The corporate media has been obsessed about the downfall of their former hero, Rudolph Giuliani. The ex-mayor of New York City was seen leaving 2nd Chance Bail Bonds in Atlanta after surrendering to authorities as one of Trump’s co-conspirators.
Long gone were the days in 2001 when Time magazine made him — of all the billions of human beings — its “person of the year.” Comedian David Letterman gushed over Giuliani on The Late Show while Queen Elizabeth made him a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
These accolades were bestowed because of Giuliani’s supposed heroics on Sept. 11, 2001. So what did Giuliani mean when he said to ABC’s Peter Jennings that “we were told the World Trade Center was going to collapse”?
Who knew the South Tower (WTC 2) would crash at free-fall speed? And why weren’t the firefighters inside told, 343 of whom were killed?
Giuliani should have been jailed a long time ago. As President Reagan’s Associate Attorney General in the early 1980s, Giuliani was torturer-in-chief of Haitian immigrants.
Over 2,000 Haitian immigrants were kept in squalid conditions at Miami’s Krome Avenue concentration camp and other detention centers. They were denied access to lawyers, while dozens had attempted suicide.
Reagan kept dictator “Baby Doc” Jean-Claude Duvalier — the son of “Papa Doc” François Duvalier — and his Tonton Macoute thugs in power. In what was not meant to be an April Fool’s joke, Giuliani claimed on April 1, 1982, that repression in Haiti “simply does not exist now.”
Eighteen years later, on March 16, 2000, one of Mayor Guiliani’s undercover cops profiled and tried to entice the Haitian security guard Patrick Dorismond into a drug deal. When the father of two indignantly rejected the proposition, he was killed.
Giuliani demonized the dead victim, and his police attacked mourners attending Dorismond’s funeral, arresting 27.
The New York 8+ attempted frame-up
Giuliani and Trump were indicted on charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Rudy loved using the federal RICO statute when he was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Prosecutors adore conspiracy charges, of which RICO laws are an example. It allows them to use hearsay testimony more easily.
Organizing labor unions was once considered to be an illegal conspiracy. Clarence Darrow brought a halt to this frame-up method as a union lawyer during an 1898 strike in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Giuliani used RICO charges against the “five families” that supposedly controlled organized crime in New York. New Jersey initially denied a gambling license for Donald Trump to open a casino because he worked with organized crime.
The world’s biggest crime families don’t have vowels at the end of their names. These dynasties have names like Rockefeller, DuPont, and Mellon.
While the media considers it ironic that Giuliani is now facing RICO charges, it’s silent about Giuliani’s using the RICO act to jail liberation fighters in New York City.
In the fall of 1984, 500 cops and federal agents staged terror raids in New York City’s Black communities to round up defendants for a show trial. Irin Carmon described in New York magazine the raid on the home of Dorothy Roberts, the noted lawyer and author of “Killing the Black Body,” whose husband Coltrane Chimurenga was one of those targeted:
“One evening in October 1984, Roberts was at home with her 2-year-old and her 3-month-old when the phone rang. The FBI and the NYPD’s joint counterterrorism task force, she was told, was waiting at her door. Placing the toddler in the crib and hoisting the baby on her hip, she opened the door to what felt like dozens of armed officers, who began to interrogate her and ransack the apartment.”
Coltrane Chimurenga, Viola Plummer, Ruth Carter, Omowale Clay, Yvette Kelley, Jose Rios, Robert Taylor, and Roger Wareham faced fantastic charges of conspiring to rob banks and Brinks’ trucks and to stage jailbreaks. Even their political activity was claimed by the government to violate the RICO Act!
Giuliani was the inquisition’s ringmaster. He impaneled eight grand juries to get around the rules that spouses can’t be forced to testify against each other.
The tactic blew up in Giuliani’s face. People went to jail instead of lying. It’s to recognize these courageous grand jury resisters that this case is called the New York 8 “plus.”
No bail for Cop City defendants
Trump and Giuliani had their mug shots taken but didn’t have to spend time in Fulton County jail. Seven inmates have died so far this year in the overcrowded, cockroach-infested facility.
Among them was Lashawn Thompson, whose body was covered in lice and bedbugs.
While Trump and his co-conspirators are being accorded their rights, that’s not the case for those protesting Atlanta’s Cop City. The proposed police training facility, costing $90 million, will be the largest in the country.
It will include a replica of a city block where cops can practice urban warfare. People want its planned 300 acres to be turned into a city park and urban forest.
The unarmed protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, was killed at the site on Jan. 18 by local police, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, and State Patrol officers.
Dozens of protesters have been arrested on domestic terrorism charges. Many were refused their Eighth Amendment right to bail.
Three activists associated with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were arrested on May 31. They were charged with money laundering for helping to raise bail money for the defendants. That’s what fascism looks like.
Giuliani is the real domestic terrorist. His cops fired 41 shots at the unarmed Amadou Diallo on Feb. 4, 1999, killing the African immigrant. His kicking 640,000 poor people off welfare was also terrorism.
The people’s movement needs to defend the Cop City protesters. Trump and Giuliani can rot in jail.
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