Patrick Fitzgerald already has an unusually high number of famous scalps to his name.

The fearless federal prosecutor who brought charges against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich also brought down a previous Illinois Governor as well as a host of other prominent defendants, including Lord Black of Crossharbour.

The son of an Irish-American doorman in New York, who studied at Harvard Law School, is a former rugby player who stands an imposing 6'2". He was once included in People magazine's roundup of the "Sexiest Man Alive."

He earned his spurs as a terrorism prosecutor in New York, convicting the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman for the first World Trade Centre terror attack in 1993 and indicting Osama bin Laden years before the hijackers demolished the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Arriving as US attorney in the northern district of Illinois in 2002, he put former Illinois Governor George Ryan in prison.

Mr Fitzgerald also secured the fraud conviction of disgraced Daily Telegraph chairman Conrad Black, who has the misfortune to run a company that operated in Chicago.

Mr Fitzgerald served as special counsel to investigate the leak that exposed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent after her husband Joseph Wilson, a former Ambassador to Iraq, was sent on a mission to investigate suspected Iraqi uranium imports from Africa.

During the investigation, he earned enemies by jailing New York Times journalist Judith Miller for 78 days for contempt of court for failing to reveal her sources.

His investigation also led to the conviction of Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, whose sentence was later commuted by President Bush.

Mr Fitzgerald has become such a key figure in Illinois politics that his future in his current job became an issue in the presidential election campaign. Pressed not to remove Mr Fitzgerald if he was elected president, both Barack Obama and John McCain promised to keep him in his job.

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