New York mayor goes from toast of the town to grist for the tabloids

NEW YORK – Just over a year ago, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was a tough-guy former mob prosecutor with a strong shot at the U.S. Senate. When prostate cancer forced him from the race, he sought comfort in the arms of his girlfriend – which didn't sit well with his wife, who is a popular newscaster and actress.

This summer, hizzoner moved out of the official mayoral home because his estranged wife wouldn't leave. All the while, the tabloids screamed about the "War at Gracie Mansion," the mayor's "Secret Love Nest" and revelations about the "Private Torment" his prostate treatments were causing in his sex life.

Now, with only four months before term limits force him out of City Hall, New York's favorite soap opera threatens to overshadow the legacy of a man who cleaned up Times Square, cut crime, put the city's finances in order and took on the mob, the smut-peddlers and the double-parking diplomats.

"It's disgraceful," said longtime friend Schuyler Chapin, the mayor's cultural arts commissioner and former head of the Metropolitan Opera. "It is a shame that he will be leaving amid this splash of atrocious publicity. ... I think he's been extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. I put him up with La Guardia."

That's Fiorella La Guardia, the mayor's hero, a reformer who drove out the corrupt Tammany Hall machine and left behind subways, hospitals and an airport. A half-century later, Mr. Giuliani is hoping for a more tangible legacy than a stack of titillating headlines. The lifelong Yankees fan has worked feverishly to land a $1 billion baseball stadium, but talks have apparently stalled.

Even on Broadway, where the ratio of broken hearts to light bulbs is 1-to-1, there's a sense that the mayor has let his life spiral too far out of control.

"The guy's done a tremendous job cleaning up the quality-of-life issues, the squeegee guys, the Fulton Street Market. Having said that, the guy's a complete buffoon," said Bill Castor, 40, a businessman who had been waiting all day outside The Producers, hoping to score tickets to the hottest show in town. "His ego has gotten way too big."

A recent New York Times poll found that only a third of New Yorkers say they would move out of town if they could, compared with six in 10 before Mr. Giuliani took office. Yet the same poll reported that in hypothetical matchups with the two Republicans and four Democrats in Tuesday's primary, he wouldn't come close to the 14-point victory he enjoyed in 1997.

Friends introduced Mr. Giuliani and Donna Hanover in 1982. She was a divorced Miami newscaster; he had split from his first wife. After a two-month courtship, he proposed at Disney World. They had two children Andrew, now 15, and Caroline, 11. A chill had set in by the 1997 re-election, though. Campaign donations from the Hanover family had dried up, and she refused to say whether she would even vote for him.

By the time the prostate cancer was diagnosed in spring 2000, Mr. Giuliani was in love with Judith Nathan, a pharmaceutical company sales manager. When he went public with his condition, his wife learned along with the rest of New York that he wanted Ms. Nathan at his side in his time of need.

Two weeks later, the Giulianis were officially separated. Nine days after that, he quit the Senate race, leaving the field to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It wasn't long before the mayor stripped his wife of her ceremonial role as first lady – "Fired!" read the headline – reassigned most of her police escorts and axed her chief of staff. When she wouldn't go quietly, his allies spread the word that she was an uncaring mom.

She fought back, winning a court order to keep the first girlfriend out of Gracie Mansion. "Gracie Now a Judi-Free Zone," the tabs said.

He complained publicly that his wife's early-morning exercise routine was robbing him of precious sleep and driving him crazy. He began staying with a Queens car dealer friend and his lover, but he wouldn't say whether the experience made him rethink his objections to gay marriage. "Rudy Stays Mum About Roommates," the Daily News said.

When reporters realized he wasn't going home to the mansion at night anymore, he dropped all pretense and moved out. "Say Goodbye, Gracie," the New York Post said.

The mayor's celebrity divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, has tried repeatedly to shame Ms. Hanover into turning the mansion over to the man elected to live there. "She's howling like a stuck pig," he said – on Mother's Day. "I suppose we're going to have to pry her off the chandelier to get her out of there."

The nastiness prompted a scolding from the weekly The New York Observer, which noted that "Mr. Giuliani has expended no small amount of energy over the last seven years hectoring New Yorkers about civility, respect and common decency," but had shelved his own advice "in this hour of extreme personal pain."

Then again, this mayor has never been one to pull punches. Political foes are "morons." Journalists investigating his marital woes are "jerks." People who keep ferrets are "deranged." An unarmed black man shot by police was "no altar boy."

This is a mayor who, in his drive to catch scofflaw diplomats, once sent New York's finest to check for double-parked cars outside a tea party for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's wife – thrown by the mayor's own U.N. liaison.

Mr. Giuliani became a household name in the 1980s as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, after serving as the No. 3 man in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department.

He prosecuted the Colombo crime family, hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, stock manipulator Ivan Boesky and commodities trader Marc Rich, the fugitive granted an 11th-hour pardon by President Bill Clinton.

He lost the 1989 mayoral race to David Dinkins, who had felled three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic primary, but he won the rematch four years later, becoming the first Republican mayor in several decades. By then, crime was peaking and the budget was a mess. New York was one "Rotten Apple," Time magazine said.

Once in office, Mr. Giuliani took control of the budget and went after fare-jumpers, unleashed dogs, unlicensed falafel vendors, the homeless and the squeegee men who "cleaned" windshields and menaced drivers for payment. The homicide rate has dropped by half. Central Park is filled with baby strollers. In Times Square, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry's and the Disney Store supplanted most of the 25-cent peep shows.

"He's kind of like Bill Clinton," said Doug Shields, a tourist from Knoxville, Iowa, strolling 42nd Street with his wife, Ruth. "But look at the job he's done."

Longtime Giuliani pal Ray Harding, head of the city's Liberal Party, said the turnaround has been so great that "if the next mayor, whoever he is, stumbles, there'll be a clarion call for Rudy to return. He's one of the great mayors in history. There's nobody since La Guardia who comes near Giuliani."

Even the victim of one of the city's most notorious incidents of police brutality offered praise. "He's been a good mayor. There's no question about that," said Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant assaulted with a broomstick in a stationhouse bathroom a few years ago. "When it comes to fighting crime and also trying to make the city a safer place, he's done a good job. There's a few bad cops, but there are more good cops."

Mr. Giuliani has made plenty of enemies. As self-appointed public scourge, he crusaded against the Brooklyn Museum of Art, starting in 1999 over a Virgin Mary depicted partly with elephant dung. ("Is Art or Rudy Crusade Uglier?" the Daily News asked.) Last February, he assembled a decency task force in response to a new exhibit, "Yo Mama's Last Supper," that showed Jesus as a nude black woman.

For critics, Mr. Giuliani's New York is a sort of American Singapore without the public canings. "It's an authoritarian and repressive place," said Norman Siegel, of the local American Civil Liberties Union and a law school classmate. "There's some pluses, but there's also a dark side. ... It's very sad. He could have been great."

But for the most part, residents and visitors love the transformation, if not the mayor himself.

"I heard New York is a dangerous city. But he improved it a lot. Now it's a safe city," Sagar Vemulakunda, 29, an Indian software engineer who arrived six months ago from Hyderabad, said while waiting for the Staten Island ferry.

In Chinatown, Pat Gough, a caterer on holiday from the British Midlands, said the only place she's felt safer is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where "they'd cut your hand off for stealing."

Nearby, vendor José Pereira of Queens was selling cold drinks on a sultry afternoon. The 38-year-old echoed the near-universal gratitude Mr. Giuliani enjoys for the drop in crime.

"I'm a Christian," he said. "What he's doing, it's wrong. I think Giuliani forgot the wife for the politics. It's not nice."

"It's an authoritarian and repressive place," said Norman Siegel, of the local American Civil Liberties Union and a law school classmate.

I'm sure that you would agree with this statement.

NYC cops are total asses. But they do keep the peace, and I'd rather have a bunch of hardnosed jackasses who do their job over "nice" policemen who don't.

Hundreds who live now would have been murdered but for this mayor.

Watch crime return when Green is elected. Not at first but a slow creep upward especially when Bratton and he part ways.

Live like Klinton (live like Caligula) - and you become fodder for the supermarket tabloids.

Giuliani has nobody to blame but himself.

Tell me about it. Never thought I'd long for anything out of NYC, but we could sure use some REAL cops out here.

Never thought I'd long for anything out of NYC

Oh cmon, the hustle and bustle chaos of Times Square, the stench of fermented piss in the subways, the falafel stands.. what's not to long for?

2 - Indeed.

Exactly my thoughts as I watched unionized police loaf along the "Labor Day" parade route up Fifth Ave. Saturday.

Potbellied, almost all-white, low-brow smooth-brained types marched past Gucci and Trump Tower carrying crude plackards supporting the teachers' union.

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