Kerik Was Disaster in Waiting

It turns out that all that Capitol Hill huffing and puffing for three weeks about how our mighty intelligence agencies should share information was irrelevant. They have no information to share, whether it’s about Iran, Iraq – or Bernard Kerik.For New Yorkers the Kerik saga is a nice moment of New York one-upmanship at Washington’s expense. To know that the former police commissioner and current partner in Mayor Giuliani’s post-9/11 money machine was a disaster waiting to happen, you didn’t need the bureaucratic talents of an army of FBI agents and White House lawyers. All you needed was to be a reader of the New York Post’s Page Six. Over the years, Mr. Kerik has garnered more blind items than Paris Hilton. No one in this town believed for more than 10 minutes that Bernie-gate was just another nannygate.The New York tabloids are better informed than the FBI and the CIA put together, but they’re even less likely to share what they know – in this case, for political reasons. The Post’s contortions have been something to behold. If this had been a Democratic nomination fiasco, Rupert Murdoch’s relentlessly Republican scandal sheet would have served it up grand. Instead the Post’s politics meant the paper had to regurgitate the Kerik and Giuliani spin while simultaneously painting the administration as heroes of rigor for surfacing Mr. Kerik’s “background issues” – not an easy feat of juggling. Free of such inhibitions, Mortimer Zuckerman’s New York Daily News has been whipping the Post’s Aussie behind with a barrage of front-page screamers on love nests, financial finaglings, arrest warrants, and more. One of the downsides of Mr. Kerik’s booting the Homeland Security job is the press jollity we’d have been treated to when he first got caught taking a girlfriend out for a joyride on a Coast Guard cutter.The problem for Mr. Kerik was that he could never rise above being Mr. Giuliani’s mini-me. The more Mr. Giuliani channeled Winston Churchill, the more Mr. Kerik channeled Tony Soprano.Take his bizarre choice of lawyer: not Robert Fiske nor Lloyd Cutler nor some other well-oiled fixer in the corridors of power but none other than his old crony Joe Tacopina, a wiseguy defense attorney whose client list includes Peter Gotti’s bagman, Jerome Brancato. (“You wanna have a public fight? You wanna fight the whole defense team?” Mr. Tacopina yelled at another lawyer in a courtroom dispute during the Gotti-Brancato trial – not exactly an Edward Bennett Williams moment.)Who knows, maybe Mr. Kerik would have given the torpid Homeland Security behemoth a needed shot of testosterone. But Mr. Giuliani’s protege and one-time driver zoomed up so fast he didn’t realize that his rocket didn’t have a third stage. Back at Mission Control, Mr. Giuliani should have known the thing wouldn’t fly.That’s why the real satisfaction of the flameout lies not in Mr. Kerik’s fall but Mr. Giuliani’s chagrin. America’s mayor having to eat a little crow after three years of galloping hagiography is a classic case of karma coming due.The city has become just a tad cranky about Mr. Giuliani’s naked branding of September 11, 2001, for his own political and pecuniary ends. Increasingly, his speeches seem to turn New York’s saddest day into shtick to dramatize his own heroism. It’s been hard for some to feel the same about him since hearing him sell an invidious merging of al Qaeda with the war in Iraq right at the top of his RNC convention speech.Add to that a growing uneasiness in many quarters about the gravy train of Giuliani Partners. Nobody minds Mr. Giuliani making a comfortable living after courageously leading the city through its darkest hour, but there is something increasingly over the top about the way he’s raking it in. It’s disconcerting to see the man who so feelingly attended over 200 funerals of dead heroes score 15 million bucks from Nextel’s emergency communications system when during all his years in office the NYFD never replaced the faulty radios that failed in the first World Trade Center bombing. Judith Giuliani tempted fate last year with her appearance reclining on a loveseat in a scarlet Carolina Herrera ball gown and talking about her monogrammed silver napkin rings in a cover story for Manhattan’s glossy giveaway Avenue magazine.It seems that Mr. Giuliani now considers himself so untouchable he saw no reason why he shouldn’t get his protege rubberstamped for the Cabinet, however preposterous the backstory. Why not? The mayor of America was able to appear before the 9/11 commission and be treated with obeisance even though the staff report had been critical of the city’s preparedness.Perhaps Bernie-gate will prove a crossroads for Mr. Giuliani, the moment when he has to choose between his pursuit of political prestige and his pursuit of prodigious pelf. As Clark Clifford discovered, those two goals sometimes have a way of colliding.At the very least, Mr. Giuliani is getting a salutary taste of what might be in store for him if he runs in 2008.

Kerik Was Disaster in Waiting

Kerik Was Disaster in Waiting

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