Kerik case likely to cast shadow on Giuliani

WASHINGTON – Being a top aide to New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani allegedly brought a lot of perks to Bernard Kerik, many of them paid for by people who had business with the city: a new Jacuzzi, a “marble entrance rotunda” installed in a Bronx apartment, $9,000 a month in rent payments for a flat on the Upper East Side.

Those and other favors were laid out Friday in a corruption indictment against Kerik, New York’s former police commissioner. The charges open a window on Republican presidential candidate Giuliani’s inner circle, detailing how Kerik lived the high life while Giuliani ran a law-and-order administration.

The indictment, with details that would fit an episode of “The Sopranos,” could create problems for the GOP front-runner, who has built his candidacy on his image as an efficient manager and dogged crime fighter.

Kerik, a police detective elevated by Giuliani first to corrections commissioner and then police commissioner in 2000 and 2001, faces 14 charges – including criminal conspiracy, tax evasion and making false statements to White House officials considering him for the job of Homeland Security secretary.

President Bush nominated Kerik to the Cabinet post in 2004 on Giuliani’s recommendation. The nomination was withdrawn after a torrent of disclosures about Kerik’s finances, including some of the allegations included in the indictment.

At a news conference Friday, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a post Giuliani held during the 1980s, accused the former mayor’s protege of “in effect selling his office, in violation of his duty to the people of the city.”

Sensing an opening, Giuliani’s presidential opponents pounced. Arizona Sen. John McCain’s campaign suggested that Giuliani’s support of Kerik was an ethical failing. “Rudy Giuliani’s history with Bernie Kerik is a story of poor judgment,” the campaign said.

Giuliani is not mentioned in the 29-page Kerik indictment, and it is unlikely he will be called as a witness, according to an attorney familiar with the case. But it could prove difficult for Giuliani to distance himself from Kerik’s travails.

While Giuliani said last week that the two men had not talked recently, they were professionally and personally close. The former mayor is godfather to Kerik’s daughter, and Kerik wrote in his autobiography that Giuliani had “made” him.

Media reports have indicated that, before Kerik’s appointment as police commissioner, a New York City official briefed Giuliani about Kerik’s ties to a New Jersey waste disposal company that is at the heart of the federal indictment. Giuliani has not disputed those reports, but maintains he doesn’t remember the briefings.

Kerik’s indictment had been anticipated, and Giuliani has sought to blunt its political impact by admitting that he failed to properly vet Kerik before recommending him for the homeland security post.

“I think that voters should look at it, and what they should say is, in that particular case, I pointed out that I made a mistake,” the former mayor said Thursday in Iowa. “I made a mistake of not clearing him effectively enough. I take the responsibility for that.”

Kerik turned himself in to the FBI Friday and pleaded not guilty in U.S. district court in White Plains, N.Y.