Crime Bosses Considered Hit on GiulianiU.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1987, with his prosecutors, John Savarese, Michael Chertoff and Gil Childers. (Photo: Mario Suriani/Associated Press)

In 1987, when Rudolph Giuliani was still the aggressive United States attorney in Manhattan, he came within single vote of having a contract put on his head by the leaders of the five New York organized crime families, according to an F.B.I. memo read in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday.

“That was one vote I won I guess,” Mr. Giuliani said this morning on Mike Gallagher’s syndicated radio show.

The vote was taken during the famous “commission case” in which Mr. Giuliani and Michael Chertoff, who is now homeland security chief, prosecuted the five families as a single criminal enterprise.

The memo’s author, Roy Lindley DeVecchio, is a former F.B.I. supervisor now standing trial on charges that he helped his prize informant, Gregory Scarpa Sr., commit four murders in the 1980s and 1990s. Brooklyn prosecutors have accused Mr. DeVecchio of tipping Mr. Scarpa to arrests and to other F.B.I. cooperators. Mr. DeVecchio’s lawyers have entered the memo into evidence.

“On Sept. 17, 1987, source advised that recent information disclosed that approximately a year ago all five New York LCN families discussed the idea of killing USA Rudy Giuliani, and John Gotti and Carmine Persico were in favor of the hit. The bosses of the Luchese and Bonnano and Genovese families rejected the idea, despite strong efforts to convince them otherwise by Gotti and Persico,” the memo states, according to the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes.

On the radio this morning, Mr. Giuliani said he received a number of similar warnings over the years from the F.B.I.

“You get used to living with it,” he said, according to a transcript provided by his campaign. “You say to yourself ‘It’s worth doing what you are doing and it’s always a remote possibility.’”

Mr. Giuliani joked that when he was first United States attorney, a crime group put out a contract on his life for $800,000, but five years later another group set the price at $400,000.

“If I were a company, my market cap would have been cut in half,” he said.

It looks like the last laugh goes to Mr. Giuliani. Carmine Persico is serving life in federal prison, and John Gotti died in prison in 2002.