Fund, Fund, Fund: NYC Papers Roasting Rudy

By: E&P Staff Whatever it does to the 2008 race for the White House, the recent revelations about mysterious and buried costs surrounding Rudy Giuliani's extramarital affair with Judith Nathan when he was mayor of New York has certainly provided a boost to the city's newspapers coverage.

Not to mention headline writers, with titles such as SEX ON THE CITY and TRYST FUND.

There is too much today in the Times, Post, Daily News and nearby Newsday to recount here, but visits to their Web sites may suffice.

Here's the Daily News today: "Unlike her predecessor as mayoral girlfriend, Mike Bloomberg's gal pal, investment banker Diana Taylor, has never had a separate police protection detail.

"Taylor, 52, takes the bus every day to her midtown office and rides the subway to business appointments. In the six years Taylor and Bloomberg have lived together, she said she has never had reason to want or need personal NYPD security. "'I don't have security in Bogota or Nairobi or Moscow when I travel there on business, why would I need security in the safest city in the world?' Taylor told the Daily News yesterday."

New York Times columnist Gail Collins weighed in: "It?s fitting that Giuliani?s first big campaign crisis wound up being about his special subject: security. When he was mayor, he got a whole lot of it. The city was at one point paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block."

The New York Post added on Sunday: "A former Giuliani administration official says he's 'sick' over reports that his little-known agency was used to hide taxpayer money that funded police escorts during the ex-mayor's romantic rendezvous in the Hamptons. 'The cover-up of this and the explanations for it have been so disingenuous,' said Brendan Sexton, who chaired the Procurement Policy Board in 2000. The panel was charged $29,757 for travel bills racked up by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's security detail as he hung out with then-girlfriend Judith Nathan on Long Island."

The popular blog, Talkingpointsmemo.com, has been leading the way in following the case, along the way coining the title, THE SHAG FUND, and today did its own neat summary of the latest from New York media, as reprinted below.
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The Shag Fund not only paid for the 11 tryst visits to Hamptons.

-- It paid for hotel and other expenses for mayoral aides -- in addition to the security detail -- who also went with the mayor to the Hamptons on the tryst weekends.

-- Nathan's NYPD-chauffeured trips (without Rudy) to visit her parents in Pennsylvania, 130 miles outside the city.

-- NYPD detectives and city-owned undercover Dodge to drive Nathan around the city.

-- NYPD detectives and city-owned undercover Dodge to drive Nathan's friends and family around the city even when she wasn't in the car.

-- NYPD security detail for Nathan, personally approved by Bernard Kerik.

-- NYPD cops to walk Nathan's dog.
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