We're Number One! We're Number One!

Patrick Fitzgerald, your U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, has been named The National Law Journal's 2005 Lawyer of the Year.

Besides handling the [Valerie Plame] leak investigation, Fitzgerald, as the U.S. attorney in Chicago, earlier this year brought fraud charges against Conrad Black, accusing the former publishing executive at Hollinger International and three of its other executives of illegally diverting almost $84 million from the sale of the company's newspapers and other publications. Fitzgerald announced four new charges against Black last week: racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and wire fraud.

Also this year, Fitzgerald's office charged two Chicago executives in a widespread corruption scandal with fraudulently rigging the hiring and promotion of favored job applicants by conducting false employment interviews and falsifying application scores. ***

Fitzgerald, famously press shy, is known to keep cool under pressure. Dean Polales, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago who served as counsel to Fitzgerald until last February, said that his former boss is positively "mellow."

"Even in the pressure-cooker situations, I have never seen him get upset. I've never seen him bark at anyone," said Polales, who now practices white-collar criminal defense with Chicago's Ungaretti & Harris.

And he's soooo dreamy.

Cross-posted at Illinoize