Earl E. Devaney, who began his career as a Secret Service agent who guarded President Richard M. Nixon and rose to become one of the United States government’s most aggressive and feared internal watchdogs, died on April 15 in Boca Raton, Florida. He was 74.
His son Michael said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications from a heart attack.
Friends and foes alike called Mr. Devaney the big man, and not just because he long retained the imposing weight he once gained as a college football player.
As an administrative entrepreneur, he helped build the Secret Service’s financial fraud division, gave real teeth to the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement capabilities, brought down a corrupt agency within the Department of the Interior as Inspector General, and succeeded the massive 2009 economic stimulus efforts virtually fraud-free.
Mr. Devaney had a flair for flashy business and congressional testimony that made headlines, not, he said, for their own benefit or to boost his career, but for their deterrent effect.
“You can have an inspector general lurking in the shadows,” Felicia Marcus, a fellow at Stanford University who worked with Mr. Devaney at the EPA, said in an interview. “He wasn’t lurking in the shadows.”
In his office at the Department of the Interior, he kept a crocodile head with a camera hidden inside, which he had used to film a department official entering into a bribe deal while on a fishing trip in the Louisiana bayou.
“If an assistant secretary comes in and asks about it, I tell that story and they get a little nervous,” he told DailyExpertNews in 2009.
When he arrived at the Ministry of the Interior in 1999, many of the people in the leadership had never met his predecessors, and there was no need to. in that role, make an active effort to suppress wrongdoing or bring transparency to government activities, two things Mr. Devaney liked to do.
“Ed was a standout because he recognized the full breadth of an inspector general’s responsibilities,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the impartial Project on Government Oversight, said in an interview.
His biggest case came to light during the George W. Bush administration, in 2008, when he released a series of reports of widespread misconduct at the Minerals Management Service, a division of the Department of the Interior that collected approximately $10 billion in royalties. on federal property mining.
The potential for corruption was enormous, and Mr. Devaney and his team showed that government officials in the service had manipulated contracts and received sports tickets and other gifts from industry officials while engaging in drug use and sex with oil company employees in the United States. what he called “a culture of ethical failure.”
Although the department attempted to reform the service, the failures identified by Mr Devaney were too great and it closed in 2011.
In another investigation, he accused J. Steven Griles, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, of corrupt practices related to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist; Mr. Griles denied the charges but was later convicted of lying to Congress about his ties to Mr. Abramoff and sentenced to prison.
Mr. Devaney’s most talked-about post was his last. Although he had promised his wife Judy that he would retire so they could move to Florida, in 2009 Vice President Joseph R. Biden asked him to act as an internal watchdog for President Barack Obama’s massive economic recovery attempt.
“I’ve been practicing saying no all weekend” to Mr. Biden, he told The Washington Post in 2011. “Something like ‘I’m really honoured’ or ‘Let me give you a few names you could consider instead of me.'”
But then Mr. Biden took him to the Oval Office, where President Obama asked the question.
“I hadn’t practiced saying no to a president,” he said.
Although he only stayed in the job for a few years, he was once again transformative. As head of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board—preferring its acronym, the RAT Board—he oversaw the implementation of Recovery.gov, where members of the public monitor the progress (or lack thereof) of government programs in their area, and he encouraged people inside and outside government to report abuse where they saw it.
“I want to make it possible for Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Ohio to see exactly how the money is being spent,” he told The Times.
His efforts paid off: there was virtually no evidence of fraud when he retired on December 31, 2011, which was widely acclaimed by members of both political parties.
Earl Edward Devaney was born on June 8, 1947, to John and Claire Devaney in Reading, Mass., a northern Boston suburb. His father had several small businesses. His mother was a model and actress.
He attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied government, played on the soccer team as a lineman, and graduated in 1970. Early on, he sensed the pull of a criminal justice career and spent summers as a police officer on Cape Cod. .
Together with his son, he is survived by his wife; another son, Matthew; and five grandchildren.
From college, Mr. Devaney went straight to Secret Service, where he worked on presidential details for both Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. It can be life-threatening work: At one point, he came under fire from a deranged woman who thought he was President Ford.
He later transitioned to the agency’s newly created white-collar crime division, where he distinguished himself as a highly effective agent working on a custom basis within complex operations such as the banking system.
mr. Devaney left the Secret Service in 1991 to join the EPA, where he bolstered the agency’s historically weak enforcement efforts.
And though he’d long traded his Secret Service agent’s gun for a desktop computer, he could still act decisively when needed.
Once in San Francisco, he and three EPA colleagues, including Ms. Marcus, walked up a hill after dinner. Mr. Devaney followed her.
“I felt a gust of wind on my neck, but I didn’t think much about it,” she recalls. “Then I turned and saw that someone had tried to take something from my bag – and that Ed had just as quickly grabbed the man and pushed it against a wall.”
“He had this blend of grace and strength that is remarkable,” she said.
