SACRAMENTO, Calif. — He may be riding a surging wave in the Republican presidential race. But former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani found himself pleading for privacy Monday in the wake of news coverage over troubled relationships with his children.

The twice-divorced Giuliani appeared Monday at a Los Angeles County anti-gang meeting with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and law enforcement officials. Yet he wound up facing reporters' questions over comments by his son, Andrew Giuliani, who described hurt feelings and a sense of estrangement with his father.

In interviews with the New York Times and ABC News, the 21-year-old sophomore at Duke University said he and his presidential candidate father were working to improve their relationship after not speaking to one another for "a decent amount of time."

Though he said he supported his father for president, Andrew Giuliani told the New York Times that there was friction stemming from Giuliani's marriage to his current wife, Judith Nathan.

"There's obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife," the son said.

On his relationship with his father, he said: "For a while there, we weren't talking. ... But lately we've been having more contact and trying to figure things out."

In Los Angeles, Giuliani, who went through a bitter public divorce with Andrew's mother, Donna Hanover, acknowledged that he is facing problems common to families dealing with divorce and remarriage.

"My wife, Judith, is a very loving and caring and a good mother and stepmother," Giuliani said. "She has done everything she can. The responsibility is mine. I believe these problems with blended families are challenges, and challenges are best faced privately."

He went on to say: "Look, I know it's the presidential campaign and all that, but if you guys (media) give us a degree of privacy, I think any family would want that."

Before his son's interviews, Giuliani's appearance with the governor at a summit on how to deal with California's youth gang problem appeared to be a natural event to highlight two pillars of his political biography.

Giuliani, who also appeared at a fund-raiser in Brentwood and will campaign in San Diego today, won acclaim as a federal prosecutor for pursuing Mafia bosses and other mobsters and as a crime-fighting mayor who oversaw a 70 percent drop in New York's homicide rate.

"I used to think ... that when we were dealing with organized crime back in the 1980s that if we could be as well organized as they were, and then better organized, we could defeat them," Giuliani said after meeting with the governor, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and law enforcement officials from four Southern California counties.