EXCLUSIVE: Linda & Vince McMahon and Rudy Giuliani — And the McMahons’ Defense Lawyer’s ‘Fixer’ Husband — Go WAY Back Together

“Thank you Mayor Rudy Giuliani for joining me at SS&C Technologies in Windsor this afternoon,” Senate candidate Linda McMahon just tweeted.

Giuliani shares quite a history with Linda McMahon and her husband Vince, the impresarios of World Wrestling Entertainment. It is a story that remains untold during the campaign, except on this blog.

In 1994 Vince was acquitted at a federal trial charging him with conspiracy to distribute steroids. His lead defense counsel was Laura Brevetti (now a partner in WWE’s favorite outside law firm, K&L Gates).

Also in 1994, Brevetti married an odd character named Marty Bergman. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, officiated the ceremony.

Brother of the more celebrated investigative journalist Lowell Bergman (who was portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the movie about tobacco industry exposes), Marty Bergman was a notorious “fixer.” A year after the McMahon trial, both the New York Post and the Village Voice reported that Bergman had been behind smears of the McMahon prosecutors that were published prior to the trial in The New York Observer. In addition, Bergman met with a key prosecution witness, Vince’s former secretary Emily Feinberg, and, representing himself as a tabloid television show producer, suggested that she could be paid in six figures for her exclusive story.

For full background on the wonderful friendships of Giuliani, Bergman, and the McMahons, see:

* “Tampering Cloud Over Wrestling Big’s Trial,” by Jack Newfield and Phil Mushnick, New York Post, November 22, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/nyposttext.pdf

* “The Fixer: Journalist. Private Eye. Mole. Snitch. It’s All in a Day’s Work for Marty Bergman, the Zelig of New York’s Information Highway,” by William Bastone, Village Voice, December 19, 1995 — full text viewable at http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf

Irv Muchnick