Madame Judi's Chariot

Rudy Giuliani is trying to call the story about his taxpayer-funded adultery a hit job. In that case, the hits just keep on coming.

In 2001, the last year of Rudy's mayoralty, the city gave Judi her own taxpayer-funded security detail, too -- even as it reduced the size of the security detail assigned to Rudy's soon-to-be-ex.

From the New York Post on June 4, 2001:

"The Post has learned that city detectives have once again been assigned to protect Mayor Giuliani's girlfriend, even as he has scaled back the size of his estranged wife's police detail.

Nathan and her pooch were seen yesterday being escorted to her Upper East Side apartment by one of the detectives now assigned to watch over her during the day when she's not at the mayor's side."

Turns out that the NYPD were a taxi service for the Mayor's mistress. All of these costs protecting a private citizen, the overtime and travel expenses, were billed to New York City taxpayers. This is exactly the kind of behavior that took down New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who was using state employees "as chauffeurs and aides to his wife." So we not only have extremely unethical behavior, it could be criminal, though Josh Marshall thinks Rudy will skate because Hevesi was nailed on a state law, not a city statute.

It's still unclear how much money we're talking about here, because the expenses are so buried and misallocated:

The comptroller found that Giuliani's office hid $143,867 worth of "non-local travel" expenses in random city agencies in 2000; they upped the slippery accounting in 2001, charging $435,215 in 2001. Given the charges for the Hamptons travel noted in the Politico piece, only a fraction of this was for the eleven trips.

In other words, Giuliani's office had something like a widespread policy of misallocation of which the trysts were just a part -- something that they'd also done for certain salaries, according to today's New York Times:

"The administration of Mr. Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said in 2002, several months after taking office, that the Giuliani administration had kept the budget for the mayor’s office artificially low by paying more than $5 million in salaries through other city agencies. The agencies to which Mr. Giuliani billed the travel expenses were outside the mayor’s office."

The Times adds that the NYPD typically picked up the bill for the mayor's security detail. But a Bloomberg aide tells the New York Daily News that it is common for the security detail to bill the mayor's office and then for the NYPD to reimburse it. However, "the aide could not confirm it was past practice to shuffle costs among an alphabet soup of agencies." There lies the rub.

What we have is the slow uncovering of a history of recklessness and lawlessness while in the Mayor's office, where loyalty was valued and rules were disregarded. I think that'll be of note to the voters.