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.

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.

Kerik has already briefly served the Bush administration, in the daunting job of acting Iraqi minister of the Interior. After the invasion of Iraq the Bush administration tapped Kerik to go to Baghdad to begin rebuilding the local police force. As he left, Kerik vowed that he'd be gone for six months or until he'd finished the job. But he came home after a little more than three months, just as the insurgency was starting to explode. Kerik told reporters that he needed a vacation; officials now say he left because an Iraqi was ready to take over his job.

Kerik has always had a knack for following the money, both the criminals' and his own. He helped crack the Cali, Colombia, cartel as an international drug buster assigned by the NYPD in the early '90s; before that he was briefly a well-paid security coordinator for the Saudi royal-family hospitals. He recently cashed in as a director of a company that makes Taser stun guns, selling stock options worth $5.8 million (he never had to put up any of his own cash). Taser sold the controversial stun guns to the NYPD during Kerik's reign (and before Kerik had a relationship with the company), and has since sold some to the Feds, mostly for a pilot program run by the Border Patrol. There is no evidence of self-dealing; still, it appears that Kerik got unusually lucky.

Kerik's sweet deal and his earlier ethics scrapes could face close scrutiny when he comes up for Senate confirmation this winter. A White House spokesman told NEWSWEEK that Kerik has been "thoroughly vetted," and he has strong Democratic backers in New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. The New Yorkers are hoping that Kerik will reverse the flow of Homeland Security dollars, which, at least in the early going, disproportionately favored rural states at low risk of attack like Alaska (home of Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and King of Pork). Still, Kerik will have to be uncharacteristically diplomatic with his various congressional masters. Ludicrously, the Department of Homeland Security reports to 88 different congressional committees. "You try telling 60 senators from rural states that they're no longer going to get as much money as they were getting," says a DHS official. "That's suicide."

If confirmed, Kerik will have a hard time figuring out where to begin to fix the manifold problems of the DHS. One starting point would be to create some esprit de corps and attract real talent from other government intelligence services. The DHS intel unit is run by elderly retired generals who seem to be better at telling war stories than creatively connecting dots.

The DHS has been ridiculed for its color-coded terror warnings, but the real problems go deeper. Morale is at rock bottom at some formerly elite units like Customs, whose undercover operatives were once highly effective at cracking arms smuggling and drug rings at home and abroad. The reason: they were merged with chaotic and low-budget Immigration offices. Customs agents complain that they can't get gas for the cars to go on stakeouts, NEWSWEEK has learned. Then there are the sky marshals, who are supposed to guard commercial airliners from hijackers. One problem: a former Secret Service agent in charge ordered them to wear business suits, which makes them look like, well, G-men.

Trying to anticipate the myriad threats facing the United States is a daunting task. As he stepped down as Department of Health and Human Services secretary last week, Tommy Thompson bluntly declared, "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it would be so easy to do." America's chemical plants and seaports are especially vulnerable. Twice on the anniversary of 9/11, ABC News managed, as a test, to smuggle into the country suspicious objects giving off a radioactive signature. Embarrassed, Homeland Security wanted to prosecute the newsmen. Kerik is going to have to move fast to secure the ports before real terrorists smuggle in a real bomb.