The Dark World Of Giuliani Partners: Rudy Admits Some Clients Remain Secret

[Janett_Reno]

Giuliani's business ties create challenge

http://www.chicagotribune.com/servic...087,full.story

Was a consultant for controversial tycoon
By Andrew Zajac and Evan Osnos, Tribune correspondents

8:05 AM CST, November 21, 2007

WASHINGTON

Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort.

Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government.

Giuliani's participation as a security consultant in the Singapore gambling venture illustrates the challenge he faces while attempting to win the Republican presidential nomination with a law-and-order message while maintaining a far-flung, international business portfolio, an unknown portion of which remains in the shadows.

As a candidate, Giuliani is banking on his reputation as a hard-nosed prosecutor and a crime-fighting mayor, along with his performance after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to trump doubts about his turbulent personal life, his tolerant stands on gambling, abortion and other social issues and perhaps some of the decisions he has made as a businessman.

So far, the strategy seems to be working, as Giuliani leads most polls of GOP presidential contenders.

But as the primary campaign nears its first electoral tests in Iowa, New Hampshire and other states in the coming weeks, new details of Giuliani's extensive business dealings since leaving office continue to emerge piecemeal.

Each revelation raises new questions for the first major presidential candidate in memory to build a multimillion-dollar business on the foundation of his time in elected office, and not the other way around.

Confidential candidate

Even today, more than a year after the former New York mayor signaled his intention to run for the presidency, it remains impossible to fully evaluate Giuliani's business dealings because he has declined to list all of the clients in Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm he founded and heads.

Questioned during a campaign appearance Tuesday in Chicago, Giuliani said that, "all of Giuliani Partners' clients, maybe with one or two exceptions, I'm not even sure that's right, are public. ... At least the ones that I was familiar with."

Confidentiality agreements prohibit disclosure of an unspecified number of clients, Giuliani said, "but somehow I think you -- you meaning the press in general -- have been successful in discovering. I'd have to check if it's every client. But just about every single client of Giuliani Partners. You'll have to check with them."

A spokeswoman for Giuliani Partners said that "a number of client relationships ... must remain confidential, as per the specific request of those clients."

She did not respond to questions about whether Giuliani was asking those clients to waive privacy in light of his presidential bid.

Giuliani's public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore hosted by Mark Advent, CEO of Eighth Wonder LLC, a Las Vegas development company heading one of three consortia competing to build the Sentosa Integrated Resort.

Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, a division of Giuliani Partners, was to provide security on a celebrity-studded, multibillion-dollar project featuring participation by soccer legend Pele, chef Alain Ducasse, New Age guru Deepak Chopra and designer Vera Wang, according to Advent.

Advent estimated that he spent more than $30 million to assemble and present his plans to Singaporean authorities.

He declined to disclose the fees paid to Giuliani, but described them as "fair and priceless."

Advent said he sought Giuliani's services because he was impressed by the way Giuliani ran New York, before and especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. "In my personal opinion, the mayor is the best crisis manager, post-traumatic event, of anyone I've ever seen," Advent said in a recent telephone interview.

'Tremendous due diligence'

Behind the scenes, Giuliani had been involved in the project for three months before his involvement was made public, and he had a 10-year agreement to provide "security management on all levels," including employee background checks, security features and disaster response, said Advent, who previously developed Las Vegas' New York, New York casino.

Giuliani participated in Eighth Wonder's presentation to Singaporean authorities last Nov. 29, according to Advent. That was nine days after the Rudy Giuliani Exploratory Committee Inc. registered with the Federal Election Commission.

Advent said he never discussed how the consulting arrangement would be affected if Giuliani ran for president. "At no time did Rudy ever talk politics with me," Advent said.

Advent described Giuliani as extraordinarily concerned about his firm's partners and associates.

"They did a tremendous amount of due diligence. ... They wanted to make sure they vetted everybody," Advent said.

But in a later interview, Advent said Giuliani's vetting only extended to Advent and his Eighth Wonder colleagues, and that Giuliani had no role in evaluating Eighth Wonder's outside partners.

Those partners would include Melco PBL, a joint venture based in Hong Kong which joined the project, with a 24.5 percent equity stake, in October 2006, according to Advent.

Melco PBL is a collaboration between Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, an Australian firm run by James Packer, son of the late media magnate Kerry Packer, and Melco International Development, run by Lawrence Ho, son of Stanley Ho, a colorful casino tycoon.

At 85, Stanley Ho remains the dominant player in the gambling industry on Macau, an 11-square-mile spit of land near Hong Kong on China's southeast coast.

A Portuguese possession for more than 400 years until it was returned to China in 1999, Macau has long been the gaming capital of Southeast Asia. For 40 years, until 2002, Stanley Ho held a monopoly on casinos there.

Even now, with the Macanese gaming market open to foreigners, including Americans, Stanley Ho and two of his 17 children, Lawrence Ho and Pansy Ho, have an interest in three of Macau's six casino licenses.

Although Stanley Ho has never been charged with a crime, the U.S. government's 2000 International Crime Threat Assessment described him as "a reputed organized crime figure."

A 2007 State Department narcotics and law-enforcement report noted links between casinos controlled by Stanley Ho and Chinese organized crime.

Ties to North Korea

In addition, Stanley Ho retains ties to the regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. In 1999, he opened a casino in Pyongyang.

In March 2003, the South China Morning Post, the main English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, reported that Stanley Ho conveyed an offer of asylum in North Korea by Kim to Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.

The State Department has designated North Korea a state sponsor of terror since 1988.

A spokeswoman for Stanley Ho declined to comment.

Advent and Giuliani's spokeswoman said Stanley Ho had no involvement in the Singapore casino bid, pointing out that Stanley Ho has no direct interest in Melco PBL.

"We did business with Lawrence Ho," Advent said. "It has nothing to do with his dad. ... He [Lawrence Ho] has a separate company."

A spokeswoman for Melco PBL said that "Dr. Ho was not involved in the Singaporean bid and he is not involved in the affairs" of Melco International, PBL or their joint venture Melco PBL.

According to Hong Kong regulatory filings, Stanley Ho resigned as chairman and director of Melco International, sold the bulk of his shares in the company and turned over leadership of it to Lawrence Ho, in March 2006, about seven months before Melco PBL's participation in the Singapore casino bid was announced.

But at the time of the bid, Stanley Ho and a firm controlled by him still owned more than 21 million shares of Melco International -- just under 2 percent of the shares outstanding.

In addition, regulatory filings in Hong Kong and the U.S. show a series of loans and contracts for computer services and gaming machines between Melco International and Stanley Ho-run firms.

Melco International reported spending about $2.4 million as its share of costs to pursue the Sentosa license through Melco PBL.

The Giuliani Partners spokeswoman termed the link between Stanley Ho and the Eighth Wonder partnership "a stretch."

The government of Singapore announced Dec. 8 it was passing over Eighth Wonder and another bidder and selected a consortium headed by Genting International Bhd, a Malayasian casino company.

Analysts studying the three bids for the project before the decision generally marked down Eighth Wonder for its relative lack of experience in developing an entire resort.

Such a deficiency might be enough to eliminate Eighth Wonder without considering other factors, but even a tenuous tie to Stanley Ho would give Singapore regulators pause, said William Eadington, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has extensively studied casino gaming in Macau.

"There were and probably still are Triad [Chinese organized crime] connections around Stanley Ho," said Eadington.

"I think anything very close to Stanley Ho they [Singaporean regulators] are going to have trouble with."

[Janett_Reno]

Giuliani's Critics Point to Cronyism

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...301687_pf.html

"Surround Yourself With Great People" was the title of a chapter in "Leadership," Rudolph W. Giuliani's best-selling celebration of his management style, but to critics of his performance in two terms as mayor of New York, it was an admonition he too often ignored.

While some of his original appointments to high-level city jobs were well regarded, these critics describe a pattern in which capable appointees either quit or were pushed out, leaving the top levels of the Giuliani administration increasingly populated by friends and close associates. Some of the later appointees became shrouded in scandal, including Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner indicted this month on 16 counts of corruption, mail and tax fraud, obstruction of justice, and lying to the government.

"As he became more confident in his ability, he didn't need anything from others other than to be loyal to him," said Marilyn Gelber, who was ousted as Giuliani's environment commissioner in 1996. "The management style grew harder as time went on and as he grew more comfortable with the level of control he wanted."

Giuliani's close association with Kerik, especially his lobbying of the Bush administration three years ago to make his former associate the secretary of homeland security, threatens to undermine one of the central arguments of his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination: that he is a superior leader who would bring to the White House high standards and a level of managerial acumen that many, including Republicans, say is missing under President Bush.

Giuliani's critics say that while he is justifiably praised for his leadership in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, his advancement of Kerik, his former chauffeur, was part of a pattern of rewarding loyalty over competence in personnel decisions. "It's pretty clear that his judgment on political appointments was weighted more heavily to cronies and friends than to quality," said Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) for president and has turned sharply against Giuliani after supporting him early in his mayoralty. "Are we going to have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who's a private first class but who happens to be a friend? Are we going to have a law clerk who becomes attorney general?"

The Giuliani campaign dismisses such criticisms, saying that Giuliani's judgment as a manager was vindicated by his administration's overall success in reducing crime and welfare and improving the city's quality of life and economy.

"You've got to look at the results," said Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, speaking for his presidential campaign. "The results are emblematic of his philosophy and the people he hired to implement that philosophy."

Hiring political allies for top jobs has a long history in city government, and Giuliani was hardly the first mayor of New York to bring along loyalists to be his advisers inside City Hall. What set him apart, observers say, was the extent to which he also emphasized loyalty in looking for people beyond those City Hall aides to run city agencies. And, given that he was taking over after years of Democratic rule, he was faced with a smaller pool of candidates who were both experienced and politically sympathetic. This became apparent as time wore on, said Dick Dadey, director of Citizens Union, a city watchdog group.

"When you start a new administration, you generally draw from a pool of extremely interested and well-qualified people who are eager to bring change," Dadey said. "As the first wave starts to move on, those who have been with you from the beginning and remain loyal to you start to move up, but they do not necessarily move up because they're the most qualified."

The police department exemplifies the shift. Giuliani hired as his first commissioner William J. Bratton, who made his reputation leading the Boston police and New York transit police but was also known for his self-promotion. After forcing Bratton out in 1996, when they clashed over claiming credit for the drop in crime, Giuliani passed over several department veterans and instead turned to his more strait-laced fire commissioner, Howard Safir, whom he knew from their days pursuing drug traffickers in the early 1980s. Safir was then with the U.S. Marshals Service, and Giuliani was with the Justice Department. "Howard and I go back 20 years," Giuliani said in announcing the move.

Safir presided over a continuation of the drop in crime. But he came under intense criticism after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man, for failing to provide adequate oversight of the police unit involved in the shootings and for his detached response. He also came under scrutiny for, among other things, taking a corporate jet to the Academy Awards shortly after the shootings, for assigning eight detectives to his daughter's wedding, and for sending officers to investigate a woman who rear-ended his wife's car.

When Safir left four years later, Giuliani pronounced him the "city's greatest police commissioner." Fred Siegel, the author of a flattering biography of Giuliani, disagrees, calling the switch from Bratton to Safir the "worst policy decision" Giuliani made. Safir, Siegel said, lacked the instincts needed in the city and contributed to the worsening racial tensions in Giuliani's second term. "This was [Giuliani's] biggest failure," said Siegel, "not being big enough to keep Bratton. . . . Many of the failures [of his second term] flowed from that decision."

To replace Safir as fire commissioner in 1996, Giuliani chose Thomas Von Essen, a rank-and-file firefighter who was far down the department's chain of command but headed the firefighters union local that backed Giuliani in 1993. Also in 1996, Giuliani selected a nationally known bioterrorism expert, Jerome Hauer, to head his new office of emergency management. But Hauer left in 2000, partly out of frustration with Giuliani's inability to get the police and fire departments to cooperate more.

Giuliani replaced Hauer with Richie Sheirer, an early supporter of the mayor's and an aide to Safir who spent most of his career as a fire department dispatcher. Sheirer and Von Essen both met with tough questioning by the Sept. 11 commission over the failure of the fire department's radios and the lack of coordination among public safety agencies the day of the attacks. They now both work for Giuliani's security consulting firm and did not return a call seeking comment. Safir also did not return calls.

Hauer said the limits of Giuliani's leadership team became clear to him after he returned at City Hall's request to help out after the Sept. 11 attacks and was startled to discover that neither Kerik nor Von Essen nor Sheirer had ever obtained federal security clearance, which made it hard for Hauer to discuss information he was receiving from Washington. Shortly afterward, Giuliani banished Hauer from Ground Zero after Hauer endorsed a Democrat to succeed the mayor.

Giuliani "had a blind spot when it came to people he knew well" and "very little respect for the vetting process," Hauer said. "The competent people in the administration all tended to leave because they got tired of the borderline-incompetent people who got in. He ran off the professionals because they were difficult to work with. If they didn't do things the way he wanted or overshadowed him, he got furious."

Fran Reiter, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, said most initial Cabinet hires came via a "very extensive search process," but the mayor was more likely to emphasize personal ties when it came to public safety jobs. Giuliani wanted ownership over that realm because of his law enforcement background, she said. And he worried that department veterans who he did not have ties with would have more allegiance to the departments than to him.

"These were areas where he just really wanted people whom he trusted and who were not going to do anything other than what he wanted them to do," she said.

Giuliani's most ill-fated promotion, other than Kerik's, was his 1998 choice to run the city's Housing Development Corp.: Russell Harding, the son of the former head of New York's Liberal Party, whose backing of Giuliani was crucial in his election. Harding had no college degree or background in housing and finance, and was eventually convicted of stealing more than $300,000 from the agency and sentenced to more than five years in prison for the embezzlement and for possessing child pornography. In "Leadership," Giuliani wrote that there is nothing wrong with hiring supporters if they are qualified. "Patronage does not mean giving a job to someone who supported you politically," he writes. "It means giving a job to someone only because he supported you politically."

Gelber, for one, argues that the latter definition applied to the Giuliani administration. She freely admits she got her job for political reasons -- she was chief of staff to the Brooklyn borough president, and to curry favor with him, a Democrat, Giuliani hired her as his first environment commissioner. At first, she was impressed with Giuliani's zeal to "look for new ideas and new ways of doing things," which included organizing thoughtful seminars on governance for Cabinet members.

But she grew disillusioned when she started getting pressure from City Hall to hire political supporters and fire those from the previous administration, including a secretary, as well as criticism for receiving too much praise in the newspapers for her work. Things came to a head, she said, when City Hall told her to hire an applicant for a key deputy post overseeing air quality who presented as his qualification some materials on his work for the Giuliani campaign, including a thank-you letter from the mayor.

Gelber eventually gave in but blew up at the deputy in 1996 after two asbestos incidents in which she says he failed to take charge. Giuliani fired her shortly afterward.

[FishForLunch]

What are you trying to say, Guliani is a crook like Hillary?

[Janett_Reno]

More news for Rudy....

Giuliani's 'Kucinich-Size' Crowds Disappoint In New Hampshire

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/1...e_n_73982.html

The numbers of reporters have ballooned. In addition to the regulars, all of the New York City tabloids are here, as are several national newspaper chains and numerous still photographers. Even Australian and Danish press made a cameo. For a campaign that never had a formal launch, this weekend almost seems like an unveiling.

The crowds, however, don't seem to have gotten the message. A rally for Giuliani in front of Manchester City Hall garnered only a few dozen supporters. Backers of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich almost seemed to match them in numbers. Giuliani generates healthy crowds at town hall meetings, but they are not all loyalists. When it comes to rallies and events where partisans are expected in droves, Giuliani's crowds disappoint. And the mainstream media has started to notice.

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Mainstream Media is starting to notice. This doesn't mean Fox News dude. This means real fair and balanced main stream media news. Remember even a former hero of yours, Fred Thompson, doesn't see eye to eye with the chosen one, Fox News. I know, you now have him on a swift boat but hey he is conservative.

[Janett_Reno]

More in the life and times of a Rudy. Speaking of a flip flopper. I like Dr Pepper better but i drink Mountain Dew because it sounds better, haha.
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Rudy: Yes, I Voted For McGovern, But I Actually Preferred Nixon

http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/1...rred_nixon.php


As he seeks to court GOP primary voters, one potential sticking point has been his opposition to the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and his vote for Dem George McGovern in 1972. But Rudy has now concocted a new explanation for that vote: He didn't mean it.

Or so he says in a new interview with The Weekly Standard:

"I had traditionally been a Democrat," Giuliani told me in a recent interview in Las Vegas. "It was almost like a reflex mode. I actually remember saying to myself, 'If I was a person really deciding who should be president right now, I'd probably vote for Nixon, because I think the country would be safer with Nixon.'"
Hmmm. Does this mean that Rudy didn't vote for the candidate who he himself thought would keep the country safer? Seems a bit odd. Foreign policy and national security issues were kind of front and center during that campaign.

The article also delves into Rudy's switch to the GOP, which came in 1980. In the piece Rudy seems to suggest that this was driven partly by his discontent with Dems on foreign policy. But as the Standard article accurately points out, Rudy's switch to the GOP neatly coincided with his desire to get a political appointment from the newly-minted Reagan administration.

[Janett_Reno]

dude i must say, Rudy is an everyones man. Whatever the flavor of the week is this week, that is what Rudy is for. What is funny, is that i never thought i would see a conservative get behind Democrat that flip flops back and forth like this. Atleast Libberman will let you know where he stands but Rudy doesn't know what he is or where he is going.

One thing the Democrats must feel at ease with Rudy, is one week he might vote with the gop and the next week the Democrats because he want's to do what is popular. Different strokes for different folks i guess. So much being a conservative or liberal these days. Be like Rudy and be an it.

[Arne]

Never saw that one till moments ago..:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYE...eature=related