Wampum

My friend Susie points us to a NYTimes article on the rise and fall of Bernie Kerik, a close friend and former business partner of purported Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani. It's not pretty, for either Kerik or Rudy:

Mr. Giuliani defended Mr. Kerik, a friend and business partner, whom he had recommended to the Bush administration. But he also tried to shield himself from accusations that he had ignored Mr. Kerik's failings.

"I was not informed of it," Mr. Giuliani said then, when asked if he had been warned about Mr. Kerik's relationship with Interstate before appointing him to the police post in 2000.

Mr. Giuliani amended that statement last year in testimony to a state grand jury. He acknowledged that the city investigations commissioner, Edward J. Kuriansky, had told him that he had been briefed at least once. The former mayor said, though, that neither he nor any of his aides could recall being briefed about Mr. Kerik's involvement with the company.

But a review of Mr. Kuriansky's diaries, and investigators' notes from a 2004 interview with him, now indicate that such a session indeed took place. What is more, Mr. Kuriansky also recalled briefing one of Mr. Giuliani's closest aides, Dennison Young Jr., about Mr. Kerik's entanglements with the company just days before the police appointment, according to the diaries he compiled at the time and his later recollection to the investigators.

The additional evidence raises questions not only about the precision of Mr. Giuliani's recollection, but also about how a man who proclaims his ability to pick leaders came to overlook a jumble of disturbing information about Mr. Kerik, even as he pushed him for two crucial government positions.

But it's important to note that Kerik was not the only friend who Giuliani has promoted to the Bush Administration. First, there was current Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff:

Giuliani hired Chertoff as an assistant in the 1980s, and Chertoff prosecuted high profile organized crime cases. The first President Bush named Chertoff U.S. attorney for New Jersey, and President Clinton retained him.

Giuliani pushed for Chertoff to be nominated as the new Attorney General. However, when vocal opposition arose in the Senate, Giuliani was fortunate to get a second fan into the nomination seat, Michael Mukasey. From Wikipedia:

Mukasey's son, Marc L. Mukasey, leads the white-collar criminal defense practice in the New York office of Bracewell & Giuliani. The Mukaseys have a professional relationship with Rudy Giuliani; Mukasey and son are also justice advisers to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Mukasey swore in Mayor-elect Giuliani in 1994 and 1998.

Most interesting, however, is Giuliani's post-mayoral connection with the bankrollers of the Bush crime family. I'll tackle that in part two (Eric is at ICANN in LA for a week, and my time blogging has been thus extremely curtailed.)