WASHINGTON -- In a city with 8 million people, five boroughs, 24 subway lines and two major-league baseball teams, even the most ardent New Yorker had a hard time keeping track of the many faces of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

There was the Prince of the City, the Giuliani whose policies dramatically reduced crime, transformed 42nd Street from a seedy porno district to an urban Disney attraction, slashed welfare rolls, cut taxes, turned a deficit into a surplus and tamed a government bureaucracy that many experts had said was untamable.

''Rudy Giuliani fundamentally changed the way New York is governed in generally positive ways,'' said Fran Reiter, a former New York state Liberal Party head who was deputy mayor under Giuliani. ``As such, he changed the way New York is governed in the future -- it was a successful mayoralty.''

Then there was the Prince of Darkness, the ego-driven, thrice married, mean-spirited, always combative Giuliani, who saw enemies everywhere, couldn't share the spotlight, had little patience for the plight of the city's poor and turned a tin ear to African-American complaints of overaggressive police tactics even after three violent, high-profile incidents.

''He's an oversized personality who can capsize a ship in calm waters,'' said Fred Siegel, a professor at New York's Cooper Union and the author of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life. ``The good comes with the bad. It's a package -- you can't separate one from the other.''

Voters know Giuliani as ''America's Mayor,'' the leader who gained national praise for the resolute and compassionate way he steered New York through the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

THE HARD-EDGED MAYOR

His handling of Sept. 11 is the cornerstone of his presidential campaign, but it's only part of his story as mayor. To know Giuliani fully, friends and foes agree, one must also know the man who was running New York the day before the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

''The people who are supporting him have one image -- 9/11 -- and are unfamiliar with his record,'' said former Mayor Ed Koch, a one-time Giuliani supporter turned critic and the author of Giuliani: Nasty Man. ``I thought he handled 9/11 superbly; no one could have handled it better. But had there been an election on 9/10, he couldn't have been elected dogcatcher.''

After a high-profile career as the No. 3 official in President Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and as the mob-busting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani became New York's 107th mayor on Jan. 1, 1994.

He inherited a Big Apple rotting at the core because of violent crime fueled by crack cocaine, rising rents, poor services and a growing homeless problem.

Embracing free-market economic solutions and an aggressive law enforcement strategy that focused on small crimes in order to deter bigger ones, Giuliani vowed to take back the city by restoring a sense of safety.

But his path to a more tranquil New York was anything but. He angrily butted heads with the Democratic City Council and advocacy groups that quickly chafed under what they called mean-spirited and autocratic ways.

''Giuliani's tone was a function of what he was up against,'' Siegel said. ``He's accused of being hard-edged, but he had no choice in order to move the city. When he encountered hostility, that's when he returned it in kind.''

But friends and foes say that Giuliani more often than not appeared to be itching for a fight. Former U.S. Rep. Floyd Flake, D-N.Y., one of the few African-American elected officials to endorse Giuliani for a second term, said the mayor's combativeness was a legacy from his federal prosecutor days.

UGLY POLICE DRAMA

He sparred with his first police commissioner, William Bratton, who was one of the main architects of the get-tough law-enforcement strategy that Giuliani credits for cutting crime dramatically.

When Time magazine put a trench coat-clad Bratton -- not Giuliani -- on its cover for a January 1996 story, ''City Hall was apoplectic,'' recalled Andrew Kirtzman, the author of Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City.

In retaliation, Giuliani's administration opened an investigation into a book deal that Bratton had signed and, after the tabloids reported the commissioner's propensity for traveling in high style, scrutinized trips that Bratton and his wife had taken.

Bratton got the hint and quit after two years on the job.

After more than a decade of icy silence, in May Giuliani reached out and met with his former police commissioner, who's now the L.A. police chief.

People who know Giuliani say the attempt at rapprochement shows that the passage of time has softened the former mayor.

But Guy Molinari, a former Staten Island borough president and the co-chairman of Giuliani's presidential campaign in New York, disagrees.

''Rudy is the same Rudy I met years ago,'' he said. ``He's a very firm person; he's hard-charging. He's not changing direction at all.''

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