Remarks By Craig S. Morford to Project Safe Neighborhood Conference 2007 Awards Ceremony
Atlanta, Georgia – September 26, 2007

MR. MORFORD: Before I do anything or say anything, I want to make sure nobody misinterprets what just happened. The FBI shouldn't get nervous that Mike was handing me a bag full of stuff. It was just my -- it was just my briefcase that I had left at the table, and I had a newspaper in there that I wanted to refer to.

So if at some point during this time, you may see me put my glasses on. I never used to need those, and I still try to do without them, particularly if I'm up in public. But the older I get, the more I need them, so I'll set them here in case I need it.

I was going to start off and say greetings from Washington, but that never seems to work. And as somebody that managed to stay out of Washington for 23 years and 48 weeks of my career, it just doesn't sound right. But I've been in Washington, D.C., for seven weeks now as the acting deputy attorney general, and I'm noticing it hasn't been that long, but I have figured out a few really important things. And one is that things can change in an incredible hurry. And they will often change several times in the period of a day or two in Washington, and so you have to learn to roll with the punches.

As many of you know, we have a new nominee for Attorney General, Judge Michael Mukasey. And I don't know the judge, I've never appeared before him. I actually met him yesterday for the first time in the airport. He was flying back to New York as I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta and I saw some guys with those earpieces in that didn't look like any of the Marshals who I know that protect me. And I said to my guys, I said, who -- what are they here for? And they said, the Attorney General. And I said, oh, wow, which one? (Laughter.)

And they said, the judge. And I said, oh, wow, which one? (Laughter.) And it's the new judge, not the old judge. But the old judge still has protection detail, so I didn't know what they were there for.

And so I said, well, where is he? And they said, he's going to be here in a minute. And I said, well, let's just wait here and we'll meet him. And so we met him and he seemed like nice guy, but I noticed yesterday -- seemed like a really nice guy. I'm not -- (laughter) -- seemed so nice. (Laughter.)

People from New York tell me he's a nice guy unless you don't come to court prepared. That he's a very good, fair but tough and demanding judge. So I'm going to get a lot of sleep in the next couple weeks and make sure my A game is on.

I thought it was interesting in his appearance at the White House, there were two things that he said that certainly stood out to me, and it was just his initial remarks. He didn't speak long, probably two minutes. But there were two things that jumped out to me. The first was that it is his fondest hope and prayer at this time that, if confirmed, he can -- can't even read my own writing -- I wrote this late last night -- that he can give to the employees of the Department the support and leadership that we deserve.

And I thought that was a really cool thing for him to say that first moment in front of a microphone. And then the second thing he said really struck me. That the Department he will lead faces vastly different changes than it did when he himself was an AUSA 35 years ago.

And I've been an AUSA now for 20 years. I've been with government service for 23. But I have to tell you, as I think about the Department of Justice that I started at 20 years ago, the Department of Justice that I work for today bears very little semblance to that in so many ways. It's such a different time and such a different set of challenges.

Think about that. In 1972 which would have been -- if my math is correct -- when he would have been an AUSA, and there are some of us here who remember that, think about what was going on in our offices? What were the major cases that we were working on? And many of you will remember this.

If it came to violent crime, if we were here to talk about violent crime, we would have been talking about bank robberies, car theft rings, counterfeiting rings, mail frauds, tax frauds. Organized crime was the big thing of the day. That was the cutting edge stuff. That was the stuff where we were doing stuff that if anything was going to get us in trouble, it was that. We were getting statutes like RICO and Title III and people were looking at Title III and saying, I think this is dangerous, I think we can't give the government this much authority. This RICO thing is dangerous. I think this thing could be applied in ways that Big Brother is going to go crazy.

And what happened is the Department of Justice used those tools for 40 years, and they used those tools carefully, they used those tools with great discretion and they used those tools with great precision and organized crime is almost a footnote now when we talk about what we do.

And I think it's important, and I say that, because I think we have a track record for dealing with incredibly difficult, challenging events. If you look back and read what was going on and the debate that passed the 1968 crime bill, organized crime was a menace that people thought we could never get out in front of. But we did. And what we have is we have a heritage as a Department and as state and local law enforcement working together with the federal law enforcement component, of rolling up our sleeves and going after problems that at the time that we start, people say, that's out of control, we'll never get there. And I think it's sometimes important to look back at our history and remember what people were saying, remember what people were thinking. And let's be honest. Remember some of the things that we were thinking that we would never, ever be able to have the impact on organized crime that we had.

They were doing some drug cases, but certainly not the international scope that we are doing today. And occasionally some public corruption cases. And I say occasionally, because we will talk about in a minute, because compared to what's going on now, it's a very, very different landscape.

So let's fast forward 35 years and talk about and compare the challenges that we face today. First, of course, we need to talk about terrorism. That's the number one priority of the Department of Justice. It's the number one priority of every law enforcement agency in every country in the world today. And that's not just a bumper sticker, that's not a political slogan. That is a reality, that is a reality that's not going to change and that's a reality that we need to get used to. Because the problem that exists in that area is one that's far greater than any problem we've ever confronted.

I begin each day in my job every day at 7:30 in the morning in the FBI SCIF. And in that room they have a couple people from the FBI and somebody from the CIA. And they have a couple of guys that get there at 11:00 at night and they pull wires from desks all over the world and they put together a briefing book and we spend the first half hour of every day looking at all the major events that are going on everywhere in the world.

And I have to tell you, it's a very sobering way to begin your day. But it's a very good reminder of what's important and why.

My first six weeks in this job were spent at that table looking at different things that were happening around the world, and one was something that was developing at lightspeed in Denmark and another one in Germany. And it was amazing to me to see this thing playing out. And then it was even more amazing for me to see law enforcement agencies in Germany and Denmark descend and take down and disrupt what would have been very bad acts of terrorism.

And as I say, it's a very tough way to start the day, and a very sobering thing. But for me, it's also an incredibly -- sense of security and sense of peace to see the incredible work that people are doing to be out in front of these things. And it doesn't mean we're always going to be out in front of every one of these incidents. But I'll tell you, if you look what happened at Fort Dix, if you look at what happened at JFK, if you look at what happened in Germany, if you look at what happened in Denmark, there's no way you can look at those things and think back 10 years, think back to 9/11, think back before 9/11, think back at what happened in 1993 when the Twin Towers were first hit or two or three years later when the U.S.S. Cole was hit, or two years after that when the towers in Tanzania and Kenya were hit, or the Khobar Towers were hit. And you had, every two years, there was this major incident.

We are doing better in our efforts to detect and disrupt terrorism today. And the reason is we're spreading the field. We're dealing with state and local law enforcement agencies all over this country. We're dealing with federal agencies all over this country, and we're dealing and interacting with agencies all over the world in a way we've never done before. And I think that's part of the reason we are where we are.

But our job is not simply to prosecute terrorism cases, which is what we are used to doing, investigating and prosecuting. We are now getting brought into the world of disrupting and detecting. And to detect means we need intelligence and we need sources and we need to balance the desire to prosecute against the necessity to keep the information flowing. That's one thing that didn't exist when I started 20 years ago.

How many of us 10 years ago spent time thinking about terrorism unless we were in New York or a couple different places. That's changed our world. That's changed our world in terms of priorities. It has changed our world in terms of focus. And that needs to continue to be the case. Because this problem has not gone away, it's not going to go away. There are people who want to get into this country and try every day, for no purpose other than to kill as many American people as they can. That's the reality; that's what we're up against. So that's one thing that's changed.

Second thing I think that's changed is I was an AUSA for years who did corruption work. And I have done a number of different kinds of corruption. I did the case on Congressman Traficant. And during the course of that case, I had to do some research for a speech or debate clause motion. And I had to go back and look at every single reported case on a congressman.

And I remember being struck at the time how few cases there were. I expected that there would be all kinds of cases. But there were far fewer than I thought there would be. I can tell you right now, I think we have more cases either under indictment or under investigation than there were cases reported for all time going back -- that are active cases, right now.

We also have cases going on mayors. We had the big case here in Atlanta on the mayor of Atlanta but we have cases like that all across the country. We have cases against local governments, state legislators, members of Congress, police, prosecutors.

Our corporate institutions, not just our public institutions, are under the attack of corruption, which is why we've seen over 1,260 people convicted since the Enron scandal broke and we started this major focus on corporate corruption.

And I started thinking about these things. And I'm thinking, what's going on that we seem to have so many cases involving public corruption, government corruption, police corruption, corporate corruption? And then I started thinking about our institutions across the board as a society. We've got scandals and corruption going on in every major institution in our culture today. We've had media scandals that we've read about, we've got sports scandals. You know, everyone was joking that the NFL was the only one that wasn't getting hit by all this stuff. And in the period of a few months, we've had a couple major scandals there. The baseball scandals out in San Francisco with BALCO and steroids.

And then you think about some of our most revered institutions, the church, and some of the scandals that have gone on in the churches. And it's all churches; it's not protestant, Catholic, it's everything. It's a culture-wide thing.

And we get called into that. We, the Department of Justice, get called into that, because when there is rampant corruption, there are corruption cases to be made and we get pulled into those, and those are incredible, asset-eating cases. And so we are seeing more efforts towards corporate and public corruption and corruption in other industries. That's two things that have changed.

The third thing is immigration. We all know what a huge problem immigration is. And this immigration issue is jamming our courts, it's filling our prisons beyond their capacity and it is overwhelming our system. And we don't know what to do about it. And there's a lot of people that come in that either don't get charged, or they get charged with a misdemeanor, because our system isn't set up to deal with that big a problem.

Which brings us to the fourth problem that has changed. And that is that the Mexican border, certainly on the Mexican side, is now very much controlled by drug cartels. And so you have the international drug problem affecting our border.

And, you know, it's one of these things that every time we make, you know, great strides someplace, it creates something else that we never thought about. And there used to be a time when they would fly drugs in from South America and we did a lot of things with airstrips and stuff. As many of you will remember, I certainly remember, in the '80s and '90s, and now they no longer do it that way. They do it through the border. And, as a result, you have these cartels along the border that many times have control of the border.

You have other problems that are being brought on by the area of drugs. In addition to the border control area, you have these problems in places like Afghanistan where they are growing opium and farmers are growing flowers that produce the opium and then selling them. And when the West comes in to irradiate those fields, groups like the Taliban can come in and say, see, this is the problem with the West, they take the food out of your babies' mouths. And so you have the drug trade affecting even international relationships in key places like Afghanistan and Mexico and Colombia and all the other places.

And then you've got inner city violence, and the impact that drugs are having on inner cities. The mayor of Cleveland grew up in an inner city neighborhood and we did a big gang case there, Greg White's office. And I was talking to the mayor at one point, and he grew up in that neighborhood. And he remembered the street gang we were prosecuting had existed all the way back when he was a kid.

And I was talking to him about the neighborhood he grew up in and what the difference was that he saw from where he grew up when it was a bad neighborhood and what it is now when it's a really, really bad neighborhood. And he said, you know what the number one thing that changed that neighborhood was? Crack cocaine. And he said, crack cocaine came into this neighborhood and it changed everything. And I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

But we didn't have crack cocaine prior to the 1990s. And crack cocaine came in and some of these kids now have mothers and grandmothers who are crack cocaine addicts. And they have no parent, they have no education, they have no hope for a job, they have no hope. And some of these neighborhoods are deteriorating to the point where they become a machine that produces violence. It produces violent criminals, it produces violent street gangs. And that's a problem.

And we get called in to do our part in that as federal, state, local investigators and prosecutors, and to take our limited resources and do all we can to have an impact. And we'll talk about that. But that's another thing that really didn't exist.

When I started, violent crime was a local issue. We feds did frauds and stuff. That wasn't on our -- wasn't on our plate. And when they first started pulling us into that, I remember a lot of us saying, you know what, who's going to do the frauds and who's going to do this and who's going to do that. But today we realize we can't impact these problems without doing our part.

And then we have the area of the Internet. The Internet came along and it produced just a whole level of stuff that nobody ever thought about or intended. In fact, I think when you think about some of the crime problems that are coming off the Internet today, going back to drugs, internet pharmacies, it's probably the biggest single growing drug problem in America today.

Child exploitation. We could take offices with 70 AUSAs and do nothing but child exploitation cases. We could take the investigators in this room and have you do nothing but child exploitation cases and we still wouldn't begin probably to scratch the surface.

Identity theft, intrusions. Somebody sitting in an apartment in Uzbekistan can reach from their apartment right into a corporate office and pull some of the greatest corporate secrets off a computer. And if you think of our economy today, we're not a bricks and mortar anymore; we're an idea economy. And the corporation that's coming up with a new idea, that's worth something. And if somebody can reach into a computer and steal that idea before it gets to market, that's worth a lot. And we have foreign governments and we have foreign criminals who have sophisticated computer technology tools that allow them to do just that.

I wonder sometimes if he could have looked into the future and seen all these problems, would Al Gore have invented the Internet? (Laughter.) I don't know. I'll leave that up to you. But the point is, he did. It's a new problem and it's another one that we have to deal with that prosecutors didn't have to deal with 10, 15 years ago.

If you think about -- there's one last area that I haven't even hit yet, and that's fraud. Talk about fraud, I mean, fraud has been our bread and butter for 40 years. It's the thing we do best, it's the thing we know most, it's the thing that probably eats more U.S. attorney assets up than anything else, and it's number seven on the list that I'm talking about.

But when you get to the area of fraud, we have health care fraud. We didn't have health care fraud when I started. I don't remember it. Mortgage fraud; securities and pension fraud, where pensions are being drained; bankruptcy fraud; procurement fraud. I know Dave is in charge of our procurement fraud task force. They have a big one here. It's a national and international problem, as we are doing wars and Katrina relief. You have program frauds and tax frauds that we've done forever. The list goes on and on.

But finally, you get my point, that when the judge yesterday talked about this department being very different than what it was 35 years ago and the challenges that we face being very different than what they were 35 years ago or 20 years ago when I started, or six years ago when the attack took place at the Twin Towers, you realize that this is reality, this is what we're up against today, and this is why it's so important that we do what we do and do it as well and as good and as hard and as dedicated a fashion as we can do it.

You know, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running a series of articles on inner city crime. And I'll tell you, the last three years of my time in U.S. Attorneys offices, I spent an inordinate amount of my time out in inner city neighborhoods, first in Detroit and then in Cleveland and then finally in Nashville. And what I found was there was more similarities than differences when you got into inner city neighborhoods, when you got into where the projects were, you got into those neighborhoods where people live not because they want to live there but because they have no choice.

Dave Nahmias (phonetic) told me that somebody yesterday had a great little quote and I'm going to butcher it, but it was something about one of our jobs is to take the people who are living behind bars right now because they have bars on their windows, because their neighborhoods are so unsafe that they go into their house and bolt lock the door at 6:00 and have bars on their windows because it's not safe to go out and they want to keep people from getting in, and turn that around so that the people that are living behind bars aren't living behind the bars and the people that should be are. And that's what PSN is all about.

I just want to read a couple quick quotes. These were from actual people that were interviewed by reporters who got down into the inner city of Cleveland. One was the Venturas who keep baseball bats and iron rods in an old milk pail near the porch gate, ready to be used for self-defense. Planks of dense wood stacked high against the house wait to be nailed to bedroom walls, reinforcement against stray bullets.

If noise and destruction were all I had to deal with, fine, Ventura says, peeking through a screen front door to check on her two young grandchildren, asleep in the living room. But what bothers me the most is not knowing what's going to happen tonight. Will there be a fight? Will there be gunshots? Will bullets come through my window? Will someone get killed?

Vacant houses surround the Venturas' home, making them seem like the sole inhabitants of an inner city island. Other residents feel equally isolated. And they say too afraid to join forces and reclaim their neighborhood.

Sometimes after someone gets shot, the rest of the night somehow feels safer, Ventura says, after a long silence, because at least you know the worst is over.

There was another person interviewed and said, she sees highlights the symptoms of urban decay, houses pocked with bullet holes, yards used as trash dumping grounds and 12 vacant homes, some with the familiar plywood decor. Cars cruise down the road, doors open, music blaring, a sign that drugs are for sale within. People are beaten in the street with baseball bats. Drug transactions take place with children as the middleman, shaking hands with adults in the driveway for the exchanges. It's like they're driving through a McDonald's but for drugs. And it goes on all night long, the person says.

You know, I know these things are true. Because I've sat in inner city churches, I've sat in inner city rec centers and I've talked to these people -- not these particular people but people that tell the same story in Nashville, Tennessee. They tell the same story in Detroit. They tell the same story in Cleveland. And you say to yourself, can you imagine what it would be like to be stuck living in a neighborhood that's like this, not because you choose to, but because you have nowhere else to go?

When I was in Detroit, we had a federal judge who didn't like this whole PSN thing, and she felt we were cluttering up -- cluttering up her courtroom with these cases that belonged in state court. And I went over to talk to her and I said, Judge, where do you live. And she told me the name of the suburb. And it was a pretty nice suburb. And she said, how do you get home at night? She goes, well, I take this road out. I said, do you ever look at those neighborhoods as you're riding by them? Because I've been in that neighborhood. And you know what the people in that neighborhood tell me? They don't see us as victimizing them and their families like you do by putting some of these people away for long periods of time. They see us as salvation. They live in a neighborhood where they don't have the luxury of driving by in a car and keep driving. They live there, they get up on their porch 6:00 at night and they go in and they lock the door and they're afraid to go out and they sit and listen to gunfire. They watch their grandkids walk to school on these streets and they just hope and pray that their kids don't get sucked up into this lifestyle.

That's the reality of what we're dealing with. And that's the reality of what PSN is all about. Six years ago, Jim Comey (phonetic) and a number of others, some of you may be in this room, had a vision of something that we could do together in partnership, as our various federal agencies. It started with ATF and it started with the state and local police, of going out and taking the hammer that we had as federal prosecutors and doing all we could to get as many of the nastiest of the nasty off the streets.

He talked about the fact that there was only one language some of these thugs understood. That they were in the business of marketing fear and intimidation and the only thing they understood was fear and intimidation. And if we were going to make headway, we needed to market to them the fear and intimidation of going to jail if they carried guns and they were felons.

And so we started this partnership and over time, we've been able to expand it and get others to join it. We've gotten more grant money. We've expanded into the area of gangs. We've brought in the Marshals and the great things they do with fugitive task forces and Operation Falcon and in Fugitive Safe Surrender. We brought in the FBI and the expertise that they have with large enterprise cases that transcend not only the United States but in some cases go international, and the resources they can bring through their Safe Streets. We brought in the DEA and their MET teams. The ATF developed their VCIT teams. And basically what we tried to do was take our limited resources that are limited because of all the other problems I just described that never used to exist, and we live in reality, we realize our resources are limited, and we try to pool them together and leverage them. And then we reach out to all of you in the 93 districts. And the thing I love about this is we say, take a look at your neighborhood, take a look at your districts, see where the real problem is, see where we can make the most impact with the dollars we have to spend and then see what clever, outside-the-box kinds of stuff you can come up with that will work and out of that, we've gotten some tremendous programs and great initiatives. And I would like to encourage you to do those kinds of things.

There was an initiative that a good friend of mine, a Marshal in Pete Elliott (phonetic) was out jogging one day and started thinking about their fugitive programs where they go out into these neighborhoods and risk their lives helping locals clear warrants and pull felons off their -- fugitives off the street. And he had this idea of setting up a makeshift courtroom in a church and offering fugitives an opportunity to voluntarily surrender.

And he met me for lunch and he laid out this whacked out idea. And I looked at him and said, what is wrong with you? Who's going to do this? People aren't going to do this. And the ACLU is going to sue and this is going to happen and that's going to happen.

But you know what? He pursued his idea and he had this Fugitive Safe Surrender. And they did it in Cleveland and they got hundreds of people. Nobody expected it. They went out and they did it in Phoenix and I think they got 1,400 people. They've now done it in 10 cities.

We did it in Nashville and I stood in that church and I talked to the people and it was amazing, not only to see how many fugitives turned themselves in, but the impact and the credibility that we had within that neighborhood. And the partnerships that the police were able to develop and expand upon in dealing with people in inner city neighborhoods.

During that process -- the church we had it at was called the Galilee Baptist Church, and that pastor told me a story. He started in that church 20 years ago. And he had a vision. And his vision was, he can't change the world, but he could change the 10 blocks around his church. It was the worst crime area in the city of Nashville at the time. And his vision was if he could clear out that neighborhood, if he could help make his neighborhood better, push the drug dealers out, push the prostitutes out, it was one of these open-air drug markets in the little road right behind the church, boarded up houses all over.

They came with a plan, they pestered the police, they pushed the guys out of their neighborhood, he got some HUD dollars and when they ran out he got -- the group that builds the houses -- thank you. Habitat -- just seeing if everybody is still with me, everybody is awake -- I knew that -- Habitat for Humanity. And you know what? They built 20 houses. They took down the 20 worst dilapidated houses and they put up new houses and today that's a different neighborhood.

And he said you know what people criticize him for? Because there's always critics? They criticize him because they say, well, that's fine, now you've done your little parish. All you've done is pushed them over the tracks to the next neighborhood. And he said, that's right, and that's Pastor Smith's problem. (Laughter.)

And he said, you know what? If Pastor Smith would do that, he would push them into Pastor Jones's neighborhood. And Pastor Jones -- but the point is, is that they pushed them out and then they brought something in in place of it that was lasting. It was like a nongovernment weed and seed. They got us to do the weed and they did the seed.

Those are the kinds of ideas we need to build on. You know, in Nashville, we wanted to re-up and re-ramp our PSN program. And so we called around and a lot of people talked to us about what they were doing in Memphis. And so we took a group down to Memphis and we looked at what they were doing and we loved the ideas and we're trying to incorporate those into Nashville now. I know some people from Michigan went down and did the same thing.

That's the beauty of this. There's like 93 incubators for ideas. Pete Elliott creates Fugitive Safe Surrender and now most of our districts are waving saying, can I get in on that? And we're looking at what each other are doing and trying to find ways to better utilize the resources we have. And that's what this is really about. That's what this conference is about. We're able to bring in people from High Point to show the High Point plan. We're able to bring in people. We're able to connect you at the bar last night having beers when you're not watching the Indians hit the game-winning home run in the tenth inning, which was great. You're talking about ideas that other districts are having and making connections where you can send a team down to actually look at what they're doing and see how it plays where the rubber hits the road.

And the other thing we can do, and that's what's so great about this this morning -- afternoon, we can -- we can actually have an awards ceremony where we pick out some of the innovative things, some of the hard work, and lift up for everybody to see some of the great things that are being done in these 93 incubators around the country.

And so I want to make sure though that as you understand that as we call people up here today to single out these particular programs for special attention, that it's a thank you to everything that every single person in this room is doing.

Now, I say this room. I do have to say one more thing. Robyn asked me to work this in; this seems like a good segue. There are some people, unfortunately, who are not in this room because this conference is so large, there are so many people doing this mission that some of them had to be pushed out into another room. And I feel bad about that. And I felt even worse when I heard that -- only the government can come up with this -- the people in the other room are the people that are actually working this week, the people that are speaking. So they asked the speakers to sit across the hall. But we want to let them know how important they are to this thing and how much we appreciate them being willing to step out in the outer room. But it's not just the people in this room, it's the people in this room, the next room, the people back in our districts that are working on these projects that can't be here because we can't bring everybody in.

But the point is, is we filled this room to capacity and we still don't have all the people that are a part of this. This is about partnership, this is about innovation, this is about leveraging, this is about us realizing the incredible opportunity we have to change the lives of ordinary people even as we have to do it at a time when our priorities are pulling us in eight different directions.

And so I want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for the way you're doing what you're doing to make a difference in peoples lives, the kind of people who are crying out in this newspaper. Their lives are being changed, they appreciate what you're doing. We appreciate the way you're doing it with such limited resources. But the creativity and the leveraging is what we want to honor today in this awards ceremony. So we thank all of you in this room and the other room and people back in the districts for all your great work.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

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