On Sept. 16, 1992, the police in New York City held a rally that spun out of control. The cops wanted a new collective-bargaining agreement, and they were angry at Mayor David Dinkins for proposing a civilian review board and for refusing to issue patrolmen 9mm guns. More than a few of them tipsy or drunk, the cops jumped on cars near city hall and blocked traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. According to some witnesses, they waved placards crudely mocking Mayor Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, on racial grounds, while at the same time chanting "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" to welcome Rudy Giuliani, the crime-busting former U.S. attorney who had arrived in their midst to shore up his political base.

It is not clear Giuliani knew exactly what he was getting himself into—he later denied that he did—but video shows him wildly gesticulating and shouting a profanity-laced diatribe against Dinkins...

...The next day the New York newspapers were sharply critical of Giuliani (a Daily News editorial called his behavior "shameful"), and Dinkins, years later, accused him of trying to stir up "white cops to riot." At the time, Giuliani refused to back down or apologize for his remarks, saying only: "I had four uncles who were cops. So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am."

Michael Lubin on Rudy: "As far as I'm concerned, we were watching a madman"

Loyalty has always been the greatest virtue to Giuliani, sometimes trumping all others. By loyalty, Giuliani's critics contend, he means "loyalty to Rudy." Disloyal subordinates learned this the hard way, even if they thought they were serving some higher master, like truth and justice. By the early '80s, Giuliani had risen to claim a top job in the Reagan administration Justice Department. At the time, the department was investigating McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturer, for making foreign bribes. Without telling career prosecutors who had been working on the case for months, Giuliani met with McDonnell Douglas defense lawyers. The career prosecutors were upset that a top official had gone over their heads, and wrote a letter to Giuliani expressing "shock" and "dismay," and warning that his secret meeting with the defense could undermine the prosecution's case. The letter leaked. Giuliani summoned the prosecutors, Michael Lubin and George Mendelson, to his office—and exploded.


"As far as I'm concerned, we were watching a madman," Lubin told Jim Stewart for his book "The Prosecutors." "I've never heard or seen anything like it, even in the movies . He ranted and raved for a full twenty minutes." Giuliani, who later dropped criminal indictments against four McDonnell Douglas executives as part of a plea agreement in which the company paid $1.2 million in fines, dismissed Lubin and Mendelson as "jerks." With petty vindictiveness, he withdrew a special Justice Department commendation awarded the two prosecutors.

"Loyalty to Giuliani means staying out of his limelight. Police Commissioner William Bratton discovered that in January 1996, when he made the mistake of posing for the cover of Time magazine in a trench coat to tout New York's astonishing success at fighting crime. Giuliani was not pleased; he ordered city hall's lawyers to start investigating Bratton's expenses, and the commissioner was gone in a couple of months... In truth, both men deserve credit for New York's turnaround. Bratton was a vocal apostle of the "broken window" theory of crime—that small acts of vandalism can create a lawless climate conducive to bigger crimes."

Giuliani never found an equal to Bratton. The next commissioner, Howard Safir, was regarded as a "Yes Rudy" who tried too hard to please his master. ("I am very loyal to Rudy," Safir tells NEWSWEEK. "However, when I disagreed with him … I made sure I did it in private.") The police stepped up their stop-and-frisk campaign in poor, largely minority neighborhoods. A series of ugly police-brutality cases besmirched Giuliani's crimefighting record and alienated blacks and Hispanics. In 2000, when an undercover narcotics detective killed an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond, who was black, Giuliani scoffed that Dorismond was no "altar boy." Actually, he was an altar boy—and had attended Bishop Loughlin high school.