Born in 1957; son of a cleaning-company owner; married a Spanish professor, c. 2001; children: one son
Education: University of New Hampshire, BA (cum laude), 1979; Stanford University School of Law, JD, 1982.
Career
Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, U. S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, law clerk, c. 1981; U. S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, assistant U.S. attorney, 1984-88; U.S. Department of Justice, attorney, 1988-93; New York University, associate professor, c. 1988-93, and professor, 1996-; U.S. Treasury Department, assistant secretary for enforcement, 1993-94; U.S. Treasury Department, Treasury Undersecretary for enforcement, 1994-96; Interpol, Lyon, France, secretary-general, October 2000-.
Life's Work
Ronald K. Noble is the first American citizen ever to head Interpol, the prestigious international law-enforcement agency. A former Clinton Administration appointee in the Treasury Department, he authored the official report on what went wrong in the 1993 Waco, Texas, conflagration between U.S. federal law-enforcement personnel and a well-armed doomsday cult. For a time in the 1990s, Noble was the highest-ranking African-American law-enforcement official in the United States.
Noble was born in 1957 and grew up in Fort Dix, New Jersey. He grew up in a mixed-race household; his German-born mother had met his father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army, when he was stationed overseas. Back home, his father worked two jobs--one at the military base nearby, and another as the owner and principal employee of a janitorial services company. As a youngster, Noble sometimes accompanied his father to work on the latter shift. His father had high hopes for him, Noble recalled in an interview with the New York Times's Joyce Wadler. When they cleaned offices together, "my father would point at the degrees on the wall and say: 'Look. As soon as you have one of those, you will have someone like me working for you.'"
Dismayed by Job Offers
Noble and his brother attended local Roman Catholic schools. He went on to the University of New Hampshire, where he studied economics and business administration. After he graduated in 1979, he entered the Stanford University School of Law. Though he earned good grades and even served as the articles editor for the school's Law Review, job offers were scarce as he neared his 1982 graduation date. His father decided to take matters into his own hand, and went to the Philadelphia home of a prominent federal judge and respected civil-rights figure, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. The elder Noble asked Higginbotham to hire his son as a clerk--a type of internship undertaken by law-school students around the time of graduation--and the judge agreed. Noble said that his father had promised the federal judge that his son was "going to make your career," as Noble recalled in the interview with Wadler. The son was mortified when he learned what his father had done, but Higginbotham agreed to hire him
The months that he spent working for Higginbotham certainly changed the direction of Noble's career. As his clerkship neared an end, Noble planned to enter private practice. Higginbotham recommended otherwise, advising Noble to enter public service. "My dream was to be able to pay the bills," Noble recalled in the New York Times interview. "I left Stanford with the idea of making as much money as I could make. The judge kept telling me, 'Ron, you do not want that kind of life.' I said, 'Yes, I do!'"
In the end, Noble acquiesced and took a job in the U. S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was a federal prosecuting attorney, and he quickly made his name with a famous drug-ring bust that was known as the "Yuppie Conspiracy," as he explained to American Banker writer Robyn Meredith. The bust involved several University of Pennsylvania dental students who began selling cocaine as a way to finance their own drug use. It evolved into a $50 million cartel that operated in 13 states. "We ended up indicting and convicting a number of dentists and lawyers and stockbrokers and pilots," Noble told Meredith by the time the case went to court. "It was a very wealthy, upper-class group who made tremendous amounts of money." Noble also prosecuted one of the largest public-corruption cases in history during his years as a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia, and earned high marks from his mentor. As Higginbotham told Jet a number of years later, Noble proved "a whiz. He's the smartest lawyer I've ever had in my courtroom."
Became Top Cop in United States
In 1988, Noble took a post with the U.S. Department of Justice, and also began teaching at New York University Law School. In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as assistant Treasury Secretary. It made him the highest-ranking law-enforcement official at the Treasury Department. Within a year, he was made Undersecretary of the Treasury, a newly created position. This gave him supervision of several agencies, including the Secret Service, Customs, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). It also made him the highest-ranking African American in federal law enforcement.
President Clinton named Noble as the lead investigator of the disastrous BATF raid in Waco, Texas, that occurred in April of 1993. BATF agents had laid siege to a compound where a cult group known as the Branch Davidians lived. Noble had originally cautioned against storming it, but his advice was not heeded. His report on what went wrong cited several internal problems with the BATF and other law-enforcement agencies, and several resignations of Treasury Department officials followed.
Noble was an early advocate for investigating money-laundering trails in order to track down criminals, and headed a Financial Action Task Force within the Treasury Department to track down shadowy criminal groups via their bank transactions. He left the Treasury Department in 1996, returning to his teaching post at NYU. In 1999, Attorney General Janet Reno nominated him to head Interpol, an international agency dedicated to coordinating the law-enforcement efforts of different national agencies. He was officially elected secretary-general by its General Assembly and arrived on the job in the fall of 2000.
Headed Interpol
Interpol is an acronym for the "International Criminal Police Organization," a Lyon, France-based agency that dates back to 1923. Its original mission was to serve as a cooperative agency of police officials that would help track criminal rings that worked the casinos in Monte Carlo. In the years following World War II, its leadership had been dominated by French law-enforcement professionals. Noble was the first American to ever hold the post.
By the time Noble took over at Interpol, it had evolved into an international organization of some 181 member nations. Its internal mechanisms, however, were famously slow, and Noble believed that bureaucratic roadblocks kept it from reaching its full potential. He already had some experience with the ponderous bureaucracy for which Interpol had become somewhat infamous: back in 1998, he served on an executive committee for Interpol, where he authored a study that recommended its richer member-nations should pay added dues to offset the financial shortfalls when poorer countries could not meet their obligations. Some of this money would enable Interpol to provide the same advanced-technology tools used by countries like the United States to cash-strapped law enforcement agencies in other parts of the globe. The plan it was approved and implemented.
When he took over at Interpol in late 2000, Noble immediately began studying its remaining flaws and enacting changes. He recommended, for example, that the Interpol information clearinghouse become a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week office, instead of operating during standard business hours. He also instituted a practice whereby international alerts on suspected terrorists went out to law-enforcement personnel around the world within 24 hours. These new policies were scheduled to begin on September 17, 2001. Instead it began operating under the new plan in the hours immediately following the devastating September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon Building in Washington.
At the Forefront of Anti-Terrorism Battle
Four days after September 11, Noble wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times that outlined his goals as Interpol chief. "It's fine to talk about fighting terrorism, but the United States and other countries must invest more in law enforcement agencies outside their own countries," he wrote. "Investing in the world's police forces and Interpol is the only way to ensure that valuable intelligence can be gathered, analyzed, and shared internationally."
Noble also made Arabic one of the agency's official languages, along with English, French, and Spanish, and worked to rebut criticisms of Interpol. In 2002, Iraq and Libya belonged to the agency, and some critics argued that allowing rogue nations to participate was unconscionable. But Noble countered such talk by pointing out that it was an international cooperative agency, and the more members it had, the more effective it could be. He also noted that Libyan officials were the first to issue an Interpol red notice for Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden back in 1998. "If you're looking for dangerous people," he explained to Fast Company writer Chuck Salter, "you don't care whether it's your enemy or your friend who tells you, as long as you find out."
In 2003, Noble sounded a warning about fake consumer goods after an Interpol investigation linked them to shadowy political organizations such as Al Qaeda. He called the illegal trade in counterfeit designer wear such as shoes and purses "the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups," according to an International Herald Tribune article by David Johnston.
Thanks to his mother, German is one of the languages that Noble speaks fluently, which is crucial for an Interpol chief. In earlier interviews, he claimed that the 16-hour days he regularly put in at his job made having a steady personal relationship impossible, but after becoming Interpol head, he began dating the professor who had been assigned to improve his Spanish. They had become parents in 2002, by the time Salter interviewed him for Fast Company. He recalled the important advice his father gave him and his brother early in life. "My father used to tell us, 'You're going to meet people who are better off than you. You can't change that,'" he told the magazine. "'But you don't have to meet anybody who works harder than you.'" It's a lesson Noble lives out every day.
Awards
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton Award, 1996.
Further Reading
Books
World of Criminal Justice, Gale, 2002.
American Banker, November 18, 1993, p. 6; June 21, 1994, p. 2.
Bond Buyer, April 29, 1993, p. 3.
Fast Company, October 2002, p. 96.
International Herald Tribune, July 18, 2003, p. 1.
Jet, May 31, 1993, p. 8; August 1, 1994, p. 36; January 8, 1996, p. 7; July 26, 1999, p. 4.
New York Times, July 13, 1999; September 15, 2001, p. A23.
— Carol Brennan
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