Exposed: Yet Another Of His Lies

It's the old joke about Beloved Leader's Poppy: You know he's lying because his mouth is open. That's all you need to know....

Today: How he became a great prosecutor (over than by grandstanding for the media).

ON “Meet the Press” a week ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani attempted to deflect criticism of his close relationship with his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, by saying that his misjudgment of Mr. Kerik had to be weighed against his other accomplishments. “How can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney’s office?” he asked. But Mr. Giuliani’s claim to have turned around the Manhattan United States attorney’s office is not only untrue, it is an insult to the outstanding men and women who have served in that office over the last 50 years.

When he became the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1983 (I was his immediate predecessor), Mr. Giuliani did not take over a moribund prosecutor’s office; he became the head of the premier United States attorney’s office in the country, with a tradition of excellence stretching back 30 years under the leadership of such legal luminaries as Robert M. Morgenthau, the current Manhattan district attorney, and Robert B. Fiske Jr., the original Whitewater special prosecutor. Mr. Giuliani took over an office staffed by a group of the finest young lawyers in the country.

To Mr. Giuliani’s credit he made no major changes in the staff or leadership group he inherited. He retained William Tendy, a career prosecutor, as chief assistant, and Lawrence Pedowitz, a former Supreme Court law clerk and partner in the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, as chief of the criminal division. It was primarily the outstanding lawyers Mr. Giuliani inherited who investigated and prosecuted the important cases.

This is not to say that Mr. Giuliani was not a good trial lawyer and that he did not provide effective leadership. But the important cases prosecuted during his tenure did not result from some unique initiative or insight on his part.

Mr. Giuliani claims that he came up with the idea of prosecuting the leaders of each of the major crime families in a single case under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. While that may be his perception, the idea was first broached by the head of the criminal section of the F.B.I.’s New York office in a meeting with me and my staff approximately a year before Mr. Giuliani took office. By the time he was sworn in, the office was laying the groundwork for that case and had in place wiretaps on three of the five organized-crime families in New York City. Among the lawyers already assigned to those cases were Louis Freeh, later the director of the F.B.I., and Barbara Jones, later the chief assistant district attorney for Manhattan and now a United States district court judge.

While the United States attorney’s office under Mr. Giuliani prosecuted a number of high-profile securities fraud cases, including those against Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, the original information from which these cases developed came from Merrill Lynch, whose compliance staff had spotted what appeared to be insider trading in an account in the Bahamas. This account turned out to be owned by Dennis Levine, a leading Wall Street investment banker who, when confronted with the evidence against him, agreed to cooperate with the United States attorney’s office.

The principal case that Mr. Giuliani personally tried during his six-year tenure, that of Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader accused of corruption, had its genesis in an investigation conducted by the F.B.I. in Chicago. A person who had been caught paying bribes to Chicago city officials revealed to the F.B.I. that he had also been paying bribes to an official in the New York City Parking Violations Bureau. That official, Geoffrey Lindenauer, in turn cooperated in the investigation, and this led to the indictment — and ultimately the conviction — of Mr. Friedman.

There is no question that Mr. Giuliani is an able lawyer. It is unfortunate, however, that he feels he must denigrate the accomplishments of others to advance his own political interests. What has made the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York an example of what a great prosecutor’s office should be is its tradition of hiring the best lawyers available, without regard to party affiliation, and allowing them to do their job free from political influence. Mr. Giuliani did not have to turn the prosecutor’s office around; he simply had to keep it moving forward.

John S. Martin Jr. was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1980 to 1983.

Link.