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Re: NYCity Said to Have Paid Bills for Giuliani Affair
Late in his tenure as mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani billed tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses to little-known city agencies as he was beginning an extramarital affair, a political Web site reported yesterday.
The report, on the Politico Web site, cited documents obtained under the New York State Freedom of Information Law. But it was unclear from those documents whether Mr. Giuliani allocated those travel costs, from 1999 through 2001, to obscure city offices in an attempt to conceal expenses associated with the relationship or for some accounting purpose.
The administration of Mr. Giuliani's successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said in 2002, several months after taking office, that the Giuliani administration had kept the budget for the mayor's office artificially low by paying more than $5 million in salaries through other city agencies. The agencies to which Mr. Giuliani billed the travel expenses were outside the mayor's office.
The New York mayor always travels with a security detail, and the expenses for the police detectives assigned to protect him are normally paid for by the Police Department when he travels on city business.
Asked about the travel expenses during the Republican presidential candidates' debate last night, Mr. Giuliani denied any wrongdoing. 'I have nothing to do with the handling of their records,' he said. As far as he knew, he said, the records were handled appropriately.
One of Mr. Giuliani's chief political advisers, Anthony V. Carbonetti, said earlier yesterday that any suggestion that the former mayor had sought to hide anything was 'nonsense.'
'As far as we are concerned, these are all legitimate expenses incurred by the N.Y.P.D. while performing their duty protecting the mayor,' Mr. Carbonetti said.
Mr. Carbonetti told reporters, 'There was no effort to hide anything '” on the mayor's part definitely because this is stuff he has never seen.'
He suggested it would have been easier to conceal the expenses had they been billed to the Police Department, which routinely declines to provide information about security. A Giuliani aide said last night that it was the campaign's understanding that the Police Department had reimbursed the agencies billed for security expenses.
The documents obtained by Politico, described as American Express bills and travel documents, detailed hotel, gas and other costs for the detectives on trips to Southampton, N.Y. The woman with whom Mr. Giuliani was having an affair, Judith Nathan, who became his third wife, had a condominium in the Long Island beach community.
Politico said it was impossible to know whether all of Mr. Giuliani's trips to Southampton were to see Ms. Nathan. In fact, little is known about the trips, and the Giuliani campaign yesterday did not provide details.
The fact that Mr. Giuliani was carrying on an extramarital affair at the time he made the trips, and that he had been accompanied by his security detail, was widely reported in 2000.
But the unusual accounting practices highlighted by the Politico Web site, in which the costs for the security detail's travel expenses were billed to small agencies, had not before been reported. The disclosure served to refocus attention on that period of Mr. Giuliani's life with just over a month before the first votes are cast in the Iowa caucuses.
The report also comes as one of Mr. Giuliani's rivals for the presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, has been questioning his fiscal stewardship of the city.
Politico cited credit card receipts for expenses incurred by the Mr. Giuliani's security detail; the report did not suggest that Mr. Giuliani had billed the city for the costs of his own expenses or meals. The costs were billed to offices that had nothing to do with the trips or the mayor's security, including a agency that regulates loft apartments, one responsible with aiding the disabled and another that helps provide lawyers for indigent defendants.
When the fact that the security detail was accompanying him on the visits to Ms. Nathan's condominium was first reported in May 2000, the Giuliani administration refused to provide an accounting of the expenses, suggesting that it was a security issue.
Police officials acknowledged in January 2001 that they also paid for detectives to guard Ms. Nathan during a period of time before she and Mr. Giuliani were married. Mr. Bloomberg continued that practice after he came into office in January 2002, and continued to offer security for Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Nathan and Mr. Giuliani's estranged wife, Donna Hanover, saying it was a sensible policy as long as there were 'credible threats' to their safety.
The unusual billing of the 11 Southampton trips documented in the receipts came to light at the end of Mr. Giuliani's eight years as mayor. An auditor at the comptroller's office was reviewing the records of the city's Loft Board in 2001 and found $34,000 in travel expenses, an unusual sum for the tiny agency.
When the comptroller's office sought an explanation, Mr. Giuliani's aides refused, citing security. Later, according to a spokesman for the comptroller, when the office sought answers from Mr. Bloomberg's administration, they got the same response.
