Fact File
Name: Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III
Age: 53
Occupation: Just re-elected Mayor of the City of New York
Born: Flatbush, New York
Lives: Gracie Mansion, New York
Marital status: Married to television reporter Donna Hanover (47) for 13 years. Two children, Andrew (11) and Caroline (7).
Least likely to say: "I feel your pain."
Most likely to say: "Oh yeah? Just watch me."
If you can judge a politician's success by his list of enemies, then Rudolph Giuiliani has no equal. As federal prosecutor in New York and latterly as mayor of the city, Mr Giuiliani has earned the hatred of Mafia bosses, Wall Street billionaires, Yasser Arafat and the majority of his own Republican party.
Not bad going for a skinny guy with bad hair who, as New York magazine recently quip ped, "thinks panache is a pastry".
Even those who just re-elected the Republican mayor to a second term, with an impressive 60 per cent majority in this 80 per cent Democratic city, cannot say they actually like him. He is perceived as abrasive, callous, mean-spirited, vindictive, arrogant, paranoid and power-crazy.
Rudy loses it a little too often in public. And why do his only friends wear police or firefighting uniforms?
But even critics who call him a fascist voted for Mr Giuliani this week, chiefly because their streets look better and feel safer since he took over.
Homicides are down by 60 per cent with just 984 murders last year. Other crime has decreased by almost 50 per cent, the sex industry and the homeless have been quarantined and the Walt Disney Company is sanitising 42nd Street.
Mr Giuliani's administration faces a $1 billion budget gap and accusations that it has further ghettoised poor and black citizens. But he is unapologetic: "It takes a tough mayor to make a tender city," his deputy, Mr Randy Mastro, observes.
Rudolph Giuliani, one suspects, has always been tough. The only child of Helen and Harold, Guiliani grew up in working-class Flatbush.
On his second birthday he received his first pair of boxing gloves from his father, who owned a Brooklyn bar. He was an exemplary pupil at his Catholic primary school, then a scholarship student at the allmale Manhattan College in the Bronx.
He opposed the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, supported the civil rights movement but did not go to Woodstock. Deciding not to become a priest, Giuliani went to New York University law school where he dabbled in Democratic politics but plotted a legal career.
That career could have been a Hollywood screenplay. In 1970 Giuliani began practising law in the Justice Department and ended up running it. As US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, he went after the city's white-collar godfathers as well as its five Mafia families.
Forty Wall Street traders, including Ivan Boesky, were convicted of insider trading when Giuliani applied 1930s criminal securities laws.
The 1983 Pizza Connection case destroyed a Mafia heroinimporting ring and resulted in the incarceration of eight members of the New York Cosa Nostra's ruling "commission". Giuliani's office nailed taxdodging oil baron Charles A. Atkins and corrupt New York political fixer Stanley Friedman.
New York loved having a crusader as prosecutor. It was not, however, ready for one as mayor. In 1989 Mr Giuliani ran for the office against Mr David Dinkins and lost by two percentage points.
Mr Dinkins had the minority vote and the city's Democratic tradition in his favour, while Mr Giuliani had his reputation as a short-fuse zealot working against him.
Former mayor Ed Koch later identified Mr Giuliani's problem: "Rudy's public persona," he commented, "is that of a killer."
By 1993, after four years of soul-searching and political seminars, a softer, gentler Rudolph Giuliani challenged Mr Dinkins again. Despite a new hairstyle and a 25lb (11.4kg) weight loss, the Giuliani makeover was not totally convincing.
Press conferences still brought out the candidate's icy sarcasm and venomous glare. But the naturally aggressive Mr Giuliani exhibited sufficient compassion to woo a disenchanted electorate away from the incumbent.
He told stories of witnesses crying in his arms, of rescuing suicidal detectives.
"I assumed that everybody knew that about me," he said afterwards, "that I care for people, that I'm very loyal to people, that personal relationships are more important to me than anything else."
Mr Giuliani won the 1993 mayoral race by just 50,000 votes and went into overdrive, barely sleeping, running before dawn, taking on the New York Times one minute, Fulton fishmongers and panhandlers the next.
"Here is a man who could be President," Governor Mario Cuomo recently observed, plun g ing New York into frenzied speculation.
"As an Italian-American, I'm proud of him," one citizen told New York magazine. "But I don't know about Rudy and the bomb."