Gaze into my crystal ball for the answer....
Posted on 11/28/2007 11:56:43 AM PST by Fred
Giuliani billed obscure agencies for trips By: Ben Smith November 28, 2007 02:55 PM EST
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
Giuliani’s relationship with Nathan is old news now, and Giuliani regularly asks voters on the campaign trail to forgive his "mistakes."
It’s also impossible to know whether the purpose of all the Hamptons trips was to see Nathan. A Giuliani spokeswoman declined to discuss any aspect of this story, which was explained in detail to her earlier this week.
But the practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani's security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.
The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.
When the city's fiscal monitor asked for an explanation, Giuliani's aides refused, citing "security," said Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for the city comptroller.
But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.
Auditors "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes," City Comptroller William Thompson wrote of the expenses from Fiscal Year 2000, which covers parts of 1999 and 2000.
The letter, whose existence has not been previously reported, was also obtained under the Freedom of Information Law.
Long Island bills
The receipts tally the costs of hotel and gas bills for the police detectives who traveled everywhere with the mayor, according to cover sheets that label them “PD expenses” and travel authorizations that describe the trips.
Many are from hotels and gas stations on Long Island, where Giuliani reportedly began visiting Nathan’s Southampton condominium in the summer of 1999, though Giuliani and Nathan have never discussed the beginning of their relationship.
Nathan would go on to become Giuliani’s third wife, but his second marriage was officially intact until the spring of 2000, and City Hall officials at the time responded to questions about his absences by saying he was spending time with his son and playing golf.
The receipts have languished in city files since Giuliani left office, apparently in part because of City Hall's decision to bill police expenses to a range of little-known city offices.
"There is no really good reason to do this except to have nobody know about it," Carol O'Cleireacain, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who was budget director under Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, said of the unusual billing practices.
A Giuliani spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, declined to comment on any aspect of the travel documents or the billing arrangements.
A Giuliani aide who would speak only on the condition of anonymity denied that the unorthodox billing practices were aimed at hiding the expenses, citing "accounting" and noting that they were billed to units of the mayor's office, not to outside city agencies.
The aide declined to discuss Giuliani's visits to Long Island.
The trips themselves were a departure for a mayor who had prided himself on spending every waking moment in the city and on the job, and offer a glimpse into the dramatic and controversial finale to his tenure in office.
Receipts show him in Southampton every weekend in August and the first weekend in September of 2001, before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 disrupted the routines of his city.
Both the travel expenses and the appearance that his office made efforts to conceal them could open Giuliani to criticism that his personal life spilled over into his official duties and his expenses grew in his final years in office.
It is impossible to say which of the 11 Long Island trips indicated by credit card receipts were to visit Nathan and which were for other purposes.
Eight of those trips, however, were not noted on Giuliani's official schedule, which is now available in the city's municipal archive and contains many details of Giuliani's official and unofficial life.
The billing practices, however, drew formal attention on Jan. 24, 2002, when Thompson, the city comptroller, wrote the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a confidential letter.
One of his auditors, he wrote, had stumbled upon the unexplained travel expenses during a routine audit of the Loft Board, a tiny branch of city government that regulates certain apartments.
Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People with Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.
The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.
Increasing costs
"The Comptroller's Office made repeated requests for the information in 2001 and 2002 but was informed that due to security concerns the information could not be provided," said Simmons. Thompson took office in 2002.
Thompson also warned that travel costs had increased by 151 percent in Giuliani's final fiscal year, to more than $618,000, a number which also includes police security on campaign swings for Giuliani’s abortive 2000 Senate run and trips to Los Angeles by Donna Hanover, who remained Giuliani's wife and the city's official first lady, in the fall of 2000.
Most of that travel also was billed to obscure agencies, though portions — much of it trips to and from Washington by Giuliani deputies — were accounted for more conventionally, with a more visible charge to the mayor's office.
Thompson suggested Bloomberg "review…the cost of Mayoralty travel expenses, given your administration's focus on fiscal constraints."
A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Stu Loeser, said: "When we received the letter from the comptroller, we referred the matter to the department of Investigations as we would in any case like this."
A spokeswoman for the department of Investigations declined to comment.
The executive director of the Loft Board referred Politico to Bloomberg's office for comment.
The first trip to Southampton appearing in the travel documents runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, 1999.
Four police officers spent the night at the Atlantic Utopia Lifestyle Inn, according to an approval request for official out-of-city travel, billing the city $1,016.20.
Giuliani’s private schedule, available from the municipal archive, lists no events on Long Island that day.
The New York Post reported the following year that Giuliani "had long weekend visits with gal pal Judi Nathan at her Southampton, L.I., condo last summer, according to neighbors who said the mayor did little to conceal their relationship.”
The neighbors called their relationship and their time in Nathan's two-bedroom condo overlooking Noyack Bay "an open secret.”
"Several residents of the condo sometimes asked Giuliani's driver and members of his security entourage to turn off their car engines," the Post reported.
That first trip was followed by at least 10 more, according to the travel and credit card documents.
One of those trips, on Aug. 20-21 of 1999, included a fundraiser on the evening of the 21st. Giuliani’s four-man detail arrived 24 hours early, billing the city $1704.43 at the Southampton Inn, according to their approval request.
More trips followed in the summer of 2000, after the mayor's affair with Nathan became public and they were seen together publicly in Southampton. The trips accelerated in the summer of 2001, when he visited Southampton every weekend in August, as well as on Sept. 2.
Many of the trips only show expenses for gas, though his police detail billed the city $1371.40 for the nights of Aug. 3-4 of 2001 at the Village Latch Inn in Southampton.
Giuliani's police detail also spent a night in Palm Beach, Fla., according to the bill for the American Express card under Giuliani's name. The detectives spent $1714.99 at The Breakers, a sprawling hotel and resort.
There is no indication that Nathan visited Palm Beach. Giuliani's aide did not recall the trip.
The 2001 travel expenses were billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, a little-known unit of the mayor's office involved in programs that provide lawyers to poor defendants.
None of the 2001 trips to Southampton appear in Giuliani's official schedule. However, the schedule does contain a potential clue to his destination. Before three of them, Giuliani paid a visit to his barber, Carlo Fargnoli, on York Avenue near the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion.
Politico intern Kate Linthicum contributed to this article.
TM & © THE POLITICO & POLITICO.COM, a division of Allbritton Communications Company
I’ve gotta know, are you a Thompson supporter and, if so, did you predict that way back in 1997 when you chose your screen name?
This might do him in ...
As someone willing to vote for Giuliani in the general election, I think he is a goner (assuming this report is true).
IN OTHER WORDS, LETS SWITCH FIRST AND LAST NAMES, RUDY KERIK, BERNARD GIULIANI...
That's your opinion. IMO he is NO BETTER and unworthy of an honest conservative vote just as the Democrats are.
LOL!
Now if your screen name was Fred2008 I would have been really impressed!
|
|
Giuliani | Clinton | Dem Platform | GOP Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abortion on Demand | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Partial Birth Abortion | Supports Opposed NY ban |
Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Roe v. Wade | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Taxpayer Funded Abortions | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Embryonic Stem Cell Research | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Federal Marriage Amendment | Opposes | Opposes | Opposes Defined at state level |
Supports |
| Gay Domestic Partnership/ Civil Unions |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Openly Gay Military | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Defense of Marriage Act | Opposes | Opposes | Opposes | Supports |
| Amnesty for Illegal Aliens | Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Special Path to Citizenship for Illegal Aliens |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Tough Penalties for Employers of Illegal Aliens |
Opposes | Opposes | Opposes | Supports |
| Sanctuary Cities/ Ignoring Immigration Law |
Supports | Supports | Supports | Opposes |
| Protecting 2nd Amendment | Opposes |
Opposes | Opposes Supports bans |
Supports |
| Confiscating Guns | Supports Confiscated as mayor. Even bragged. |
Supports | Supports Supports bans |
Opposes |
| 'Assault' Weapons Ban | Supports | Supports | Supports | |
| Frivolous Lawsuits Against Gun Makers |
Supports Filed One Himself |
Supports | Opposes | |
| Gun Registration/Licenses | Supports | Supports | Opposes | |
| War in Afghanistan | Supports | Supports Voted for it |
Supports | Supports |
| War in Iraq | Supports | Supports Voted for it |
Supports Weak support |
Supports |
| Patriot Act | Supports | Supports Voted for it 2001 & 2006 |
Opposes | Supports |
He owes the public a good explanation. Could be just to avoid chatter in the office about his personal life, if the billing pattern used resulted in different people processing the expenses, instead of one person or group if the billings had all been routed to the main “mayor’s office” account. Not too clear what the meaning is of “units of the mayor’s office”. If these are just subsets of the mayor’s office, I’m not sure why they would each need separate budgets and maybe they didn’t. If they did each have separate budgets, did they get billed for a portion of expenses each time the mayor went on some public outing that was related to a given unit’s function, but also related to other things?
I don’t have a problem with public figures getting taxpayer-funded security details for personal activities. Someone like a mayor of NYC is very definitely a target, and it would get pretty hard to find people willing to take these positions if they had to spend a couple hundred thousand a year in extra security costs just to stay reasonably safe while doing whatever they would normally be doing in their personal time (other thatn the occasional billionaire who gets an urge to take a huge pay cut and put up with all the crap that public office entails). But pending some good explanation, this sounds like a deliberate attempt to conceal expenses, and that is definitely not okay for public figures to do with taxpayers’ money.
So far, Fred looks fairly clean (apart from the fact that he took more than $5000 to push pro-abortion legislation as a lobbyist--an ethical breach of a different kind).
But Mitt's ethics background is spotless. In fact, Mitt is a hard-headed businessman, a notorious tightwad. He's never shown the slightest tendency to want to gorge himself at the trough of special interests and hidden slush funds. He's wealthy by his own effort but not greedy for filthy lucre.
The severely ethically-challenged and corrupt Hillary will likely be the Democratic candidate. Only Mitt and Fred can speak boldly to her many ethical failures without sounding like hypocrites.
I read it, and I'm still wondering what the story is. It seems that the Mayor's security detail is paid for by the city, and includes security costs for his personal trips and travel. Well... of course it does. Security details are all of the time, not just working hours.
Somebody want to tell me what the big deal is?
No he is just the damn same.
Read #52. Add onto that the fact that this was to see his mistress. It wasn’t kosher when Clinton was Governor of Arkansas and it wasn’t kosher when Giuliani was Mayor of NYC.
Rudy's personal life is an absolute 'train wreck'. That means, of course, that Rudy DOES benefit a great deal (more than anyone else in the campaign) from the Clinton VACCINE (the position that Clinton and the democrats made so strongly during the Monica fiasco--that personal life DOES NOT MATTER).
I bet that many of the Rudy-Apologists defending Rudy here on FR were the same ones attacking Clinton during the Monica fiasco--by saying that 'PERSONAL LIFE, CHARACTER and CONDUCT DOES MATTER'. How ironic is that???
High Infidelity What if three admitted adulterers run for president and no one cares?
It could have been to go to a whorehouse, and *still* the mayor's security detail remains on duty with him. Like a Presidential Secret Service detail... they go everywhere.
Look, I know that people around here hate Rudy's guts. I've got a few concerns myself. But this is just a lame attempt to spin up a controversy-- hoping that enough buzzwords and turn of lingo will make it sound like there's something interesting happening. But if you actually read the story... there's nothing but vague hysteria over things that when you think about it, aren't all that unusual.
It's like somebody hyperventilating because the Secret Service covers Bush out at his ranch when he's on vacation. Well... duh?
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