(continued)

Except for his trail rides, Fabio leads a quiet existence these days. His enormous house is modestly decorated, save for an abundance of large crystals and slabs of agate. He recently scored around $20,000 worth of specimens in Brazil for the bargain price of $8,000. Most days, he rolls out of bed around 11, makes himself breakfast—typically a five-egg-white omelet with mushrooms and spinach. He feeds his five Rottweilers and spends some time playing with them. Then it's lunch with friends, followed by the gym or some motocross. In the evening, dinner, again with friends. "I like life to be very simple," he says. If he needs to run errands, he runs them. When a woman approaches him for a picture (which happens a dozen or so times whenever he leaves the house) he poses. "No big deal," he says. "I like to pose for pictures. I like to make people happy. I don't understand these celebrities who make a big deal out of it. It's like, excuse me, if you don't like it, go do something else."

Fabio is looking a bit like a cartoon right now, his giant body crammed into a tiny folding chair; he's drenched in sweat, with an untucked neon motorcycle jersey clinging to his 6-foot-3-inch, 220-pound frame. Conversation soon circles back to the Middle East—this time, Iraq.

"[Fabio] is so damn friendly, even when calling for mass carnage, that I find myself nodding along with him"

"I'll tell you my policy," he says confidently. "Invading Iraq was a total fuck-up because you have Muslims—Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurds—who hate and would like to kill each other to the end of time. Listen, it took a bastard like Saddam Hussein, because he was a fanatic, killing hundreds of thousands, to keep those people quiet. We get there and are like, 'Oh!' Now what you've got is a civil war and we're stuck in the middle. It's like when you step on a nest of rattlesnakes. What are you gonna do? Of course, if we have to go to war with Iran, we are right there. That's the only good side."

He's also critical of how the war has been waged. "We went in too fast," he says. "To me, shock and awe should not be a light touch. Where's the shock, you know?" The model, who served the once-mandatory 18 months in the Italian military after high school, nods a lot when he speaks. He's so damn friendly, even when calling for mass carnage, that I find myself nodding along with him.

"Bomb them for a few years," he suggests, "And when they start coming out with the white flag ... bomb them a little bit more. Then you go in with our soldiers."

"Let me give you an example in life," he says, by which he means a example in fantasy. Fabio is big on outrageous hypotheticals. "You can't go into the ring with Mike Tyson and say, 'You know, Mike, you can't punch me in the face because I have a pretty face, okay? And of course you can't punch me under the belt, and not too hard.' He wants to rip you apart! He wants to bite your ear off, he wants to kill you. You see, it's war. This is what people don't understand."

"Think about it," he goes on. "On one hand, they show Abu Ghraib and Americans are like, 'What's the world coming to?' On the other hand, they chop off your head on TV. And you know, they're watching us and laughing. Because to them we are pussies. It's like they look at us and they're like, 'Oh, look at those wimpy little pussies.'"

Politically, Fabio is not a Democrat, but neither is he a Republican. He says he isn't interested in running for office because he's not a fan of compromise. Then again, he's not a U.S. citizen anyway, so any party operatives hoping to launch the new Schwarzenegger can keep dreaming.

Even so, Fabio has a deep respect for the United States, which he credits with helping him achieve his incredible success. He has traveled the world, and says he has no doubt that America is by far the best country out there. His Ride for the Heroes, as he envisions it—20,000 or so motorcyclists cruising the Pacific Coast Highway from L.A. to San Francisco or thereabouts, each rider raising a certain amount of money—is his way of giving back to the nation and to the families of injured and fallen troops.

"They are the true heroes—not the people in Hollywood," Fabio says. "I guarantee the majority of stars, they hear a gunshot, they'd be the first one under a car."

But so far, organizing the ride has been frustrating. The charities he's tried to partner with—and he's talked to dozens—all demand a big cut to participate. "One charity requested $2.5 million, just for expenses," he recalls. "I said, 'Excuse me?' With the majority of the charities, 85 percent goes to the charity, 15 percent to the cause. It should be the other way around!"

"Before Fabio, it was the woman who was featured on the cover, with the man in the background. "They discovered that every time they put me on the cover, the sales would go up," he recalls proudly.

Still, sincere as his motives may be, it's hard not to think the ride might benefit Fabio as well, by offering a way for him to prove to the world that he's more than just a beefcake. He wouldn't be the first model to make a bid for respect. Fabio insists that the secret to his success has been "not taking myself seriously" and to "just enjoy life." But his relentless ambition tells a different story. In 1982, less than three days off the boat, Fabio signed with the Ford Modeling Agency. A day later, he snagged a Gap campaign with Kathy Ireland and Andie MacDowell. The modeling jobs kept pouring in, including numerous ads for designer Andrew Marc. His first romance novel cover was, for Fabio, just another $150-an-hour gig. In fact, he says, it wasn't until one night in 1987, when two women spotted him in a Miami club and presented him with copies of their books, that he even realized what the pictures were being used for.

"I had no idea," he says. Soon enough, Fabio was doing up to 15 book-cover shoots a day. It can fairly be said that he changed the face of the romance novel. Before Fabio, it was the woman who was featured on the cover, with the man in the background. "They discovered that every time they put me on the cover, the sales would go up, sometimes by 60 percent," he recalls proudly. "All of a sudden they just started featuring me on the cover without the girl. And I was kind of bummed. I was like, where's the girl?"

By then Fabio wasn't just a cover model, he was a veritable legend. In the past two decades, he has appeared on more than 2,000 romance novel covers; it is estimated that some 100 million books have carried his image. In 1993, he made a critical decision: He would no longer appear on a book unless he wrote it. Negotiating six-figure advances, the first-time author published seven romances under his own name. The first was titled Pirate.