Louis Freeh

Louis Joseph Freeh (born January 6, 1950) is an American attorney and former judge who served as the fifth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from September 1993 to June 2001.

Graduated from Rutgers University and New York University School of Law, Freeh began his career as a special agent in the FBI, and was later an Assistant United States Attorney and United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A Republican, he was later appointed as FBI director by President Bill Clinton.

He is now a lawyer and consultant in the private sector.

Freeh was born January 6, 1950, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Italian-American parents Bernice (née Chinchiolo), a former bookkeeper, and William Freeh Sr., a real estate broker.

As a youth, Freeh became an Eagle Scout in 1963 and in 1995 was awarded the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award by the Boy Scouts of America.

A notable case Freeh was associated with was the "Pizza Connection" investigation, in which he was lead prosecutor.

Freeh, a native of North Bergen, graduated from St. Joseph's High School in West New York, NJ in 1967, where he was taught by Christian Brothers.

He then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University–New Brunswick with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971, and received a Juris Doctor degree from Rutgers School of Law–Newark in 1974 and a Master of Laws degree in criminal law from New York University School of Law in 1984.

Freeh was an FBI Special Agent from 1975 to 1981 in the New York City field office and at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney.

Subsequently, he held positions there as Chief of the Organized Crime Unit, Deputy United States Attorney, and Associate United States Attorney.

He was also a first lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve.

The case, prosecuted in the mid-1980s, involved a drug trafficking operation in the United States by Sicilian organized crime members who used pizza parlors as fronts.

After a 16-month trial, 17 of 19 defendants were convicted, of which 16 were sentenced.

The "Pizza Connection" case was, at the time, the most complex criminal investigation ever undertaken by the U.S. government.

Another notable case Freeh was associated with was the murder trial of Walter Moody, accused of the pipe bomb assassination of federal judge Robert Smith Vance in Birmingham, Alabama and attorney Robert E. Robinson in Savannah, Georgia.

Freeh was appointed Special Prosecutor in the case alongside Howard Shapiro.

Vance was assassinated on December 16, 1989, at his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama, when he opened a package containing a mail bomb sent by serial bomber Walter Moody.

Vance was killed instantly; his wife Helen was seriously injured.

Moody had mistakenly thought Judge Vance had denied his appeal of another case.

The Department of Justice charged Moody with the murders of Judge Vance and of Robinson, a black civil-rights attorney who had been killed in a separate explosion at his office.

"Roy" Moody was also charged with mailing bombs that were defused at the Eleventh Circuit's headquarters in Atlanta and at the Jacksonville office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1991, Moody was sentenced to seven federal life terms, plus 400 years.

Freeh was nominated by President George H. W. Bush on April 9, 1991, to a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by Judge Richard J. Daronco.

He was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 24, 1991, and received commission on May 30, 1991.

An investigation of the August 1992 incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which an FBI sharpshooter killed the wife of Randy Weaver, was ongoing when Freeh joined the FBI as its director.

An FBI unit, the Hostage Rescue Team, was present at the incident; Freeh later said that had he been director, he would not have involved the HRT.

FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi was later charged with manslaughter; Freeh said that he was "deeply disappointed" at the charges, filed by a county prosecutor and later dropped.

Freeh was not censured for alleged managerial failures in the investigation of the incident, although a Justice Department inquiry had made such a recommendation.

His service terminated on August 31, 1993, when he resigned to direct the FBI.

Shortly before and during Freeh's tenure, the FBI was involved in a number of high-profile incidents and internal investigations.

An investigation of the events of April 19, 1993, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) special agents served a warrant on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas was ongoing during Freeh's tenure.

He was subsequently tried by the state in 1996 for the murders and was executed by the state of Alabama in 2018 when he was 83 years old.

Among other Justice Department officials (including Attorney General Reno), Freeh was named a co-defendant in Zieper v. Metzinger, a 1999 federal court case.

The American Civil Liberties Union assisted the plaintiffs who sued due to the FBI's conduct in investigating "Military Takeover of New York City", a short (fictional) film made in October 1999 that discussed riots and a military takeover of Times Square on New Year's Eve, 1999.

In May 2000, he reached an agreement with Rep. José Serrano, then Puerto Rican Independence Party Senator Manuel Rodríguez Orellana, and then Puerto Rico Senate Committee on Federal Affairs chairman Kenneth McClintock, the island's current Senate President, to release FBI files on Puerto Rican political activists.

Nearly 100,000 pages have been released and are being catalogued by the Office of Legislative Services of Puerto Rico.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Freeh said that the widespread use of effective encryption "is one of the most difficult problems for law enforcement as the next century approaches".

He considered the loss of wiretapping to law enforcement as a result of encryption to be dangerous and said that the "country [would] be unable to protect itself" against terrorism and serious crimes.

Writing about Freeh in 2011, Reuters wrote that Freeh "faced widespread criticism for a series of high-profile blunders" during his tenure as FBI Director.