Don't look at my personal life or my social views, Rudy Giuliani seems to be saying to Republican presidential-primary voters. Instead, look at my management record.

Since he ended his eight-year tenure as New York City's mayor at the start of 2002, Giuliani has steadily laid the groundwork for his current presidential bid by parlaying his experience as chief executive of one of the nation's largest regional economies into a lucrative run as a consultant.

"They used to call it unmanageable, ungovernable," the candidate says of pre-Giuliani New York in a TV ad. "I believe I've been tested in a way in which the American people can look to me. They're not going to find perfection, but they're going to find somebody who has dealt with crisis almost on a regular basis and has had results."

But it's not what he did as New York's mayor that is getting attention these days. It's what Giuliani has done in the private sector—along with some long-ago issues dating before the September 11 attacks—that raise uncomfortable questions about the kind of manager he is.

Even before terrorists struck New York four months before the end of his term at City Hall, Giuliani planned a move into consultancy. As the saying goes, 9/11 changed everything—including "America’s Mayor" being hailed as a hero.

Accounting giant Ernst & Young rushed at the chance to work with him. Two weeks after leaving office, the ex-mayor opened Giuliani Partners with a rumored $3 million signing bonus in the bank. The former federal prosecutor had turned into a C.E.O. in an instant.
 
Giuliani went on to form a series of eponymous entities. He founded the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Leadership. He leveraged a Texas Republican connection to join the Houston law firm of Bracewell & Patterson, which was changed to Bracewell & Giuliani. Giuliani Partners and Ernst & Young jointly begat Giuliani Capital Advisors (which was sold after he entered the presidential race), and that begat Giuliani Compliance Japan. Giuliani-Kerik L.L.C. was later renamed Giuliani Security & Safety, which spawned the Rudolph W. Giuliani Advanced Security Centers and Giuliani Security & Safety Asia.
 
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Giuliani's wealth has exploded since he left office. All the firms that bear his name are private and therefore not required to publicly furnish information, but Giuliani's F.E.C. disclosure shows that he earned $16 million last year. Factor in investments, and Giuliani and his wife Judith Nathan, a former pharmaceutical-sales rep, are worth between $12.7 million to $45.4 million, according to filings. By contrast, in his mayoral-disclosure forms, Giuliani reported assets of between $1.2 million and $1.9 million in 2002.
 
Political foes and public-interest groups criticized Giuliani for continuing to work for his consulting firm because of the inevitable conflicts of interest should he become president. After months of silence and unflattering news reports, Giuliani Partners finally clarified on December 2 that Giuliani no longer had management duties or client involvement. In the most extensive review of Giuliani's client list to date, the Associated Press identified more than 175 Giuliani Partners clients–among them Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and numerous government contractors.
 
Companies generally hire consultants when they are in deep financial or P.R. trouble, or when they want help navigating federal regulations. "For the most part, it's real cloak-and-dagger," says Joseph Kornik, editor in chief of Consulting Magazine, which voted Giuliani one of the top 25 most influential consultants in 2002. "When clients sign them, they sign them on the down-low," he adds. In other words, Giuliani's reluctance to disclose client information is an industrywide practice.

But what Giuliani is promising to do as president is hold institutions to account—not help them make problems go away. On the campaign trail, Giuliani insists that all of his business dealings have been "totally legal, totally ethical," and that the media have already rooted out nearly every one of his clients. But without the cooperation of Giuliani Partners in answering these questions, there's no way to confirm his claims. "We comply fully with all F.E.C. rules and regulations," is all campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella would say on the subject.
 
Both publicly and privately, Giuliani Partners steadfastly denies it has anything to hide. A source who has a long history with the former mayor and knowledge of the company’s inner workings dismissed news accounts that Giuliani was being evasive. The source said most of Giuliani Partners’ client list had already been made known, and further insisted that the company's secrecy is a product of "the specific request of those clients."
 
Mitt Romney, one of Giuliani’s main rivals for the Republican nomination and a former consultant himself, might have no problem with that explanation. "Most clients want it to be confidential that a [consulting] firm is working with them," says Bob White, a longtime business partner of Romney's who is now the former Massachusetts governor's campaign chairman. But there’s a crucial difference in their career trajectories: Romney was out of the consulting business for more than 20 years when he announced his bid for the White House while Giuliani was building his consulting business and planning a presidential campaign at the same time.

Mike Wallace, a historian and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, says Giuliani's closed-mouth approach would have grave ramifications in the White House.
 
"What troubles me is the possibility that a key element of his management style is a penchant for secrecy and keeping information out of the public’s eyes," Wallace says. "When he was in office he was extremely tightfisted about policing information that the public had every right to know. He had to be sued repeatedly by news organizations to get information."
 
Rival campaigns and the Democratic National Committee have begun a whispering campaign among political reporters in the hopes of pressuring Giuliani to disclose more of his mayoral documents and business records. A Freedom of Information Act request has already yielded the first potential bombshell of his campaign: Taxpayers helped fund his then-extramarital affair with Nathan. In addition, unfortunately for Giuliani, the private-sector work that has come to light has rarely been flattering. After Purdue Pharma, maker of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin, ran into a host of legal and P.R. troubles in 2004, company officials were quick to trumpet their hiring of the former mayor, whom one heralded as "a sort of rock star."
 
But instead of being extricated from the OxyContin controversy, top executives were prosecuted for misleadingly claiming the drug was less addictive than other narcotics. In June, the lead prosecutor on that case told the New York Times that Giuliani was key in negotiating a plea deal that kept three Purdue executives out of prison.
 
Critics have pointed to the Purdue relationship as contradicting Giuliani’s claim that he is the true law-and-order candidate (as opposed to actor, lawyer, and former Senator Fred Thompson who has made similar claims). And Giuliani’s secretive and loyalty-driven management style—several key Giuliani Partners officers hail from his administration, and many have been reimbursed by Giuliani’s campaign for volunteer work—are raising questions about his judgment. That J word has been dogging Giuliani pretty hard thanks to his association with longtime associate Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner. Partly on Giuliani’s recommendation, President George W. Bush nominated Kerik to be Homeland Security chief in 2004.
 
Giuliani severed his business relationship with Kerik after the nomination flamed out amid allegations that Kerik hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny, failed to pay all his taxes, and had two extramarital affairs. In November, Kerik was indicted on 16 federal corruption charges. Adding to Giuliani's potential woes is book editor and publisher Judith Regan’s $100 million lawsuit against News Corp. alleging that executives pressured her to lie about an affair she had had with Kerik after he was nominated to Bush’s cabinet. The reason, said Regan, the original would-be publisher of O.J. Simpson's book If I Did It, was to protect Giuliani’s political ambitions. News Corp. is a client of Giuliani Partners.

Apart from the corporations that bear his name, Giuliani has had at least two high-profile opportunities to demonstrate his much-ballyhooed leadership skills. In 2003, Mexico City hired Giuliani to advise officials on its rampant crime and corruption problems, to mixed reviews at best. "They weren't consultants, they were retired policemen. And they were trying to organize another police force, but not with a methodology or a clear idea," a Mexican police official later complained to the New York Sun.
 
And then there's the Iraq Study Group. Giuliani is one of the staunchest backers of the war effort, but he resigned from the bipartisan panel after failing to attend a single meeting in two months. Members of the I.S.G. have said that Giuliani opted out of the meetings due to his numerous speaking engagements, for which he earned $11.4 million last year.

With his private-sector record hidden, Giuliani is left to stump heavily on his years as mayor. To succeed, he'll need to keep the focus on his antipornography, pro-business, and low-crime initiatives and hope that the more damaging stories about his temper, poor race relations, and extramarital affair stay out of the public eye.
 
"I think that I can get you results that the others are talking about," he told a voter at a recent town-hall meeting in Laconia, New Hampshire. "They don't have the results to back up what they are promising," he added of his rivals on both sides of the aisle. "I do."