NEW YORK — The first Hispanic to run the FBI’s largest field office almost never got there.
As a schoolteacher in the late 1980s, Diego Rodriguez applied to join the FBI, but when it called hoping to recruit a Spanish speaker as part of a diversity drive, his response was, “I’m really happy teaching. Thanks, but no thanks.”
Rodriguez eventually gave in and became an FBI agent mostly working drug cases. More than 25 years later, as assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, he’s overseeing about 2,000 agents and some of the nation’s most important terrorism, insider trading, cyber fraud and public corruption cases.
It’s a potentially high-profile role. But while law enforcement luminaries like Police Commissioner William Bratton and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara bask in the media spotlight, Rodriguez has remained largely in the shadows in his first six months on the job, reflecting a low-key approach that lets his agents’ work speak for itself.
“I genuinely care about their cases, but I’m not a micro-manager,” Rodriguez, 50, said in a recent interview in his lower Manhattan office. “They’ve got their own chain of command. The head of the office doesn’t need to be meddling in certain things.”
Rodriguez was born in Colombia and moved to New York City with his family as an infant. He spent his childhood in working-class Queens, where his father turned him in to a lifelong soccer fan by taking him to see the legendary Pele play for the New York Cosmos.
After graduating from St. John’s University and teaching middle school Spanish, he made his career switch and landed his first FBI assignment in a taskforce investigating money laundering by South American and Mexican drug rings. Over the years, he held various investigative and supervisory positions in Puerto Rico, Miami and Washington before being appointed in 2010 to head the New York office’s criminal division.
