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Rudy camp: City didn't fund security for trysts

BY CRAIG GORDON AND TOM BRUNE | craig.gordon@newsday.com
tom.brune@newsday.com

7:57 PM EST, November 28, 2007

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WASHINGTON - Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign scrambled Wednesday night to explain why his administration shifted tens of thousands of dollars in his personal security costs to obscure city agencies -- right at the time in 1999 when he was beginning an extramarital affair with Judith Nathan on eastern Long Island.

Giuliani aides at the time refused to explain the unusual accounting procedure to the city auditors, citing the need for "security." City Comptroller William Thompson later reported that his auditors "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes," according to a January 2002 letter from Thompson to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But bills and travel documents obtained by the website Politico.com suggest one reason because the expenses cover visits from 1999 to 2001 by Giuliani to Southampton, where Nathan had an apartment. Giuliani was married to Donna Hanover at the time, though later married Nathan.

One of Giuliani's top political advisers, Tony Carbonetti, told Newsday Wednesday night: "There's a legitimate expense incurred by the Police Department with 24/7 to cover and protect the mayor, as was their duty. There was no effort to hide or conceal anything."

But Carbonetti, who once served as Giuliani's chief of staff, also said neither he nor Giuliani knew anything about the expenses being shifted to other agencies but insisted, "It's not geared to hide something."

The story, which broke just hours before Wednesday's YouTube-CNN debate among Republican contenders, put Giuliani's checkered marital history back before voters barely five weeks before primary voters go to the polls in Iowa.

And for the first time, it appeared to draw a link between Giuliani's public performance as mayor to his private life outside City Hall, where he made little secret of the fact that he was seeing Nathan while estranged from Hanover.

On the presidential campaign trail, Giuliani has asked voters to look beyond his personal mistakes -- particularly because he says they had no impact on how well he did his job as New York City mayor, before and after 9/11. Some Republican voters who put "family values" first have looked askance at Giuliani's personal life.

But the story also could call into question Giuliani's credentials as a fiscal conservative, because Thompson's letter notes that out-of-town travel and security expenses for Giuliani doubled between 2000 and 2001, from $309,852 to $620,011.

The Politico.com story says the billing and travel records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request cover at least 11 Giuliani trips to Long Island in the summers of 1999-2001, including a visit the first weekend in September 2001, before the terror attacks.

The expenses were moved into at least one city agency that reported no such travel, the city's Loft Board. Other expenses were moved to the Office for People with Disabilities and the Procurement Policy Board, as well as $400,000 to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office.