Those who know Freeh call him a dogged pursuer

When he was FBI director, Louis Freeh's hard-driving style brought down terrorists and pushed forward a perjury investigation that led straight to his boss - in the Oval Office.

As a federal judge, he sent hundreds of drug dealers to prison and earned a reputation for doling out tough justice.

And as he presented the results of his investigation Thursday into one of the largest scandals in the history of college athletics, Freeh's scathing assessment proved once again that he has never been one to shy away from uncomfortable conclusions.

His 267-page report on the role Pennsylvania State University administrators played in keeping quiet child-sex-abuse allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky implicated one of Pennsylvania's most beloved figures, former head coach Joe Paterno, and one of the nation's most respected college administrators, former university president Graham B. Spanier, in a decadelong cover-up.

Speaking in Philadelphia on Thursday, Freeh said his investigators simply followed the evidence where it led.

"We have a great deal of respect for Mr. Paterno," Freeh said. "He's a person with a terrific legacy. But the facts are the facts. The reasonable conclusion is that he was an integral part of this active conspiracy."

To those who know Freeh, a 62-year-old father of four, that pull-no-punches mentality comes as no surprise.

"He's a bulldog," Howard Means, who cowrote Freeh's 2004 memoir, My FBI, said in a November interview. "He'll wade in there and do everything he can to piece a story together."

Freeh grew up and attended college and law school in North Jersey. As an FBI street agent, then as a prosecutor and finally as a federal judge, he was stationed in New York.

He was appointed FBI director under President Bill Clinton in 1993, shortly before standoffs with white separatists in Idaho and a bungled assault at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

But in his eight-year career at the head of the agency, which ended in June 2001, Freeh was credited with reshaping the FBI - recovering from those early setbacks and transforming a culture still operating with J. Edgar Hoover-era techniques into a modern crime-fighting force.

Freeh personally involved himself in big cases such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the perjury investigation into Clinton's involvement with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Freeh brought that hands-on style to the Penn State investigation, conducting many of the interviews with key players himself, sources close to the investigation said. In the course of eight months, his team interviewed 430 people, ranging from university trustees to janitors.

After Freeh resigned from the FBI, he became general counsel for the credit-card behemoth MBNA in Wilmington and later opened a Washington-based law firm, which counts several high-profile institutions among its clients.

In recent years, the firm has been commissioned to conduct investigations into major scandals, including bribery probes involving FIFA, the world's governing body for soccer, and a large casino business, Wynn Resorts, in Nevada.

Freeh's investigation into Wynn began in November - the same month that a grand jury's presentment on Sandusky was made public and that Penn State trustees hired Freeh to conduct a probe.

Speaking Thursday, Freeh said his firm brought the same intensity to bear on those investigations as it did at Penn State.

"We adhered to our original mandate," he said. "To investigate this matter fully, fairly, and completely, without fear or favor."

Staff writers Susan Snyder and John P. Martin contributed to this article.

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