Witness: Mob Considered Giuliani Hit
Heads of organized crime families in the New York City area discussed whether to kill then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani in 1986, according to a witness in an ongoing murder trial in Brooklyn, N.Y., against a former FBI supervisor.
But at the same time that ABC News and the Associated Press, among other media outlets, report the startling news of the possible assassination plan, the New York Times casts doubt on whether it was ever seriously considered.
“The Sicilian Mafia killed Italian judicial magistrates and police officers, and the American Mafia didn’t do that,” Andrew McCarthy, a prosecutor who worked with Giuliani in Manhattan, tells the Times. “In the United States, their general M.O. was that killing prosecutors and cops could do nothing but bring harm.”
Giuliani himself, who subsequently became New York City’s mayor and is now a presidential candidate, joked about the alleged mob hit discussion, saying that he had difficulty keeping track of the number of times that he had been subjected to death threats as a federal prosecutor, and praising the FBI for its efforts to protect him.
Referring to an alleged assassination plan early on during his tenure as U.S. attorney, in which the value of the hit was supposedly $800,000, Giuliani said he was a bit worried to discover the contract price had gone down substantially by end of his tenure in office.
“After 5 ½ years of being U.S. attorney, they put out another contract to kill me, another group, for only $400,000,” he said in a radio interview reported by AP. “So I thought, my goodness, my value. If I were a company, my market cap would have been cut in half.”
