Rudy Giuliani clearly has a love/hate thing when it comes to the Mafia: celebrates the fictional characters, incarcerates the felonious ones, keeps mum about those in his own family tree.
The former federal prosecutor is both film buff and mob buster, still breaking out his raspy Don Corleone impression and quoting lines from The Godfather more than two decades after busting up the New York mob's ruling hierarchy.
But Giuliani spent a lot more time -- he once estimated 4,000 hours -- listening to the bugged conversations of real Mafiosi than channeling Marlon Brando's character. And long before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Giuliani was jailing "Fat Tony" Salerno after the 1986 "Commission" trial.
Giuliani's mob fascination -- including a reported link in his own family -- has already surfaced during the presidential campaign, although few expect much political fallout from the occasional Godfather parody.
While many Italian-American public figures avoid the word "Mafia," saying it reinforces stereotypes, Giuliani used it repeatedly at news conferences when he arrived as a US attorney in 1983.
"By using the word Mafia correctly," he insisted, "you actually help to end the unfair stereotype."
Giuliani's prosecutorial zeal led an attorney for Genovese boss Salerno to charge that Giuliani had "made it his personal mission to bury my client."
In addition to the "Commission" case, where the heads of New York's five Mafia families were indicted, Giuliani made his prosecutorial bones with the "Pizza Connection" case -- a mob-bankrolled plan to import US$1.6 billion in heroin through pizzerias.
His interest in the mob, as either movie patron or prosecutor, is unlikely to impact his presidential candidacy, said one political analyst. Voters are more likely to focus on his performance after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or his three marriages and the resultant fallout.
A 2000 investigative biography revealed that Giuliani's love/hate deal with the Mafia included his own family: His father and uncle had Mafia ties. Uncle Leo D'Avanzo ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation out of a Brooklyn bar, and used his father Harold as muscle to collect unpaid debts, author Wayne Barrett reported.
According to the book, the two were involved in a shootout with a member of the mob on a Brooklyn street in the early 1960s over a loan-sharking dispute. D'Avanzo was partnered with a made man, Jimmy Dano, in their illegal business, Barrett wrote in Rudy!
Giuliani did not dispute the book's claims, but said: "I'm not going to read it, I'm not going to comment about it."
The book said Giuliani's cousin Lewis D'Avanzo was a mob associate who ran a major car theft ring. It also says the FBI suspected that D'Avanzo -- who went to school with Giuliani and attended the mayor's first wedding -- was involved in several murders.
D'Avanzo was killed in Brooklyn by FBI agents in 1977 when he tried to run down an agent who had stopped him on a warrant for transporting 100 stolen luxury cars.
Among the book's claims is that the mayor's father, Harold Giuliani, spent a year and a half in Sing Sing prison for robbing a milkman at gunpoint in the 1930s.
Giuliani's ventures into mob-speak are an issue that Italian-American groups have complained about, said Dona De Sanctis, deputy executive director of the Order Sons of Italy in America.
"If Mr. Giuliani continued to do his Don Corleone imitation, that would offend and annoy a large number of Italian-Americans," she said. "We would prefer no jokes, please. It's not a laughing matter to us."
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