Rudy Giuliani Reminds Me of Willie Mays And Not in a Good Way

Two tales of Rudy Giuliani in the courtroom.

First from The New York Times Magazine on June 9, 1985 when he was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York:

How have years of investigation by hundreds of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, city police, state and Federal prosecutors come - for so much of the public - to be embodied in one man? How has it come to be Rudolph Giuliani versus the ''mob''?

Part of Giuliani's secret has been hard work, an innovative legal mind and a courtroom flair. At the same time he was supervising 130 attorneys in the nation's largest Federal prosecutor's office, he was personally devising the imaginative strategy for one of the most significant Mafia cases in recent times.

Until a decade ago, law-enforcement tactics had been directed at individual Mafia members. More recently, the F.B.I. has concentrated on individual Mafia family leadership. Giuliani's brainstorm was to go the next step: Attack the board of directors guiding all of New York's Mafia families in loan sharking, drug trafficking, labor racketeering and contract murder. Next fall in a single trial at the Federal courthouse in Manhattan, Giuliani will prosecute the purported heads of the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno families.

And this from The Associated Press today as President Trump's errand boy:

Rudy Giuliani, representing a client inside a courtroom for the first time in nearly three decades, showed some rust as he tried to make the case that President Donald Trump has been robbed of reelection.

The former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, who has taken over Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the election results, entered a courthouse Tuesday in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with a few dozen Trump supporters cheering him from across the street.

Over the next several hours, he fiddled with his Twitter account, forgot which judge he was talking to and threw around unsupported accusations about a nationwide conspiracy by Democrats to steal the election.

Not only has no such evidence emerged since Election Day, but the federal government’s top election security officials have deemed it the most secure U.S. election ever. In Pennsylvania, an Associated Press canvass of county election officials likewise unearthed no significant problems.

Nevertheless, Giuliani plowed ahead Tuesday, needling an opposing lawyer by calling him “the man who was very angry with me, I forgot his name.”

He mistook the judge for a federal judge in a separate Pennsylvania district who rejected a separate Trump campaign case: “I was accused of not reading your opinion and that I did not understand it.”

The former New York City Mayor reminds me of another New York icon - Willie Mays and not in a good way. The Say Hey Kid is best remembered for that sensational over the shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series robbing Vic Wertz of at least a double. But nearly two decades later during the 1973 World Series, Mays flailed about and fell down while trying to run down a routine fly ball.

The Rudy Giuliani who was bringing down the mob in the 1980's was Willie Mays leading the New York Giants to a World Series title. The Rudy Giuliani who is acting as consigliere to President Trump in 2020 is Willie Mays letting the World Series slip away from the New York Mets. 

Most people would rather remember Willie Mays at his finest hour. I think the same can be said of Rudy Giuliani whether he was bringing down the mob or comforting the nation after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Sadly, Giuliani's finest hour passed long ago and isn't going to come around again.