Inside a Kingdom of Allegiances
For Giuliani's Inner Circle, Loyalty Reigns Supreme

By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 15, 2007

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.

It was Kerik whom Giuliani elevated from his personal driver to New York police commissioner. Then Giuliani made him a partner in his consulting firm. And in 2004 Giuliani recommended Kerik to President Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security -- before Kerik's ties to a company with suspected links to organized crime were revealed in the press. Last week, he was indicted on 16 counts of corruption, mail and tax fraud.

It's the same kind of fidelity that drove Giuliani to employ his high school friend, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, as an analyst at Giuliani Partners, despite allegations that the Catholic priest was involved in the church's sexual abuse scandal. (Placa denied the charges and was never charged with a crime.) Placa's ties go deep: He helped get Giuliani's first marriage annulled, performed the services at the second marriage, to Donna Hanover, and baptized his children.

It's a philosophy of allegiance quite familiar to Italian Americans of Giuliani's generation, deeply rooted in his family upbringing in New York, where immigrants like his own grandparents built tight, insular communities -- both personal and professional -- and stuck close in the face of ethnic discrimination.

"Many of these people around him may be skilled professionals, but they're also fanatically loyal," says Democrat Mark Green, who as New York City public advocate tangled with the Giuliani administration regularly.

"They would throw themselves under a bus if that's what it took. And that's what it took to stay prominent in Rudy's circle."

Extending the Family

Everyone will tell you that Giuliani's comfort is with the old extended family. But he knew he had to bring in and test a few new cousins if he wanted to expand the kingdom.

Over a guys' dinner last year at New York's fanciest private cigar club, the Grand Havana Room, Giuliani first asked Pat Oxford to help him become president.

"We had been playing footsie, but we never had a direct conversation," says Oxford.

The men have been law partners since 2005, when Oxford brought in the former mayor to run the newly created Manhattan office of Bracewell & Patterson, a 400-lawyer Texas powerhouse. The firm, which paid Giuliani and his business a reported $10 million for his name and skills, is now called Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.

But Oxford would bring a lot more than just financial value to Giuliani as he assembled a presidential campaign. A conservative Republican with deep national political connections, Oxford had been a fundraising "Pioneer" for President Bush, raising at least $100,000, and had chaired two of Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate races in Texas.

Oxford liked Giuliani, but he was looking for assurances on a key issue on which he and Giuliani differ: abortion. "I wanted to understand how he felt about life issues," says Oxford, who is opposed to abortion. "He told me he was committed to reducing abortions."

Giuliani, who supports abortion rights, also told Oxford that he had an issue with "criminalizing abortion," Oxford recalls. "Putting young women and young doctors in jail would not be a positive thing for the United States."

Oxford concluded that Giuliani was "wrestling with these issues and his heart was in the right place." He signed on as campaign chairman and came to represent what political junkies have long referred to as the "grown-up" of the operation.

"I think the last campaign he worked on was McKinley's reelection," jokes Carbonetti.

Together with campaign manager Mike DuHaime, a 34-year-old GOP comer hired by Carbonetti, the three put together an operation considered disciplined and organized -- and one in which the old friends and insiders had a seat at the table. Mastro is a regular at weekly campaign meetings as a legal adviser; Joe Lhota, a cable executive who was New York City's budget director, has been tasked with talking to reporters about Giuliani's record as mayor; Rudy Washington, a former deputy mayor who suffers from respiratory ailments resulting from the time he spent at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, is chairman of the New York City campaign.

Another close friend, Ted Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general who's known Giuliani since their days in the Reagan administration, chairs the campaign's justice advisory committee.

In his book, Giuliani wrote that the only time he cried on Sept. 11 was when he realized from a reporter's question that Olson's wife, Barbara, a well-known Republican pundit, had been on one of the hijacked planes. Olson said in an interview that he supports Giuliani in part because of the former mayor's decisive handling of 9/11 and its aftermath.

"His instincts were instantaneous and genuine. He went to where the problem was. He knew the importance of compassion and of stability -- all of those things came naturally to him," says Olson, recently mentioned as a candidate for Bush's attorney general and a key legal player in the 2000 vote recount fight in Florida. "In that situation, you can't say to yourself, gee, I'm gonna run for president someday so this is how I should behave."

On the question of what one adviser in a now famous memo called Giuliani's "weirdness factor" -- his multiple marriages, a histrionic personal life, a son who doesn't speak to him, among other well-told stories -- Olson says:

"I think voters will look at the whole person. . . . What are the characteristics that are important? At the end of the day, am I electing the captain of my softball team or . . . the president of the United States?"

'Everyone Came Back to Help'

Carbonetti's grandfather, Louis, a local Democratic community leader, and Rudy's father, Harold, were best friends a generation ago, when the Giulianis lived in Brooklyn and the Carbonettis lived in East Harlem (then known as Italian Harlem). Giuliani's Uncle Rudy was a cop in East Harlem, and Harold and Louis used to pick him up from his shift.

Carbonetti's father, Lou, and Giuliani were not close, but reacquainted when Giuliani became a public figure. So, when Giuliani first ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1989, the younger Carbonetti didn't think twice about leaving Boston University to become a gofer.

"When Rudy ran for mayor obviously everyone worked for him. Everybody came back to go and help," he says.

After the loss, Carbonetti returned to Boston to finish school and tend bar. But he left school once again and was back in New York in 1993, this time opening storefronts in all the boroughs for Giuliani's next race for mayor. When Giuliani won, Carbonetti was given the powerful job as head of appointments. He was 24 years old and didn't have a college degree.

"I was the guy giving out the jobs," he says unabashedly.

He was also the guy taking away jobs. He shrugs off charges of cronyism that have dogged Giuliani since those early housecleaning days at City Hall.

"What they want to call cronies were just our people. You had to make a sea change in government. The city wasn't being run properly and there needed to be a change. There were times when we'd go to remove someone from a position and phone calls would come flooding in like the Earth was going to open up and swallow us whole," says Carbonetti.

His father was one of those who received a good job -- director of the community assistance unit. But Lou Carbonetti's job opened the administration to criticism when he was forced to resign because he had failed to report back debts on his business on his disclosure form. It was a misstep his son makes no excuses for.

Tony Carbonetti rose to become Rudy's chief of staff and was by his side through the tumultuous final years as mayor that saw a meltdown of his personal life, prostate cancer, a downward spiral in his approval ratings and the abandonment of his Senate race against Hillary Clinton. Carbonetti walked with him through the rubble of Sept. 11. After Giuliani left office, Carbonetti became his business partner, along with several others from the inner circle, in the very lucrative Giuliani Partners. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Carol, and their two young daughters.

Today, he often travels with the candidate. No one makes a move without him.

Oxford couches Carbonetti's political contribution this way: "Tony is just invaluable -- he knows the candidate's history and perspective, who the mayor has gotten along with, who he hasn't, the players, the chemistry. If there were past problems with someone as we're going into a state, he can tell us how the problem went down, if it would be better if I called to soften someone up."

And then there is his significant personal contribution.

"They say I'm soothing on him," says Carbonetti. "Sometimes he just doesn't want to talk about work and we can talk about anything -- the Yankees, the old mayor's office . . ."

He says Giuliani sleeps only four hours a night and listens to opera on a portable disc player on planes because he can't get good sound on an iPod. Giuliani phones Carbonetti on a 24-hour cycle. "All hours of the night -- never considers where he is, like the West Coast," Carbonetti says, laughing.

At first glance, it's hard to imagine this fast-moving guy being a soothing influence on anyone: The phone is constantly ringing at his Times Square office and a steady stream of longtime disciples buzz around him.

To interview Carbonetti is to keep up with his frenetic pace, whether in his office or speed-walking down Fifth Avenue or at Chase bank where he was desperately trying to close on a condo.

After observing Carbonetti at the bank -- where no fewer than four people lamely try to explain to him why a substantial amount of money he had transferred from another account at the same bank couldn't be accessed for the closing -- you start to see the calm part.

He is soft-spoken and unruffled when, after 30 minutes of excuses, any mildly excitable person would have by now reached over and grabbed one of the bankers' bureaucratic necks.

He is disarmingly friendly and direct with a reporter in a New York sort of way, starting most clipped sentences with "you know" and punctuating them with "Okay?"

He never goes off the record. Here's what he has to say on some controversial topics:

On whether Giuliani -- known to be a micromanager -- can let others run the campaign: "I actually thought, well, this is going to be a learning curve. But he gets it. He understands it's now a much bigger operation and people have to be allowed to talk. But the thing is, as long as the people who are talking for him know him, he's comfortable with it."

On whether Giuliani's loyalty to a friend could have blinded him to Kerik's problems: "I keep saying to myself, I should have known, and I should have. But when you have an employee who comes in late, leaves early and does a crappy job, you look up and say, okay, something is wrong with this person. [But] the guy that comes in early and does a phenomenal job is usually not the one you're looking at."

On talk that Carbonetti doesn't get along with Giuliani's third wife, Judith: "That's another one of those overblown things. To be fair to her, it's been very difficult for her to be thrust into this."

John Weaver, an adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who is a good friend of Carbonetti's, says the man "is without ego and that's not something you find in this business."

"He has one client, and for that reason, everyone in the organization trusts him. He has no other agenda but Rudy," says Weaver, who met this fiance through Carbonetti.

So what job would he have in a Giuliani administration?

"He would be the counselor down the hall -- like Karl Rove without the policy portfolio," says Weaver, who added that he's not all that convinced that Carbonetti would give up his life for the White House. "Truth be told, I think politics for him falls somewhere behind his kids, Las Vegas and the Yankees."

Carbonetti has clearly enjoyed the ride. If he's ever had a misgiving about doing only one job his whole life, he doesn't reveal it.

"I've seen a lot more than most. A lot of who I am and what I've learned I owe to him," he says of Giuliani. "Look at the opportunities he's given me, a poor kid from East Harlem."

Research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.