Arthur Meister has a fascinating resume: author, educator, consultant, business executive and crime fighter.
During his 24 years with the FBI, Meister helped bust up major racketeering operations; took down mobsters, gang members and crooked union officials; and tracked down killers and other violent criminals. He led management courses for field agents and police executives at the FBI Academy; managed the Organized Crime National Strategy for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit and several other major cities; and taught investigative operations at the International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest.
Meister entered law enforcement in 1968 as a trooper in the Connecticut State Police and later was promoted to detective. While with the State Police, he earned a B.S. degree in criminal justice from UNH in 1975.
He was recruited by the FBI and became a special agent in 1978. While assigned to the Newark, New Jersey, Field Division, he led a complex, five-year investigation that broke up a hugely lucrative wastepaper recycling racketeering operation and put a top-level organized crime figure and two of his cronies behind bars. Meister’s success in New Jersey – and, he says, the master’s degree in public administration that he received from UNH in 1981 – led to his promotion to supervisory special agent at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
While assigned to the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Field Office, he supervised an international organized crime undercover drug operation that resulted in multiple convictions of gangsters in both the United States and Italy. His unit also took down the entire top echelon of America’s second largest maritime union on racketeering charges.
The highlight of his career was his work in the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, where from 1995 to 1998 he was chief of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, a criminal investigative analysis service provided to police agencies worldwide. In 1998 until his retirement in early 2002, he served as chief of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a computerized, national behavioral-based crime analysis system that tracks serial murderers and rapists. For his leadership of ViCAP, Meister received a national Computerworld/Smithsonian Laureate Award, which recognizes individuals whose innovative use of technology produces significant benefits for society.
Today, Meister heads a consulting firm specializing in training managers to deal with problem employees and workplace violence as well as providing coaching, counseling and communications training. He also is busy writing a management book on the subject.
Posted Winter 2011
