All Episodes
Previous Next
May 14, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
36:29
The FALL, RISE and FALL of "the Crossroads of the World" | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 137
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm back with you with another edition of Rudy's Common Sense.
Today, we're going to discuss probably one of my favorite places.
And we're going to discuss what's happening to it now, and a little bit of the history of it.
And that's Times Square.
Maybe I should start sort of in the middle.
When I was running for mayor in 1993, the second time I ran, one night we finished very late and I was driving back from Staten Island or Queens or somewhere like that with my close friend, lifetime friend and campaign manager, Peter Powers.
And I asked the driver to stop at Times Square.
It was about, I'd say about two in the morning.
It was still, you know, kind of busy.
And I went to the middle of the street where the center of the traffic, the traffic had pretty much dwindled down at 42nd and Broadway.
And I stood there and I looked to the Hudson River.
And all I could see were pornography theaters, live sex shops, still prostitutes on the street, pimps, obvious drug dealers, many of whom I had probably put in prison when I was a U.S.
attorney.
I mean, I looked at that many, many times since it was my job to enforce the law in New York.
Times Square was a place where a lot of laws were broken.
But I decided to close my eyes, which probably wasn't too smart because traffic was coming.
And I kind of thought about it like it used to be when I was a kid.
And my mother would take me there to see live shows.
It was tradition then to show a feature movie of, let's say, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and then they would appear live, or Bob Hope, or Frank Sinatra.
And it was really an unbelievable place.
I mean, it was truly the center of the world.
And here it had deteriorated into one of the crime centers of the crime capital of the world, New York, at the time.
And I dreamed of what it could be, what it used to be, and then what it could be.
And I said to Peter, we're going to make it that way.
I just have this picture in my mind.
We're going to change Times Square because this place defines New York.
People come here, they look at it, and they walk away with one impression or the other.
This is a growing, vital city that just can't be beaten and just constantly reinvents itself.
It's a city in decline.
And when I was standing there in 1993, it had been in that terrible condition all through the 70s, all through the 80s, into the 90s.
I often tell people to look at the scenes of Times Square in the movie Taxi Driver, which was in the 70s, and you'll get an idea of the place was owned by criminals.
Again, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, and every possible illegal creep imaginable.
You couldn't go there without a very, very good chance of getting mugged, having your wallet taken, your purse taken, and you were lucky if that was it.
So, I vowed that I would change it.
And I devoted a great deal of time to doing that when I was the mayor.
I mean, this is the place, Times Square, just so we put it in context, had its first New Year's Eve celebration on December 31st, 1904.
And I think that celebration probably cements its Status as the crossroads of the world.
Because everybody watches New Year's with the ball dropping and they've been doing it now for over a hundred years.
I often say if I were up on the moon and there were human beings on the moon or Venus or someplace else and they looked down at the earth and they said, where's the center of that place?
I'd say, Times Square.
That's the center of the place.
That's where more people come together from more different backgrounds from all over the world.
In good times and bad, but a lot better in good times.
And the New Year's Eve celebration probably has a lot to do with cementing that reputation.
It's been held since 1904, every year but two, 1942 and 1943, which was during the war.
but two, 1942 and 1943, which was during the war. It's also the pictures of it for VE Day and VJ Day,
when we won the Second World War and delivered the world from Nazism and fascism.
You can see how it was something special about being there.
And of course, there's the iconic picture of the sailor and the nurse, which was Times Square.
And at that time, it was filled with movie theaters, live theaters, and as I said, great performers performed there, and it was really, really great.
You could bring your family from Iowa or Brooklyn, and you'd have no problem.
Nobody hurt you, nobody harm you.
And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, in the late 60s, Crime surged in New York.
Kind of like it's doing right now.
It just... 1969, for the first time, we went over 1,000 murders per year.
We didn't go below 1,000 murders until 1996.
1969, 1,000 murders.
Never had 1,000 murders before.
Probably thought it was an aberration.
We didn't do much about it.
Let it go.
Did the wrong things, like we're doing now, and it took us the 70s, the 80s, and half of the 90s, or a little more than half of the 90s, to overcome it and set the city straight.
It was 1996 when we had our first year, while I was mayor, of less than a thousand murders since 1969.
since 1969. 1990, 1991, we actually got above 2,000 murders.
Now we're talking like war figures.
2,245 in 1990.
2,154 in 1991.
Now we will take a short break.
Your credit card company found suspicious charges on your card.
That's simple identity theft.
It's annoying, but they cover it.
The type of fraud you really need to worry about is home title theft, a devastating crime that takes you off your home's title.
and you're not covered by insurance or most identity theft programs.
That's why you need Home Title Lock.
Here's how easy it is for cyber criminals to get you.
The title documents to our homes are kept online.
The thief forges your signature on a quick claim deed stating you just sold your home and he's the new owner.
Then he borrows money using your home's equity and leaves you in debt.
You won't know until late payment or eviction notices arrive.
The instant Home Title Lock detects someone tampering with your home's title, they help shut it down.
Let's get you protected.
Go to HomeTitleLock.com and register your address to see if you're already a victim.
And enter Rudy for 30 free days of protection.
That's promo code Rudy at HomeTitleLock.com.
Thank you for returning.
That crime surge all throughout the city had a major effect on Times Square.
Crime surged on Times Square at least as much, if not more.
And by the time we get into the 70s, all those live theaters and those great performers and great restaurants and turn into All pornographic theaters.
Stores with pornography.
Stores with drugs.
Live sex operations.
Out on the street are pimps trying to get you to come to their establishment.
Drug dealers trying to get you to buy their drugs.
And then, of course, along with it, violent criminals.
Muggers, rapists.
It had a very, very high level of crime and it deteriorated very, very quickly.
And by the time we get to the mid-70s, or a little later than that, which is if you see the footage in Taxi Driver, you can see what it looked like then.
All the animals come out at night.
Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.
Sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
And it just went down from there.
It just went down from there.
And think about it.
What did it do?
It defined a city in decline.
People came and looked at it.
They remembered New Year's Eve celebration.
They remember the VE Day.
They wanted to see Times Square.
And what did they see?
They saw a city in mass decline, deteriorating.
And people wrote about it.
The city had its greatest day.
Then in 1994, when I took over, we changed all the policing.
We specifically had a special program for Times Square that included police on horseback, communicating with anti-crime police in the crowds to stop the mugging and the purse snatching and some of these assaults.
Police on horseback would notice it.
The anti-crime unit would then stop it before it became a serial problem.
Maybe one, maybe two person actions.
Then the guys take it.
Goes right to a court, right in Times Square, and then he goes off to prison.
Not like today.
Today, de Blasio has gotten rid of that anti-crime unit that did what I told you.
Cuomo's done away with bail, so even if you arrest him, they're back out in Times Square in a couple hours.
How do they ever get these ideas?
Who taught them these things?
You let criminals out right after you arrest them?
And what's the point of that?
They're just going to go steal more purses.
But like it declined and just didn't stop, Once we got the momentum and Disney decided to invest in the new Amsterdam theater, and then that was followed by numerous follow-the-leader investments, by 1996, 97, Times Square was already safe-er, and then really safe.
And a very, very booming, beautiful part of New York.
The longest-running show on Broadway, I think, was The Lion King, and it started in the New Amsterdam Theatre that Disney built for live productions, and the contribution to the city was enormous.
We worked out a plan to get rid of the porn shops.
We worked out a plan to get rid of the pimps.
The plan was to arrest them.
The prostitutes just went somewhere else, because they weren't the kind of customers there that they would want, and kind of disappeared for a while.
Maybe they went inside, I don't know.
But the porn shops were all moved out, and legitimate establishments took over, and I left it in really good shape, and Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly made it even better.
They improved on it.
They kept up the safety of it, the quality of life and the expansion of it.
The strong condition of the city that the present mayor inherited kept things pretty good for a while.
But you could see it.
You could see it in the policies and the programs.
You could see it in the ridiculous ideas that he had about crime.
You could see it in his antagonism toward the police and his favoritism for criminals.
I call them criminal-friendly policies.
You know, the policies where there's no bail, and you all of a sudden just let a whole group of people out of prison because it's too crowded, or pandemic, or just put them out on the street so they can commit more crimes.
You have these judges who have somebody who's been arrested 40 times, and they put them in jail for two days.
We were going back to that.
But things remained pretty good, and then all of a sudden it exploded.
Exploded all at once.
All the usual so-called progressive Democrat policies that favor criminals over the police came home to roost.
Started a little bit in 19... 2020 set a record.
The record it set was the biggest increase in shootings and murders in one year ever in the history of New York City.
About an almost 45% increase in murders and over 100% increase in shootings, meaning they doubled.
I mean, a change like that is felt dramatically because you feel it all over.
45% increase in homicide?
Wow.
100% increase in shooting?
I mean, that starts to deteriorate a city really, really fast.
And this year, this year it got started and went wrong direction.
More violence, more shootings.
Increase in homicide again.
But what about Times Square?
Did Times Square follow along or did it maintain Did it maintain its quality of life and its safety?
No, no.
Same thing happened in the 60s and 70s.
The surge in crime in Times Square either paralleled the rest of the city or in some cases was even worse.
I'll give you the numbers and then we'll talk about the incident that I think has brought this all to the fore and hopefully is going to be the thing that turns it around.
For the last two years, Murder, homicide in Times Square has increased by 50%.
Rape by nine, robbery by 1920, felonious assault by eight, and burglary by 37%.
Those are all terrible numbers, but there's one that's completely descriptive of now a dangerous Times Square.
Over the last two years, shootings have gone up 200%.
I've never heard of a 200% increase in anything like that.
It's a dangerous place to be.
It was a very dangerous place to be.
We'll take a short break and we'll be right back.
I accomplished a lot in 2020, exposing the truth, establishing the relationship with you, working tirelessly for America.
And I came to know the work and value of the people at American Hartford Gold.
You see, you buy gold, not only for what you know, but you buy gold for what you don't know.
American Hartford Gold is the company you can trust when it comes to buying gold.
They sell physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside of your IRA.
In the precious metals industry, they are the highest rated firm in our country with an A-plus from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients.
Give them a call and tell them Rudy sent you.
And be sure to ask them what I bought.
And if you call them right now, they will give you up to $1,500 of free silver on your first order.
Folks, these are uncertain times.
The one thing you can count on to protect what you have worked so hard for is physical gold and silver.
So don't wait.
Call them now.
Call 833-GOLD-777.
That's 833-GOLD-777.
Or text RUDY to 65532.
Again, that's 833-GOLD-777.
Or text RUDY to 65532.
Welcome back.
777 or text Rudy to 65532 again That's 833 gold 777 or text Rudy to 65532
Welcome back. So now let's Let's go through the galvanizing incident
It's very, very common that problems can go on for a very, very long time, and public really has so much to think about, and even public officials have to think about.
They don't see the problem.
I mean, the statistics have been indicating for two years that Times Square was getting very dangerous, that it was a very different place.
I remember times now driving through it over the last two years where I was very, very upset with the conditions, the quality of life.
It seemed to me that a lot of the problems were returning.
And I, of course, looked at the statistics and they were very alarming to me, but it didn't seem to me that anybody was paying really much attention to how this was becoming a focal point for crime.
I mean, this is supposed to be the crossroads of the world.
Not for crime.
And if it is going to be for crime, it'll take the city down.
Because it'll cut right into that tourist industry that's one of the bulwarks of our economy.
And we'll be back where we were.
All the work that I did, and Bratton, and Safer, and Bernie Kerrick, and all the businesses, and Disney, and Bloomberg, and Kelly, and all of it will be for naught.
We'll be back where we were when it was a crime capital like Taxi Driver.
So what galvanized people's attention?
Well, it was about five o'clock on Saturday, May 7th.
And because of the pandemic and the fact that we are returning, but we're returning slowly, Times Square is not nearly as crowded as it would normally be on a, even like on a Saturday at five o'clock.
But there were a fair number of people there.
I mean, somewhere in between.
A year ago it was deserted and now there are increasingly more people, but it's nothing like it used to be.
And all of a sudden a dispute broke out between two brothers, it turns out, who were involved in selling some kind of goods on the street.
And one of them just began shooting.
In the course of shooting, He hit three people, three women.
One was a four-year-old who was shopping for toys with her family, and she was struck in the leg, and her name is Skye Martinez.
The other was Wendy Magranat, who was struck in the thigh, and Marcella Aldana, who was hit in the foot.
And Magrinette is a Rhode Island resident who was on a Mother's Day trip to New York, and she told the reporters that doctors told her she'll likely have a bullet in her leg for the rest of her life because it is too dangerous to remove it, and kind of just has to get used to it.
Placed there by, now identified as Farrakhan Mohammed, who is 31 with a record, of course.
And he's being looked for.
They're searching for him.
And then the third person that was shot was Marcella Aldana, who was hit in the foot.
And they all survived.
Skye Martinez, the young girl, had to have an operation.
And I think her quick recovery had a lot to do with a police officer, and a really wonderful police officer, but a police officer that is really basically the police officers of New York City.
I mean, a lot of people are very amazed at what this police officer did, but this is what police officers do.
Police officer is Elissa Vogel.
She's a New York City police officer.
She heard the shooting.
She saw the situation.
She ran there.
She saw the girl bleeding on the ground.
There's some footage of this.
I think it's a baby down there.
It's a little hard to see, but if you play it a few times, you can see what she does.
The.
Alyssa puts, Alyssa Vogel, Officer Vogel, puts a tourniquet on the girl.
I'm sure, I don't know that it saved her life, but it sure probably spared her from a very, very long recovery because, well, maybe it did save her life.
I mean, she's just a little girl and it wouldn't be all that hard for a little child to bleed out.
But she put the tourniquet on.
And then if you watch it very closely, you can see she takes the baby in her arms.
She takes charge of the whole situation.
Takes the baby in her arms and she runs.
I'm looking at a picture of it.
and a half to get her to the ambulance.
So the ambulance won't be tied up in what has now become a very, very crowded, I'm looking
at a picture of it, hopefully you are, a very crowded Times Square where we can see lots
of people gathering because of what happened, probably the gunshots and all the commotion
and then a lot of emergency vehicles there.
So in order to get through all that, because it would take time for the ambulance to get there, she did a very, very smart thing.
She picked the girl up and she ran her.
And then she stayed in the ambulance with her and delivered her to the doctors at Bellevue Hospital.
And then when she was asked about it, she said what they all say.
Nothing special.
I did my job.
You know how often police officers would tell me that?
You know how often this happens in comparison to the stuff that the racial hucksters try to use against them?
You realize this is what they do.
You know, Officer Vogel, when she ran toward that child, either because she heard the gunfire or saw the commotion, Officer Vogel didn't know if that child was black or white or Hispanic or Asian or some combination of all that.
She's too far away to see that.
If the gunfire was going on, she ran there anyway.
They do that.
I mean, the cops do that.
They run into gunfire to save people.
And they don't ask to color their skin.
And when she got there, She did the same thing she would do to save a child or to help a child, whatever the race or background of the child.
That is a New York City police officer.
That's New York City's finest.
What I just described to you is the overwhelming majority behavior of the finest police department in the world.
It's the best trained.
And it gets most experienced and it's always had the strongest morale until now because it's morale is being destroyed by a mayor who should have stayed in Cuba when he went there for his honeymoon.
He'd have been much more comfortable there with their policies and their programs, but he's not unusual.
He's a Democrat mayor with policies and programs that make cities dangerous.
Do I need to prove that to you again?
Go look at the 10 top Democrat cities in the country and see what's happening to crime.
I don't know, New York's the worst.
I mean, we're up 100% in shootings, but Chicago, it seems to me, about 10 people get killed every weekend forever.
I know crime's out of control in St.
Louis.
Crime's out of control in Philadelphia.
Crime is way out of control in Atlanta.
But now they're deteriorating time square again.
This shouldn't happen.
I mean, intelligent human beings, you know, make mistakes.
Intelligent societies make mistakes, but then they learn from the mistakes and they don't repeat them.
This is stupid.
It's ideologically driven by an ideology that's a failed ideology.
Why we call it progressive has always baffled me because it's nothing if it isn't retrogressive.
We're going back to the stupid things we did in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.
We're encouraging people to be on welfare.
We're encouraging them not to work.
We're not doing anything about homelessness.
We're not doing anything about Quality of life crimes.
When de Blasio came in, he immediately lost the respect of the police department because of the way he handled the riots in Baltimore and suggested that New York City Police Department is racist.
The president believes that the New York City Police Department is systemically racist.
And the country is.
I'm sorry, a systemically racist police department.
Doesn't have a white police officer, you know, just running to the aid of a child without knowing what the child's race is.
The New York City police department saves too many people of too many different backgrounds so that you can ever charge them with racism.
And so does the fire department.
Now you want to want to debate that with me.
I'm ready to debate with you.
I'll show you the statistics.
I'll show you the facts and I'll show you that your charge that they're racist indicates you've got a real problem.
You're probably a racist.
They're not.
And I tell you what, when this young lady, this young girl, this young baby, four years old, was in trouble, right?
Her mother, I'm sure, was very, very glad that a police officer arrived and not somebody from Black Lives Matter or some social worker or some left-wing impractical person that probably would go in the wrong direction to get to the ambulance because they're off in some kind of impractical world.
Let's hope that everybody has a full recovery here.
I am astounded And extraordinarily disappointed.
And he never ceases to disappoint me.
The mayor's comment.
The mayor blamed it on guns.
Not on Farrakhan Mohammad.
I'm sorry, the gun doesn't go off unless you shoot it.
You gotta shoot it.
And you know, you're not going to do anything about guns, idiot, because there are over 300 million guns in America.
Maybe there shouldn't be.
And you're sure not doing anything about guns because you did away with the one unit that was most effective in taking illegal guns out of the city, the anti-crime unit.
And if we had the anti-crime unit, I'm not going to say this wouldn't have happened, but it might not have.
This is where they were best, Times Square.
There's no one that understands law enforcement doesn't realize they were the unit that took the guns out of the city and that got me a 60% decline in murder.
Homicide.
That's the crime that went up 45% under you after you disbanded the unit that takes guns out of the city.
And then you blame it on guns.
There's a mayoral election going on right now.
So listen carefully, those of you who are in New York, listen carefully to what they're saying.
Times Square could be turned right back in the other direction in about a month.
Basically with, I think, even greater speed because the technology is much better than what we were using in 1994 with the walkie-talkies.
My goodness, the cameras, the space recognition cameras, the way in which you could set up quadrants, which we did in some other cities in South America to reduce crime.
I mean, you could just get those horses back and use the modern electronic equipment and you'll end this thing in no time.
Aha!
But if you also change the ridiculous contribution of another progressive Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, which is the no bail law, which means if, you know, one of these people who grabs a purse or bangs a woman around or whatever, they're going to go right back out.
So they can be back on Times Square, you know, within three, four hours.
You got to change that.
You got to change that so that if you commit a crime, like you steal a woman's purse or you pickpocket or you hit somebody over the head or you It's treated seriously. And boy, have you turned out to be
wrong. When de Blasio came into office, he did away with the broken windows theory, which I don't
think he ever even understood.
He said, yeah, I can pay attention to these little crimes.
The little crimes don't mean anything. Let them jump over the turnstile and not pay the
fare. Look at the amount of crime on the subways. I bet you everyone of the people that are
committing those crimes don't pay the fares.
And if you arrested them, maybe you'd interrupt them?
Hmm?
And you'd start to be able to catalog them?
Half of the people we arrested for fare jumping were wanted for violent crimes.
And we prevented a serial murder.
Do you ever read these things or learn about these things?
Or are they just too unimportant to a progressive who wants to Probably deep in your heart you want to do away with the police.
I mean, you've got people in your movement that want to do away with the police and do away with jails.
So, here's what needs to be done.
Any of you mayoral candidates that want to pick it up and use it, I have no pride of authorship, because I worked this out.
It wasn't just me, it was Bratton, Eddie Maple, and then it was refined by Safer and by Carrick.
Here's what it is.
Times Square is very crowded.
People commit these quick, quick crimes there.
They still do pickpocketing.
Burglary has gone up some ridiculous amount right in that area.
So, bring back the horses.
Bring back the police on the horses.
Use the modern communication equipment, photographic equipment.
Have the police pick out the Farrakhan Mohammeds in the crowd.
Maybe the cop sees that gun come out.
Before it actually goes off.
They did that a lot.
Maybe from the horse.
He sees the gun come out.
And he's got a couple of his plainclothes guys within 40 feet.
Says, gun.
Gives them the direction.
Gun.
Turn around to your right.
50 yards.
There's a guy with a gun.
How many times they did that?
Over the years?
They're not able to do it now because they were disbanded.
So put them back.
Put the anti-crime unit back.
Get the guns out of the city.
That's important.
Get the illegal guns out of the city.
Don't think you can solve it with gun control because criminals don't get controlled.
They don't register their guns.
You gotta go take the guns.
And maybe we should go back to the conservative form of stop, question, and frisk that I began in 1994, and which was found to be perfectly constitutional by the Clinton Justice Department, headed by Janet Reno and by Mr. Holder.
We can do that.
It's already been held to be constitutional by the Justice Department and by a liberal Justice Department.
There's a way to do it.
So I don't know who's going to be elected mayor, but I do know if this crime continues to go up, we're going to be in another 30-year cycle.
And if sensible things are done, unlike the progressive, criminal-friendly things that are done in most Democrat cities now, but if we become an exception to that, And we do sensible things, like we do have bail for criminals.
We do make it difficult for them to return and continue their crimes.
We do make sure they get stiff prison sentences.
And we don't let them out on any excuse.
We can turn this right around.
It hasn't gone that far yet.
We let it go for another three, four years and we're in for a really, really big problem in a city already declining because of taxes, with people moving out left and right.
You add the crime problem to it and it'll just exacerbate it.
So I plead with those people that are running for mayor, whatever else your policies are, Focus on reducing crime and focus on bringing Times Square back to being a crossroads of the world that enriches New York and that enriches America.
Thank you.
We'll be back in a few days with another episode.
▲
Export Selection