by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Features, Student Stories
MBA students harnessed entrepreneurship to envision revitalization
A hub where pet owners can gather to meet neighbors. Urban agriculture using recycled water. Incubators for entrepreneurs and makers.
These were just a few of the projects that MBA students, led by Assistant Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship James Bort, proposed for a South Side community this winter quarter as part of DePaul’s partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority.
Writ large, the partnership harnesses entrepreneurship to drive economic growth on the South Side in conjunction with the agency’s historic Red Line Extension.
Students’ project proposals are the first step towards that larger goal. They demonstrate how entrepreneurs can capitalize on this massive investment in infrastructure, setting off a cycle of revitalization. To a much-needed infrastructure project, these projects bring entrepreneurial imagination.
“Entrepreneurship is fundamentally an imagined reality,” said Bort. “It’s about storytelling. It’s about your ability to be optimistic and empathetic.”
In collaboration with the CTA, focusing on a community with promise
The class focused their efforts on a once-booming stretch of South Michigan Avenue in Roseland.
CTA Director of Diversity Programs JuanPablo Prieto explained the factors that led to that decision.
“For every dollar we invest in transit, we get $4 in economic return,” he said. “We want the communities where we’re making these investments to benefit from that return.”
The CTA commissioned a transit-supported development study on the area, engaging extensively with community members. Students delved into that research.
With Prieto’s help, they also heard directly from community stakeholders. The head of the Chamber of Commerce came to speak. So did the local alderman’s chief of staff.
Stakeholder interviews ensured that students’ projects were grounded in the needs of the community.
“We moved from studying the history of Roseland to understanding who’s there today and what they need,” Bort said. “Only then did we move into ideation.”
Informed by stakeholders, projects focus on empowering local entrepreneurs
Stefanie Slager, center, at the class’ poster presentation
On March 7, students shared their visions at a packed poster presentation. Faculty, staff, and students attended. So did CTA officials and community stakeholders.
“We were blown away by the thought, the intentionality, and the care that went into the listening sessions with the stakeholders,” said Prieto. “Each project had some element of what the stakeholders brought to the table.”
MBA student Stefanie Slager’s team shared a plan for a “living lab” for new entrepreneurs. There, they hoped, local founders and makers could launch businesses that would attract visitors to the neighborhood – especially in culinary arts, entertainment, fashion, and business innovation.
A box of fresh donuts sat on a table next to Slager. She’d picked them up that morning from Old Fashioned Donuts, an iconic 50-year-old, family-owned shop in Roseland: an example of the community’s existing strength and potential.
“When I went in on the day of the presentation, you could tell that everyone kind of knows each other,” Slager said. “How blessed are we to work with this community and hopefully make a difference? It is our goal for Roseland to again become the jewel of the South Side.”
A few groups over, MBA student Keiph Oliver and his team presented their plan. Like Slager’s group, they envisioned an entrepreneurial ecosystem – one that would equip residents with tools and resources to realize their own visions for the community.
“We want to create programs that bring businesses into high schools,” creating mentorships and job opportunities, explained Oliver. Exposing youth to a wide range of career paths was a priority.
“Exposure affects what someone believes they could be,” he said. “They don’t know what skills they already have. They don’t know how those skills could transfer.”
Looking ahead to the next phase of the DePaul-CTA partnership
Dean of the Driehaus College of Business Sulin Ba converses with CTA representatives at the March 7 poster presentation
In future phases of the DePaul-CTA collaboration, some students will partner directly with local businesses. Others will pick up where Bort’s winter quarter class left off, bringing select projects one step closer to reality.
For Bort, the projects attest to the vital role entrepreneurship plays in community renewal.
“Entrepreneurship is one of the most important elements for a community to succeed,” Bort said. “You need entrepreneurs working outside of the box, or working with resource constraints, figuring out how to make it happen.”
And, he added, you need initial investments in infrastructure to give those entrepreneurs a place to start.
“Without infrastructure, you really don’t have anything,” Bort added. “People have been fighting for this Red Line Extension for 50 years. What an exciting time to have been here for it.”
Prieto echoed Bort’s sentiments.
“I want to reiterate CTA’s commitment to this project,” he said. “This was a promise that was made more than 50 years ago to this community. We are committed to delivering on that promise. And we are excited to go down this path with the community as we not only build the extension but support the development that will come with it.”
For students, a lesson in the power of place and purpose
Another lesson of the project? The power of place, in all its specificity: whether that place is Chicago, Roseland, or DePaul.
Oliver is a graduate of DePaul’s film program who plans, empowered by his DePaul MBA, to one day launch his own production company.
“A lot of what I think about as a filmmaker is Hollywood,” he said. “The entertainment industry found a city and set up shop. It created this entire infrastructure that, for a long time, had no competition.
“How do we create an infrastructure like that for Chicago? What does that look like? In my lifetime, can I not only create a company, but can I contribute to generating a higher standard and a better business infrastructure? One that will bring more jobs and allow people to stay here?”
From Bort’s perspective, the collaboration is uniquely suited to DePaul.
“We have this Vincentian mission. When we see an opportunity to help, we jump in. That’s our default,” Bort said. “How does a DePaul grad stand out? Things like this, maybe. There are pro-social elements; there are human-centered design elements, empathy elements. It’s really tangible. It’s hands-in-the-dirt. And you’re working together to figure it out.”
by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Features, Student Stories
Capstone class “challenges the status quo” of learning
When the co-directors of DePaul’s M.S. in Business Analytics program, Khadija Ali Vakeel and Sina Ansari, embarked on rethinking the program’s capstone last year, they knew they wanted it to center on a collaboration with real-world companies.
This approach promised to set students up for success in industry. But it also posed challenges. Real-world datasets are often messy. Clear answers aren’t guaranteed. Distilling insights from data is as much art as it is science, demanding storytelling skills as well as analytical savvy.
In a word, the setup for the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone “challenges the status quo” of how most classes are taught, according to Vakeel.
“Students lead their own projects,” she said. “Students pose their own questions and find their own answers, supported by the instructor and industry partners. They are discovering things. It pushes them to think about their own creativity and storytelling as well as analysis — all in a very compact time of 10 weeks.”
Students offer companies a fresh perspective
Vakeel and Ansari launched the new, hands-on version of the capstone project in spring 2024. That year, with the help of a third-party mediator, Altheon AI, the program collaborated with Skyline Design and Valqari.
In fall 2024, the program began collaborating with Reyes Holdings, a food and beverage distributor that is the sixth largest privately held company by revenue in the U.S. according to a list compiled by Forbes. That collaboration has continued ever since.
Reyes has a vast logistics network with a trove of data to match. Powered by AI, cameras in truck cabs collect virtually every kind of data imaginable. Are drivers eating or texting while they drive? Are they leaving an adequate stopping distance?
Most of all, Reyes wanted to know, how effective were its coaching programs? What could it do to make its operations safer — and bring down costs in the process?
The company had in-house experts to answer those questions. But it also needed a fresh perspective.
That’s where DePaul students came in.
“The students have so much energy,” said Vakeel. “They think outside the box. When employees of the company are looking at the same data day in and day out, they might not be able to see what a fresh perspective from students can bring in.”
The power of data — from unearthing hidden stories to driving strategy
The winning team poses with faculty and corporate partners from Reyes Holdings.
The brief for the project was intentionally open-ended. Student groups could choose which variables to look at, how to analyze them, and how to put them in context.
In capstone instructor Nidhal Bouazizi’s words, the project offered an invitation to “get a little messy with the data.”
“We were just given this dataset and the objective to enhance driver safety. There were no other real guidelines,” said Nithya Abraham, one of the students in Bouazizi’s latest winter quarter class. “That wasn’t because of our professor; that was the nature of the project. You have to play with the dataset and figure things out on your own.”
For Abraham’s class, that dataset was an intimidating file spanning over 100 columns and nearly 300,000 rows. Ongoing guidance from Bouazizi helped the student teams refine their approach. So did representatives from Reyes Holdings, who worked closely with the class throughout the term.
Some teams analyzed how factors like time and location affected risky behaviors. Others, including Abraham’s, looked at the firm’s coaching programs, comparing their effectiveness across different subsidiaries around the country.
Often, the hardest part wasn’t sifting through data fields or crafting complicated predictive models. It was figuring out how to chart a course through the data that could lead to an actionable recommendation.
In that choice lay a key lesson of the capstone project: Data is only as useful as the recommendations distilled from it.
“We could have gone and talked about a thousand things, but we stuck to focusing on preventing near-collision events to align with the cost-saving objective,” said student Alyssa Kozal. “We wanted to make a strong recommendation. And I think that made our presentation strong too.”
Or, as Bouazizi put it: “recommendations are how you monetize the data.” Recommendations — and the narratives that connect recommendations directly to the data.
Ultimately, the story of the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone project isn’t merely about students’ considerable technical expertise, or even their creativity and drive in applying it to real-world scenarios. It’s about the power of connecting statistics to strategy — and about what happens when students get the chance to think like a leader.
Kozal and her teammates, Malika Diwakar and Srushti Summanwar, were among a select few teams who got the chance to present their findings directly to executives from Reyes Holdings.
“It was important to us to have a storyline,” said Diwakar. “Who are we? What was our objective in this process? We really focused” — inspired by guidance from Bouazizi, she added — “on explaining our entire thought process, beginning to end.”
That’s part of what the capstone class gives students, said Vakeel: the ability to tell stories not just about the data, but about the process of sifting through it. The ability, in that way, to connect a company’s operations on the ground now to its strategy moving forward.
“I’m not someone who can sit at a screen for eight hours coding,” said Abraham. “What I do enjoy is looking at datasets, drawing insights from them, and making recommendations based on those insights. The capstone solidified that this is what I like doing. This is where I want to build my career.”
For students and companies alike, the capstone opens up new possibilities
Business analytics is a growing field. Bouazizi and Vakeel cite a number of students who leveraged their capstone experience to secure internships. One of Bouazizi’s students even landed a full-time role working for a manufacturer of AI-equipped cameras like the ones Reyes uses.
“This hands-on experience puts our students at a huge competitive advantage,” said Bouazizi. “We’re not providing you with a case study somebody wrote. This is the real deal.”
This spring, the program will partner with LabelMaster in addition to Reyes. That will give students the opportunity to pick a project that aligns with their career goals. It will also, Vakeel stressed, be just as beneficial for industry partners as it is for students.
“I’d say that this is a call to action to Chicago-based companies who want to partner with us,” said Vakeel. “We are open to such strategic partnerships, and we would welcome them in the future.”
“The responsibility involved in these projects is very high,” she added. “But the students have made us proud. It is a win-win situation—for DePaul, for our students, and for the companies.”
by Sulin Ba | Nov 23, 2024 | College News, Features, Notes from the Dean, Student Stories
A Message from Dean Sulin Ba
Dear Driehaus alumni, supporters, and community members:
Welcome to the fall 2024 issue of Business Exchange. Read on to learn about how our faculty are advancing knowledge, how our students are building careers, and perhaps most importantly, how our alumni are forging change in their fields.
Driehaus Dean Sulin Ba, at left, serves donuts to students to welcome in the fall quarter.
The latest from the college
First, though, a few pieces of good news.
For the second year in a row, Driehaus was ranked a top school for entrepreneurship by the Princeton Review! Driehaus was ranked #12 among undergraduate programs and #15 among graduate programs. The rankings testify to the vibrant entrepreneurial community we’ve built in Chicago and around the world and to the entrepreneurial spirit of Driehaus grads.
You can read more about the news here.
I am proud and grateful to share that, thanks to a generous $2.6 million gift from Dr. Curtis and Mrs. Gina Crawford, DePaul is launching a Business Technology Leadership Institute. Housed right here in the Driehaus College of Business, the institute will facilitate collaboration with technology experts in DePaul’s Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media.
Dr. Curtis J. and Mrs. Gina Crawford (Photos courtesy of the Crawford Family)
Like so many of our faculty, students, and alumni, the Crawfords recognize that cutting-edge technologies have the potential to transform how business gets done. Indeed, much of that potential is already being actualized.
Their gift will empower our students to drive this change. More importantly, it will empower our students to drive this change in a meaningful way, informed equally by the subject-matter expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and commitment to social good that already make Driehaus distinctive.
You can read more about the initiatives this gift will fund here. My gratitude goes out to the Crawfords for their generosity — and to the faculty, students, staff, and alumni who are already doing exceptional work in this space.
Driehaus is already driving change at the intersection of business and technology. Our Halperin Emerging Companies Fund recently invested $100,000 in Orgaimi, an AI tech firm specializing in data science models and predictive analytics.
In this issue
In this issue of the Business Exchange, you’ll read about how we’re working to prepare students for meaningful careers at the forefront of change. Students at the Northern Trust competition got the chance to delve into timely, real-world issues with guidance from industry experts. Opportunities like this don’t just set up our students for jobs after graduation. They set up our students for meaningful career trajectories, which will surely include jobs we can’t yet envision.
Read more about the case competition here.
Our faculty are also driving change by advancing our understanding of real-world issues. Read on to hear insights into how brands should and shouldn’t intervene in hot-button political issues and learn about the widespread, damaging phenomenon of weight-based mistreatment in the workplace.
Learn about pioneering research into weight-based mistreatment in the workplace.
Hear the surprising results of a study that examined how to approach discussing controversial political issues.
Underpinning so much of this work — as I know it underpins so much of your work — is the entrepreneurial spirit. The two alumni profiled in this issue, Triple Demon Dana Alkhouri and the late, prolific entrepreneur John Goode, embody that spirit.
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John Goode, Sr.
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Dana Alkhouri
Read the story of John Goode’s remarkable life and legacy here.
Hear from Dana Alkhouri about making a career pivot and centering women’s stories.
In closing
Many of us are preparing to spend the holiday season with friends and loved ones: with members of the communities that make us strong. Although there are many challenges ahead, for Driehaus College, for DePaul, and for the larger world we live in, I find comfort in returning to what makes Driehaus what it is: our alumni and our students. Your passion — not just for innovating or forging your own path, but for taking others with you along the journey — are making a difference.
Sincerely,
Sulin Ba, PhD
Dean, Driehaus College of Business
by Meredith Carroll | Nov 22, 2024 | Features, Student Stories
The foreign currency exchange market is endlessly complex and constantly shifting. For the institutions that trade on it, being able to do so seamlessly — and in a way that maximizes profits — is paramount.
DePaul students dived headfirst into the complexities of the foreign exchange market (also known as Forex) at the inaugural Northern Trust case competition on October 17 and 18.
Co-organized by Driehaus’ BETA Hub and the School of Computing and sponsored by Northern Trust, the competition charged teams of students (who could compete on a business or technology track) with improving a hypothetical bank’s process for Forex, including cryptocurrency. With guidance from Northern Trust professionals, students had just over 24 hours to devise a workable solution — and sell it to a panel of experienced judges.
Preparation, delegation, details — and trust
For the four Driehaus students who won the business track, the victory was a testament to the importance of preparation, delegation, details, and trust.
“I think DePaul did a great job preparing us,” said team member Diego Villaseñor. “What really helped us was knowing how to do due diligence, how to do your homework, and how to ask the right people the right questions.”
Diego, his brothers Fabian and Maximos, and their teammate Nick Lopez came in with a wide array of strengths. All seniors, their majors span accounting, marketing, management, and finance.
“The last thing you want is to be stressed about your other team members,” said Lopez. “I don’t think there was a single moment where that happened. We were able to divide and conquer. I took over the cryptocurrency side, and I knew my part forward and backward. We knew that we could trust each other with what we were assigned.”
The team had been working on building trust since long before the competition — or even their time at DePaul. The three Villaseñor brothers are triplets; Lopez is a longtime friend who grew up down the street in Orland Park, a southwest suburb of Chicago.
The group found a room where they could focus. They brought in a whiteboard to jot down ideas. Diego, the group’s finance expert, brought in a second monitor. Feedback from the judges helped them quickly to home in on the main questions:
“There are a lot of buzzwords when you talk about crypto in particular,” said Maximos. “You can come up with a lot of ideas. But how are you going to do them? What are the legal parameters? Those are the common questions teams kept getting asked by judges.”
On selling your idea
Once the team had the framework of a solution in place, they faced a second hurdle: How to sell their solution to a panel of judges in just under 10 minutes? And how to ensure their solution would be memorable?
Fabian’s experience in sales helped them arrive at a solution. They would anchor their presentation around Carmen: a fictitious pension fund manager who needed her bank to be able to make trades on foreign assets.
“It’s so important to make the information tangible,” said Fabian. “You can have great information. But if customers don’t understand it, what use is it?”
“With the Carmen story, we were able to talk about a particular client and specific issues she might have,” echoed Maximos. “It really made our presentation come full circle.”
Equally important was being ready to embrace the unexpected:
“During the Q&A portion,” said Diego, “it was so important to defend your answers, to make sure the judges were able to understand. We had to get comfortable with being asked questions on the spot.”
Connections, careers, and where to go from here
Reflecting on the experience as a capstone of sorts for their time at DePaul, the team returned to the value of making connections — to one another, to professionals, and to their careers.
“I think a lot of times, students are nervous about doing a case competition – or to network with people there,” said Lopez. “One of the mentors we spoke with was the Senior Vice President of FX Technology and Product Development for Northern Trust. He’s a very successful individual – but at the end of the day, we’re all people. I think a lot of the success we had was connecting with people on a personal level.”
All four teammates see direct connections between their experiences at Driehaus, in the case competition, and where they’re going next.
Maximos will be starting a full-time role in HR at Plante Moran, where he’s been working part-time while he finishes up his studies.
“A lot of what I work on relates back to this case study,” he said. “There’s a lot of communication. You need to be able to have trust, and to be able give and receive constructive feedback.”
Fabian will continue pursuing his passion for tech sales in a role at Salesforce. This work, he hopes, will allow him to continue helping fellow Blue Demons advance their careers.
Diego is choosing among competing offers in consulting. It’s an industry, he said, that speaks to his passion for project management and learning about new, complicated topics quickly — both skills he got to hone at the case competition.
Lopez, who is graduating in June, is preparing to sit for his CPA exam. After graduation, he has an offer lined up with Apercen Partners, a boutique tax consulting firm for high net-worth individuals: the kind of setting where he may well be able to implement what he’s learned from his deep dive into Forex and cryptocurrency.
When the team looks back on their time at DePaul, they think of opportunities like this case competition. Over time, the team said, such opportunities can accumulate into invaluable experience.
“All four of us are first-generation college students. That, and coming from a Latino background, really lit a fire under us to make the most out of our time here,” said Maximos. “I think case competitions like this really help you build those connections and get experience. Win or lose, you’re still going to get something – and it’s those connections with those people.”
by Meredith Carroll | Jun 24, 2024 | Alumni Profiles, Features
Paula Price (BUS ’82) shares her insights from an extraordinary career as a leader
By Meredith Carroll
Look at Paula Price’s (BUS ’82) resume, and it could be tempting to split it in two.
There’s her leadership experience, as extensive as it is varied. There’s her tenure as CFO for multiple Fortune 500 companies; her years of teaching for Harvard Business School; and her current role as an independent board director for four major, publicly traded companies.
And then there’s the part of her career that started right here at DePaul. The part where she mastered accountancy, the “language of business.” The part she spent on the ground, immersed in the many small but critical details that keep businesses running.
It is easy to imagine these two phases as diametrically opposed: first the view from the ground, and then the view from 30,000 feet. First the microscope, and then the panoramic lens.
Diametrically opposed, that is, until you hear Price tell her story.
A Tale of Dedication to Curiosity and Craft
Photos of Price on stage in conversation with Sulin Ba, Dean of the Driehaus College of Business, on April 22 (Photo credit | Working Anchor)
On April 22, Paula Price returned to DePaul to share insights from her career. She was the first speaker in the college’s Executive Speaker Series: a series, established with a gift from Cory Gunderson (BUS ’91) designed to help DePaul students envision and embark on their own paths to success.
Sitting across a small stage from Dean Sulin Ba, Price speaks in the measured tone of an experienced leader. She chooses each word with care and clarity. She is passionate about taking the time to get it right — whether “it” is a major decision in a corporate boardroom, or a visit to her alma mater.
What shines through above all else, though, is Price’s commitment to curiosity.
She lights up when talking about her early career. You can see the student in her; the young DePaul graduate, eager to master a notoriously challenging discipline.
“I spent the first several years of my career in public accounting really honing my skills and honing my craft,” she recalls. After that came a tenure in industry, when she began working with senior executives.
“What they wanted to know,” she says, “was: ‘is this a good business idea? Does this create value for our shareholders? Does this idea have a good return?’ It became very evident to me that accounting should do more than talk about the past. It should illuminate the path forward.”
It is the first of many moments of clarity – in the way Price speaks about the world of business, in the way she charted her own course through it. That fundamental insight led her to the University of Chicago, where she earned her MBA in finance and strategy. She became obsessed with putting her insight into action.
“How do you create financial models for looking at new product lines? For looking at acquisitions? For looking at research and development projects?” she remembers asking herself. “I just began building all these models. People knew that I was modeling these things. And they were asking me to work with them. They were asking me to lend my models to them.”
“I kind of thought,” she adds with a smile, “I could build a financial model for anything.”
From left to right: Malik Murray (BUS ’96, MBA ’04), Dean Sulin Ba, Laura Kohl (MBA ’94), Paula Price (BUS ’82) and Cory Gunderson (BUS ’91). Murray, Kohl and Gunderson are all members of the Driehaus Business Advisory Council. (Photo credit | Working Anchor)
Price’s curiosity, and the keen insights it generated, propelled her to the C-suite.
“Even as a CFO, the idea of fusing accounting, finance and strategy together was essential,” she says. “It was essential to telling the story of our business, to telling the story of our strategies and how they created value. To telling the story of what they would do in the future.”
There’s such clarity to the way she tells her story that it can be hard to imagine her path as anything other than foreordained. Hard to remember, too, that her time as a top leader spanned multiple major financial crises.
When Price looks back on moments of turmoil, it’s her dual perspective she returns to. Her ability to see the big picture without losing sight of the small but crucial details. To keep her eyes on the horizon without losing sight of the world around her.
“The biggest role of the CFO is to create space for innovation,” she says, when asked about difficult decisions she has faced. “And economic downturns often coincide with the greatest need to invest in innovation. That leads to tough decisions.
“What’s hard,” she adds, “is that at the end of those kinds of decisions are people.”
The People Factor
And that’s what Price returns to, what she never loses sight of in telling her story: people.
During her visit, she is asked about her seemingly inexhaustible career: the way her resume encompasses seven top leadership positions at major, publicly traded companies. That’s not to speak of her time teaching the next generation of leaders at Harvard Business School, or her service to nonprofits and her community.
It was all simpler, she says, than it might look from the outside.
“For every major move in my career,” Price says, “I can point to a relationship that is based on trust. Trust in my work. Trust in my abilities. Trust in my integrity. These relationships – they lead places. Connections lead places. Every person. Every change. Whether it’s moving to London. Moving back to the U.S. Moving into teaching. Moving out of teaching. Pivoting back into corporate. Pivoting onto boards. I can point to a person. For each move, I can point to a person.”
“You can’t be my friend overnight,” she quips, later, when Dean Ba points out that many of her friendships have lasted decades. In fact, some of them have lasted since high school. Two of her friends from her days at what was then called Jones Commercial High School sit in the front row, laughing. All night, they’ve been cheering her on.
Price and Dean Sulin Ba pose with two of Price’s close friends, both of whom attended DePaul alongside her: Charlena Griggs (far left) and Aaron Tolbert (BUS ’82, far right)
(Photo credit | Working Anchor)
Price sums up her advice to the students and young alumni in the audience by reflecting on her own career and the principles that have guided it:
“I have four pieces of advice. The first is: to find your towering strength. That is, the thing that distinguishes you from the next person. And, when you find it? Own it, hone it, and leverage it.
“The second, third, and fourth, is to: Build great relationships. Build great relationships. Build great relationships.”
by Meredith Carroll | Jun 24, 2024 | Alumni Profiles, Features
The retired FBI agent, corporate executive, author and philanthropist reflects on the educations he received — in school and outside of it
By Meredith Carroll
Millie Cronin and Sean McWeeney | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
Now retired, Sean McWeeney (BUS ’61) lives a quiet life in Reston, Virginia, with his wife, Millie Cronin. They are both widowers; in fact, they met through Cronin’s first husband, a coworker of McWeeney’s. They volunteer for their local parish. They spend time with their family. They support causes close to their hearts, including DePaul. Just this year, McWeeney established the McWeeney Family Scholarship Fund to help under-resourced students attend DePaul.
McWeeney’s life up to this point was anything but quiet. He served for decades in the FBI, where he played a central role in the capture of notorious Mob boss Carlo Gambino. He rose through the ranks to become the longest-serving section chief of the Organized Crimes division. After his retirement, he launched Corporate Risk International, a global security firm specializing in kidnapping and extortion cases. It’s a career so action-packed that, with the encouragement of his family and friends, he wrote a book about it, entitled “Up by the Bootstraps.”
Like many success stories, McWeeney’s life attests to the ever-shifting balance between luck and hard work. It’s a story about being in the right place at the right time, but it’s also about having the right skills to rise to the moment. It’s a story about education, broadly defined: the kind of education you get from the people and environments around you. The kind of education you make out of what you are given.
McWeeney’s education would ultimately take him around the world. But it began right here in Chicago.
A Chicago Childhood
It has been decades since McWeeney lived in Chicago – a lifetime, even. But his roots are still evident. He speaks with a faint Chicago accent. He talks about himself with a distinctively Chicagoan strain of understatement: humble yet direct; self-effacing yet also, justifiably, proud.
McWeeney was born in 1938 to two Irish immigrants. Among the kids in his West Side neighborhood, he can’t recall knowing anyone whose parents were born in the U.S. Being in that environment at that time was an education – only McWeeney didn’t know it yet.
“I was a scrappy kid,” he recalls. “I had an unusual name for that time, and they made fun of me for it.”
It was easy to fall into trouble.
“A lot of people I grew up with became Mafia,” McWeeney says. “We had one person we knew quite well whose brother was killed by the Mafia.”
It was an environment that offered up two ways to navigate the world.
“You either win one way, the good way,” McWeeney recalls, “or you win the bad way. And I happened to be lucky in who I turned out to be. Going to a school like DePaul certainly helped – and so did having good parents. I was lucky in that regard.”
The West Side gave McWeeney one kind of education. In school, he received another.
For high school, he earned a four-year scholarship to St. Ignatius College Prep. It promised to be a pivotal moment for McWeeney. But it lasted just two weeks.
McWeeney was kicked out after a fight with a boy who made fun of his name. He transferred to St. Mel’s, another Catholic school.
“St. Mel’s identified me as a bit of a thug,” he says. “They assumed that ‘this guy isn’t going to college. This guy won’t go much further because he’s a scrapper.’ That’s part of being from the West Side, I guess.
“Anyway,” McWeeney adds, with his trademark understatement, “I outdid their expectations.”
From DePaul to the FBI
Outdoing those expectations began in earnest when McWeeney enrolled in the College of Commerce at DePaul University.
At DePaul, McWeeney found his place.
Despite working a grueling overnight shift at the railroad switchyard off 35th and Pulaski, he was active in sports and in his fraternity. In his senior year, he was elected class president.
He also met his first wife at DePaul: the late Joan Hennessy, a fellow student. They were set up on a blind date. They would travel the world together, raise a family, and launch Corporate Risk International from their kitchen table.
When McWeeney looks back on his time at DePaul, it’s his good fortune that he stresses. The good fortune to have met Hennessy; the good fortune to receive an education that allowed his world to expand, equipping him with tools he’d need to earn his MBA and launch a second career as a successful entrepreneur. Good fortune — and the commitment to taking advantage of it.
McWeeney, at right, escorts Carlo Gambino into the courthouse for his hearing. The photograph would be widely reproduced, leading McWeeney to receive media enquiries up until today. | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
From DePaul, McWeeney ventured out into the world. He joined the Navy as an officer candidate. He moved to Rhode Island, where he earned his MBA.
The MBA allowed him to stand out when he applied for his dream job as an agent at the FBI.
From day one, working in the FBI was its own kind of education. He lived in cities in distant corners of the U.S. He learned all he could – from the culture, and from agents who were stationed in these posts as discipline.
“The punished agents knew how to get the job done,” he writes in his memoir. They were also repentant, “eager to share their story and what they learned from it.”
In the summer of 1969, McWeeney and his family landed in New York, where he was eventually assigned to the Gambino Squad.
Thanks to his upbringing, he was precisely the right man for the job.
“There were a lot of agents, believe me, who were a little leery of talking to the Mafia,” he recalls. “But when you grow up where I did, you just kind of learn to talk to them. I used to go right up to them – let them know who I was and what I wanted to know.”
He approached his work as a plain dealer: collected, straightforward, respectful. In McWeeney’s hands, even the arrest of Gambino was understated.
Gambino’s wife and children were with him, McWeeney recalls, when McWeeney and his agents pulled him over near his home in Brooklyn.
“He seemed surprised,” McWeeney writes, “but consistent with his typical demeanor, he remained calm and gave us no trouble during the arrest.”
The Capstone of a Remarkable Career
The Gambino arrest, like McWeeney’s years at DePaul, was a turning point in a much longer story. From there, he would go on to senior leadership positions in the Bureau. He would found a successful, global company.
McWeeney’s memoir, Up by the Bootstraps, details his life and extraordinary career. | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
But if you ask McWeeney, it’s those early days as an FBI agent that stand out.
“If anyone ever asks what I did, my first reaction is to say I was an agent,” he says. “I was a top executive, of course. But I’m very, very proud of the fact that I was an FBI agent.
“It was the first time my father ever said he was proud of me – and I heard that from secondary sources,” he recalls. “My dad was soft-spoken, a tough guy. All he did was work, work, work. For him to have said that meant a lot.”
