The Irony of Shag

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There’s an irony emerging in the Shag Fund story. As is often the case, it’s an irony Rudy isn’t in a position to make much use of. But I think it’s important to flesh it out.

Rudy’s defense in all this has been that there’s nothing wrong here because this Enron accounting he was using in the mayor’s office wasn’t specifically to conceal the Shag Fund. And we’re getting the sense that he’s right. At least in part.

It seems more likely in his final years and months as mayor Rudy was living larger and larger on the NYC dime. And a look at the book-keeping details that are emerging suggests a very conscious effort to use these squirrelly accounting techniques to hide Rudy’s high-living ways from public scrutiny. Some of it was Shag Fund spending, but not all, probably not even most.

The problem is that even though the accounting techniques were part of a general effort to hide Rudy’s living the high-life on the city’s dime, it’s now shined a bright light on the Shag Fund. And the Shag Fund was evidently spread more widely than the stuff accounted for with the squirrelly book-keeping.

Who paid for the city car and driver given to Judi while she was still Rudy’s mistress?

Who paid for her security detail?

Why did she have one?

Does the city have to pay for travel and expenses for Rudy’s wife and his mistress? Can’t the budgeting be monogamous even if Rudy’s not?

The point is that the effort to hide Rudy’s mounting travel and high life expenses really does appear to have been a general practice, one not restricted to hiding the Shag Fund — a point that Rudy’s flacks are now trying to make, but one, as you can imagine, that isn’t possible to make in a really straightforward way.

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