November 9, 2007 (LPAC)--Rudy Giuliani's former bodyguard Bernard Kerik, whom Rudy raised to Police Commissioner and pushed for U.S. Homeland Security czar, was indicted yesterday on 14 counts of tax fraud, obstruction of justice, and lying to government officials checking his background.

In his 2002 autobiography, The Lost Son, Kerik described his amazement in 1994 that then-New York City Mayor Giuliani was appointing him a high prison official. Giuliani led Kerik to a dimly lighted room where the Mayor's top aides were assembled.

Peter Powers, Rudy's first deputy mayor, kissed Kerik on the cheek. Powers had been Rudy's friend from their boyhood days, when Rudy's father Harold was a violent enforcer for mob loan-sharking. Kerik wrote, "Next was Randy Mastro, the mayor's chief of staff. He did the same. In this dark sitting room, one by one, the mayor's closest staff members came forward and kissed me.... I know the mayor is as big a fan of The Godfather as I am, and I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a Mafia family.

"I was being made.

"I was now a part of the Giuliani family, getting the endorsement of the other family members, the other capos. We all sat up drinking wine until two-thirty in the morning, celebrating...."

Former Giuliani chief of staff and deputy mayor Randy Mastro, one of the celebrants in the Kerik ceremony and now a frequent spokesman for the Giuliani Presidential campaign, responded to the Kerik indictment by lashing out at Kerik critic Sen. John McCain, for having been involved in the Keating savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

Kerik is charged with accepting $255,000 worth of construction work on his home from the mob-connected Interstate Industrial Corporation that sought to do business with the city. The indictment says Kerik lobbied for the company by "contacting on [its] behalf regulators and other public officials who were considering whether [Interstate] should be licensed ... and awarded municipal-related business."

Interstate employed Kerik's brother and also Larry Ray, who had paid for Kerik's wedding. Interstate had bought a garbage transfer station from Mafia soldier Edward Garafola, and couldn't get a city waste disposal license because they employed mobsters and used mob-controlled trucking companies. Larry Ray and Garafola were indicted together on unrelated stock fraud charges.

Giuliani made Bernard Kerik New York City Police Commissioner in 2000. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Kerik took over an apartment donated for the recovery workers at Ground Zero, using it for trysts with girlfriends. One of them was publisher Judith Regan, who put out Kerik's autobiography. Kerik later became a partner in Giuliani's consulting and lobbying firm, Giuliani Partners, along with capos from Kerik's induction such as Denny Young, and with Anthony Capponetti, whose family had been close to Rudy's father, enforcer Harold Giuliani.