Former RPD top dog now FBI leader

Assistant FBI director Janice Fedarcyk has been much in the news recently. As the first woman to head the New York City office, she has been involved this month in a huge computer intrusion investigation that involved National Aeronautics and Space Administration computers, a billion-dollar pension fraud case, insider trading charges against a Goldman Sachs board member, and a gun smuggling case against New York police officers. She is the subject of a profile in this month’s Vanity Fair magazine.

Fedarcyk is a former Reno Police Department officer. In Reno, her last name was Penegore. She is now married to retired FBI agent Mike Fedarcyk.

After she was appointed assistant FBI director and head of the New York City office on June 25, 2010, the New York Daily News published a profile of her that read in part, “The daughter of a Navy man, Fedarcyk, 52, joined the Reno, Nev., Police Department after college. She patrolled a beat; worked in the K-9 unit with her German Shepherd, Nick, named for the witty sleuth in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and headed the child abuse division.”

At the time of Fedarcyk’s appointment to take over the largest FBI field office, FBI director Robert Mueller said in a prepared statement, “Jan Fedarcyk brings both a strong national security and criminal investigative background from her current assignment as head of the Philadelphia Division and from her work at FBI Headquarters, where she managed terrorist financing investigations, served at the National Counterterrorism Center, and oversaw investigations of online exploitation of children.”

After joining the FBI, she coauthored with University of Nevada, Reno criminal justice professor Ken Peak a scholarly paper titled, “Police Chief Acquisitions: A Comparison of Internal and External Selections.” It was published in the American Journal of Police.