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Hizzoner Has No Honor:
Rudy Giuliani v Tony Sopranoby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
May 25, 2001Next to the Godfather films, HBO's The Sopranos is NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's favorite popular entertainment. Giuliani, who opens most speeches with an imitation of Marlon Brando's Godfather, has had the entire Soprano cast over to Gracie Mansion and frequently comments on how much he enjoys the show.
Too bad Rudy the Rude can't achieve the level of decency Tony Soprano, the fictional Mafia capo, displays in the television series.
Not that Tony is anyone's idea of the perfect father, husband or citizen. A role model for impressionable youth he's not. It's just that compared to the disgraceful Rudy Giuliani, Tony's looking pretty good.
Although "T" cheats on his wife with an assortment of exotic strippers and girlfriends, he doesn't try to bring them to the family home and introduce them to his kids. Unlike Donna Hanover, Tony's wife Carmella is always treated with respect in front of his children and in public.
It would be unimaginable for Tony to dump his wife on live TV or arrange for his divorce lawyer to viciously malign her character as a bad mother. Even more unthinkable from a traditional family man like Tony Soprano would be for him to try throwing his wife out of their NJ mansion in order to move one of his girlfriends in, as Giuliani has spent the past few weeks trying to do.
Unlike Rudy, who has left many embittered former friends and disposable associates in his wake, Tony is a man of loyalty. He gives credit where credit is due, shows even his worst enemies respect and can be depended on by friends under the most difficult conditions. Both men demand loyalty, but in Giuliani's case it's blind loyalty to him not to any code of honor.
Megalomaniac that he is, Giuliani expects his henchmen to go down with the ship while he waves goodbye from the lifeboat, sacrificing their careers and reputations in order to salvage his. All Tony Soprano demands of his crew is that they turn a nice profit and don't wear a wire for the Feds.
In the near future many a Giuliani henchman will be signing a plea bargain agreement and testifying against their former boss to avoid doing jail time. Until then, they'd better be careful about accepting any Ferry ride invitations from Giuliani, who might try a late-night Staten Island version of the way Tony handled Big Pussy working for the Feds.
Tony's weekly scenes with his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, depict a man struggling to come to terms with his inner demons. If only Rudy Giuliani were half as honest with himself.
Now that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische has threatened to send the entire Giuliani family to be evaluated by a mental health practitioner, Giuliani may well be facing his own Dr. Melfi - a development that's long overdue. For a guy who has committed murders and dished out some vicious beatings, Tony Soprano is certainly not the world's worst father. He genuinely cares about his kids and goes to great lengths to shield them from the negative aspects of his occupation.
Compare that to Rudy Giuliani. What must his children think about the daily newspaper headlines - all self-servingly generated by the Mayor and his surrogates - concerning his impotence, his new life-long love or his children's mother Donna Hanover, "squealing like a stuck pig" and having to be, "removed from the mansion kicking and screaming".
Remember that this is a man who publicly castigated the mothers of unarmed innocent young men "accidentally" killed by the NYPD as bad parents, whose Administration of Childrens Services routinely takes children away from their families for nothing more than refusing to submit to workfare or for being homeless. Wouldn't most mental health practitioners consider Giuliani's recent public actions to be a form of both spousal and child abuse?
It's not Italian-bashing - merely factual - to point out that Giuliani's family background is similar to Tony Soprano's. As Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett documented in his biography of the Mayor, Rudy Giuliani's father was a convicted hold-up man and small-time mafia enforcer whose Brooklyn bar was a front for loan sharking and the numbers racket. The baseball bat the senior Mr. Giuliani kept on hand was used far more frequently on the knees of those who didn't pay their gambling debts than for anything resembling a Yankees game.
Like many a cold-hearted sociopath, Giuliani is intensely sentimental about his mother. Prisons are filled with men who brutally beat or murdered innocent people or cheated seniors out of their life savings without the slightest twinge of guilt yet would find it unthinkable to forget Mother's Day or their mom's birthday.
Like Pauley Walnuts and the other mobsters in the Sopranos, Giuliani - deficient in conscience though he may be - has been a dutiful son who looks after his mother's every need. In Tony's case this filial piety was extended until her death, despite the fact that his abusive mom actually tried to have him whacked. Now that's a degree of loyalty any parent would envy.
One might say hold on a minute, you're comparing a real person - Rudy Giuliani - to a fictional person - Tony Soprano. Well, isn't the public Rudy Giuliani also a fictional person?
What we know of him from eight years of fawning media coverage influenced by hundreds of millions in tax write-offs to newspapers and television networks turns out to have been the work of imaginative scriptwriters, not reporters. Giuliani and his press staff deserve a Pulitzer, an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for their accomplishments in the category of original fiction. His reputation as a brilliant lawyer, for example, is about as fact-based as a typical episode of Zena, Warrior Princess.
No elected official in U.S. history ever lost so many lawsuits or filed ones so utterly lacking in legal credibility. Can one imagine a series like Law and Order - which the Mayor recently made a gratuitous guest appearance on - where the prosecutors lied to every judge, falsified every piece of evidence and still lost almost every case? Giuliani's much vaunted career as a Federal prosecutor involved case after high-profile case of trumped up charges where the defendant was acquitted or the charges were dropped after camera-loving Rudy reaped his whirlwind of publicity.
His undeserved reputation as a crime fighting Mayor is based on statistics which simultaneously fell in every large American city, including those where nothing whatsoever was done to lower crime. What little local credit for the drop in crime is deserved would have to go to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the NYPD and the winding down of the crack epidemic, not the Mayor.
The economic miracle he loves to claim credit for was achieved by the combined manipulations of the Clinton administration, the Federal Reserve and top players in the stock market. Much of this false economic windfall has already evaporated with the deflation of the internet stocks.
The local real estate boom that coincided with his administration likewise had it's origin in other people's efforts - a bullish stock market, the real estate development policies of former Mayor David Dinkins and years of effort by the City's Business Improvement Districts - in their own way a sophisticated new form of organized crime family.
Of the hundreds of thousands of so-called criminals the Mayors' arrest policies are alleged to have removed from the streets, more than 90% were never prosecuted with most cases being dismissed by the District Attorney's office at arraignment. That's just as well, since 95% of them were vendors, bicyclists, street artists, homeless people or innocent victims of racial profiling.
The welfare recipients and homeless people he claims to have 'helped" with his policies were given temporary jobs at below minimum wage, locked up on Rikers Island or statistically reclassified into oblivion - a Giuliani specialty refined to perfection since the days he was in charge of the Reagan administration's phony crime stats.
His so-called war on the Mafia substituted one group of organized crime bosses for another, only this time with lucrative government contracts. Fulton Fish Market, garbage carting, construction, the garment industry and the San Gennaro Festival are still run by "connected" people not to mention thousands of other "family" operations that are an accepted part of the New York City business community.
And speaking of mob predation, the Giuliani administrations' network of incompetent relatives, ex-wives, former mistresses, political cronies and childhood pals parasitically leaching tax dollars from the City payroll makes Tony Soprano's crew look like a distinguished meritocracy by comparison.
And what of his reputation as the man who single-handedly "cleaned up" New York City? Topless dancing, porn, nightclubs and prostitution flourish despite eight years of expensive and blatantly unconstitutional Giuliani crackdowns. In terms of "decency", there's more that needs to be hid from the kids coming out of Gracie Mansion than Times Square.
Drug dealing, muggings, robbery, child molestation, rape and murder are still the breaking news stories every day in the blood-soaked Big Apple. After eight years of Giuliani making this town "squeegee safe" for tourists and the rich, our children are now more at risk inside the public schools than if they were left to run wild on the streets.
Not surprisingly, educational results are worse than ever after eight years of the "Giuliani miracle". Besides his yearly cuts to schools, hospitals, EMS, libraries, after school and day care programs, the entire population has had its' immune systems and brains permanently damaged by nerve gas pesticides invented by IG Farben's Nazi scientists, thanks to the Mayor's West Nile Virus experiments.
Outside of Midtown Manhattan and other select neighborhoods on which he bestowed special attention in exchange for campaign donations, the streets of NYC are more polluted, pothole-scarred and toxic than ever. With forty thousand cops kept busy padding the Mayor's ever-expanding statistical records by arresting fare-beaters and marijuana smokers, the saying, "there's never a cop around when you need one", rings truer than ever before.
Thanks to Rudy Giuliani's leadership over the past eight years the NYPD now enjoys a lower level of morale, public support and respect than at any time in NYC history. The entrance requirements for new recruits must be reduced each year in order to maintain any police force at all.
Teachers, bureaucrats and high-ranking police officers are retiring early or fleeing the City for the suburbs in record numbers. Day-to-day hostility between the races is more pronounced than at any time since the 1960's. Remember the Mayor's politeness and decency campaigns? Snarling Rudy and his loud-mouthed divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, are it's anti-hero poster boys.
Around January 1st 2002 the chickens will all be coming home to roost. The supposed billion dollar tax surplus Giuliani is busily committing to building baseball stadiums for his wealthiest friends is expected to be transformed overnight to a multi-billion dollar deficit once real accounting practices are allowed to resume, post-Giuliani.
To describe this shameful mess as a legacy, an accomplishment and a miracle is an act of fiction so far beyond the realm of credibility that no television producer would consider airing such a non-reality-based fantasy show. Yet, every candidate for Mayor assures us he'll maintain the "Giuliani Legacy".
We need a real person to be the next Mayor of New York rather than the cartoonish, cross-dressing thug term-limits will shortly deliver us from.
May I suggest a person of better character, greater honesty and superior leadership?
I'd like to nominate Tony Soprano.
To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum websiteHis essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htmIf you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
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Peck Slip Station
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or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
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Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.Blue Collar Pundit Essays
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