November 26, 2007

Giuliani's Culture of Corruption Why did an Israeli billionaire hand $250,000 to Giuliani protégé Bernie Kerik?

by Justin Raimondo

They say he's the only one who can beat the Democrats in '08, the only one who's tough enough to take on Hillary and keep the White House for the GOP, but the truth is quite the opposite. With at least two major scandals brewing under the surface, in addition to his other distinctively un-Republican peccadilloes, Rudy is the candidate with the biggest glass jaw of them all. (Actually, Rudy G's peccadilloes are anything but un-republican. They are not in keeping with the Rethugs' image as the party of family values (whatever the hell those are), religiosity, conservatism, etc., but image is all there is to it, in most cases. Just think of all the Republicans who have gone down in flames for sexual misbehavior since the GOP convened their lynching party to deal with the much despised Bill Clinton, the man who interfered with their plans for several decades of uninterrupted Republican rule by daring to defeat Poppy Bush: Livingston, Newtie, Foley, Craig and others, in and out of Washington. We are not even counting the crusading crackpots who call themselves Christian and blindly vote Republican every time the polls open. But one must wonder why the Holy Rollers are content to even have Rudy in their party, let alone as their nominee for president. My personal guess would be that killing Muslim Babies and adults is more important than saving American fetuses from the abortion clinics. Anyone who sees Muslims as people, just as we are, will not get their vote. They see the "war on Turr" as the new crusades and,yes, they think Rudy can beat Hillary.) The slow-burning fuse of the controversy surrounding the lack of functioning radios for the New York City firemen who suffered such heavy losses on 9/11 has already been lit by the grieving – and angry – families of those who died. The firemen's union is going to harry the Giuliani campaign until the whole, sordid story of how a no-bid contract with Motorola and that company's cozy relationship with Giuliani led to the deaths of so many – the very ones whom Giuliani invokes as key actors in his 9/11 narrative, whose heroism he bathes in as if it would rub off. The media isn't covering it yet, but the firefighters aren't going to let go of this one: "hubris invites nemesis," as the ancient Greeks correctly believed, and in Giuliani's case, it's just a question of when his nemesis is going to appear – before the Republican convention or after. We have been hoping against hope that Rudy G will be the chosen Gooper. This nation has withstood about all it can, maybe more than it can stand, of the type of leadership Rudy so clearly represents, the kind we have witnessed since election 2000 and before, truth be told. Cronyism with a capital C, among other signs of slime. However, the trial of Bernie Kerik, a former Giuliani protégé charged with 16 counts of fraud, conspiracy, and lying on his federal disclosure forms, has a much shorter fuse and packs much more explosive potential. The indictment [.pdf] of Kerik, which I wrote about here, was long expected: the one surprise was a count of lying on his financial disclosure forms when he was being vetted for various positions with the federal government. Kerik failed to report a $250,000 "loan" from a mysterious Israeli billionaire, which had been laundered through a Brooklyn businessman. As the indictment puts it: "On or about June 13, 2003, 'John Doe #7,' a Brooklyn businessman, made a personal loan of $250,000 to Bernard B. Kerik ('the John Doe #7 loan'). As Kerik well knew, John Doe #7 obtained the funds with which to make the loan to Kerik by in turn taking a loan from 'John Doe #8,' a wealthy Israeli industrialist whose companies did business with the federal government." It turns out that John Doe #8 is Eitan Wertheimer, the richest man in Israel, whose Iscar Metalworking Companies – recently acquired by Warren Buffet for $4 billion – makes precision metal-cutting tools. Iscar maintains a global network of metalworking facilities, from Tefen, Israel, to the U.S., Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, China, India, and Brazil. Wertheimer passed the money to one Shimon Cohen, "John Doe #7," a Brooklyn dealer in marble and stone, who then handed it off, in the form of a "loan," to Kerik. Dan Janison, writing in Newsday's Spin Cycle blog, puts this train of circumstances into perspective: "A lingering question: Why would Cohen, described as a pal of Kerik, front the loan for Wertheimer as opposed to a direct transaction? Another question: Where did Kerik, who investigators portray as chronically in search of cash, get the funds to pay back the loan? Wertheimer is described in the indictment as having done business with the federal government." They knew they were doing something wrong. Why else try to launder the money through Cohen? Wertheimer, as the indictment says, "does business with the federal government": Iscar has government contracts with the Department of Defense. What's interesting, however, is that at the time the "loan" was made, Kerik was being vetted by federal investigators because of his appointment to the post of chief trainer of the Iraqi police – you know, the same police who turned out to be little more than Shi'ite death squads. In the atmosphere of New York City politics, such "loans" are part of the political culture, i.e., the culture of corruption that flourished under the Giuliani administration. The same sort of shenanigans led to the deaths of all those firemen on 9/11: a sweetheart deal between the city of New York and Motorola, which left the firefighters without working radios on that fateful day. In the case of Wertheimer's attempted bribery, however, it doesn't look like an ordinary case of venality and corruption .After all, what did Wertheimer think he was getting for his money? Wertheimer's motive is murky, at best, but his politics are certainly in sync with Giuliani's. He appeared on the same stage with Christian Zionist nut John Hagee at the last AIPAC policy conference, where he touted the success of Iscar as Israel's success story. AIPAC, you'll recall, is currently enmeshed in a messy spy scandal, with the trial of the group's former head honcho, Steve Rosen, and his sidekick, Keith Weissman, scheduled for mid-January. The charge: filching U.S. secrets on Israel's behalf. And what about Janison's fascinating final question: where did Kerik get the money to pay back the "loan" days after it was discovered by city investigators? The Kerik-Giuliani-Wertheimer connection goes all the way back to 2001, when Wertheimer was appointed "honorary police commissioner" by Kerik. Among the other honorary appointees was Judith Regan, Kerik's former lover and publisher. Regan is now alleging, in a $100 million lawsuit against her former employers in the Murdoch media conglomerate, that at least two Murdoch executives urged her to "lie and withhold information" from government investigators to "protect Giuliani's presidential ambitions." Fox News, the jewel in the crown of the Murdoch media empire, has not exactly been shy about its partiality for Giuliani. The Kerik case has all the ingredients of a real courtroom potboiler: money, illicit sex, political corruption, and, quite possibly, an attempt to unduly influence U.S. operations in Iraq on behalf of a foreign power. Perhaps our somnolent press corps will wake up long enough to ask Rudy if he can shed any light on these matters. Kerik was and is Giuliani's man, no matter how energetically he tries to paddle away from his former pal. The Mayor of 9/11 not only personally lobbied for his protégé's appointment as head of the newly created Department of Homeland Security, he was the chief promoter of the cult of Bernie Kerik, the tough guy from the wrong side of the tracks who made it big. A movie was in the works, and as Kerik cashed that $250,000 check from Cohen, he was riding high. The irony is that his meteoric rise and fall may limn the arc of Giuliani's political career. It seems apparent to anyone with eyes and ears that the DHS, the creation of which the White House was vigorously opposed before the Bushites suddenly did a 180, has become nothing more than an agency for Bush cronies to find work, usually jobs for which they are no more qualified than I am but jobs which give people ample opportunities to make big bucks on the side or after leaving government "service." Has anyone else noticed how the Bushites are usually against something or remain mute about it until they find a way they can make tons of money off it for themselves and/or their supporters?

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

What That Regan Woman Knows...

About Rudy G.


By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 18 November 2007

New Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful "America's Mayor" cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton 'tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray, a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.

Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson "If I Did It" fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what's most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: "In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani's presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik."

Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush's short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan's charge about that unnamed Murdoch "senior executive" is true or not - her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence - her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.

Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I'd written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.

What I didn't know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we'd later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in "The Lost Son" - published before the revelation of their relationship - there was "one hero who is missing" from his book's tribute to "courage and honor" and "her name is Judith Regan."

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani's side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city's $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik's pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, "In the Line of Duty." Though that project's profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik's royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik's association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.

Ms. Regan's knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn't limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996. A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city's cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes's wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox's early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, "That Regan Woman."

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy's secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated "Hannity & Colmes." That show's co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan's lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as "a gossip column story," and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit's reference to that "senior executive" at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper's brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled "A Journal Briefing - Whitewater." You'd think the controversies surrounding "America's Mayor" are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We'll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper's Murdoch era.

But beyond New York's dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch's Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani's checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It's astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York's municipal archives. Historians told The Tribune there's no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton's papers has received all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it's hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of "Whitewater," an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.