My FBI by Louis J. Freeh

Author:Louis J. Freeh [Freeh, Louis J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Lawyers & Judges, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Political, Retail
ISBN: 0312321899
Google: yQNGfXtf6CgC
Amazon: B005ZOFZAQ
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2005-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Sometimes the cases I was handed touched me in deeply personal ways. One day I was randomly assigned a Title 7 complaint, a woman alleging sexual discrimination by a Wall Street firm. I looked at the firm’s name, and all of a sudden my memory went shooting back more than three decades to a story my mother had once told me. She had just left high school and was trying to land her first full-time job in New York when she went down to this Wall Street firm to fill out an application. A friend worked there and thought it would be a good fit, and indeed the interview seemed to go very well. Two or three people were under consideration, her friend told her, but my mother seemed to be the front runner. Finally, after waiting half the afternoon, the personnel head came out and told my mother, “We’d like to employ you, but we don’t hire Italians.”

Here it was, almost half a century later, and the son of that woman they wouldn’t hire had been handed a case with allegations that substituted sex for country of origin. Only in America. I had to recuse myself from the matter, obviously, but it served as a useful reminder that while discrimination can change stripes, it doesn’t go away.

There were moments, too, during my two years as a federal judge when history just came rushing at me, in ways that would have foretold my future if I could have read them at the time.

I was sitting in my courtroom on Foley Square in lower Manhattan on February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first struck. Six people died in that attack, but it’s worth remembering that if the bomb that exploded in the parking garage beneath the towers had been better configured, one or both buildings might have collapsed then, with a terrible loss of life, eight years before Osama bin Laden’s suicide aerial bombers finally succeeded in bringing them down. (Eerily enough, one of the people in the towers at the time of the first attack told a reporter, “It was like an airplane hit the building.”)

I’ll never forget hurrying down from the courthouse to the site of the bombing. People were mostly fleeing in the other direction. Panic was in the air. I suppose I should have stayed away and let the emergency rescue teams do their job, but that’s just not me. Without knowing it, I was looking at the bookends of my tenure as director. Within half a year, I would be leading the FBI. Eight years later, a little over two months after I’d left the job, these towers would be reduced to rubble.

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