UK Guardian Observer Profile of FITZGERALD : St. Patrick's Day!

[SillyGoose]

Sunday February 12, 2006
The Observer
St. Patrick's Day


<snip>

Few Chicagoans would recognise Patrick Fitzgerald on his jogs. The same cannot be said of some of the most powerful, the most violent and the most deadly people in the world. To them, he is clearly a dangerous man. For Fitzgerald has carved out a career in American law enforcement that has earned him the nickname 'The Untouchable', after the legendary Chicago lawman Eliot Ness. It is a good comparison - like Ness, Fitzgerald is ruthless and unrelenting. But unlike Ness, who put Al Capone behind bars, Fitzgerald's enemies go far beyond Chicago gangsters. They stretch from the caves of Afghanistan to the corridors of the White House. They include the Gambino mob family; the blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; Osama bin Laden, and a generation of Chicago politicians, bloated on a culture of corruption that Fitzgerald is seeking to eradicate.

<snip>
Patrick Fitzgerald is a workaholic. A single man who appears to have married the law and whose photographic memory has helped him become the best prosecutor in America. 'He is the best I have ever seen. Simply remarkable,' said his former boss Mary Jo White.

<snip>

He spent so many nights sleeping in his office that he would keep used socks in his desk drawer. Colleagues knew that if they had to get hold of him at 3am, the first number to call was the office. 'I get emails from him in the middle of the night,' said William Mateja, a former colleague. 'He just loves his job.'

<snip>

In a Minnesota prison in 2000 the blind terrorist Abdel-Rahman was sitting in a cell. He was banned from contact with the outside world by the man who had put him there for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993: Patrick Fitzgerald. The rules that kept him silent were designed to stop him sending orders to militants abroad. As Abdel-Rahman talked with his lawyer, Lynn Stewart, about his isolation, a picture emerged of how he saw his tormentor.

more...

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1707291,00.html

[glitch]

1. God Bless Him. nt

[splat@14]

2. Fitzmas needs to be more than once per year & my tree is still up! n/t

[stop the bleeding]

3. I like this part

Plamegate was not really about who leaked what and when; it was about the war in Iraq. It was about how mythical weapons of mass destruction led to the bloody loss of tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and the death of more than 2,000 US soldiers. It was about a political spin machine that brooked no criticism and smeared its critics in the rush to war.

[Dunvegan]

4. Whoa...Fitz's letter of 2001...

Of course, nothing stopped the terrorist attacks of 2001. By then Fitzgerald was in Chicago, brought in to clean up one of the most corrupt cities in America.

He had switched from international terrorism to political corruption. One of his last emails for his old New York job was to a colleague who was also leaving the terror field. 'You can't leave, they're going to hit us again and someone has got to be around to work it,' he wrote.

The email was dated 10 September 2001.

The Observer:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1707291,00.html