Kelly began his working life as a delivery boy while he was still in high school. He joined the NYPD as a teenager in the police-cadet program and stayed with it. He literally worked his way from the very bottom of the department to the very top. And he did it with no relatives in the Police Department and no "hooks" -- cop-speak for connections. Kelly has held some 25 different commands in the NYPD: He was a beat cop in East Harlem and a captain in Crown Heights. He worked in anti-crime and the organized-crime-control bureau. He did swat-team work and he was in special ops. And the whole time, he stayed in the Marine Corps reserves.

"I like the excitement of being a cop," Kelly says. "The thrill of chasing people and arresting them. There is an aspect of this, of course, where you're helping people and you really have an impact on people's lives. You feel like you're a participant, like you're part of what's happening."

Kelly is polite, respectful, and even friendly in a cautious, military sort of way. But he can be tough to draw out. "Nobody really knows Ray," says someone who's been close to him for years. "He has good friends, longtime friends. But he has, like, a force field around him. You can see a tender moment. You can hear a candid remark. But you'll never walk away saying I know that guy better than he knows himself. Having said that, he's the most instantly likable person I've ever met. Everybody loves Ray."

You can open a small window into Kelly's soul by looking at the way he responds to criticism. Back when he was commissioner the first time, the late columnist Mike McAlary was killing him on a regular basis. Finally, Kelly couldn't take it anymore. He'd had enough and decided he was going to put a stop to it. He got the word out that he was after McAlary, and actually went looking for him in the bars on Second Avenue where the writer was known to hang out.

But Kelly's intent wasn't to have a showdown, to storm in and kick McAlary's ass. It was to talk to him. "I'd never even met him," Kelly says now when I ask him about it. "I used to see him standing in the back at my press conferences, and he'd never say a word. I thought, This guy doesn't even know me -- why's he saying these things about me? I have fairly substantial credentials. I think I'm the real deal," he says, and then reconsiders, thinking out loud about the way this might sound. "Anyway, I thought we could work it out." Kelly never did find McAlary's bar stool, but the two men eventually talked and became good friends.

Though Kelly is too much of a gentleman to complain (at least publicly) that some history has been rewritten, and too much of a pragmatist to dwell on the past, it must drive him nuts to see his record as police commissioner in '92 and '93 repeatedly mauled, or simply dismissed. He gets credit only for the bad (the community-policing debacle and the horrible Michael Dowd corruption scandal, which led to the Mollen Commission, both of which he inherited) and none of the good (he added 6,000 cops to the force through the Safe Streets, Safe City program).

Kelly did have lousy timing. Through much of his brief tenure, Dinkins and Giuliani were locked in a tense campaign battle, which essentially tied Kelly's hands. He couldn't risk making waves. And unlike Bratton, Kelly did not have an unbridled mandate from his boss to go after crime and disorder. Controlling the streets was never a Dinkins priority.

It is an extremely well-kept secret, however, that it was Kelly -- not Bratton and not Giuliani -- who actually took care of that reviled icon of urban disorder, that onetime symbol of police and government impotence: the squeegee man. Kelly ordered a study and had just begun to implement his plan when he had to leave office because Giuliani won the election. "We walked in the door and picked up his plan to get rid of the squeegee guys," says a member of Bratton's team, "and we knew we had to finish it. It was great. So we did, and it makes Ray crazy when someone says Bratton or Giuliani is responsible for getting rid of the squeegee guys." (In fairness to Bratton, he gives Kelly full credit in his book and whenever the subject comes up in conversation.)

But each time Bratton and his guys introduced a new strategy, they explained in copious detail why the old way (i.e., Kelly's way) didn't work. (How's the narcotics unit going to catch anybody when they work nine to five, Monday to Friday? Guess what: The drug dealers work nights and weekends.) This infuriated Kelly and his supporters. They didn't understand why Bratton couldn't just move forward without dumping on the past. But it was Bratton's management style. He believed you had to tell people why you were making changes.

"Ray's heart is in the right place," says a former member of Bratton's team, "but he has this blind spot. He bought into the whole bureaucratic thing, like the community-policing morass. We came in and said let's try something unique. Instead of community policing, we'll go after the guns. We'll go after the drugs. We'll go after the homicides. And we'll get to the community right after that, if they're still alive."

When Mayor-elect Giuliani was deciding whether to keep Kelly or give the job to Bratton, people familiar with the decision-making say there was one factor that weighed heavily. Giuliani wanted a grand gesture, a substantive and symbolic act to herald the beginning of a new era. One possibility was the firing of a handful of superchiefs at the top of the Police Department's hierarchy. Insiders told Giuliani that Kelly would never do it.

"These guys were a bunch of old biddies; they were obstructionists," says a member of Bratton's team. "But Ray couldn't bring himself to fire them. He should've done it when he first became commissioner, but he couldn't. He'd come up through the ranks with them. He knew them for years. But he believed he could go around them. Of course he couldn't. Ray came from the NYPD culture, and he believed a lot of the myths these guys were selling, because he'd heard them repeated his whole adult life."

Bratton got the job, of course, and because he was an outsider, it was easy for him to get rid of the obstructionists Kelly couldn't bring himself to fire. The irony was that once Bratton cleaned house, the guys he promoted to those jobs were Kelly's best and brightest. The guys Kelly had handpicked. The guys he brought along as his personal cadre of advisers. Guys like John Timoney, Lou Anemone, and Mike Julian.

Kelly has a second chance now to create the kind of record he'd like to have, but to do that he needs to surmount some very serious obstacles. His first problem is, how does he top what's been done over the past eight years? He's going to have to create the impression -- through accomplishment and effective public relations -- that this is the Ray Kelly era.

"Ray can leave his mark," says one insider, "by doing what Bratton was just starting to do, what Howard Safir never wanted to do, and what Kerik might've done if he'd had the time. Kelly's the guy who can bring the department back to the people. He's the guy who can make blacks, Asians, Hispanics, everybody feel that this is their department again. That it's not an occupying army."

Someone said to me that Kelly is actually the city's third black police commissioner (along with Ben Ward and Lee Brown, whom he succeeded). He was only partly kidding. Kelly used to spend weekends visiting black churches, working on the relationship between the Police Department and the community. His credibility ran deep enough that in 1997, when Al Sharpton ran for mayor, even he said he wanted "someone like Kelly" as his police commissioner. "You can't just sit back and tell the city's diverse communities 'We know what you need' and then shove it down their throats," Kelly says. "The department needs to make sure it has more validation about what it's doing. Look, there are 140 different ethnic communities in this city, and they all want the best possible quality of life. Most of it is how you deliver the services."