"America's Mayor:" Rudy Giuliani after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. As he campaigns for president, the story of the mayor's tenure in New York is contained in records that Giuliani kept private after he left office. AP photo.

by Andrew Zajac

Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from city hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.

Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.

That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as "America's mayor," serves as the foundation of Giuliani's presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.

It followed a pattern of tight control over information that the often combative Giuliani practiced as mayor, a pattern that included more than 100 legal challenges from one New York newspaper alone.

While no evidence has surfaced that the record was compromised, the city of New York nonetheless changed its laws to prevent another mayor from doing what Giuliani did. A coalition of archivists, historians and other city officials also raised questions about whether the documents would be sanitized, but the Giuliani Center was allowed to finish archiving the records.

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Last December, as Giuliani prepared to announce his GOP presidential bid, the last of the documents were returned to New York's Municipal Archives, where they are now available for public inspection.

Kenneth Cobb,assistant commissioner of the Department of Records and Information Services, said he's "very confident" that the papers were returned intact, but "I couldn't testify in court that every paper came back."

Saul Cohen, president of the Giuliani Center, said the mayor's papers were handled according to strict archival standards and were not screened for potentially embarrassing information. "Absolutely not," said Cohen, a retired attorney and longtime friend of Giuliani's.

The reliability of the archival record of Giuliani's stewardship of New York takes on added importance now that Giuliani, 63, is a contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

Giuliani's presidential aspirations ride largely on the glowing publicity he received as a strong and calming influence after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. He also is running as a law-and-order candidate who presided over New York's sharp drop in crime in the mid-1990s.

But his two terms as mayor also were marked by bitter disputes and frequent court battles with other office-holders, civic groups and news organizations over what many observers regarded as the Giuliani administration's unwarranted secrecy regarding basic public information.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek said it's important that the archives now are publicly accessible so journalists and others can measure Giuliani's campaign claims against the documentary record of his mayoralty.

Dallek acknowledged that the Giuliani Center's possession of the papers could cast doubt on the completeness of the record.

"That's always a problem," said Dallek, who has written books on six 20th Century presidents. "You have to ask, 'Are they holding anything back?' "

But, Dallek said, "unless you can prove them wrong, you've just got to accept it at face value."

Others are more doubtful. "There should always be an asterisk next to any citation of the Giuliani papers, saying ... 'The chain of public custody of these documents was broken,' "said Michael Wallace, a history professor at the City University of New York and a leading critic of the ex-mayor's archiving plan.

"He had to be sued repeatedly to get him to disclose even the most inoffensive material," Wallace said. "Somebody with that kind of track record, you don't want to turn over to him the task of archiving his papers."

The transfer of the papers raises other questions about Giuliani's leadership style. The contract to place the papers in private hands was signed by the then-commissioner of the Department of Records, a Giuliani appointee and campaign fundraiser. The six directors of the Giuliani Center at its founding included four top Giuliani assistants whose papers are part of the mayor's archive.

The archiving itself cost about $1.5 million, paid by the center with contributions. One donation that has been publicly listed is a $10,000 grant in November 2003 from the William E. Simon Foundation, co-chaired by Bill Simon, a former GOP California gubernatorial candidate and now a key adviser to the Giuliani campaign.

As a non-profit, the Giuliani Center is not required by IRS rules to disclose donors.

Beyond archiving the mayoral papers, the Giuliani Center has never gotten off the ground. Its address is the Times Square headquarters for Giuliani Partners, the mayor's consulting firm, and the telephone number for the board secretary rings at Giuliani's campaign office.

According to its IRS tax-exemption filing, "The center was established to further the independent and non-partisan study of public policy concerns, and to promote the education and advancement of current and future leaders of the public sector."

The breadth of that statement notwithstanding, "the center's primary goal was to finance the archiving of the records of the Giuliani administration," said Larry Levy, a former Giuliani mayoral aide who is secretary of the center. "Beyond that, it was intended to be a forum for debate about best practices in municipal government."

With Giuliani on the campaign trail, efforts to establish the center have been suspended, Levy said.

Giuliani Center's Cohen said that if Giuliani wins the White House, "we'd take a look at the foundation as the basis for a presidential library." But, added Cohen, "that's way down the road."

The non-profit listed a deficit of $116,000 for 2006.

Cohen, who signed the center's original agreement with the city on Dec. 24, 2001, said the contract was drafted by a municipal civil servant insulated from political pressure. "There were no special favors," Cohen said.

But the city's signatory was the Records Department's then-Commissioner George Rios.

Giuliani appointed Rios to his $102,000-a-year post in 1994 and later to a seat on the board of the City University of New York.

Rios said he was a volunteer and fundraiser for Giuliani's mayoral campaigns, and federal campaign records show that he donated a total of $1,500 to his boss' campaign fund in 1999 and 2000, when Giuliani made an aborted run for U.S. Senate.

Rios said he consented to the Giuliani archiving project because the Department of Records was overwhelmed by the volume of material.

"We went from 92 people in '93 to 44 in 2001," Rios said in a telephone interview. "That's the largest percentage drop of any city department. The archives were over-stressed."

The agreement let Giuliani keep certain records secret, specifying that "whenever Rudolph W. Giuliani has a personal interest or right in a document separate and apart from the interests and rights of the city, his approval shall be required before any such document may be released or disclosed by the center to the public."

Rios said he agreed to the contract's terms because they had been drawn up by the city's attorneys and because "they were the wishes of the mayor."

Following public outcry, the archiving plan signed by the city and the Giuliani Center in February 2002 specified that decisions on what would be public or private would be made by the city's corporation counsel.

But concerns about the completeness of the records didn't end. In March 2003, the city's comptroller's audit said, "The integrity and trustworthiness of and the access to these documents has been called into question because of the change in their custody; the Giuliani documents were transferred out of city custody into the custody of the Giuliani Center, a private organization."

The audit called the transfer of mayoral papers "unprecedented." Less than two weeks after the audit report, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation forbidding such privatized archiving.

The law prohibits mayors from making archival arrangements while in office and forbids foundations and private entities from taking possession of elected officials' records.

The standards for archiving the Giuliani papers exceeded those used by the federal government, said Linda Edgerly, an archivist and managing director of the Winthrop Group, which was hired by the center to process the mayor's collection. "We did no weeding as we normally do. ... We didn't destroy anything," Edgerly said.

Levy, the center's secretary, dismissed concerns about the integrity of the archive as unfounded "political rhetoric." By archiving the papers privately, Giuliani sped up public disclosure, Levy said, noting that the papers of his predecessor, David Dinkins, are still not public.

As mayor, Giuliani was known for being personally accessible to reporters but for keeping a tight rein on information, in essence inviting news organizations to sue if they wanted records badly enough.

Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel said that Giuliani "was responsive to all media inquiries in this intensely competitive and aggressive media market. He never ever shied away from questions."

Eve Burton, a former vice president and deputy general counsel of the New York Daily News, said taking questions at a news conference was no substitute for providing records or access to decision-makers.

"It was extraordinarily difficult. We couldn't get access without overcoming barriers. It was an everyday problem," said Burton, now vice president and general counsel of Hearst Corp.

The problem extended beyond the media, as public interest groups and even other government officials took legal action to try to extract information from the mayor's office. Burton said the Daily News alone filed 104 legal actions.

"Of those 104, I won the large majority, but often the information was stale," Burton said. "We won the battles. He won the war. ... It was a very effective strategy."

Raymond Horton, former president of the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission who now teaches ethics and corporate governance at Columbia Business School, said information control by Giuliani was a "major issue for any number of public interest research organizations."

"Information is power," Horton said. "The less people know about what you're doing, the better off you are. I think that's Rudy's perspective."