Giuliani's father did 1 1/2 years for Armed Robbery, Uncle and Cousin in Mafia Also, Cover-up

Louis Mangone, an attorney active in Italian American affairs, remembered hearing the mayor extol his father's honesty at a gathering at the Columbus Club, the city's premier Italian gathering spot. Giuliani, whose prosecutions as a U.S. Attorney had been targeted at friends of many of those present, got a chilly reception.

"You can't visit the sins of the father on the children; we know that very well. But he's been so sanctimonious on this very issue with others," said Mangone.

And then there was the response of Sal Mondrone, who so far has been unable to qualify for a waste-hauling license. "I was told by my lawyer I knew too many people," he said. "I think it's two standards here. father hung out with gangsters. His cousin had mob affiliations."

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If anyone made the mayor's father a worthy subject for further exploration it was the mayor himself. He has cited his father's influence to every journalist undertaking a profile of him since he first made headlines as a prosecutor in the mid-1980s.

As recently as this April, when he announced his prostate cancer, he described Harold Giuliani as "a very, very important reason for why I'm standing here as the mayor of New York City."

But the mayor has declined to discuss the book's specifics beyond suggesting that his family has fallen victim to negative stereotypes of Italian Americans.

"I think I'll stand on my record of having prosecuted and put in prison more members of the Mafia than probably any United States Attorney in history," the mayor said. In the course of his pursuit of organized crime, he had been threatened with death "at least three times," he added. "And if that's not enough to remove the Mafia prejudice, then there probably could not be anything you could do to remove it."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0029,robbins,16567,5.html

Mr. Barrett, citing an unnamed family friend, also writes that Mr. Giuliani's father was for a time a bat-wielding enforcer of a loansharking and gambling operation run by his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who was Mr. Giuliani's uncle. In addition, Mr. Barrett cites F.B.I. documents to assert that Mr. Giuliani's first cousin, Lewis D'Avanzo, was a ''ruthless and widely feared mob associate in charge of a massive stolen car ring,'' who was killed by F.B.I. agents in Brooklyn in 1977.

Nothing in the excerpts of the book released so far suggests that Mr. Giuliani himself had any connections to the Mafia or was ever sympathetic to it. Some readers might draw the conclusion that the reputed Mafia ties of Mr. Giuliani's relatives, whose lives are described as bleak, made the one-time prosecutor even more determined to fight organized crime. But Mr. Giuliani, who said he had not read the book and did not intend to, apparently sees it differently.

Asked if the revelations constituted a targeting of Italians, Mr. Giuliani replied, ''People have to draw their own conclusions.''

He also said, ''All you have to do is look at the last 20 years, and take a look at my career, and ask yourself the following question: Is there anybody that's done more to reduce the influence of, end the Mafia, than me?''

Mr. Giuliani said a front-page headline in The Daily News on Thursday, ''Rudy Book Bombshell: His Mob Kin,'' was disgusting and added that the newspaper ''should actually be embarrassed.''

As the news conference continued, Mr. Giuliani cited more details of his record on organized crime. ''I put in prison the heads of the five families for 100 years each,'' Mr. Giuliani said, referring to the five mob families that made up the ''commission,'' a board of directors that once ruled the Mafia in the United States. He added, ''I myself went to Arizona and handled the case that put Joe Bonnano in jail for the first time in 30 years.'' News accounts generally support Mr. Giuliani's statements.

Mr. Giuliani refused to answer questions about Lewis D'Avanzo, the man whom Mr. Barrett says was killed by the F.B.I. He also refused queries about his uncle Leo D'Avanzo. But when he was asked about his relationship to both of them by a reporter who apparently thought that the D'Avanzos were brothers and still alive, Mr. Giuliani paused.

Then he flatly replied, ''They're both dead.''

''The two sons?'' the reporter asked.

''There was only one son, and he's dead,'' the mayor said. ''A long time.''

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE7DA1638F934A35754C0A9669C8B63

Above all, he was a political man. Like most denizens of his world, he was insistently patriotic, and generally conservative if not reactionary in the usual political terms, with an understandable distaste even for reformers, let alone social revolutionaries—though he always seemed to understand, long before more educated men, that ideology and conviction in American politics commonly have a price. Like his successors over the rest of the twentieth century who learned the lesson well, he would be an inveterate contributor to Democratic politicians at all levels. Lansky paid "handsomely"—legal scholar and sociologist William Chambliss recorded his secret cash contributions—into the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928, Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Harry Truman in 1948, Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and 1964, and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, as well as the races of senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, and councilmen. At a Democratic National Convention in the 1930s he met the amply corrupt Louisiana senator Huey Long, whose partnership opened the South to the alliance, and for whom Lansky opened what would be one of the first foreign bank accounts for corrupt American politicians. Covering his bets, he also passed cash through an intermediary to the 1944 Republican presidential campaign of onetime New York "gangbuster" Thomas Dewey, and backed a few GOP candidates over the years, though generally preferring, and thus flourishing under, Democrats. Beneath the surface, Lansky knew, Dewey was a classic example of the American prosecutor and politician who exploited the public fear of criminals but in the end did remarkably little about crime, a prosecutor who convicted a few big names while imprisoning mostly street-level small fry, leaving the Syndicate and the system that fed it undiminished. "You can't help liking Mr. Dewey," a shrewd New York socialite would say of the man in an epigram that captured his real record as well, "until you get to know him."

Lansky's practical politics were plain. Applying the wisdom acquired on the Lower East Side and in the national underworld he came to dominate, he was unyielding and merciless with those who challenged or cheated him. But he would be very different from many of his predecessors and successors, in legitimate business as in crime, who overreached. Monopolistic greed, he believed, led to blood or headlines, rupturing society's usual apathy, arousing if only for a moment a spasm of reform that was bad for everyone's profits. He welcomed his competitors—the more corruption the better; the more people compromised, the more collusion, acceptance, and resignation, the less danger of change. Nowhere was this strategy more decisive than in his convoluted relations with his supposed enemy but often de facto ally, the government of the United States.

Those closest to Lansky would claim that he accomplished the supreme blackmail in the thirties, obtaining photographs of homosexual acts by J. Edgar Hoover, the increasingly powerful and celebrated director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The pictures were said to hold at bay this most formidable of potential adversaries. But the racketeer and the bureaucrat also had mutual friends, backers, and associates, among them prominent businessmen like Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Industries or developer Del Webb, or groups, like the American Jewish League Against Communism, that shared the right-wing politics the gangster and G-man had in common. Whether by crude blackmail or the more subtle influence of their common circle, over the decades Lansky enjoyed almost singular immunity from serious FBI pursuit; "Lansky and the Bureau chief in a symbiotic relationship, each protecting the other," University of California scholar Peter Dale Scott would write of the suborning.

But sexual compromising, mutual friendships, or ideology only began the collusion. In 1937, Lansky arranged for the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to make the highly publicized arrest of one of his associates, drug trafficker Louis "Lepke" Buchalter. The betrayal at once removed a Lansky rival, gratified Hoover and FBN director Harry Anslinger in their mutual obsession with popular image, and further compromised federal law enforcement, which was growing ever more dependent on informers and double agents for its successes.

Then, at the outset of World War II, U.S. Naval Intelligence and the nation's new espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), enlisted Lansky and the Syndicate in a historic collaboration, the top-secret Operation Underworld, in which government agents employed mobsters and their labor goons in a campaign of coercion and bribery ostensibly to prevent sabotage and quell uncontrolled leftist unions on New York docks. The "dirty little secret of Operation Underworld," as a former White House official put it, "was that the United States Government needed Meyer Lansky and organized crime to force an industrial peace and a policing of sabotage on the wharves and in the warehouses. The government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and because it could conceive little other choice in the system at hand."