Tony Carbonetti

For decades, Dorrian's has stood sentry on the Upper East Side, the quintessential prepster hangout and high schoolers' mecca. Carol Dorrian Carbonetti, daughter of the bar's proprietor Jack Dorrian, has lived not so very far away with her politico husband, Tony Carbonetti. But unlike the bar that has watched over many a debauched youth, the Carbonettis are on the move. The couple has sold their uptown digs at 52 East 72nd Street.

While Ms. Carbonetti's family has made their fortune promoting vice, Mr. Carbonetti spent years cracking down on it as Mayor Rudy Giuliani's longtime chief of staff. Mr. Carbonetti later followed his fearless leader, taking a top post at Giuliani Partners and helping engineer his failed bid for the White House in 2008.

Although they didn’t quite get the asking price, the Carbonettis did well for themselves. City records show they bought the property as two separate units, paying $1.9 million for 3A in 2006, and $695,000 for 3B in 2007. They came out on top, selling both apartments for $3.85 million, slightly less than the $3.99 million ask but still a handy $1.25 million profit. The Carbonettis must be glad the place sold, as it sat on the market for over a year before entering contract.

Claremont House.

The 18-story condo building, known as Claremont House, was built in 1986 in fine faux prewar style. Contrary to what one might expect, a listing from Douglas Elliman broker Dolly Lenz notes that the Carbonettis never combined the spread. “Currently configured as two separate apartments, they can be combined to create a full floor home with approximately 2,300 sqft,” her listing states. Currently the spread therefore includes both a kitchen and a kitchenette, in addition to two living rooms.

The combined space is marketed as a four-bedroom, 4.5-bath apartment, which comes complete with a 302-square-foot living room (the main one), a library (ideal for late night Republican strategizing)  and a small balcony off the master bedroom, from which to watch the kids stumble home.

eknutsen@observer.com

Ed Cox, the Republican State Committee chairman, has suggested as much. He won the chairmanship over Henry Wojtaszek, who was backed by Giuliani and his surrogates Jake Menges and Tony Carbonetti. (Menges told Liz Benjamin that a Times report that Giuliani will not seek the governorship is "premature.") The door was left open to Giuliani as a senatorial candidate.

Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, a Cox backer, just offered this reaction to the Times report: "I knew you were going to ask that obviously I would love to see him run for the U.S...uh, for the governorship. We're going to have great candidates out there that are running. Governor Paterson has indicated that he's going all the way, so it will be a very vulnerable incumbent, and I'm very interested that governor, uh...Mayor Giuliani has not ruled out running for the U.S. Senate against Senator Gillibrand. And I think that would be great for our state if he did, and he would be great for our country. I believe he would be elected, and he would serve us well in the U.S. senate."

Here's another reaction too good to pass up: Paterson 2010 advisor Tracy Sefl's AIM away message is "Noun, Verb, 2010," an echo of Joe Biden's famous, belittling epithet.

"I am always there for Rudy if he decides to run for office," Carbonetti said. "I'm there doing anything I can. I am still an adviser, confidante and friend." And, he added, "He is still weighing his options about whether he will run for governor or not."

Carbonetti said he will serve as a strategic adviser to Langone but the new job will allow him more freedom to pursue other business endeavors, namely a new consulting company he is starting with Chris Henick, a former aide to Karl Rove.

The new firm, which is not yet officially named, will have offices in New York and Washington D.C., and will specialize in helping formally freewheeling hedge funds and investment banks navigate the new environment of expanded government regulation.

Carbonetti says that he will maintain an association (and email address) with Giuliani Partners, though he will not be in a paid position.

Mr. Giuliani is in danger of being a permanent "Fmr."
If he wants to have a public future outside of cable commentary gigs, his options now seem limited to one elected office: governor of the State of New York. His most loyal backers are already starting to lay down the foundation for such a campaign.

Here's what Randy Mastro, the former deputy mayor and close Giuliani associate, said in response to a question from The Observer about the possibility of the former mayor running: "If ever New York State needed strong leadership in this fiscal crisis, it's today. And the one thing we know for sure is that Rudy Giuliani is a strong leader who led our city through its fiscal crisis in the early '90s. So New York State could use him now more than ever."

In conversations with Republicans around the state, a couple of other candidates come up regularly as potential challengers to weaker-by-the-day Governor David Paterson next year.

Officials and consultants talk about Rick Lazio, the former congressman who ran unsuccessfully for Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000. They mention Edward Cox, a lawyer (and son-in-law of Richard M. Nixon) who ran even more unsuccessfully for the Senate seat in 2006.

But Mr. Giuliani, undeclared though he is, is widely acknowledged as the 800-pound G.O.P. gorilla in the room.
It should be said that it is very, very early in the campaign season, and that there is as of now no hard evidence that Mr. Giuliani has resolved to run. He has yet to make any formal foray into the race, and has not reached out to Republican chairs around the state.

"He hasn't made his mind up as to his political future," said Anthony Carbonetti, a senior political adviser to Mr. Giuliani. "He obviously loves the city and state very much, but he has not given thought to the point where he has made a decision."
But with a unique résumé, a national fund-raising base that is at least partly intact and near-universal name recognition, Mr. Giuliani may find it all too much for him to resist, his supporters seem to believe.

"Rudy and some of Rudy's people have always thought that he would excel more at an executive position rather than a legislative position," said the former congressman Guy Molinari, adding, "As the days go by and I talk to various people, more and more I'm encouraged that some of his close friends believe that he is going to run."

"Rudy has got instant name recognition," said Robert Christman, the Republican chairman in Allegany County. "Obviously, he came off the platform at the convention with a lot of enthusiasm; he is probably at this point the candidate with the most plausibility. There's no doubt about that."

Mr. Christman said neither he nor any of the other Republican County chairs he knows had been formally approached by Mr. Giuliani or his emissaries.

"But there has been a lot of informal communication about him," Mr. Christman added. "In conversation with the various chairs and politicals in the Republican Party, his name has come up, and obviously that's the beginning of the process."

At the same time, Mr. Giuliani's name has also been circulated by supporters of his potential opponents, and in a less flattering light. They bring up Mr. Giuliani's ill-fated presidential run, in which he failed to win a single primary or delegate, and question whether all the "America's Mayor" imagery still has much currency with New York voters.

There's also the matter of Mr. Giuliani's last high-profile appearance at the Republican National Convention, which didn't exactly have crossover appeal. His malicious mocking of Mr. Obama, the current president of the United States, as a "community organizer" did not go over big with Democrats, and New York, ultimately, has a lot of them.

And New York Republicans with even longer memories are bothered less by the haphazard 2008 campaign than by memories of Mr. Giuliani's last statewide campaign. That would be the Senate bid in 2000 that ended, officially, with the mayor withdrawing to deal with a diagnosis of prostate cancer, but which was preceded by much public indecision about whether to commit to the race and, more memorably, a public declaration of love by Mr. Giuliani for his mistress while he was still married.

"One thing that needs to be watched for is what happened last time," said one longtime ally of Mr. Lazio. "Rick wanted to get in early. Giuliani announces, and Rick is pushed aside by the Republican leadership until Giuliani got sick with five months to go in the race. So if Giuliani is going to do it, he can't play his Hamlet routine back and forth and decide later on. He needs to actually step up, and then Rick can make his decision about what he is going to do."

(Mr. Lazio entered the 2000 race late and suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Mrs. Clinton.)

"This is 2000 all over again," said one influential Republican consultant not allied with any of the prospective candidates. "Lazio trying to take action to potentially forestall somebody else's candidacy, but having no real capacity to do so until Rudy makes up his mind. I think we've all seen this movie."
This time, though, the stakes for Mr. Giuliani are higher.

Even his closest supporters acknowledge that his options for returning to public life are limited. Even if he ran for and won a Senate seat, at 64, he's too old (and too Republican) to have much of a chance of wielding any real influence before retirement age.

As for running for mayor again one day-he's allowed-his supporters are taking a been-there, done-that attitude. The presidential thing didn't work out, and people in the Giuliani camp acknowledge that the idea of another two-year race is stomach-turning.

Which leaves governor.

"It's a lot easier," said one source close to Mr. Giuliani.
"There may be a lot of people licking their chops," said Lowell Conrad, a Republican chairman from Livingston County. "But when it comes down to it, it's got to be someone who has enough money to win a statewide race."

Some supporters of Mr. Lazio expressed a suspicion that Mr. Giuliani's flirtations with a run were motivated by his need to heighten his political profile to benefit his once-booming consulting business, Giuliani Partners. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Giuliani's longtime spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, left the firm.

Then again, one source close to Mr. Giuliani pointed out that another former Giuliani operative, Matt Mahoney, was already working to prepare the road for a potential run for governor. Mr. Mahoney is a former Giuliani advance man who did a stint in the State Senate before joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reelection campaign last month to help build the mayor's support among Republicans.

According to the source, part of Mr. Mahoney's unofficial role, both in the Senate and with Mr. Bloomberg, was smoothing out any remaining hard feelings toward Mr. Giuliani. His time spent with Mr. Bloomberg's highly funded campaign is also expected to give Mr. Mahoney, and the Giuliani universe, more up-to-date state and city experience after the decade or so Mr. Giuliani spent on the national scene, the source said.

One thing Giuliani supporters and critics both seem to believe is that he's unlikely to jump in unless it looks like a reasonably sure thing.

"Certainly he knows that if he runs and loses, it's a disaster," said an adviser to Mr. Lazio. "So I think he waits to see what happens with Paterson."
But still.

"If a poll came out tomorrow that said Mao Zedong could be a competitive nominee for governor," said the influential Republican consultant, "lots of Republicans would be for him."

Senior political adviser Tony Carbonetti, former Deputy Mayor Peter Powers, and Giuliani’s new unofficial spokesman, the actor Jon Voigt, couldn’t resist tossing around some Nerf footballs outside of a Giuliani campaign headquarters in Broward County just now, where the former mayor thanked volunteers working the phone banks.

The campaign’s security detail finally had to call them back, mom-like, to the bus, which was taking off for another event.

I called Giuliani's senior political adviser Tony Carbonetti for a response, and he said, “Rudy Giuliani’s commitment to his city and his country on Sept. 11 and the days and months following speaks for itself.”

Which may not be their last word on the matter.

UPDATE: McEntee's office just sent over a statement:

Here's what Carbonetti said:

"Rudy accepts responsibility for it," said Carbonetti. "That being said, let's move to my real thoughts on this, which are, how would we know? Everything he's been accused of was personal to him."

"When you look at the allegations and issues he had in the past, none of that had to do with his work as police commissioner. It was all private to him. Him and his home."

I asked Carbonetti if the Kerik scandal reflected poorly on Giuliani's judgment.  

"That's' what I'm trying to get to," said Carbonetti. "Because you like to think you learned something every time. And you say, 'OK. What did I learn in this?' And I can't point to something. What was my sign? I want to take something out of this knowing we might be in a position one day to appoint more people.  And I'm saying 'what did we miss?' And it bothers me because I can't come up with what I missed. But there's got to be something, you say to yourself."

I asked if he or Giuliani had ever seen any signs to suggest something suspicious about Kerik.

"I'd never been to his apartment," Carbonetti said. "Rudy had never been to his apartment. We knew this guy as you know, a guy who as corrections commissioner kicked ass in the city jails, brought crime down 90 percent in the city prisons, and cut overtime by 40 percent. He shows up at City Hall, and he's a big guy, he's a stud, he's kick ass, and you're like 'him!'"

Regarding the subsequent revelations about Kerik, Carbonetti reiterated that there was no way he or Giuliani could have known.

"How the hell am I going to know that," he said.

In fact, Mr. Carbonetti, a senior political adviser for the Rudy Giuliani campaign, is pretty much a newcomer to thinking about politics on a global level.

Not that he’s intimidated.

“I’m a different person than I was in City Hall,” said Mr. Carbonetti in a recent interview over beers in an Outback Steakhouse in Manhattan. “I don’t have any self-doubt.”

An affable back-slapper with short salt-and-pepper hair, full cheeks, small gold-framed glasses and a big gray suit, the 38-year-old Mr. Carbonetti’s entire political experience comes at the service of Mr. Giuliani, a longtime family friend.

Over the past couple of years, he’s made the abrupt career leap from local political fixer to architect of a front-running presidential campaign.

Early on in the campaign, Mr. Carbonetti—who served as Mr. Giuliani’s chief of staff in City Hall—helped formulate carefully calibrated positions on issues like abortion, guns and gay rights in an attempt to make them more palatable to conservative Republican primary voters without obviously contradicting the former mayor’s previously liberal record on social issues.

Mr. Carbonetti served as a sort of friendly emissary for his notoriously intemperate boss, reaching out to Mr. Giuliani’s old rivals in the party (Al D’Amato) and serving as a sounding board for complaints from potential new ones (Michael Bloomberg).

It was also Mr. Carbonetti, as much as anyone, who cleared the way for Mr. Giuliani to run for president in the first place.

“I made sure we went out and endorsed the right people, did the right things for the party, kept all the doors open that we possibly could,” Mr. Carbonetti said, referring to his extracurricular activities while working at the firm Giuliani Partners. “After the [2006] cycle was done I said, ‘Let’s start a committee.’”

He subsequently recruited Republican National Committee operative Mike DuHaime—“We went all the way across the water to Jersey to get him,” Mr. Carbonetti said—and former Rove aide Chris Henick to work on the campaign.

Pointing to Mr. Giuliani’s lead in national polls and unexpected competitiveness in key conservative-leaning primary states, Mr. Carbonetti evinces delight at the way his presidential project has gone so far.

“I don’t believe this can be taken from us,” Mr. Carbonetti said of that lead, placing his hands in the air around an imaginary throat. “Now that I have locked that up I can go do battle elsewhere.”

Mr. Carbonetti makes it all sound pretty simple.

But what if it’s not?

FRAN REITER, THE deputy campaign manager of Mr. Giuliani’s 1993 campaign and a former City Hall official, said that while Mr. Carbonetti was an effective “behind-the-scenes type guy” she doubted his ability to navigate all the complicated policy questions that come up in a presidential campaign.

“He does have good political instincts,” said Ms. Reiter. “But I don’t think they are necessarily translatable.”

And some veterans of the national Republican scene, pointing to missteps like Mr. Giuliani’s poor preparation for the early debates, his stuttering late entry into the New Hampshire primary battle and the campaign’s inability to quell the nagging scandal surrounding his connection to the now disgraced former aide Bernie Kerik, have been downright dismissive.

“I don’t know of another Republican campaign that he has worked on, and this is not a position for on-the-job training,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who worked for Robert Dole in 1996 but is not working for any of the 2008 candidates. “Other than with Giuliani, I’ve never heard of the guy.”

Certainly, his credentials as a would-be presidential kingmaker are unusual.

MR. CARBONETTI GREW up on 116th Street and Second Avenue in what was then called Italian Harlem.

His grandfather, Louis Carbonetti Sr, was a Democratic district leader and antagonist of the infamous Tammany Hall’s Carmine De Sapio. Louis was also pals with a failed stickup artist named Harold Giuliani.

Their sons, Louis Carbonetti Jr. and Rudy Giuliani, also became friends.

As Mr. Giuliani built a successful career as a prosecutor, Mr. Carbonetti’s father stayed in East Harlem, established a printing company and eventually raising three sons with his wife, JoAnna Aniello, a city worker.

A political junkie like his father and childhood friend, Louis took his middle son, Tony, to the 1976 Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden.

“I still have some of the buttons that we bought then,” said Mr. Carbonetti. “My dad just sent me some of the ‘Romney for President’ buttons from 1968. It’s just amazing how much Mitt looks like his dad.”

A year later, the Carbonettis moved to the mostly uninhabited Queens neighborhood of Roosevelt Island. When his parents split, the 13-year-old chose to stay with his father. His two brothers, Louis, now a printer in North Carolina, and Joseph, now the owner of a pub called the Brass Monkey on 12th Street, went to live with their mother in Brooklyn. (Mr. Carbonetti has a third brother through his father’s second marriage.)

Just a few years later, in 1986, Mr. Carbonetti, an A-average high school student at the La Salle Academy on Second Street, went to get career advice from then U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern called “a surrogate father to him.”

“‘Become a lawyer,’” Mr. Carbonetti remembers Mr. Giuliani telling him. “Everyone wanted me to be a lawyer. I never listened.”

Boston University didn’t suit Mr. Carbonetti. He said he found his political science major too abstract and unsatisfying. He was restless. So when Mr. Giuliani ran for mayor in 1989, Mr. Carbonetti took a semester off to perform menial tasks on the campaign.

Mr. Giuliani lost to David Dinkins, and Mr. Carbonetti went back to school. When his father’s business went bankrupt in 1990, he ran out of money for tuition. He attended graduation but never received a diploma. The bar he tended to was called Cityside in Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

In 1992, with Mr. Giuliani about to make another run for mayor, Mr. Carbonetti contacted Peter Powers, then Mr. Giuliani’s chief adviser, to offer his services. A few weeks later Mr. Carbonetti was made a deputy director of field operations.

“He was a natural magnet for field workers and really motivated them,” said Mr. Mastro, a former deputy mayor for Mr. Giuliani and fellow member of Mr. Giuliani’s inner circle who played a key role in the 1993 campaign. “You had to sort of create the field operation from the ground up. He was instrumental in building that organization.”

This time Mr. Giuliani won, and Mr. Carbonetti, a 24-year-old registered Democrat who reporters joked had only the qualification “mixologist” to put on his résumé, became “director of appointments,” a post from which he gave out jobs, or more accurately, cleansed the city agencies of any trace of Mr. Dinkins’ influence.

(Mr. Carbonetti’s father also received an administration post, but was forced to resign in 1995 as the result of a financial scandal. His mother received a promotion to a lucrative position at the city’s Housing Authority as Mr. Giuliani prepared to leave office.)

His only prior work experience before his fortuitous City Hall appointment by Mr. Giuliani was as a bartender in Boston.

But loyalty is what counts in Mr. Giuliani’s universe, and in that category, Mr. Carbonetti’s qualifications are unsurpassed.

“I had no allegiance to anyone but Rudy,” said Mr. Carbonetti. “So I guess that made me the perfect guy for that job.”

He would later proved his fealty to Mr. Giuliani by sending the letter to Mr. Giuliani’s then-wife, Donna Hannover, that essentially stripped her of her budget as first lady. He also tagged along with Mr. Giuliani and his future wife, Judith Nathan, on their first public date and stuck close to the former mayor’s side during Sept. 11. After leaving City Hall, he followed Mr. Giuliani to the consulting firm Giuliani Partners.

Mr. Carbonetti, known to other Giuliani loyalists as “Carbo,” says that he has no professional goal other than to help his boss succeed. “I’m hopefully only doing this twice in my life, this time and his reelection,” he said. “I kid you not. And a number of people have told me that that comes across with the way I deal with the consultants and elected officials because there is no life for me, I’m not going to go be a consultant to the R.N.C. or the Republican Senatorial Committee. That’s it. I work for Rudy. And I’ll do this; if he wins, I’ll do it again. But that’s it.”

When asked to explain what it is that he liked so much about Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Carbonetti said, “He’s the smartest guy you’ll ever meet.”

MR. CARBONETTI HAS done his best to keep up, embarking on what has amounted to a campaign-long project of self-improvement.

In January, he participated in a briefing about Iraq with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. King by Iraq “surge” architects Gen. Jack Keane and military scholar Frederick Kagan. He says he takes loads of policy briefing papers home every night to his Upper East Side apartment, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, and talks about his “friends in the Middle East.”

In Mr. Giuliani’s universe, certainly, Mr. Carbonetti taken seriously.

In a pamphlet sent out to key supporters of the campaign at the end of October, Mr. Carbonetti is listed at the top of the campaign hierarchy.

“It goes on for page after page after page,” Guy Molinari, the campaign’s New York co-chair said, describing the pamphlet. “When they list the campaign structure, number one on the list is Tony. He is the number one guy who makes it all go.”

“One of the questions at the beginning of the campaign was, ‘Can a guy whose whole experience has been local adjust to the national scene?’” said Representative Peter King of New York, a supporter of Mr. Giuliani. “And yeah, he has.”

Mr. Carbonetti’s responsibilities now include standing in for Mr. Giuliani when he is out of town, watching the first cuts of commercials for Mr. Giuliani and “immediately pick[ing] out what he won’t like,” he said. He helps recruit and coddle bundlers and supportive elected officials, and gives rundowns of the political state of play on countless conference calls.

He also owns the distinction of the campaign’s designated Nice Guy, helping smooth all the feathers ruffled by his confrontational boss.

This spring, Mr. Carbonetti set up a meeting at the Grand Havana Room cigar bar on Fifth Avenue between Mr. Giuliani and one of his most committed, and potentially problematic, critics: former Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York.

“He got us to sit together,” said Mr. D’Amato, who supports Fred Thompson. “It was to explore possible opportunities of working together.”

Mr. D’Amato called Mr. Carbonetti a “bridge builder” who “got the trust of the mayor because he earned it the old-fashioned way.”

Mr. Carbonetti has also become responsible for preventing any embarrassing spats from breaking out between Mr. Giuliani and his successor at City Hall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. According to one Bloomberg official, the current administration keeps a “hot line” to Mr. Carbonetti, in order to “keep the temperature down” in the case of any flare-ups between the two mayors or their officials.

Asked about the criticism of Ms. Reiter and others, that he lacked the sufficient seasoning to handle such a momentous job, Mr. Carbonetti reacted with the air of a man who’s heard it all before.

“Peter Powers was in my office not too long ago, and Steve Forbes called,” said Mr. Carbonetti. “And we’re talking about some tax policy stuff and I hang up and Peter goes, ‘Now I have seen it all—Carbo on the phone with Steve Forbes about tax policy. The world is off its axis.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve got to do different things now.’”

One of the basic ideas (and Rudyblog has a much lengthier explanation here) that Giuliani shouldn't try to hedge on his pro-life position, but could seek to find common ground with social conservatives on abortion by advocating for strict constructionist judges. If those judges happen to find Roe v Wade unconstitutional, the thought goes, so be it.

In the course of reporting for the paper this week, I asked Tony Carbonetti what he thought of the idea. As it turned out, he approves.

"He has a record of supporting conservative judges and appointing conservative judges here in New York," said Carbonetti, a senior Rudy advisor. "As with any chief executive he already has a record and anyone can look at that record."

Carbonetti also said that Giuliani has never stopped being himself -- "What you see is what you get" -- no matter how conservative the crowd he addresses.

But of course, if Giuliani can keep the focus on security issues and away from abortion, as he did during his trip to Illinois last week, so much the better.

--Jason Horowitz