Specifically, Kerik started his rise to power as a veteran street cop tasked to be Giuliani's driver and bodyguard during the 1993 mayoral election. The two became friends. Giuliani made him commissioner of the Corrections Department—where, it must be said, Kerik did a bang-up job, reducing gang violence at Riker's Island by 90 percent. He then became deputy commissioner of the NYPD and, finally, the commish.

He was the city's top cop for the last 16 months of Giuliani's tenure. For the first 13 of those months, terrorism wasn't much of an issue. Kerik's three main priorities, as he laid out in a talk at the Manhattan Institute in March 2001, were reducing crime (which had been plunging for eight years already), boosting police morale (which had recently been damaged by rancorous labor negotiations), and "improving community relations" (a euphemism for "saying hello to black people once in a while," which Giuliani had barely done since his first year as mayor).

Kerik did well in all three areas. But they had nothing to do with countering terrorism—an issue that Giuliani preferred to manage himself (with much enthusiasm, but mixed results, as when, for instance, he decided to put his multimillion-dollar anti-terror command headquarters on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center).

Not to denigrate Kerik's job performance, but he spent much of his own term writing an autobiography (which became a best seller). He used active-duty police officers to help with research on the book, a violation of policy for which the city's Conflicts of Interest Board fined Kerik $2,500. And when someone stole his publisher's cell phone and necklace, he assigned some homicide detectives to the case—a move that caused some outrage in the ranks.

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- david | 11:37 PM