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Rudolph William Louis Giuliani was born on May 28, 1944 in an Italian-American section of East Flatbush in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. He was the only child of working-class parents, Harold and Helen Giuliani who were both first-generation Americans and the children of Italian immigrants. He was raised a Roman Catholic. His father was convicted of felony assault and robbery and served time in Sing Sing Correctional Faciliy, and was reputed to have worked as an enforcer for an organized crime operation led by his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo.
Giuliani graduated high school from Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn in 1961. He attended Manhattan College in Riverdale, Bronx, where he majored in political science. He considered becoming a priest, but eventually decided to attend New York University School of Law in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1968.
Giuliani started his political life as a Democrat. He volunteered for Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968, worked as a Democratic Party committeeman on Long Island and voted for George McGovern for president in 1972. When he graduated from law school he clerked for Judge Lloyd Francis MacMahon, a judge of the United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. During the Vietnam War, his conscription was deferred while he was in college. In 1970, Giuliani joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York where in 1973, he became Chief of the Narcotics Unit.
In 1975, Giuliani switched his party registration from Democratic to Independent. He was appointed as Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Harold "Ace" Tyler. His first high-profile prosecution was of New York Democratic U.S. Representative Bertram L. Podell, who was convicted of corruption. From 1977 to 1981, Giuliani practiced law with the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler law firm, where his previous DC boss, Ace Tyler, was a partner.
On December 8, 1980, Giuliani switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican. He later said "by the time I moved to Washington, the Republicans had come to make more sense to me". In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General in the Reagan administration, the third-highest position in the Department of Justice. In this role he supervised the U.S. Attorney Offices' federal law enforcement agencies, the Department of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service.
In 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. This was technically a demotion, but Giuliani claimed that he sought the position in order to personally litigate cases. Here he gained national prominence by prosecuting numerous high-profile cases, including Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, two prominent white collar criminals. He amassed a record of 4,152 convictions and 25 reversals. As a federal prosecutor, Giuliani was fond of the "perp walk" (the parading of suspects in front of the previously alerted media). His critics claimed that he arranged public arrests of people, then dropped charges for lack of evidence on high-profile cases rather than going to trial.
In what became known as the "Mafia Commission Trial", which ran from February 25, 1985 to November 19, 1986, Giuliani indicted eleven organized crime figures, including the heads of New York's so-called "Five Families", under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) on charges including extortion, labor racketeering, and murder for hire. Eight defendants were found guilty on all counts and subsequently sentenced on January 13, 1987 to hundreds of years of prison time. According to an FBI memo, leaders of the five New York mob families voted in 1987 on whether to issue a contract on Giuliani. All by John Gotti rejected the idea.
Giuliani was U.S. Attorney until January 1989, resigning as the Reagan Administration ended. He was accused by his critics of prosecuting cases to further his political ambitions. He joined the law firm White & Case in New York City as a partner, remaining thereuntil May 1990, when he joined the law firm Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky, also in New York City. Giuliani first ran for New York City Mayor in 1989, attempting to unseat three-term incumbent Ed Koch. He won the September 1989 Republican Party primary election. In the Democratic primary, Koch was upset by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. In the general election, Giuliani lost to Dinkins by 47,080 votes out of 1,899,845 votes cast, in the closest election in New York City's history.
Four years after he was beaten by Dinkins, Giuliani again ran for mayor. The city was suffering from a spike in unemployment associated with the nationwide recession, with local unemployment rates going from 6.7% in 1989 to 11.1% in 1992, and a sharp spike in crime, with record numbers of murders and other violent crimes. This time Giuliani won by a margin of 53,367 votes. He became the first Republican elected Mayor of New York City since John Lindsay in 1965.
He was re-elected in 1997, winning 59% ifthe vote to Messinger's 41%, and became the first registered Republican to win a second term as mayor while on the Republican line since Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1941.
In Giuliani's first term as mayor, the New York City Police Department adopted an aggressive enforcement strategy known as the "Broken Windows" approach. This involved arrests for relatively minor offenses such as graffiti, turnstile jumping, cannabis possession, and aggressive panhandling, on the theory that this would send a message that order would be maintained. Giuliani also instituted CompStat, a computer-driven comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically. Critics of the system argued that it created an environment that encouraged police to under-report or otherwise manipulate crime data. The CompStat initiative won the 1996 Innovations in Government Award from the Kennedy School of Government. During Giuliani's administration, crime rates continued to drop in New York City.
During Giuliani's administration the privatization of failing public schools and a voucher-based system was implemented. Giuliani supported protection for illegal immigrants. Gay and lesbian New Yorkers received domestic partnership rights. In 1998, he codified local law by granting all city employees equal benefits for their domestic partners.
Due to term limits, Giuliani could not run in 2001 for a third term as Mayor. In November 1998, four-term incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement and Giuliani immediately indicated an interest in running for the seat. He was supported by the state Republican Party. First Lady Hillary Clinton was recruited to run for Moynihan's seat. An early January 1999 poll showed Giuliani trailing Clinton by 10 points.By April 2000, reports showed Clinton 8 to 10 points ahead of Giuliani in the polls. In this time period Giuliani discovered that he had prostate cancer and needed treatment. His extramarital relationship with Judith Nathan became public and he announced a separation from his wife Donna Hanover. On May 19, 2000 he announced his withdrawal from the Senate race.
The most prominent event of his tenure as Mayor was, of course, the September 11th attack.
Giuliani was prominent in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He made frequent appearances on radio and television on September 11 and afterwards. The 9/11 attacks occurred on the scheduled date of the mayoral primary to select the Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed Giuliani. Giuliani gained international attention and was widely praised for his leadership during the crisis. Oprah Winfrey called him "America's Mayor" at a 9/11 memorial service held at Yankee Stadium on September 23, 2001. On December 24, 2001, Time magazine named Giuliani its Person of the Year for 2001. Historian Vincent J. Cannato said, of Guiliani's legacy as Mayor of New York, "With time, Giuliani's legacy will be based on more than just 9/11. He left a city immeasurably better off—safer, more prosperous, more confident—than the one he had inherited eight years earlier, even with the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center at its heart. Debates about his accomplishments will continue, but the significance of his mayoralty is hard to deny."
For his leadership on and after September 11, Giuliani was given an honorary knighthood (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II on February 13, 2002.
After leaving office as Mayor, Giuliani has remained politically active by campaigning for Republican candidates for political offices at all levels. Giuliani and Governor George Pataki were instrumental in bringing the 2004 Republican National Convention to New York City. Giuliani was a speaker at the convention, and endorsed President George W. Bush for re-election by recalling that immediately after the World Trade Center towers fell. He told his audience, "based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, 'Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president'."
After campaigning on Bush's behalf in the U.S. presidential election of 2004, he was reported to be the top choice for Secretary of Homeland Security after Tom Ridge's resignation. He turned down the offer and instead recommended his friend and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. After the formal announcement of Kerik's nomination, information about Kerik's past emerged, and Kerik withdrew his nomination.
In November 2006 Giuliani announced the formation of an exploratory committee toward a run for President of the United States in 2008. In February 2007 he filed a "statement of candidacy" and said on the television program Larry King Live that he was indeed running. Early polls had Giuliani with one of the highest levels of name recognition and support among the Republican candidates. Throughout most of 2007 he was the leader in most nationwide opinion polling among Republicans. On November 7, 2007, Giuliani's campaign received an endorsement from evangelist, Pat Robertson.
Giuliani's campaign hit a snag in November and December 2007, when Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani had recommended for the position of Secretary of Homeland Security, was indicted on 16 counts of tax fraud and other federal charges. Media reports alleged that while Mayor of New York, Giuliani had billed to obscure city agencies several tens of thousands of dollars of mayoral security expenses incurred while visiting Judith Nathan, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Subsequent analysis showed this assertion to be incorrect. Giuliani's national poll numbers began steadily slipping.
Giuliani adopted a curious strategy of avoiding early primaries. In the January 8, 2008 New Hampshire primary, he finished a distant fourth with 9 percent of the vote. Poor results continued in other early contests, as Giuliani decided to focus all efforts on the crucial Florida Republican primary. But by then McCain's campaign had regained its strength. On January 29, 2008, Giuliani finished a distant third in the Florida result with 15 percent of the vote, trailing McCain and Mitt Romney. Giuliani withdrew from the race on January 30, endorsing McCain.
During the 2008 Republican National Convention, Giuliani gave a prime-time speech that praised McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, while criticizing Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Giuliani served as one of McCain's most active surrogates during the remainder of McCain's unsuccessful campaign.
Giuliani returned to work at his companies Giuliani Partners and Bracewell & Giuliani. He considered hosting a syndicated radio show. During the March 2009 AIG bonus payments controversy, Giuliani called for U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to step down and said that the Obama administration lacked executive competence in dealing with the ongoing financial crisis. He considered a 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign. In March 2009 he still owed $2.4 million from his 2008 campaign. On December 23, 2009, Giuliani announced that he would not seek any office in 2010 and on October 11, 2011, Giuliani announced that he was not running for president in 2012. He said "it's tough to be a moderate and succeed in GOP primaries".
Giuliani has come out in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He gave a prime time speech during the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention.