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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- Here's an important NY Times article on Giuliani, but it barely gets into the real nature of his consulting business. This quote by Mussolini says it very succinctly:"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini Following this Times article is one showing how a key Giuliani Partners aide, Bernard Kerik, is training the new Iraqi secret police. Wherever you find Giuliani or Bush you will find corporate criminality of the highest order. There have been about 100 recent articles on the liklihood of Giuliani replacing Dick Cheney as VP. -RL http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/nyregion/22GIUL.html NY Times Librado Romero/The New York Times Rudolph W. Giuliani with, left, Bernard B. Kerik, former police commissioner, and other members of his consulting firm at a meeting. The firm has quickly attracted a diverse base of clients. Graphic: The Giuliani Partners Roster RUDY INC. By Selling Very Public Image, the Private Giuliani Prospers By ERIC LIPTON Published: February 22, 2004 When the manufacturer of the drug OxyContin - a top-selling prescription painkiller that was proving lethal in a ballooning black market - needed to tackle its growing legal and public relations problems, it hired a former mayor of New York best known for his formidable public safety credentials, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Only months later, the Department of Justice, the cabinet agency charged with combating drug crimes and abuse, including traffic in OxyContin, also turned to Mr. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, and the consulting firm he had set up with a dozen of his aides. The dual contracts only hint at Mr. Giuliani's remarkable success in building a business empire since leaving City Hall in December 2001. In its two years of existence, his firm, Giuliani Partners, has earned tens of millions of dollars by assembling an extremely broad range of clients, jumping almost immediately into the ranks of the nation's most prestigious consulting firms, according to two industry guides. A detailed examination of its business practices shows that the firm's work for its base of 20 or so clients - with at least two on different sides of the same issue - stretches well beyond providing advice on policing and domestic security, the type of job that has produced the most publicity for Giuliani Partners. The firm has been hired to improve public confidence in a horse-racing gambling operation. It has advised New York hospitals on buying bulk supplies, helped expand a California-based business that sells inexpensive wills, and set up an alliance with a large accounting firm to fight computer hackers. More recently the partnership moved into the world of venture capital, working with Bear Stearns & Company to invest $300 million in security-related businesses, with Giuliani Partners to eventually share in the profits of businesses that succeed. Taken together, the firm's deals, carried out chiefly by a handful of former civil servants, have made the partnership one of the most novel and lucrative ventures ever begun by an out-of-office American politician, avoiding the familiar path of many ex-officials who join law firms or become lobbyists. The firm, which opened in January 2002 in affiliation with Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, is clearly and without apology driven by the stature Mr. Giuliani gained in commanding the New York City Police Department and in guiding the city after the World Trade Center attack. It is sustained by the advice Mr. Giuliani and his partners offer in appearances they make around the nation and the world, warning audiences that more attacks are almost certainly on the way. Such predictions, of course, benefit both the former mayor's firm and the clients he has retained, many of them involved in selling terrorism preparedness products. "I'm not a piano player," Mr. Giuliani said, discussing his firm's security work. "That isn't what I learned how to do. What I learned how to do is law enforcement, security, reduction of crime, running organizations." Every step Mr. Giuliani takes, including appearances in California, Florida, Pennsylvania and five other states over the past month, elevates his profile as a businessman in advance of the return to politics that he acknowledges is all but inevitable. Through it all, Mr. Giuliani has moderated the stridency and confrontational tactics he often employed as mayor, avoiding issues that caused controversy in City Hall and staying with the building blocks of his improved reputation. Former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, an occasional political ally of Mr. Giuliani, said he was impressed, if somewhat surprised, by the mayor's successful marriage of big business with high-profile politics. "He is a better politician out of office, than in it," Mr. Cuomo said. Most of the firm's clients benefit from the former mayor's reputation and advice to sell their products in a straightforward way. But the firm's broad range of interests, like that of many enterprises headed by once-powerful politicians, has at times produced some awkward appearances. Bear Stearns, for instance, benefited from tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks offered by Mr. Giuliani when he was mayor and it was threatening to leave the city. And Nextel Communications, the wireless phone carrier based in Reston, Va., has offered the partnership compensation worth at least $15 million, in part to help its pursuit of an important reshuffling of the radio spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission. At the same time, Mr. Giuliani and his staff have also served as unpaid advisers to the F.C.C., spending more than a year helping prepare a report about how local governments can best communicate with the public during catastrophic events, an assignment that was brokered by Nextel's chief regulatory counsel. Nothing the former mayor has done appears to violate any formal conflict of interest rules. Mr. Giuliani said he scrupulously avoids any conflict in his sometimes overlapping roles, adding that he is not a registered lobbyist. "Everybody knows what we're doing, so there's nothing hidden," said Mr. Giuliani, whose firm now has 58 employees. "We have nothing to do with decision-making in either area." The First Customer A Drug Company Comes Under Federal Scrutiny In January of 2002, less than a month after Mr. Giuliani left office, Purdue Pharma found itself facing a host of legal, financial and public relations problems surrounding the manufacture of OxyContin. The drug, a time-released painkiller, was introduced in 1996, and sales grew from $125 million in 1997 to $1.35 billion in 2001. OxyContin was an enormous profit center for Purdue. But with its success came crime waves in certain parts of the country, including pharmacy break-ins and robberies: word had spread that the time-release features could be wiped out simply by crushing the tablet, turning it into a superpotent narcotic. Misuse of the drug had also been cited by government authorities in more than 400 deaths. The federal government was becoming concerned. Asa Hutchinson, then the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Congress that Purdue's aggressive marketing and promotion had helped cause the widespread abuse of OxyContin. By 2001, the drug agency advocated allowing only specialized pain management doctors, instead of all general practitioners, to prescribe the drug, and requiring that it be distributed only through special centralized pharmacies, moves that would have cut Purdue's sales. It also was investigating security and management problems at Purdue's main manufacturing plant. The company needed the political cover of an alliance with someone considered an unimpeachable American hero , and Purdue officials later made it clear why they became the first client of Mr. Giuliani's firm weeks after he left City Hall. "We had to switch over to using more political consultants," explained Robin Hogen, a Purdue spokesman, in a speech he made to public relations executives in March 2002, three months after Mr. Giuliani was hired, but before the hiring was publicly disclosed. "We're about to announce next week bringing on a sort of rock star in that area." The goal, Purdue officials said later, was to limit new federal enforcement or regulatory actions. "We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma," said Purdue's chief lawyer, Howard R. Udell, in a statement advertising Mr. Giuliani's services to other possible clients. To Mr. Giuliani and his associates, the contract seemed a perfect assignment. "Purdue Pharma has hired some of the most experienced experts on drug enforcement and drug monitoring in the country," Mr. Giuliani said, referring to his own law enforcement experience, as well as that of his partner Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner who once specialized in drug enforcement cases at the Police Department. Mr. Kerik was dispatched with other former Police Department aides to evaluate security practices at Purdue's OxyContin manufacturing plant in Totowa, N.J., where two Purdue employees were arrested in 2001 for trying to steal thousands of pills. Mr. Giuliani, meanwhile, began organizing doctors, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and other health care professionals into a group that his company called the Rx Action Alliance, which would try to build a strategy to limit prescription drug abuse. The efforts of the former mayor and prosecutor on behalf of a manufacturer that D.E.A. officials said had contributed to the spread of OxyContin abuse help illustrate the unusual range of Giuliani Partners' client base. Few outside the company are aware of the variety of clients that Giuliani Partners has advised. There is, for example, Leeds Weld Equity Partners, a investment firm based in Manhattan specializing in companies that sell education equipment and services, which Giuliani Partners is being paid to advise. The former mayor also teamed up with We the People Forms and Service Centers USA, a company based in California that is opening stores across the country selling low-priced wills or divorce papers. And late last year, Mr. Giuliani also announced a deal in which his firm would advise nearly 100 hospitals in the New York region that want to save money by buying surgical equipment and drugs in bulk. For the most part, an examination of the firm's work shows that the mission of Giuliani Partners is not to make calls to drum up government business for a client, in the timeworn fashion of many former city and national officials. "We are religious about not doing that," said Michael D. Hess, who was the city government's top lawyer while Mr. Giuliani was mayor and now is senior managing partner at the firm. "That is something we turn down." But in his various roles, Mr. Giuliani does not hesitate to work closely with government officials abroad and at home. As a consultant, he attended two meetings in 2002 to discuss OxyContin with Purdue executives and Mr. Hutchinson, the D.E.A. administrator at the time. As a law enforcement icon who was one of the top three officials in the Department of Justice, he also stood next to Mr. Hutchinson that same year in Washington at a ribbon-cutting for a new Drug Enforcement Museum exhibit, an event that included a luncheon where the former mayor helped the agency's museum raise $25,000. Approximately 10 months after Mr. Giuliani's firm began its work for Purdue, it also won a $1.1 million contract from the Department of Justice to look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, whose duties, in part, included helping investigate OxyContin abuse and to whose director, Karen Tandy, Purdue officials had appealed for help, a Justice Department official said. The outcome so far for Purdue has been positive. In September 2003, it won its bid to hold off restrictions on the sale of OxyContin. No government action has yet been taken against the company for lapses at its New Jersey plant, which the company says is more secure because of Giuliani Partners' involvement. Purdue officials would not disclose how much Mr. Giuliani has been paid, but they said they are pleased with the work his firm has done. "Rudy Giuliani is a man of action," Mr. Hogen said in a recent interview. "He does not do things to take a picture and move on. He wants substance. He wants change. He wants to see impact. And that is what he has done for us." But critics have contended that the firm's work for parties on opposite sides of a drug investigation appears to raise a conflict-of-interest question. "On the one hand he is representing a client with a problem before the D.E.A., and on the other hand he has a contract with the Justice Department that has him talking to agents at the D.E.A.," said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group in Washington that monitors government ethics issues. "That sure seems to be a conflict to me." Mr. Giuliani said he sees no chance for a conflict in the multiple ways he is involved in the matter, since his company was not involved in making decisions on law enforcement matters. "It was all disclosed," he said, sitting in his wood-paneled offices 24 floors above Times Square. "It's two different areas of expertise." The Salesman Message on Security With Corporate Sponsor He was introduced as the man who "guided America through the emotional shock of Sept. 11 and in the difficult days that followed." When the ovation died down that day in August 2002, Mr. Giuliani moved on to the central premise of his appearance before a public-safety communications convention in Nashville. "We are never, ever, ever going to be able to figure out every possible way in which we can be attacked," Mr. Giuliani said, according to a recording of his remarks. He went on to urge support for a major change in the radio spectrum that Nextel Communications had requested of the Federal Communications Commission. "I want to thank you and Nextel and the private operators who all agreed on that," he said, referring to a few other cellular carriers. "I think that can be a very positive improvement for the future." Mr. Giuliani's remarks that day were similar to those he had made in scores of visits around the nation, in to more than 30 states since he left office, where he has given lectures on leadership, promoted the campaigns of fellow Republicans and reflected on his experiences on Sept. 11, 2001, sometimes speaking at events that are like auto shows for antiterrorism products. But his audiences, including the crowd in Nashville, are not always told that Mr. Giuliani is being paid by companies that sell just the kind of security products or services he in effect is urging his audiences to consider buying. Nextel has sent the mayor or members of his staff to St. Louis, Washington, Austin, Sacramento and Anaheim, Calif., to promote its products, introducing him as a public safety leader who can "address critical homeland security communications needs." In many ways, the firm's work for Nextel embodies Mr. Giuliani's ability to combine his new financial life with his political past and future. The Nextel phone that he carried on Sept. 11 is now in the Smithsonian, and his call for better communications during disasters, part of his stock speech demanding better preparation for the next attack, is virtually identical to the thrust of Nextel's marketing campaign for its wireless service. At the same time, his appearances burnish his public profile and allow him to resume his best-received role providing reassurance to worried audiences. Nextel has hardly been the only one of his clients that has benefited from repeated warnings about the need for greater domestic security. Aon Corporation, the insurance giant that lost 175 of its World Trade Center employees and associates on Sept. 11, has joined with the partnership to create what it calls the Aon Giuliani Protocol, a crisis management service sold to corporations worldwide. Strohl Systems of King of Prussia, Pa., is jointly marketing with Giuliani Partners special computer software that helps companies after operations are disrupted by a disaster. CB Richard Ellis, the global real estate firm, has signed a partnership with Mr. Giuliani under which Giuliani Partners evaluates office buildings to identify vulnerabilities they might have to possible terrorist attacks or weaknesses in fire and life-safety equipment. Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns five nuclear power plants, including Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y., about 35 miles north of Manhattan, hired Giuliani Partners to evaluate its emergency planning and security systems, and in particular its ability to defend the plants against a possible terrorist attack. Nextel, however, may have the most at stake from the work it hired Giuliani Partners to perform: a contract that went far beyond the wireless company's message that government agencies should upgrade communications equipment so employees can talk to one another during an emergency. The company's combination cellular and two-way-radio phones, it turns out, have caused radio interference around the country. To preserve its franchise in the face of complaints about the interference, Nextel has billions of dollars riding on a petition before the F.C.C. to rearrange part of the radio spectrum, and helping to achieve that goal is one of the principal reasons Nextel hired Giuliani Partners. At appearances around the country, including the one in Nashville, Mr. Giuliani has told audiences about the need to deal with the interference problem, even specifically supporting Nextel's proposed solution on occasion. Verizon, a competitor of Nextel in this arena, says this method, if approved by the F.C.C., would be worth $6 billion to Nextel. But Nextel officials have vigorously disputed any suggestion that they will profit from the reassignment of the wireless spectrum, saying the effort is purely intended to eliminate interference. Mr. Giuliani's staff members acknowledge that he and members of his team have worked in a orchestrated way with Nextel to help persuade public safety officials to back the Nextel petition and to encourage governments to upgrade their equipment. "That's not lobbying," said Mr. Hess, the senior managing partner at Mr. Giuliani's consulting firm. "That's the First Amendment." Mr. Giuliani has stayed away from directly urging the F.C.C. to approve Nextel's petition. But his appeal was so great that the F.C.C. wanted his help on a broadcast industry project, and an agency official asked Nextel to see if Mr. Giuliani might be interested. Giuliani Partners was eager to comply, sending three representatives to an F.C.C. meeting in Washington and then assigning a member of the firm to spend months working with the industry committee on its report. The advice was offered free to the F.C.C., but Mr. Giuliani and his team have had a direct financial interest in the success of Nextel's ventures. At least part of his compensation package, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, consisted of stock options that Giuliani Partners exercised. If the firm has already sold the Nextel stock it bought at a discounted price, it has earned at least $15 million. If it is still holding onto that stock, it has realized a profit of $28 million from the Nextel contract. After two years in the business world, Mr. Giuliani said he is enjoying this experiment in public speaking, management advice and capitalism. The firm, he said, has grown faster than he expected it would. He does not deny, however, that a return to politics is probably inevitable. "I know at some point in the future I'm going to want to be probably involved in public office again," he said in the interview. "If you ask me when, which one, my ideas haven't been formulated." As to what will happen to Giuliani Partners if the large chunk of his staff that went from the mayor's office to his firm follows him back into politics, Mr. Giuliani said he cannot say for sure. "Who knows the answer to that," Mr. Giuliani said. "It really depends on a prediction of what our business is going to be like at least a couple of years from now." Right now, he said, in addition to helping President Bush's re-election campaign, he is focusing on building his business. ----------------------------------------------------- Giuliani's former chauffer is training the Iraqi secret police [Note: NYPD sgt. Bernard B. Kerik was Giuliani's chauffer during his 1997 Mayoral campaign and was later appointed by him to head the NYPD, a position he held on 9/11. According to Kerik's autobiography (which he somehow had time to write immediately following 9/11 while working as NYPD police commissioner) before becoming a NYC cop Kerik ran security for the Saudi royal family. Now he's part of Giuliani Partners, the former Mayor's so-called consulting firm which represents corporate interests facing criminal indictments and other major scandals. He's in Iraq at Bush's request, heading the Iraqi Interior Ministry, working closely with Dick Cheney's company Haliburton and training the Iraqi secret police. Ironically, it seems the Iraqis have traded Sadamms police state for Giulianis, who was sometimes called Saddam Giuliani and Rudy Gestapo Giuliani during his eight years as Mayor. See the excerpt from Giulianis book below for a sense of the outright lies and legal violations behind his legendary NYC police state. -RL] <http://www.americanfreepress.net/09_22_03/Halliburton_Creating/halliburton_ creating.html> Halliburton Creating Iraqi Secret Police At Your Expense To explain to the American people why the U.S. is spending more on the "war on terrorism"-some $215 million a day-than it does on education, Congress should audit the profiteers that service the military, starting with the company Dick Cheney headed before he became vice president. Exclusive to American Free Press By Christopher Bollyn KAPOSVAR, Hungary-"Camp Freedom" is a converted Soviet-era base at Taszár near Kaposvar, where the U.S. military trained an exile militia known as the "Free Iraqi Forces" and where it reportedly plans to train another 28,000 Iraqi "policemen." The Taszár base resembles a high-security prison, and local authorities say they don't know anything about what actually goes on inside the base. Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who heads the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad, told The New York Times that he hoped to begin training Iraqis at Taszár within a few months. Kerik said the courses in Hungary would be short and intensive, lasting about eight weeks. When U.S. officials said they were holding talks with Hungary about training up to 28,000 Iraqi police officers at Taszár, the local authorities only learned of the plan when the Hungarian press picked up the story. Karoly Szita, the mayor of Kaposvar, told the Hungarian press that it was "the same game" the U.S. had played earlier in the year when "nobody knew anything." The exiles then were said to be training as interpreters for U.S. forces, but "were armed, in uniform, and being put through combat training," The Guardian (UK) reported recently. European press reports allege that the former Iraqi chief of staff and high-profile defector Gen. Nizar al-Khazraji, who mysteriously vanished on March 17 from Denmark where he was under house arrest, was snatched by the CIA and taken to Taszár, where he is helping the Americans train the new Iraqi forces. Al-Khazraji, who was suspected of war crimes against Iraqi Kurds was under a court order to remain in Denmark, where he defected in 1999. Danish reporter Arne Moeller said that CIA agents shepherded Khazraji out of Denmark to help with the war against Saddam: "All the witnesses told our newspaper that he left in a black car heading to the south of Denmark," Moeller said. A Gulfstream aircraft "was ready to take off and two members of the CIA put him on board." American company Brown and Root Services, a subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) and its Dallas-based parent company Halliburton Corp., is running operations at the base from its fortress-like headquarters in Kaposvar. Brown and Root employees are forbidden from discussing what they do and see at the base. Local authorities say, "I don't know" and add they are not allowed to discuss activities related to the base. AFP visited KBR's Kaposvar headquarters to ask about Wayne Uhl about the work the company did at the Taszár base. After an hour, a company representative named Valeria Strasszer emerged from the compound with the mayor of Taszár, Sándor Pataki. "I don't know," Pataki replied to all questions. Strasszer said all questions had to be submitted in writing. To a dozen questions submitted by AFP, Strasszer responded, "We do not discuss any given mission" and "we cannot answer on behalf of the U.S. Army." Kellogg, Brown and Root won a 10 year contract to provide support services to U.S. military bases around the world on Dec. 14, 2001. The contract is known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). The LOGCAP contract "basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send KBR anywhere in the world to run humanitarian or military operations for profit," according to a 2002 article entitled "The War on Terrorism's Gravy Train" published by the Berkeley-based (Calif.) CorpWatch. Dick Cheney, who served as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War, was chief executive of Halliburton before resigning to run for office with George W. Bush. During his last two years at Halliburton (1999-2000) Cheney made nearly $30 million from compensation and stock sales. In 2001 KBR took in $13 billion in revenue, much of it from service contracts with the U.S. military. The board of directors of Halliburton includes well-known former and active senior executives from the energy giants Chevron Corp., Hunt Oil Co., Phillips Petroleum Co., and Southern California Gas Co. Robert L Crandall, chairman emeritus of American Airlines and AMR Corp. has been on the board since 1986. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage worked as a consultant to Halliburton before his present job. On "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, Cheney said: "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." Cheney, however, continues to receive a large deferred salary of more than $160,000 a year from Halliburton. Cheney also holds 433,333 in unexercised Halliburton stock options. Cheney bought an insurance policy for $15,000 before he was sworn in as vice president to protect this income if Halliburton were to go out of business, according to CNN. In 2001, Cheney received $205,298, and in 2002, another $162,393, in deferred salary payments from Halliburton. Sens. Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) say the revelations of Cheney's financial interest in Halliburton and the no-bid contracts Halliburton has received from the Bush administration should be investigated. "In 2001 and 2002, Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president," Lautenberg said. "The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind,' with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton," Daschle said in a statement. On Sept. 16, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to look into contracts awarded to Halliburton and its subsidiaries during the past two years. KBR began providing services at U.S. military bases in 1992 after the Pentagon, under Cheney's direction, paid the company nearly $9 million to produce a classified report on how private companies could help American troops. The same year, KBR won its first five-year logistical contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide services to the U.S. military in the Balkans and elsewhere. CorpWatch reported that KBR's Balkan operations had been the most profitable part of the company prior to the current U.S. war against Iraq. KBR has made more than $2.2 billion from its Balkan contract to provide a host of services for the U.S. military, according to the GAO. In March 2003, Halliburton received a contract, without open bidding, from the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) to repair and restore Iraq's oil fields. The cost of this contract to taxpayers is about $1 billion, according to the ACE. Reuters reported that KBR has "racked up over $1 billion in expenses in Iraq, according to the U.S. Army Field Support Command." A February 1997 study by the GAO found that KBR overcharged the government $462.5 million for an operation it said would cost $191.6 million when presented to Congress in 1996. In February 2002, KBR paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit with the Justice Department which alleged that the company had defrauded the government during its work in the closure of Fort Ord in Monterey, Calif. Dammen Gant Campbell, a former contracts manager for KBR, turned whistle-blower and revealed "that between 1994 and 1998 the company had fraudulently inflated project costs by misrepresenting the quantities, quality and types of materials required for 224 projects," CorpWatch reported. "This is a company which has more experience with insider dealing and corruption than with efficiency," Bill Hartung of the World Policy Institute said about KBR. "During the Second World War, there was a Senate committee on war profiteering," Hartung said, "I think we should set it up again and investigate Kellogg, Brown & Root." "The Bush-Cheney team have turned the United States into a family business," Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War, said about the KBR contracts with the military. "That's why we haven't seen Cheney-he's cutting deals with his old buddies who gave him a multi-million dollar golden handshake." Re-writing history, Giuliani style. One Giuliani lie down, only one million to go........America's phoniest hero, Rudy Giuliani. http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nyplaz282981629oct28,0,6435300. column COMMENTARY ONE POLICE PLAZA CONFIDENTIAL Rudy's Problem With the Truth Leonard Levitt October 28, 2002 This column has called former mayor Rudolph Giuliani many things, but never a liar. Until today. Reading in his best-selling book "Leadership" how he rid New York City of "squeegeemen," One Police Plaza Confidential can only conclude that after winning worldwide adulation for his post-Sept. 11 heroism, he believes he can now get away with anything. In "Leadership," Giuliani says that upon becoming mayor, he was told by then-Police Commissioner William Bratton that ridding the city of the once-ubiquitous car window-washers "couldn't be done." "So long as they were not physically threatening drivers or 'demanding' money," he writes, "we lacked a legal basis to ... arrest them." So what did America's favorite mayor do? "I said, 'How about the fact that they're jaywalking?' ... You could give everyone of them a ticket immediately. Then ... you could investigate ... whether there were outstanding warrants and so on. If they became intimidating, you could arrest them." Bratton, he said, then conducted a survey and discovered there were only 180 squeegeemen in the entire city. "So we started writing summonses for these guys ... In under a month we were able to reduce the problem dramatically." Now, the truth. The squeegee crackdown began in 1993 under Bratton's predecessor, Ray Kelly, and Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins. It began after a squeegeeman spit on a car in which Kelly and his wife, Veronica, were riding. According to a former top police official who worked under both Kelly and Bratton, the department first identified 70 squeegeemen and six squeegee hot spots: the Holland, Lincoln and Midtown tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, 96th Street and the FDR Drive, and 12th Avenue and 56th Street just off the West Side Highway. That summer, the department videotaped the squeegeemen and analyzed the dates of their appearances. They learned that half had prior drug arrests and half other priors. Virtually all had criminal records. The department began chasing and warning them. When that failed, they tried summonses. None of them responded. So in October, the department began arresting them. By November, the squeegeemen had disappeared. During all this, Giuliani hadn't even been elected. In his book, "Turnaround," published after he resigned as police commissioner, Bratton credits Kelly with solving the squeegee problem. As commissioner, however, he made no such acknowledgment, infuriating Kelly. Giuliani's spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, did not return a phone call. -------------------------------- [Sung to the tune of "Springtime for Hitler" from Mel Brooks' The Producers. Words adapted by RL] KARL ROVE WAS HAVING TROUBLE WHAT A SAD SAD STORY HOW COULD HE KEEP DUBYA ON THE PATH TO WHITE HOUSE GLORY WE MUST DUMP DICK CHENEY BUT WHO WILL BE VP? WE LOOKED AROUND AND THEN WE FOUND RUDY GIULIANI AND NOW IT'S SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER AND GERMANY WINTER FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER AND GERMANY COME ON GOP GO INTO YOUR DANCE www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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