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GIULIANI KEEPS THE HUSTLE GOING, EVEN AS TRUMP IS IMPEACHED

The president’s lawyer craves attention and influence—but what he really needs
is money.



Rudy Giuliani arrives for a state dinner for Australian Prime Minister Scott
Morrison at the White House in September.

Photo illustration: 731; Photographer: Erin Scott/Reuters

By
Stephanie Baker
@StephaniBaker More stories by Stephanie Baker
December 19, 2019, 3:00 PM GMT+1


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Rudy Giuliani is answering his phone less these days. For years the former New
York mayor was renowned for talking with any reporter who could get hold of his
number, but now he’s more likely to respond by text or call back with his lawyer
on the line, if he responds at all. When I first called Giuliani in February for
a Bloomberg Businessweek story on his foreign business dealings in Ukraine and
beyond, he told me he had five minutes but spoke for closer to 45. That happened
twice. By May, when I was reporting on a trip he was planning to Kyiv to push
for investigations to help President Donald Trump, he refused to comment,
texting: “Why would I call you after your extremely unfair article. Talking to
you was a waste of time.” Later that month, he butt dialed me, as he has other
reporters, and I overheard him apparently having a heated argument with an
unidentified woman. “I really don't care,” he texted when asked about the
episode. I’ve spoken to him a few times since May, but Giuliani declined to
comment for this story.




He’s on television less, too, perhaps because his appearances in defense of
Trump, for whom he’s serving as an unpaid personal attorney, haven’t always been
helpful. (In September, as the impeachment inquiry was launched, Giuliani
appeared on Fox News and shouted “Shut up, moron! Shut up!” at a fellow guest.)
That’s not to suggest he’s backing off. In addition to his roles as lawyer,
adviser, pundit, and shadow diplomat, he’s now trying his hand at journalism, if
you can call it that. In early December he announced he was working with One
America News Network, a right-wing U.S. cable channel, on a project attacking
the impeachment inquiry. The series focuses on the debunked conspiracy theory
that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 U.S. election and on
unproven allegations that former Vice President Joe Biden engaged in corruption
by calling for the ouster of a prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings, a gas
company for which Biden’s son, Hunter, served as a board member. Ukrainian
officials have said there was no active probe of Burisma at the time.





Undeterred by the hearings in Washington, at which he was invoked countless
times, Giuliani flew to Ukraine in December to interview so-called “witnesses”
to “testify under oath” about his unsubstantiated claims of Ukrainian
interference and the Biden family’s alleged corruption. (No one was under oath;
these were just TV interviews.) Several former prosecutors who once worked with
Giuliani have noted he’s getting “evidence” from the kinds of people he might
have been investigating in his heyday as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s.




Roughly 18 months ago, Giuliani’s world was gate-crashed by Lev Parnas and Igor
Fruman, two Soviet-born emigres who were seen everywhere with “America’s Mayor”
before being arrested for campaign-finance violations in October. Giuliani’s
back-channeling to Ukrainian officials with Parnas and Fruman on behalf of Trump
has landed him in legal jeopardy. Federal prosecutors are looking at his
business dealings and whether he violated foreign lobbying laws. Parnas and
Fruman have both pleaded not guilty. Giuliani denies any wrongdoing.




Giuliani with Lev Parnas before a funeral service for former President George
H.W. Bush at the National Cathedral in December 2018.
Photo illustration: 731; Photographer: Al Grago/Bloomberg

Besides Parnas and Fruman and a motley crew of former Ukrainian prosecutors,
there are more, previously unreported characters in Giuliani’s
universe—including a Congolese-born former NFL player trying to drum up business
for him in Africa. Giuliani is never so busy, no matter how hot things get for
his No. 1 client, that he can’t explore new opportunities.

The broad outlines of his business have been reported by Bloomberg and other
news organizations. But the flow of money still remains largely unknown, and the
details could determine whether he faces serious legal peril. Giuliani recently
settled a bitter divorce battle that revealed not only how much he’s amassed
over the past two decades—$30 million in assets—but also how much he and his
now-ex-wife spent: $230,000 a month. The divorce fight tied up his bank accounts
and forced him to borrow from friends to pay his taxes earlier this year, he
told reporters this summer. 

This week, Giuliani returned to the limelight with his customary gusto. His
client was on the verge of becoming only the third president in history to be
impeached by the House of Representatives. And so Giuliani was again everywhere
at once, dialing up some of the very assertions that plunged Trump’s presidency
into crisis by affirming he’d told Trump that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,
Marie Yovanovitch, was in the way. He was back in his element.

Some friends say Giuliani has always cared more about being a power player than
making money. Even if that’s true, the need to be on the stage doesn’t make the
need for money go away. He could have been a man of influence. He could have
continued to make millions. The compulsion to do both might be his greatest
vulnerability.

Much of Giuliani’s reputation as the prosecutor who took down the Mafia stems
from his astute sense of public relations when he took over as U.S. Attorney for
the Southern District of New York in 1983. Instead of having a secretary
announce indictments, as his predecessors did, Giuliani hired three people just
to handle the media, and he became a star. “I remember walking into the U.S.
attorney’s office one day, and he had a press conference on,” recalls Nick
Akerman, who worked with Giuliani in the office and is now a partner at Dorsey &
Whitney in New York. “It looked like the West Wing of the White House, there
were so many people in there.”

The America’s Mayor title was courtesy of Oprah Winfrey, who’d been impressed,
as so many were, by his leadership following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
After finishing his term as mayor in 2001, Giuliani went on to make millions
giving speeches and consulting on security around the world. He found national
and local government clients in more than 30 countries, from Brazil to Colombia
to Qatar. He started multiple companies—the biggest were Giuliani Partners,
Giuliani Security & Safety, and Giuliani Capital Advisors—and advised clients on
bankruptcy, security, and policing strategy.


Giuliani at the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2000.
Photo illustration: 731; Photographer: Doug Kanter/AFP/Getty Images

But he was aiming higher, and had been even before his term as mayor was over.
An aborted run for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000 gave him a
thirst for the national stage. He withdrew from that race in May 2000 amid
personal turmoil, announcing within the space of a few weeks that he had
prostate cancer and that he was splitting from his wife, Donna Hanover, after
reports he was having an affair with Judith Nathan. Nathan would go on to become
his third and now ex-wife.

It was that first run that planted the seeds of his network of political and
business allies in Texas. One of the most important figures in his circle is Roy
Bailey, a Republican fundraiser and Texas insurance mogul. Giuliani met Bailey
in 1999 and encouraged him to run for the Senate. After the campaign was
abandoned, Bailey became managing partner of Giuliani Partners. Bailey would go
on to introduce Giuliani to a string of energy executives in Texas. In 2005 he
helped him land a lucrative position as senior partner at a major Houston law
firm, Bracewell & Patterson, which was then renamed Bracewell & Giuliani. By
2006, as Republicans in Texas were looking for a successor to President George
W. Bush, Bailey thought Giuliani might be their man. He connected him to the
late T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oilman and prodigious political donor, says
Jay Rosser, a former Pickens aide. Pickens became Giuliani’s key fundraiser
after the two met to discuss his candidacy in 2006.



At the time of his run, Giuliani held progressive views in favor of gun control,
gay rights, and abortion rights. To soothe the Bible Belt voters who were uneasy
with the candidate, former Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions—a close
ally of Bailey, who financed, and frequently ran, Sessions’s campaigns—often
accompanied Giuliani at public events. (Sessions is one of several Texans who
achieved some notoriety in the impeachment inquiry, having written a letter last
year to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging the removal of Yovanovitch, whom
he said was disparaging Trump. The congressional spotlight was even brighter on
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and Trump’s first secretary of energy.
Perry was described as one of the “three amigos,” along with Gordon Sondland,
U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and U.S. Special Representative for
Ukraine Kurt Volker, who were pushing Giuliani’s irregular diplomacy efforts in
Ukraine.)

With powerful Lone Star State backers and Bailey’s connections, Giuliani raised
more money in Texas than anyone else in the race by the end of 2007. But his
campaign was dogged by his refusal to sever his financial ties to his consulting
firm if he became president or disclose his client list on the campaign trail.
“I’m an owner,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2007. “I’m not going to do more
than what is absolutely required.”

Unlike Trump, who managed to brush off similar criticism, Giuliani flopped at
the ballot box. And so he returned to making money. In 2012, Darwin Deason, a
billionaire Republican donor based in Dallas, joined Giuliani in an investment
firm they named Giuliani Deason Capital Interests LLC.


Giuliani welcomes Trump to the stage at a campaign rally in Charlotte in August
2016.
Photo illustration: 731; Photographer: Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/Tribune
News/Getty Images

Giuliani was a particularly effective surrogate for Trump during the campaign.
Many believe his hint on Fox News that then-FBI Director James Comey was
planning something big on Hillary Clinton prompted Comey to publicly announce he
was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
The announcement is widely regarded as a turning point in the race. When Trump
won the election, Giuliani expected to be rewarded. Trump offered him a handful
of positions, but not the one he really wanted: secretary of state. Many in
Washington said his international business relationships might make it difficult
for him to win confirmation in the Senate. But Giuliani told me earlier this
year it was his then-wife Nathan who prevented him from taking the post, because
she didn’t want him to take a pay cut. In 2017, Giuliani earned $9.5 million,
according to divorce proceedings. He gave up at least $4 million a year when he
stepped down from his former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, to work for Trump for
free in 2018.

Instead, he went on to become a kind of shadow secretary of state, traveling the
world first as Trump’s cybersecurity adviser and then as his personal lawyer. It
may have been a better position, given his needs, than the one that eluded him.
He could be the crucial man, the insider who knew what the president wanted and
was committed to providing it. And he could continue to make a lot of money.
“He’s really trading on his relationship with Trump,” says Akerman, Giuliani’s
former associate in the U.S. attorney’s office. “That's where he’s making his
money. He’s combining the two things. Everybody knows he’s the personal lawyer
to Donald Trump, so if you want to buy influence with the administration, you
hire Rudy Giuliani. That’s his M.O.”

Giuliani has steadfastly denied he trades on his connections to Trump or engages
in influence peddling on behalf of his private clients. “I don’t ask the
president for anything for them ever,” he told me earlier this year. “Any
contract I have makes it clear I don’t lobby the government.” That doesn’t mean
he hasn’t brought up clients with Trump. During a 2017 meeting in the Oval
Office, Trump asked then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to drop a criminal
case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab, who was
Giuliani’s client. Tillerson refused, but Trump told him to talk to Giuliani
about the case. The New York Times later reported that Giuliani attended a
separate Oval Office meeting to press Trump and Tillerson about the case. In
October, Giuliani told me at first he didn’t bring up Zarrab with Trump but then
said he might have done so. “Suppose I did talk to Trump about it—so what?” he
said.

In 2017, Giuliani went twice to Ukraine, once for a consulting gig and the other
time for a public speech, and both times he met with President Petro Poroshenko
and top members of his government. When I spoke to Giuliani in February and
March of this year, he grew testy when asked about those meetings. “I fail to
see how this has to do with President Trump,” he grumbled. Little did I know
that in the same time frame, Parnas and Fruman were meeting with Poroshenko and
then-Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko to push Giuliani’s plan to help Trump via
investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016
election. The meeting was first reported by the Wall Street Journal last month.

As for Giuliani’s consulting work in Ukraine, it’s still unclear who paid him.
He said earlier this year that a local businessman named Pavel Fuks and an
unspecified number of other “private individuals” paid him for the security
consulting contract he had with the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Fuks
confirmed the arrangement but declined to provide more details. It remains
unclear if those private individuals have any relationship to ongoing probes.

Giuliani met Parnas and Fruman in the summer of 2018. They’d been looking for a
way to get to the former New York mayor to recruit him to a company, Fraud
Guarantee, that Parnas was trying to start with a man named David Correia. They
described the company to contacts as an investor due-diligence company that
could prevent the next Bernie Madoff-like scandal.

Parnas and Fruman wanted Giuliani to star in infomercials about Fraud Guarantee,
similar to a low-budget ad campaign Giuliani did in 2013 for the identity theft
company LifeLock Inc. He met with Parnas and Fruman in New York in July 2018 to
discuss the company. Giuliani was advised not to do it because of regulatory
risks and a feeling the company wasn’t ready to go, people familiar with the
situation say.

He went ahead anyway. In September, Giuliani agreed to work on the venture in
exchange for as much as $2 million in fees and a small equity stake, according
to the Wall Street Journal. Not long after, Parnas and Fruman raised $500,000
for Fraud Guarantee from a Long Island lawyer named Charles Gucciardo. He paid
the funds directly to Giuliani Partners. Gucciardo declined to comment for this
story, but his lawyer said he thought he was investing in a company backed by
America’s Mayor.

“Mr. Giuliani was going to do for the Company what he did for LifeLock,” Randy
Zelin, a lawyer for Gucciardo, said in a statement. He said his client was a
passive investor in a company that he believed had “tremendous potential” in
light of promises that Giuliani “was going to be behind, alongside of, and in
front of the company.” Fraud Guarantee still has a website, but there’s no
evidence it’s had any customers.



Giuliani continued to juggle paid gigs with his shadow diplomacy efforts. In
December he traveled to Bahrain to pitch for a security-consulting contract.
While there, he met with King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and the two discussed
“Bahraini-U.S.” relations, according to the Bahrain News agency, which described
Giuliani as the leader of a “high-level U.S. delegation.” In January he, Parnas,
and Fruman held a Skype call with a former Ukrainian prosecutor general, Viktor
Shokin, who told them about alleged corruption by the Bidens. A few days later,
Giuliani met with Shokin’s successor, Lutsenko, in New York. The next month they
met again in Warsaw. Giuliani’s choice of partners in Ukraine was opportunistic
at best. Shokin and Lutsenko have themselves faced allegations of corruption,
which they have denied. During their combined four years as prosecutor general,
Ukraine’s equivalent of U.S. attorney general, Shokin and Lutsenko never
prosecuted any high-level officials for corruption, despite Ukraine being ranked
as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

Giuliani has accepted Lutsenko and Shokin’s often wild allegations without much
probing. During his recent trip to Ukraine, Shokin told Giuliani that his
medical records show “he was poisoned, died twice, and was revived,” a claim
Giuliani made to his 610,000 Twitter followers. Shokin’s alleged poisoning has
never been reported in Ukraine.

Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman became almost inseparable after the Fraud Guarantee
deal, friends say. In late May, Giuliani celebrated his 75th birthday with a
party inside the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium with about 40 friends, most of
whom he’d known for years—a mix of Fox News presenters and Republican lawyers
and businessmen from New York and Texas. Parnas, dressed in an unbuttoned
Yankees jersey and wearing a gold chain, and Fruman, with his graying hair
slicked back, worked the room as some of Giuliani’s old friends looked on
warily.

As he sought new business ventures that spring, Giuliani was working with Eric
Beach, a California political consultant who co-headed the pro-Trump Great
America political action committee in 2016 and had worked on Giuliani’s
presidential bid in 2008. Beach said in an interview that he introduced Giuliani
in the spring to a couple named Patrice Majondo-Mwamba and Debbie Smith to talk
about drumming up clients who could hire Giuliani for security work in Africa.
Like Parnas and Fruman, this couple is far removed from Giuliani’s universe.
Majondo-Mwamba is a former NFL player born in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Beach said there was no formal arrangement in place between Giuliani and the
pair, and he’s not aware that anything materialized from their contact. “They
did a call and had a meeting with the mayor,” Beach said. “They were suggesting
some countries had security needs that would fit within the Giuliani security
business.”

In September, Majondo-Mwamba and Smith were making the rounds at events held on
the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, trying to tee up
meetings for Giuliani to land security contracts. At a cocktail reception for
visiting dignitaries, they approached a U.S. businessman with links to wealthy
Africans with a brazen pitch: Help get us a meeting for Giuliani with a
prominent African businessman, and he can influence where Trump goes on his
first visit to Africa. Majondo-Mwamba introduced himself as the head of
Giuliani’s security company in Africa. He declined to comment for this story.

“They really wanted African businessmen to meet with Rudy to discuss where Air
Force One would land in Africa,” the American businessman recalled. “They kept
saying, ‘We have clearance from Oval.’” The businessman said he declined to make
any introductions but asked what would be in it for wealthy businessmen to meet
Giuliani. “It’s their chance to influence U.S. foreign policy,” they told him.

Beach said such bragging was routine. “I don’t think that’s surprising,” he
said. “I have been in tons of meetings where people say they’re close to Trump
and to Rudy.” Meanwhile, Beach said he’s been in discussions with Giuliani about
raising a private equity fund to invest in cybersecurity and other unspecified
ventures. He said the venture still hasn’t been finalized.

Over the summer, Giuliani tried to find more contacts in Ukraine to pursue the
investigations he thought would benefit Trump. Dimitry Firtash, a Ukrainian
oligarch fighting extradition to the U.S. on bribery charges, began working to
dig up dirt on Biden over the summer in an effort to get Giuliani’s help in his
case. The Justice Department has described Firtash as an associate of Russian
organized crime. He has denied all the charges. Two pro-Trump lawyers close to
Giuliani, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, took over Firtash’s case, using
Parnas as a translator. Prosecutors in New York have said that a lawyer for
Firtash transferred $1 million from a Russian bank into the account of Parnas’s
wife in September, raising new questions about who Parnas was working for as he
hobnobbed with Giuliani. A spokesman for Firtash said Firtash had no knowledge
of the transfer. Parnas has maintained it was a loan.

The cash from Firtash, who made his fortune in Ukraine’s gas industry, puts
Parnas and Fruman’s other efforts to make money in a new light. Using Giuliani’s
name to open doors around the world, they’d been hustling for months to try to
do a deal to sell gas to Poland and Ukraine. They lined up meetings with
executives from Ukraine's state-controlled Naftogaz and high-powered Republicans
with ties to Giuliani's old Texas connections.

Giuliani continued to make money on the side to finance his work in Ukraine on
behalf of the U.S. president. In July he traveled to Albania to speak at a Free
Iran summit and meet with the leaders of National Council of Resistance of Iran
at the organization’s camp outside the capital, Tirana. NCRI, which the State
Department designated as a terrorist organization until 2012, has provided a
consistent source of income for Giuliani, who’s given paid speeches around the
world for the group since 2008. Senate Democrats have complained to the Justice
Department twice about his failure to register as a foreign agent for that work
and other international clients.

Not long after his trip to Albania, Giuliani was in Madrid with Parnas at his
side. On the morning of Aug. 2, Giuliani met with Andriy Yermak, a key adviser
to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy, at the Westin Palace Hotel, a
five-star hotel in the center of the city. As they drank coffee in the hotel
lobby, Yermak noticed a group of people who were clearly with Giuliani sitting
at a nearby table. It was only later, when Parnas and Fruman were arrested and
their pictures were everywhere, that Yermak realized one of the men with
Giuliani that day had been Parnas, he recalled in a recent interview in Kyiv.

Yermak says he spoke with Giuliani for an hour and a half and they bonded over a
common friend—Vitali Klitschko, a former boxer and now the Kyiv mayor, whom
Giuliani has known since advising Klitschko on his first, unsuccessful mayoral
campaign in 2008. Giuliani pressed Yermak on what he knew about Burisma and
Ukraine’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Yermak replied that he
knew very little about either. Over the next few weeks, Giuliani worked through
Volker and others to try to persuade Yermak to draft a statement for Zelenskiy
to announce investigations. The announcement was never made.

On the same trip, Giuliani sent out a mysterious tweet featuring four random
pictures that appeared to show him wandering in the woods, with the comment:
“South of Madrid are beautiful small towns and lovely countryside and very
wonderful people.” It turns out he was in Spain to meet with another previously
undisclosed client, Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, a Venezuelan energy executive,
at Betancourt’s estate outside Madrid, the Washington Post was first to report.
Betancourt is under investigation as part of a $1.2 billion federal money
laundering case. A month later, Giuliani and Betancourt’s other lawyers met with
the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division to argue that their
client shouldn’t be charged. Jon Sale, one of the lawyers, said his client
denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment further.

Last week, Giuliani was back at the White House. As impeachment dominated the
attention of Washington and prosecutors dug around in his finances, he was
briefing the president on his recent trip to Kyiv. —With David Kocieniewski,
Christian Berthelsen, Erik Larson, and Greg Farrell



 

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