NEW YORK (AP) — Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner during the 9/11 attacks who later admitted to tax fraud charges before receiving a pardon, has passed away at the age of 69.
FBI Director Kash Patel said that Kerik’s death Thursday came after an unspecified “private battle with illness.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor, who initially hired Kerik as his bodyguard during the 1993 mayoral campaign and subsequently appointed him to head the NYPD, reminisced about their long-standing connection on his show Thursday.
“We’ve shared a journey since the start. He’s like my brother,” Giuliani expressed emotionally. “Knowing Bernie made me a better person. He undoubtedly made me braver and stronger.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also a former NYPD officer, said he’d visited Kerik, his ”friend of nearly 30 years,” at a hospital earlier in the day.
Kerik, an Army veteran, was hailed as a hero after the 9/11 attack and eventually nominated to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, before a dramatic fall from grace that ended with him behind bars.
He served nearly four years in prison after pleading guilty in 2009 to tax fraud, making false statements and other charges. The charges stemmed partially from apartment renovations he received from a construction firm that authorities say wanted Kerik to convince New York officials it had no links to organized crime.
During Kerik’s sentencing, the judge noted that he committed some of the crimes while serving as “the chief law enforcement officer for the biggest and grandest city this nation has.”
President Donald Trump pardoned Kerik during a 2020 clemency blitz. Kerik was one of the guests feting Trump after his first federal court appearance in Florida in a case related to his handling of classified documents.
Kerik grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, where he dropped out of the troubled Eastside High School later depicted in the 1989 film “Lean on Me.”
He joined the Army, where he became a military policeman stationed in South Korea. He went on to work private security in Saudi Arabia before returning stateside to supervise a jail in New Jersey.
He joined the NYPD in the late 1980s and was appointed in the 1990s to run New York’s long-troubled jail system, including the city’s notorious Riker’s Island complex.
Kerik was appointed by Giuliani to serve as police commissioner in 2000 and was often by the mayor’s side in the period after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He was at my side within 20 minutes of the attack and never left,” Giuliani recalled in a statement following Kerik’s death.
In Kerik’s 2015 book, “From Jailer to Jailed,” he described becoming “America’s Top Cop” after the attacks.
“But I’d give anything for that day not to have happened. I wish it hadn’t. But it did,” he wrote. “And I happened to be there at the time. I was there, and I did the best I could do under the circumstances. It’s all any of us did.”
He was tapped by President George W. Bush to help organize Iraq’s police force in 2003, then nominated to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the following year.
But Kerik caught the administration off guard when he abruptly withdrew his nomination, saying he had uncovered information that led him to question the immigration status of a person he employed as a housekeeper and nanny.
More serious legal troubles followed, culminating in his conviction.
In 2005, Kerik founded the Kerik Group, a crisis and risk management consulting firm.
More recently, he worked for Giuliani again, surrounding the efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.
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This story has been corrected to show that Kerik pleaded guilty in 2009, not 2010.
