Sept. 16, 1992 turned out to be a day of brutal foreboding for everything that was about to go wrong over the next generation. The lesson that Rudy Giuliani revealed in that riot-mongering, racist rant was that he now understood the way to get ahead in today’s America was not to punch up at the corrupt and contented wealthy but to punch down on the poor and the underprivileged. It was the opening act of a Greek tragedy right here in the United States, an epic that spanned three decades as one man’s hubris put thousands of young black men behind bars yet propelled him upward toward the melting rays of a corrupt White House ... and the Russian mob.