2008 Elections

Wednesday, Dec 5, 2007 06:00 EST

The bill for Rudy Giuliani's love life

View some of the documents that set off a new controversy over spending for security details for the mayor, his ex-wife and his affair.

In an article last week, the Politico's Ben Smith reported a story whose impact continues to be felt by the presidential campaign of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That city taxpayers had funded a security detail not only for Giuliani but for his children, his now ex-wife Donna Hanover -- from whom he separated while still in office -- and for his then-girlfriend Judith Nathan was not a secret. But Smith showed that someone in the mayor's office may have been trying to hide the expense of the detail by filtering some of it through obscure mayoral agencies (a charge the Giuliani campaign denies, saying the NYPD reimbursed the agencies and that the maneuver was simply a way of ensuring speedy payment). More than that, Smith and reporters who've followed have showed just how much money Giuliani's tangled love life cost the city.

What follows is a selection of some of the documents Smith relied on in his reporting, which Salon obtained through a Freedom of Information request. On this page is an example of one of Giuliani's early visits to see Nathan in Southampton, a resort town not far from New York City, where she had a condo. In that trip, members of Giuliani's detail racked up more than $1,000 in charges at a local hotel, the Utopia Lifestyle Inn.

On the following page is a collection of bills from the summer of 2001, just over a year after Giuliani had gone public about his affair with Nathan and announced his separation from Hanover. Giuliani was a frequent visitor to Southampton that summer, as credit card statements show charges for fuel and lodging at least once a month in each of June, July, August and September that year.

Finally, on the third page is documentation of the costs Hanover incurred as she traveled frequently to California -- reportedly to seek solace from her parents -- during her very public marital troubles. On these trips Hanover and occasionally one or both of her children were accompanied by unusually large retinues, security details that included as many as seven detectives. The total cost of security on these trips to taxpayers was more than $100,000. The documents available here show that just three short trips accounted for almost half that total.

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