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Two days after Rudy Giuliani hailed Donald Trump’s “victory for the ages”, a New York court gave the president-elect’s former lawyer a week to hand over a Mercedes-Benz and a collection of luxury watches he owes to two poll workers he defamed after Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
“I gather he was in Palm Beach . . . He can deliver the keys and tell [his creditors] where the car is,” Judge Lewis Liman told Giuliani’s lawyers, referring to the fact that journalists pictured the former New York mayor being driven in the 1980s convertible as he went to vote in Florida.
The 80-year-old’s appearance near Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday prompted an angry letter from plaintiffs, who said he was “flouting his obligations” to hand over the vehicle.
A visibly disgruntled Giuliani, who was forced to appear in court, protested that those with knowledge of the location of his assets had “virtually been tortured” by demands from the creditors. Liman responded: “You don’t have the right to exercise self help.”
Giuliani was last year ordered to pay $148mn to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who were hounded out of their home after being falsely accused of rigging the 2020 vote. He faces a host of other lawsuits, mostly stemming from his actions as a personal attorney for Trump, who still owes the former mayor millions of dollars in legal fees.
Guiliani’s attempt to file for bankruptcy was dismissed earlier this year, due to his repeated failure to disclose his assets in full. Last month, Liman ordered him to hand over his Upper East Side apartment, a series of luxury watches, Yankees memorabilia and the blue Mercedes, which was once owned by actor Lauren Bacall.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss said they had yet to take ownership of the assets, and asked the court for help. Giuliani’s lawyer, Kenneth Caruso, claimed he had not been given an address for the exchange, and attempted to argue that his client had “no control” over a storage facility in Ronkonkoma that housed some of the luxury items in question.
Caruso was given a dressing down by the judge for asking that one watch — purportedly bequeathed to Guiliani by his grandfather — should be exempt from the handover order.
“Oh come on,” Liman said, when Caruso said creditors had been “vindictive” in pursuing the watch. The judge said he had debtors in front of him who “run bodegas, who short their employees of minimum wages, and they have got items that are family heirlooms and the like, and if they owe a debt, they have to pay a debt”.
“The law is the law,” Liman added.
The judge also rejected Caruso’s argument that the Mercedes might be “worth less than $4,000” and thus exempt from seizure under New York law.