David Leiting
Like many adult students, , ’79, says he “was kind of in a hurry to get on with life,” when he enrolled at Carthage after three years in the U.S. Army. Mr. Leiting considers his busy years at Carthage a turning point in his life. After he graduated, Mr. Leiting became a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His FBI experience and training opened the door to his present position as Eastern Hemisphere director of security for BP. “I really believe being a Carthage graduate helped me get into the Bureau,” Mr. Leiting says. “At least two of the board members who interviewed me knew of Carthage, and thought highly of it.” Mr. Leiting’s journey to his position at BP’s headquarters in London began with a wrestling scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where “I improved my wrestling skills dramatically, but I didn’t apply myself academically,” he says. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” After one year of college, Mr. Leiting enlisted in the Army. “I needed the three years in the Army to decide what I wanted to with my life,” he says now. He settled on the FBI as his goal, then went to the Bureau’s Kenosha office and talked to Burdena “Birdie” Pasenelli, who would become the highestranking female agent in FBI history. “She sat me down and told me not to major in criminal justice, but accounting,” he recalls. “She said, ‘that’s the best way to get in.’” At Carthage, Mr. Leiting was selected by the faculty as the
"I really believe being a Carthage graduate helped me get into the Bureau.”
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outstanding accounting major in his class, and graduated magna cum laude. He also won a College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin wrestling championship, and graduated in two years. He accomplished these things while married, holding down outside jobs, and taking 20 credits per term. Mr. Leiting spent seven years of his decade in the FBI participating in three long-term undercover investigations into organized crime and political corruption, which he estimates led to more than 200 convictions. “I’ve got a thousand stories, and some of them are even true,” he says with a chuckle. “It was a fantastic experience, really satisfying work. It was a dream to get into the Bureau, I had no regrets.” Mr. Leiting left the FBI to join Amoco, the Chicago-based oil company that BP acquired several years later. With Amoco, Mr. Leiting traveled to more than 60 countries, doing investigations and strengthening security for company employees and facilities. On Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Leiting was in New York, at BP’s annual global security meeting of its top 75-80 security managers worldwide. “Our current BP America CEO, Bob Malone, was 10 minutes into his talk, when the first plane hit,” he says. Minutes later, Mr. Leiting and his colleagues watched as terrorists flew a second jet into the World Trade Center. “Fortunately, we had three or four satellite phones in the office,” Mr. Leiting adds, allowing the security staff to communicate with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and BP’s global businesses throughout the crisis. Mr. Leiting's career bears a slight resemblance to an answer he gave in third grade when class members were asked what each wanted to do for a living. “I said I wanted to be a spy. The teacher said that was sweet, but that ‘you’ve got to pick something else.’ “I said, ‘Why? Somebody has to do that job.’”
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