Inside a Kingdom of Allegiances

After observing Carbonetti at the bank -- where no fewer than four people lamely try to explain to him why a substantial amount of money he had transferred from another account at the same bank couldn't be accessed for the closing -- you start to see the calm part.

He is soft-spoken and unruffled when, after 30 minutes of excuses, any mildly excitable person would have by now reached over and grabbed one of the bankers' bureaucratic necks.

He is disarmingly friendly and direct with a reporter in a New York sort of way, starting most clipped sentences with "you know" and punctuating them with "Okay?"

He never goes off the record. Here's what he has to say on some controversial topics:

On whether Giuliani -- known to be a micromanager -- can let others run the campaign: "I actually thought, well, this is going to be a learning curve. But he gets it. He understands it's now a much bigger operation and people have to be allowed to talk. But the thing is, as long as the people who are talking for him know him, he's comfortable with it."

On whether Giuliani's loyalty to a friend could have blinded him to Kerik's problems: "I keep saying to myself, I should have known, and I should have. But when you have an employee who comes in late, leaves early and does a crappy job, you look up and say, okay, something is wrong with this person. [But] the guy that comes in early and does a phenomenal job is usually not the one you're looking at."

On talk that Carbonetti doesn't get along with Giuliani's third wife, Judith: "That's another one of those overblown things. To be fair to her, it's been very difficult for her to be thrust into this."

John Weaver, an adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who is a good friend of Carbonetti's, says the man "is without ego and that's not something you find in this business."

"He has one client, and for that reason, everyone in the organization trusts him. He has no other agenda but Rudy," says Weaver, who met this fiance through Carbonetti.

So what job would he have in a Giuliani administration?

"He would be the counselor down the hall -- like Karl Rove without the policy portfolio," says Weaver, who added that he's not all that convinced that Carbonetti would give up his life for the White House. "Truth be told, I think politics for him falls somewhere behind his kids, Las Vegas and the Yankees."

Carbonetti has clearly enjoyed the ride. If he's ever had a misgiving about doing only one job his whole life, he doesn't reveal it.

"I've seen a lot more than most. A lot of who I am and what I've learned I owe to him," he says of Giuliani. "Look at the opportunities he's given me, a poor kid from East Harlem."

Research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.