Will McCollum Condone or Condemn Cronyism With Campaign Cash At Stake?

Despite the scandals of cronyism-at-all-cost that some critics would say cost Rudy Giuliani the Republican Presidential nomination in 2007 and early 2008, the Florida GOP gubernatorial hopeful and long-time Giuliani ally Bill McCollum made the former Presidential hopeful star of his campaign, Saturday in Orlando.

"Rudy Giuliani became the poster-boy for political cronyism during the Bernard Kerick scandal, and despite recent revelations of the level of corruption, Bill McCollum is still using his connections with Giuliani to raise money for his campaign," Florida Democratic Party Spokesman Eric Jotkoff said. "Does Bill McCollum condone or condemn the kind of political cronyism Giuliani's promotion of Kerick embodied?"

Newly Released Legal Papers Showed "Hints Of The Lumps" That Giuliani's Reputation Would Have Taken In The Kerik Trial. Last month, The Village Voice reported that "buried in court legal papers that were not released until weeks after Kerik's guilty plea [in November 2009] are some strong hints of the lumps that the reputation of New York's legendary former chief executive might have taken had the Kerik case gone to trial."

* Village Voice: Giuliani "Has Always Been Fuzzy About His Own Knowledge Of Kerik's Ties." "Giuliani, who started out as a rackets-busting prosecutor, has always been fuzzy about his own knowledge of Kerik's ties to Interstate Industrial Corp. The contractors were desperately trying to convince city regulators that their business dealings with organized-crime figures were incidental, and that they should not be denied lucrative city contracts worth some $30 million. The city's concerns had been sparked after Interstate bought a large waste-transfer station on Staten Island from a Gambino crime family soldier named Edward 'Cousin Eddie' Garafola, and then kept the gangster's wife and sons on the payroll as mob-owned trucks rolled through the gates. Kerik helped contractors Frank and Peter DiTommaso relay their side of the story to city officials. The grateful builders in turn secretly funded a quarter-million-dollar renovation of Kerik's new Bronx apartment."

* Kerik's Law Breaking Happened "Even As Giuliani Was Promoting" Kerik For Police Commissioner Job. "All of this happened even as Giuliani was promoting his former driver and bodyguard from head of the city's Corrections Department to police commissioner. When Kerik's Homeland Security nomination blew up in a tempest of scandal in 2004, the ex-mayor insisted that he knew nothing about his top cop ever going to bat for the mob-tainted contractors. But back in 2007, the Times' William Rashbaum got hold of a transcript of Giuliani's April 2006 testimony before a Bronx grand jury that was the first to probe the episode. Giuliani, the transcript showed, admitted that he was briefed more than once by his own top investigations chief-but then forgot all about it. It took a lot of forgetting."

* Prosecutors Were Prepared To Introduce Never Released Notes That Kerik Typed Out To The Commissioner Who Briefed Giuliani About The Related Agency Activities. Among the exhibits that prosecutors were prepared to introduce as evidence in the federal case were three pages of never-released notes that Kerik typed out in March 2000 regarding his involvement with Interstate. The memo-in detective-style jargon of initials and free-form punctuation-was written, prosecutors explained, for then city investigations commissioner Edward Kuriansky, who was regularly briefing Giuliani about his agency's activities." (The Village Voice, 01/19/10)