Rudy Giuliani, once ‘America’s mayor’, had a very bad year

Chalk up 2023 as Rudy Giuliani’s annus horribilis. On the other hand, 2024 may even be worse. The man once known as “America’s mayor” faces financial ruin and criminal prosecution with no end in sight to his woes. The hair-dye dripping down his face at a 2020 press conference ominously presaged what would eventually follow. It took less than two decades for the former federal prosecutor and contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination to morph into a punchline, full-time defendant and deadbeat.

Back in the day, Giuliani garnered a reputation for crime-busting – perp-walking Wall Street bankers and sending mobsters to jail. In summer 2023, a Fulton county, Georgia, grand jury indicted him on state-law racketeering charges along with the 45th president and a host of supporting characters.

As the year closed, Donald Trump’s henchman-in-chief lost a $148m defamation verdict in federal court for sliming two Georgia election workers. Days later, he filed for bankruptcy. Yet even before that he was banging a tin cup.

Reports repeatedly surfaced of Giuliani personally begging his godfather to pick up his legal tab. Long story short, that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump threw a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser to help pay his legal bills, but apparently little else.

Giuliani’s sell-by date had long expired. Then again, Trump had already done plenty for – and to – his sometime sidekick.

Depressed and drinking to excess after his failed-presidential run, Giuliani secretly recovered at Trump’s Palm Beach home years earlier. “We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Giuliani’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, said in Andrew Kirtzman’s 2022 book, Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.

Even knowing Giuliani’s