Boogahz wrote:Guiliani is a non-factor to me personally. I don't want to see him in the office at all. What has he done other than stand in front of cameras?
A BIOGRAPHY OF
MAYOR RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI
In 1944, Rudolph W. Giuliani was born to a working class family in Brooklyn, New York. As the grandson of Italian immigrants, Mayor Giuliani learned a strong work ethic and a deep respect for America's ideal of equal opportunity. He attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School (Class of '61) in Brooklyn, Manhattan College (Class of '65) in the Bronx and New York University Law School in Manhattan, graduating magna cum laude in 1968.
Upon graduation, Rudy Giuliani clerked for Judge Lloyd MacMahon, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. In 1970, Giuliani joined the office of the U.S. Attorney. At age 29, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and rose to serve as executive US Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani was recruited to Washington, D.C., where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General. From 1977 to 1981, Giuliani returned to New York to practice law at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler.
In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General, the third highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised all of the US Attorney Offices' Federal law enforcement agencies, the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the US Marshals.
In 1983, Giuliani was appointed US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he spearheaded the effort to jail drug dealers, fight organized crime, break the web of corruption in government, and prosecute white-collar criminals. Few US Attorneys in history can match his record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals.
In 1989, Giuliani entered the race for mayor of New York City as a candidate of the Republican and Liberal parties, losing by the closest margin in City history. However in 1993, his campaign focusing on quality of life, crime, business and education made him the 107th Mayor of the City of New York. In 1997 he was re-elected by a wide margin, carrying four out of New York City's five boroughs.
As Mayor, Rudy Giuliani has returned accountability to City government and improved the quality of life for all New Yorkers. Under his leadership, overall crime is down 57%, murder has been reduced 65%, and New York City - once infamous around the world for its dangerous streets - has been recognized by the F.B.I. as the safest large city in America for the past five years.
New York City's law enforcement strategies have become models for other cities around the world, particularly the CompStat program, which won the 1996 Innovations in Government Award from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. CompStat allows police to statistically monitor criminal activity on specific street corners as well as citywide, holding precinct commanders accountable for criminal activity in their neighborhoods. Because this data is updated constantly, it enables the police to become a proactive force in fighting crime, stopping crime trends before they become crime waves that negatively effect the quality of life for neighborhood residents.
When Mayor Giuliani took office, one out of every seven New Yorkers was on welfare. Mayor Giuliani has returned the work ethic to the center of City life by implementing the largest and most successful welfare-to-work initiative in the country, cutting welfare rolls in half while moving over 640,000 individuals from dependency on the government to the dignity of self-sufficiency. In addition, Giuliani has enacted a record of over $2.5 billion in tax reductions - including the commercial rent tax, personal income tax, the hotel occupancy tax, and the sales tax on clothing for purchases up to $110 dollars. In addition, hundreds of millions of dollars have been returned to the private sector as a result of the Mayor's aggressive campaign to root out organized crime's influence over the Fulton Fish Market, the private garbage hauling industry, and wholesale food markets throughout the City. These reforms, combined with the fiscal discipline which enabled the Mayor to turn an inherited $2.3 billion dollar budget deficit into a multi-billion dollar surplus, have led the City to an era of broad-based growth with a record 450,000 new private sector jobs created in the past seven years. As news of the City's resurgence has spread around the nation and the world, tourism has grown to record levels.
Mayor Giuliani is committed to nurturing and empowering New York City's children. By creating the Administration for Children's Services, New York City now has an accountable, proactive and effective protector for our City's most vulnerable children that is recognized as a national model. Moreover, New York City is working everyday to find loving families for children requiring adoption. The City has completed a record number of adoptions since 1996 - more than 20,000 - marking a dramatic 65% increase over the previous six-year period. Mayor Giuliani has also been a leader in getting health insurance to children through the innovative HealthStat initiative, which uses computer technology to coordinate a citywide effort to enroll children in existing health insurance programs. To date, 96,000 eligible children and families have been given access to health insurance through the HealthStat initiative. These improvements have increased hope and opportunity for all New York City's children and laid the foundation for our City to be even stronger in the 21st century.
To turn around the nation's largest urban public education system, Giuliani has worked tirelessly to restore accountability and raise standards throughout the City's schools. Student-teacher ratios are at an all-time low, while the annual operating budget for New York City's public schools has increased from $8 billion to $12 billion. Bureaucratic roadblocks to meaningful reform such as social promotion and principal tenure have ended, while programs such as bilingual education and special education have been reformed for the first time in a quarter century. Under the Mayor's leadership, New York City has introduced innovative new instructional programs that improve reading skills, give all students access to computers, and restore arts education as a fundamental part of the school curriculum. In the past year, these successful education initiatives have been accompanied by the establishment of 300-book libraries in every classroom and weekend classes for science and English instruction. In October 2000, the Mayor launched the New York City Charter School Improvement Fund, the first fund ever offered by a city government to help charter schools with equipment and facilities costs. The fund is the most recent example of the Mayor's commitment to both providing quality educational alternatives to all City families, regardless of their income, and to spurring the New York City public schools to improve through competition.
Under Rudy Giuliani's leadership, New York City has become the best-known example of the resurgence of urban America. From his success at cleaning up Times Square and other public spaces around the City to closing the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, Mayor Giuliani has worked tirelessly to pass New York to the next generation better and more beautiful than it was before he entered office.
New York has established itself as the City others look toward when they want to study the most innovative strategies for reducing crime, reforming welfare, encouraging economic growth, and improving the overall quality of life. In the past decade, New York City's population has reached a record 8 million residents, confirming that New York is again a City on the rise, full of optimism and confidence that its best days are still ahead of it.
Rudolph Giuliani Biography
Former Mayor of New York City
Rudolph Giuliani Date of birth: May 28, 1944
Print Biography
Rudolph William Giuliani was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Harold, had run afoul of the law as a young man, and after paying the consequences, worked hard to instill an unwavering respect for the law in his only child. To escape the influences of criminal acquaintances in the old neighborhood, Harold Giuliani moved the family from Brooklyn to the Long Island community of Garden City when his son was seven. Respect for the law and a sense of duty were reinforced by the extended family. Four of Rudolph Giuliani's uncles were policemen, and another was a much-decorated captain in the New York Fire Department.
Giuliani majored in political science and philosophy at Manhattan College, and graduated magna cum laude from New York University School of Law in 1968. After receiving his law degree, he served as clerk to Federal District Court Judge Lloyd F. McMahon, who encouraged him to join the U.S. Attorney's office. In 1970, Giuliani became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. He was soon named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and promoted to the position of Executive U.S. Attorney. In 1973, at age 29, he was put in charge of the highly publicized police-corruption cases arising from the Knapp Commission report. In 1975, he was appointed Associate Deputy Attorney General. He returned to New York in 1976 and became a partner in the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler.
After practicing law for four years, Rudolph Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General in the new administration of President Ronald Reagan. As the third-highest-ranking member of the Department of Justice, he oversaw federal law enforcement agencies including the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Marshal Service. In 1983 he was named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. As U.S. Attorney, he earned a national reputation for prosecuting mob bosses, corrupt politicians and Wall Street inside traders with equal zeal. In six years, he obtained 4,152 convictions; he was widely regarded as the most effective prosecutor in the country.
After leaving the Justice Department, his thoughts turned toward the state of his native city and what role he might play in its regeneration. Long troubled by violent street crime, New York City had been further ravaged by the crack cocaine epidemic. The city was considered a case study in urban decay, and was thought by many to be beyond repair. As Giuliani considered running for Mayor, he was often told that, as a Republican, he could never win election in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. In 1989 he lost his first race for Mayor by the closest margin in New York City's history. As the city's condition continued to decline, Giuliani resolved to run again. In the election of 1993, the race was also close, but the outcome was reversed. Rudolph Giuliani was elected the 107th Mayor of New York City, the first Republican to hold the post in 20 years.
When Giuliani took office, more than a million New Yorkers were on welfare -- every seventh resident of the city. The new administration initiated the country's largest "workfare" program, and over the next eight years, 691,000 people moved from the welfare rolls to work and self-sufficiency.
The new Mayor adopted the controversial "Broken Windows" theory of crime prevention, in which the smaller signs of disorder -- such as graffiti and vandalism -- are suppressed, to alter the perception that a neighborhood is out of control. Computer mapping enabled the New York Police Department to identify precise locations with the highest incidence of violent crime and direct their resources accordingly. In only two years, serious crime had been reduced by more than one-third and murder by almost half.
Many attributed the drop in crime to the improved national economy and declining national crime rates, but crime in New York continued to decline during an economic downturn, even while it rose in the rest of the country. While a few cases of police misconduct or excessive force received intense publicity, actual police shootings declined by 40 percent during Giuliani's administration, and long overdue reforms reduced violence in the city jails by 95 percent. Over Giuliani's eight years in office, New York's crime rate fell by 57 percent, and the FBI rated New York as America's safest large city.
Drawing on his past accomplishments as a prosecutor, Giuliani also moved to eradicate the influence of organized crime from the city's commercial life. Hundreds of millions of dollars that had been routinely siphoned from the city's economy by racketeers were returned to the legitimate sector. Income and property values rose throughout the city, and whole neighborhoods were redeveloped. With the improvement of the city's economy, Giuliani was able to cut taxes while turning a $2.3 billion budget deficit into a multi-billion dollar surplus. After his first two closely-fought campaigns, Rudolph Giuliani was easily re-elected to a second term in 1997, carrying four of the city's five boroughs.
From the beginning of his administration, Mayor Giuliani made a high priority of emergency preparedness, taking to heart the lessons of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in the year before he took office. He created an Office of Emergency Management to coordinate the efforts of the Police and Fire Departments, and ran drills for a variety of possible disasters, including plane crashes, bombings and attacks with Sarin gas or anthrax.
Barred by term limits from serving a third time as mayor, Giuliani was expected to run for the United States Senate, but in the Spring of 2000 his marriage was ending in a highly public divorce, and he announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. He withdrew from the Senate race and underwent months of radiation treatment. He recovered completely, and is now free of cancer, but in the autumn of 2000 it was assumed that Rudolph Giuliani's role in the life of the City was coming to an end. The primary election to choose his possible successors was scheduled for September 11, 2001.
That morning, on hearing that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers, and that a large fire had broken out, the Mayor rushed to the scene, arriving just after another plane hit the second tower. He saw fellow New Yorkers jump to their deaths from the flaming towers and saw old friends from the Fire Department as they charged into the burning buildings, never to be seen again.
The Mayor took charge of the emergency efforts from a nearby building, but when the second tower collapsed, the building was engulfed in a wave of dust, ash and debris. The Mayor, his staff, members of the press and other occupants of the crumbling building were trapped. After finding the basement exit blocked, Giuliani led his crew through the storm of ash and smoke to a firehouse several blocks away, where a detective pried the door open and the group found momentary safety.
Giuliani established a new command post at the Police Academy, where he remained for the next three days. The Mayor of New York took to the airwaves immediately, reassuring a shaken nation and giving honest, straightforward information about the ongoing rescue effort. Although nearly 3,000 people died in the attack, as many as 20,000 civilians were rescued from the collapsing buildings. While some advisors urged the Mayor to keep the city's public places closed, Giuliani insisted that the New York's signature institutions -- Broadway theaters, the Stock Exchange and major league baseball -- re-open within days of the attack.
In the days and months following the terrorist attacks, the Mayor's commanding leadership earned him the admiration and respect of the international community and especially of the grief-stricken residents of New York City. In all, 23 police and 343 fire fighters lost their lives on September 11, and the Mayor made a point of attending as many of their funerals and memorial services as possible -- over 200 in the months that followed. Rudolph Giuliani left office at midnight, as 2001 turned to 2002. His last official act as Mayor was to set the giant ball rolling in Times Square to signal the start of the new year. Today, he is the President of Giuliani Partners, a New York-based consulting firm specializing in security, preparedness, and crisis-management. In the years to come, Rudolph Giuliani may seek public office again, but whatever the future brings, he will always be remembered as the greatest mayor in the long history of New York City.
