Profile: Hon. John F. Clark

Director, United States Marshals Service
Reprinted from 55 The Federal Lawyer (August 2008) 28

One of Director John Clark’s most treasured possessions hangs on the wall of his office within the building that houses the U.S. Marshals Service: an aerial photograph of his parents’ dairy farm in Chateaugay, N.Y. Less than an hour’s drive from Montreal, Canada, Chateaugay is a border town straddling the disparate cultures of Quebec and upstate New York. Like his brother Clarence, a recently retired member of the U.S. Park Police, John F. Clark left the family’s farm after graduating from high school to pursue a career in law enforcement. Even though he left the farm, however, farm life has never left him. He still gets up before dawn and tends to work long days (catching opportunities to fish when he can). He rarely takes a sick day. And no matter how tough the job gets—and a deputy U.S. marshal’s job can get pretty tough—it’s a walk in the park compared to picking rocks off a 20-acre cornfield, a job Clark found particularly grueling during his days on the dairy farm. His parents’ work ethic permits Clark—who exercises daily and is a crack shot who can still score 296 out of 300 on the firearms test—to hold his own with deputies who are decades younger.

Confirmed by the Senate in March 2006, Director Clark is the first director of the U.S. Marshals Service to rise through the ranks from deputy U.S. marshal. Director Clark had wanted to be a U.S. marshal ever since he heard a deputy marshal speak to his college class, but Clark’s law enforcement career began with stints with the U.S. Border Patrol and Capitol Police. The Marshals Service hired him over a payphone in the Senate Office Building, after Clark was pulled from a roll call by his Capitol Police sergeant to take the call. Since his first posting as a deputy marshal in San Francisco, where he slept on an air mattress in an efficiency apartment, Clark has logged more than 25 years in Marshals Ser-vice. He was the U.S. marshal for the Eastern District of Virginia when he was tapped for the position of director. His 25 years of operational experiences give Director Clark a unique insider’s view of the day-to-day operations of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Moreover, Director Clark is, in a very real sense, married to the Marshals Service. His wife Luci, whom he sometimes calls “the real director,” has been an employee of the Marshals Service for her entire life. They have been married for more than 20 years, after having been set up by mutual friends when Direc-tor Clark was on a 30-day assignment in the service headquarters in Virginia. She is, in some ways, more of a beltway insider than Director Clark is, and she is an important partner and sounding board for him as he fulfills his expanded duties as director. Despite the couple’s different schedules (he is a morning person, she is a night owl), they are devoted to each other, to the principles of the U.S. Marshals Service (justice, integrity, and service), and to their 10-year-old Shetland sheepdog, Princess, a deathbed bequest from her former owner, Director Clark’s father.

Director Clark identifies his parents as perhaps the most important influences in his life. He says that they instilled in him the virtues of hard work and honest living, faith in God and country, and the importance of maintaining good relationships with neighbors. Clark describes his parents as people who sacrificed their own wants without complaint in order to ensure that their four children received the best education and healthcare a dairy farmer’s income could allow. Although the director is too modest to say so himself, his co-workers that Clark’s internalization of his parents’ emphases on work and relationship building assisted his unprecedented rise through the ranks of the Marshals Service and help him negotiate the competing power structures of Washington’s bureaucratic jungle.

Dealing with official Washington—in addition to the sometimes conflicting jurisdictions and missions of the multitude of federal police agencies (there are no fewer than 65 federal law enforcement agencies that are members of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which named Director Clark “Di-rector of the Year” for 2007)—requires political skills that Director Clark has had to acquire on the job. Even though the director is appointed by the President, as is each of the 94 district U.S. marshals, the circumstances of Director Clark’s appointment suggest that politics weren’t all that important in his rise to the post. When he was being considered for the appointment as U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the district’s federal judges asked him whether he knew either of the state’s sitting senators, John Warner and George Allen. “I can’t say that I know either of them,” Clark replied. The judge laughed and said, “John, I don’t think you have a chance in hell of getting this job.” Clark got the job anyway. When he was summoned to the White House in May and June 2005 to be interviewed for a “senior position,” Clark wasn’t told that the post was that of director until almost the moment he was offered the job. To this day he does not know who recommended him for the position. When he called his wife Luci to tell her that he had been offered the job, she replied somewhat incredulously, “Are you sure that’s what they said?”

The U.S. Marshals Service has changed quite a bit in the last 25 years, particularly in its use of technology. Director Clark can still remember when technical surveillance consisted of “two guys with self-purchased equipment from Radio Shack.” But the recent changes have been dwarfed by the increased demands that have been placed on the Marshals Service since 9/11and the rise in threats against federal judges. The workload of the Marshals Service has increased dramatically, but the number of marshals has not grown. There are only 3,400 deputy U.S. marshals, and the service hires more personnel only infrequently. One of Director Clark’s top priorities is to increase both the staff and the budget of the U.S. Marshals Service.

The Marshals Service has a broad mandate; essentially, the service enforces the laws of the United States and is increasingly being called upon to act outside of the territorial United States. Each day, largely unheard and unnoticed, the Marshals Service carries out its mandate to apprehend fugitives (including more than 100,000unregistered sex offenders); to protect more than 5,200 judges plus the lawyers who appear in their courtrooms as well as federal court employees; to administer the witness protection program, which is responsible for the safety of more than 17,000 persons; and to ensure the care and custody of more than 56,000 federal detainees—all on a small budget with limited personnel.

One of the reasons that the U.S. Marshals Service has been able to function so effectively is its willingness to enter into partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies in targeted task force police operations. One example is the remarkably successful Operation Eagle Claw, a federal/state/local task force operation undertaken during Director Clark’s tenure in the Eastern District of Virginia, whose goal is to identify and arrest fugitives for whom there are warrants that were issued in Petersburg, Va. Task force operations proceed in three phases: (1) the homework phase, during which investigators conduct an in-depth analysis of the problem and determine a list of potential targets; (2) the planning phase, during which investigators prioritize the list and conduct full-scale background investigations; and (3) the implementation phase, during which investigators aggressively and publicly pursue the police operation that was planned previously.

Task force policing is as cost-effective as it is efficient; Operation Eagle Claw resulted in closing 345open warrants and making 106 for an aggregate cost of only $25,000—a mere $235 per arrest or $72 per warrant. The Marshals Service has repeated the taskforce approach on a national scale in the ongoing Operation FALCON, the first-ever national roundup of fugitives. The U.S. Marshals Service has traditionally been the lead agency for apprehending fugitives, and the service is increasingly called upon to assist in the apprehension of fugitives overseas. The service currently has foreign offices in Mexico City, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, and Director Clark hopes to open field offices for fugitive apprehension in Canada, the European Corridor, and the Far East. Last year, the Marshals Service secured the arrest of nearly 100,000federal, state, and local fugitives and concluded nearly800 international extraditions.

One of the real pleasures of Director Clark’s official duties is the opportunity to field questions from high school students, who invariably ask how reality compares with the portrayal of the Marshals Service in the movies. (The Marshals Service probably enjoys the most uniformly positive media treatment of any federal agency.) In Director Clark’s opinion, Tommy Lee Jones’ character in “The Fugitive” is the quintessential deputy U.S. marshal—resolute, dogged, tireless, and humane. These same qualities are central to the iconic deputy marshals played by John Wayne and Gary Cooper in the past. And, truth be told, these qualities are also the legacy of John and Louella Clark to their five children, one of whom is now the director of the U.S. Marshals Service.