Bernard Kerik

Bernard Bailey Kerik (September 4, 1955 – May 29, 2025) was an American consultant, police officer and convicted felon who was the 40th Commissioner of the New York Police Department from 2000 to 2001.

Kerik joined the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in 1986. He served from 1998 to 2000 as commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction and from 2000 to 2001 as New York City Police Commissioner, during which he oversaw the police response to the September 11 attacks. Kerik conducted two extramarital affairs simultaneously, using a Battery Park City apartment that had been set aside for first responders at Ground Zero.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush appointed Kerik as the interior minister of the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority. In 2004, Bush nominated Kerik to lead the Department of Homeland Security. However, Kerik soon withdrew his candidacy, explaining that he had employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny. His admission sparked state and federal investigations. In 2006, Kerik pleaded guilty in Bronx Supreme Court to two unrelated misdemeanor ethics violations and was ordered to pay $221,000 in fines.

In 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to eight federal felony charges for tax fraud and making false statements. In February 2010, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison, of which he served three years. In 2020, he obtained a presidential pardon from President Donald Trump for his federal convictions for tax fraud, ethics violations, and criminal false statements. After the 2020 United States presidential election, Kerik supported Trump's false claims of voter fraud and attempted to help overturn the election results.

Early life and education

Kerik was born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 4, 1955, the son of Patricia Joann (née Bailey) and Donald Raymond Kerik Sr. His mother was Irish American. His paternal grandfather was an ethnic Slovak who emigrated from Western Ukraine (then the Russian Empire) to a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania and changed his surname from Kapurik to Kerik.

Kerik was raised Catholic and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Eastside High School in Paterson, and dropped out in 1972.

In July 1974, he enlisted in the United States Army and received a General Educational Development (GED) certificate from the State of North Carolina while assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After leaving the New York City Police Department, he received a B.S. in social theory, social structure and change, from Empire State College of the State University of New York in 2002.

Career

Military

After dropping out of high school, Kerik enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Military Police, stationed in Korea.

Private sector

After leaving the Army, Kerik worked as a security expert in the Middle East; for a time, his clients included the Saudi royal family.

Law enforcement

From December 1981 to October 1982 and then July 1984 to July 1986, Kerik worked at the Passaic County sheriff's office, in New Jersey. He served as the department's training officer and commander of special weapons and operations, and ultimately chief and warden of the Passaic County jail.

Kerik worked from 1982 to 1984 as chief of investigations for the security division of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Six members of the hospital security staff, including Kerik, were fired and deported after an investigation in 1984 by the Saudi secret police. In his autobiography, Kerik wrote that he was expelled after a physical altercation with a Saudi secret police interrogator.

However, in 2004, after his nomination as Secretary of Homeland Security, nine former employees of the hospital told The Washington Post that Kerik worked with a hospital administrator (Nizar Feteih) to surveil people's private affairs, leading to a scandal partly based on Feteih's use of "the institution's security staff to track the private lives of several women with whom he was romantically involved, and men who came in contact with them." Kerik and Feteih (among others) were fired and Kerik deported.

Kerik joined the New York City Police Department in 1986. He first met Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1990, and during the 1993 New York City mayoral election campaign, served as Giuliani's bodyguard and driver. He joined the New York City Department of Corrections in 1994, and enjoyed a series of promotions with Giuliani's backing.

He was credited with reducing violence among the city's jail inmates. Giuliani appointed Kerik commissioner of the city Department of Corrections, a post he served in from 1998 to 2000.

Giuliani appointed Kerik the 40th Police Commissioner of New York City on August 21, 2000. Giuliani made the appointment against the advice of the outgoing police commissioner Howard Safir and many members of his own cabinet. Kerik's critics noted that he did not have a college degree, which at the time was a requirement for police officers to advance to the rank of captain and above.

As police commissioner, Kerik had a tense relationship with the FBI, in part because he criticized federal agencies for not sharing enough intelligence with local police. Although crime in New York dropped during Kerik's tenure, he was sometimes criticized for abuse of power. The New York Times reported that: "Behind the scenes Mr. Kerik ruled like a feudal lord. Moreover, many former employees have said he had taken up with a woman who was a correction officer; he was accused of directing officers to staff his wedding. He befriended the agency's inspector general, whose watchdog responsibilities require keeping an arms-length relationship, and the investigator attended his wedding."

On one occasion, Kerik sent homicide investigators to interview and fingerprint a number of Fox News employees whom Kerik's publisher, Judith Regan, suspected of stealing a necklace and mobile phone. During his time as police commissioner he made five arrests, including one involving two ex-convicts—one a paroled killer, wanted for a carjacking at gunpoint in Virginia—for allegedly driving a stolen van in Harlem.

Kerik was serving as police commissioner during the September 11 attacks. He was in his office when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. He arrived at the base of the North Tower three minutes before United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower, showering him and his staff with debris as Giuliani, Kerik, and their top aides were trapped inside a building at 75 Barclay Street. The September 11 attacks gave Kerik a national profile. Kerik served 16 months as commissioner, leaving office on December 31, 2001, at the end of Giuliani's term.

During a televised Fox News joint interview of himself and Giuliani with Jeanine Pirro on June 6, 2020, Kerik stated that "over the eight-year period that Giuliani was in office, we dropped the violent crime by 63 percent, dropped the murder [sic] by 70 [sic] overall in the city."

Return to private sector

Following his departure from the New York City Police Department, he was employed by Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm formed by Giuliani. He was the senior vice president at Giuliani Partners and chief executive officer of Giuliani–Kerik LLC, an affiliate of Giuliani Partners. Kerik resigned from these positions in December 2004. In March 2005 he created The Kerik Group LLC, where he served as chairman until June 2009, consulting in crisis management and risk mitigation, counterterrorism and law enforcement, and jail/prison management strategies.

He served as an adviser and consultant to King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and to President Bharrat Jagdeo of the Republic of Guyana. He oversaw threat and vulnerability assessments for a ruling family in the United Arab Emirates and also worked on crime reduction and national security strategies in Trinidad and Tobago.

Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq

In May 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Kerik was appointed by the George W. Bush administration as interim Interior Minister of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the governing body of occupied Iraq, and senior policy adviser to U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer. When Kerik arrived in Iraq, the Ministry of Interior did not exist, having collapsed and dissolved during the U.S.–led coalition's invasion of Iraq. Kerik was responsible for restructuring and rebuilding the ministry and all its constituent parts: the national police, intelligence service, and border and customs police, as well as choosing the officials who would take control of these institutions when he left.

Prior to Kerik's departure from Iraq on September 2, 2003, more than 35,000 Iraqi police were reinstated, 35 police stations were placed in Baghdad, with several more around the country, senior deputy interior ministers were appointed, and the newly established governing council appointed the first Iraqi minister of interior, post–Saddam Hussein, Nuri Badran. A United Nations UNODC fact-finding mission report dated May 18, 2003, at the beginning of his term, noted that Kerik's team made "positive interventions in a number of areas."

During his tenure as Interior Minister of Iraq, Kerik secretly accepted and failed to report a $250,000 interest-free "loan" from Israeli billionaire Eitan Wertheimer, for which he was later indicted by the U.S. government and sentenced to prison.