Louis Bladel
EY Managing Director, Assurance Services – Forensic & Integrity; former FBI Special Agent in Charge (NY Field Office) for Counterintelligence Division; former Section Chief of the Counterproliferation Center at FBI Headquarters
Lou is a managing director in the Forensic & Integrity Services practice. He is the Practice Leader for Intellectual Property Theft Services, which assists clients in responding to, investigating and remediating insider threat, intellectual property, trade secret theft and third party risk management. Lou and his team develop and implement comprehensive data integrity and security services. Lou consults with US federal law enforcement agency directors, government regulators and key executives of Fortune 100 companies, Fortune 500 C-suite officials and boards of directors from across industry on matters of economic espionage and insider threats.
Lou has over 26 years of federal law enforcement experience serving in the U.S. Marshals Service, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), retiring from the FBI in 2016. The majority of Lou’s law enforcement career involved leading and investigating counterintelligence matters.
Lou has held numerous leadership positions within the FBI, including Special Agent in Charge of the New York office of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division where he led the recent espionage/insider threat arrest and successful plea negotiation of an FBI employee. As Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, he led the espionage investigations of David Petraeus and Edward Snowden. He also led the production of The Company Man, an award-winning training film that educated private sector companies on the dangers of economic espionage. The film won an Emmy (2016), the CINE Golden Eagle Award (2014), and five gold and bronze Peer Awards.
In 2013, he successfully testified before the U.S. Sentencing Commission to enhance the criminal penalties for theft of proprietary information. He managed the DuPont economic espionage investigation, which resulted in the FBI’s first-ever jury trial conviction for economic espionage. The case won the 2014 FBI Director’s Award for Counterintelligence Excellence. He was featured on NBC Nightly News promoting awareness of the FBI’s economic espionage program. Lou also won the National Counterintelligence Executive Award for Community Excellence in Leadership for his role in the FBI operation that led to the arrest and deportation of three Russian Intelligence Service illegals.
Lou frequently speaks at high-profile public and private sector forums. He has briefed the White House staff, the U.S. Attorney General, and US intelligence community officials and provided expert testimony to Congress on espionage and intellectual property and trade secret theft.
