NYC NOW - August 21, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

A massive tent facility is now open for migrants on Randall’s Island. Plus, the New York City Health Department is reminding parents to get their kids vaccinated ahead of the new school year. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with journalist Andrew Kirtzman about the rise and fall of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani after his indictment in Georgia last week.

Good evening and welcome to NYC now. I'm Junae Pierre for WNYC. Every day it continues to be a fight to make sure that we're able to provide beds and respite to everybody that is coming into our care. A new tent facility for migrants arriving in New York City is now open on Randall's Island. The Relief Center will house up to 3,000 adults, more than any other facility built since asylum seekers started coming to the area last year. Ted Long is Senior Vice President at New York City Health and Hospitals. I wanted to say that 3,000 is not just a number, though. For some people at this site, there have been former police officers who in their home countries

did the right thing and were punished with their lives and the lives of their family members being threatened. City officials say more than 100,000 migrants have passed through the city since 2022. The New York City Health Department is launching a campaign to remind parents to get their kids vaccinated. You remembered their books, you remembered their forms, you remembered their schedules, be sure to remember their vaccines. That's from one of the city-sponsored PSAs that will be popping up over the coming weeks on the radio, TV, Subways, and the internet. The ads remind parents that to go back to school or daycare, kids have to get immunized against diseases such as polio, measles, and the chickenpox. The campaign emphasizes that vaccines are safe. New York has recently seen a resurgence of certain diseases that are preventable through vaccination. A measles outbreak hit parts of Brooklyn in 2018, and last year, a case of polio was reported in Rockland County. Stick around. There's more after the break. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is facing charges in connection to a sweeping election probe in the state of Georgia.

Prosecutors say he made false statements in connection to President Trump's conspiracy. to undermine the 2020 election. Giuliani called the indictment, quote, an affront to American democracy. Longtime New Yorkers have been following Giuliani's career for decades, from his time as a federal prosecutor to his two terms as mayor, to his ascension in the Republican Party.

For more on the mini twist and turns, WNYC's Sean Carlson talked with Andrew Kurtzman, author of Giuliani, the rise and tragic fall of America's mayor. So a lot of the recent controversy about mayor Giuliani comes from his relationship to President Trump. What was their relationship when Giuliani was mayor and how has it evolved over time? His mayoral papers were available in the city archives. And what we found was a trove of communications between Giuliani and Trump and Giuliani's

AIDS in Trump. And there was this terrific story in which Trump has decided to build the largest residential tower in the world right next to the United Nations General Assembly building. And there's an agreement with the city signed long ago in which there can be no development higher than the General Assembly. Well, Trump, of course, wasn't deterred. And there was this major kind of push to prevail upon Giuliani to reject this. And Walter Cronkite, who was a resident of the area, protested. Walter Ristin, who was the president of Citibank at the time, and Giuliani was not even returning their

letters. And you could just tell from the increasing desperation and anger in these letters that these incredibly prominent people were being dissed by the mayor. Meanwhile, Giuliani was speaking at Trump's mother's funeral, his father's funeral. So, you know, there has been an affinity between the two of them that's gone on for a long time, and the relationship has only warmed, obviously, as time went on. How did we get here with Giuliani? I mean that to say, in, you know, his public persona, love him or hate him, we've known him for a long time.

And sure, he had his detractors as mayor, but he won two terms. He was popular enough to consider a presidential run to an alleged co-conspirator in a national scandal. The two pivot points in the Giuliani's story are 9-11. when he became, I mean, as you know, this international hero. I mean, there was a poll taken at one point which showed that Giuliani was more popular than the Pope. You know, he was knighted by the Queen of England.

He cashed in for hundreds of millions of dollars for Giuliani partners. It became, you know, stratospirically wealthy. You know, things were going very well for him. And he decided to run for president in 2008, and he crashed and burned badly. He was the frontrunner for a year. And then once the race began, he only lasted eight weeks in the primaries and left with

only one delegate. And that second pivot point is that 2008 humiliation. And it was after that moment that Giuliani kind of was out of the line light. And he started to fear for his relevance. And I did a lot of interviews from my book with people around him. including his ex-wife, who told me long stories about him drinking excessively, falling into depression. And it was Donald Trump who took him in, literally. He brought Giuliani into Marilago and let Giuliani recuperate for over a month. You know, fast forward to 2016, you know,

no one was knocking at Rudy Giuliani's door in the 2016 presidential race to, you know, to endorse them, except Donald Trump. Donald Trump needed Giuliani. because he had no political support at the time. And Giuliani needed Donald Trump because Donald Trump was the only person kind of who had the potential to bring him back into power. The bond between the two of them has only increased. And, you know, Giuliani is, he's stuck to Trump to this day. Even as he's facing jail, he's stuck to Trump.

One of the things that I struggle with when it comes to Mayor Giuliani, I grew up with him being the guy who like took on the mob, you know, as a federal prosecutor. He made law and order a huge part of his campaign and how he governed the city. It's a big part of his legacy of what we think of when we think of that era. So what do you think of the irony of him eventually becoming a criminal defendant himself? I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, no one who lived during the 1980s can believe that Giuliani, who was venerated for his integrity, you know, that was kind of like high crime era, The mafia had, you know, run of a lot of industries.

And Giuliani was kind of the adult, right? He was the one kind of setting the rules for right and wrong for Wall Street, right? For city government, he battled corruption, right? And, of course, the mob. And, you know, he was at that point, he was like universally respected. And I think, you know, fast forward 40 years, I think all of this desperation for power and for money, you know, little by little, you know, moral compromise by moral compromise, Giuliani just became kind of an empty vessel. He was just governed by his read and by his, this almost

primal need for relevance. And it's very sad. But also the other thing is, you know, his age. He's now 79 years old. He's not a young prosecutor. And there's an element of trying to kind of relive the glory days. You know, he pulled all this like bumbling legal efforts during the 2020 election scandal, which only made him look ridiculous. It's a sad story. If you can recall, as Giuliani's biographer, his responses to certain police scandals during his time, Abner Luema, Amadou Diallo, and his response to those stories when activists pressed him. How is that different to how he responds now to say charges when people ask him difficult questions about things? I think that there's a significant difference. I mean, the Giuliani back in the 90s as mayor,

you know, you may have loved him, you may have hated him, but there was a rigor to his arguments. You know, today he just kind of, he's off in a hundred different places. He's made some like horrendously bad decisions in Ukraine, which got Trump impeached one. and then this in the election scandal, which got impeached a second time, I guess the one thread is this sense of kind of him having a corner on morality, him being right when everyone else is wrong. And I think you saw that during the police incidents during the 90s when everyone was criticizing him in the police force. And Giuliani just kind of stood there as like a one-man barrier and refuse to apologize.

I think, you know, you were looking at a brilliant, brilliant man back in his prime and someone who is, you know, a shadow of that now. That's writer Andrew Kurtzman talking with WNYC's Sean Carlson. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.