I’ve told this story before but it’s really apropos, so I’ll tell it now again.
Back in 1986 or so I flew down to D.C. for a meeting near Washington Cathedral. So I came out of National Airport, rented a car, drove across the Potomac, right turn on M Street, left on Wisconsin and stopped for a light on the corner of N Street, or maybe P Street, I don’t remember which.
What I do remember is that it was raining, and as I waited for the light to change an old guy wearing a raincoat and a hat shuffled by in front of my car, holding a quart of milk in one hand and the leash of a little dog in the other.
“Holy shit!” I said to myself, loud enough to be heard outside the car but thankfully, all the windows were closed. “That’s John Mitchell. That’s really him!”
And that’s exactly whom it was – the man who twelve years earlier had been the most powerful lawman in the entire United States, the guy who ran Nixon’s 1972 re-lection campaign, the guy who had been one of the most influential and important personality in a city loaded with influential and important personalities was now trudging past my car after going to the local deli to buy some milk and take some dog for a walk.
It turned out that Mitchell was walking back to the Georgetown residence of some little old lady who was giving him free room and board in exchange for running errands to the deli, picking up the laundry and walking her dog. He had served 19 months in a federal lockup, was flat broke, and if it hadn’t been for the graciousness of this dear woman, he might have been sleeping in Lafayette Park.
I recalled this memory when my sister sent me a listing of Rudy Giuliani’s New York City apartment which is now for sale with an asking price of $6.5 million bucks. It’s a 10th-floor apartment in a ‘good’ building on a ‘good’ street, I don’t know if the asking price includes the autographed uniform of Joe DiMaggio which hangs over the fireplace in the room pictured above.
I don’t know where Giuliani is living these days, but there’s a pretty good chance that at some point not far in the future, he’ll be a temporary resident at a Federal property in Otisville, NY or Butner, NC or maybe Danbury, CT – the good news is that he’ll be occupying space at one of those facilities rent free.
On the other hand, maybe Rudy will find himself a nice, one-bedroom apartment on the second floor above a Chinese take-out in Flushing or Jamaica, or better yet, maybe he’ll find a walk-up in East Flatbush, the neighborhood where he grew up.
Rudy’s father claimed to be a plumber, but he did four years ‘away at college’ for beating up some poor bastard who hadn’t made his payoff to the local Mafia loan association where Harold Giuliani worked. This was the old man’s only real employment, so it’s hardly any surprise that his son knew how to go after the heads of those five Mafia families when he became a federal attorney in 1981.
Everyone makes a big deal about how Trump helped Rudy overcome his depression after he got wiped out in the 2008 GOP Presidential primary campaign. But what is often not mentioned is that he lost the Florida primary when The Failing New York Times ran a report on how he stole money from the city budget by flying his then-girlfriend, Judy Nathan, out to the Hamptons for weekend f*ck-me’s on a police chopper but forgot to reimburse the city for the cost of her flights.
In other words, Trump moved Rudy into his circle of friends and associates because Trump feels most comfortable with guys who try to pull off a big scam. Which is exactly what this whole ‘election fraud’ nonsense is all about – just another Giuliani scam.
What I love is how the media is saying that Trump won’t help Rudy pay his legal bills because, after all, none of those election fraud cases made it through the courts.
I can see it now. I’ll be sitting in my car on a rainy day at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and 111th Street in Richmond Hill, Queens, and some old guy will shuffle by pulling one of those shopping carts half filled with soda cans that he’s taking to the recycling center next to the local Food Fair supermarket and – holy shit! – it’s Rudy.
And if I’m really lucky, I’ll notice there’s another old guy with the remnants of an orange do who will come running alongside Rudy to dump a few more empty cans he just picked up down the block.
It could happen – you know? America’s a place where anything’s possible, not just up but down.
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