Money for Nothing?

What if I told you that you could make millions of dollars doing it’s-not-clear-what? Well, Rudy Giuliani has lived the dream.

We introduced you earlier to Hank Asher, Giuliani’s friend and two-time business associate, who’s recently cropped up in a public corruption indictment. The Giuliani-Asher relationship is a tale to tell on its own, though.

The two met when Asher demonstrated his Matrix database software for Giuliani in 2002. The ex-mayor has said that he immediately became an enthusiast: “this was a technology that would have been very helpful to us even when I was the mayor and putting together programs for reducing crime to help us find serial killers, abductors of children, and of course terrorists.” Something else might have explained his enthusiasm: Asher and Giuliani inked a deal in December 2002 for Giuliani Partners to represent Asher’s company, Seisint.

The deal, first reported by The Washington Post this spring, was remarkably sweet: $2 million per year, a commission on sales of Seisint products, and 800,000 warrants to buy company stock. How much that added up to is unclear. The Post reported that Giuliani Partners got “most” of the promised compensation and that the stock warrants proved most valuable, since Seisint was sold to LexisNexis in 2004 for $775 million.

In return for all that, Asher got . . . well, it’s not clear. In fact, the Post reported, a Seisint shareholder sued the company in 2004 over the contract, arguing that it was a “waste of corporation assets” to enter into a contract for which the company received “no benefit.” The lawsuit was later settled.

There was at least a rationale for the deal.

Federal, state, and local agencies were interested in his product, particularly after the 9/11 attacks. But there was the problem of Asher’s drug-running past potentially coming back to bite him. So apparently Giuliani’s job was to help Asher land the biggest of those fish: contracts with the federal government. As the shareholder put it in his suit, Giuliani was hired to use his “influence with the federal government to enable Mr. Asher to take an active role in Seisint as a chief executive officer despite the allegations about his drug dealing.” (For the record, Asher smuggled drugs on his plane and didn’t deal drugs directly.) The Bush administration eventually made $12 million in grants for the software program.

But the drug running did come up. And Giuliani was there to help smooth things over. When The Florida Sun-Sentinel ran a piece on Asher’s past in January 2004, Giuliani was there to put things into perspective:

“I have a great admiration for what he’s doing, both in finding missing children and in coming up with creative solutions to terrorism, as well as owning up to his mistakes,” Giuliani said. “People do a lot of things in life. It’s a question of what you can do to make up for it, and Hank has done a lot.”

And when Vanity Fair interviewed Asher for a profile that same year, he “casually suggested” to journalist Michael Shnayerson that the ex-mayor might talk about him. When Shnayerson circled back to Asher after the Post broke word of his hefty contract with Giuliani, Asher was unrepentant about the fact that neither he nor Giuliani had mentioned their business relationship. “I was a client then,” he told Vanity Fair. “It just never came up.”

Maybe Giuliani’s advocacy has more to do with the fact that the two are (as the Post put it) “good friends.” Certainly they like to do business together. In December 2005, Giuliani Partners joined with Asher and the Mayo Clinic to form Jari Research Corp., a business, as ABC put it, “set on finding a bone marrow cancer cure and making a profit.”