Growing Up Giuliani

But the relationship soured. In 1988 Giuliani began preparing to step down as U.S. attorney for a possible run against incumbent Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By then D'Amato was under an ethics cloud. As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, D'Amato had close ties to the securities industry. Giuliani had made a big show as the scourge of Wall Street, arresting analysts and brokers suspected of stock fraud and forcing them to take "perp walks" before the cameras. Giuliani said it would be irresponsible for him not to be concerned about the selection process, given the ongoing investigations into D'Amato's friends in the securities industry. Meanwhile, Giuliani was maneuvering to put one of his own deputies into the job and gossiping to reporters about D'Amato's alleged ethics problems.

D'Amato "went through the roof," says a former aide, who requested anonymity to describe the details of the D'Amato-Giuliani relationship. To his aides he began shouting profanities about Giuliani. ("I'm going to kill the f–––ing c–––––––er!" he said, the aide tells NEWSWEEK.) To his partisans Giuliani had not double-crossed D'Amato but rather showed moral rectitude by distancing himself from a crony of Wall Street inside-traders. During the 1989 mayoral primary D'Amato called his selection of Giuliani "the biggest mistake I ever made" and described his former protégé as an "amoral" political opportunist. The blood feud continued: when D'Amato ally George Pataki ran for governor of New York in 1994, Giuliani endorsed liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo. Giuliani explained that "ethics will be trashed if the D'Amato-Pataki crew ever get control." Contacted by NEWSWEEK last week, D'Amato said he no longer wanted to talk about his old feud, but he is throwing fund-raisers for Fred Thompson and coaching him on how to debate Giuliani.

Loyalty to Giuliani means staying out of his limelight. Police Commissioner William Bratton discovered that in January 1996, when he made the mistake of posing for the cover of Time magazine in a trench coat to tout New York's astonishing success at fighting crime. Giuliani was not pleased; he ordered city hall's lawyers to start investigating Bratton's expenses, and the commissioner was gone in a couple of months. (Giuliani disputed that he or his staff undermined Bratton but noted that they "both had very, very strong styles.") In truth, both men deserve credit for New York's turnaround. Bratton was a vocal apostle of the "broken window" theory of crime—that small acts of vandalism can create a lawless climate conducive to bigger crimes. But Giuliani, the product of 16 years of Catholic schools where neatness and order were measures of moral health, instinctively understood that small sins can lead to big ones. Not long after his swearing-in as New York's mayor in January 1994, Giuliani launched a no-tolerance campaign against the "squeegee men," small-time shakedown artists who would ask for payment for wiping the windows of the cars of terrified tourists and suburbanites as they waited at red lights.

Giuliani never found an equal to Bratton. The next commissioner, Howard Safir, was regarded as a "Yes Rudy" who tried too hard to please his master. ("I am very loyal to Rudy," Safir tells NEWSWEEK. "However, when I disagreed with him … I made sure I did it in private.") The police stepped up their stop-and-frisk campaign in poor, largely minority neighborhoods. A series of ugly police-brutality cases besmirched Giuliani's crimefighting record and alienated blacks and Hispanics. In 2000, when an undercover narcotics detective killed an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond, who was black, Giuliani scoffed that Dorismond was no "altar boy." Actually, he was an altar boy—and had attended Bishop Loughlin high school.

Giuliani's loyalty to his last police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, bordered on the blind. The two men had come to know each other when Kerik, acting as an off-duty cop, drove Giuliani during his first mayoral campaign in 1989 (Giuliani lost to Dinkins). Kerik was the sort of diamond in the rough Giuliani appreciated—a tough street cop who got things done. Giuliani has insisted that he did not know about Kerik's questionable dealings with two businessmen with alleged mob connections. City hall records reviewed by NEWSWEEK suggest that the mayor may have been briefed on some of these problems just before Kerik was appointed commissioner. But Giuliani has said he has no memory, and his tight palace guard remains closemouthed. ("There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik," Giuliani said earlier this month, adding that Kerik's wrongdoing should not outweigh his crimefighting successes.)

Giuliani's moralism became increasingly strident in his second term as mayor. He was outraged at an art show at the Brooklyn Museum called "Sensation." The exhibits included a picture of a black Virgin Mary surrounded by bits of pornography and a pile of elephant dung. Giuliani ordered the museum to shut down the show or lose its city subsidy. He lost in the courts; the show went on. Yet he has stood by his boyhood friend, Msgr. Alan Placa, who was accused of, though never formally charged with, child molestation. (He denies the allegation.) The boy who had grown up with cops and hoods in his family was able to maintain a somewhat selective sense of right and wrong—one influenced by tribal ties.