View From City Road: Short memories

In New York, Rudolph Giuliani is still remembered as the scourge of Wall Street. Appointed US attorney for Manhattan in 1982, Mr Giuliani vowed to fight white-collar crime with the same enthusiasm his predecessors had shown prosecuting street crime and the Mafia.

By the time he left office in 1989, he had brought insider traders like Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken to justice, but not without applying methods many people on Wall Street found questionable.

He threatened firms, notably Drexel Burnham Lambert, with America's draconian racketeering law - which allows prosecutors to freeze assets pending trial - to extract confessions under duress. (Drexel was eventually forced into bankruptcy). He constantly leaked information about investigations to the media long before charges were brought, hoping to secure the co-operation of co-conspirators - and garner public attention for his office.

But perhaps Mr Giuliani's most dubious publicity stunt involved the arrest in 1987 of Richard Wigton, a Kidder Peabody veteran who was handcuffed on the trading floor and dragged away before waiting television cameras. Two years later - after Mr Giuliani had left the attorney's office - the insider trading charges against Mr Wigton were quietly dropped.

Mr Giuliani now hopes to become mayor of New York City, running for the second time against David Dinkins, the Democratic incumbent, in a race that has become too close to call. Mr Dinkins has made some unfortunate enemies since 1989 and Mr Giuliani will have the endorsement this November of key constituencies that eluded him four years ago.

Despite being the Republican candidate then, he got almost no support from Wall Street, perhaps the only overwhelmingly Republican voting bloc in the city.

This time, Wall Street appears to have forgiven Mr Giuliani. 'The money is flowing much freer now,' said William Koeppel, the property developer who chairs his campaign finance committee. Contributions from the securities industry account for about 10 per cent of the dollars 1.8m he raised in the first six months. 'It's much easier to raise money on Wall Street today than it was four years ago or even in December, when captains of finance were noticeably absent from a big Christmas gala in his honour.'

Interestingly, though, his most prominent supporters are executives at Bear Stearns, Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette and Lehman Brothers - none of which faced charges during Mr Giuliani's term in office.