Several weeks after 9/11, the senior FBI agent in Harrisburg, George Venizelos, received an alarming tip: A terrorist planned to ride an Amtrak train from Philadelphia to the state capital, carrying an atomic bomb.
In response, Amtrak closed the rail line and began searching. Venizelos soon received another surprising call, this time from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.
Mueller wasted no time. “What’s the story?” he asked.
Amtrak had not found anything yet, Venizelos recalled telling Mueller, but he promised to call back. Venizelos dug deeper and quickly concluded that the tip, like most cases pursued in the fall of 2001, was spurious, based on a vague call to a U.S. embassy overseas.
For Venizelos, who became special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division late last year, the incident marked the beginning of his 10-year relationship with Mueller and his involvement with terror cases, imagined and real.
Before taking the top job in Philadelphia, Venizelos was for three years the FBI’s second-in-command in New York. He was acting FBI chief in New York last year during two high-profile cases: the attempted Times Square bombing and the roundup of a Russian spy ring.
Venizelos, 50, is a gregarious, plain-talking North Jersey native – as a child in Edgewater, N.J., he recalled, he saw the twin towers under construction across the Hudson River. He graduated from Fordham University, roots for the Yankees, and is a longtime Giants season-ticket holder.
Venizelos’ personal history includes a father who was a Greek port captain and immigrated in the 1940s. His mother was born in Lowell, Mass., to Greek parents who had emigrated decades earlier.
Venizelos is often asked if he is related to Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece’s first modern-day statesman, the man responsible for helping reunify the country after hundreds of years of Turkish occupation. If he is, he said, the relation is distant.
Venizelos said he had his eye on Camden, a city struggling with violent crime and police budget cuts. He said he hoped to replicate the initiative he supervised last year in Newburgh, N.Y., where the FBI arrested 78 members of the Bloods and Latin Kings gangs in one sweep.
(source: philly, John Shiffman)
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