BUSTED.(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard B. Kerik, police commissioner)(Biography)

Bernard B. Kerik's concern for his immortal reputation as Police Commissioner was such that--in an especially delicious detail that surfaced in his monthlong transformation from Presidential appointee to middle-aged unemployed guy--one of the things he apparently commissioned was a set of thirty plaster busts of himself to be distributed as gifts to fortunate friends and dignitaries. Kerik's immortality will, it is now clear, be of a different sort entirely, as he enters the pantheon of celebrated New Yorkers who have been dramatically undone by their own high-handedness or low dealings. The largest difficulty in considering the Kerik downfall is knowing in which niche of public disgrace to categorize him. As Henry Stern, the former Parks Commissioner, noted in his regular e-mail newsletter to friends and supporters the other day, "Officials have gotten into trouble for sexual misconduct, abusing their authority, personal bankruptcy, failure to file documents, waste of public funds, receiving substantial unrecorded gifts, and association with organized crime figures. It is rare for anyone to be under fire on all seven of the above issues."

Kerik's multiplatformed flameout, which combined, as all the best scandals do, allegations of graft, egregious grandiosity, and the seasoning salt of adultery, may have deprived New Yorkers of the pleasure of having one of their own close to the Presidential ear, but it has at least provided the spectacle of a career crash surpassing any other that occurred last year. Martha Stewart has managed to transform her penitentiary chastisement into an opportunity for personal growth for herself and for impersonal growth for her bottom line: a new television show, produced by Mark Burnett, awaits when she emerges. Across the Hudson, the former New Jersey governor James McGreevey began his second act, as a gay American, while still just bringing down the curtain on his first--being an allegedly corruptible politician--without even a pause for intermission.

In the past, public figures have found differing means of dealing with unsought notoriety: Kimba Wood, whose potential nomination for Attorney General, in 1993, was derailed after she revealed that she had hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny, survived the embarrassment of being called the Love Judge by the New York Post when details from a diary kept by her lover, Frank Richardson, were helpfully supplied to the courts, and thus to the newspapers, by Richardson's wife. Wood now has the satisfaction not only of retaining her seat on the court of the Southern District of New York but of being married to Richardson, whose name, when mentioned in the newspapers, is generally preceded by words like "investment banker," "wealthy," or "gazillionaire."

Kerik, whose own nanny problem has emerged as only the presenting symptom of a much larger career malaise, seems likely to suffer a more complete obliteration of his reputation. But the circumstances of his fall are certainly not as decisive as those of perhaps the most spectacular career meltdown in political memory, that of Donald Manes. Manes was the Queens Borough President whose response to being caught handing out ...