At 4 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, he's pacing his office in Soho, which has sweeping views of the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. On the wall is a framed photo of George W. Bush over the phrase "Nos jodimos" (loosely translated: "We're screwed,") and a picture of Borrero's face superimposed onto an image of Fidel Castro saluting in his trademark fatigues. Today he's wearing a charcoal suit and an immaculately pressed white shirt. He absently fiddles with the silver case for his reading glasses as he talks about foreign policy, racism and the president, whom he usually refers to as "The Forest Gump of the White House," though now he is reluctantly commending Bush for "showing restraint" in his response to the recent terrorist attacks. "I still think he's an idiot, but he's been doing pretty well," he tells me.
This magnanimity does not extend to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, however, whom he has nicknamed "the Pinochet of City Hall." The day before I spoke with Borrero, Giuliani broached the subject of overriding term limits and running for reelection. "What is so fucking great about what Rudy has done?" he shouts, pounding his fists on his desk. "He's held press conferences. That's what we elected him for! Now he's the star of the show, the ringmaster. Hel-LO? What the hell is he doing different than he did before?"
Borrero begins pacing again. "People asked whether he was running again and he said he hasn't had time to think about it -- he's a lying scumbag! He's a vile person, he's a dictator and he's unscrupulous. He has the totalitarian mentality that he thinks he can reverse the will of the people!"
Borrero is 50 years old, and he has lived in New York City nearly all his life. The first thing most people notice about him is his voice, a silky Bronx baritone. If you hear him speak and you haven't met him first, you might imagine him to be very large and dangerous-looking, but he is stocky and not terribly tall, with a round face and balding head that make him look almost cherubic. When he laughs -- which is often; Borrero finds the world funny as hell -- or when he's outraged about something or other, his face turns red and he tends to bang his fists on the furniture. He is a master of the freestyle rant. One minute he'll be talking about the media ("They should get off their asses and ride the subway") and the next he'll be shouting about welfare reform ("For God's sake, there's got to be some humanity!").
He also has extraordinary stamina. Once, on the night of the disputed presidential race between Bush and Gore, he talked on the radio for 12 hours straight. Borrero is a doting father, especially when it comes to his 18-year-old daughter Taina, with whom he talks on the phone several times a day. He hates technology and he doesn't drink. He insists that he doesn't enjoy hurting people's feelings, and he often seems mystified as to why people are upset by his critiques. He says he likes to be criticized, he only wishes there were more people who could do it intelligently. On the other hand, he says, "I just don't have time to beat around the bush."
Borrero likes to see his own story as a tale of immigrant struggle and success. He was born in Puerto Rico, but his single mother, determined to offer her two sons a better life, moved them to New York when Borrero was 4. Growing up on the streets of the South Bronx, "I got my ass kicked every day," Borrero says, by Irish and Italian kids. He eventually dropped out of high school. Later, he went back and got his GED, took some college courses but never graduated, and slept on the floor of his studio apartment because he had no money to buy furniture. It wasn't until he began working at the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and speaking out on Hispanic issues that he began to find his way. A friend who was a producer at a local Spanish language TV station asked him to do occasional commentaries and he discovered that there was a market for his belligerence. In 1995, he started doing the column in El Diario full time. But many who know him say his true mitier is broadcast. "He was an incredible gabber -- electric," says Wayne Barrett, a political reporter at the Village Voice and a longtime friend.
Next page: "There are a lot of creepy people in this town, and they're all in public office"