Leo Crowley

Leo Thomas Crowley (August 15, 1889 – April 15, 1972) was a senior administrator for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the head of the Foreign Economic Administration. Previous to that he had served as chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and as Alien Property Custodian. Crowley was a significant administrator, troubleshooter, and political operative for Roosevelt from 1934 to 1945.

In 1943, Time magazine dubbed Crowley the "Nation's #1 Pinch Hitter," and one commentator called him FDR's "manager par excellence". Historians later discovered that late in the 1930s, senior Washington officials learned that Crowley had embezzled from his banks in Wisconsin in the 1920s and 1930s. This information was suppressed because of Crowley's political and administrative usefulness. Biographer Stuart Weiss wrote that Crowley's story is:

the darker story of the businessman as speculator and embezzler, whose fraud was covered up in Wisconsin and Washington....[in part it is] the morally complex and compelling story of Crowley as a bureaucrat and politician in Washington, administering multiple major agencies, often simultaneously;...but also deeply involved in conflicts of interest a later generation would find unacceptable and even incomprehensible.