U.S. Atty. Patrick J. Fitzgerald had just flown into Chicago from New York on the morning of Sept. 11 when he was paged by a friend from New York as he was driving from O’Hare International Airport.
After stopping at a gas station pay phone, Fitzgerald learned that one jet had just crashed into the World Trade Center. Without a cell phone or a working radio, the Brooklyn native hurried to where he was staying and turned on the television in time to see both towers fall.
“All I can say is I felt like there was a sledgehammer into your stomach,” Fitzgerald told reporters Monday in his first interview since his confirmation last month as Chicago’s top federal prosecutor.
On the job here just two months, Fitzgerald vowed to be an aggressive prosecutor, saying he comes with no agenda other than to do “the right thing” and promising he wouldn’t let the fear of losing stop him from prosecuting anyone he is convinced is guilty. While priorities still have to be coordinated with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, Fitzgerald said he expects to go especially hard after terrorism, narcotics offenses, organized crime and public corruption.
During 13 years as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, he gained near-legendary status among colleagues for his work ethic. But some defense lawyers have criticized Fitzgerald for being overzealous in his terrorism prosecutions in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.
Fitzgerald defended his courtroom tactics as ethical and said the purpose of his prosecutions has been borne out by the horrible events of Sept. 11.
On that day, Fitzgerald was unable to get through to former colleagues in Manhattan from his temporary quarters in Chicago, so he rushed in his car to the Dirksen Federal Building and went to the FBI’s command post.
In the first couple of hours of the crisis, Fitzgerald, who had been co-chief of the federal prosecutors terrorism unit in Manhattan for six years and a leading expert on Osama bin Laden, said he made sure his law enforcement friends in New York knew he was ready to help in any way he could.
Being from New York and working near the World Trade Center–as well as having been involved in anti-terrorism efforts–“intensified what I felt,” he said. “I was in shock at watching those buildings come down. I thought about all the people inside.
“It’s your hometown. It’s everyone’s nightmare. You hope you wake up and it’s a bad dream,” he said.
Fitzgerald acknowledged his first thoughts turned to the possible involvement of bin Laden.
“You had to think it was good chance it was him, but I also told myself to wait for the facts to come in,” he said. “We didn’t want to jump to conclusions.”
In the weeks since, Fitzgerald confirmed that the Justice Department has mined his extensive knowledge of bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization.
“If an issue comes up that they think I might know something about, they’ll call me, and if need be, I’ll travel there,” he said. “They know they can call me any hour of the day or night.”
After helping win convictions in 1995 of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others on charges of conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center and the United Nations, Fitzgerald was among the first in law enforcement to turn his attention to bin Laden’s connections to terrorist attacks on American targets.
Aware at the time of allegations of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism, Fitzgerald said he, other prosecutors and agents began their investigation “with an open mind.”
“We went in saying OK, there’s smoke here, let’s see if there’s something behind it,” he said. “The more deeply we got into it, the more we realized he definitely was involved in terrorism.”
Within a day or two of the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Fitzgerald was in Africa taking the confession of one of the bombers, according to former colleagues.
After an intensive investigation spearheaded by Fitzgerald over many months, bin Laden and 22 others were charged in the African bombings, which killed 224 people and injured thousands more. Earlier this year, in a prosecution led by Fitzgerald, four bin Laden associates were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
When the bin Laden charges first came down, Fitzgerald said some in the media thought the U.S. attorney’s office had “overreacted” by claiming a broad conspiracy.
“And then when Sept. 11 hits, people are like, `Why didn’t you guys do more?'” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve been playing it straight all along.”
Fitzgerald told reporters Monday he has been warmly received in Chicago despite being the first outsider named U.S. attorney here in 40 years.
Assistant U.S. attorneys in Chicago say their new boss has brought a high level of energy to the job and wants agents and prosecutors unshackled from red tape and bureaucracy so they can get results.
Fitzgerald said he won’t prosecute any cases himself for at least a year so he can concentrate on administrative duties.
Fitzgerald said he has found the working relationships among federal law enforcement agencies in Chicago to be good but he wants to focus on making them even better.
He expressed some surprise at the quantity of the political corruption cases routinely brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago. Two suburban mayors were convicted of wrongdoing this summer only two days apart, he noted. “There may be less than 10 mayors charged nationwide last year,” he said.
A political independent who didn’t even vote in New York primaries, Fitzgerald said he would work to keep the U.S. attorney’s office here apolitical in its prosecutions.
“My goal will be to lead by example,” said Fitzgerald, 40, who jogs, likes to get away from work with non-lawyer friends and intends to travel the Midwest to get to know the region.
Fitzgerald, who has never married, put in extraordinarily long hours in New York, often seven days a week. In the midst of the World Trade Center bombing trial in 1995, New York Police Detective Tommy Corrigan said he thought of something in the middle of the night and telephoned Fitzgerald at work to leave him a voice-mail message.
But to his surprise, Fitzgerald answered the phone; it was 3:30 a.m.
“I used to say to him, `You’ve got to get a life,'” Corrigan said of Fitzgerald. “But you can’t help but be inspired by someone who works that hard. He just doesn’t quit.”
Some critics see a darker side to his selfless dedication.
“Pat is a bulldog,” said Stanley L. Cohen, a New York lawyer who has represented a number of Muslim clients. “He is vigorous, tough and a true believer, but I think the ultimate irony is he has evolved into the very zealot that he decries so publicly and loudly in the cases he prosecutes.”
But Fitzgerald defended his actions in the terrorist trials.
“Do I believe earnestly in what we were doing? Yes,” he said. “But we didn’t charge anyone who was innocent. We didn’t break any rules. We played by the book.
“But if in the end we also had passion about what we were doing, if that makes me a crusader, then OK, that’s fine.”
