Rudy And The Apple Tree

Rudy Giuliani by Nancy Ohanian

-by Granny Smith

While stereotypes often contain kernels of truth, as a whole they are dangerous generalizations that can be weaponized against individuals or groups, with the aim of inciting denigration, hate, anger and retribution.

Obviously, there are good and bad people in most groups, be it religious affiliation, nationality, political affiliation, race, gender, etc. Still, when a stereotype fits like a glove, it can be quite striking.

One common adage, “The apple does not fall far from the tree,” is often used to cast aspersions on a person’s parentage. The implication is that children wind up following in the footsteps of their parents. Some do, many do not.

Donald J. Trump, a racist who flaunts the law and enriches himself at the expense of everyone else, has certainly mind melded with his father, Fred Trump. And by virtue of his office, his power to run amok far outstrips that of his Dad. Ivanka and her brothers appear to be modeling their father, making Trump family greed, criminality and ethical dysfunction intergenerational.

Another obvious example of the apple/tree theory in Trump world is Jared Kushner, who also appears to be outdoing his father, Charles Kushner, in grand fashion. Charles is a convicted white collar criminal. All indications suggest that Jared is sprinting down the same path, leveraging his position in the Trump administration for his own enrichment.

Jared has cozied up to notoriously tyrannical and evil people around the world. MBS comes to mind. His associations with foreign governments, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, do not pass the smell test. Clearly, Jared is compromised and is a threat to our national security. He never should have been granted security clearance and only obtained it when Trump overrode all established channels and simply handed it to him. This issue is currently under investigation by the House. Who knows what Jared has been up to with his suspicious contacts and international jaunts? Will he eventually wind up in prison, just like his father? If so, he would surely outdo Charles in spades.

Given that Trump surrounds himself with sycophants who have a low bar for ethics, morality and criminality, does apple/tree theory apply to anyone else in his immediate orbit? The answer is YES. Rudy Giuliani.

I was taken aback by a recent Salon interview with David Kay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and an expert on Donald J. Trump.

Harold Angel Giuliani

During the interview, Johnston mentioned the little known fact that Rudy’s father, Harold Angel Giuliani, served time in prison. Wow. The Giulianis were associated with the mob. Several of Rudy’s cousins were involved in organized crime. Thus Rudy, like Donald and Jared, is currently on track to outdo his father.

From the interview:

Is Rudy Giuliani a true believer or is he just working for Trump in the shadows because it is a way to make money?

I believe that Rudy Giuliani is one of the great frauds of all time. Giuliani's father was a bandit who served time in Sing Sing prison. Giuliani surrounded himself with mobbed up people like Bernard Kerik, who he made first corrections commissioner, and then Police Commissioner. Of note: Giuliani did not try any of the mob cases [during his time as U.S. attorney in New York]. He just took credit for them. The convictions were won by career prosecutors who did an excellent job.

When he worked for the Reagan administration, Giuliani made it clear that he is a horrible racist as shown during the Haitian refugee crisis. Giuliani is an opportunist. He's certainly looking out for his own pocket and his own welfare. Giuliani now has this lucrative gig with Donald Trump. And Giuliani has made this claim that he's not being paid by Donald Trump. In fact, lawyers know lots of ways to get paid. It will not surprise to me one bit if Giuliani’s alleged associates in the Ukraine scandal, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, eventually reveal that Giuliani had some side extortion scheme to make money.

In July 2000, the release of 'Rudy!' An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani by Wayne Barrett revealed shocking details about the twisted tree from which Rudy has fallen. Given Rudy’s current shenanigans, his family background is intriguing, to say the least.

Here are a few excerpts from Michael Powell’s review of the book in the Washington Post, 'Rudy!' Shakes the Family Tree:

It seems Hizzoner Rudolph Giuliani, bane of the mob and scourge of street hoods, is himself the son of a stickup man and the nephew of a mobster.

The revelations, contained in Rudy!, a new "investigative biography" of New York's once-fearsome mayor, are another curious turn in a curious year for him. He has prostate cancer and a girlfriend and a wife who is just a little bit bitter. And, no, on second thought, he's not going to run for the Senate against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. So a public man's life becomes Shakespeare meets Freud as rendered by Mario Puzo.

Giuliani always has woven a moral hair shirt out of his life's work. As U.S. attorney and mayor, he took on the mobsters and beat back the predators. And always, he mocked anyone who gainsayed him. He was Sin City's Mr. Clean, out to restore New York to its technicolor 1950s heyday. It was a vision that he credited to his old man, the janitor and Brooklyn barkeep who instilled in him a reverence for working hard and keeping his nose clean.

Now, according to author Wayne Barrett, a longtime investigative reporter for the Village Voice, a rather different father emerges. It seems that the mayor's dad, Harold Giuliani, was a 5-foot-11, big-knuckled man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and made a living as "muscle." Which, in Brooklyn at that time, meant working as a debt collector for a loan-sharking operation. He swung a mean baseball bat and was a most skilled craftsman.

According to the book, Harold Giuliani "shoved people against walls, broke legs, smashed kneecaps, crunched noses. He gave nearby Kings County Hospital a lot of business. 'People in the neighborhood were terrified of him,' said a frequent customer at Vincents," the Giuliani bar.

Giuliani's father enjoyed signing his love letters to his future wife "Your Savage."

Giuliani has refused to comment on the book, although there's no indication that he contests the findings. It's not known if he was aware of his father's criminal past. He did say Tuesday that his father, who died in 1981, "was the finest man I ever knew... the most generous and kindest and most charitable man I ever knew."

In 1934, his father took a step farther over the line, according to the book. With an accomplice, he grabbed a milkman in the stairwell of an apartment building on East 96th Street in Manhattan (seven blocks from Gracie Mansion, where the mayor now lives) and stuck a gun to his stomach. The two men forced the milkman to drop his pants and began to bind his feet when a police officer came running in.

Giuliani was sentenced to two to five years at Sing Sing prison in New York.

Harold Giuliani lied about his name, age, address and occupation when he was arrested, which perhaps explains why his arrest and conviction went unnoticed by reporters and political opponents during the past two decades of Mayor Giuliani's very public life.

"Twenty-five years in public life with everyone out to get him, and they didn't know his father was a stickup man?" says Mitchell Moss of New York University's Taub Urban Research Center. "Who says you can't keep a secret?" When Harold Giuliani arrived at Sing Sing, he received a psychiatric examination. Reading it today--the document is posted on the Web site TheSmokingGun.com--is like reading a cross-generational X-ray. Giuliani the father bears more than a passing temperamental similarity to Giuliani the son.

"He is a personality deviate of the aggressive egocentric type," the 1934 report reads. "This aggressivity is pathological in nature and has shown itself from time to time even as far back as his childhood. He is egocentric to an extent where he has failed to consider the feelings and rights of others."

As late as 1962, when Rudolph Giuliani was in college, his father engaged in a shootout with a Mafia thug, Barrett's book claims.

About all of this, the mayor will say but one thing: His father's past died with him.

An August 2000 article in the New York Times by Andy Newman, Giuliani Acknowledges Knowing Of His Father’s Criminal Activity, described an interview with Giuliani, which addressed his father’s crimes and Rudy’s knowledge of them. Here are some excerpts:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani acknowledged for the first time last night, in a television interview, that he had known about his father's criminal activity, which was revealed in a book published last month. The mayor said his father's mistakes had influenced him to go into law enforcement.

"Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected," Mr. Giuliani said of the accounts in the book, Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Wayne Barrett.

"Some of it," the mayor said, "did come as a shock."

Until yesterday, Mr. Giuliani, a former United States attorney, had refused to answer recent questions about his father, other than to defend him as scrupulously honest and the "finest man" he had ever known.

But last night, in an interview on New York Close-Up on NY1 with Sam Roberts, the program's host and deputy editor of the Week in Review section of the New York Times, the mayor opened up a little.

He refused, however, to say just what he knew and when he knew it. "Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected, some of it I absolutely didn't know, and when I write my book, I'll explain which is which," he said with a chuckle.

Mayor Giuliani, who claims not to have read the book, said that his father was "compulsive about being honest," perhaps to compensate for his past deeds.

"He would tell me, 'Never take anybody else's money, make sure you always pay for things, make sure that you don't make a mistake when you fill out a form, make sure it's accurate,'" the mayor said. "I've driven myself crazy over this all my life. And when any mistake has been made it really bothers me, and I realize more than I did as I was growing up why my father was doing that. I mean, he wanted to make sure that I didn't make the same mistakes that he believed he had made."

When asked if his father's criminal past had influenced him to go into law enforcement, Mr. Giuliani replied, "I'm sure it did."

Mr. Barrett's book also said that several of the mayor's cousins were involved in organized crime, and the mayor said that his parents' decision to move to Long Island was in part an attempt to get him away from an unsavory environment.

"I think the decision that my father and mother made, essentially, was to take me out of Brooklyn, where they thought I could get into trouble," he said, "and keep me away from some of the things that I guess my father was worried about."

There are several points to be made here. One, it seems the family’s move from Brooklyn to Long Island, away from “an unsavory environment,” did not in the end save Rudy from associating with criminals and engaging in potentially criminal enterprises. Two, Giuliani unwisely ignored his father’s advice about taking anyone else’s money-- think $500,000 from Lev and Igor’s company, Fraud Guarantee. And who knows what other financial shenanigans and shakedowns he may be involved with. Three, although Harold did not want Rudy to repeat his mistakes, he appears to be making whoppers of his own on the world stage.

Rudy, once a respected district attorney for the Southern District of New York, has gone to the dark side. He is the latest of Trump’s bad apples to be in the line of fire. Ironically, Rudy is currently under investigation by the very own federal office he once headed.

How and why did Rudy veer onto a road of criminality? Perhaps apple/tree theory explains some of this. Surely his father would be extremely disappointed in him. It now looks like Rudy will be indicted. If he eventually finds himself in prison, he would likely serve far longer time than Harold. It would be doubly ironic if Rudy wound up in Sing Sing.