By Tom Deignan

LIAM O’Grady is a child of the streets of Newark, New Jersey. But after attending Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania and then George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, the nation’s capital across the river beckoned as the place O’Grady would build a legal career.

Positioning himself so close to the Beltway, of course, meant that O’Grady would preside over a fair number of high profile, politically charged court cases.

Indeed, after ending up in the headlines again this week, you can actually look back at the recent career of the man who is now a magistrate judge for the Eastern District of Virginia and see that he’s been at the center of some of the more shocking court cases of the post-9/11 world.

Consider the ruling O’Grady issued just this past Monday. In recent weeks, most of New York City and America has been talking about the five year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, or the gruesome discovery of yet more human remains at Ground Zero, or even the toxic air that seems to be crippling many of the heroic rescue workers who responded that day.

But Judge O’Grady has been presiding over a case which revolves around the seemingly-forgotten anthrax mail attacks, which jarred New York City, Florida and the rest of the nation just a month or so after the 9/11 attacks. A total of five people were killed by the “weapons grade” anthrax which was mailed to numerous media outlets, and for a while had many Americans donning gloves to simply handle their daily mail.

To this day, no one has been prosecuted for the anthrax attacks.

One man who was labeled by the FBI as “a person of interest” in the anthrax case was Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a specialist in germ warfare who once worked for the Army.

As the anthrax investigation slowly progressed in 2001 and 2002, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote numerous columns quoting anonymous federal sources who more less implicated Hatfill as the anthrax attacker.

But Hatfill denied all the charges. He was never arrested and demanded to know the identity of Kristof’s anonymous sources. He sued The New York Times for defamation, citing Kristof’s columns.

Magistrate Judge O’Grady was given the case of Hatfill vs. The New York Times, which has been closely followed by media watchdogs, Washington insiders and also reminds us of the astonishing fact that the anthrax attacker -- whoever he or she is -- is still out there.

On Monday, O’Grady ordered the Times to reveal the identities of Kristof’s confidential sources.

“The court understands the need for a reporter to be able to credibly pledge confidentiality to his sources. Confidential sources have been an important part of journalism, which is presumably why Virginia recognizes a qualified reporter’s privilege in the first place,” the Irish American judge said in his ruling.

The Times is planning to appeal.

Last year, O’Grady also heard a case revolving around a plot to assassinate President George W. Bush. A June 2003 search of the residence of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali in Falls Church, Virginia turned up evidence that the Saudi man was interested in joining al-Qaeda and participating in terrorist operations.

During the case, Judge O’Grady was told by government prosecutors, "Abu Ali and co-conspirator No. 2 discussed two options for assassinating President Bush, an operation in which Abu Ali would get close enough to the president to shoot him on the street; and, an operation in which Ahmed Omar Abu Ali would detonate a car bomb."

All of this, of course, brings Judge O’Grady quite a ways from the streets of his hometown Newark, New Jersey, where the courts tend to deal with lower profile crimes that might seem straight out of an episode of The Sopranos.

But it’s worth noting that on that popular HBO crime series, one of the storefronts at which Tony and his crew are often seen is only a fictional Italian pork store. In real life, that storefront actually houses a Jersey Irish cultural group.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)