Securing the home. err, homeland... yeah, that's the ticket!

[Huckleman2000]

From the Daily News:

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik conducted two extramarital affairs simultaneously, using a secret Battery Park City apartment for the passionate liaisons, the Daily News has learned.

The first relationship, spanning nearly a decade, was with city Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero; the second, and more startling, was with famed publishing titan Judith Regan.

His affair with Regan, the stunningly attractive head of her own book publishing company, lasted for almost a year.

Dramatically, each woman learned of the existence of the other after Pinero discovered a love note left by Regan in the apartment.

The revelations about Kerik's private life come as repercussions over his suitability to be nominated for the post of secretary of homeland security. Kerik, 49, married with two children from his current marriage, withdrew his name from consideration in a sudden and unexpected call to the White House on Friday night.

Kerik said that questions about the immigration status of his family's former nanny and failure to pay taxes prompted his decision to walk away from the job. But speculation has continued that there were deeper and more controversial reasons.

Yesterday, The News reported that a six-month investigation showed Kerik had accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts without proper disclosure, and had ties to a construction company that investigators believe is linked to the mob.

Now revelations about his private life also cast a shadow on his suitability for one of the administration's highest-profile cabinet positions.

Asked about the affairs and the secret love nest yesterday, Joseph Tacopina, Kerik's attorney, said Kerik and Regan had denied the affair in the past.

Tacopina said Kerik's "friendship" with Pinero ended in 1996.

He would not comment on the apartment.

Regan could not be reached for comment.

But sources with intimate knowledge of both affairs painted a picture of passionate, and sometimes volatile, liaisons.

The tumultuous Regan-Kerik romance carried on for months, through the writing, publication and promotion of his autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," which Regan's company published.

The two worked out together most mornings at the New York Sports Club in Rockefeller Center and often dined at Fresco restaurant in midtown, according to sources.

Kerik visited Regan's Central Park West apartment almost daily, and occasionally stayed the night, with his police detail camped outside.

They became so close that Kerik's two nieces stayed with Regan while the commissioner's sister was hospitalized, one source said.

Regan visited the Battery Park apartment several times, the source said, but apparently never knew that his actual residence at that time was an apartment on E. 79th St.

Furnished corporate rentals similar to the unit Kerik used, according to the sources, are advertised at monthly rents from $3,150 to $6,200. Representatives of Milstein Properties, whichs owns the Liberty View, could not be reached yesterday.

After one encounter, Regan left a romantic note, which was later discovered by Pinero. The two later spoke on the phone.

"She wanted to know if Judith was still seeing him," the source said. "She told Regan about their affair and Regan told her she was shocked."

Many close to Kerik in the mid-1990s assumed that someday he would marry Pinero, a career correction officer described as spirited and attractive by friends, a close friend and a former high-ranking Correction Department source said.

The relationship continued after Kerik married Hala Matli, a hygienist in his dentist's office whom he met in mid-1996 and wed in November 1998, according to multiple sources close to Pinero and Kerik.

Kerik's affair with Pinero is at the center of two lawsuits against the city, both brought by correction employees who claimed Kerik retaliated after they crossed her.

The city settled one last year for $250,000, The News reported at the time.

The second suit, in which Pinero and Kerik were deposed last week, was filed by former Deputy Warden Eric DeRavin 3rd, who claims Kerik quashed his promotion after he reprimanded Pinero. The city demanded a gag order on both depositions.

Pinero declined to comment.

But sources with whom she has spoken said that on her trips to the Battery Park City apartment, Pinero was shuttled in through a side service door.

"She's going to be my wife for as long we live. I support her 100%," said Pinero's husband, who asked that his name be withheld.

Yesterday, Kerik remained at his $1.2 million home in Franklin Lakes, N.J.

After announcing his decision to withdraw his name from the top homeland security post, he remained at the house over the weekend, emerging only twice to talk to media.

On both occasions, he stressed that he had made the decision to withdraw his name from consideration solely on the basis of problems with the family nanny.

He said he had realized on Wednesday evening that there were issues with the woman's immigration status and tax status.

He added that he wanted to avoid any embarrassment to the President, with whom he had stood side-by-side at a press conference announcing his nomination just a week before.

Kerik, who had a national profile after the events of 9/11, had been one of Bush's most enthusiastic public supporters during the election campaign.

 

[LadyJeanne]

Kerik and Giuliani are pretty tight too, as are Giuliani and Bush.

Not a surprise - I wasn't expecting Bush to nominate people I could actually respect.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Not a surprise ...

Have you SEEN this man? *shudder*

Shanglan

 

[LadyJeanne]

Have you SEEN this man? *shudder*

Shanglan

Power and wealth, sweets. Makes even a troll sexy.

 

[rgraham666]

Why is it the people who talk the loudest about 'family values' and 'law and order' often have the least respect for either?

 

[LadyJeanne]

Why is it the people who talk the loudest about 'family values' and 'law and order' often have the least respect for either?

It's a case of 'the hypocrite doth profess too much, methinks.'

 

[rgraham666]

I figure it has to do with misdirection.

If you're watching a magician's right hand, you don't notice what their left is doing.

 

[shereads]

I don't care who he shared the Little Officer with. What I find most interesting about this is that so little is said about the issue of hiring an undocumented immigrant as a full-time employee. This isn't the first time a nominee to the Cabinet or the courts has had to remove his/her name from consideration because of a live-in nanny or housekeeper without a green card.

What about the consequences to this woman? Is she subject to deportation now, while her employers get a public slap on the wrist? People don't hire illegal aliens to take care of their homes and children out of compassion. They do it because they don't have to pay a decent wage, and don't have to make a payment to the person's Social Security account. The employer gets full-time household help for the price of room and board, and just enough of a salary so it doesn't feel like owning a slave. The employee can't afford to leave, even if the work environment is abusive, and gets to look forward to old age without a penny of social security or savings.

What greed. What arrogance. So it costs this ass an appointment to what Garrison Keillor refers to as the "Achtung Department." Big damn deal. What about criminal charges?

 

[Huckleman2000]

Honestly, I deleted several rants commenting on the utter hypocrisy displayed by this dick, and the people who nominated him, because I couldn't quite decide on what it was that most outraged me.

What it comes down to is this: I really don't have any clue how people like this live with themselves.

Actually, I don't quite understand how anyone who voted for Bush can live with themselves, except through some degree of the suspension of disbelief. But this is such an egregious example of clear and crass manipulation of the system, it boggles my mind how such an incomparable jackass rises to such a position that he can crash and burn in so spectacular a fashion.

 

[rgraham666]

I believe the correct term for people like this is 'sociopath'.

With no conscience they can rise higher and faster than people who possess one.

In the society we are cobbling together sociopathy is a valued survival trait.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Just exactly whose HOMELAND are we supposed to be protecting?

http://aztlan.net/homeland.jpg

Rumple Foreskin

 

[Huckleman2000]

I believe the correct term for people like this is 'sociopath'.

With no conscience they can rise higher and faster than people who possess one.

In the society we are cobbling together sociopathy is a valued survival trait.

Unfortunately, RG, you are insightful and accurate. [x-ref the various threads about depression here]


Rumple - re: both your post above and your AV - a picture is worth a thousand words indeed.

 

[shereads]

From this morning's Washington Post:

Giuliani's Warped Reflection

By Tina Brown
Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page C01

It turns out that all that Capitol Hill huffing and puffing for three weeks about how our mighty intelligence agencies should share information was irrelevant. They have no information to share, whether it's about Iran, Iraq -- or Bernie Kerik.

For New Yorkers the Kerik saga is a nice moment of one-upmanship at Washington's expense. To know that the former police commissioner and current partner in Rudy Giuliani's post-9/11 money machine was a disaster waiting to happen, you didn't need the bureaucratic talents of an army of FBI agents and White House lawyers. All you needed was to be a reader of the New York Post's Page Six. Over the years, Bernie has garnered more blind items than Paris Hilton.

No one in this town believed for more than 10 minutes that Berniegate was just another nannygate.

The New York tabloids are better informed than the FBI and the CIA put together, but they're even less likely to share what they know -- in this case, for political reasons. The Post's contortions have been something to behold. If this had been a Democratic nomination fiasco, Rupert Murdoch's relentlessly Republican scandal sheet would have served it up grand. Instead the paper had to regurgitate the Kerik and Giuliani spin while simultaneously painting the administration as heroes of rigor for surfacing Bernie's "background issues" -- not an easy feat of juggling.

Free of such inhibitions, Mort Zuckerman's New York Daily News has been whipping the Post's Aussie butt with a barrage of front-page screamers on love nests, financial finaglings, arrest warrants and more. One of the downsides of Bernie's booting the Homeland Security job is the media jollity we'd have been treated to when he first got caught taking a girlfriend out for a joyride on a Coast Guard cutter.

The problem for Kerik was that he could never rise above being Rudy's mini-me. The more Rudy channeled Churchill, the more Bernie channeled Tony Soprano.

Take his bizarre choice of lawyer: not Robert Fiske nor Lloyd Cutler nor some other well-oiled fixer in the corridors of power but none other than his old crony Joe Tacopina, a wiseguy defense attorney whose client list includes Peter Gotti's bagman Jerome Brancato. ("You wanna have a public fight? You wanna fight the whole defense team?" Tacopina yelled at another lawyer in a courtroom dispute during the Gotti-Brancato racketeering trial last year -- not exactly an Edward Bennett Williams moment.)

Who knows, maybe Bernie would have given the torpid Homeland Security behemoth a needed shot of testosterone. But Rudy Giuliani's protege and onetime driver zoomed up so fast he didn't realize that his rocket didn't have a third stage. Back at Mission Control, Rudy should have known the thing wouldn't fly.