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Giuliani Ready to Use Muscle to Put His Man in Mayor’s Seat

Rudolph Giuliani is backing Joseph J. Lhota, an ex-deputy.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

He has hit the road as a best-selling author, dabbled in presidential politics, tried his hand at overseas security consulting and hopped aboard the corporate speaking circuit.

But after a sometimes bruising and unfailingly colorful decade, Rudolph W. Giuliani is turning his relentless personality and blustery style back to the New York City office that catapulted him to national fame.

With the man he endorsed to succeed him, Michael R. Bloomberg, about to leave office, Mr. Giuliani is determined to play an outsize role in the race to replace him, quietly putting his political muscle and bulging Rolodex behind a former top City Hall deputy who is seriously considering a mayoral run.

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Giuliani and a coterie of former aides have coalesced around the deputy, Joseph J. Lhota, a Bronx-born Republican, with a single-mindedness that borders on fervor, encouraging him to leap into the campaign and talking up his prospects to business and political leaders, at times well beyond the borders of New York. In Ohio, a few days before the presidential election, Mr. Giuliani was overheard extolling Mr. Lhota’s mayoral qualifications backstage at a rally for Mitt Romney.

For Mr. Giuliani, 68, a Lhota candidacy represents a coveted chance to reassert his stamp on a city that he transformed in the 1990s, and a way to fend off what he sees at the ultimate threat to his legacy: the election this year of a liberal Democrat who rejects his conservative approach to policing and budgeting.

His anxieties echo those concerns that have been widely, but quietly, voiced in the business community with a growing sense of alarm: After an unbroken 20-year stretch of Republican and independent mayors, New York City could slide backward, Mr. Giuliani warns. In the wrong hands, City Hall could fall under the sway of public unions. Spending could spiral. The Police Department could retreat. Crime could surge.

New York, he seems to be saying, might return to pre-Rudy days. “It was the same concern of mine in 2001, before Sept. 11,” he said in an interview. “Because I felt like after eight years of the reforms we had, particularly the fiscal reforms, if the city went back into the hands of the usual Democratic politicians, it would be run in the usual Democratic political way.”

Enter Mr. Lhota, 58, until Monday chairman of the sprawling Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who is a potential Bloomberg for the post-Bloomberg era, or so the Giuliani-inspired thinking goes. (A sign above Mr. Lhota’s desk at the transportation authority read “Bring Back Common Sense.”)

A distinguished investment banker in 1980s, when he specialized in public finance, and a top executive at Cablevision in the early 2000s, when he ran a telecommunications subsidiary, Mr. Lhota is a favorite of the city’s influential corporate crowd.

In a sign of how deeply he is weighing a mayoral run, Mr. Lhota resigned his transportation authority post to clear a path for a campaign.

Unlike Mr. Bloomberg, who had never worked in government until his election, Mr. Lhota spent eight years in the highest ranks of the Giuliani administration — often filling in as acting mayor when Mr. Giuliani was away or ill — a credential that might, in the unforgiving churn of a mayor’s race, become as much of a liability as an asset.

Should he enter the race, Mr. Lhota will most likely be linked with equal vigor to Mr. Giuliani’s hard-fought progress and his operatic excesses, to a time when indisputable improvements to quality of life were achieved through profoundly polarizing means. Crime plunged during Mr. Giuliani’s administration, but racial divisions deepened, and before Sept. 11, even some of his supporters had soured on his brash style. After Sept. 11, he tested his soaring popularity with an ill-fated proposal to remain mayor beyond the end of his term.

Mr. Giuliani, never known for shying from a fight, seems to relish a debate over his tenure as well as his return to New York politics. Mr. Lhota, he said, “is the right person at the right time,” just as he believed he was in 1993 and Mr. Bloomberg was in 2001.

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Rudolph W. Giuliani with Joseph J. Lhota in 1999.Credit...Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Within a Giuliani cabinet known for its tightly wound and fiercely loyal figures, Mr. Lhota frequently stood apart: he was a number-crunching pragmatist with a knack for quiet diplomacy. As budget director, and then as deputy mayor, he brokered deals averting ugly showdowns over Mr. Giuliani’s stands on the placement of homeless shelters and steep cuts to spending on the arts. “In Giuliani world, he was one of the adults,” said Fernando Ferrer, who clashed with the administration as Bronx borough president and later ran for mayor against Mr. Bloomberg.

But Mr. Lhota was also a protagonist in several of the Giuliani administration’s most pugilistic adventures. After a series of disagreements in the late 1990s with the Citizens Budget Commission, an independent fiscal watchdog, Mr. Lhota called major securities firms that underwrote city bonds, discouraging them from attending the commission’s annual fund-raising dinner. Given Mr. Lhota’s role in selecting which investment firms received city business, the calls touched off a furor.

“There was an implied threat,” recalled Ray Horton, the budget commission’s then president, who believes Mr. Lhota was carrying out the mayor’s wishes. Mr. Lhota, he said, “did not exercise very good judgment” at the time.

Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Lhota remain close, their bond solidified by years of reciting lines from “The Godfather,” a weakness for Winston Churchill and occasional dinners to catch up.

Mr. Lhota declined to comment for this article.

But Mr. Giuliani played down the political risk of Mr. Lhota’s links to his administration, arguing that Mr. Lhota’s record — and that of his administration — spoke louder than any theatrical tactics.

“Almost all of these cases had happy endings,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But they always started with a very dramatic uncompromising position. Part of it was the time. We had to change the city. We had to change 30 years of the city and how it operated.”

As Mr. Lhota weighs a run, former aides to Mr. Giuliani have constructed a kind of campaign in waiting for him. Jake Menges, a former City Hall staff member, has tried to line up support from the city’s five Republican Party chairmen for him. Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s former chief of staff, has spoken to potential Lhota donors, sounding some of them out during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

Mr. Giuliani said that, if he received Mr. Lhota’s blessing, he would become a highly visible presence on the campaign trail for his former deputy, who he believes understands the city’s finances and budgeting “better than anyone else running or who could conceivably run for mayor.”

Indeed, Mr. Giuliani sounded sorely disappointed as he assessed the rest of the likely 2013 mayoral candidates, describing them as likable but unqualified. Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council “had to vote on the budget; she didn’t really do the budget.” About former Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., who ran the Board of Education during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty, he said this: “He really didn’t do that budget. We did it.”

Mr. Giuliani could soon find himself at odds with Mr. Bloomberg, who aides say admired Mr. Lhota’s record at the transportation authority but who is still expected to support Ms. Quinn in the mayor’s race.

Mr. Giuliani’s biggest worry: that as mayor, one of these Democratic candidates would agree to overly generous contracts with public worker unions, almost all of which have stopped negotiating with Mr. Bloomberg in the hopes of reaching more favorable deals with his successor.

“New York has a crisis; it has a fiscal crisis,” Mr. Giuliani said without citing specific data.

For many New Yorkers who arrived after the Giuliani era, and even those who lived through it, his dark vision may prove a tough sell.

“Rudy won in ’93 with a city that was on its heels — it was palpable. You felt it every day,” said Fred Siegel, a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn who served on Mr. Giuliani’s transition committee in 1993.“The city is not on its heels right now,” he said. “There is none of that now. Try to tell hipster Brooklyn that the city is in trouble.”

Mr. Giuliani does not dispute this. The city forgets, he said.

Mr. Lhota “runs at a different time,” he said. “It will be hard for people to remember how bad it was.”

Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Giuliani Ready to Use Muscle To Put His Man in Mayor’s Seat. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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