Robert S. Mueller may be the most recognizable lawyer in America, a former FBI director now heading the special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But he was just another young law enforcer when he was introduced to Chronicle readers more than four decades ago — in an Aug. 3, 1978, photo, standing next to a towering mound of confiscated hashish.

“$700,000 Drug Raid — 5 Charged,” the Page 2 headline announced.

“A Mill Valley tax lawyer and four other men were arraigned in U.S. District Court here yesterday on charges they conspired to smuggle 547 pounds of hashish from Pakistan to San Francisco in packing crates containing wooden trays,” the story explained.

Mueller’s name would appear in The Chronicle more than a dozen times in the next four years, mostly prosecuting local cases — including a brief encounter in court with Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger.

The Manhattan-born prosecutor’s 1960s education was detoured by enlistment in the Marine Corps and service in the Vietnam War. After the war, Mueller received his University of Virginia law degree and worked at Pillsbury Madison and Sutro before joining the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco in 1976.

Still in his mid-30s, Mueller’s name began showing up frequently in The Chronicle starting in 1978.

He prosecuted a Brink’s truck guard who robbed his own vehicle for $1.85 million, getting a 15-year sentence — lengthened after Mueller’s insistence that George Bosque still had $300,000 hidden away.

The prosecutor had less success with Barger, who was part of a massive racketeering case against the Hells Angels. Mueller took over the case in 1980 after a hung jury, and Barger was released after 14 months in jail.

“Federal prosecutor Robert S. Mueller, who took over the case after a jury on July 2 failed to convict them following a nine-month trial, said the dismissals were ‘in the interest of justice,’” The Chronicle reported.

The hash case was a more complicated legal journey.

Mueller, 34, was just five years out of law school when he worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration on the 1978 bust, which confiscated $700,000 worth of hash during a drug raid at a storage facility in Concord.

Mueller was pictured next to the haul in a photograph taken by Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal, the former World War II photographer who captured the “Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima” image. Local DEA head Daniel Addario was there as well.

The DEA arrested five men, including Mill Valley attorney Morry Weinstein, who was unloading crates from a rented van when agents swooped in with guns drawn. Federal charges were eventually dropped against Weinstein, who says a client asked him to pick up the package and he had no idea drugs were inside.

They “knew I wasn’t involved, but the DEA doesn’t get any publicity from not busting anybody,” Weinstein told The Chronicle in 1980, when reporter Rob Haeseler wrote a four-part series on the bust.

Weinstein later that year sued Mueller for alleged malicious prosecution.

“I haven’t seen the complaint, so I haven’t any comment,” Mueller told The Chronicle.

The lawsuit was dismissed in 1982. By that time, Mueller had moved back to the East Coast, continuing his career with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Republican would return to San Francisco in 1998 as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, and was appointed FBI director in 2001.

Mueller refused to comment in a front-page 2001 Chronicle profile about his rise. But a bipartisan group of lawyers and politicians were willing to praise him, for hiring more women prosecutors, increasing the office’s civil collections twentyfold, and doubling the number of criminal cases filed.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., arguably had the strongest endorsement: “I know Bob, both personally and professionally, and I believe him to be an individual of the highest integrity.”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub