The round dining-room table in the handsome New Jersey home featured veal Milanese, pasta with shrimp, Mediterranean salad. Two darling little girls with wet hair chattered to Mom and Dad about their swimming class. Seemed like any typical American family. It wasn’t.
Bernie Kerik, New York City’s one-time top cop, was days from being sentenced to jail. Although the steps were snowy and icy, he stayed inside the door. “Can’t help you out of the car. My ankle monitor won’t let me step over the threshold.”
OK, Bernie, my first question: So now what happens financially to your family?
“From October to the end of the year, it’s cost half a million dollars.” He showed me legal bills. “Nobody can afford that. Since this is a federal case, I’m not allowed back in my security field. Meanwhile, I’m not sure. We may sell the house.”
Added his wife, Hala: “My babywear business can’t continue. You can’t invest what you don’t have. Although I have a degree in biology, I haven’t been in the work force for 11 years. I know I’ll have to find some job. I have two little ones.”
“It’s cost tens of millions,” said Bernie. “Two to four hundred thousand every month. My consulting company’s gone, potential is gone. I’m into hock. Nobody understands the magnitude of what happens. Anyone who goes this road had better be prepared financially. I made mistakes. I’m sorry. Very sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry for what I did. There is a price to pay and I’m paying it.”
And what would lead a man, held up as a 9/11 hero, to commit eight felonies?
“I guess . . . hubris. Maybe I got involved in my own celebrity. In that position of power, you lose sight of things you shouldn’t be doing. It’s . . . arrogance. You get caught in that power. In that high a position, you almost think above the law. You don’t focus. You don’t think things through until it hits you.
“What nobody knows is I didn’t want President Bush’s Homeland Security job. The offer came a Friday afternoon in 2004. I declined it. I’d just returned from Iraq. My wife hadn’t had me around. My kids had no father and were just starting school. Hala did NOT want me to take that job.
“Having just built our house, now she’d have to uproot and move to Washington. She knew nobody. No family or friends there. The kids would be pulled from a new school. And she knew my schedule as police commissioner. Leave 6 a.m. and work 18 hours a day. She absolutely did not want me secretary of Homeland Security. On a Sunday night, I told the White House no.
“Monday morning, calling my home office, they said again President Bush wanted me. Standing right at the phone, Hala kept shaking her head no, so my conversation was limited. Trying to keep her calm, I couldn’t give them full answers. I’d just say, ‘Yes . . . uh-huh . . .’ So I went to Washington ‘just to talk.’
“My big regret is, I’ve let the president down.”
Nobody drops in on the Keriks. Over terrifying barks of Duke and Duchess, two locked-up German shepherds the size of camels, I asked if he’s heard from his one-time buddy Rudy Giuliani.
“No.”
Just a simple no? What’s “no” actually mean?
“Means no. Haven’t heard from him. You don’t know your friends until this happens. I’ve been ignored by them all. Get in trouble, there’s three categories. Close personal friends you always had. They stick around. Those you didn’t know you had who suddenly show up to help. Then there’s the powerful so-called friends you thought you had for years. They disappear.”
Heard from any of Rudy’s inner circle?
“No.”
Has Bernie himself reached out to them?
“No . . . Look, I admit I haven’t heard from him. But I don’t want to discuss that further.”
“I do,” said Hala who, on this freezing night, was bringing us hot tea in the living room. “Bernie’s as disappointed as I am, but he’ll never say it publicly. Way too loyal. He’d go to his grave before he turned against Rudy. Rudy’s my kids’ godfather. I’m disappointed for my daughters. They’ve done nothing to deserve this. He hasn’t even sent word through friends. People are reluctant to be in touch. They don’t want to be intimidated.”
Down 50 pounds, a very quiet Bernard Kerik said softly, “That’s the assumption.”
About his children: “It’s been a little tough in class. People know their father’s going to jail. Somebody said something in school and I had to explain, ‘Daddy made mistakes and now will pay for these mistakes . . . Then we’ll move on with our lives.’
“I’m up 6 every morning. I help with their breakfast. See them off to school. I cherish every minute with Angelina and Celine. We do homework together and have movie nights weekends. Leaving them again now will be tough. My son, Joseph, a detective with the Newark Police Department, comes by Sundays. When I get out, the focus will be on my family.”
Might a four-year sentence seem excessive punishment, or might he think the prosecution overzealous?
“I don’t know. People have said I had no right to have reached that high because I was nothing and I came from nothing . . . I don’t know.”
The safety issue. A former police chief in prison? Will he be safe inside?
“That’s the least of my problems. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is very professional.
“When I get out, I’ll maybe try counseling. Teaching that the lessons learned are you can’t cut corners. Everything must be done by the book. You can’t not care.
“And a few months ago, I started writing a novel. I have a literary agent and I’m speaking to a writer who’ll work with me. It’s about a group of feds hunting homegrown terror cells. Basically kids born here, sent abroad to return as teenagers indoctrinated with radical Islamic ideology and planning US targets.”
“Look,” Bernie said. “I only know whatever I did, it was the wrong thing to do. I couldn’t be more sorry for what’s happened.”