The Daltaí Boards: "Doing the veil" and Patrick Firtzgerald

Caped Crusader’ sets his sights on CIA leak

Irish Sunday Business Post, October 30, 2005 By Niall O'Dowd

When he was first chosen as US Attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, 44, cracked a key element of a case that had puzzled his prosecutors. He told the story to Irish America magazine last year.

It involved Robert Burke, a Connemara-born conman, who had passed a handcuff key to a notorious criminal named Jeffrey Erickson. Erickson had used the key to set himself free and shoot dead two police officers.

On the wiretaps of Burke's phone conversations to his mother in Ireland, prosecutors continually heard him use the phrase “doing the veil'‘, which baffled them.

Fitzgerald, however, recognised the phrase right away as one that his Clareborn parents had often used on him when he was annoying them. “Dun do bheal'‘, (dun do bhéal) he told them, meant “shut your mouth'‘.

Armed with this knowledge, the prosecutors knew which part of the lengthy tapes to listen to for sensitive material. They succeeded in convicting Burke on five counts of perjury for denying he had slipped the key to Erickson. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

There are many in the White House today who very likely wished they too had learned to “dun do bheal'‘ once Fitzgerald got on their track.

Last week Tina Brown in the Washington Post called him “The Caped Crusader'‘ and wrote: “It's one of the ironies of our media culture that the mystique of Patrick J Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, grew to mythic size simply by virtue of Fitzgerald keeping his mouth shut until he has something to say.

“Manhattan media circles have been so excited by Fitzgerald's silence right up to the eve of the grand jury's term. . . [that they] have turned him into a cross between Philip Marlowe and the Shadow: fearless, honest, independent, laconic and unstoppable.”

Unstoppable seems to be the most accurate description of the native New Yorker. At just 34 years of age he was the lead prosecutor who won convictions against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 accomplices for their roles in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

A few years later, after he beat scores of other top prosecutors for the top job in Chicago, he took some time off to “clear his head'‘ at the family farm in Kilmaly, Co Clare. Evidently he returned refreshed and launched into a career that cracked many of the unsolvable cases involving political corruption in Chicago, the most nefarious involving a huge bribery scandal.

Where he learned "Dun do bhéal"

Fitzgerald said part of his discretion comes from his time growing up in an Irish household in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His father was a Manhattan doorman and accustomed to being discreet. His son worked part time at the job to pay for college tuition and obviously picked up tips on keeping his mouth shut.

The family's circumstances were modest. Fitzgerald was the classic Irish-American son of emigrants. He and his brothers played the accordion at Irish hooleys – he still plays it as a way of winding down and dealing with stress.

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