Inside a Kingdom of Allegiances

For Giuliani's Inner Circle, Loyalty Reigns Supreme

Tony Carbonetti's persona swallows a room, not unlike the man he has worked for his entire adult life.

He is Rudy Giuliani's closest adviser, the archetypal alter ego -- a stocky, cards-on-the-table New Yorker who conveys absolute authority in his main area of expertise: Rudy.

"Carbo," as his friends call him, is not officially running the presidential campaign. But it is important to know that he hired those who do. And he talks to them or the candidate a dozen times a day from his New York office at Giuliani Partners. He is the affable final buffer between an exacting, edgy politician and the world. He knows what the candidate wants to eat, when he sleeps (rarely) and what will set him off like a Fourth of July rocket. And he can take the heat. It was Carbonetti who, as the New York mayor's chief of staff, famously relieved Giuliani's then-wife Donna Hanover of her duties as the city's first lady during the public spectacle of Giuliani's extramarital affair.

"I know his likes, his dislikes and his comfort levels," says Carbonetti in a rare interview. "I save [the campaign] a lot of time. When they say, 'We want Rudy to do this,' I can say, 'He is not doing it.' "

In the Giuliani Kingdom, Carbonetti, 38, may be the key player, but it is a monarchy fortified by numerous other devoted courtiers and confidants who share one thing in common: intense loyalty, dating back years, even before Giuliani served as mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001.

They are barely known outside of New York and are, like Carbonetti, not on the campaign's payroll. But they have the candidate's ear and have been pressed into service as surrogates, mega-fundraisers and advisers. They are neither ideologues nor policy wonks, but part of an eclectic tableau of Giuliani's life and career.

They include high school buddies such as tax lawyer Peter Powers; ex-federal prosecutors from Giuliani's time as U.S. attorney, such as Randy Mastro and Dennison Young, who moved with him to City Hall; attorney John H. Gross, a young prosecutor with Giuliani in the '70s who has been the little-known treasurer of every one of his campaigns; and Giuliani's onetime labor negotiator, Randy Levine, now president of the Yankees.

Some held powerful jobs in city government and were mocked in New York political circles as the "YesRudys." They couldn't care less.

Their connection to him is anchored in the premise that mutual loyalty and longtime ties trump all else. Giuliani has performed their weddings and been the first to greet their babies at the hospital. They stood in for him at funerals in the horrific days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the former New York mayor's best-selling memoir "Leadership," he devotes an entire 24-page chapter to the topic of loyalty. It is called "The Vital Virtue."

"He wants people around him he can trust. It really matters to him," says Frank Luntz, the pollster on Giuliani's mayoral races.

Admirers offer up his loyalty as a sign of character; his relationships, they say, are genuine, not simply expedient. But detractors are more likely to say it is blatant cronyism that has led Giuliani into dangerous waters -- most painfully through his association with Bernard Kerik.