One person Rudolph Giuliani is not likely to mention in his high-paid motivational speeches is Bernard Kerik, who served as police commissioner on Sept. 11, 2001, and who, largely on the strength of that, was nominated by George W. Bush to become U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in late 2004.
On June 30, 2006, long after the nomination memorably fell to pieces, Kerik pleaded guilty and paid a fine for having improperly accepted $165,000 for renovation work to his New York apartment in 1999 while he was the city jails commissioner. During his plea in a Bronx courtroom, Kerik said he believed the company was "clean" when he allowed it to pay for his renovation work. Investigators contend the company is linked to organized crime. True or not, it employed both the commissioner's brother and the best man at his 1998 wedding, and Kerik additionally set up a meeting between one of the owners and the head of the city Trade Waste Commission when the company was seeking a waste hauling contract.
Some of the ties between the company and Kerik were known by the city's Department of Investigation when it later investigated the company's application for a garbage hauling license. In August, 2000, Giuliani decided to promote Kerik to city police commissioner, bypassing a first deputy commissioner many considered more dependable. Although the investigative agency's traditional autonomy vis-a-vis the mayor's office had been eroded under Giuliani -- as mayor, Giuliani required the investigation commissioner to attend his 8 a.m. cabinet meetings -- it's not known whether Giuliani knew of the Department of Investigation's findings. Even if he had, it might not have mattered. To Giuliani, the personal is political. Most important, he liked Kerik, who had started his meteoric rise in city government as Giuliani's campaign driver and bodyguard.
It has been reported that Kerik was not put through the usual Department of Investigation background check when he became police commissioner, supposedly because he had undergone one before becoming correction commissioner. So, for Giuliani, who is now closer than ever to running for president, this whole mess becomes a question of judgment which his Republican rivals will likely raise, albeit indirectly or through a surrogate since they live in glass houses themselves. You can tell some things about a presidential contender by the company he keeps and the pals he promotes, no?
Back to Kerik. He withdrew abruptly from Homeland Security consideration citing a "nanny question" amid a swirl of reporting about his public and personal conduct, some of which went back over his tenure as correction commissioner. Sidney Schwartzbaum, president of a city union for deputy wardens, had been among the first to assert that Kerik, while sharply reducing violence in city jails during his 32 months in charge, had engaged in blatant favoritism in promotions and disciplinary actions. Kerik, for example, had an affair with a female officer that drew widespread attention when it was revealed that he had used an apartment overlooking the scarred acreage of the former World Trade Center -- meant for use as a place for exhausted rescue workers to sleep - to conduct that affair and another one with the publisher of his memoirs (in which he reveals his mother was a prostitute).
As the New York City civil service newspaper The Chief reminded me this week, one of numerous lawsuits dating from Kerik's tenure involved trumped-up sexual harassment charges that his department brought against a captain who tried to discipline a friend of Kerik's lover. These suits were left for the city law department under Giuliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, to settle.
Schwartzbaum told The Chief's editor Richard Steier that the Kerik matter should be a lesson to future mayors who are similarly inclined to reward their friends and acolytes with top city jobs.
"When you appoint people based on loyalty and blind fealty rather than merit," he said, "this is what you get."
For the record, Giuliani's public comment on the case went as follows: "Bernard Kerik has acknowledged his violations, but this should be evaluated in light of his service to the United States of America and the City of New York."