Even before he formally started his job, Giuliani put the world on notice that he was eager to go after the nation's drug problem -- as well as the administration's political opponents.
"Heroin, cocaine and related kinds of drugs are the biggest single problem," he declared at a news conference the day before he took office in May 1981. "I don't think that in the Carter administration the issue of narcotics enforcement was a priority. It was something they were not concerned about."
He picked up that theme again in August 1982. When former Vice President Walter F. Mondale complained about the rise in crime, Giuliani unloaded. In a Washington Post opinion article, he defended the Reagan record and derided Mondale's comments as "another typical politician's contribution."
Giuliani's article drew high praise from Edwin M. Meese III, Reagan's top White House counselor. "Let the liberal carpers know that they can't raise their heads without getting them shot off," a delighted Meese told him.
Inside Justice, Giuliani proposed folding the Drug Enforcement Administration into the FBI and making the DEA administrator answerable to the FBI director. Because drugs traditionally spawned violent crime, he reasoned, it made sense to combine the two agencies' expertise to combat the increasingly sophisticated world of illegal narcotics.
FBI officials embraced his plan, but the proposal triggered protests from DEA agents and police chiefs around the country. Local agencies such as the Los Angeles Police Department depended on the DEA for assistance in fighting drugs, then-Police Chief Gates said, and he warned that "any disruption in the DEA's mission" could jeopardize that cooperation.
Giuliani brushed the concerns aside and went ahead with the reorganization.
But Giuliani's vision did not survive -- and it did not stop the drug problem. The mid-1980s saw an explosion of crack cocaine and gang warfare. And the joint DEA-FBI operations lasted only a few years, before the two agencies went back to their separate crime-fighting duties.
Managers of the two agencies "never really had their hearts in it," said Stan Morris, who worked alongside Giuliani as the department's associate deputy attorney general. "Their cultures are so different," Morris said. "You could get them in bed, but they weren't going to sleep together for a long time."
At the same time, Morris and others credit Giuliani for quickly taking stock of the growing drug menace and taking a bold step to combat it.
