Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through Giuliani before donating it to Oxfam. This is not just any old biography – it’s a 480-page character assassination.
Born in 1944 to an ex-con who broke kneecaps for a living and a mother who was about as ambitious as Margaret Beaufort, Rudy Giuliani excelled at school, qualified as a lawyer and started making his mark as a prosecutor. Across 12 days in 1986, he won convictions against the heads of four New York crime families (the fifth was murdered before he came to trial), a politician from the Bronx who’d presided over ‘a vast municipal corruption scandal’ and the Wall Street banker Ivan Boesky, ‘an icon of a delirious era in the financial sector’.
In 1994, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. The only person this failed to impress was his mother.
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