On the snowiest day of the year in February 2011 — when 60 mph winds hurled more than a foot of snow on Chicago, stranding drivers and paralyzing the city — U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald decided it would be a nice night for a run.

Intrigued by the extreme conditions, Fitzgerald wanted to feel the full force of the blizzard raging outside his home in Chicago. 

Along the way, a critter began to lope along with him. Fitzgerald thought it was a dog and shrugged it off, grateful to have a companion, according to Chicago FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Grant, who says he teases Fitzgerald about the story all the time.

Fitzgerald later realized he was running alongside a coyote. 

“I think he likes an adventure; he’s a curious individual,” says Grant. “To him, that was a rather breathtaking night. It was intriguing and drew him into it.”

The anecdote is perhaps a perfect metaphor for what Fitzgerald, 51, has come to represent in his 10 years as the top prosecutor in Chicago — the man who isn’t afraid to head into the storm. 

Fitzgerald arrived in Chicago from the Southern District of New York just before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Early in his tenure, Fitzgerald was often compared to the legendary Eliot Ness. By now, though, Fitzgerald has become a symbol of the incorruptible, “untouchable” prosecutor in his own right. It would surprise few if he went down in history as one of the toughest prosecutors Illinois — and the nation — has seen.

On the heels of convicting back-to-back governors, Fitzgerald, appointed as a special prosecutor by the U.S. Department of Justice, again captured national headlines in January. He brought a case against a former CIA officer for allegedly leaking to reporters a covert official’s identity and other information, some of which was found in the materials of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. 

Under Fitzgerald’s leadership in the Northern District of Illinois, some of the state’s biggest names — former Gov. George Ryan (a Republican), former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (a Democrat), media baron Conrad Black, former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, a slew of mobsters and behind-the-curtain operatives such as Springfield millionaire William Cellini and former?Chicago Ald. Ed Vrdolyak — went to prison or are headed there.

The smartest guy in the room “by light years” but who doesn’t try to show it, according to Grant, Fitzgerald is credited not only for helping shape cases but for remaking the U.S. attorney’s office, as well. He has taken a direct hand in hiring and building back up the numbers of assistants to about 170, nearly full strength for the office. Last year, the office collected more than four times its annual budget in fines, civil judgments, seizures and forfeitures. 

Fitzgerald has built a reputation of taking a shot at less-than-perfect cases. And if he doesn’t win at trial or at sentencing, he tries again until he does.

His recent successes come just a year after Fitzgerald, the golden boy of Chicago, faced stiff questions. 

The much-publicized first trial of Blagojevich on charges that, as Fitzgerald once famously said, “would have Lincoln rolling over in his grave” ended with an embarrassing mistrial on 23 of 24 counts. While there was one “holdout” juror, other jurors complained the case lacked a smoking gun.

That was after Blagojevich, as a seated governor, had been arrested at home for attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat Barack Obama vacated. The charges were based on what was supposed to be remarkable wiretap evidence and led to his impeachment and removal from office. Wiretaps, though, had been pulled early, with Fitzgerald saying he didn’t want to be responsible for allowing the corrupt appointment of a U.S. senator. He later admitted that leaks to the media about how investigators were recording Blagojevich also factored into taking down the wires prematurely.

The Wall Street Journal, already critical of Fitzgerald for his prosecution of then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, called for Fitzgerald’s resignation. 

“If Mr. Fitzgerald doesn’t resign of his own accord,” the Journal urged, “the Justice Department should remove him.”

Blagojevich went on the offensive, continuing a series of televised appearances calculated to curry favor with the public. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, kept a low public profile. His office vowed a retrial.

“I don’t think the guy loses sleep over what people think about him. And he doesn’t personalize things, which is very appropriate for a prosecutor,” says Patrick Collins, who prosecuted former Gov. Ryan as Fitzgerald’s highest-profile assistant. “I think he thought he had incredibly overwhelming evidence, and he should get a conviction on that.” 

The office revised its strategy, streamlining witnesses and evidence, focusing the case on the tapes and the attempted sale of the Senate seat. In June, more than two years after the former governor’s arrest, after listening to Blagojevich profess his innocence during countless media appearances, Fitzgerald saw Blagojevich soundly convicted at retrial on 17 of 20 counts. 

Months later, Blagojevich and his top campaign fundraiser and adviser, Tony Rezko, were handed prison terms that the Dirksen Federal Courthouse had rarely seen for political corruption cases. Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years and Rezko to 10 and a half years.

Those who know Fitzgerald say the case cemented his reputation for fighting graft in perhaps the most corrupt state in the union.

“To have two governors and their apparatuses dismantled in succession is just unprecedented,” Collins says.

Fitzgerald came to Chicago after working as an assistant in the Southern District of New York, which has a solid reputation for bringing tough federal cases. In 1998, before anyone knew the name Osama bin Laden, Fitzgerald’s unit indicted him and 22 others in connection with the bombings of two American embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people. Fitzgerald was chief counsel in the prosecution. Four men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In Chicago, Fitzgerald is still known for his expertise in terror prosecutions. But he’s brought complex, high-profile cases in just about every major area. Trials drawing international interest are becoming more common in the Chicago courthouse. 

Last year, one of the most watched terror trials in the nation — as well as in India and Denmark — unfolded as terror cooperator David Headley avoided the possibility of the federal death penalty by testifying against a Chicago man who was charged in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. 

This year, the most significant drug prosecution in North America is headed for trial in Chicago. The case has threads leading back to the powerful and violent Sinaloa drug cartel, allegedly also responsible for importing loads of cocaine and heroin into the United States.

Jeff Cramer, who worked with Fitzgerald both in New York and as an assistant in Chicago, says Fitzgerald’s heart is with efforts such as Project Safe Neighborhoods, which aims to get felons working, take guns off the streets and curb violence. Fitzgerald has called on corporate Chicago to hire felons to cut down recidivism. His office has brought wide-reaching gang cases, targeting leadership in both the city and suburbs. 

“He’s genuinely trying to impact and lower some of the gang violence. It cuts to really the essence of the job, which is trying to make people’s lives better,” Cramer says. “Those gang prosecutions, in my opinion, speak louder about Pat Fitzgerald than any other investigation.”

Fitzgerald’s decisions are not without controversy — or consequences. Defense lawyers have pounded the office for giving Stuart Levine, one of the most corrupt but significant government witnesses in Illinois history, a deal that would mean just five and a half years behind bars. Levine cooperated with prosecutors in the Blagojevich trial and testified in the cases against Rezko and Cellini. 

The office indicted Blagojevich adviser Christopher Kelly three times, turning the screws in hopes of flipping him. After Kelly pleaded guilty in a tax case in 2009, the office moved to revoke his bond. Kelly committed suicide days later. 

The decision to use Headley, an admitted terrorist who helped scope out targets in the terror attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed about 160 people, also drew questions. Headley’s cooperation meant he didn’t face the death penalty but that his testimony could put a little-known Chicago businessman, Tahawwur Rana, behind bars. Ultimately, Rana was not convicted in the Mumbai attacks but of another, unrealized plot against a Danish newspaper targeted for running derogatory cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Headley, though, provided investigators with a wealth of information about terror leaders in Pakistan.

After years of rampant corruption that was perceived to have escaped local prosecutors, former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [no relation] is praised for appointing Patrick Fitzgerald, saying someone from outside, with no loyalty to a law firm or political party, needed to take the post. 

“That’s preposterous,” says defense lawyer Thomas Anthony Durkin, who says Fitzgerald has been over-praised for doing the same thing his predecessors did: take down dirty politicians. “You think [previous U.S. Attorney] Scott Lassar had political affiliation? Who was it [among federal prosecutors] who wasn’t aggressively prosecuting white collar or corruption cases?” Durkin says. “I defy anybody, give me an example. I’ve been doing this for 37 years. I haven’t seen any lack of desire to go after political corruption.”

Durkin criticizes Fitzgerald for seeing the world in black and white and for “stretching the honest services statute as far as it could stretch” in some of his office’s prosecutions, including that of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s patronage chief Robert Sorich. That statute, which the U.S. Supreme Court has limited, has to do with a public official depriving constituents of his or her “honest services.”

Ed Genson, a veteran defense lawyer in the city, says it’s the Chicago office’s tradition to indict politicos. “I don’t see him investigating people that other U.S. attorneys wouldn’t have investigated,” Genson says.

Collins agrees that Lassar would not have hesitated to indict Ryan once the evidence got there. That’s despite a famous utterance that Ryan was not a target of the office’s Operation Safe Road probe at the time. Collins says some pundits used that statement to question Lassar’s support of the investigation when, in fact, Lassar was chiefly responsible for initiating it and aggressively staffing it at key stages.

Still, Collins says Fitzgerald was also a significant asset in the probe. Fitzgerald showed strong support and was also a strong counterforce in the politics of justice, he says. “People talk about [how] you can’t mess with him here, but we also believed he would push back against any attempt to improperly derail the case in Washington. If there had been a political appointee who wanted to put a thumb on the scale against the case improperly, that person would have had to think twice,” Collins says. “We knew he had our back, and that is a great comfort to any investigative team. “

Cramer says that under Fitzgerald’s tenure, the U.S. attorney’s office solidified its position as being the “last stop” for justice in Chicago. That includes the decision to prosecute Burge, using felons as witnesses, on charges tied to the torture of suspects in police custody that happened decades earlier. 

“What has distinguished Pat from some of his predecessors is some of the decisions that Pat has made,” says Cramer. “He’s made some tough decisions to go forward on cases that are not slam dunks.”

The question now is, after a decade, will Fitzgerald stay or will he go? 

At a press availability last fall, Fitzgerald gave a now-common refrain of his — that he loves his job and planned to stay as long as he was allowed. Since his arrival in Chicago, he has married and now has two children.

Yet, the presidential election looms, ramping up discussion over a possible Fitzgerald replacement. He was widely speculated to have been in the running for national FBI director when Robert Mueller’s term was up last year until President Barack Obama extended Mueller’s stay for two years. Grant says that to his knowledge, Fitzgerald was never contacted, though candidates with thinner resumes were. 

“What is shocking is, he is an obvious, an obvious short-list candidate, but he never shows up on anyone’s list. And the question is, why?” Grant says. “You can’t find a more experienced person in the world we are in today than Pat.”

Fitzgerald’s name may have become too politically divisive since he prosecuted Libby, says Grant, who says that was the likely source of the scathing editorial from the Wall Street Journal in 2010. It called Fitzgerald a “willful prosecutor who throws an exaggerated book at unpopular defendants and hopes at least one of the charges will stick.”

Despite the Libby prosecution controversy, Fitzgerald was again named special prosecutor in the case that brought January’s charges against John Kiriakou, the former CIA?agent. Fitzgerald said his work outside Chicago hasn’t taken away from the office’s productivity. 

“I stay later or I come in on weekends to make up for it,” Fitzgerald said at a media availability last fall.

“No case is not being made in this district because of my role as a special prosecutor.”

Last year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago filed 670 criminal cases — a number that for the most part has climbed over the past five years. In 2007 there were 549; in 2008, 581; in 2009, 666; in 2010, 663; and last year, 679. 

Those who work with him say Fitzgerald is the first to redirect praise to others and routinely goes out of his way to thank those lower on the totem pole. That was true in the Blagojevich investigation. 

Fitzgerald rewarded the agent who expertly installed two bugs in Blagojevich’s campaign offices. The agent went without sleep for 36 hours to get the job done in time. Fitzgerald personally gave him a bottle of expensive vodka as a thank you. 

“He never forgets the little guy,” says Grant, who has worked alongside Fitzgerald for about eight years. “What a great friend, what a — just a decent human being. I cannot say enough good things about him,” Grant says. “I think everyone trusts Pat’s acumen — he has a passion for doing the right thing for the public. That’s the easiest thing to say about Pat: He loves public service; he has no further ambitions.”

Natasha Korecki is the federal courts reporter for the Chicago?Sun-Times.

Illinois Issues, March 2012