As a newly minted special agent for the FBI in the early 2000s, Douglas DePodesta cut his teeth on a squad that went after Colombian and Mexican drug cartels that used the city as a hub for trafficking thousands of tons of narcotics every year.
Two decades later, DePodesta has taken over the reins of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office amid a push from the Trump administration to go after a new generation of cartel bosses and the dangerous drugs they import, particularly the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl.
“It’s killing an American every seven minutes,” DePodesta said, adding fentanyl has been cited routinely as a source for an epidemic of overdoses and deaths across the nation. “That is scary, one poor individual takes a pill and it kills them.”
DePodesta’s comments came in an exclusive interview with the Tribune on Thursday, several months after he started his role as special agent in charge in August. To help combat the growing fentanyl problem, he told the Tribune he recently created a 12-member squad with agents from various jurisdictions to focus on trafficking by the cartels in an attempt to disrupt a complex network that spans from Central and South America to Asia.
“We are looking to cut off the supply of fentanyl and also the precursors to fentanyl, the chemicals,” DePodesta said. “It’s really interesting. It’s a little different problem than just the cartels, but it’s also the same, right? Because it’s a chemical we’re trying to cut off. So we’re working with our international partners (because) a lot of it comes from China. … I’m very excited about it.”
Taking over the nation’s fourth-largest FBI field office has been a sort of homecoming for DePodesta, 54. Though he’s a Detroit-area native, he spent 14 years as a special agent in Chicago, where he rose to head the office’s Technical Program that mines digital and multimedia evidence to support investigations.
Though initially tasked to investigate cartels, DePodesta eventually had a hand in some of the era’s biggest investigations, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and its connections to financiers in Chicago, and the corruption probe that same year that felled then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, he said.
DePodesta said that while he only assisted in the Blagojevich probe, it stood out in his mind “just how rampant the corruption was in that investigation.”
“It was crazy, right?” he said. “Anything to get a dollar.”
DePodesta was selected for the plum Chicago position by then-Director Christopher Wray, and landed here a week and a half before the Democratic National Convention. Though it was a bit of a trial by fire, DePodesta said he was fortunate to inherit a “great team” that had spent years planning how to mitigate security threats while still leaving room for protests and other events.
“It really showcased how great this city is and the law enforcement partnerships we have here,” DePodesta said, sitting in his corner office at FBI headquarters on West Roosevelt Road with views of the downtown skyline. “And the great people, right? At the end of the day it was about the people, everyone from the hotel workers, the bus drivers. It really showed what Chicago is and what it can be.”
In January came the change in administrations and with it a new boss in Washington, FBI Director Kash Patel. DePodesta acknowledged there have been shifting priorities for the bureau since, but said that’s typical whenever there’s a change in leadership.
“This is my fourth director. And each time a new director comes in there are new priorities and new shifts, so we are seeing a little bit of a shift in priorities now,” he said. “But I can tell you our core mission is the same: Uphold the Constitution and protect the American people.”
In addition to cartels and fentanyl trafficking, DePodesta said his agents have had a hand in one of the Trump administration’s other hot-button issues: immigration enforcement.
DePodesta said the Chicago FBI, which has more than 1,000 total employees, has partnered locally with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, embedding some of the FBI’s 450 agents on the street “helping them effect arrests.”
The targets, DePodesta said, “are people that have removal orders that have a criminal history — murderers, rapists,” adding that the effort was “ongoing” and had no timetable for a conclusion.
“It is not a surge; it is a sustained effort,” DePodesta said. He said no new agents have been added to fulfill the FBI’s role in immigration enforcement — instead, agents from other squads have rotated and worked overtime.
DePodesta said that despite the new priorities, the FBI will continue to focus on its bread-and-butter areas of operation, including terrorism, gang and gun violence, crimes against children, drug trafficking and public corruption.
“The great thing about Chicago is we have about 1,100 employees here, so we have the ability to concentrate on a lot of things,” he said. “Although we’re getting pulled in different directions … we are big enough we can do a lot of stuff really well.”
As always, the bureau has had to adapt with the times. As gangs have fragmented, he said, the FBI has learned to deploy resources more strategically, with agents assisting Chicago police and other local authorities in targeting violent offenders on the street. One of the FBI’s biggest assets, he said, is time, with the agency having the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture of who is driving violence.
“We have to look to see where we can make the most impact, get the most bang for our buck,” he said. “So we determine which cases we should go after, if it’s the most violent offenders, if it’s the leaders of gangs, that’s where we go.”
One of Chicago’s most notorious leaders, Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover, this past week had his federal life sentence commuted by Trump. Though Hoover is still serving a 200-year sentence for his state court conviction for murder, making him likely to stay behind bars for the time being, DePodesta said in his interview with the Tribune that Hoover “deserves to be in prison.”
“The president of the United States has the authority to pardon whoever he wishes,” he said. “I think Larry Hoover caused a lot of damage in this city and he deserves to be in prison and he will continue to be imprisoned in the state system.”
DePodesta also noted that homicide rates were way below their high-water mark during the pandemic, and that non-fatal shootings were also down last year — drops he attributed in part to federal efforts, including the Crime Gun Intelligence Center recently established by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“I think that’s really shedding light on who’s doing a lot of these shootings, and we’ve been able to bring those people to justice,” he said.
While multinational terrorist threats such as Al Qaeda and ISIS have quieted somewhat in recent years, the bureau’s counterterrorism efforts are “not going away,” DePodesta said, pointing to the the assassination of two members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., last week, a crime allegedly carried out by Chicagoan Elias Rodriguez.
DePodesta said that although Rodriguez was charged in Washington, the Chicago FBI, which conducted a raid on Rodriguez’s Albany Park apartment on the morning after his arrest, is continuing to have a role in that investigation.
“As you can imagine we follow every thread, every lead to understand exactly everything that subject was going through, anyone he was talking to, figure out the whole thought process he was going through,” DePodesta said. “And that’s for two reasons. Obviously for prosecution, but also, we want to understand what someone like this is thinking to try to stop the next one.”
As for public corruption, DePodesta noted the parade of political titans that have been felled in recent years in part due to the FBI’s work, from former governors such as Blagojevich and George Ryan to ex-Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, who is currently in prison, and former House Speaker Michael Madigan, who will be sentenced in two weeks.
“Obviously our public corruption program is unfortunately still very busy,” DePodesta said. Asked if the most recent conviction of Madigan in February put an end to politicians with their hands out, DePodesta gave a slight smile.
“I don’t think that’s true,” DePodesta said. “Unfortunately there is a culture of corruption in this city and it’s my job to ensure that the taxpayers get honest service for their tax dollars.”
DePodesta grew up in the Detroit area, where his father worked in the steel industry, and he still considers it home. He graduated from Ferris State University in Michigan with a degree in criminal justice. He began his career in law enforcement as a patrol officer in Cincinnati, where he eventually worked his way up to investigations and joined a multi-agency task force focused on cargo shipping.
“Back in the day it was baby formula. … A truck full of that, even back then, was like $250,000,” he said. “So that kind of gave me the thirst to do something different.”
He joined the bureau in 2002 and was assigned to Chicago, which he acknowledged was “not my first choice.” But after settling in Wrigleyville, he said, he quickly grew to love the city — though his baseball loyalties still remain with the Detroit Tigers.
“It’s different neighborhoods quilted together to make a community,” DePodesta said of Chicago. “And I would say the law enforcement community is some of the strongest partnerships I’ve seen.”
In 2016, DePodesta was promoted to chief of the Sensitive Operations Support Unit at FBI Headquarters in Washington. He later moved back to Detroit, where in 2019 he became assistant special agent in charge of the FBI field office there, responsible for managing all violent crime, gang, and drug investigations across Michigan.
From there, DePodesta went back to headquarters to head up what he called “the business side of the house,” the Finance and Facilities Division, where he was in charge of a $1 billion budget that included more than 650 field locations and 18 million square feet of office space.
He was named interim special agent in charge of the Memphis Field Office in 2023 and spent about a year and a half there before finally landing back in Chicago. He now lives in Evanston with his wife and their 3-year-old golden retriever, Charlie.
With three years to go before the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of 57, DePodesta said he’d love it if he could call it a career here. But there still a lot to do.
“I think I have a lot left in my tank,” he said.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
