Freeh’s Partner in N.Y. Heroin Case Is Named FBI Deputy Chief

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has named David Binney, who worked with him on the Pizza Connection heroin-trafficking case, to become deputy director of the bureau.

Binney, 53, has been the assistant director in charge of the inspection division since May, 1992, and he “has excelled in complex assignments since becoming an FBI agent 24 years ago,” Freeh said in a statement issued Friday.

Freeh and Binney worked together on the Pizza Connection case in New York in which Sicilian Mafia members used pizza parlors as fronts for heroin trafficking. Sixteen of the 17 co-defendants in that case were convicted.

At the time the case was being developed, Freeh was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York City, heading the Organized Crime Task Force and the Pizza Connection prosecution. Binney was supervising an FBI organized crime squad working one aspect of the case, FBI spokesman Charles Mandigo said.

Binney, a 1964 West Point graduate with an undergraduate degree in engineering, earned a law degree from the University of Indiana Law School in 1976. He served in the Army from June, 1964, to December, 1969, including a 1966 tour of duty in Vietnam, and left with the rank of captain.

He joined the FBI in 1970 and served in Milwaukee, Indianapolis and FBI headquarters before he became a supervisor investigating organized crime in New York City.

Binney succeeds Floyd I. Clarke in the bureau’s No. 2 post. Clarke, who is retiring after 30 years of service, had been named to the position in 1989 by former FBI Director William S. Sessions.

Sessions was ousted last summer after an internal Justice Department report accused him of numerous ethical lapses.