Who Is CIA Leak Probe Prosecutor?

Fitzgerald Has Taken On Mob Bosses, Bin Laden And Bungee Jumping

(CBS/AP) 
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College and then from Harvard Law School. After a three-year stint in a private law firm, he joined the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, getting in on some high-profile cases and eventually heading the anti-terrorist unit.

In 1993, he helped jail a Gambino crime family capo and three other mobsters for murder, racketeering, narcotics trafficking and other crimes.

He helped send Omar Abdel Rahman to federal prison for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and conspiring to blow up bridges and buildings.

And he supervised the 1996 trial of three men who plotted to blow up 12 airliners.

Fitzgerald also brought charges that Osama bin Laden and 22 of his followers conspired to murder Americans and were responsible for the August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Four defendants went to trial and are serving life.

Axelrod reports that even some who you'd expect to be Fitzgerald's critics are fans: Fred Cohn, an adversary in the al Qaeda bombing case and a liberal trial lawyer with no love for the White House, says he has confidence in Fitzgerald – even if he indicts no one in the CIA leak case.

"I can accept it from Pat because I trust him as a true patriot and as a professional prosecutor," Cohn said.

Since he arrived in Chicago in 2001, dozens of city workers and trucking executives have been indicted in a payoff investigation, including the former boss at the city water department who was a political powerhouse.

In April, agents raided City Hall and came away with piles of records — resulting in fraud charges against two city officials from the mayor's family's home ward. They are accused of violating a long-standing court order against using politics as a basis for hiring workers.

Daley, whose father built the Chicago Machine with Election Day get-out-the-vote workers who held patronage jobs on the city payroll, says he is determined to reform hiring. But he emphasized that "for more than 30 years, through six administrations, such violations have been treated as civil matters — until now."

Matthew Piers, an attorney who has gone up against Fitzgerald, says he's overzealous.

Piers represented Enaam Arnaout, the head of a defunct Muslim charity whom Fitzgerald charged with funneling aid to al Qaeda. He said Fitzgerald, using an old photo showing Arnaout with bin Laden, hyped charges against his client as fear swept the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Arnaout made a last-minute deal to plead guilty to defrauding his donors. He is serving 11 years.