{"id":191505,"date":"2022-11-08T07:15:09","date_gmt":"2022-11-08T12:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=191505"},"modified":"2022-10-19T11:15:35","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T15:15:35","slug":"uconn-magazine-frank-figliuzzis-fbi-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/11\/uconn-magazine-frank-figliuzzis-fbi-story\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Magazine: Frank Figliuzzi\u2019s FBI Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time Frank Figliuzzi \u201987 JD<\/strong>\u00a0applied to be an FBI agent, he was turned down.<\/p>\n

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He was disappointed \u2014 but then again, he was only 11 years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved the old Sunday night TV show \u2018The FBI\u2019 with Efrem Zimbalist Jr.,\u201d says Figliuzzi. \u201cThese guys would solve every problem in the world in less than an hour \u2014 and they wore suits.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Figliuzzi was two, his father moved the family from Port Chester, New York, where he\u2019d owned a small Italian foods shop, to New Fairfield, Connecticut, to become a regional manager for ShopWell foods. Young Frank loved the idyllic suburbs, but found the city more exciting.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a kid growing up in southern Connecticut, our news came from the New York media market, stories of the FBI breaking up the mafia. These guys using their brains for justice and equality.\u201d Inspired, he wrote a letter to the New Haven field office, asking the head of the FBI in Connecticut for a job. \u201cThe guy wrote me back and said, \u2018Here\u2019s what you need to do \u2014 get back to us in about 15 years.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Figliuzzi\u2019s career plan, never waver\u00ading, was met with all manner of skepticism along the way. An uncle told him at a family gathering, \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s gonna work, because we\u2019re Italian, and I don\u2019t think they like us.\u201d Undaunted, he gained a bachelor of arts in English from Fairfield University in 1984, the first in his family to earn a college degree, and went on to get his law degree, with honors, from UConn in 1987. He knew a law degree would be attractive to FBI recruiters but says his classmates scoffed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey looked at me like I was crazy. \u2018You\u2019re gonna live on a government salary?\u2019 They were all trying to become a partner in some law firm. Within a couple of years, those same classmates were calling me, saying they couldn\u2019t stand the lack of integrity at their law firm, or they were bored out of their minds, and how could they get an application to the FBI?\u201d<\/p>\n

Integrity has always mattered to Figliuzzi, who became an agent almost exactly 15 years after writing that letter and the same year he got that law degree. He worked in Atlanta, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he was a unit chief in the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI\u2019s Internal Affairs component. In 2001, after the 9\/11 attacks, he headed the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Miami, where many of the attackers had trained, and where the government feared more were hiding.<\/p>\n

A week after 9\/11, anthrax powder was discovered in the Boca Raton mailroom of American Media, publisher of the\u00a0National Enquirer.<\/em>\u00a0Al Qaeda was suspected at first, though the search ultimately led to a home-grown government scientist. Figliuzzi directed the FBI investigation from a trailer in the parking lot outside the American Media offices.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a 60,000-square-foot, three-\u00adstory building, filled with microscopic, deadly anthrax spores that killed somebody, and we\u2019re doing hazmat entries into the building. Meanwhile, I see kids getting on school buses. I see people out for their morning run, oblivious to the fact that down the street, an incredibly deadly attack has occurred. But that\u2019s why we have the FBI, to take that kind of burden on, so that everybody else doesn\u2019t have to worry about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sense of mission and honorable purpose has animated Figliuzzi\u2019s life from the first day he set foot in the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. After Miami, he became Chief Inspector and led the Cleveland Division in 2004. In 2011, he was named Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, the nation\u2019s top spy-catching agency. Over his 25 years of service, he watched the FBI change from an organization that primarily investigated crimes after the fact to one that tried to predict and prevent them.<\/p>\n

Read on for more.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank Figliuzzi \u201987 JD, host of the podcast \u201cThe Bureau with Frank Figliuzzi,\u201d MSNBC analyst, and author of \u201cThe FBI Way,\u201d maintains a \u201cfidelity, bravery, integrity\u201d mission despite retirement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":191509,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,1857,2235,102,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-191505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-law","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-magazine","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-03 05:41:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191506,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191505\/revisions\/191506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/191509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191505"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=191505"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=191505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}