You probably heard this bombshell already: as mayor, Rudy Giuliani used taxpayer money to help fund trips to the Hamptons, where his now-wife and then-mistress Judith Nathan lived. Basically the mayor billed the cost of his security detail to "little-known city offices":
The billing practices, however, drew formal attention on Jan. 24, 2002, when Thompson, the city comptroller, wrote the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a confidential letter.
One of his auditors, he wrote, had stumbled upon the unexplained travel expenses during a routine audit of the Loft Board, a tiny branch of city government that regulates certain apartments.
Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People With Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.
The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.
That's right: Giuliani, an advocate of "fiscal restraint," used city taxpayer money earmarked for the poorest among us to help him carry on an extramarital affair in the ritzy Hamptons.
Kossak Hunter:
Fine, so Saint Rudy was having an affair. Not an unheard of concept. What on earth would make someone bill the expenses related to that secret affair to the city of New York? Did he think his penis was declared a city landmark? Did he think that his sexual exploits made the subways run on time? Was it somehow titillating for Rudy Giuliani to hide expenses for his sex romps to city agencies charged with helping the disabled? Did it make it more sexually satisfying for him to know that his Hamptons-based Republican affair was being paid for by agencies to help the indigent? Is this how Republicans make their sex "fun" -- to attach a monetary price to it, and then screw as many other people as possible in the process?
Or is this just a perfectly normal case of a crook being a crook, and doing what a crook does -- squeezing for every dime and dodge and cheat, just for the sake of the thing? Is Rudy simply so damn corrupt that to him, his now-indicted friend Bernard Kerik really did seem like a great fellow?
Meanwhile, like OJ Simpson, Rudy Giuliani has vowed not to rest until the real perpetrators of the accounting tricks are brought to justice.
Is this the end of Giuliani? Or just another "ho-hum" scandal for the press? |
