The turning point that ultimately forced Giuliani to withdraw was the death at the hands of the police of a 26-year-old black man, Patrick Dorismond:
Cracking under the pressure of facing a rival with a star quality that outshines even his own, Rudy revealed his dark side to everyone in March. Perhaps the bubble of euphoria by which New York was portrayed as the safe and civilized Millennial City was just waiting to burst anyway. How many times can police shoot unarmed men of color before a crisis boils over?The article gives some insight into Giuliani's psyche:
When the news reported on March 17 the third killing of a defenseless black man in 13 months, a collective shudder went through the city. Media reports were scanty the first morning after. Patrick Dorismond, a 26-year-old security officer of Haitian origin, was off-duty and hailing a cab near Madison Square Garden when approached at random by a plainclothes officer asking to buy drugs. Police could not confirm a witness’s report that a backup plainclothes cop had hit the victim with his service revolver. The gun went off and killed Dorismond.
Within hours of the shooting, Giuliani authorized opening sealed police records on the dead man, both juvenile and adult records, and began pumping out an incriminating picture of the victim. Rather than expressing sympathy to the family and two children of the slain man, the mayor said the dead man had a “propensity to violence.” Only two and a half days after the shooting, the mayor put on his prosecutor face for a TV interview on “Fox News Sunday” and all but “convicted” Patrick Dorismond of “robbery, attempted robbery, possession of a gun . . . convictions and arrests, both.”
In fact, the man had only two convictions, both for disorderly conduct, and had paid small fines. A former high official in the Giuliani Police Department almost choked on his coffee when he saw the mayor on TV that Sunday. “I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Why would he intentionally escalate it? I think he’s losing it. Trust me, this is more than defending the police. I hear he’s looking for a reason to get out of the Senate race. He can’t stand the possibility of being beaten by a Clinton.”
As a broader picture emerged, it became clear that Giuliani had authorized a new anti-narcotics program, Operation Condor. The lure of overtime was drawing police into the street on their days off to hunt down low-level drug offenders, ostensibly to keep the mayor’s crime-fighting record intact. Despite the $24 million program, homicides were up this year by 11 percent—embarrassing for a candidate running on his record as a crime fighter. Condor cops are expected to produce collars. The three Hispanic officers who stalked Dorismond, with Condor cops in their backup team, were nearing the end of their shift and wanted to go for one more collar. “The first lesson they get as undercovers is: You’re not a cop, so you can’t react like a cop,” says a former top police official familiar with their training. “When the confrontation starts, you get your ass out of there. Walk away. Don’t engage. You’re not a cop.”
Tragically, the opposite happened when undercover detective Anderson Moran, scruffily dressed, asked Dorismond if he had any “krill” (street argot for crack cocaine). Dorismond reacted predictably: “Get outta my face.” Moran persisted in asking where he could score. Tempers flared. Moran summoned his “ghosts,” two plainclothes police. In less than 15 seconds many punches were thrown, somebody yelled “Gun!,” and, Detective Anthony Vasquez would later claim, his gun went off accidentally. Dorismond took a bullet to the chest, and before he could fall, dead, Moran delivered two more punches.
“Guns do not go off accidentally,” says the former high police official. “Somebody has to pull the trigger. . . . It’s an unintentional discharge, not accidental. Here’s the issue. Whether it’s subliminal or hidden in the deep recesses of our mind, we approach black men differently. To deny that is doing a disservice.” Giuliani’s first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, says, “One of my great frustrations with the mayor is that he did not recognize that he could have used the police success to bridge the racial divide in New York City. . . . Rudy was insensitive to the minority community.” Giuliani didn’t appreciate Bratton’s celebrity or his social-work approach and forced his resignation after just two years.
“Our big joke about Rudy was he never made it to school with his lunch money,” says a former police official.
A current narcotics commander who has spent a long time in a minority community was among many police officials and cops who were upset by Giuliani’s handling of the Dorismond tragedy. “The mayor is off base completely,” he told me over his cell phone. “I’m going to a meeting in the madhouse [N.Y.P.D. headquarters] right now. They’ve lost their confidence. There is no leader there.” I asked the commander if Giuliani was now the police commissioner.
“Without question,” he said. “Without question.”
Hillary Clinton once told me, “I don’t do spontaneity.” Cautious and guarded, she is not quick to respond to the unexpected, and, at worst, as with Mrs. Arafat, she freezes. But the mayor’s demonization of a dead man and, by association, incrimination of a whole minority community inflamed her sense of injustice.
On the fifth night after the killing they were waiting for Hillary in Harlem. Eight hundred people sitting as still as gravestones in the Bethel A.M.E. Church, some cooling themselves with paper fans, they waited an hour for the First Lady to come and speak to their pain. As she walked down the aisle, a choir burst into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Hillary Clinton was heralded with:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . .
In a trembly rasp, Congressman Charles Rangel said, “I feel in this church tonight the spirit of the 60s and the civil-rights movement.” He cloaked Hillary in the mantle of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of the bus, he said, was an unexpected inspiration. “Nor did we in New York expect it would be Hillary Clinton who would come to our city to help us regain our dignity as a great metropolis.” As Hillary stepped forward, 800 people got to their feet and slapped their hands and everyone swayed. She did not let them down.
“New York has a real problem, and we all know it—all of us, it seems, except the mayor of this city.” Cheers of relief. She slammed Giuliani for rushing to judgment instead of waiting for the facts. “At just the moment when a real leader would have reached out to heal the wounds, he has chosen divisiveness.” But she was careful to withhold condemnation of the police.
In fact, that inspired evening wasn’t anything like the 60s. People were reflective, resolute, and empowered by what they heard. Most of them were already registered to vote, and they took home forms to register friends and family members. Ed Koch made a prediction to me: “Blacks and Hispanics are going to come out in this election like they’ve never come out before, because they hate Giuliani with a passion.”
By the beginning of April, Hillary had pulled ahead of Rudy in the polls for the first time in months—by up to 10 points. Rudy had lost among all his core groups: fellow Catholics, city residents, suburbanites, even among white men. His striking loss of support was summed up by analysts in one word: Dorismond. But to those who know him best, it may not have been the racial crisis that provoked Giuliani’s eccentric behavior but, rather, Giuliani’s eccentric behavior that provoked the crisis.
Curiously, Giuliani went straight for Hillary’s psyche in his counterattack: she was projecting. “There’s a process called projection in psychology,” the mayor explained at a City Hall news briefing. “It means accusing someone of what you’re doing. That is precisely what Mrs. Clinton is doing.” When he threw around other psychoanalytic terms such as “blocking” and “the unconscious,” his press secretary, Sunny Mindel, explained that the mayor reads a lot of Freud.
Both Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer and Congressman Rangel accused the mayor of being “in deep denial,” as his attempts to demonize the victim while lionizing the police became more frenzied by the day. The city comptroller, Democrat Alan Hevesi, excoriated the mayor for releasing the sealed records of Patrick Dorismond. “It was not only illegal, it was despicable, it was inhuman.”
Even when Hillary is pressed to trumpet her maternal love, an adviser said, “she will never exploit Chelsea.”
“This isn’t the mayor’s strong suit—psychological stability,” I was told by Philadelphia police commissioner John Timoney, who lost his number-two job in the N.Y.P.D. when Giuliani forced out Bill Bratton. “When you marry yourself to the Police Department, as a politician, I guarantee you’re going to get burnt,” says Timoney. “Things go wrong all the time. The problem is, he has invested so much of his personality and persona in the Police Department that to save himself he has to come to their defense—even when they don’t want him to.”
The mayor lashed out at “demagogues”; he tried to wrap Al Sharpton, protégé of Jesse Jackson, around Hillary’s neck; and, finally, he blamed the press. I was at a City Hall press conference 12 days after the Dorismond shooting, when Giuliani was still obsessed with justifying his own conduct. The mayor was asked if he had created a “toxic atmosphere” in the city by releasing Dorismond’s sealed records and autopsy information. He sneered.
Mayor: It’s amazing. It’s amazing how you all go one way. It’s amazing how you do not want the public to know the facts that might suggest that the officers might have acted properly. . . .
Q: How do you respond to those who say you are the lawless one, you are out of control? . . .
Mayor: Bogus. Let’s move on.
Q: Are you mentally ill?
Mayor: What was that? [Rudy looks down at the reporter, Rafael Martínez Alequín, one of his chief goads.]
Martínez Alequín: Are you mentally ill?
Mayor: [Sarcastically] Yes, I am.
Reporters: Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor . . .
Finally, I got a chance to ask my question:
One of your attributes as U.S. attorney was that you gave a man the benefit of the doubt. First he was a human being, second he was a criminal. Why, in the case of Patrick Dorismond, in the first 72 hours, even though he went to your high school under the guidance of the Christian Brothers, why would you first call him a criminal? Why did you rush to judgment?
Mayor: I didn’t. I laid out the facts that were being ignored by the press, which is what [they are] doing now, which is create a vacuum, and put the blame on the police officers. I haven’t reached a verdict, and I have no right to do so. Only a grand jury can do so. [He glares down at me with prosecutorial wrath.] You create a big lie, and ultimately a grand jury comes to the conclusion that the police officers acted correctly, but the public has been emotionally led that the police officers have done something wrong.
His black eyes hooded by a bulging frontal lobe, one of the brightest of all mayors in the history of New York appeared bent on self-destruction.
....
Giuliani was first elected mayor by only 2 percent, defeating David Dinkins in 1993. His insecurities were soon apparent. He ordered the portraits of both immediate predecessors, Dinkins and Koch, moved out of the Blue Room, where press conferences are held at City Hall. By 1998, although his power had increased exponentially, Giuliani barricaded himself behind a deformity of concrete and steel grates, placing City Hall essentially off-limits to the public he serves. It took a federal judge to rule unconstitutional the mayor’s restrictions on rallies there.
Koch, who was originally a booster of the mayor’s, told me, “Giuliani cannot help himself. He’s like a scorpion. Why does a scorpion sting? It’s the nature of scorpions. Why does Giuliani do these bizarre things? Because it’s his nature.”
A former senior aide to Mayor Koch laments, “Giuliani could have been great, as Nixon could have been great, but their insecurities were too great. Giuliani is paranoid. Striking out at everybody, believing that people are trying to do him in or undermining him, is a sign of paranoia.”
One person who was close to the Giuliani administration over the years and who now works as a consultant describes the mayor as “a nightmare of a man. One day he could be as sweet and charming as you’d ever want. Then all of a sudden—it is bizarre, like watching a robin turn into a hawk. I’ve seen it happen too many times. That was why I got out of there. I had a constant fear of danger. Of danger. . . . People close to him say he is not well. Mentally.” How close? “As close as you can get.”
Giuliani was first elected mayor by only 2 percent, defeating David Dinkins in 1993. His insecurities were soon apparent. He ordered the portraits of both immediate predecessors, Dinkins and Koch, moved out of the Blue Room, where press conferences are held at City Hall. By 1998, although his power had increased exponentially, Giuliani barricaded himself behind a deformity of concrete and steel grates, placing City Hall essentially off-limits to the public he serves. It took a federal judge to rule unconstitutional the mayor’s restrictions on rallies there.The article examines Hillary's psychological motivation as well; it's a very interesting read.
Koch, who was originally a booster of the mayor’s, told me, “Giuliani cannot help himself. He’s like a scorpion. Why does a scorpion sting? It’s the nature of scorpions. Why does Giuliani do these bizarre things? Because it’s his nature.”
A former senior aide to Mayor Koch laments, “Giuliani could have been great, as Nixon could have been great, but their insecurities were too great. Giuliani is paranoid. Striking out at everybody, believing that people are trying to do him in or undermining him, is a sign of paranoia.”
One person who was close to the Giuliani administration over the years and who now works as a consultant describes the mayor as “a nightmare of a man. One day he could be as sweet and charming as you’d ever want. Then all of a sudden—it is bizarre, like watching a robin turn into a hawk. I’ve seen it happen too many times. That was why I got out of there. I had a constant fear of danger. Of danger. . . . People close to him say he is not well. Mentally.” How close? “As close as you can get.”
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