem to make a buy-bust. The publicity stunt was supposed to show how seriously the government took the war on drugs. It certainly suggested a budding political alliance.