By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — When the boss of the Chicago FBI placed the infamous early morning phone call to inform then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich that agents were outside his house, he dialed the number he was sure Blagojevich would pick up — the governor’s official emergency line.
“He didn’t answer,” Robert Grant recalled Monday after announcing his retirement from the FBI after 7 ½ years in charge of the Chicago field office. “So I called his cellphone. Then he picked up.”
Later, with Blagojevich in handcuffs in the back of a government car, Grant gave the sitting governor a little advice.
“I told him when we were on our way downtown that he might want to get that emergency phone checked out,” Grant said.
Grant, 54, a 29-year veteran of the FBI, will officially step down Sept. 3 to join The Walt Disney Co. as part of its global security team. He said his decision to step down a month after the retirement of former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was a coincidence.
“I’ve always wanted another career after the FBI,” said Grant, who like Fitzgerald was in office longer than any predecessor in the more than 100 years of the Chicago field office. “I consider myself still a young man. I have a lot of energy left.”
He also said there is a “generational shift” taking place at the FBI under its director, Robert Mueller.
“Most of my generation has left or is going,” said Grant, who is a few years shy of the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of 57.
A native Virginian, Grant worked closely with Fitzgerald in recent years on an array of public corruption, mob and terrorism cases. When he came to Chicago in January 2005, Grant joined an office already deep into several major investigations, including corruption and patronage at City Hall that brought down several leaders in then-Mayor Richard Daley’s administration as well as the Operation Family Secrets probe into decades of unsolved mob hits.
Grant had already had one stint in Chicago as an agent in the early 1990s, overseeing the health care fraud and public corruption squads. From there, he had worked in various field offices before landing the position of chief inspector in Washington, traveling to many of the bureau’s 56 field offices across the country.
He said the people he got to know in that position helped him when the opening arose in Chicago, even though it was a large office for someone with no experience in such a top position.
“The timing was right,” Grant said in a telephone interview.
Grant said he was immediately impressed with Fitzgerald, his decision-making as a prosecutor and especially his vast knowledge of national-security and terrorism issues.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better partner,” Grant said. “True blue, ethical to the core.”
And while Grant garnered far less public attention than Fitzgerald, he was an articulate spokesman for the FBI at news conferences. For example, on the morning of Blagojevich’s arrest, a reporter asked about the state of affairs in Illinois. It was Grant who stepped up to the microphone.
“If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor,” Grant said. “Even the most cynical agents in our office were shocked.”
But the usually reserved Fitzgerald got the headlines when he memorably called Blagojevich’s conduct “a political corruption crime spree” that “would make (Abraham) Lincoln roll over in his grave.”
Grant said all the behind-the-scenes work done by his agents and technical teams was what he was most proud of during his tenure in Chicago, including the bugging of Blagojevich’s campaign office in October 2008 after authorities learned the governor had called a meeting with top staff to discuss how to squeeze donors for campaign cash.
“We had 48 hours from start to finish to get court approval, to get our people in place and have it up and running for that meeting … and we did it in 36 (hours),” Grant said. He said his agents had to figure out on the fly what alarm systems were in place, who got called if an alarm went off, whether there were hidden cameras and myriad other details that threatened to blow the whole operation.
“One of our tech fellows worked 36 straight hours. … He just would not give up,” Grant said. “It worked beautifully.”
One of the biggest cases he was involved with was the investigation of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed about 170 people and a separate plot to murder the editor of a Danish newspaper that printed unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. As part of that investigation, Grant’s agents had to bug a Chicago immigration law office, where FBI agents needed to drill holes and install equipment.
“They were able to go into a high-traffic area in the middle of summer, bypass security alarms without being detected,” Grant said.
Grant said that as a native East Coaster, he never thought the Midwest would appeal to him. But he grew to love the city and appreciate its energy and people, despite the corruption.
He said law enforcement can “prosecute all the corrupt politicians in the world,” but new ones will continue to take their place until voters say they’ve had enough.
“I don’t think the institutions that give rise to corruption have necessarily been reformed,” Grant said. “There are still an awful lot of people who believe that this is the way you do business.”
