Bernard B. Kerik
$26.50 / Hardcover / 370 pages
ISBN 006009012
Regan Books
Autobiography

The absorbing narrative of Bernard Kerik’s eventful life shows that it takes an extraordinary man to perform an extraordinary job, and Kerik’s job is indeed an extraordinary one. When two hijacked airliners struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Bernard B. Kerik was at the scene within moments. As the police commissioner of New York City, he worked with Mayor Rudolf W. Giuliani to coordinate rescue efforts at ground zero, ensuring the city’s safety and reassuring Americans with his strength, determination, and leadership.

From the decrepit row houses of Paterson, New Jersey, to the cocaine fields of Colombia, from the razor wire of Rikers island to the streets of New York City, Kerik has focused his energies to a single purpose: to fight the injustice he sees around him. The September 11 attacks marked the latest and most visible in a series of extraordinary challenges Bernard Kerik has faced throughout his singular law enforcement career. A third-degree black belt in Tae kwon do and a background in antiterrorism who worked for years in the Middle East for Saudi royalty, returned to the US in 1986 and out of love for the city and of police work, took a substantial pay cut to become a beat cop in Times Square. As a narcotics detective, he went undercover to buy drugs in Harlem, seized millions of dollars of cocaine from the drug lords of the Cali cartel, and was awarded the police department’s Medal of Valor for saving the life of a fellow officer. He rose rapidly through the ranks, to be appointed in the 1990s the city’s commissioner of correction. In this capacity he ended the hellish violence at Rikers and transformed it into a model of its kind. Today, as Kerik directs a police force of 55,000—the largest municipal force in the world—his battles continue.

And yet Bernard Kerik’s most personal battle was not pitched on tough city streets but with himself. For even as he drove himself to seek justice in every corner of the world, this extraordinary man never looked back until he reached the top. And when he did, he face the greatest unsolved case of his life—the tragic mystery of his own mother, who abandoned her young son forty-one years ago.

Kerik has to tell an amazing story indeed: A Dickensian childhood, a rough-and-tumble adolescence, and then a rocketing rise from NYPD foot soldier to New York’s 40^th police commissioner. He recounts his against-the odds success-story with blunt truth and generous heart and acknowledges without flinching that at its core for a long time sat an abandoned little boy waiting for his doomed mother to pick him up and take him home. The odyssey of Bernard B. Kerik is a poignant tale with lessons for all about what it means to be a brave and good man and how each of us should aspire to such ideals. A testament of courage in the services of honor and a moving and riveting life story written by one of the most remarkable complex man ever to have run the NYPD. some of his calls while the police chief were questionable yet his life remains an example of triumph over adversity. You will be moved by this tale of life!