Who Trolled Amber? - Trump and Rudy: A bare-knuckle romance - Episode 1

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Twenty years ago, Rudy Giuliani was “America’s mayor”. Now he’s been indicted, along with Donald Trump, for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Will Rudy die in jail for The Don?Listen to the three part series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Tortoise

I am very, very honored. This indictment is a travesty. If you're older than, well, a teenager, you may recognize the lisp, the rasp, the defiance, the hyperbole. Those allegations are totally false. The voice belongs to Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York who picked America up when it was knocked down on

9-11. The case he's talking about is no ordinary case. This is the 91-page criminal indictment brought by the state of Georgia against him and Donald Trump and 17 others, but Giuliani is first among equals. The case brought for trying to steal the 2020 US presidential election. Giuliani is not just involved in this case. He is a principal defendant. He could be going down. He's watching his entire legacy explode. And if any one of them ends up turning, it's destruction for the rest. At the peak of his political power, Rudy Giuliani looked like a shoo-in for the presidency himself. At the peak of his earning power, he could pocket $200,000 for a half-hour speech as America's

mayor. And he did. He made $20 million a year for his first five years after leaving public office. He bought houses in Hamptons and Florida. Along the way, he threw in his lot with Donald Trump and recast American politics in their image. Let me try that again. Along the way, Rudy Giuliani threw in his lot with Trump and materially assisted him in dragging American politics and public discourse into a parallel universe of conspiracy, lies and superheated grievance from which progressives fear it may never escape.

They have goaded each other, lied for each other, scratched each other's backs and tumbled like drunken linebackers into two impeachments and four sprawling prosecutions that look set to dominate the next election. Yeah, that's more like it. Oh, and a bit earlier, Rudy Giuliani was knighted by the Queen. Trump is now odds-on favourite to be the Republican presidential nominee again. So Rudy is broke, disgraced, a laughingstock. All the, oh my goodness, all the networks. Wow. All the networks. We have to forget about the law. Judges don't count. Yes, he's the one whose hair dye ran in his last desperate press conference before the 2020

election was called for Biden. He's being sued for defamation by two black election workers he accused without a shred of evidence of selling drugs. Back in the day, he cheated on all three of his wives, and now he's being sued by too much younger women for sexual assault. Rudy Giuliani is 79. He says he doesn't care about his legacy because he'll be dead. No one believes him. So what will it be? The prosecutor who took down the mob?

The mayor who cleaned up New York? The hero of 9-11? Trump's template and enabler? A serial alleged molester, or something else? The answer depends on one more question. It's a question which has a parlor game quality to it, but it's more consequential than that. And the question is this. Does Giuliani have the goods on Trump? Does he have compromising information on the 45th President of the United States

that only he can know and that could now change the course of history? He's boasted that he does. I've seen things written like, he's going to throw me under the bus. Right. When they say that, I say, he isn't, but I have insurance. But if so, will he use it? Will Giuliani flip and do a deal with prosecutors so he can retire in peace? Or will he die in jail for the Don?

I'm Giles Whittle, and this is Trump and Rudy from Tortoise. Look, I knew wise guys and I knew everybody. I was Hank, you know. That's why you're here, I guess. The time that Rudy Giuliani came into power and the time that Donald Trump was creating his Trump persona, you could not, in operating any of those worlds, not be involved or have knowledge of something that guys, the people with bent noses,

that wise guys were involved with. It was just the way it was. Later, we found out he'd made a few mistakes, like he indicted the wrong guy to be the head of the Genovese crime family. He indicted a guy named Fat Tony Salerno, this cigar-chewing guy from East Harlem who was a high-ranking figure in the crime family,

but what everybody learned later was that there was this other guy down in Greenwich Village named Vincent Giganti who used to walk the streets in his pajamas pretending to be crazy. And Vincent Giganti was the real head of the family, as everybody admitted later. So the charge against Tony Salerno wasn't even accurate, but it didn't stop him from being convicted and dying in prison. So there was, you know, some things. It was kind of typical Giuliani.

That's Tom Robbins, a legendary New York reporter who's covered most of Giuliani's career. And before him, the political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. Talking to them about Trump and Giuliani, two things stick in the mind. One is they came from a world that sounded a lot like Goodfellas. And the other is there's a reason a lot of these people think Giuliani won't go to jail for Trump. Rudy Giuliani knows exactly what the prosecutors are up to in his case, because he practically wrote the book on it. The disgraced version of Giuliani is being charged with one of the gravest crimes in the history of the American Republic.

He's being charged under RICO, the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Practices Act, which is poetic because 45 years ago, the righteous version of Giuliani used the same law to etch his name in New York history. He used it to take down the mob. The Gambinos, the Lucchesis, the Genoveses, and the Colombos all in one go. My name is Daniel Richman. I'm a professor of law at Columbia Law School. Way back, I was an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, hired by Giuliani.

I started in 1987. He left in 1989, but I stayed. And I've been in New York watching his rise and not so much rise. What was he like as a boss? What was he like as a boss? Just to be very clear, I was a junior person starting out, really committed to trying to be as good a prosecutor and as focused on the public interest as possible. And I was thrilled to work for Giuliani. I found him to be a terrific, inspiring boss. Like Giuliani, Daniel Richman became a successful prosecutor. Unlike Giuliani,

he stayed in public service and academia. He doesn't use words like thrilled lightly, but on Giuliani, he's just getting started. hope of trying to do the right thing. And he was focused as much on getting things right as on being a good leader in the office, which means a hard combination of supervising these young punks like me who are doing things and at the same time, giving them some discretion and respecting their judgment. Richmond isn't the only one who admired the young Giuliani. In fact, it's not much of a stretch to say most of the city did. To understand why... I guess it's important to understand how rough New York City was in that period, right? If you think of all those great old 1970s New York City movies, it's like, it's that image. Eileen Markey was an intern at the Village Voice when Trump and Rudy arrived on the scene. In the Bronx, in other boroughs, there's been tremendous

fire and devastation and burning out. This is like that era of like the birth of hip-hop. And in Manhattan, there's tons of vacant office buildings. In the previous 10 to 15 years, just the faith in the city had fallen apart. Giuliani wanted to be the person who put that faith back together again, or at least took the credit for it. Trump wanted to be the person who got rich in the process. To begin with, from the outside, it looked like plain sailing for both of them. They didn't even need each other. Here's Tom Robbins. You couldn't imagine two more different characters on the New York scene. I mean, they were both enormous figures of great influence

and clout, but Rudy Giuliani was kind of a tightly wound lawman who fiercely set out to go after wrongdoers in the financial field, in the political field, and going after mobsters. And he was kind of a humorless, intense, but intensely honest guy, or at least that was our perception of him when he came in as U.S. attorney. Donald, at the same time, had already made his mark as an irreverent, wild, ego-driven developer who was basically flaunting his reputation despite having not really accomplished a whole lot until he built Trump Tower

and then became one of the biggest figures on the New York development scene. They were both from the outer boroughs, bridge and tunnel folk as far as Manhattan was concerned. Trump's father famously made his fortune building block houses in Queens. Giuliani's father was an enforcer for a loan sharking operation who tried to straighten up after a spell in jail, which is not a story his son liked to tell. Because Giuliani Jr. was smart and single-minded. He was the high-achieving Catholic kid from Brooklyn whose only heresy was being a Yankees fan. He was driven, not least to prove that Italian-Americans could enforce the law as well as break it. By 1981, age 36,

he was the third most senior official in the Department of Justice in Washington. Two years later, he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York is the premier prosecutorial job in the federal system. It is the premier. There is nothing else in the country. Just because it maps over Manhattan. It doesn't matter. Being in Manhattan means you are the guy or the woman. We haven't had a woman, I don't think.

But the guy. You are on the front pages across the country. You control Wall Street. You control the economic system. Anything that goes on that is a federal crime goes to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District, in the sectors where it matters most. Giuliani could have chosen to be an operator. He could have sized up the other New York alpha dogs, bided his time, but he didn't. He picked all four big New York crime families at once, wrapped their bosses up in RICO indictments,

and sent them down. These are extremely dangerous individuals. They are people who have destroyed the lives of other human beings. Some people say he let others do the legwork and swooped in to nab the headlines. Richman says that is unfair. There really hadn't been an effort to have the kind of intense focus and deploy the RICO statute in such a capacious way to deal with the leadership of the family. So on the law side, I give him enormous credit. The FBI is going to be critical and their commitment of resources was critical in making

these cases. Back then, completely in contrast to now, there was an FBI squad for each family. And now they barely have one squad for all the families. It's a very different focus. But that doesn't happen at the Bureau without persuasion and advocacy from the U.S. Attorney's Office, and I believe Rudy had a lot to do with that. He was relentless.

From organized crime, he moved on to political corruption and a whole new tribe of white-collar outlaws who didn't know what hit them. One of them was Stanley Friedman, deputy mayor of New York and a Democrat. So Friedman, interesting story. So Friedman. The year was 1986. Here's Hank Sheinkopf. And a couple of other guys came up with this machine

that was going to record information about the parking, about the individuals based on plates, information about those cars to be able to write tickets faster and to automate them. The city needs parking tickets as a means of generating revenue. The problem was the machine didn't exist. So he was in business with a guy named Donald Maness,

who was the boss in Queens, who I also knew, and did business with from time to time. And they came up with this idea, and they were going to get it through, they were going to get it funded, and they probably thought they'd make a lot of money. The problem was that there was a guy that they were working with who was in Chicago who was doing a similar scam, and he got locked up,

and he was now a rat for the feds. So this was a moment in history made for Rudy Giuliani because it was the perfect meeting. It looked like organized crime. It had politicians acting like organized crime members, and it was just perfect. Friedman looked the part, well-dressed, but he behaved like a wise guy. And he represented rot at the heart of the democratic mayoralty of Ed Koch, a titan of venal New York machine politics

whom Giuliani wanted to replace. And there was something else that Giuliani noticed about Friedman. The last thing he did before going to prison was to sign a sweetheart deal for the redevelopment of a grand hotel on 42nd Street, and he signed it with Donald Trump. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. The podcast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood.

It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. ACAST.com I'm now on East 42nd Street, half a block from Grand Central Station, and I'm standing in front of one of New York's first real tastes of Trump kitsch.

In a sense, this is where it all began, even more than at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Trump kitsch is, putting it politely, some might call it Trump vandalism, but this was also one of the city's first good glimpses of the Trump M.O., which was to buy cheap, take the city for all you can in tax breaks, and sell deer, or at least offload long-term liabilities

as fast as possible to someone who can afford them. The building opposite me was once the Commodore, a venerable old railway hotel, and the young Trump pounced as it was going out of business in the mid-1970s. His lawyer and fixer at the time was Roy Cohn, who was also lawyer to Fat Tony Salerno, among other mobsters. Cohn and Deputy Mayor Stan Friedman agreed a sweetheart deal involving nearly 60 million in tax abatements. And then Trump's engineers went to work, cladding the old Commodore in glass. And the result is like a giant dirty gold armchair. It's now the Hyatt Grand Central, mercifully close to being shut down and re-redeveloped. But not long after it opened, Rudy Giuliani sent Stanley Friedman to jail for corruption and he noted in court that

the Commodore deal was one of Friedman's last ones as deputy mayor before he left public office to work for Roy Cohn. The young Trump looked on, accused of nothing, cleaning up. And it's really a gravy train to get in on. It's really a gravy train of government money to subsidize real estate development, to subsidize business development. And Trump is very good at having his hand out, right? So all of that wealth that he eventually acquires and loses and acquires and loses in the course of the 80s and 90s starts with government subsidy.

Trump is a quick study, and Giuliani is too. It turns out he's not quite as upright as his admirers hoped, or as the people on the gravy train may have feared. One of my concerns when he was elected mayor was that somebody who had this hardcore sense of right and wrong that he seemed to have when I saw him in action, would not be as ready as perhaps need be to make the kind of sleazy deals that make New York work, or that have so far made New York function, if not work. I was quickly shown to be wrong on that front. We're getting a little ahead of ourselves here.

Giuliani isn't mayor yet. But in any case, Daniel Richman need not have been concerned. Case in point, Trump Tower. We're standing in the huge pink marble atrium of Trump Tower on 5th Avenue and 57th Street. This is where Trump still has an apartment. This is where he announced his run for the presidency, gliding down the escalator next to us.

And this is where, a few years on, there's a huge fake presidential crest on the wall, three or four feet wide, with tourists lining up to have their pictures taken in front of it, and a dozen stars and stripes next to it on the wall, and facing it a gift shop where you can buy red baseball caps with USA on them, and blue baseball caps with the word Trump in gold on them. Oddly, not any MAGA caps at this particular point. But having built this tower in the early 80s, Trump had to sell it and thereby hangs a tale. There was a guy who was a mob-tied accountant who had gotten jammed up, as we say, and he was

facing his own charges, I think, in the Eastern District in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office. And he and his attorney had gone to Giuliani's office and said, my client has information about Donald Trump and he'd like to cooperate. That's Tom Robbins again. The mob-tied accountant is Frank LaMagra. The subject he wants to talk about with Giuliani's people is Trump Tower. And who wouldn't want to talk about it, if only for the address? It's called the Tiffany location because it's right next to Tiffany's. And that's how Trump always saw it. It's Tiffany's, you know, it's the best single place you can be. And the watchword

in New York's real estate industry is location, location, location. That if you can find a prime real estate spot, you can sell itself. And so he built this enormous tower in the process, knocking down a landmark Bonwood Teller building next door, trashing all of the pieces that had these wonderful bar reliefs on them. leafs on them. I wrote a lot of stories about the crew of undocumented Polish demolition workers who we stiffed on the job at the time knocking down the Bonwood Teller building. But he was lauded for having built this first big new tower up there. And he was widely celebrated then as a successful developer. So, you know, it was definitely a significant edifice on the New York skyline. People really said, oh, wow, look, that's Trump Tower. And, you know, he put his big brazen names on the front. You can still see it today. As Robbins says, if you get the

location right, the building is supposed to sell itself. But apparently it didn't. And Trump was, according to La Magra, doing cash deals with gangsters and others, taking money in suitcases that was being laundered from illegal guns. There was one guy named Robert Hopkins, most notoriously, who I think was arrested right in Trump Tower. And there were a bunch of other people of his ilk. And this guy, La Magra, alleged that he had the goods on it. Skyler Magra alleged that he had the goods on it. Hopkins ran New York's biggest illegal betting ring. He was linked to the Lucchese family. He was indeed arrested in Trump Tower and charged with murder, but that was later. Before that, he bought two apartments in the tower using $200,000 in cash in a briefcase as part of the down payment. Cash that was taken to La Magra's New Jersey bank in a Trump limo. That was the story La Magra wanted to tell.

And it was the kind of case that you would have thought Rudy Giuliani would want to do. And if you wanted to tip off as to how Rudy Giuliani had begun to understand political power in New York, it was his failure to aggressively pursue that case. Because it would have been a headline maker. A case against Donald Trump would have been, you know, the two biggest tigers going against each other, the U.S. attorney versus New York's most brazen developer. But his performance was just, you know, was not known. Nobody knew about this at the time.

It was, you know, it was just one guy coming in and saying, I have information. And nothing. Nothing public at any rate. Ordinarily, the U.S. Attorney's Office would have had La Magra thoroughly debriefed to work out whether to pursue the case, and if so, how. Instead, Giuliani assigned his top aide, a guy named Tony Lombardi, who I knew pretty well at the time, to go and talk to Trump about it, which was kind of the last thing you do. You sort of wait until you have all your ducks in a row and know what your really important questions. And instead, he went to talk to Trump. And apparently, Trump convinced him, no, everything is on the up and up.

There's nothing here. Sometime later, Tom Robbins had dinner with Tony Lombardi. Lombardi said he was planning to retire soon, and the conversation got around to what he'd do next. And he said, well, Donald's got a job lined up for me. Lombardi, Robbins said, had traded a job for a case, and Giuliani had looked the other way. It was a missed opportunity to bring Donald Trump to justice very early on in his career.

Would it have resulted in conviction? I don't know. But we'll never know, because Rudy Giuliani never pursued the case. It never even had a number. The Commodore was now the Hyatt. Trump Tower was the apotheosis of 80s gangster Baroque. The actual gangsters were in jail. Seinfeld was in development. New York was back, baby, after a fashion.

There was a Manhattan party scene with Trump in the middle of it. Hope was in the air, Robbins says. Hope that new money flowing into the city might be used at last to revive neighborhoods abandoned since the 70s. There was intense poverty in the outer boroughs and parts of Manhattan at the same time. So it was always a tale of two cities, but they had begun to turn the corner, really, by the time Rudy showed up. Fast forward to the early 90s, and the only frustration, the only irritant in Rudy Giuliani's life, is that he isn't mayor.

David Dinkins is. Dinkins is an ex-Marine, a successful lawyer, a lifelong Democrat, and the first African-American to lead New York. Losing to Dinkins in the 1989 mayoral race was, for Giuliani, a deep personal humiliation. He'd constructed the persona of a fearless crime fighter who speaks for the outer boroughs, not just the elite. It felt authentic to him and to many others. But he didn't work. Next time, he'd do whatever it took.

The mayor doesn't know why the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low. He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit! The reason the morale of the police department is so low is one reason and one reason alone. David Jenkins! I was living in Hell's Kitchen, or as I called it, Hell's Living Room. It was 45th Street and 8th Avenue.

I called it Hell's Living Room. It was 45th Street and 8th Avenue. And every day I'd be solicited by the same hookers and pimps and winos and drug addicts and beggars, frankly. And it got tiresome because, you know, I took the same route to work every day. In 1992, Ken Friedman quit his job in a consulting firm and went to work for Giuliani. My partners and I decided, I went to them and said, listen, I got to, in effect, give back. Giuliani's running for mayor. He's the guy who's going to clean it up, make it safe. I want to do my part. Friedman was hired as Giuliani's spokesman for his second mayoral campaign. Crime and policing became its defining issue. The Dinkins administration had taken steps to reform the New York Police Department,

and those reforms were deeply unpopular with its rank and file. Here's C. Virginia Fields, a city councillor at the time. David Dinkins had done some very progressive things in establishing the Civil Complaint Review Board, holding police officers accountable. He had appointed the black police commissioner, and they were very out of step, the police, with what he had done, and they supported Rudolph Giuliani. So here now you got this rally at City Hall and it grew and it grew and they were jumping up on cars. They were intimidating people who did go into City Hall. The police officers were not in uniform, but they're clearly defined as the police against David Dinkins and for Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani was invited, and Friedman went too.

When we arrived through City Hall Park into City Hall Plaza, he was greeted by 10,000 cops screaming Rudy. And as I told the New York Times, subsequently, it was a home run. Now, I've grown to regret that interpretation. Although, at the time, I thought, there are 10,000 people screaming Rudy Giuliani's name. That's great. Okay. in Rudy Giuliani's name. That's great, okay? And Rudy then was ushered to the riser through a sea of off-duty cops screaming his name.

It was a sea parted, actually. It was a remarkable scene. And had he not yelled bullshit and not screamed, but rather addressed them in a calm, professional manner. The history would have been probably different. Although, when we got back to the office and we turned on the television, there were some drunken people in the crowd, some holding racist signs, some screaming racist epithets.

And to this day, I say that I didn't hear or see any of that. And neither, I don't think, did he, because I was with him the whole time. Which is not to say they weren't there, but the majority of the crowd was just angry. Okay, they weren't racist, or not overtly racist. So he yelled bullshit. That was the moment the campaign crystallized around crime and race. The so-called bullshit was Dinkins' effort to assert control of a mainly white police force in an increasingly black and brown city. Virginia Fields, the former city councillor, says that day reminds her of the

January 6th insurrection in Washington. There were so many similarities between what we saw, the rioting of police officers, and I suppose friends, in front of City Hall where he was campaigning against the first black mayor, and some of the language, the N-word, you know, comparing the mayor to washroom cleanups, just very vile stuff. He supported that riot. We also saw how he campaigned. Giuliani campaigned selectively.

He was too smart to play the race card overtly. In fact, he played it by pretending to do the reverse, by claiming to be campaigning, quote, for all New Yorkers, unquote, and implying in the process that Dinkins was in it for his own people. It was dog whistle politics, just barely, as Eileen Markey explains. It's like in a low enough register that we can hear it. No, you're not using banned words, but you're talking about how rotten these people are, how wild, uncivilized. Ask Ken Friedman about Giuliani's outreach to black voters in that 1993 campaign. And he tells an interesting story. Early in the campaign, in early 92,

I did convince him to accept the invitation of a group of black reverends in Brooklyn. Although he did it grudgingly, because he'd only gotten 2. half percent of the black vote last time and had not been received favorably by the black community. But we had time. It was early. So we drove to Brooklyn and we met with this group of black ministers and all the way there. He gave me a hard time about it. You know, it's a waste of time.

All the way there, he gave me a hard time about it. It's a waste of time. We're going to be out of there in 10 minutes because they're only going to want to know how many jobs I'll provide, how many patronage jobs if I win, and how much walking around money. Walking around money? Yeah. Pocket money. And I said, come on, don't be so cynical. I know you only got to an 8% last time, but we've got to be able to do better.

So he bet me. And he said, and gentleman's bet. And I said, let's hear what they have to say. Well, he was right. As soon as we sat down, they were, why should we not support the African-American mayor, the incumbent? What can you offer us that he didn't? How many jobs are you going to provide to the community? And how much financial support are you going to provide to the community? financial support are you going to provide to the community? So the meeting didn't last more than five minutes, as I recall. It was a very, very short meeting. He got up, and I got up with him, and we drove back, and he yelled at me the whole way back, never doing that again, he said, and he never did. In 1989, Giuliani lost to Dinkins by two points. In 1993, he beat Dinkins by two points.

Friedman spent election night on the floor of Giuliani's hotel room. The first thing his boss did the next morning was go downstairs to film a cameo for Seinfeld. It's hard to understand because I've been doing everything I normally do. I've been watching my diet very carefully. I exercise regularly. My only indulgence, I guess, would be that I eat a lot of frozen yogurt, but it's nonfat. Nonfat yogurt? Oh my God, they got Giuliani

and he doesn't even know it. Then Mayor Giuliani went to work, shutting down the sex shops on Times Square. And because it was Times Square, it made headlines around the world. He hired Bill Bratton from Boston as his police commissioner with a remit to cut crime on the broken windows theory, that if you go after the small stuff, the big stuff looks after itself. It seemed to work. And because this was New York, other cities copied it. There were sceptics who said the rezoning of Times Square started before Giuliani. They said crime had started falling under Dinkins. They said his budgets were racist,

cutting funds to non-white neighbourhoods. But because Giuliani was a force of nature, he took the credit and he dodged the blame. In fact, he became so obsessed with getting the credit and fearing Bill Bratton was taking the limelight that he brutally sacked him after two years. I've just met with the mayor, Mayor Giuliani, this morning and have given to him my letter of resignation

as the police commissioner for the city of New York. Hank Scheinkopf remembers it all vividly. The first term was bombastic. You know, he's locking people up, he's Dick Tracy, you might as well have given him a radio car with a red dome on top of it to run through the streets. The second term, not so much. And there were excesses like shootings here and there and stop and frisk.

Driving while black became a crime in certain neighborhoods. Walking while black became a crime later, but driving while black was a real crime. You know, things were out of control. You know, things were out of control. In 1999, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student, Amadou Diallo, was gunned down by police in the doorway of his apartment building in the Bronx. The four officers involved were charged with murder and acquitted. In 2000, a Haitian-born security guard named Patrick Dorismond was shot dead by police after taking offense when plainclothes officers asked if he could sell them drugs.

Giuliani chose to defend the police and blame the victim. And then the response by the mayor to that is to look into the victim's history, to look into the victim's, has he ever done anything wrong? Did he ever get kicked out of school? Did he ever have any small-time arrests? And then famously to say he's no altar boy, because we had a really great, robust New York press corps at the time. They found out that, in fact, he was an altar boy. But that's the sort of thing that made so many New Yorkers tire of Rudy by September 10th, 2001, that that would be his reaction to tragedies. And especially to anything having to do with black men. That it was always a, what's wrong with this guy?

Like as though he fundamentally misunderstood what happened, right? What happened was that this guy was shot, not that he did something wrong. But that's how Rudy's thinking went. He was always that guy. And I think part of the story of what happened to Rudy under Trump or with Trump or mixed up with Trump is that he became the worst version of himself. By September 10th, 2001, Giuliani was close to the end of his second term.

By law, there wouldn't be a third. He was a lame duck. More than that, he kept offending people and doubling down. He ditched his popular wife, live on TV. In many ways, we've grown to live independent and separate lives, and we should probably strive toward formalising that. He'd allowed Trump to build another skyscraper slap-bang in front of the UN building on the East River.

Even Walter Cronkite, the legendary news anchor, had written to complain about losing his view. And he got no reply. The next day, September 11th, was primary day for the mayoral election. About 8.30 in the morning, Hank Sheinkopf was walking to vote on 3rd Avenue. 3rd Avenue gives a clear view all the way down Manhattan. Hank looked up and realised... There's something going on for the island. Coming up in the next episode of Trump and Rudy,

how 9-11 made Rudy Giuliani more popular than the Pope, richer than he could ever have imagined, and a miserable guest at Mar-a-Lago. by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts or for the best Tortoise listening experience curated by our journalists, download the Tortoise app. And please leave ratings and reviews. It really helps. This episode was written and reported by me, Giles Whittle. The producer was Charlie Bell. The editor was Jasper Corbett with sound design by Carla Patella.

Tortoise with sound design by Carla Patella.