At 53, the career FBI agent looks more like an airline pilot, a job he wanted after graduating from Cathedral High School in 1978.
06.24.2013 | SPRINGFIELD -- Richard DesLauriers, Special Agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, speaks with a reporter with The Republican as he reflects on his years with the service with the bureau, during an interview in the newspaper's Springfield office. SPRINGFIELD — Long before joining the FBI, Richard DesLauriers, who investigated the Boston Marathon bombings, already had a knack for sizing people up.
Literally.
His first job was at Riverside Amusement Park in Agawam, guessing the height and weight of people wandering through the arcade. Every wrong guess cost the park a Miller Lite beer stein.
“I didn’t want to bankrupt Riverside,” said DesLauriers, who later plied his analytic skills investigating bank robberies in Birmingham, Ala., working counter-intelligence cases in New York City, and pursuing mobsters and terrorists as the FBI’s Boston bureau director.
The Longmeadow native was back home Monday for a farewell visit to the local FBI office before his retirement July 12.
“I’ll always cherish the FBI as an institution, but it’s the people I’ll miss the most,” DesLauriers said, adding that the bureau enjoyed strong support from other state, local and federal agencies.
Ending 26½ years with the agency, DesLauriers announced three weeks ago that he was accepting a position as vice president of corporate security with Penske Corp. in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
At 53, the career FBI agent looks more like an airline pilot, a job he wanted after graduating from Cathedral High School in 1978. He ended up going to Assumption College and Catholic University Law School, then joined the FBI in 1986.
“I changed my mind (about being an airline pilot) when I realized my eyesight wasn’t good enough,” he said.
At the Springfield FBI office Monday, he listed several career highlights, including breaking up a Russian spy ring in 2010; the capture of Irish mobster Whitey Bulger in 2011 and cracking the Boston Marathon bombing case within 100 hours of the Patriot’s Day attack.
On the 23d anniversary of the notorious Gardner Museum heist in March, he announced that the FBI has identified an East Coast crime ring responsible for the $500 million theft.
Not breaking the Gardner theft case was perhaps his greatest regret, DesLauriers said.
“I really wish we could have solved that,” he said, adding that the investigation is continuing.
Despite public jubilation following the killing of one Marathon bombing suspect and the arrest of a second, DesLauriers had to field questions about his office’s handling of a tip about one of the two Cambridge brothers allegedly responsible for the bombing.
In 2011, Russian authorities notified the bureau that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two suspects, had turned to “radical Islam,” leading to an investigation that dismissed him and his family as a threat.
Without offering details, DesLauriers said the older Tsarneve brother had been the subject of a “very thorough” review by his office.
The bureau receives approximately 1,000 names of potential terrorists to check out each year, DesLauriers said.
With Whitey Bulger standing trial in Boston for murder, extortion and other crimes, DesLauriers would not comment on details of the case, including the mobster’s alliance with corrupt FBI agents during the 1980s and early 1990s.
After arriving in Boston in 2008, DesLauriers made capturing Bulger, a fugitive for 16 years, a top priority.
His decision to run a series of public service announcements on daytime television paid off when Bulger and girlfriend Catherine Greig were recognized and arrested in Santa Monica, Calif.
In a second media coup, DesLauriers released photos of the Cambridge bombing suspects four days after the attack, leading to a chase and shoot-out that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead and his younger brother wounded.
In dozens of interviews following the bombing, DesLauriers was the public face of the FBI, a sharp contrast to his earlier work in espionage and counter-intelligence.
Regardless of his shifting roles, DesLauriers said his mission was always the same.
“My greatest satisfaction is serving the American public and protecting it’s safety,” he said.