Ex-FBI chief now has S. Florida base
Freeh’s global firm gets Palm Beach HQ
Get used to seeing more of former FBI director Louis Freeh around South Florida, whether or not his company is hired to conduct an independent investigation of the Parkland school shooting.
His global risk management firm, Freeh Group International Solutions, opened an office on Worth Avenue in the town of Palm Beach a few months ago and is moving its headquarters here, Freeh told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday in a rare interview.
Freeh and his wife, Marilyn, had already moved their primary home to Palm Beach, so making it a work base — with other locations in Delaware, New York and London — made sense on business and personal levels.
“South Florida is a busy area, it’s the fastest-growing part of the U.S. and it gives us terrific access to clients we work for,” Freeh said. “We also do a lot of work in Latin America … this is a very important hub for Latin America and for commerce.”
Freeh’s business move was planned long before the mass shooting on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and is not linked to his company’s bid to conduct an indepth and independent investigation.
The Broward County Commission has said it wants a thorough examination of the shooting incident and how law enforcement handled it, as well as an examination of how authorities dealt with possible warning signs that the gunman Nikolas Cruz was a danger in the months and years before the massacre.
Cruz has offered to plead guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted firstdegree murder in exchange for multiple life sentences in prison. So far, state prosecutors say they plan to seek the death penalty.
Broward County Administrator Bertha Henry is considering several applicants to perform the independent review but has not yet made her pick, officials said Tuesday.
County Commissioner Michael Udine has been pushing for a major investigation led by a high-profile individual or company that could provide “an unimpeachable report” that would show where mistakes were made and how they can be prevented in the future, he said.
In a 45-minute interview Tuesday at his Palm Beach office, Freeh declined to comment specifically on the Parkland tragedy. He also made it clear he wouldn’t wade into commenting on controversies surrounding President Donald Trump or the FBI.
But he spoke about school safety and security in general — and about comparable investigations his firm has handled. The pitch he made to Broward officials was confidential, he said.
“They have a very, very strong and emotional need — but also a legal need — to put together the facts and circumstances so they … can have a better understanding as to what happened and, more importantly, what could be done in the future to reduce the risk of those types of tragedies,” Freeh said.
In recent years, the firm is perhaps best known for its investigation of how Penn State officials handled the child sexual abuse allegations involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. That investigation involved about 50 employees and was expensive, but not as costly as the financial settlements linked to the case, Freeh said.
Such investigations are difficult “in terms of facts and emotion and human suffering” but are necessary to ensure that public officials or company leaders are doing whatever is possible to “manage the risk and reduce the incidence of violence or some catastrophic result,” he said.
Gun control measures that would reduce easy access to semi-automatic and assault-style guns would help, Freeh said. But eliminating all access to such weapons is impractical and unlikely to happen anytime soon, he said.
Having armed law enforcement officers at some schools is probably necessary, but will have to be balanced against administrators’ and parents’ feelings about that, he said.
Installing bulletproof windows and doors and introducing gun-free zones can all be discussed but Freeh said those expensive measures won’t eliminate all risks.
There may be some teachers who want to be armed at school, but there are also many teachers — and parents — who would not be comfortable with the idea of educators being forced into the role of being an armed guard, he said.
“It introduces a number of weapons inside a school and no matter how you secure them … you still have more weapons inside a
school and that creates its own issues,” Freeh said.
One of the most important things that public officials, and those who run private businesses, need to do is pay attention and respond to the information and warning signs they already have, he said. Whether that comes from social media or from other sources, he said the most important thing is to act on the information before something happens.
“After some of these workplace and even school disasters it turns out that there was a lot of information available in different quarters but … it was never put into a form where someone with responsibility and authority and resources could act upon it,” Freeh said. “There’s a lot of discussion about hardening sites and arming teachers but I think if you don’t have that first piece right, the rest of it is not really going to work.”
Born in Jersey City, N.J., Freeh became an FBI agent in 1975 and later worked as a federal prosecutor in New York, most famously prosecuting the “Pizza Connection” case. The investigation, the most complex ever undertaken by the feds at the time, involved Sicilian organized crime gangs who used pizza parlors as fronts for a massive drugtrafficking operation.
In 1991, then-President George Bush appointed him to a federal judgeship in the Southern District of New York. During the Clinton presidency, he was appointed FBI director and held that position from 1993 to 2001. Since then, he’s worked in the private sector.
Many of Freeh’s clients are large U.S. and international corporations that hire the firm to advise them on safety and security, conduct investigations, provide legal analysis and opinions, defend them during investigations and make pro-active recommendations to keep them out of trouble.
Freeh’s firm has about 50 employees, including attorneys, business and finance analysts, and a network of former FBI, Secret Service and other retired federal agents and former prosecutors.
As Freeh shifts his business headquarters to South Florida, he has hired retired FBI agent John Osa to be one of the local faces of the business.
Osa worked public corruption cases in South Florida and counterterrorism operations in Chicago before he retired in 2015. He is best known locally as the lead agent on a series of undercover federal corruption cases that sent several Broward politicians to federal prison in 2010, including former school board member Beverly Gallagher; former county commissioner Josephus Eggelletion; and former Miramar City Commissioner Fitzroy Salesman.
Freeh said he’s enjoying life in South Florida but he’s not a snowbird and it’s nothing close to a retirement for him. The last of the couple’s six sons recently moved out so, for the first time in 32 years, there’s nobody but him and his wife at home. “I’m not a beach guy and I don’t play golf,” Freeh said, laughing as he explains that he hasn’t yet acquired any Florida hobbies. He likes to hike but still heads to New England for some more hilly terrain than South Florida has to offer.
He still travels to handle cases for overseas clients about 60 percent of the time. And though he’s very computer literate, he says he still grabs his trusty yellow legal pad when he interviews clients and witnesses: “It’s important to look people in the eye and take notice of what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.”
“South Florida gives us terrific access to clients we work for.” Louis Freeh