He made a name for himself in New York 40 years ago as an anti-mafia prosecutor before becoming “America’s mayor” for his handling of September 11, 2001: Rudy Giuliani is now a former glory who has fallen into disgrace, convicted by justice.
On Friday, this unwavering supporter of former President Donald Trump was ordered to pay $148 million to two election officials he had defamed over the results of the 2020 presidential election.
And this is not the only legal concern facing this descendant of an Italian family.
Because a Georgia prosecutor indicted Donald Trump and 18 other people in August, including Rudy Giuliani, and is prosecuting them under legislation against organized crime, generally used against the mafia and gangs.
Federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s, Rudy Giuliani gained respectability and popularity by being the first magistrate to attack the megalopolis’s famous five major mafia families of Italian origin.
And by using at the time the same legislation, called “RICO”, to bring them down.
New York on its knees
But Rudy Giuliani was also, 20 years ago, still renowned in the United States and Europe as the “mayor of America”: the resilient city councilor who knew how to reassure, protect and restore New York, brought to its knees by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which left some 3,000 dead.
© AFP/Archives
Former New York City mayor and lawyer Rudy Giuliani, pictured here with his mentor former US President Donald Trump in August 2020 in Washington.
Mayor until the end of 2001 of the Big Apple, where he was born 79 years ago into an Italian-American family, he had maintained his image as a strong man and conservative by causing the delinquency figures to plummet. and homicides.
His detractors in the press in the 2000s, some having worked with him, accused him of especially liking cameras, provocations and controversies.
He suffered his first political failure in 2008 during an unfortunate campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Fifteen years later, lawyer suspended from the New York bar, Rudy Giuliani is today accused by the American courts of having helped Donald Trump to try to reverse the result in Georgia of the November 2020 presidential election.
“Book of Lies”
If found guilty, the one who will celebrate his 80th birthday on May 28, 2024 faces several years in prison.
“This is simply a new chapter in a book of lies with the aim of trapping President Donald Trump and anyone who wants to attack the regime in place,” this vocal lawyer defended himself in August. hissing on the social network
As soon as Joe Biden’s victory in November 2020, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal legal advisor, was one of the first to assert that the Republican billionaire’s election had been “stolen” from him, at the cost of incredible conspiracy theories. .
© AFP
Rudy Giuliani, lawyer of Donald Trump, November 19, 2020
During a surreal press conference at the end of November 2020 in a suburban parking lot surrounded by a crematorium and a sex shop, he claimed without any proof that Joe Biden had hatched a “centralized plan” of massive electoral fraud. A maneuver which would have allowed the Democrat to take votes intended for Donald Trump.
The images had gone around the world: he was sweating profusely, to the point that the dye from his hair was running down his temples.
Four years earlier, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani relayed allegations from Donald Trump that outgoing President Barack Obama was a founder of the Islamic State organization.
Gaffer
He also defended his mentor when an old recording was released in the press in which the Republican, president from 2017 to 2021, boasted of being able to “grab women by the pussy”.
Returning to President Trump’s side in 2017, he distinguished himself by often contradictory statements and gaffes in the investigation of a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, working on Russian interference in the United States.
In 2019, Rudy Giuliani tried to convince kyiv to provide compromising information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter: this will help bring then-President Trump to the brink of impeachment.
In 2019, in an interview with the elite magazine The New Yorker, he seemed lucid – and ironic – about his relationship with his mentor: “I fear that on my tombstone there will be ‘Rudy Giuliani lied for Trump’ . If that’s the case, why bother? I’ll be dead. I guess I can explain it to Saint Peter.”
2023-12-15 22:01:00
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