’80s Plot to Hit Giuliani? Mob Experts Doubt It
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For reasons that ought to be obvious, the leaders of the city’s organized crime families have never shown much fondness for federal prosecutors. And with a crime-fighter like Rudolph W. Giuliani — who boasts of applying particular zeal to organized crime cases while winning more than 4,000 convictions as the United States attorney in Manhattan from 1983 to 1989 — the Mafia might not even mind seeing him dead.
But while a discussion along those lines was revealed during testimony in the trial of a retired F.B.I. supervisor this week, the proposition might not have been as simple as gathering the five family bosses for a show of hands on that ballot measure.
“The Sicilian Mafia killed Italian judicial magistrates and police officers, and the American Mafia didn’t do that,” Andrew McCarthy, an organized crime prosecutor who worked with Mr. Giuliani, said in a telephone interview. “In the United States, their general M.O. was that killing prosecutors and cops could do nothing but bring harm.”
To be sure, law enforcement was and is a dangerous vocation. In a 2006 report, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 40 percent of state prosecutors had received threats in the previous year. Three percent had been assaulted, as had 6 percent of their assistants. In cities with more than a million people, 84 percent of state prosecutors had received threats. The report did not address threats to federal prosecutors.
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