Kidding. Once a deranged, lying scumbag, always a deranged, lying scumbag....Jim Dwyer in the Times:
On his way to school one morning, a 13-year-old boy was knocked down by a cab outside his home on East 86th Street in Manhattan. The first ambulance arrived in six minutes. The boy was conscious. He had a small cut on his head. His leg hurt. With a supervisor steadying the boy’s head, the medics moved him onto a backboard, and then into the rear of the ambulance.
“Your first concern is for a long-bone fracture,” said Erik Marketan, one of the emergency medical technicians who lifted the boy into the ambulance. “With a kid, they can bleed out inside the thigh before you know it. It’s all spelled out in the trauma protocols.
“There was nothing remarkable about the job.”
Up to that point, no.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, then living across the street, was about to arrive on the scene. It was just before 8 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1993, in the opening days of Mr. Giuliani’s life as an elected public official. In two weeks, he would be sworn in as mayor.
What followed in the next 10 minutes would soon be lost to history for nearly everyone but the people directly involved. The tone of that moment, however, would be heard again and again through the eight years of his mayoralty, like the forgotten note of an A played by a first violinist just before a performance, tuning the entire orchestra for all that will follow.
With his presidential hopes seeming to turn to dust in Florida, that first moment foreshadowed how he would see himself, and be seen by the people of New York. Some heard the loud, necessary note of assertiveness, the sounds of a leader taking direct charge to shape a better city, as Mr. Giuliani had promised in his campaign. Some heard a bully with a bullhorn, a man heedless of his own limits and hard facts, trampling the lives of others.
With the boy tucked into the ambulance, Mr. Marketan and his colleagues were getting ready to take him to the nearest trauma center, just 16 blocks down York Avenue at New York Hospital. The boy’s mother, who was at his side, wanted him taken to Columbia-Presbyterian, where his father was a surgeon. But it was more than six miles away, and was not a trauma center.
“That’s where the diplomacy comes in,” Mr. Marketan said. “Once they realize you’re operating in the best interests of the kid, and they see that you’re competent, they go along.”
Lt. Jimmy Ayuso, the senior paramedic on the scene, explained the reasoning to the mother. They would get the boy to New York Hospital, and once the doctors were sure he was safe, he could be moved.
The mother was close to agreeing, Mr. Marketan said, when Mr. Giuliani arrived and learned of her concerns. He lit into Lieutenant Ayuso for not going along with her request. There is a slight dispute over precisely what was said: The medical workers and some witnesses heard Mr. Giuliani directing combinations of multisyllabic profanity at Lieutenant Ayuso. Mr. Giuliani would later say that his strongest words were “idiot” or “stupid.” He assailed “red tape” and “bureaucratic rules.”
No one disagrees about the result. After a few minutes, Lieutenant Ayuso, known for a calm head, stepped back into the ambulance and instructed the medics to take the boy to Columbia-Presbyterian, but to note that it was being done against medical advice. “The decision was, if that’s what is going to get us off the scene, let’s go there,” Mr. Marketan recalled.
Over the next few days, Mr. Giuliani gave a narrative of the event that starkly contradicted the accounts of others who were there, and even the geography of the city. “The fact is, if you calculate the traffic, it’s no closer,” said Mr. Giuliani, dismissing the idea that the 16 blocks to New York Hospital would have been covered faster than the six miles to Columbia-Presbyterian.
“The young boy was shivering on the ground while they were arguing with the mother,” Mr. Giuliani said, and suggested that he was responsible for making the boy comfortable: “We finally got the blanket put on him so he would be warm.”
In fact, witnesses and medical workers said, the blanket had been put on the boy by a doorman even before the ambulance — or Mr. Giuliani — arrived. They also said the boy was already in the ambulance when the mayor-elect appeared. “I never left his side,” Mr. Marketan said. “The idea we would leave a patient shivering on the street, unattended — I thought about suing him for $1 for the slander, but I was 28 years old, just starting my career. I wish I had.”
Even the medical adviser on Mr. Giuliani’s transition team was distressed, although the boy recovered. For his part, Mr. Giuliani said he would do it again. “If I have to leave quickly,” he later joked at a political gathering, “it’s only because there might be an emergency out there that needs my help.”
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