By Bill Vann
...In further cyber conversation (click here)) (by Guiliani) with the man from the Midwest, Harding confided that he would like to “move to a conservative, all-white state like Idaho,” and referred to African-American college students as “stupid monkeys.”
The HDC, the agency that Harding led, was supposed to provide low-interest loans for the building of affordable housing for New York’s predominantly black and Hispanic low-income population.
Harding, 38, was a college dropout with no experience in either housing or finance when Giuliani tapped him for the post in 1998. He was, however, the son of Ray Harding, the politically influential head of the Liberal Party, who had helped elect the Republican mayor twice by placing him on the Liberal ticket.
“Russell Harding has done an excellent job for this administration,” Giuliani declared when asked about the blatant patronage appointment. “This new job is something that he will do, I’m sure, with exceptional skill and ability. I don’t hire people because of their father, and I don’t hold anybody’s father against them either.”
A second Harding son, Robert, was picked as the city’s budget director and was later promoted to deputy mayor.
Details of Russell Harding’s spending spree first appeared in an article by Village Voice columnist Tom Robbins, who obtained expense records after filing freedom of information requests. The records showed that the bulk of the quarter-of-a-million in city money went to pay for trips taken by Harding and Luke Cusack, a close friend whom he hired as the agency’s senior vice president.
