Attorney Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City in 1993, staying in office for two terms. He is currently Donald Trump's lawyer.

Who Is Rudolph Giuliani? Rudolph Giuliani, born on May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York, worked as a private attorney and with the U.S. Department of Justice. He later won the New York City mayoral race as the Republican candidate in 1993. He stayed in office for two terms, taking a tough view on crime while becoming a divisive figure because of his handling of police abuses and racial issues in cases. He later unsuccessfully campaigned for his party’s presidential nomination in 2008. Giuliani was also recognized for his focused leadership in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that felled the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. He later started his own security consulting firm and worked with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, before joining the president's legal team.

Background Former mayor of New York City Rudolph William Louis Giuliani was born on May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York, into a large Italian-American family that consisted mostly of cops and firefighters. "I grew up with uniforms all around me and their stories of heroism," Giuliani remembers. His mother, Helen Giuliani, was a smart and serious woman who worked as a secretary, and his father, Harold Giuliani, ran a tavern and worked for a brother's mob-connected loan sharking business. Although Giuliani only learned the full story as an adult, his father had been arrested in 1934 for robbing a milkman at gunpoint and had spent a year and a half in jail. "I knew he had gotten into trouble as a young man, but I never knew exactly what it was," Giuliani recalled. Nevertheless, Harold Giuliani was an excellent father who was determined not to allow his son to repeat his mistakes. When Rudy Giuliani was 7 years old, his father moved the family from Brooklyn out to Long Island to distance his son from the mob-connected members of the family, and he instilled in him a deep respect for authority, order and personal property. "My father compensated through me," Rudy Giuliani later said. "In a very exaggerated way, he made sure that I didn't repeat his mistakes in my life—which I thank him for, because it worked out." Giuliani attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, where he was only a decent student but an active participant and leader in student politics. Upon graduating in 1961, he continued on to Manhattan College in the Bronx, graduating in 1965. Inspired by his father's constant lecturing on the importance of order and authority in society, Giuliani resolved to become a lawyer and attended New York University Law School. At NYU, Giuliani truly excelled as a student for the first time, graduating magna cum laude in 1968 and landing a prestigious clerkship with Judge Lloyd MacMahon, a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. At Judge MacMahon's encouragement, Giuliani then moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the U.S. Attorney's Office. He received his first big promotion in 1973, at the age of 29, when he was appointed the attorney in charge of the police corruption cases resulting from the high profile Knapp Commission.

Early Political Career In 1977, Giuliani left the U.S. Attorney's Office to spend four years in private practice with the firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler in New York. Then, in 1981, he returned to Washington to serve as President Ronald Reagan's associate attorney general, the No. 3 position in the Justice Department. Two years later, in 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and began his lifelong fight against the endemic problems of drugs, violence and organized crime in New York City. During his six years as U.S. attorney, Giuliani worked tirelessly to jail drug dealers, prosecute white-collar criminals and disrupt organized crime and government corruption. Giuliani's 4,152 convictions (against only 25 reversals) distinguish him as one of the most effective U.S. Attorneys in American history. It was also as a U.S. attorney that Giuliani began to develop his reputation as something of a publicity seeker, sometimes publicly handcuffing mob bosses and business leaders on trumped up charges only to quietly drop the charges later. New York City Mayor In 1989, Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City as a Republican against Democrat David Dinkins. He lost by a razor-thin margin in one of the closest mayoral elections in New York City history, and Dinkins became the city's first Black mayor. Four years later, in 1993, Giuliani again challenged Dinkins. With more than one million New Yorkers on welfare, crime rates skyrocketing and an ever-worsening crack cocaine epidemic plaguing neighborhoods, the mild-mannered Dinkins had fallen out of favor and a tough-on-crime prosecutor appeared—to many—to be exactly what the city needed. Giuliani won the election and took office as New York City's 107th mayor on January 1, 1994. Comparing himself to Winston Churchill leading London through The Blitz of 1940, Giuliani set out to tackle New York's problems with a single-mindedness that bordered on ruthlessness. In his first two years in office, his policies helped reduce serious crime by one-third and cut the city's murder rate in half. Police shootings fell by 40 percent and incidents of violence in city jails, once a seemingly insurmountable problem, virtually disappeared by the end of his first term, dropping by 95 percent. Giuliani's highly successful "welfare-to-work" initiative helped more than 600,000 New Yorkers land employment and achieve self-sufficiency. Perhaps inevitably for a mayor so determined to fundamentally change the way city politics operated, Giuliani earned nearly as many enemies as admirers. Minority leaders abhorred him for his widespread reliance on racial profiling in law enforcement and liberals criticized his failure to reform the city's troubled public school system. "Civility" campaigns against jaywalking, street vendors and public funding of controversial art likewise provoked public ire, and Giuliani even garnered news over his threat to force the United Nations from the city due to unpaid parking tickets. In 1997 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the disease that had killed his father, and began undergoing treatments that sapped him of his usual vigor. Although he won reelection by a landslide that same year, by 2000—as his second term was nearing its end—Giuliani's popularity had fallen off radically partially due to what was seen as the racialized handling of crime by police, which included stop and frisk tactics. A number of high-profile cases came to the fore during this time: In August 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was beaten and brutally tortured by a group of police officers at the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn. Then in 1999, the weaponless Amadou Diallo was shot at dozens of times and killed by authorities outside of his door while attempting to reach his wallet. Another unarmed man, Patrick Dorismond, was killed by police outside of a bar in 2000.

September 11 Attacks Giuliani was suddenly thrust into the international spotlight by a tragedy that shocked the world and came to define his public career. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked two commercial passenger airliners and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Both towers collapsed within hours and 2,752 people perished from the attacks. Giuliani's leadership during the city's moment of crisis inspired many. Arriving on the scene within minutes of the second plane crash, Giuliani coordinated rescue operations that saved as many as 20,000 lives and emerged as the national voice of reassurance and consolation. "Tomorrow New York is going to be here," a somber but resolved Giuliani announced to the city, the nation and the world. "And we're going to rebuild, and we're going to be stronger than we were before... I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can't stop us." Yet years after his time as mayor was over, Giuliani faced criticism over worker safety during the months spent at the site of the 9/11 attack otherwise dubbed Ground Zero. Thousands of recovery workers have faced long-term health issues related to the cleanup of Ground Zero, with reports that the managerial emphasis was on efficiency and completing jobs quickly as opposed to heeding federal safety protocols. More than 10,000 workers eventually sued the city, resulting in a 2010 group settlement that totaled more than $600 million.