Mr. Fitzgerald Goes To Washington

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Fitzgerald even turns vacations into occasions to test himself. Last summer in the Sierra Nevada in California, he wielded an ice ax to scale the treacherous slopes of Mount Whitney, at 14,491 ft. the highest peak in the lower 48 states. He has gone bungee jumping in New Zealand. He hang glides. All of which would be only mildly impressive if he weren't also scared of heights, notes David Kelley, a close friend and former colleague in New York. "He sees the challenge and wants to take it on," says Kelley.

In the 1990s, Fitzgerald put away Mafia brothers, Islamic terrorists and drug kingpins in New York, and in many cases, he pushed the envelope--invoking laws that other prosecutors wouldn't have touched. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Fitzgerald used a Civil War--era sedition statute to win the conviction of blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. When the jury sentenced Abdel-Rahman to life, Fitzgerald still wasn't satisfied. He became the first prosecutor to use a new antiterrorism law to get Abdel-Rahman imprisoned in isolation. (Later, Abdel-Rahman and his attorney would be caught on tape discussing how "evil" Fitzgerald was. "He's like a crusader," said lawyer Lynne Stewart.)

Fitzgerald eventually became the nation's top terrorism prosecutor. After the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, he immersed himself in the case for three years, learning about Islam and picking up some Arabic in the process. In the end, the jury sentenced all four defendants to life in prison, though Fitzgerald had requested the death penalty for two of them. "He's a bit of a moralist, an up-by-his-bootstraps Catholic boy with a strong sense of right and wrong," says David Baugh, a Richmond, Va., defense lawyer who represented one of the defendants. "He's like a Bing Crosby movie. He needs to get out more."

In Chicago, a city that has a rich tradition of graft and influence peddling, Fitzgerald has continued to cause discomfort. A federal judge rebuked Fitzgerald in 2003 for pursuing "sensational" charges against Enaam Arnaout, who was head of an Islamic charity. Fitzgerald accused Arnaout of financing terrorism and having ties to al-Qaeda. The judge threw out a 101-page report that Fitzgerald had submitted in an effort to enter hearsay evidence against Arnaout. Ultimately, Fitzgerald dropped the terrorism charges, and Arnaout pleaded guilty to racketeering.

Fitzgerald is currently prosecuting former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican, for corruption--using, among other things, a mail-fraud statute typically invoked in organized-crime cases. He has also gone after a slew of Mob bosses and members in connection with 18 murders, pursued city workers for allegedly running a kickback scheme and convicted a crony of Democratic Mayor Richard Daley's for using a sham minority firm to get millions in public money--all while he was serving as special counsel in the CIA-leak case. Much of the work is done by his 160 Assistant U.S. Attorneys, but Fitzgerald, who is single and has no children, monitors the cases closely.