The 60-foot-wide roll-call room features one desk, a few chairs, and a flimsy lectern. Twenty-four cops stand in four lines facing Marino. "I want to congratulate you on your response time," Marino begins. "You went from last in the borough to first. Let's build on that. Don't ignore something because you think some other cop will take care of it." Marino pauses to clear his throat. "You know we have a robbery pattern off Eastern Parkway and Washington."

At the mention of the robbery pattern, some officers drop their eyes. They look as if they'd rather be doing anything but heading out into the streets to find a thief with a gun.

Marino studies the cops before him. NYPD officers are stereotyped as rough and streetwise, but nothing could be further from the truth: A precinct is like a small town with every type imaginable. Some of Marino's officers are crisp and eager to hit the streets. Others slouch, uncomfortable in their uniforms. There are officers who attended Ivy League schools and read Shakespeare, others who can barely understand simple orders. One of the young cops in the first row has made a series of shaky decisions on the street, but he's a hard worker who can run like the wind; "dumb as nails and fast as shit" is how one co-worker describes him. Marino is planning to try him out on an anti-crime team that often chases fleeing suspects.

"It's the holidays. No shopping on duty." Marino's soft voice is fading now. "Don't worry about numbers -- take care of shit that's in your area because it's what you're supposed to do. Be a cop. Okay, boys and girls, have a safe tour."

A few minutes later, Marino is back in his office, meeting about the robbery pattern with a dozen sergeants and lieutenants seated on plastic chairs.

"My wife would complain about something and I'd be thinking, 'I've just seen a guy get his brains blown up.'"

"How you feelin' today, Captain?" a sergeant asks.

Marino nods to a moonfaced lieutenant with a walrus mustache. "Things could be worse," he says. "I could look in the mirror and that could be looking back." For a moment, in the roar of laughter that follows, Marino relaxes.

"Let's put our heads together," Marino says. "This isn't going to be a beat-up." The white-shirted sergeants and lieutenants nod in unison.

"I can train a monkey to react," he continues. "What are they doing beforehand? When this asshole hits, everybody is showing up at the location. Train them to go to the outlying areas. Somebody go down in the hole" -- the subway. Marino reaches for his bottle of Tums, pops one in his mouth, and shakes the bottle to see how many are left.

"Dunne and Esposito love cops. But they're smart. They know bullshit when they see it." He cautions his senior staff about officers who milk overtime after an arrest by delaying the paperwork. "They can't make their mortgage payment on one collar."

"Is it okay if I have my guys in the van?" a sergeant asks. "No," Marino snaps. "I want them on the street on Washington." Marino points to a street grid and reviews the game plan to catch the robber. "Stagger the meals -- this guy knows when we're out there."

After the meeting, a stocky sergeant hangs behind to make small talk. "We're gonna get you more movers," he says. The more moving violations the precinct issues, the more GLAs -- grand-larceny autos -- they find. "I tell my guys what to look for -- I used to get beaucoup GLAs myself," the sergeant says, chortling.

"How come you don't get them anymore?" Marino asks.

"I don't want to get jammed up." He's talking about avoiding official trouble.

"Jammed up?" Marino growls. "How many times have I been jammed up? Haven't I been to the trial room?"

The truth is Mike Marino has been "jammed up" so many times that despite his passion for the job, lofty I.Q., and high marks on promotion exams, it's a miracle he ever got a command in the first place.

Marino's record in the 28th Precinct in Harlem, where he started as a cop in 1979, was sprinkled with enough "force complaints" that it seemed unlikely he'd ever be trusted with a command. None of the charges was substantiated by department investigations, but the image of a heavy-handed officer with a chip on his shoulder was the last thing the NYPD wanted to push front and center. Any administration that allowed him to take command would have to answer to the community if he ran his precinct like a Wild West show.

It was the Crown Heights community itself that demanded Marino's appointment. As the executive officer to Captain Dowd, the commander who preceded him at the 77, Marino had responded swiftly to community concerns. "He always did what he said he was going to do," remembers James Caldwell, president of the Precinct Community Council. "We knew he was the perfect person for the command."

At a January 1999 meeting attended by the Brooklyn borough chief, Community Board Eight, and the Precinct Community Council, Marino sat off to the side. "We want him," said a Precinct Community Council member. The borough chief thought the board member was referring to Dowd. "I told you you can't have him, he's leaving."

"No, him," the board member repeated, pointing at Marino. "Zero chance," the borough commander snapped.

The blackball was even more explicit. "You will never get a command," Marino says he was told point-blank by a superior in the department. But Marino also had admirers, including Anemone, who had watched him through the years. "With Marino, you don't get niceties," Anemone says. "You get the truth."