Corporate work can be stranger than you'd think. "We handled a case," Stanton says, "where we were hired to protect the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. The company makes colored contact lenses, and believe it or not one of these white-supremacist groups issued threats against him because he was enabling non-Aryan types to have blue eyes."

Surely no one has ever done more with less time in the police department than Stanton. "You know," says Miller, who was Bratton's deputy commissioner for public information, "part of me feels like, Who the hell did he think he was to try and fashion himself into the modern-day Sam Spade and start taking on clients who use Kroll and Fairfax and Bo and people on that level? He had an awful lot of nerve to do that. On the other hand, he went and did it. And a lot of guys who saw him on the way up and said, 'Who does he think he is?' and 'He'll never make it,' are now asking if he can give them work here and there."

Stanton has this Ralph Kramden, unrealistic-dream-of-the-week side to his personality that enables him to go after something even when it seems clear to those around him it makes no sense.

"He works off an entirely different page than other people," says Mike Swain, a nineteen-year NYPD veteran who oversees the day-to-day operation of Stanton's company and has been with him since they worked together in the 40th Precinct. "I could never come up with the stuff he comes up with. And that's one of the reasons he's the best at putting together a scam or an undercover operation on a case. It's always another TV episode, and he's starring and writing the script."

Though Stanton didn't pay his dues the traditional way, his current social and professional success came after a decade of grunt work, of getting experience wherever he could and trying to learn from the right people as he went along.

When he was forced to retire from the NYPD, Stanton spent his first couple of years as a civilian, predictably making the most of the few attributes he had. He became a bouncer. The place was a very popular working-class club in Manhattan called Rascals. "The owners, Tommy Nally and George Stephanos," he says, "taught me about Manhattan nightlife."

But the work was tough. "It was a place that attracted people from the boroughs who wanted a night out in the city but couldn't get into the A-clubs. And the mentality of the guys was, 'If I'm not gettin' laid, I'm gonna get into a fight.' "

Next he tried security, working the midnight shift guarding a construction site. He was posted on the fifty-second floor. "So I'm there, and this cop with a big gut shows up to work with me. He's got his blanket and a little TV and his lunchbox, and he sets up his bed on the Sheetrock," Stanton says, shaking his head and starting to laugh. "I remember I just sat there all night freezing my ass off, listening to that fat, alcoholic motherfucker snore, and thinking about my life working for $12 an hour. As I watched him, I knew I was looking at the Ghost of Christmas Future."

Stanton figured his only way out and up was to get some real training, to add value to what he was trying to sell. He'd met a guy who was a member of Henry Kissinger's security detail who convinced him that protecting politicians, celebrities, and dignitaries might be the kind of thing he was looking for.

So Stanton took a course at the Executive Protection Institute in Virginia. When he got there and took a look at the competition -- ex-Navy seals, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, state troopers -- he quickly realized he was completely overmatched. "They looked like the Boys from Brazil, and I was looking like some mutt from the ASPCA."

It was here that Stanton got his first real sense of the importance of personal style. "The clients wore us like they wore their jewelry," he says, "so the way you looked and behaved was important. They assumed we were all qualified."

Stanton learned how to act, which fork to use at dinner, and how to blend into the background. He began buying better clothes, and he realized there was this whole world he'd known nothing about. He worked for the king of Greece, the Rockefeller family, John Kennedy Jr., and Jackie O. Stanton's hair was quite long back then, and the former First Lady would sometimes help him pin it up. She also sweetly offered small tips -- on fashion or manners -- to help him bevel some of his rough edges.

After about a year, just around the time he was becoming frustrated by the long, lonely hours of protection work, Tommy Nally called with an offer. The China Club was opening a place in Aspen, Nally was going to manage it, and he needed someone to handle security, run the front door, and work the VIP area. Within 48 hours Stanton had packed up his Pathfinder, and the kid who'd never been west of New Jersey was on his way to Aspen.

"I was in Aspen working on getting the club ready to open," says Michael Barrett, one of the owners of the China Club. "Suddenly these phone calls start. 'Hey, it's Wild Bill. I'm on my way, I'm in Illinois.' Then, a little while later, 'Hey, it's Wild Bill. I'm in Indiana. I got on my slicker and my cowboy hat.' 'Hey, it's me again, and I'm in Nebraska, and I've had like 22 cups of coffee.'

"He probably called 25 times during the 48 hours it took him to drive out there. He believed he was taking the first real step toward where he wanted to be. You know, Aspen, celebrities, and all of that. It was like opening Pandora's box."

When Stanton finally arrived at Barrett's house, he kicked in the door, dropped to his knees, and kissed the carpet. "Wild Bill's here," he screamed.

"We had people over for dinner," Barrett remembers, "and at this point I really hated him." Nevertheless, he stayed with Barrett, and they quickly became fast friends. Within three weeks, he'd also become fast friends with Sylvester Stallone (it is hard to overstate the significance of this for a kid who'd had Rocky and Rambo posters in his bedroom growing up).

"Aspen was party fuckin' central," Stanton says. "I couldn't believe the drugs, the sex . . . But I realized after a while that I was popular for what I was, not who I was. I ran the door at the hottest club in town, the place everybody wanted to be."

After eight months, he was back in New York, bouncing around between the China Club, Bo Dietl, and protection work. One day he'd be picking up the Stanley Cup at the airport, responsible for guarding it and getting it to a WFAN radio promotion, and the next day he'd be working security at Moe Ginsburg.

"I was like a cowboy working roundup to roundup. I'd be with the king of Greece, working protection, and we'd go to the opera, to Cipriani, and shopping at Ferragamo," Stanton says. "And then the next night I'd be guarding a dead body at some fuckin' funeral parlor in the Bronx because the guy's family thought the estranged wife was going to kidnap the corpse."