Rudy Giuliani can’t quite recall whether it was 1950 or 1951 when his father brought him on the subway from Brooklyn to the cathedral in the Bronx for the first time.
He knows for sure the New York Yankees were playing the Boston Red Sox because his child’s mind couldn’t fathom how Joe DiMaggio was competing against his brother Dom.
Decades later, he got a signed Joltin’ Joe No 5 shirt, enclosed it in a glass frame, and hung it over the wood-burning fireplace in the library of his Upper East Side apartment. A relic of his childhood hero. An emblem of the life Giuliani had made himself. ‘America’s Mayor’ and all that.
“I have been an over-the-top Yankees fan since I was a little boy,” wrote Giuliani about his fandom. “It’s not just a passion. To me, the Yankees represent a prism through which I have learned about leadership and about life.”
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Nobody knows where the autographed DiMaggio is today, just that it is regularly mentioned in dispatches from the broke Giuliani’s increasingly labyrinthine legal troubles. Some say it was still in his New York condo as recently as last September; others contend he had long since moved it to Florida, placing it beyond the grasping reach of the court’s tentacles. With an estimated value of $10,000, the DiMaggio could be worth multiples of that if proven to be game worn. Verifying authenticity might be difficult however, given that its owner now conveniently claims to not know where it is.
As Donald Trump prepares for his second inauguration on January 20th and an administration that will profoundly alter America, his once most trusted consigliere and personal lawyer has yet another significant appointment in Washington that day.
To purge contempt of court, he has until that date to “acknowledge and affirm” everything he has claimed about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stealing the 2020 election in Georgia from Trump to be false. Following the duo’s earlier successful defamation suit against him, he was ordered to pay the poll workers $148m for repeating baseless allegations they doctored the count using a USB stick that turned out to be a mint.
His refusal to turn over all his valuables to pay down that sum is why lawyers are sifting through the sporting artefacts of somebody regarded as the Yankees’ official mascot during the club’s last great dynasty.
Mayor of New York when the team won four World Series in five seasons between 1996 and 2000, Giuliani was usually found in the prized seats behind home plate for every big game of a magical few years. Regularly cavorting on the field during victory celebrations or being doused with champagne in jubilant locker-rooms, he was such a devout fan that in the weeks following 9/11 he spent more hours watching and travelling to see the team compete for another title than he did attending to matters at Ground Zero.
After every World Series triumph, players and coaches receive diamond encrusted rings and clubs often ensure prized off-the-field employees, those deemed to have contributed to the success, get gifted those same baubles too.
Giuliani was regarded as such a part of the Yankee furniture during his mayoralty that he was somehow awarded four rings. To avoid charges of receiving political benefit in kind, he claims to have paid $16,000 for the quartet. In a country perversely obsessed with memorabilia, those trinkets are worth significantly more than that today.
Lawyers for Moss and Freeman want to repossess them but the 80-year-old rather dubiously claims he gave three of the four to his son, Andrew, six years ago. On Thursday, a New York judge who Giuliani has already denounced as “Marxist” may well compel him to belatedly hand over the rings, as well as the elusive DiMaggio, and, most seriously for him, the condo in Florida he now calls home.
The latest act in his own personal Greek tragicomedy will no doubt culminate in him finding microphones where he can rant and rave about political lawfare and the injustice system. After all, he didn’t do anything except endanger the lives of these innocent women.
While other long-term denizens of Trumpworld prepare to wield power anew, Giuliani is the lawyerly equivalent of the Japanese soldier emerging from the jungle years after the conclusion of the second World War.
Still fighting the mythical lost cause from four years ago, this martyr continues to debase himself for a lie and an incoming president who reputedly owes him $2m in unpaid legal bills. A peddler of conspiracy theories so outlandish he’s banned from Fox News Channel, ‘America’s Mayor’ is now the pathetic caricature standing outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the sweaty knave whose hair dye traced an incriminating arc down the side of his face under the klieg lights, the flatulent elder farting on television in mid-testimony.
The denouement of the 2003 movie Anger Management involves the main character Dave (Adam Sandler) trying to get on to the in-field at Yankee Stadium to propose to his girlfriend Linda (Marisa Tomei). When heavy-handed security guards try to prevent his grand gesture, Giuliani stands up in his seat, orders that the romantic be allowed to say his piece, and everybody obeys because his word is law. Before delivering his spiel, Dave turns and says, “Thank you Mayor Guiliani, you’re the man by the way”.
He was somebody then. He is something else now. A meme for all seasons.
