Rudy Giuliani, the former two-term mayor of New York City who earned the title “America’s Mayor” for his extraordinary leadership in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is hospitalized in critical but stable condition, his spokesman Ted Goodman confirmed Sunday, May 3, 2026. Giuliani is 81 years old.
Goodman released a statement that asked for prayers and spoke to the character of the man in the hospital bed:
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani is currently in the hospital, where he remains in critical but stable condition. Mayor Giuliani is a fighter who has faced every challenge in his life with unwavering strength, and he’s fighting with that same level of strength as we speak. We do ask that you join us in prayer for America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”
No cause of hospitalization has been disclosed and no specific hospital has been identified.
What is known is that Giuliani appeared on his online program “America’s Mayor Live” from Palm Beach, Florida on Friday May 1 and noted at the opening of the show that his voice was “a little under the weather” before coughing.
By Sunday, his spokesman was asking the public for prayer.
President Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday, calling Giuliani “a True Warrior, and the Best Mayor in the History of New York City, BY FAR.”
The Career That Defined a City
Rudy Giuliani was born on May 28, 1944 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Harold Giuliani, a plumber, and Helen D’Avanzo Giuliani.
He grew up in a working-class neighborhood with the specific combination of toughness and ambition that Brooklyn has historically produced in its sons, and he applied both for the next six decades to the work of public service.
He attended Manhattan College and then New York University School of Law, graduating in 1968.
After law school he served as a law clerk in the Southern District of New York before joining the United States Attorney’s Office in the same district, the beginning of the prosecutorial career that would make him one of the most recognized law enforcement figures in American history before he ever ran for office.
As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989, Giuliani became a nationally known name by doing something that had generally been considered impossible. Taking on the Five Families of the New York mob using the RICO statute in ways that permanently disrupted the Mafia’s control of major industries in the city.
He prosecuted Ivan Boesky and other Wall Street figures for insider trading at a moment when financial markets were in the middle of a corruption crisis that few prosecutors were willing to confront.
He prosecuted corrupt politicians. He made the office into something that stood apart from the institutional caution that often defines federal law enforcement, and he did it with a visibility and confidence that made him a celebrity prosecutor at a time when that was not yet a category.
He lost his first campaign for mayor in 1989 to incumbent David Dinkins. He won the rematch in 1993 and was sworn in as the 107th mayor of New York City on January 1, 1994.
What Giuliani Did For New York
The New York City that Giuliani inherited in January 1994 was not the city that exists today. The murder rate in 1990 had reached 2,245 killings — the highest in the city’s recorded history.
Times Square was famous for reasons that had nothing to do with tourism. Neighborhoods that are now among the most desirable real estate in the world were places where residents organized their lives around avoiding crime rather than enjoying their city.
The narrative of New York’s decline, the city that could not be governed, the city that was burning, the city that reasonable people were leaving, had been the dominant story of urban America for twenty years.
Giuliani changed it. He implemented the CompStat system, a data-driven approach to policing that tracked crime patterns in real time and held precinct commanders accountable for results in their specific districts in ways that had never been done before.
He adopted broken windows policing, the theory that addressing visible disorder and lower-level crime creates an environment that discourages more serious crime.
He rebuilt the police department’s sense of mission and deployed it with an intensity and focus that the city had not seen.
The results were not subtle. By the time Giuliani left office at the end of 2001, the murder rate had fallen from 2,245 in 1990 to 649, a reduction of approximately 71 percent.
Overall felony crime dropped by more than 57 percent during his two terms. New York City went from the archetype of urban failure to a city that mayors and police commissioners from around the world came to study.
The transformation of Times Square, from a place people warned each other about to the most visited tourist destination in the United States, is the visual shorthand for what happened to the entire city during those eight years.
He also oversaw the fiscal recovery of a city that had nearly gone bankrupt in the 1970s and had been managing its decline ever since.
He cut taxes, reduced the city’s workforce, privatized services, and ran surpluses that gave the city the financial foundation to weather future shocks.
The Day That Defined Him
On September 11, 2001, Giuliani’s second and final term as mayor was seven weeks from its end.
He had served his eight years, transformed his city, and was preparing to hand over the mayoralty to his successor Michael Bloomberg. His place in New York’s history was already secure.
Then the planes hit the towers.
What Giuliani did in the hours, days and weeks that followed is the thing that made the phrase “America’s Mayor” feel like more than a nickname. He was at the scene within minutes.
He was visible when visibility was what the city needed. He communicated with clarity and compassion through days of sustained shock and grief at a moment when the entire world was watching New York to understand how a civilization responds to the worst thing that has ever happened to it.
He led press conferences that informed, organized and steadied a population that was terrified and overwhelmed.
Giuliani held memorials for the fallen. He personally attended dozens of funerals for firefighters and police officers who had run into the buildings while everyone else ran out.
Time magazine named him its Person of the Year for 2001. Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Across a political spectrum that rarely agrees on anything, there was consensus: in the days after September 11, Rudy Giuliani was exactly what New York needed.
He did not need to do any of it. His term was ending. He had already achieved what he set out to achieve. He stayed anyway, and in staying, became the figure history was always going to remember.
His Son And The World Cup
While Rudy Giuliani fights in a Florida hospital, his son Andrew Giuliani is carrying the family’s tradition of public service into a new arena. Andrew Giuliani currently serves as the executive director of the presidential task force for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the historic tournament that the United States is hosting jointly with Canada and Mexico this summer.
The World Cup represents one of the largest sporting and logistical events ever held on American soil, and Andrew Giuliani’s role in preparing the country’s infrastructure, security and organizational response to the tournament is a direct continuation of the Giuliani family’s decades-long connection to New York and to the public work of making major American events function.
The family has been asked to carry much simultaneously.
The Giuliani name, associated for decades with the city’s transformation and with one of the most defining moments in American history, now includes a son managing the country’s biggest summer undertaking while his father lies in a hospital bed described as critical but stable.
Giuliani Fighting For His Life
The word his spokesman used was fighting. “Mayor Giuliani is a fighter who has faced every challenge in his life with unwavering strength, and he’s fighting with that same level of strength as we speak.”
The biographical record supports that description. Giuliani contracted COVID-19 in 2020 and spent four days in the hospital fighting the illness at a point in the pandemic when it was frequently fatal for men his age with his health profile.
In August 2025, the vehicle he was riding in as a passenger was struck from behind at high speed in New Hampshire. He was taken to the hospital with injuries that included a spinal fracture and was released.
Each time, he came back. Each time, he returned to his show, his public life and his advocacy for the causes and the people he believes in.
The man who ran into the worst disaster New York had ever seen in September 2001 rather than away from it has not developed the habit of not fighting.
His spokesman is asking for prayer. President Trump is calling him a warrior. The city he transformed over eight years and unified on the worst day in its history knows him as America’s Mayor.
He is 81 years old and critical but stable. He is fighting.
