Saint Patrick's day

He is the relentless scourge of mobsters, terrorists, corrupt city bosses and even the White House. Paul Harris profiles Patrick Fitzgerald, the tenacious workaholic special prosecutor, who gives George Bush sleepless nights, and who has now turned his sights on the former Telegraph tycoon Conrad Black

Sunday February 12, 2006
The Observer


On fine days, when the icy blasts that give Chicago its Windy City nickname are not too strong, a lone figure sometimes exits a plush downtown house. The man, tall but unstriking, jogs a short distance to the shore of Lake Michigan. There, he runs a narrow path between the deep blue of the lake and Chicago's jagged-toothed skyline.
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.

Now, they also include the Bush administration, for Fitzgerald is the man investigating 'Plamegate'. In his hands an obscure investigation into the public unmasking of CIA agent Valerie Plame has become the most far-reaching political scandal since Whitewater, perhaps even Watergate. It was the ticking time bomb under George W Bush that blew up last October, when top White House official Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was indicted on perjury charges.

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.

Now, after two years of probing, even grilling Bush in the Oval Office, the Untouchable has achieved what the Democratic party could not: a direct hit against the White House. And it is not over yet. Libby's trial is yet to come; the investigation is ongoing. Other high-ranking officials might yet be charged.

Fitzgerald burst upon America's public consciousness at a press conference on 29 October last year which was beamed live on TV across the nation. Republicans quaked at the thought of their top echelons being indicted en masse. Democrats drooled with anticipation: they dubbed the day 'Fitzmas'.

When Fitzgerald got up to speak, he looked tired after long nights preparing for this moment. But his voice, hesitant at first, grew stronger as he explained why he was bringing criminal charges against one of the highest officials in the land. It was a very Eliot Ness moment: 'If we were to walk away from this, we might as well hand in our jobs,' he said.

It was a statement of which Ness would have been proud, but Fitzgerald works in a different world to the man immortalised by Kevin Costner. Fitzgerald was entering the murky realm of international geopolitics. It is a surprising place to find the son of a Manhattan doorman who started out chasing drug dealers.

It began with a seemingly offhand observation in a column penned by journalist Bob Novak on 14 July 2003. Novak is a well-known Washington conservative whose gravelly voiced pronouncements regularly pop up on cable news channels. Novak mentioned that the wife of a former US diplomat, Joe Wilson, worked for the CIA. So far, so harmless. Yet the comment was anything but innocuous.

Wilson had infuriated the Bush administration by going public with his doubts about Saddam's WMD. He had been sent to Niger by the CIA to research claims from intelligence sources that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in west Africa. He returned saying the story was nonsense. But the claims kept surfacing in White House spin in the build-up to war, even appearing in Bush's state of the union speech in 2003. Wilson snapped, penning a furious article in the New York Times lambasting the White House for ignoring his Niger report.

Novak's subsequent exposure of Plame - thus ending her job as a spy - was seen as a warning to whistleblowers: speaking out costs careers. But one thing went wrong. Blowing a CIA agent's cover wasn't just spin, it was illegal. Thus Plamegate was born.

Metathemes quickly emerged. Wilson's trip was all about the phantom WMDs that led to war in Iraq. He was smeared by the media attack dogs that define the era of Fox News. It seemed less an investigation into a leak, more a probe of an Orwellian Big Lie. At least that's how Bush's critics saw it. The truth is, Fitzgerald treated Plamegate like he would any other crime. He started at the bottom - with the leak - and then worked up to the original source - the White House. It is a pattern seen in his mob investigations, where you start with the street thug, turn him into a snitch on his boss, and then repeat the process going higher and higher. Only this time the trail led not to some Little Italy Godfather but to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Read more here