Lou Bladel

Lou is an executive director in the Fraud Investigations & Dispute Services practice of Ernst & Young, LLP. He is the national coordinator for Insider Risk and Threat Management services, which assists clients in responding to, investigating and remediating insider threats, as well as developing and implementing comprehensive insider threat programs and services. Lou consults with U.S. 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 sectors on matters of economic espionage and insider threats.

Lou has more than 26 years of federal law enforcement experience serving in the U.S. Marshals Service, Naval Criminal Investigative Service and as a special agent of 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 in the New York and Washington, DC, metropolitan areas. 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 negotiations of an FBI employee.

As chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, he led the espionage investigations of General David Petraeus and Edward Snowden. In 2013, he successfully testified before the U.S. Sentencing Commission to enhance the criminal penalties for theft of propriety information, and managed the DuPont economic espionage investigation, which resulted in the FBI’s first-ever jury conviction for economic espionage. The case won the 2014 FBI Director’s Award for Counterintelligence Excellence. 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.