Index: Four Seasons Total Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani has always been egomaniacal, self-serving, loquacious, mean-spirited, vile, and morally bankrupt. This is who he is, and who he has always been. It’s “America’s Mayor” that’s a fraud.
If you, like me, lived in New York City on September 11, 2001, you will no doubt cling to the memory of the heroism of the mayor on that awful day, and the days and weeks that followed. But Rudy Giuliani is no hero. The reality is that even in his finest hour, he remained a horrible human being. Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, by Dan Collins and the late, great Wayne Barrett, smashes the idol, exposing Giuliani as a lousy mayor whose pre-9/11 preparedness policies—or, rather, lack thereof—made the events of that fateful day demonstrably worse. And as we’ve seen with our own eyes, Rudy has spent the 22 years since the attacks exploiting our national tragedy for his personal benefit.
With the requisite trigger warning, I encourage everyone to read the lawsuit filed against Giuliani by his former employee, Noelle Dunphy. Among other things, he (allegedly) sexually abused her in horrific ways, verbally abused her, treated her like garbage, and refused to pay her money he owned her for doing work for him. Dunphy had the presence of mind to record a lot of the stuff Rudy said to her. Some of those transcripts were released last week, during the Trump hoopla. I have a lower opinion of Giuliani than most, and even I was shocked by what I read.
Sure, Rudy Giuliani acted like a heroic leader on 9/11—and Bill Cosby was really good as Heathcliff Huxtable.
Here are pieces written on PREVAIL—and one pre-PREVAIL—about Giuliani:
The Myth of America’s Mayor:
Will the Real Rudy Giuliani Please Stand Up?
November 6, 2019, via The Erin Endeavor
Luxuriating in the muck at the center of the president’s Ukraine scandal is Rudolph William Louis Giuliani—a man who, not that long ago, was named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. How could the crisis leader hailed by Newsweek as “our Winston Churchill” have fallen so precipitously from grace? How did “America’s Mayor” become Trump’s partner in crime? When did Rudy break bad?
Ivan IV only assumed the “Terrible” sobriquet after a traumatic illness almost killed him. Henry VIII’s personality completely changed after a bad accident in which he was thrown from his royal horse. Our natural tendency is to look for a similar life-changing event in Rudy’s recent history. How else to square the noble Rudy of 9/11 with the Trumpist traitor who cavorts with criminals?
The answer, alas, is that the Rudy Giuliani we see today—“Colludy Rudy” who operates as Trump’s shadow Secretary of State, doing his client’s illicit bidding in Eastern Europe; “Nosferatu Rudy,” who spewed fire and brimstone at the RNC; “Rantin’ Rudy,” who raves like a madman on the cable news shows—is the real Rudy Giuliani. Not only that, but the 2019 vintage is no different than the 2016, the 2001, or the 1997. Rudy Giuliani has always been egomaniacal, self-serving, loquacious, mean-spirited, and morally bankrupt. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
It’s “America’s Mayor” that’s a fraud.
How Rudy Giuliani is Helping Putin & Trump Conquer Cyberspace: An interview with the investigative reporter & researcher Portlus Glam
December 20, 2019
Rudy Giuliani may seem like a buffoon, the court jester in the opera buffa that is Trumpland, but what he’s been doing for the last three years could not be more serious. After falling off the radar following his aborted attempt to land the Secretary of State gig in late 2016, Giuliani has re-emerged as the key figure in the Ukraine scandal that this week led to the president’s impeachment. But at no point in the last three years did he ever actually go away.
While the details of the fateful call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky have been dissected to death in the press and in Congress, the context of that meeting has eluded most of the reporting. And context is everything. The Zelensky quid pro quo was but a still shot from an epic motion picture that has gone on for more than three years—and it’s absolutely a horror movie.
From the hour he vanished from the scene almost exactly three years ago to the present day, Rudy Giuliani has been operating as Trump’s “informal cybersecurity advisor,” an innocuous title that belies his Orwellian objective: the conquest of cyberspace by Putin, Trump, and…well, let’s just call them what they are—the forces of evil. (Despite claims of working for Trump for free, Giuliani has of course been handsomely compensated for his odious treachery).
This is all difficult to wrap one’s head around. So I asked the crack researcher called Portlus Glam, who has been sounding the alarm about this for almost as long as it’s been going on, to explain it to me:
F—ck Giuliani: Rudy and The Red Garter
By Nia Molinari
October 2, 2020
A retired stripper explores the connections between Rudy Giuliani, the Five Families, and the clubs where she worked in the late 90s.
Even after I quit stripping, I couldn’t stop thinking about the strangeness of my summer in New York. I came to town with a decade of experience and excellent references. If that was enough to get me hired on the spot at Lace and The Red Garter, why did the managers at Flashdancers and Scores invent reasons to send me away? And: Why were some of the clubs shut down, but not the others? "Re-zoning” alone failed to explain it—not given the neighborhoods where those clubs were located. Also: why were the clubs that weren’t shut down the very same ones that specifically rejected me? I thought back to what I’d overhead at the club in Queens, the anti-Giuliani complaints. What defined “us,” and what defined “them”?
I began to sift through what information I had. I knew that some of the clubs I had worked at over the years were what might be called “mobbed up.” Some owners were Italian, some Irish, some bikers, some Korean, and some were Persians that tried too hard to make people think they were Italian. It all depended on what part of the country you were in. As long as you minded your own business, and stayed out of theirs, it was no big deal. As a matter of fact, those clubs were usually better to work at than the newer, corporate clubs. Generally speaking, they treated you better. I never asked questions when I was working in the clubs. I knew what I worked for, but not who—not exactly. But that seemed critical to solving the mystery.
I started a deep dive down the Internet. I discovered Jerry Capeci’s Gangland News. I’d sit for hours, drink a bottle of wine, and scour that website, among others. I learned the history of the Mob, going back a hundred years. I learned the origins of the NYC Five Families: the Genoveses, the Gambinos, the Bonannos, the Lucheses, the Columbos, and the Chicago Outfit, as well as the other scattered families throughout the country, including in Philadelphia. I became an absolute true crime nerd. I also realized that I probably knew some people and knew some things that I didn’t know I knew, and I don’t want to know I know, and if I knew I would deny knowing, if you know what I mean.
Rudy in Reverse: A Retrospective of Wretchedness
December 8, 2020
The father went to Sing Sing for sticking up a milkman. The son is even worse.
Maker of myths, exploiter of national trauma, disseminator of Russian propaganda, spreader of plague, friend of organized crime, ruthless opportunist, fallen crusader, media whore, Trump apologist, feckless performance artist, and, above all, selfish asshole. To fully appreciate the abject wretchedness of Rudolph William Louis Giuliani—in the event that he dies of covid-19, and sympathetic obituaries whitewash him—it helps to work backwards, Benjamin Button style…
13848: In the Event of Foreign Interference in a U.S. Election (with Gal Suburban)
June 3, 2022
How turning in an assignment late might have saved democracy.
. . . As Trump well knows, a hostile foreign power—Russia—did tamper with the election of 2016. Our Intelligence Community should be making sure hostile foreign powers are not tampering with our elections. The threat of foreign interference in elections is a national emergency. President Biden agrees; back in September, he re-upped E.O. 13848 for one more year.
But Trump doesn’t do anything without some ulterior motive. And if Gal Suburban, the crack open-source researcher and today’s guest on the PREVAIL podcast, is right, 13848 was one of the weapons Trump and his seditious brain trust planned to use to nullify the results of the 2020 election. The executive order was an arrow in the fascist quiver—perhaps the arrow that would end democracy in the United States. . .
The timeline of events from early November 2020 through the January 6 insurrection strongly suggests that Trump was willing to move heaven and earth to remain Commander-in-Chief, despite his decisive loss in the election—the popular will of the people, and the Electoral College, be damned.
7 November 2020
Major media outlets, including The Associated Press and Fox News, call the election for Biden, interrupting a press conference Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani is holding at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. . .
13 December 2020
Late Sunday night, an obscure attorney named Ken Chesebro sends an email to Rudy Giuliani—“Dear Mayor,” it begins—that comprises the first known attempt by Trump’s legal team to subvert the spirit of the Electoral Count Act into “a day-by-day plan of action,” as U.S. District Court Judge David Carter would later write in his opinion. The memo, Carter determined, “likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. . . ”
18 December 2020
On the day the intelligence report was due—oops—an impromptu meeting is held at the White House. Mike Flynn, Patrick Byrne, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and a host of other potential seditious conspirators talk their way into the Oval Office, where they meet with Trump. The powwow goes on for four hours, eventually relocating to the Residence, and may prove to be the critical event in the planning of the January 6 insurrection.
19 December 2020
Trump advisor Peter Navarro releases a 36-page report alleging mass election fraud, maintaining that the election was stolen. Trump tweets out the link, saying: “Statistically impossible to have lost 2020 election. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Our Man in Kharkiv
From “Unsolved Mysteries of the Trump Years, Vol. 1”
June 6, 2023
Ever since he showed up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping with hair dye streaming down his face, Rudy Giuliani has rightly become a target of popular ridicule. But in the early days of the Trump Administration, when he was still respected in certain circles, he was operating in some sort of unofficial “envoy” capacity for Trump, stirring up shit in [checks notes] Ukraine.
As the researcher Portlus Glam explained on these pages in December 2019:
Russia made their goal for militarization clear in December 2016, when Putin released his new doctrine for cyber warfare. Trump created a national upheaval by firing FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. And in June 2017, Russia imploded the U.N.’s 13-year effort to draft new global cybersecurity rules.
This created an influence vacuum and put vulnerable ex-Soviet countries at imminent risk for cyberattack by Russia. That allowed Giuliani to go over and operationalize in Ukraine during May and June 2017 via contracts with Mayors in Kharkiv and Kyiv. . .
Remember—by February 2017, Paul Manafort was out of the Ukraine game. Michael Cohen and Felix Sater’s peace plan hijinks had taken them out too. Rudy probably ended up wearing many more capes than anyone had initially planned. . . So that’s why his goon squad from Giuliani Safety and Security LLC was literally on the ground in Kharkiv the day Comey was fired—May 9, 2017. And that’s why Giuliani was at the White House the day after Comey was fired—May 10—meeting with Tom Bossert to put the finishing touches on the Administration’s first Executive Order on Cybersecurity. Fun fact: that was also the same day Lavrov and Kislyak visited Trump in the Oval Office.
Skipping to early July 2017, Trump held his first meeting with Putin during the G20 Summit in Hamburg—the one where they chatted about a “joint cyber unit.” A week later, Rex Tillerson directed State to shutter its Office of Cyber Issues, pushing out a well-respected global cyber envoy, Christopher Painter. Once again, Giuliani’s goon squad was on the ground in Ukraine for this announcement, meeting with ex-Party of Regions leaders.
Bottom line, Giuliani and his people were active in Ukraine from the very beginning of the Trump years—before Rick Perry got up to whatever he got up to, before Trump attempted to extort President Zelenskyy. In light of recent developments in the region—that is, Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine—this early activity demands greater scrutiny.
Justice Undone: Clemency Decisions in the Trump White House
May 30, 2023
Then there is the revelation buried in the recent lawsuit filed against the odious Rudy Giuliani by his former employee, Noelle Dunphy. Here are the two relevant paragraphs:
132. [Giuliani] also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
and
119. To bolster his claims about the need to keep Ms. Dunphy’s employment “secret,” Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy about other schemes he undertook to reduce the amounts he owed to his ex-wife. For example, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that someone owed him $1 million, but Giuliani hinted that instead of having the money paid to him, he had his friend, Robert Stryk, hold it for him. He said, “Robert Stryk just got me a million-dollar payment.” This statement was recorded.
It may be that Giuliani was blasted out of his mind, making shit up to try and impress Dunphy. [Note: I have since found out that the general impression is that he was not making it up, that he was being serious]. But if there’s any truth to Rudy’s bluster, selling pardons for $2 mill a pop, while not explicitly prohibited by Article II, is pretty clearly a no-no. Remember, it was a crime akin to selling pardons—attempting to sell off a Senate seat—that took down former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Coincidentally, Blagojevich was 1) a member of Burton’s Committee, and 2) himself the recipient of a Trump pardon.
And here is the ultimate irony: If there’s one person who should have been infuriated at the Marc Rich pardon, and who should therefore fundamentally detest the prospect of the hard work of law enforcement going poof with the stroke of a corrupt president’s pen, it is Rudolph W. Giuliani. After all, he was the federal prosecutor who indicted Rich in 1983.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City speaking to supporters at an immigration policy speech hosted by Donald Trump at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, August 2016.
Amazingly, I have one more. I recently watched on Max, "Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York." SPOILER ALERT: It turned out that the serial killer, who exclusively murdered young gay men in the late 80s and 90s, was a male nurse at Mt. Sinai Hospital. In the early 90s, Giuliani's mother, Helen, was at Mt. Sinai for something or other, and when it was reported that the serial killer was a nurse there, Mr. Mayor INSISTED on having his mother moved to a different hospital for her safety. Of course, the nurse had already been arrested, and Helen was not really a target of a gay serial killer anyway, but Rudy's rampant homophobia and desire to always be in the news didn't stop him from making a big show of "protecting" his mother. Conveniently, Helen died on 09/09/2002, so that on the 10th, the NY Post (what may be the OG Fake News) could run the headline: "GIULIANI MOURNS MOM ON 9/11 EVE."
I encourage, as I think I have before, EVERYONE to read "Grand Illusion" to really get a handle of Giuliani. It was released in 2006, and any time after that is recorded in recent history. Greg is right, Giuliani has ALWAYS been an "egomaniacal, self-serving, loquacious, mean-spirited, vile, and morally bankrupt" character. It started WAY before 9/11 and continues to this day.
ETA: "With the requisite trigger warning, I encourage everyone to read the lawsuit filed against Giuliani by his former employee, Noelle Dunphy."
This requires a little more than a trigger warning. It is the most repulsive thing I have read in a long time, but yes, read it or try to. Eventually you will start to skim it as the details are too horrific to take in. Giuliani is ALLEGEDLY a disgusting pig, the likes of which we have not seen before, and I'm going to go ahead and include Trump in that assessment. Keep in mind as you read that your mind will make pictures of what you're reading. That is the worst part.
I always thought his one redeeming virtue was his time as a prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, during which I have read that he put away some serious criminals. But it’s hard to believe that anyone as morally bankrupt as Giuliani did even that with clean hands.