In his five attempts in the past 18 years to win the CBS reality TV gauntlet Survivor, Rob Mariano has always sought extreme control over the island chaos in his midst. He has tamed thickets of palm trees and bamboo, drawing on his construction experience to build serviceable sleeping huts and seaworthy vessels. He has sized up his fellow contestants, each with motivations as tangled as the jungle canopy above them, and “run the numbers,” as he puts it, to figure out the loyalists he could squeeze and the threats he should shiv. (He also found a rad woman who wanted to marry him, but more on that in a bit.)

He is particularly skilled at the art of the confessional interview, distilling petty tribal inside baseball into catchy Godfather references with the lasting command of an on-message politician. In 2013, when Rob Mariano published a slim volume called The Boston Rob Rulebook: Strategies for Life on the heels of finally winning Survivor on his fourth try, Get Organized was one of the titular strategies for life. “One of the first things you do when you go camping,” he wrote, “is get organized. You set up a shelter. You gather wood. You build a fire. It creates a feeling of comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable environment.” Back in the comforts of the real world, however, all of the fastidious alpha energy of the guy known best as Boston Rob manifests a little bit differently.

“He’s hyper, hyper-organized,” says Mariano’s agent, Jamie Lopez. “There have been, I’m going to say, several occasions where he phoned me from his car, and I asked him what he’s doing, and he’s literally crossing state lines, going on a six-hour drive to retrieve some sort of Tupperware.” Like everyone who talks about Boston Rob, Lopez can’t help but imitate the guy’s accent, the one that still sounds like it’s bubbling up straight from the murky bottom of the Charles River, even though Mariano and his family have lived down in Pensacola, Florida, for years. “If you stack it up just right,” Lopez-as-Mariano exclaims, “I can fit 30 of these in my drawer!”

[Read Katie Baker's profile of Survivor legend Boston Rob Mariano]