He s the toughest opponent, and he s the person to beat. - koch says he is still the man for the job. - when i look at some of these people who are running, i don t think they can hack it. - it was my cases that led to the revelation of ed koch having turned this city over to a bunch of political crooks. - rudy s affect was this working-class, aggrieved, pissed-off white dude. and there s a big demo out there for working-class, aggrieved, pissed-off white dude, qed trump in the last, you know, seven years of our american political hell.
He would get it, because he was that driven. he was that ambitious. he wanted to be a power player. he wanted to have influence. and i think he more or less thought he was running new york when he was head of the southern district. - the lines are drawn, and the battle has begun. former u.s. attorney rudolph giuliani launched his formal campaign today to capture city hall from mayor koch. - rudy announced his candidacy in 1989 in the same room where fiorello la guardia first announced his candidacy. - in 1933, fiorello la guardia stood in this room and asked the people of new york to embrace the candidacy based not on political name tags but on integrity, leadership, and vision. - la guardia, for most of rudy s lifetime, was the prototypical mayor. - in la guardia s case, he was fighting the corruption of tammany hall against great odds with a larger-than-life kind of tabloid personality.
And so his arrival was like a gift from heaven. they lived on hawthorne street. it was a blue-collar italian neighborhood. they were a little trinity. on the kitchen wall, there was some kind of decoration with all three of their names. and i think that rudy was the star of the family. a theme that runs through his life is that he s got to be at the center of the action. he s got to be the guy. and i think it started on hawthorne street with mom and dad where he was the star. - i was born and i grew up one mile from ebbets field. - ebbets field, the home of the dodgers, a brooklyn institution. - the signs tell the story of brooklyn s love for its own bums, as they fondly call their team.
I mean, i know from my history that there is such a thing. and i know what it does and what it can do. - the fbi, sometime several years before rudy became the u.s. attorney, had decided to focus in a big way on the five new york mafia families. they had devoted separate squads to focus on individual families. but rudy had the idea, well, let s make the biggest of all mafia cases, where our targets are the heads of the five families. - the commission case was something that i developed actually shortly before i became united states attorney when i was reading some of the materials and reading joe bonanno s book. it occurred to me that we could do a racketeering case against the commission of the mafia. - joe bonanno, who was the head of the bonanno family years ago who was in retirement, wrote a book called man of honor. - he had basically written the book to describe his interaction with the mob. i can remember rudy reading us passages from the book
Moneymaking machine on wall street. - wall street has been hit by yet another insider trading scandal. - the merger and acquisition boom. - it s ten years behind bars for one of america s richest men. - the rise of the junk bond world. - the once omnipotent wall street king was left staggering off his throne. - the raiders, the hostile takeovers. - once one of wall street s mightiest, ivan boesky appeared for sentencing, in the judge s words, humiliated, vilified, and cut down to size. - and all of that was entwined with what was a deeply corrupt system. - you find for me in the law where the united states congress has distinguished multibillion-dollar financial firms from other institutions, and you show me where that is. - rudy created the character of himself as a working-class, seam straight, streetwise new yorker who wasn t gonna take all the bullshit from these elites. rudy knew that he was igniting a populist revolt against this class of people.