Bernard B Kerik

Looming federal charges against former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik are prolonging potential damage to the presidential bid of his mentor and former business partner, Rudolph W. Giuliani, political analysts said Saturday. Prosecutors are weighing charges including tax evasion, conspiracy to commit wiretapping, and filing false information with the government, said a legal source familiar with the investigation of Kerik.

Being a top aide to New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani allegedly brought a lot of perks to Bernard Kerik -- a new Jacuzzi, a "marble entrance rotunda" installed in a Bronx apartment, $9,000 a month in rent payments for a flat on the Upper East Side -- many of them paid for by people who had business with the city. Those and other favors were laid out Friday in a corruption indictment against Kerik, New York's former police commissioner.

President Bush will name Bernard Kerik, a plain-spoken career law enforcement officer who was New York City's police commissioner during the Sept. 11 attacks, as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, senior administration officials said Thursday. Kerik, 49, who spent 4 1/2 months in Iraq last year to rebuild a police force, would take over a department created less than two years ago to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorist attacks.

Bernard Kerik easily would bring the most colorful background to an otherwise uniformly button-down Bush Cabinet -- standing in sharp contrast to Tom Ridge, the by-the-books public servant he is expected to succeed as Homeland Security secretary. Kerik, 49, is the son of an alcoholic prostitute who was found murdered in a pimp's bed, as he recounted in his 2002 autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice."

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik on Friday abruptly withdrew himself from consideration as the nation's next Homeland Security chief, saying he had determined that a former household employee might have been an illegal immigrant.

The abrupt withdrawal of the White House's choice to head the Homeland Security Department is an embarrassing setback for President Bush's effort to put his second-term Cabinet in place quickly and without controversy.

As local newspapers reported a series of new allegations against Bernard Kerik, New York political observers suggested Monday that he hadn't withdrawn his nomination as Homeland Security secretary solely because of a nanny problem. And Democrats and Republicans predicted that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had pushed Kerik's candidacy with members of the Bush administration, would take the greatest political heat for the failed nomination.

Bernard Kerik, New York's former top police officer who withdrew as a Bush administration Cabinet nominee, resigned Wednesday from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani said. He told reporters that Kerik, nominated by President Bush to be Homeland Security secretary before being overtaken by scandals, left Giuliani Partners LLC voluntarily.