WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE LIVING WITH GIULIANI AS PRESIDENT

NY TIMES - In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani's radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: "GOTCHA!"

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci's doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci's decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.

Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.

"Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower," the mayor told reporters at the time. "Maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers."

Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. "It really damaged me," said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. "I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.". . .

After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group's application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers. . .

In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani's youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.

At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani's press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.

"My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption," Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.

None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy's professional life was wrecked.

"I was soiled merchandise - the taint just lingers," Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.

Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation - a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization - and the prospective job disappeared. . .

Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel's office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.

In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Giuliani's record on police brutality. A week later, a city official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school's clinical programs and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship, according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.

"It was ridiculously petty," Mr. Berger said.

N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after that semester.

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