Mayor Bloomberg’s allies say it’s no coincidence that the man leading the legal campaign to block the City Council from extending term limits is Randy Mastro, a longtime Rudy Giuliani loyalist. If Mastro succeeds in derailing Bloomberg’s plan for another four years, he’d embarrass the mayor. Taking Bloomberg down a peg could only help Giuliani, who’s positioning himself to mount a comeback by seeking to unseat David Paterson in 2010. “Mastro is the Luca Brasi of this operation,” jokes a veteran political operative. But the former deputy mayor denies it. “I am doing this out of principle,” Mastro, a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, says of his firm’s pro bono work on behalf of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and other Democratic officials. “It has nothing to do with anyone I worked for in the past.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Jacob Gershman
• Table of Contents: Oct 27, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!