Thirteen years ago, the 40th Precinct was one of the worst in the city. The cops called it Alcatraz. There was gunfire just about every day, and as hard as some of the cops worked, the neighborhood remained a virtual free-for-all: robberies, muggings, shootings, rapes, drug deals, murders. There were only two reasons a cop got assigned to the four-oh. Either he was being punished or, like Stanton, he was a rookie with no hooks (connections) to get him a better assignment.

On his way out to the patrol car, Stanton tossed the usual obscene insults back and forth with a couple of his friends in the squad. Then he and Parlato started their shift the way they always did, at their favorite coffee shop on 149th Street and the Grand Concourse. (There was a waitress they couldn't resist.)

The two men seemed an odd pair. Parlato was a cop's cop, the most popular guy in the four-oh if not the entire Bronx. With just over two years on the job, Stanton was still essentially a rookie. But he was impossible to ignore. Loud and cocky, he was the precinct peacock, the kind of cop who bought a full set of custom gear -- from shirts to nightstick -- on the day he graduated from the academy. He was a lean, tautly muscled triathlete, and oh how he relished taunting his less snappy-looking colleagues.

But Parlato loved Stanton's sense of humor, his manic energy. He picked Stanton to be his driver because he believed he saw something special in him, a raw intelligence, and the two became inseparable. They worked well together, and they even screwed up well together.

Like the time they were doing a midnight-to-eight tour and they were both really tired. At 4 a.m. they stopped for a red light at 138th Street and Brook Avenue, a very busy intersection. Parlato still laughs when he remembers he closed his eyes for just a moment and woke up an hour and a half later. They were still at the intersection. Stanton was fast asleep with his foot on the brake. Traffic was going by all around them. Somehow, no one thought it was worth reporting a running radio car in the middle of the street for an hour and a half with two sound-asleep cops in it.

"Bill appears genuinely fascinated by women, which is the key difference between a womanizer and a romantic," says New York Times media reporter Alex Kuczynski.

Their shift on that critical night in March, however, got off to a quiet, routine start. For a couple of hours, they drove around so Parlato could check, as sergeants often do, on the cops out on foot patrol. But just before seven o'clock, the radio began to squawk a priority code: 1085-Forthwith. 1085-Forthwith. Officers in pursuit need assistance. Repeat, officers in pursuit need assistance.

"When this happens," says Stanton, "your adrenaline goes from zero to a hundred in two seconds flat. 'Cause now you hear a cop yelling into his radio as he's chasing someone. You hear him huffing and puffing, and you hear all kinds of other noises, and you don't really know what's going down. You just know you gotta get there. So it's lights and sirens, and the juices are flowing. I mean, I'm 23 and I'm Superman. I even had an S on my vest. And I'm thinking, I'm gonna get the bad guy as my trophy. I'm gonna say to the other cops, 'I beat you guys.' "

When Stanton and Parlato screeched up to the scene, Stanton spotted one of the cops chasing the robbery suspect on some train tracks just below street level. He let his door fly, and he was out of the car practically before it stopped. He scaled two fences and was running along a wall that was six feet above the tracks.

"They were about 25 yards ahead of me, and I could see them go into a tunnel. I couldn't go any further unless I got down to the tracks. So, thinking I'm Rambo, I jumped," Stanton says. "And as soon as I jumped, I knew I was in trouble. I was in the air too long. The tracks got lower as they went into the tunnel, and what had been maybe six feet was now more like twelve or fifteen feet."

Stanton put his hands down to help cushion the fall, and when he landed, his palms hit the ground and he fell over backward. For a moment he thought he'd gotten lucky. He was so pumped, so adrenalized, he felt no pain and was ready to pick up the chase.

"I go to grab my gun, and it was dark, and I didn't seem to be able to get at it. For a minute, I didn't understand what was going on. My fingers just wouldn't curl around the handle. Then I saw the blood squirting everywhere. So the other cops are yelling, I'm yelling, and I'm pissed because I'm out of the game now. And Parlato is standing up on the wall like a dog looking to jump in a pool. He's moving back and forth trying to find the right spot. He never did actually jump."

Landing in debris on the tracks, Stanton severed the tendon and some nerves in his right hand. The injury required several surgeries, and then almost a year of physical therapy. But in the end, he was still unable to produce the sixteen pounds of pressure required to pull the double-action trigger on a .38, the NYPD's standard-issue weapon back then. As a result, Bill Stanton's career as a cop was over.

There were no maudlin all-nighters at McSherry's across the street from the precinct. There were no watery-eyed heart-to-hearts between Stanton and Parlato. Stanton had always wanted to be a cop, and he was deeply disappointed that he couldn't be one anymore. But he also recognized it as an opportunity.

His injury was a chance to get out of the Bronx, to see some of the world, and, as things turned out, to reinvent himself. Here was this half-Polish, half-Puerto Rican kid from City Island whose father drove a cab and whose mother was a legal secretary. A kid whose brother was always the smart one, the good-looking one, the one with all the promise.

Now he was 24, out of a job, and without any easily identifiable skills. But though he'd rarely been anywhere beyond the Bronx ("It was like I lived in Mayberry and Manhattan was Mount Pilot"), he had an insatiable hunger to succeed, to get a piece of the good life. "Billy really loved being a cop," says Parlato, who recently retired after 32 years on the job. "But he was always a dreamer. We'd park sometimes when there was a lull, and he'd talk about being a star. Not an actor necessarily, but some kind of celebrity, something in that life.

"You know, most cops sit around and dream about winning Lotto or someone dying and leaving them money. Not Billy. He was gonna do it himself."

What Stanton has done is become a player. First, there's his business, the private-investigating agency with its colorful case mix that includes Fortune 500 companies as well as high-stakes matrimonial dustups and complex criminal actions being handled by some of the city's most visible lawyers: people like Richard Emery, Joe Tacopina, Ron Fischetti, and Larry Shire.

Then there's his social world. He's become a kind of star at night, a legend in certain circles, for his stamina, his creativity, and his often outrageous behavior. He's a regular at Elaine's and Il Mulino. The maître d's at 21 and Fresco and Chicama greet him by name.

And when he's out at night, which seems to be pretty much all of the time, his gravitational force pulls in a Manhattan menagerie that includes the city's best-known lawyers and cops, journalists, the occasional executive, TV producers, and a sprinkling of actors, models, Playmates, and topless dancers. (Unbeknownst to many people, given his high nocturnal profile, he has been married almost four years to a churchgoing chiropractor-nutritionist named Jane, whom he's known since he was 19. Though they have no kids, she anchors what is almost his secret "normal" life, which actually includes quiet family time.)