Rudy Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment is on sale for $6.5m but, a local luxury real estate agent said, his name does not add quite the cachet it once did.
“It was like, it’s ‘America’s mayor’, he chose this building – all very good things ascribed to him living in the same building,” Dolly Lenz told the New York Times.
Now, though, Lenz “would suspect it would be wildly different”.
From 1983 to 1989, Giuliani was US attorney for the southern district of Manhattan, famous for crusading against organised crime. From 1994 to 2001, he was mayor of New York, leading the city through the horrors of 9/11. In 2007, he briefly led the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
But in 2015 and 2016, when Donald Trump entered the Republican ring, Giuliani became his supporter, aide and attorney. After Trump became president, Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, seeking dirt on political rivals, fueled the first of two impeachments. After the 2020 election, Giuliani’s work to overturn Trump’s defeat contributed to his own mounting legal bills and problems.
That work is now the subject of criminal charges in Georgia, for racketeering and conspiracy. Last week, when the former legal eagle stood for a police mugshot at a bug-ridden jail in Atlanta, many observers noted the irony.
In Manhattan, Giuliani’s penthouse apartment on East 66th Street, on the Upper East Side, went on the market in July. That same month, in a court hearing involving Smartmatic, a voting machines company suing Giuliani and Fox News for defamation, a lawyer for Giuliani said the former mayor was “close to broke”.
“There are a lot of bills that he’s not paying,” the lawyer added. “From a $57,000 phone bill to significantly more. I think that this is very humbling for Mr Giuliani.”
The lawyer, Adam Katz, did not comment to the Times for its report on the apartment sale.
Nor did Serena Boardman, the “broker to the fallen stars” who has sold properties owned by notorious figures including the fraudster Bernie Madoff and who is now listing Casa Giuliani as a “splendid residence” within a “monumentally exuberant edifice … boast[ing] bright, high-floor outlooks and an abundance of sunshine, high ceilings, and beautiful hardwood floors”.
But Judith Giuliani, the ex-mayor’s third ex-wife, did speak to the Times.
Describing how the pair bought the apartment for $4.77m shortly after he left office as mayor, she said: “It was home for us. He was my husband, and he loved coming home. It was a place where he went for … respite.”
Saying “Rudy had prostate cancer, when we first met, which we also lived through in that apartment”, Judith Giuliani remembered how he loved the wood-paneled library, “where he could smoke cigars and relax and watch his Yankee games”.
But she also said he had now tarnished her memories of the apartment, “gobsmacking” her by filming a pro-Trump podcast in the library, then seeing the whole abode searched by the FBI, in connection with his work in Ukraine.
The Giulianis’ divorce was finalised in 2019. Before its sale, Judith Giuliani told the Times, the penthouse apartment had become “no longer a home”.
