ENTER THE 'MAYHEM MAGNET'

Kerik had no trouble posing as a drug dealer when he was involved in undercover sting operations. He wore the jewelry and had hair down to his waist. "I looked like Charles Manson," he recalled in his memoir. But he was an avenging angel in a fight, winning the New York Police Department's highest medal for bravery for rescuing a fellow cop in a gun battle. Rising to become head of New York's Department of Corrections, he drastically reduced prison violence by demanding accountability from the wardens--and punishing them for not carrying out his orders.

He was brash about getting across his message. The buses carrying prisoners back and forth from Rikers Island, the most notorious prison, were shabby wrecks. Kerik ordered them cleaned up. Seeing an old rusty prison wagon with its driver asleep at the wheel, Kerik turned to the responsible warden and told him that for the next month he would be giving up his Crown Victoria and driver and getting himself to work in the beat-up prison bus. "I'm not big on doing things that are a waste of time," Kerik said in an interview in 2001. "If it's a waste of time, get rid of it. If it's a bad manager, get rid of them."

Kerik has been known to make up his own rules. While he was police commissioner, the NYPD bought four $50,000 security doors for police headquarters. They turned out to be too heavy for the floor to support. One of them was used by the Department of Corrections, and the other three are in storage. A police department investigation found irregularities in the bidding process. After leaving the NYPD, Kerik became an adviser to a company distributing the doors, though he renounced his deal after the door-maker's president was indicted for defrauding the city.

He can be vainglorious. Eyes rolled in the NYPD when Kerik reportedly used $3,000 of Police Foundation funds to order up 30 busts of his own likeness, complete with bristling mustache. Possibly because Kerik heard the grumbles, the busts were never handed out. (His aides insist the idea for the busts originated with the nonprofit Police Foundation.) Kerik likes the glittery celebrity life. After he stopped being a street cop, he cut his ponytail and began wearing silk-thread suits and Italian loafers. His workout partner and literary editor for his memoir was Judith Regan, a flamboyant and successful publishing figure. ("She is brash, very assertive, extremely demanding and talks like a man," Kerik approvingly told Vanity Fair magazine. "But you know what? I've run the biggest police departments in the country. I've run the largest jail. Sometimes it takes a person like that to get things done.") There was more tut-tutting when Kerik (or a deputy) sent homicide detectives to investigate how Regan had lost her cell phone and possibly some jewelry. In the middle of the night, the cops roused and fingerprinted some Fox network employees on Regan's (since canceled) cable-TV talk show. In a separate case, Kerik was later reprimanded and required to pay a $2,500 fine for using city cops to help research his memoir.

Kerik has always been highly political. After he left as chief of the New York City Department of Corrections in 1999, he was named in a civil lawsuit as the architect of a system to force prison guards to work for Republicans in their off-hours. The suit, by a Democratic warden who claimed he was punished for his political views, claimed that Kerik would "hunt down" anyone deemed "disloyal." The suit was settled; the plaintiff got $300,000 and a promotion. Though a Kerik protege was later indicted, Kerik himself was never accused of criminal wrongdoing.

Kerik had the good sense to make an ally of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, volunteering to be his bodyguard and driver while he was a cop. The two men became friends and Giuliani has looked out for Kerik ever since, making him boss of the Department of Corrections and later police commissioner. When Giuliani left office in 2002, Kerik went with him as a partner in his consulting firm. Turning aside speculation that he might want the Homeland Security job himself, Giuliani recommended Kerik to President Bush. A White House aide told NEWSWEEK that Giuliani's support was not decisive, that the White House "reached out" to Kerik. The ex-NYPD boss had paid his dues to Bush, taking to the campaign trail this fall to warn voters that he worried about another terrorist attack if John Kerry were elected. "Political criticism is our enemy's best friend," said Kerik, who can sound a little like Mussolini at times.