2024-10-23 18:40:03
Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani to turn over almost all his worldly possessions as damages in the $148 million defamation lawsuit he lost at the end of 2023. Within seven days, everything on the list must go to a court-appointed receiver, then eventually to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother-daughter set of Georgia election workers whom Giuliani falsely accused of tampering with ballots in the 2020 presidential race. Among the items Freeman and Moss now own are a Mercedes-Benz, a signed Joe DiMaggio shirt, a TV, furniture, several luxury watches — and a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side.
Giuliani first put up the three-bed, three-bath penthouse at 45 East 66th Street for sale in 2023, listing it with Serena Boardman at Sotheby’s (she was also in charge of selling Bernie Madoff’s penthouse). This was before Giuliani lost the defamation suit, but he was still in the thick of several other legal battles stemming from his antics in and around the Trump administration and was “close to broke,” according to his lawyer. (In 2021, the apartment was raided by the FBI as the agency investigated Giuliani’s dealings with Ukraine.) The former mayor took it off the market in February 2023 when it failed to sell at an initial price of $6.5 million but put it back on in May of this year when his lucrative radio show was canceled — after he got into a fight with the station’s owner, John Catsimatidis.
Now, Giuliani won’t see any of that cash. But owning an Upper East Side co-op is not necessarily a straightforward payday, even if Freeman and Moss just want to sell it and take the money.
Photo: Sothebys International Realty
Photo: Sothebys International Realty
“In the short term, I think it’s definitely going to make their lives more difficult,” said Jed Garfield, an Upper East Side broker. The co-op requires $10,000 in monthly maintenance fees, though it’s unclear whether the election workers will be on the hook for that amount or whether the court receiver may have to sell off other assets to pay it. Aside from that, Giuliani had to slash the apartment price by $400,000 even though the co-op market is strong at the moment. It is now for sale at $5.1 million.
It’s also simply Rudy Giuliani’s former apartment. He bought the place in the heyday of his career, when his second term as mayor ended. Judith Giuliani, his ex-wife, told the New York Times it was a gilded retreat where her then-husband, still in his glowy “America’s mayor” era, could “smoke cigars and relax and watch his Yankee games.” It was allegedly very important to him that he lived in a penthouse. (He fought, in fact, to prevent another penthouse from being built above his.)
Having his name attached to the building used to be an asset, Dolly Lenz, a broker with other listings there, told the Times when it first listed in 2023. “It was like, it’s America’s mayor, he chose this building — all very good things ascribed to him living in the same building,” she said. The tides have shifted and the association in the current market “would be wildly different,” she guessed at the time.
So while it is certainly poetic justice that the most salient symbol of Giuliani’s former power and privilege, in all its prime Lenox Hill glory, is going to the two election workers whose lives he upended, it’s still New York real estate. “Ultimately, I think it’s going to take a little while,” Garfield said.
