Marino reaches across his desk and picks up his white plastic-covered "CompStat" binder, a detailed week-to-week report on the comparative crime statistics for every precinct in the city. What he sees makes him reach for an oversize bottle of Tums in the right-hand drawer of his desk, a samurai with heartburn.

"I'm gettin' killed here," he moans. "They're breaking my heart." He offers Tums to Lt. John Mihnovich, his special-operations lieutenant and a member of his brain trust. The shaggy, blond, 260-pound Mihnovich waves off the antacid.

"I'm losing the precinct," Marino continues. He means the all-important battle to keep crime levels in the 77 below those of last year. Things were going fine through August. Then slowly throughout September and October the number of "index," or major, crimes began to swell.

Marino gestures toward a bulletin board with green stickpins marking the locations of index crimes. "I'd commit unnatural acts," he offers, "for three weeks of five," meaning five index crimes fewer than the same time last year. Mihnovich roars. But Marino is too tense to enjoy his own joke. He's been working fourteen-hour days: He hasn't been to the gym in six weeks, hasn't spent a full weekend with his wife, Kim, and four children in months. When he is home in Staten Island, one phone call from Mihnovich can send him rocketing into Brooklyn. "Come home, Mike," Kim implored one night on his cell phone as Marino prowled yet another crime scene in the wee hours. "You're not the police commissioner."

"You won't lose the precinct," Mihnovich says. "It's just a spike."

"It's not a spike, it's a trend," Marino blurts. "I've lost homicides for the year. I'm losin' robberies. I'm gonna lose the precinct by the second week in December." He flips through the CompStat book and rechecks the soaring crime figures in a trio of Bronx precincts; he knows the figures for precincts that border his by heart. And he's concerned that if his precinct shows an increase in crime for the year, there's a solid chance he'll be relieved of his command.

One would think that a charismatic commanding officer, popular with the community, would be immune to a jump in crime that could well be the result of factors over which he has little control.

But the recent history of the NYPD tells a different story. When Giuliani made Bill Bratton police commissioner in 1994, Bratton and Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple reconceived the NYPD as a hyperaccountable department where competence and energy were valued over tenure and affability. "Giuliani could promise better police productivity because he understood how much slack there was in the system," says Eli Silverman, a John Jay College professor and author of NYPD Battles Crime: Innovative Strategies in Policing.

Their strategy was both revolutionary and simple: Precinct commanders would be held personally responsible for controlling crime in their area, the way division heads in a corporation are called to account for quarterly earnings. Computerization had made crime statistics available on a weekly, even a daily, basis, so every uptick in every crime could be measured immediately. To make the system work day to day, Bratton chose as his second in command John Timoney, an NYPD lifer with a Celtic warrior's face and a photographic memory.

Precinct bosses were confronted with their crime statistics in the biweekly CompStat meeting. Beginning in 1994, Maple and Lou Anemone, chief of patrol and later chief of the department until 1999, would call commanding officers into the eighth-floor Command and Control Center at One Police Plaza at 7 a.m. to grill them about crime prevention and police activity levels. As the COs were questioned, screens behind them were loaded up with graphs and statistics.

A more stressful employee review would be hard to imagine on Wall Street. Anemone and Maple tossed no softballs, tolerated no excuses, and cut no breaks. When they found a befuddled or complacent commander, they tore him apart. One CO was thrashed so badly he broke into tears.

Old-school COs who had gotten their posts through department connections known as "contracts" or "hooks" immediately realized they were in an unforgiving new world. Some tried to doublespeak their way off the hot seat; as one high-ranking cop stood with his feet to the inquisitorial flames, a cartoon of Pinocchio with his nose growing was projected onto the screen behind him. Others tried to cook the books, but the eagle-eyed Anemone was hard to fool. According to a former high-ranking police source, at least one of Marino's predecessors at the 77 was dumped for underreporting crime.

The process has become less brutal under Commissioner Bernard Kerik, but the bottom line is the same. If you can't convince First Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Dunne and Chief of Department Joseph Esposito that you did everything possible to prevent the increase in crime in your precinct, they'll make pointed suggestions, sometimes even offer additional resources. When you're called back, you'd better have results. If you don't, you'll eventually be relieved of your command, exiled to float around the department, or sentenced to become assistant to another CO, seated at his shoulder as a reminder of what could happen to him if CompStat goes badly.

Marino dreads failure, and he's developed strategies to control crime in his precinct. He pushes officers to enhance arrests by bringing accused felons before the detective squad to get information on other crimes. That's how the precinct helped solve the 1999 stabbing murder of social-work student Amy Watkins. He cajoles his platoon commanders and sergeants to motivate their men to work harder, and calls "all outs," when officers long assigned to desk jobs are forced onto patrol from two to four days a month.

Still, his numbers keep rising as Thanksgiving and Christmas loom. "Robbery season," Marino announces as he walks out of his office to address the four-to-midnight tour.