Giuliani's Inner Circle Defined By Loyalty

Washington Post: GOP Hopeful's Campaign Often Steered By Group Of Longtime Confidantes

(Washingtonpost.com)  This story was written by Lois Romano.

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Tony Carbonetti's persona swallows a room, not unlike the man he has worked for his entire adult life.

He is Rudy Giuliani's closest adviser, the archetypal alter ego -- a stocky, cards-on-the-table New Yorker who conveys absolute authority in his main area of expertise: Rudy.

"Carbo," as his friends call him, is not officially running the presidential campaign. But it is important to know that he hired those who do. And he talks to them or the candidate a dozen times a day from his New York office at Giuliani Partners. He is the affable final buffer between an exacting, edgy politician and the world. He knows what the candidate wants to eat, when he sleeps (rarely) and what will set him off like a Fourth of July rocket. And he can take the heat. It was Carbonetti who, as the New York mayor's chief of staff, famously relieved Giuliani's then-wife Donna Hanover of her duties as the city's first lady during the public spectacle of Giuliani's extramarital affair.

"I know his likes, his dislikes and his comfort levels," says Carbonetti in a rare interview. "I save [the campaign] a lot of time. When they say, 'We want Rudy to do this,' I can say, 'He is not doing it.' "

In the Giuliani Kingdom, Carbonetti, 38, may be the key player, but it is a monarchy fortified by numerous other devoted courtiers and confidants who share one thing in common: intense loyalty, dating back years, even before Giuliani served as mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001.

They are barely known outside of New York and are, like Carbonetti, not on the campaign's payroll. But they have the candidate's ear and have been pressed into service as surrogates, mega-fundraisers and advisers. They are neither ideologues nor policy wonks, but part of an eclectic tableau of Giuliani's life and career.

They include high school buddies such as tax lawyer Peter Powers; ex-federal prosecutors from Giuliani's time as U.S. attorney, such as Randy Mastro and Dennison Young, who moved with him to City Hall; attorney John H. Gross, a young prosecutor with Giuliani in the '70s who has been the little-known treasurer of every one of his campaigns; and Giuliani's onetime labor negotiator, Randy Levine, now president of the Yankees.

Some held powerful jobs in city government and were mocked in New York political circles as the "YesRudys." They couldn't care less.

Their connection to him is anchored in the premise that mutual loyalty and longtime ties trump all else. Giuliani has performed their weddings and been the first to greet their babies at the hospital. They stood in for him at funerals in the horrific days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the former New York mayor's best-selling memoir "Leadership," he devotes an entire 24-page chapter to the topic of loyalty. It is called "The Vital Virtue."

"He wants people around him he can trust. It really matters to him," says Frank Luntz, the pollster on Giuliani's mayoral races.

Admirers offer up his loyalty as a sign of character; his relationships, they say, are genuine, not simply expedient. But detractors are more likely to say it is blatant cronyism that has led Giuliani into dangerous waters -- most painfully through his association with Bernard Kerik.

It was Kerik whom Giuliani elevated from his personal driver to New York police commissioner. Then Giuliani made him a partner in his consulting firm. And in 2004 Giuliani recommended Kerik to President Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security -- before Kerik's ties to a company with suspected links to organized crime were revealed in the press. Last week, he was indicted on 16 counts of corruption, mail and tax fraud.

It's the same kind of fidelity that drove Giuliani to employ his high school friend, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, as an analyst at Giuliani Partners, despite allegations that the Catholic priest was involved in the church's sexual abuse scandal. (Placa denied the charges and was never charged with a crime.) Placa's ties go deep: He helped get Giuliani's first marriage annulled, performed the services at the second marriage, to Donna Hanover, and baptized his children.

It's a philosophy of allegiance quite familiar to Italian Americans of Giuliani's generation, deeply rooted in his family upbringing in New York, where immigrants like his own grandparents built tight, insular communities -- both personal and professional -- and stuck close in the face of ethnic discrimination.

"Many of these people around him may be skilled professionals, but they're also fanatically loyal," says Democrat Mark Green, who as New York City public advocate tangled with the Giuliani administration regularly.

"They would throw themselves under a bus if that's what it took. And that's what it took to stay prominent in Rudy's circle."

Extending the Family

Everyone will tell you that Giuliani's comfort is with the old extended family. But he knew he had to bring in and test a few new cousins if he wanted to expand the kingdom.

Over a guys' dinner last year at New York's fanciest private cigar club, the Grand Havana Room, Giuliani first asked Pat Oxford to help him become president.

"We had been playing footsie, but we never had a direct conversation," says Oxford.

The men have been law partners since 2005, when Oxford brought in the former mayor to run the newly created Manhattan office of Bracewell & Patterson, a 400-lawyer Texas powerhouse. The firm, which paid Giuliani and his business a reported $10 million for his name and skills, is now called Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.

But Oxford would bring a lot more than just financial value to Giuliani as he assembled a presidential campaign. A conservative Republican with deep national political connections, Oxford had been a fundraising "Pioneer" for President Bush, raising at least $100,000, and had chaired two of Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate races in Texas.

Oxford liked Giuliani, but he was looking for assurances on a key issue on which he and Giuliani differ: abortion. "I wanted to understand how he felt about life issues," says Oxford, who is opposed to abortion. "He told me he was committed to reducing abortions."

Giuliani, who supports abortion rights, also told Oxford that he had an issue with "criminalizing abortion," Oxford recalls. "Putting young women and young doctors in jail would not be a positive thing for the United States."

Oxford concluded that Giuliani was "wrestling with these issues and his heart was in the right place." He signed on as campaign chairman and came to represent what political junkies have long referred to as the "grown-up" of the operation.

"I think the last campaign he worked on was McKinley's reelection," jokes Carbonetti.

Together with campaign manager Mike DuHaime, a 34-year-old GOP comer hired by Carbonetti, the three put together an operation considered disciplined and organized -- and one in which the old friends and insiders had a seat at the table. Mastro is a regular at weekly campaign meetings as a legal adviser; Joe Lhota, a cable executive who was New York City's budget director, has been tasked with talking to reporters about Giuliani's record as mayor; Rudy Washington, a former deputy mayor who suffers from respiratory ailments resulting from the time he spent at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, is chairman of the New York City campaign.

Another close friend, Ted Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general who's known Giuliani since their days in the Reagan administration, chairs the campaign's justice advisory committee.

In his book, Giuliani wrote that the only time he cried on Sept. 11 was when he realized from a reporter's question that Olson's wife, Barbara, a well-known Republican pundit, had been on one of the hijacked planes. Olson said in an interview that he supports Giuliani in part because of the former mayor's decisive handling of 9/11 and its aftermath.