Giuliani's Ties to Black New York Troubled

But East Harlem has a strong coalition of Latino small-business owners, some of whom had backed Giuliani in his 1993 race, and they worried about the Pathmark destroying their businesses. Giuliani aides set up a meeting with Phillips and Paul Grogan, then head of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nonprofit group that works on community development projects around the country. At the meeting, Giuliani's head of economic development, Clay Lifflander, insisted that Phillips agree to jointly managing the property with a Latino firm.

Lifflander, Phillips recalled, told her that he had two news releases on his desk, one announcing a deal had been reached, the other saying the city could not reach an agreement. Giuliani's office would issue one of these by the end of the day, no matter what. In a recent interview, Lifflander defended these tactics, saying that the city needed to move urgently on the deal.

Phillips consulted with Butts, and they agreed that, although the city's method angered them, they would accept the deal. But Butts wanted to talk to Giuliani personally.

The mayor declined the offer. "We were working with mayors all over the country. There was not another mayor in the country who would have refused to talk to one of the most prominent black clergy," Grogan said.

Two years later, Phillips organized a groundbreaking for the Pathmark and was told by Giuliani aides that Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough president and a candidate for mayor against Giuliani, must be disinvited from the event. Messinger had been closely involved in getting Harlem the supermarket. "We were all just seething," Phillips said.

To be sure, Giuliani was never destined to have a perfect relationship with the black community in New York. He ran two bitter campaigns against David N. Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, losing the first time before defeating the Harlem political veteran in 1993.

Once gaining office, Giuliani tried to build relationships with influential blacks and Latinos. Three days after he was elected, Giuliani made a highly publicized trip to Harlem, where he met with Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), one of Dinkins's closest allies. Giuliani named Richard D. Parsons, one of the city's most prominent black Republicans, to head his transition team. And in the first few months of his tenure in 1994, Giuliani brought a series of black leaders to his office, including Butts and Williams.

But Giuliani often inflamed relationships with these new allies. In 1996, his administration demanded that Time Warner Cable add Fox News Channel to its New York lineup, infuriating Parsons, then the company's president. Parsons eventually resigned from a mayoral board because of his frustration with Giuliani.

For other black leaders, it was the mayor's unstinting support of police policies that caused friction. African Americans felt specifically targeted by some policies, such as the New York City Police Department's aggressive stop-and-frisk procedures, in which officers, in search of guns and drugs, patted down people whom they viewed as suspicious.

The lingering resentment burst into full-throated protests all over the city in 1999, when officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old Guinean immigrant.

Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman who is pastor of a large black church in Queens and who backed Giuliani in 1997, said he sat down with the mayor "to try to explain to him, as a black father, every African American father sees his son in Diallo. He did not understand."

Rudy Washington, an African American who served as a deputy mayor for community relations under Giuliani, defended his former boss's actions in the Diallo case, saying Giuliani could not simply attack the police without knowing the facts. "People wanted him to do a condemnation on the spot, and that's not prudent," Washington said.

A year later, when an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond was shot to death by a undercover officer posing as a drug buyer, Giuliani brought out details of Dorismond's juvenile crime record and declared that the dead man was no "altar boy." Critics accused the mayor of demonizing Dorismond.

The four officers in the Diallo case were acquitted of criminal charges. A grand jury decided not to indict the officer who shot Dorismond.

Giuliani's aides say that whatever he might have done with regard to specific police shootings, the revivals in many areas of New York, including Harlem, could have not have happened without his focus on reducing crime. "The necessary thing for economic development is to reduce crime," said John Dyson, a Democrat who served as a deputy mayor for finance and economic development under Giuliani.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Giuliani's poll numbers, which had dropped after his messy divorce from Donna Hanover and the Diallo shooting, surged upward. But blacks remained largely unhappy with his tenure.

Giuliani "paints himself as the savior" of New York, Phillips said, "but he was brutal in terms of how he dealt with this. That kind of government was not productive."

Giuliani countered that it was the results that mattered. Asked in 2000 about the fact that he did not meet very often with black and Latino leaders in New York, he said: "If I had spent my time engaged in that dialogue, the changes that you saw take place would have not have taken place. Because what happens when you engage in that dialogue is you compromise."