Who

As commissioner of the NYPD, Kelly oversees the largest urban police department in the world with close to 40,000 officers in the five boroughs under his command.

Backstory

The son of a milkman, Kelly was raised on the Upper West Side and in Sunnyside, Queens, and signed up as an NYPD cadet at the age of 19 in 1960. After an interlude in Vietnam as a Marine commander, Kelly returned to the force and steadily progressed through the ranks, serving in 25 different commands (and earning a handful of graduate degrees along the way) before assuming the No. 2 spot under Lee P. Brown, the police commissioner under David Dinkins, in the early 1990s. Dinkins eventually tapped Kelly to replace Brown as police commissioner. But after Rudy Giuliani took office in 1994, he replaced Kelly with Bill Bratton, and Kelly subsequently departed to Haiti at the request of then-President Bill Clinton, who appointed him head of an international police force to restore order in the troubled country. He later joined Interpol as the head of operations in the Americas, moving to U.S. Customs as commissioner. Kelly appeared to be closing the chapter on his lengthy career in public service in 2000 when he accepted an offer from Bear Stearns's Jimmy Cayne to serve as head of the bank's chief of global security. His outlook changed after the events of Sept. 11: When Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor, he managed to persuade Kelly to take up his old post at One Police Plaza, making him the first person to serve non-consecutive terms as New York City police commissioner.

Of note

Kelly is often said to be the second-most powerful city official behind Mayor Bloomberg: From his office on the 14th floor at One Police Plaza (where he sits behind Gov. Theodore Roosevelt's old desk), Kelly is intimately involved in a range of affairs at City Hall and is one of the few public officials with the political capital to operate relatively independently of the billionaire media-mogul-turned-elected-official. Since returning to the job in 2002, Kelly's helped steady a force that suffered a blow to its reputation following embarrassing disclosures about his predecessor, Bernard Kerik. Kelly's also been credited with vastly expanding the department's intelligence capabilities: He established satellite offices in a handful of foreign capitals to gather information about possible threats to the city, built a 1,000-member terror unit, recruited a number of former CIA agents to the force, and stepped up work with national law enforcement agencies to coordinate terrorism-prevention efforts.

But being police commissioner also means serving as a lightning rod for criticism, and Kelly's no exception. In 2004, he was roundly criticized for the department's heavy-handed tactics during the 2004 Republican National Convention. (For his part, Kelly called it the department's "finest hour.") And although he'd initially been credited with improving the always uneasy relationship between the NYPD and the city's black and Latino communities, minority opinion turned sharply against him after the November 2006 police killing of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man coming home from his bachelor party in Queens. And it isn't just the public that gives Kelly a hard time: He's had plenty of issues with the members of his own force over persistent hot-button issues like recruitment and pay.

Upcoming

The big question mark these days is what Kelly plans to do after Bloomberg's term expires. There have been rumors that he's contemplating a mayoral run, although he's something of an unknown quantity since he's never held elected office. (It's generally assumed that, like Bloomberg, he'd run as a liberal Republican.) It's likely going to be a crowded field, though, and it remains unclear if Kelly has what it takes to raise the big bucks needed to mount a bid. But it's entirely possible that another job altogether is in the cards for Kelly: Some have suggested that should a Democrat win the White House in 2008, he'll be a sensible pick for a senior job in Washington such as head of the FBI or Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Keeping score

As police commissioner, Kelly earns $181,719. He took a steep pay cut to come back and work for the city. In his previous job at Bear Stearns, he earned a salary of $450,000.

Personal

Kelly and his wife Veronica live in Battery Park City. Until 2000, Veronica was a medical device sales rep at Tyco; since her retirement, she's worked for New York City Global Partners, the group that administers New York's "sister cities" program. They have two sons, Jim and Greg; the latter is a White House correspondent for Fox News.