Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Patrick Fitzgerald - But Were Afraid To Ask ...

Every once in a while comes along someone exceedingly special, and seemingly such a man is US special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Sometimes, something other than a living breathing person prompts similar proclamations of the same sort of super-star status. Something as simple as a Sunday magazine article for instance. Like this one put together by Paul Harris and published in this weekend's Observer Magazine, then heralded by the headers highlighted hereunder.

Saint Patrick's day

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

If that's interesting enough initially to imply it sounds like a story not be missed by any mind worthy of being equated with the word enquiring, then please bear with This Old Brit. Well at least for a little bit, and join him in a giant yet truly temporary leap from the opening paragraph to the closing one.

Okay? Then what are we waiting for? Let's go.

If so, he might want to consider a saying from the French essayist Charles Peguay: 'The honest man must be a perpetual renegade.'

Alright already, he hears you and he holds his hands up. It's a fair cop, guv. This Old Brit's just jumped the gun -- but justifiably he believes - even if for purely personal reasons. Y'see, This Old Brit likes to believe that when Peguay spoke as he did of honest men, he had people such as his old self and co-renegade Richard in his thoughts.

But let's get back to business. Cast your eyes across this cut & pasted chunk of compelling copy.

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 .....

So as not to spoil things too much we're stopping short of selecting any more extracts -- since this most positively is a must read piece. Whether you know little or lots about Fitzgerald, we feel sure you'll finish up furnished with much more knowledge if you take the time & trouble to read the rest of this remarkable resume for yourself. And when you have, we wager you won't want to argue that it wasn't well worth your while.

For this certainly is a story to savour, and if ever there were genuinely cracking 'keepers' - then this is one of them.

Well, we honestly ask ya, would we two old codgers ever con ya ?

Here's the link -- you'll love it. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1707291,00.html