Here’s the background:

Mayor Giuliani took the unusual step of naming the Manhattan Detention Complex, the Lower Manhattan central lockup known informally as the Tombs, after a still-living person: Kerik. Giuliani’s police commissioner at the time, Kerik had previously served two years as his correction commissioner, after first getting to know the mayor as his bodyguard and driver and moving up through the ranks under his patronage.

Naming the jail facility after Kerik became somewhat awkward a few years later in 2006, when he was charged with the first of a series of state and federal crimes ranging from receiving undisclosed and improper gifts to lying to White House officials.

Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg recognized the awkward optics, and Kerik’s name came off the building. “After Bernie Kerik pleaded guilty, it was not appropriate to have that facility named after him,” Bloomberg said. “I informed the [Correction] commissioner of my decision and he expeditiously changed the naming of the sign.”

And here’s the funny part:

Nearly 20 years after Kerik’s name was stripped from the Tombs, in July the DOC quietly reinstalled signage designating the building at 125 White Street the “Bernard Kerik Courts.”

“The late Bernard Kerik served as First Deputy Commissioner of the NYC Department of Correction from 1995 until 1997 and served as Commissioner from 1997 to 2000,” a DOC spokesperson told Hell Gate when asked about the new signage. “The Manhattan Detention Center was previously named in his honor and signage was re-installed on the DOC side of the Manhattan Courts upon his passing.” . . .

Kerik’s professional biography is long, fascinating, and so chock-a-block with outrageous and alarming episodes of moral failure that his life takes on a sort of mythic scale, a tall tale of rolling skullduggery.

An extremely incomplete accounting might include: abandoning his daughter and her mother in Korea; commandeering a Battery Park City apartment donated for the use of tired police and rescue workers after 9/11 to conduct one of two simultaneous extramarital affairs; acting as a sex-police enforcer for a Saudi hospital; taking multi-million-dollar payouts from Taser; tasking police under his command to do book research for him and harass Fox News employees suspected of stealing his lover’s jewelry later found in her bag; and acting as the interim interior minister of Iraq, where he took a quarter-million-dollar, no-interest personal loan from an Israeli billionaire with Defense Department contracts. . . .

In 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty to eight federal corruption charges including tax fraud and lying to White House officials about having helped a company suspected of mob connections get a license in exchange for free renovations to his Riverdale home. For those crimes, Kerik did three and a half years in federal prison. . . .

So, yeah, if you’re gonna name something after this guy, it might as well be a jail! “Named in his honor,” indeed.

This is appropriate in the same sense that is was appropriate for them to name an airport near D.C. after someone who overthrew democratic governments in multiple foreign countries.

But BATF doesn’t take the bait

Also, amusingly I found this news article suggesting that the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms be named after a politician whose most famous act was to kill someone while under the influence of alcohol. I don’t think they did it, though. According to Wikipedia, they named it after Ariel Rios, an ATF undercover special agent who was killed in action in 1982. The BATF just doesn’t have the sense of irony possessed by the NYC Department of Correction.