| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Nima" |
| Date: |
11 Jun 2007 08:04:00 AM |
| Object: |
The Criminal Career of Rudy Giuliani |
The Criminal Career of Rudy Giuliani
by Paul Craig Roberts
Republican magazines have begun their pimp operations for the GOP’s 2008
presidential candidates.
In a recent issue of National Review, Jennifer Rubin, described as "a
freelance writer in Washington, D.C.," pumps up Rudolph Giuliani as
"America’s mayor" and "America’s prosecutor."
Giuliani is a media creation. Giuliani was unknown until in search of
name recognition he staged a stormtrooper assault on the financial firm
Princeton/Newport involving fifty federal marshals outfitted with
automatic weapons and bulletproof vests. On another occasion he had two
New York investment bankers hauled off their trading floor in handcuffs.
Giuliani’s victims had done nothing and were exonerated. But Giuliani’s
media stunts served to turn public sentiment against white-collar
defendants.
Giuliani once bragged that by giving negative treatment to his targets,
"the media does the job for me." Giuliani certainly had no difficulty
manipulating Wall Street Journal reporters James B. Stewart, Daniel
Hertzberg and Laurie Cohen or The Predators’ Ballauthor Connie Bruck.
Milken, who had done nothing except make a lot of money by proving Wall
Street wrong about non-investment grade bonds, was branded the "Cosa
Nostra of the securities world."
Milken’s "junk bonds" financed such household names as CNN, Barnes &
Noble, Stone Container Corporation, Time-Warner, Safeway, and Mattel.
Milken provided capital to companies with promising futures that lacked
investment-grade credit rankings. Milken operated out of Los Angeles,
not Wall Street. His earnings and those of his upstart firm, Drexel
Burnham Lambert, aroused envy and hatred among the Wall Street hot
shots. Milken failed to use his money to purchase political protection
in Washington. Instead, he gave his money to organizations that help
poor black children.
Milken was set up perfectly for an ambitious and unscrupulous prosecutor
like Giuliani.
Giuliani leaked to his media pimps that a 98-count indictment was coming
down against Milken. As Milken had done nothing and Giuliani had no case
against him, Giuliani’s strategy was to coerce Milken into a plea
bargain. When Milken failed to send his attorneys to work out a plea
arrangement, Giuliani used Laurie Cohen to report eighteen times in the
Wall Street Journal that Milken would imminently face an expanded
superseding indictment of between 160 and 300 counts.
To increase the pressure on Milken, prosecutors threatened to indict
Milken’s younger brother, Lowell, unless Milken made a plea deal. US
Attorney General ***** Thornburgh quipped to his deputies: "A brother for
a brother." Afterwards, Giuliani’s assistant US attorney, John Carroll,
told Seton Hall Law School students in April 1992 that Lowell Milken was
a "sort of ready chip in the negotiations." Giuliani even went so far as
to send FBI agents to hound Milken’s 92-year old grandfather.
Milken’s attorneys concluded that Giuliani, lacking any case, was far
out on a limb and desperate for a face-saving plea. They worked out a
plea to six minor technical offenses that had never carried any prison
time. But Giuliani was determined to have his victim, and Milken was
double-crossed by sentencing judge, Kimba "Bimbo" Wood, and spent two
years of his life in prison.
Giuliani’s assistant US attorney John Carroll later bragged to Seton
Hall Law students that in the Milken case "we’re guilty of criminalizing
technical offenses. . . . Many of the prosecution theories we used were
novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been
charged as crimes before. . . . We’re looking to find the next areas of
conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal
conduct is."
It is a damning indication of the collapse of American law that an
assistant US attorney can be well received when he brags to law school
students that federal prosecutors frame Americans with novel
interpretations that create ex post facto law and violate mens rea – no
crime without intent – the foundation of the Anglo-American legal system.
In his book, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His
Financial Revolution, University of Chicago law professor and dean
Daniel Fischel proves Milken’s innocence. But when prosecutors are
corrupt, innocence is no protection.
Giuliani’s crimes were not limited to Milken and Princeton/Newport.
After investigating, I concluded that Giuliani framed Leona Helmsley
with the suborned perjury of one of Helmsley’s accountants, whose own
infraction in helping to defraud the Miller Brewing Company was dropped
in exchange for false witness against Helmsley.
I wrote about Helmsley’s frame-up in National Review, and my story was
picked up by one of the TV shows of the era. Both Alan Dershowitz and
Robert Bork share my conviction that Helmsley was framed with suborned
perjury.
Today National Review is a Giuliani partisan, as is the editorial page
of the Wall Street Journal. During Giuliani’s "white-collar crime
heyday," the Wall Street Journal editorial page was busy exposing
Giuliani’s duplicity and misuse of the media to create cases against
innocent targets.
Giuliani rode his prosecutions of the rich to the NYC mayoralty, just as
he rode 9/11 to become a GOP presidential candidate. Giuliani’s career
never served justice; it served his personal ambition, his ego. That a
person so short on integrity could become a candidate for president is a
damning indictment of the US political system.
The account of Giuliani’s prosecution of Milken comes from my book with
Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
May 11, 2007
Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of
eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University
Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the
William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous
scholar journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has
been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the
French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political
Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny
of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos
Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello,
2000).
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts208.html
--
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