The Sordid Tale of Rudy Giuliani’s Yankees World Series Rings

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

The aforelinked piece on Rudy Giuliani losing his possessions to pay the two Georgia election officials he was convicted of defaming made reference to the dispute regarding his four World Series rings, from the Yankees championships during his time as mayor, in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. The current dispute is over Giuliani’s deeply suspicious claim that he gave the rings to his nitwit son Andrew in 2018, so they’re no longer his for the court to take.

But how did Rudy get them in the first place? It’s generally reported that these rings were gifts from the Yankees, given to him, while mayor of New York, after each win. Here’s a report today from the AP that just glosses over their provenance.

The real story is — shocker — a scandal. An embarrassment for the Yankees, but almost certainly a crime on Giuliani’s part. That he received the rings in the first place seemingly wasn’t publicly known until 2007, during his ill-fated run for president, when he campaigned while wearing one of them. The whole sordid saga was exposed by reporter Wayne Barrett for The Village Voice in May 2007, in a 6,000-word feature under the headline “The Yankees’ Clean-Up Man”:

Giuliani has been seen on the campaign trail wearing a World Series ring, a valuable prize we never knew he had. Indeed, the Yankees have told the Voice that he has four rings, one for every world championship the Yankees won while he was mayor. Voice calls to other cities whose teams won the Series in the past decade have determined that Giuliani is the only mayor with a ring, much less four. If it sounds innocent, wait for the price tag. These are certainly no Canal Street cubic zirconia knockoffs.

With Giuliani’s name inscribed in the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 diamond-and-gold rings, memorabilia and baseball experts say they are collectively worth a minimum of $200,000. The Yankees say that Giuliani did pay for his rings — but only $16,000, and years after he had left office. Anyone paying for the rings is as unusual as a mayor getting one, since neither the Yankees nor any other recent champion have sold rings to virtually anyone. The meager payment, however, is less than half of the replacement value of the rings, and that’s a fraction of the market price, especially with the added value of Giuliani’s name.

What’s more troubling is that Giuliani’s receipt of the rings may be a serious breach of the law, and one that could still be prosecuted. New York officials are barred from taking a gift of greater than $50 value from anyone doing business with the city, and under Giuliani, that statute was enforced aggressively against others. His administration forced a fire department chief, for example, to retire, forfeit $93,105 in salary, and pay a $6,000 fine for taking Broadway tickets to two shows and a free week in a ski condo from a city vendor. The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) has applied the gift rule to discounts as well, unless the cheaper rate “is available generally to all government employees.”

Needless to say, World Series rings were not available for purchase by anyone else, at any price.

Four sources, two from the manufacturer and two from City Hall, have told the Voice that a ring was made with Giuliani’s name on it in 1996 or early 1997. The City Hall sources also recall him receiving the ring at that time. In addition, one of these sources, joined by two other ex–Giuliani staffers, says the mayor did not take possession of the three additional rings until much later. The best recollection of these aides is that he got these rings as a package near the end of his term in 2001, just as his administration closed a number of critical deals with the Yankees. While the Yankees could offer no explanation for why he paid for three rings in one year and the 1996 ring a year later, the chronology cited by the sources suggests one. He paid for the three he received together, and then later remembered to pay for the one he’d gotten long before. He paid $2,000 less for the 1996 ring than he did for the others — another indication of how disconnected from market factors this reputed sale was, since many ring experts believe the 1996 ring, which ended a nearly two-decade Yankee drought, is the most valuable of the four.

I’ve quoted quite a bit here from Barrett’s reporting, but there’s so much more, all of it crooked as hell — a sordid tale of both large-scale graft and petty grift. It’s an extraordinary example of investigative reporting. Read it and laugh at now-disgraced Giuliani’s expense. Barrett’s report concludes:

Those who know Giuliani well say that when he thinks he’s in love, he waives all the rules of acceptable conduct. But the story of him and his team is not just a saga of disturbing infatuation and self-absorption. It is an object lesson in what kind of a president he would be, a window into his willingness to lend himself to a special interest, to blur all lines that ordinarily separate personal and public lives. It is not so much that he identified with the Yankees. It was himself that he was serving.

Turns out, we eventually got exactly that kind of president, and might get him again. It’s just that his name isn’t Giuliani.