...just as Democrats start salivating about the hope that Fitzgerald isn't a crook. He's already proven that he is. He is killing the Plame investigation.
Ray,
What makes you think that Fitzgerald is a "crook?" As for killing the Plame investigation, I have not come across anything that would suggest that he is a partisan prosecutor. Have you? I can't say that I am too enthused about his pursuit of the journalists associated with the case. If he is successful, that may have a chilling effect on whistle blowers. As I have said in the past, Fitzgerald will come up with a name or names. It is still an open question in many quarters as to whether or not a crime was actually committed.
Today's Chicago Tribune has an excellent profile of Fitzgerald. In addition to handling the Valarie Plame investigation and making Richard Daley's life a living hell, he is gearing up for the trial of George Ryan, the former governor of Illinois. He previously put Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, New York's blind Egyptian cleric, in jail, and led the prosecutions of the men that bombed our embassies in Africa.
BULLDOG
HIS 24/7 WORK ETHIC AND BRILLIANT LEGAL MIND HAVE SENT TERRORISTS AND MOB BOSSES TO PRISON. BUT CRITICS SAY PATRICK FITZGERALD'S TACTICS SOMETIMES COLLIDE WITH THE CONSTITUTION.
By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune national correspondent
Published February 27, 2005
Patrick Fitzgerald hates nothing more than having the spotlight on him rather than his cases. But he couldn't escape it on Oct. 9, 2002, as his boss extolled his virtues to a throng of reporters gathered for the announcement of a major anti-terrorism case.
"Many individuals are responsible for this indictment," U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said as Fitzgerald looked on, "but none more so than the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. I don't think there is anyone in the United States-or perhaps the world-that knows more about prosecuting terrorism than Pat Fitzgerald."
Ashcroft then summarized the resume of the man who has been described as America's toughest prosecutor: He had put away a blind Egyptian cleric who planned to blow up numerous New York City landmarks; he had led the team that prosecuted the men who bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa; he had first started going after Osama bin Laden back in 1996, long before most Americans had ever heard of the Saudi exile; he had been named a year earlier to Chicago's top federal law-enforcement job, an unprecedented appointment for an outsider with no local ties.
A moment later Fitzgerald stepped to the podium and quickly shifted attention back to the legal issue at hand. In a case that was expected to set national precedent, the government was charging the head of a Muslim charity with defrauding his donors and providing financial assistance to terrorists. The allegations against the man, Enaam Arnaout, were that he had funneled donations intended for orphans to Islamic fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya, that he had helped to set up bin Laden's first military camp in Afghanistan, and that his suburban Chicago charity was deeply tied to Al Qaeda.
Fitzgerald plunged into the Arnaout case with the same zeal that had made him a legend in New York legal circles during the 1990s. But the case unraveled within a year: A federal judge issued a series of rulings against the prosecution, and later went so far as to call the original charges "sensational." On the day the trial was to have begun, Fitzgerald dropped the terrorism charges and Arnaout pleaded guilty to racketeering but not to aiding Al Qaeda. He eventually was sentenced to 11 years in prison, a fraction of the 80 years the original charges had carried or the more than 20 that Fitzgerald had requested.
By most estimates, Fitzgerald's legal prowess and anti-terror expertise had fallen short of Ashcroft's ringing endorsement. Yet even after the highly touted case ended in an anticlimactic whimper, there was little criticism of Chicago's new U.S. attorney other than from a disgruntled Muslim community. Fitzgerald's national reputation-bolstered by an unmatched work ethic, a network of friends who are a virtual Who's Who of American policymakers and a decade of hard-fought and brilliantly executed cases-seemed unimpeachable.
Indeed, Fitzgerald had arrived in Chicago in the fall of 2001 to the rhetorical equivalent of a red carpet. He was dubbed "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree," a nod to the straight-arrow federal agent who tackled Chicago corruption in the 1920s and '30s and brought Al Capone to his knees. The media heralded him as a savior with subpoena power who would do what no Chicago-bred prosecutor ever could: clean up a political machine long greased by payoffs and blind eyes. And when the nation was attacked with its own commercial jetliners less than two weeks after Fitzgerald moved into his spacious office in Chicago's Loop, local law-enforcement officials tapped the expertise of this new prosecutor who had spent most of his career battling the very terror cell that had just waged war on the United States.
In the three years since Fitzgerald came to Chicago, his reputation as America's most effective prosecutor has continued to flourish. Legal experts say no one has been more influential in creating the blueprint used to prosecute terrorists.
But controversy over the 44-year-old Fitzgerald's judgment, tactics and interpretation of the Constitution also has begun to build.
His probe into the leak of a CIA operative's name by an unnamed White House official has dragged on for more than a year without resolution, resulting in the threat of jail terms for journalists who refuse to reveal sources and raising the possibility that long-accepted First Amendment protections may be scaled back in the interest of national security. And in recent months, a federal judge has ordered a misconduct investigation of Fitzgerald and four aides in connection with the handling of a civil case.
Over the summer, Fitzgerald was the government's lead witness in the closely watched trial of an activist New York defense attorney accused of helping her imprisoned client deliver messages to followers inciting them to commit acts of terrorism. One courtroom scene illustrated the conflicting perceptions of Fitzgerald. On one side were the government's lawyers, deferential as he testified in defense of the nation's aggressive terror prosecutions. On the other were the defendants, whose view of Fitzgerald was caught on audiotape and played for the jurors. In their conversation, the two debated who was the most "evil," overzealous prosecutor in America. After much consideration, they eventually settled on Fitzgerald.
So which portrait of Fitzgerald is accurate? Is he a crusader who sacrifices civil rights to win cases, or a dedicated civil servant working overtime to eradicate terror and other crime? How much of his reputation-in the eyes of those who criticize him and those who defend him-is deserved?
Which characterization, to put it in terms Fitzgerald would use, would best stand up in court?
In May 2001, as word leaked that an outsider from New York was about to become their boss, Chicago's federal prosecutors immediately began calling lawyers they knew in New York, pumping them for information. It was a touchy situation: Fitzgerald's office, the Southern District of New York, is the most high-profile, well-funded prosecutor's office in the country, and prosecutors everywhere resent its lofty status much the way baseball fans resent the Yankees.
But even though they were prepared to dislike Fitzgerald on principle, the Chicagoans kept hearing the same stories-of a quirky, affable workaholic who not only usually won his own cases but who had mentored countless young prosecutors and helped them win theirs too.
The New Yorkers loved to tell the story of the malfunctioning tape recorder. During a trial, the tale goes, Fitzgerald let a defendant prattle on about how she had been coerced into the drug deal for which she was being prosecuted. When she was done, he asked his trial partner to play an audiotape of a wiretap of the deal in question. But the recorder, because it was inadvertently set on the wrong speed, wouldn't work. The courtroom descended into a prolonged and uneasy silence as a visibly sweating Fitzgerald lamely told the judge that it seemed the court was experiencing a power outage-even though all the lights were on.
The episode, which still causes Fitzgerald to cringe when he talks about it more than 15 years later, ended up working in the government's favor. The jury was so anxious to hear what was on the tape that they asked to examine it during deliberations, figured out how to get the recorder to work and unanimously concluded the woman had initiated the deal without coercion.
Another revealing Fitzgerald story was that he went 14 years without having the gas hooked up in his New York City apartment. He never used the stove, it was said, because he spent the entire decade of the 1990s at the U.S. attorney's office in Lower Manhattan. He kept his ties and underwear there, showered and had food delivered there, and remained a bachelor because he spent so much time there.
Fitzgerald came by this renowned work ethic naturally. One of four children born to Irish immigrants Patrick Sr. and Tillie Fitzgerald, he grew up in Flatbush, a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn. Fitzgerald's father, a doorman on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, had never taken a vacation. If the senior Fitzgerald was scheduled to be at work at 8 a.m., he'd show up at 7, just to be sure he wasn't late.
Young Pat was an exceptionally bright student and was accepted at Regis High School, a highly competitive, all-scholarship Jesuit preparatory school. Regis was the kind of place that didn't have a football team, but Latin was mandatory and the most exalted clique was the speech and debate team, of which Fitzgerald was a star member.
He worked on the school's grounds and maintenance crew to pay his way through Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. He had majored in math and economics, but the thought of "sitting around predicting turns in the stock market" didn't hold much appeal, so he applied to Harvard Law School.
While working as an intern at the U.S. attorney's office in Boston during his final year at Harvard, Fitzgerald ran into his future. Literally. Heading into a courtroom to watch the trial of organized-crime boss Gennaro Angiulo, he collided with a man walking out. "You just bumped into the head of the New England mob," a Boston prosecutor told the startled law student.
From then on, Fitzgerald was taken by the notion of litigating on behalf of the government. He spent his first three years out of law school at a New York law firm but soon applied at the Southern District, a much-respected place to work because it handled some of the nation's biggest mob and white-collar crime cases.
Fitzgerald started there in 1988 at the age of 27. Like all new prosecutors, he cut his teeth on drug and gang cases before moving to general and organized crime. He rose quickly through the ranks, "not just because he never left the building, but because he was brilliant," says former Southern District U.S. Atty. Mary Jo White, now in private practice in Manhattan.
By all accounts, Fitzgerald had a photographic memory. He could remember even the most unfamiliar of Arabic names or all of a criminal's 13 aliases; it was not unusual for him to remember, digit by digit, phone numbers he had seen on bills months before.
"It makes you feel so inadequate," jokes Gary Shapiro, a longtime Chicago prosecutor who is now Fitzgerald's deputy. "It's got to be his most unattractive quality."
Fitzgerald also had a direct and honest touch, and even some of the most hardened federal informants would deal only with him. They claimed that no matter how tough he was, he never treated them like commodities.
"I think that came from the way he was raised," says Michael Garcia, a fellow New York prosecutor who is now the deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "He didn't ever seem to be pulling a fast one, was simply direct about the expectations he had of an informant and even about the risks [of] cooperating with the government."
Probably Fitzgerald's greatest talent was finding creative ways to interpret the law. David Kelley, a close friend of Fitzgerald and the current U.S. attorney in the Southern District, says, "When you'd looked at a case from every angle and you were sure you didn't have what was needed to take it forward, you could show it to Pat and he'd say, 'Have you thought about charging this?' "
Fitzgerald eventually headed the district's Organized Crime-Terrorism Unit. He supervised the major terror cases that he didn't handle personally, including the 1996 prosecution of Ramzi Yousef, who led a conspiracy in the Philippines to detonate bombs simultaneously on 12 American airliners.
In early 1992, Fitzgerald was assigned the biggest and most challenging case of his career to that point: the highly publicized trial of John and Joseph Gambino, brothers who had risen to the top of the infamous New York crime family run by John Gotti.
Fitzgerald and his trial partner, James Comey, who years later would become the deputy attorney general of the United States, worked nonstop for most of the year to prepare for the four-month trial.
And what a trial it was: There were witnesses flown in from Sicily; wiretaps and multimillion-dollar shipments of heroin; the gruesome testimony of Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, who described in a voice as rough as gravel all the hits he'd carried out in his crime-ridden life. When Fitzgerald and Comey walked out of the courtroom after closing arguments, they were sure they had a slam-dunk conviction.
The young prosecutors passed the time waiting for the jury to return by watching the "Godfather" trilogy on a little television in Comey's office. Somewhere in the middle of "Godfather III," 10 days after deliberations had begun, the jury came back. But there was no verdict; they were hopelessly deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. The complicated case that had devoured more than a year of Fitzgerald's life would have to be started anew, a prospect he viewed as "the legal equivalent of putting on a cold, wet swimsuit."
That night, the men lay on the floor of Comey's office, talking about how they felt as though they had run the best marathon of their lives only to cross the finish line and find that no one had started the clock. Comey would leave the government for private practice soon after. Fitzgerald, questioning for the first time whether the American legal system sometimes falls short, entered what he regards as the lowest point in his career.
Fitzgerald's new trial partner for Gambino redux was Richard Zabel, who realized from the start that the elder prosecutor from whom he had hoped to learn so much was utterly disengaged. During one crucial pre-trial hearing, Fitzgerald passed Zabel a note in the courtroom and Zabel thought to himself, "Finally. This guy's back in the game. The great Fitzgerald is going to give me some sage courtroom advice." But the note, to Zabel's disappointment, only asked, "Is there beer back in the fridge?"
"I still feel terrible about Zabel," Fitzgerald said recently, an uncharacteristic admission from a man who is intensely private about his personal life and feelings. "He saw me at a pretty rough time."
In the end, no second trial was needed. In early 1994, the Gambinos accepted a drug-trafficking plea deal that sent each of them away for 15 years, far less than the life sentences Fitzgerald had hoped the men would get for a slew of charges, including murder.
Fitzgerald hadn't taken a full day off since the first Gambino trial began in 1992. As would become his routine, he rewarded himself by taking a long trip. He spent nearly six weeks in Australia and New Zealand, scuba diving, surfing, hang-gliding, rock climbing and rafting. It was as if he were trying to cram all his lost personal time into a few action-packed weeks. And it worked. By the end of his travels, Fitzgerald felt himself coming back to life. Thinking about the Gambinos didn't sting quite so much, and practicing law for anyone other than the federal government no longer held any appeal.
The case had taught him a lesson he would never forget: Even the best prosecutors lose sometimes, and the only way to live with that possibility was to leave no lead unexplored, no motion unfiled. If he had worked long hours before, they would pale to what was coming; if he had been compulsively thorough already, he would now be even more so.
"I came back," he said, "ready to dive into whatever was next."
Fitzgerald was assigned that spring to what had become known as the "Bombing Team." Along with two other rising young prosecutors, Andrew McCarthy and Robert Khuzami, he prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who had given fiery speeches calling for jihad against America, and 11 of his followers.
On the heels of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Rahman was accused of plotting to simultaneously blow up New York's FBI headquarters, the United Nations and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. The evidence in what was dubbed the "Day of Terror" case was beginning to awaken Americans to the idea that some Muslim extremists hated the West enough to kill innocent civilians: There were videotapes that showed Rahman's followers casing the two tunnels; wiretaps of the cleric's call to "kill the Jews"; testimony that the men had planned to kidnap former President Richard M. Nixon in order to negotiate the release of a jailed terrorist.
The case was mind-boggling in its legal complexity. The grounds for prosecution-seditious conspiracy-had been successful only a handful of times in the previous 100 years. The prosecutors essentially were hanging their case on a 200-year-old statute that allowed the government to prosecute people for crimes they planned, but failed to carry out, against the United States. It would set a precedent for terror prosecutions that would be supplanted only by the sweeping provisions of the USA Patriot Act after 9/11.
Fitzgerald and his team prepared for more than a year to take the case to trial, which began in January 1995 and lasted 10 months. One of Fitzgerald's key responsibilities was to present the government's closing arguments, a task that meant condensing some 40 weeks of testimony into a day or two.
Fitzgerald spent the entire weekend before his summation holed up in his office. Tommy Corrigan, a detective in the New York Police Department, stopped by one night to bring Fitzgerald some food. He remembers finding the prosecutor stripped down to his undershirt, shorts and dark dress socks. He was padding around his office, stepping on piles of court transcripts and scribbling on yellow legal pads.
"I thought to myself, 'This summation is either going to be sheer brilliance or absolute madness,' " Corrigan recalled later.
Fitzgerald's closing, presented with the logical, linear reasoning of someone who had once majored in mathematics, took nearly three days. Not only did the jurors stay awake, but by the end several of them were nodding along. In Fitzgerald's presentation, the far-reaching tentacles of terrorism began to make sense: A conspiracy to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995 was connected to the first World Trade Center bombing, which was connected to the sheik's plot for New York's bridges and landmarks, which was connected to God knew what next.
"I knew we had won that case when Pat sat down," says McCarthy, one of the trial partners. They did-Rahman got life.
But for Fitzgerald, the sentence was not severe enough, and his efforts to toughen its terms were among the first legal moves to brand him as a zealot in some people's minds. Under the 1996 Anti-Terrorist Act, something called "special administrative measures" allowed the government to essentially cut a convicted terrorist off from the outside world if there was reason to believe he would try to incite violence by issuing orders to his followers from prison. Fitzgerald thought Rahman qualified and, for the first time in a U.S. court, got the law's isolation provision applied.
Fitzgerald was castigated for picking on a sick and blind old man. But years later, illustrating exactly what Fitzgerald had feared, Rahman's attorney, Lynne F. Stewart, was accused of illegally delivering messages from the imprisoned sheik to his followers in Egypt. The messages allegedly called for ending a cease-fire with the Egyptian government and the resumption of terrorist actions. Stewart maintained she did not believe the statement she released would lead to violence, but she was convicted of the charges earlier this month.
Fitzgerald's career may have been at a high point, but his personal life was foundering. He hated to go home because he had never done anything to fix up his Brooklyn apartment. The ceiling was falling in, the kitchen sink didn't drain, and he couldn't cook because the gas hadn't been turned on. When police came to investigate a break-in at a neighbor's apartment, they looked at Fitzgerald's unit and concluded, "Looks like this guy was robbed too."
His neglected cat hated him, and his relationships with women were notoriously short-lived because, as his friend Kelley would say, "He was always too honest from the beginning that it wasn't going anywhere because he didn't really have the time."
Most of his time was now devoted to investigating Osama bin Laden, a Saudi billionaire whose name seemed to come up in every conversation with terrorism informants. Along with Ken Karas, who would later become a federal judge, Fitzgerald traveled throughout the Middle East, Asia and Africa in pursuit of bin Laden and his associates. The prosecutors' eureka moment came in 1996 when a Sudanese man, who had been banished from Al Qaeda for theft, promised to tell the government everything he knew if the U.S. would protect him.
In dozens of interviews, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl detailed Al Qaeda's intricate structure: satellite offices in various countries, specific training qualifications and courses for new members, and an organized system of dispersing monthly paychecks to the foot soldiers. Most worrisome, Al-Fadl told of Al Qaeda's attempt in 1993 to buy uranium to build a nuclear weapon; he was not sure whether the attempt had been successful.
The bin Laden investigation dragged on for nearly two years, and during that time, Fitzgerald's father was dying. Ironically, the man who had taught Fitzgerald everything he knew about hard work was now the one who inspired him to temporarily set aside the demands of a professional life for the rewards of a personal one. He and his three siblings, all of whom still lived in New York, agreed they would take turns caring for Patrick Sr.-their mother had died years earlier-so he wouldn't have to go to a nursing home.
On weekends, when it was Fitzgerald's responsibility to care for his ailing father, he would lug home boxes of files so he could work when his father didn't need his attention. Corrigan, the New York detective, remembers going to the Fitzgerald house during that time to go over some evidence.
"Other people . . . might say to their brothers and sisters, 'I just can't do this right now,' " Corrigan said. "But he did it, happily and with grace."
The senior Fitzgerald died in February 1998. Patrick Jr. gave the eulogy. His colleagues watched the man they had seen so composed in so many courtrooms fight to keep from breaking down.
"It was a window into him that few of us had seen," says McCarthy, his trial partner in the Rahman case. "When you have someone who works the way Pat does . . . and you suddenly see them in a very human situation, struggling with their composure, it's sobering. You think, 'He's really real after all. He feels all the things we all do.' "
That summer, drained from work, travel and grief, Fitzgerald decided to put his nearly nonexistent personal life in order. He took two weeks off and launched, with typical vigor, into a redecorating project in his long-neglected Brooklyn apartment. He bought tools to patch the ceiling, tore out the kitchen sink and dragged his ratty old furniture to the curb. With his few remaining possessions piled in the center of the living room and covered with a drop cloth, he bought enough paint to transform the entire place.
Not one task was completed before blasts ripped through U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998, killing 224 Americans and Africans and injuring thousands. White, the U.S. attorney in New York at the time, called Fitzgerald and told him to get on a plane.
His apartment-and his personal life-would remain in disrepair.
The embassy bombings had bin Laden's fingerprints all over them. Fitzgerald and Karas stayed in Africa for weeks, investigating the crimes even as the smoldering ruins were cleaned up. When they returned to New York, they immediately began writing an indictment of bin Laden and more than 20 of his associates, a speedy turnaround made possible by the wealth of evidence they already had collected on the elusive terrorist.
The impending trial of four embassy bombing suspects who had been caught and extradited to the U.S. propelled Fitzgerald's work obsession to new heights. He rarely left his office for the better part of three years.
Few in America paid much attention.
"I would talk to people who asked what I was working on," Fitzgerald said, "and when I told them they'd say, 'Oh, our embassies were bombed?' "
When the trial began in January 2001, Fitzgerald was responsible for questioning al-Fadl, the former Al Qaeda member and the government's key witness in the case. Al-Fadl's answers to Fitzgerald's questions foreshadowed a war that would begin in earnest just nine months later.
FITZGERALD: Can you tell us as best you recall what bin Laden said during this meeting?
AL-FADL: He said that the snake is America and we have to stop them. We have to cut the head and stop them.
Fitzgerald was so consumed by the case that he scarcely had time in early 2001 to respond to a request from White, his boss, to put together an application to become the U.S. attorney in Chicago, a city he'd visited only once nearly 20 years earlier.
It was up to Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald-no relation-to recommend to President Bush someone to take the helm of Illinois' Northern District. The senator, a Republican, wasn't eager to recommend someone outside the party-prosecutor Fitzgerald describes himself as an independent-but with former Gov. George Ryan and other members of his administration under investigation for corruption, he didn't feel he could appoint a partisan who might be suspected of going easy on criminals within his own political family.
Sen. Fitzgerald reportedly called FBI Director Louis Freeh and asked him who was the "toughest prosecutor in America." Freeh, according to his spokesperson at the time, immediately named Patrick Fitzgerald.
A few weeks later, on May 29, all four men in the embassy bombings were convicted of charges that carried the possibility of life in prison. Fitzgerald recommended that two of the men-those who planted the bombs-be sentenced to death. On the first day of the penalty phase, he asked for the lights in the courtroom to be dimmed. Without sound or narration, the names and photographs of the 224 dead flashed on a screen.
"It took so long, even with just a few seconds on each face," says Garcia. "But Pat had a deep personal commitment to giving those victims their moment in that courtroom."
Several members of the jury refused to approve the death penalty, citing fears that such executions would further incite violence by making the men martyrs to be vindicated by other terrorists. The verdict needed to be unanimous, so all the defendants received life sentences. For the second time in his career, Fitzgerald watched as the court dismissed a hung jury.
After it was announced that Fitzgerald had been selected for the Chicago job, he prepared to sell his apartment. The gas still hadn't been turned on, and though his friends had long used that story to illustrate what a workaholic he was, it now confirmed something else: his obsession with detail. He asked that a clause be added to the sales agreement stating that the seller had no reason to believe the stove didn't work, but could not himself verify that it did.
Fitzgerald's friends wondered privately whether he and Chicago would be a match. Would he be as challenged by the city's bread-and-butter federal cases-white-collar crime and political corruption-as he had been by terrorism? A lifelong New Yorker, would he be at home in a city that sometimes slept?
"He loves New York so much that I just didn't ever predict he would be able to translate that passion to a job in another city," says Pasquale "Pat" D'Amuro, the head of the FBI in New York.
Chicago is the nation's third-largest federal prosecutor's office-New York and Los Angeles are bigger-and before Fitzgerald, no attorney without ties to Illinois had ever been tapped for the top job. During the summer before his arrival, Fitzgerald's reputation and outsider status prompted local newspaper columnists and editorial writers to breathlessly speculate that this tough-minded prosecutor from the East Coast would finally be the savior who would clean up the long-corrupt city.
It was as dramatic a portrayal as it was misleading.
"The idea that Pat rode into town and saved the day is just crap," says Judge William J. Bauer, 79, a Republican and respected jurist who was the U.S. attorney in Chicago and a federal trial judge before being appointed in 1975 to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. "He is a brilliant prosecutor. He has led the office as well as any U.S. attorney I can think of. But he does tend to get credit for some things that far predate him."
Fitzgerald, in fact, inherited many of what would become his biggest cases from his predecessor, Scott Lassar: the investigation and eventual corruption prosecution of former Gov. George Ryan and ranking members of his administration; the prosecution of Michael Segal, one of Chicago's most politically connected businessmen, accused of raiding a company trust fund of more than $20 million to support a lavish personal lifestyle; and the case of Joseph Miedzianowski, the Chicago police officer turned drug dealer who was said to be the most corrupt cop in the city's history.
In December 2003 Fitzgerald was ordered by the Department of Justice to oversee an investigation that thrust him onto the national stage as no previous case had. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft had recused himself from a politically sensitive probe into who in the White House may have illegally leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who alleges that his wife's identity was disclosed as a result of his assertion that the administration had exaggerated Iraq's nuclear capabilities to build the case for war.
Fitzgerald dove into the fray. He questioned the president in the Oval Office. He demanded to see the phone records of The New York Times in order to find some of the paper's confidential sources. And he issued subpoenas for some of the Beltway's most influential journalists, including, in addition to those at the Times, reporters from The Washington Post, Time magazine and NBC's Tim Russert, the host of the Sunday-morning stalwart, "Meet the Press." At least two of the journalists refused to cooperate and face jail time.
Fitzgerald's handling of the case has been sharply criticized by news media fearful that any legal precedents forcing journalists to reveal confidential sources would forever alter the independence and watchdog mission of the Fourth Estate. But even some of the nation's most respected attorneys have suggested that Fitzgerald may be pursuing a lengthy and expensive investigation into something that is not even a crime in the first place. They argue that the 1982 law he is using as the basis for his probe applies only to covert agents who live outside the country now or have done so in the last five years.
"Since Plame had been living in Washington for some time when the July 2003 column was published, and was working at a desk job in Langley (a no-no for a person with a need for cover), there is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as 'covert,' " wrote Victoria Toensing, former chief counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee who helped draft the 1982 law, and Bruce Sanford, a First Amendment specialist, in The Washington Post.
For all the attention on the CIA probe, it is the Arnaout case that may be more significant for Fitzgerald's legacy in Chicago. That prosecution was pivotal because it was the first time one of the government's most powerful anti-crime statutes-the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO-had been used against an alleged terrorist-funding organization since the 9/11 terror attacks. RICO charges had been levied against mobsters and drug rings; now it was being applied to suspected terrorist organizations if evidence showed they were committing crimes under the guise of a legal business or organization.
"It showed such creativity and innovation on Pat's part," says Jimmy Gurule, former director of enforcement for the Treasury Department and now a law professor at Notre Dame.
But as the trial neared in February 2003, the presiding judge tossed out a 101-page document that Fitzgerald had filed in the hopes of making hearsay evidence against Arnaout admissible in court. The legal blow meant that Fitzgerald would be hard-pressed to introduce reams of crucial evidence, potentially including the former Al Qaeda member he had put on the stand during the embassy-bombing trial.
A plea agreement was announced a week later in which Arnaout pleaded guilty to just one of the original seven counts against him: racketeering. He admitted in court to diverting charity funds to extremist fighters but not to charges of helping Al Qaeda.
There was more disappointment to come: Although the plea had stipulated that Arnaout would cooperate with the government, giving them information that might aid other terror investigations, a frustrated Fitzgerald said later that Arnaout had failed to do so.
"It's fair to raise questions as to what happened [in the Arnaout case]," Gurule says, "because the general rule would be for the government to obtain a detailed [statement] of how the defendant was going to help the government . . . before the deal went through."
Fitzgerald defends the plea, bristling when someone calls it a "disappointment."
"I wouldn't say that at all," he said in an interview. "An admission of racketeering is no small thing. The only thing I might say I am disappointed in is that the cooperation later was not what we had hoped for and expected."
A few days later, clearly bothered by having the word "disappointed" linked to the case, Fitzgerald called the reporter back. "I just want to be clear that I was not at all saying I consider the outcome of the case to be a disappointment," he said.
Fitzgerald's most recent high-profile case has nothing to do with terrorism or corruption, but rather with allegations of misconduct in his own office. U.S. District Court Judge James Holderman is conducting an investigation into whether one of Fitzgerald's prosecutors broke the law by turning over grand jury materials to lawyers in a civil case. The judge, who has been feuding with the U.S. attorney's office for years, also ordered a misconduct investigation of Fitzgerald and four of his assistants by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for their role in the matter.
Fitzgerald responded by formally requesting that Holderman be removed from his own criminal investigation, saying that the judge had been openly hostile to prosecutors. Fitzgerald also has been critical of the fact that Holderman's wife works for the law firm fighting prosecutors in the dispute.
Fitzgerald's old friend Comey was the one who coined the "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree" comparison. It was meant to convey several things: One was that Fitzgerald was dogged, and few would dispute that he is as committed to fighting criminals as Ness was. The other was that he was a straight-laced, by-the-book player, an assertion that has been more debated.
But there is one indisputable difference between the legendary lawman and Fitzgerald: Ness had a wife and children. He loved them and worried about them, sending them into hiding when Capone's thugs threatened them. Fitzgerald, anointed in a gossip column as one of the city's most eligible bachelors and rumored to be dating a woman in town, remains single and deflects questions by joking that he has "no personal life," then saying more seriously, "What's private is private."
"I know he wants to have a family, and he doesn't want to be married to work," says Comey. "But I think he doesn't feel comfortable with the idea of shortchanging a spouse and children because of the demands on him right now."
Fitzgerald says he doesn't consider his lifestyle for the past 16 years a sacrifice. "When you're actually doing it, it's exciting, it's rewarding," he says. But a moment later he allows, "If there were a world where you could do all those exciting and rewarding things in 40 hours a week, that would be perfect."
Since moving to Chicago, he says, he has consciously tried to strike a better balance between the professional and personal, though the addition of the White House probe to his responsibilities hasn't helped.
If nothing else, he at least no longer owns a rundown apartment without gas. He owns a house in Chicago that is so nice that Comey says his wife is even willing to stay there on family vacations to town. (Fitzgerald, who has made dangerous enemies, reportedly doesn't have mail delivered to his home and keeps a low profile among his neighbors.)
The underlying question about Fitzgerald-about anyone who surrenders to a work ethic as all-encompassing as his-is: What drives him? Comey, Karas, McCarthy, Garcia and White all responded to that question with identical answers: "He wants to do the right thing." That was Fitzgerald's answer, too, though he said it sheepishly, as though recognizing that it's the kind of statement that could sound hokey, or melodramatic.
"I'd like to think I'm making a difference," he says.
In the end, perhaps the only way someone can devote his life to something as subjective as justice is to block out the fact that it is not always a winning proposition. Sometimes you get a hung jury. Sometimes an imperfect plea bargain is all you have left. Sometimes the only way to try a case is to apply the law in ways never been tried before, in a way that makes people call you a zealot.
Fitzgerald has never finished watching "Godfather III," the movie he and Comey were halfway through when the Gambino trial ended in disappointment 12 years ago. The film doesn't have the kind of ending he would like anyway: As the screen fades to black, the beautiful and innocent have been slaughtered, the villains are carrying on as they always have, and Michael Corleone, the old and largely broken mob boss, notes that those who pursue criminals often end up feeling hunted themselves.
"He should be careful," Corleone says of an enemy. "It's dangerous to be an honest man."
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