ENTER THE 'MAYHEM MAGNET'

The Department of Homeland Security is a bureaucratic nightmare. Cobbled together out of 22 government agencies with 180,000 employees, it was guaranteed to generate epic turf struggles. Well-meaning and decent, but maybe a little too nice, the first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, always seemed slightly overwhelmed by his job during his two years in charge. To replace him, President Bush last week picked a very different sort of character.

During the late-'80s cocaine epidemic, working as a New York undercover cop with a black belt in karate and six diamond studs in his ear, Bernard Kerik seemed to thrive on violent chaos. (His colleagues called him the "Mayhem Magnet.") Later, as Gotham's tough-talking police commissioner, Kerik boasted about firing bureaucrats who couldn't get the job done.

He could be just the man to take charge of the sprawling, sluggish, feuding DHS--to knock heads and demand results. But Kerik has also been shadowed by minor scandals during his career, and he has a reputation in some quarters as a political opportunist who has been a little too eager to promote his own fame and fortune. Some of the grumbling comes from disappointed rivals in the rough-and-tumble world of New York politics. Kerik, who says he has watched "The Godfather" 50 times, is the sort of leader who seems to make as many enemies as friends.

Kerik does have some very powerful backers, including congressional Democrats as well as the White House. He is one of the most colorful self-made men to arrive in Washington in a long time; his story seems to have captured the fancy of President Bush, who may have been born on third base himself but favors Horatio Algers (like Secretary of State-nominee Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales). Kerik is a black-and-white loyalist, another quality valued by Bush. But Kerik is so driven, so intense, so determined to overcome his wretched past that he also has some of the qualities of the hero in a Greek tragedy who risks being brought low by his own ambition.

Kerik's frontline experience as NYPD commissioner on 9/11 is useful, but the real battles in Washington are often over funding and personnel. While America has not been attacked since 9/11, it may be in spite of, not because of, the DHS. For instance, Congress wanted the Department of Homeland Security to create a super-intelligence-analysis unit that could look at all the raw information coming into the federal government and connect the dots. The problem is that experienced intelligence analysts at the CIA and FBI don't want to work for DHS; instead, the old-line intelligence services hang on to analysts for their own counterterrorism centers. Will Kerik have the diplomatic skill as well as the chutzpah to referee this sort of mindless jockeying for position?

Kerik's introduction to his memoir, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," recounts a dream about his mother, a prostitute who abandoned him when he was 2 and was found murdered in the bed of her pimp. Chapter one begins, "Some f---in' mutt in a tuxedo has stopped traffic by climbing to the top of the George Washington Bridge and threatened to jump..." Clearly, these are not the memoirs of Dean Acheson. Kerik is a creature of the street. A high-school dropout (he later got a college degree by correspondence), he knows what it is like to get shot at by a drug dealer. He also knows what it's like to be a local cop getting talked down to by an FBI agent (a useful bit of understanding for the secretary of Homeland Security, whose job it is to make sure that the Feds and locals share information). Kerik learned about loyalty from bitter experience. As an MP in Korea, he got a local girl pregnant and abandoned the child--until he realized that he had behaved just like his mother. For years he fruitlessly searched for the girl; they were finally reunited in 2002.