Back in 2004, when he was the editor of a conservative magazine at Rutgers University, James O'Keefe III mounted a satirical campaign to ban Lucky Charms cereal from campus dining halls on the premise the breakfast fare was offensive to Irish-Americans.

The operation, which included a hidden-camera video with a Rutgers dining services official, was intended to demonstrate what O'Keefe saw as the absurdity of political correctness.

Two years later, while a law student in California, the Bergen County native took on larger prey, using the same undercover tactics to expose crooked counselors at Planned Parenthood.

Now, with a string of shocking hidden-camera videos on the national group ACORN, O'Keefe has scored his biggest coup, stirring up a tempest that has resulted in a criminal investigation of ACORN employees, a denunciation of the group by the White House and congressional action to cut off millions of dollars in funding.

"The tone of my videos is unique," said O'Keefe in a telephone interview Wednesday. "I'm not just reporting on something, I'm becoming something I'm reporting on."

And to think, O'Keefe, 25, had planned to spend his year studying for an MBA at Fordham. Grad school will have to wait, said his father, James O'Keefe Jr.

"This has become his work full-time," the elder O'Keefe said Wednesday in a telephone interview from the family's Westwood home. "He's an extremely conscientious, hard-working young man, and we're proud of him."

The younger O'Keefe, a former Eagle Scout who graduated from Westwood High School, and a friend, 20-year-old Hannah Giles, a journalism student at Florida International University, spent their summer traveling to ACORN offices across the nation. The group -- formally known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- helps the poor seek housing help from the government and conducts voter-registration drives.

In the latter capacity, ACORN has been a lightning rod for conservatives since last year's presidential election, when members of the group were accused of fostering voter fraud by filling out registration cards with fictitious names, with the presumed aim of helping then-Sen. Barack Obama. The FBI and at least 15 states are investigating the claims.

Posing as a prostitute and pimp, O'Keefe and Giles sought advice about obtaining loans for a proposed brothel, at one point dropping the fictitious nugget that they planned to use underage girls trafficked from El Salvador. Profits from the venture, the pair said, would fund a future congressional campaign.

A camera rolled as ACORN employees in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and San Bernadino, Calif., told O'Keefe and Giles how to evade law enforcement, shield their assets from the government and win loans for their illicit endeavor. The videos began airing last week, building outrage with each new revelation.

And he is not finished.

"I'm still in my bunker producing more videos," O'Keefe said. "We're releasing another video in San Diego right now. I'm focusing on doing what I do best."

O'Keefe grew up in a household where the politics swayed toward conservative but not rigidly so,his father said. The elder O'Keefe, 55, is an engineer. His wife, Deborah, 54, is a physical therapist. The couple also has a 23-year-old daughter.

At Westwood High, O'Keefe favored arts and theater over sports, the father said. He also loved to write and thought seriously about a career in journalism.

He tested the waters at Rutgers, where he studied philosophy and penned a bi-weekly column for the student newspaper, the Daily Targum. His political writings tended to mix two flavors: biting and lofty. One installment of his column, "Feathers of Steel," railed against what O'Keefe perceived as a campus culture stacked against conservatives.

After leaving the Targum, O'Keefe founded The Centurion, a conservative magazine.

One of the articles in the first issue dealt with professors putting political advertising on their office doors in 2004. That is when he picked up a video camera in search of a story.

"I started thinking this is absurd." he said. "Why is it that all the doors are advertising different political candidates. That's the first video I ever did.

"I went to a professor and I asked him, is this really appropriate? And then it sort of went from there, the walk-in video reports. "

Several months later, O'Keefe and three friends experimented with the platform that's launched him into the spotlight, using a video camera, into the office of an assistant director at Rutgers dining services and lobbying for the removal of Lucky Charms.

In the video, which can be seen on YouTube, O'Keefe calmly complains about the cereal box, which carries the image of a leprechaun.

"He's portrayed as a green-cladded (sic) gnome, and as you can see ... we're not all short," O'Keefe says. "We have differences of height, and we think this is stereotypical of Irish-Americans."

Instead of laughing them out of the room, as the students expected, the employee took notes and assured them their concerns would be considered. A Rutgers spokesman, Steve Manas, said the cereal never left the menu.

"Even them taking us seriously is a story in and of itself," O'Keefe said.

By the time he graduated in 2006, O'Keefe had developed a reputation as "the godfather of the conservative movement" at Rutgers, said Kyle Barry, The Centurion's current editor-in-chief.

After Rutgers, O'Keefe spent a year with the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va. He trained students on "dozens" of college campuses to establish independent conservative newspapers, said the organization's president, Morton Blackwell, before his longstanding idea to record liberal abuses became too alluring.

"He wanted to go out and catch leftists breaking the law," Blackwell said. "His opinion was -- and it's certainly been borne out -- that there is an enormous amount of scandalous and illegal things going on that they were getting away with."

O'Keefe followed his stint at the Leadership Institute with a year at UCLA Law School. There, he and a 20-year-old undergrad, Lila Rose, came up with the idea of testing Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest provider of abortions. Rose posed as a 13-year-old girl who sought abortion counseling. The father, she told counelors, was a 31-year-old man.

Instead of reporting the cases to police, as required by law, the workers told Rose in taped encounters how to get an abortion.

James O'Keefe Jr. said he believes his son is changing journalism, one shocking video at a time.

"I think there's a lesson for America here," the father said. "If he can make an impact like this, everybody can."