As a young lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, [Rudy Giuliani] was extremely ambitious, securing the best cases and prosecuting them with a startling ferocity. He slept with a Dictaphone near his bed, in case he woke up in the night with an insight that might give him an edge in court. While still in his twenties, he became a lead prosecutor in the corrupt-cops scandal that was depicted in the 1981 Sidney Lumet film “Prince of the City.”
A more characteristic courtroom triumph, however, was the bribery prosecution, in 1974, of the Brooklyn Democratic congressman Bertram Podell. Giuliani seemed able to summon a concentrated contempt for any lawbreaker in sight, but he harbored a special disdain for corrupt public officials. He questioned Podell relentlessly on the witness stand for two days, before Podell—so rattled that he pushed one of the lenses out of his eyeglasses—broke down and pleaded guilty. Giuliani relished the moment. “It was sort of like a fantasy come true,” Giuliani told the journalist Connie Bruck a decade later. “The real dream that most trial lawyers have is that the person’s going to break down and confess, like on ‘Perry Mason’—and that is essentially what happened.”
Sources
The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2007, p. 49
