Rudy Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett introduces non-New Yorkers to Ed Norris, a Rudy confidante who was deputy commissioner of the NYPD and who apparently picked up Rudy’s (and Bernie Kerik’s) penchant for romancing on the public dime:
Norris, who was still at NYPD headquarters when the Judi Nathan adventure began in 1999, pled guilty to federal charges in 2004 that he had used a supplemental police fund in Baltimore as if it were his own ATM, “financing romantic encounters with several different women.” The original indictment referred to eight women entertained by the police chief on the public tab, but that was later reduced to six. Prosecutors also claimed that the married Norris used the apartment of his chief of staff for workday liaisons that were called “naps,” sometimes occurring several times a day. Within months of taking over as police commissioner, he billed an October 2000 stay with “female number one” at the Best Western Seaport in New York to the fund, according to the indictment. The estimated $20,000 in playtime billings included luxury hotels and gifts from Victoria’s Secret, and his final plea included admitting to looting the funds and not paying taxes on the income.
Norris went on to become a much celebrated police chief in Baltimore and the head of the Maryland State Police before his federal conviction and six month prison sentence. He is now a talk radio host in Baltimore and a regular on HBO’s The Wire.
In case you’re getting antsy for the Golden Dukes awards announcement on the 31st, here’s who I would have chosen for the winners of the Dukes in each of the six categories, if I’d be chosen to be a judge …
Earlier today I pointed to the mystery surrounding that new ARG poll suggesting Hillary was opening up a big lead in Iowa. Outlier? Or the first in a late breaking trend? Prof. Charles Franklin looks more deeply and more knowledgeably into the question.
Obviously, the big news of the day is the assassination, in Pakistan, of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto. The early reports suggest that an assassin shot Bhutto twice at close range and then blew himself up. On first blush, that sounds like the killers — if in fact they’re the same people — learned a lesson from the first attack when the blast pattern left Bhutto more or less uninjured. Also important to watch, there was a sniper attack on supporters of rival former PM Nawaz Sharif earlier in the day. We’re not clear yet whether he was present at that earlier incident or not, though earlier reports suggest he was not.
We’ll be following the story closely today, bringing you the latest and trying to find the context to help explain what it means. Watch our news section to the right for the latest.
TPM’s Spencer Ackerman talks to Pakistan expert Barnett Rubin about Bhutto’s assassination and what it means for Pakistan and the United States.
TPMtv interviewed Rubin in October about the situation in Pakistan and our alliance with Pervez Musharraf.
TPM’s Spencer Ackerman just interviewed Benazir Bhutto’s longtime confidante and advisor Husain Haqqani. He says Musharraf’s to blame. “There is only one possibility: the security establishment and Musharraf are complicit, either by negligence or design. That is the most important thing. She’s not the first political leader killed, since Musharraf took power, by the security forces.”
Late Update: Lots more on this here, including polling that shows Rudy doesn’t even have any advantage on terror over his GOP rivals.
As poll numbers plummet, Rudy goes all 9/11 in new commercial.