http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/12/15647/9239From The New Yorker:
"Petty and vindictive" is the assessment of one of Giuliani’s most reliable foils, Stephen DiBrienza, a former City Councilman from Brooklyn who in 1998 was on the receiving end of a memorable act of mayoral pique. DiBrienza was chairman of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, which oversaw the city’s social- and human-services programs, principal targets of Giuliani’s reforms. One of the councilman’s abiding concerns was the warehousing of homeless people in huge city shelters, some of which held as many as a thousand beds. In December, 1998, DiBrienza sponsored a bill to limit the number of beds at city facilities to two hundred, and to require that social services be made available at the shelters.
Giuliani vehemently opposed the measure, arguing that it would require the city to close down its seven largest shelters. The Council passed the legislation, and he vetoed it. He said that if he was forced to close the big shelters he would have to build new ones—and he would put them in the districts of the chief proponents of the bill. The Council overrode the veto by a substantial margin. The Mayor called DiBrienza a "limousine liberal" and a "hypocrite," and the administration announced plans to open a homeless shelter in a neighborhood in DiBrienza’s district. An eviction notice was sent to a state-run psychiatric clinic housed in a city-owned building, with the explanation that a homeless shelter was coming in. In addition to the clinic, which tended to five hundred patients a week, the building contained a senior-citizen center and a nonprofit children’s center.