Anemone understood that the best cops aren't always the ones with the cleanest records: Some of them sat in the station house or rode the streets with their windows up. The "non-police," Anemone calls them. He says Marino was "one of us, fighting crime long before it became fashionable." Anemone and others approached Patrick Kelleher, then first deputy police commissioner, who was still wary of the reputation Marino had gained in the 28th Precinct. But Marino's rough stuff was far in the past, his supporters argued; he had changed. Community leaders wrote a letter of support and followed it up with steady phone calls to One Police Plaza. A few weeks later, Commissioner Safir gave in.

But Mike Marino probably hasn't changed all that much since he worked in the 28th. "When I came on the job in 1979, cops weren't supposed to make narcotics or misdemeanor arrests," Marino explains. "Entire streets were taken over by drug dealers. Working people couldn't come out of their homes at night and a cop couldn't do anything about it." At first, Marino walked the streets like any other rookie, wide-eyed and afraid to take action. But the blatant lawlessness he saw sparked a fire in him.

Marino started enforcing laws against loitering, littering, excessive noise. The toughs who had the run of the streets bristled, verbal insults turned physical. At first Marino didn't fare well. Then he started lifting weights. He bulked up from 152 pounds to 190, had eighteen-inch arms, and could bench-press 350 pounds. If there was an arrest to be made, he did it without calling for backup. If the arrestee wouldn't go easy, he would go hard.

It was difficult to figure out Mike Marino in those days: What kind of man spoke so courteously to people in the community, yet took so easily to hand-to-hand combat? Raised in Flatbush by a single mother who worked double shifts to support the family, Marino was dubbed "Mr. Logical" by his childhood playmates and could read on a college level in seventh grade. He flew through Regis high school and entered NYU as a premed student but dropped out in the middle of his freshman year, repulsed by his well-heeled classmates. A little over a year later, Marino was in uniform.

As a rookie in the 28th, Marino resisted the worst of police culture and walked out of a room in the precinct house if the N-word was used. But in another way, like other cops before him, he was swallowed up by the job.

"I was just married, and my wife would complain about something and I'd trivialize it. I'd be thinking, 'I've just seen a guy get his brains blown up.' " Marino's wife would look at his swelling biceps and faraway gaze and tell him, You're not the man I married, mentally or physically.

Marino admits the weight lifting had an effect on his temperament. Once, in a restaurant in Bensonhurst, a loudmouth at an adjoining table asked Marino what he did for a living. Marino just shook his head and kept eating.

"Tell him," Marino's wife urged. "He's just interested, that's all."

"He's gonna make a stupid remark about cops, and I'm gonna knock him out."

"Tell him."

Marino told the man he was a cop. The man cursed the NYPD, and Marino laid down his fork, walked over, and knocked him out. His first marriage ended soon after.

In 1984, he passed the sergeants' test and moved to the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, choosing the midnight shift to be home with his new wife and children during the day.

Sandy Arroyo, then an eager rookie in the 73rd Precinct, remembers, "It was a gift to have a sergeant like Mike who had the same passion." Not everyone was as impressed by the sergeant who did steady midnights. There was a cadre of unruly cops on the four-to-midnight shift who refused to follow orders. When that crew rotated onto midnights, the fur would fly. One dispute ended with Marino standing over one of the officers in the parking lot behind the precinct house.

Several of these officers, later dubbed "the Morgue Boys," eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree conspiracy to distribute drugs. Marino thinks that as a parting shot against him, one of them dropped his name in a deposition. Though Marino was never accused, he saw Internal Affairs investigators lurking in a car outside his home. "It was a very rough time," he says.

The meeting with his sergeants and lieutenants ends, and Marino heads to the Brooklyn Museum to receive an award from the Washington Avenue Merchants Association. As he walks past the front desk of the precinct's main room, his radio issues a high-pitched beep.

It's 6:29 p.m., and the robber has just hit again. A 30-year-old black male, six feet, 200 pounds, wearing a knee-length black leather jacket and a black cap with white letters, used a pistol to rob a man on Vanderbilt Avenue. Marino and Mihnovich had recently arranged for a unit working the six-to-two shift to be at the very location where the stickup took place. But, almost as if he had been sitting in on their strategy meeting, the robber scored just before the officers arrived.

Marino drives toward the robbery location. Two blocks away, a van full of officers on a funeral detail greets him cheerily.

"Afternoon, Captain."

Marino swallows his anger and reminds the crew in the van to stay alert. He rolls his car window back up. "Some things you can't teach," he whispers.

As he heads down Eastern Parkway to the museum, Marino can't help running over the robber's M.O. in his mind. The thief takes cash and credit cards, then runs into the nearest subway station, where he uses the cards to charge easily sellable MetroCards. He probably emerges from the subway a stop or two away. "Franklin," Marino says. He swings onto the service road to the Franklin Avenue subway stop.

As he slows his vehicle and peers into the darkness, a six-foot-tall man in a black leather jacket and a black cap with white letters is walking toward him on the sidewalk. Marino jams the car to a stop and swings out of the driver's seat, moving fast and low. He pulls out his gun with one hand and his badge with the other. "Police. Put your hands up."