The lesson that Rudy Giuliani revealed in that riot-mongering, racist rant was that he now understood the way to get ahead in today’s America was not to punch up at the corrupt and contented wealthy but to punch down on the poor and the underprivileged. 16, 1992 turned out to be a day of brutal foreboding for everything that was about to go wrong over the next generation. Giuliani led the crowd in chants, using an obscenity to refer to Dinkins administration policies.” Beer cans and broken beer bottles littered the streets as Mr.
Yet now, as the New York Times reported shortly thereafter, Giuliani and his campaign were handing out voter registration cards to this mob for a planned 1993 rematch, and then: “At Murray Street, the crowd was less hostile but more inebriated. Just three years earlier, Giuliani had come within a whisper of defeating Dinkins as his Republican challenger, running on a campaign to clean out Gotham’s ungodly temple of money changers and corrupt political bosses.
It sounded crazy - an outside-City Hall rally of 10,000 or so off-duty city cops and their friends protesting New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, had turned into a beer-soaked riot, an unruly mob that carried signs like “ Dump the washroom attendant" and startled my New York Newsday colleague, the late columnist Jimmy Breslin, by screaming at him about an “ mayor.” But even more shocking was that at the center of the disturbance, egging on the rioters, was none other than Rudy Giuliani. 6 subway, that something wild was happening in lower Manhattan.
16, 1992 - at my preinternet computer terminal in the New York Newsday newsroom, working on an innocuous story - when news started filtering back from breathless colleagues rising up from the No. It’s been 27 long years now, but I can still vividly remember where I was on Sept.