The Observer: Saint Patrick's Day ( Front cover of Sunday Mag )

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.

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

-my favorite line in the article.

What kind of relationship he had with the late John O'Neill.

:kick: