January 29, 2014
Michael Grimm was not among the four Republicans asked to respond to the State of the Union address last night, but he might as well have been. Not one to cede the spotlight casually, the representative from Staten Island eclipsed the dull speeches of his colleagues with a vintage, action-packed Michael Grimm performance. Footage of a United States congressman physically threatening a reporter may not have been the Republican Party’s preferred story of the evening, but it was the one that Grimm delivered:
Shortly afterward, NY1 released a transcript of the incident. After
obtaining Grimm’s brief response to the President’s address, the
political reporter Michael Scotto began to ask a question on another
topic—a federal investigation
into the congressman’s campaign fund-raising. Grimm walked away as the
question was asked. After Scotto signed off, Grimm, a veteran of the
United States Marine Corps and a former F.B.I. agent who worked
undercover, came back into the frame with his chest puffed, backing
Scotto out of the picture:
In Grimm’s world, there are men of great character, whose conduct stands above questioning, and boys, who come—as Grimm once put it to me—only to “demean and belittle” it. The reporter “insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot,” Grimm said in a statement, so he “verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect.”
The exchange with Scotto had a familiar ring to it. In 2011, I travelled to Grimm’s Washington office to interview him about his work as an undercover F.B.I. agent with a paid informant and con man named Josef von Habsburg. I also asked Grimm about a 1999 night-club incident in which Grimm, who was an agent at the time, was accused by an off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer of threatening a fellow-patron (“I’ll fuckin’ make him disappear where nobody will find him,” Grimm is alleged to have said), waving a gun at the officer (“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him”), and using racially charged language in the fracas’s aftermath (“All the white people get out of here”).
Grimm denied all of these allegations—and did so again, later, through a spokesperson. He also called me a “liar” working on a “chop job.” “You don’t rate to come and question me on it, quite frankly,” he said, before dismissing me from his office. After The New Yorker published the story, in May of 2011, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate at the time, called for the N.Y.P.D. to release any files pertaining to the night-club incident—files for which I had also filed public-records requests. Those requests remain unfulfilled. Grimm, for his part, called the story “fiction,” “a witch hunt,” and “a hatchet job” perpetrated by the Democratic Party. For a moment, his past seemed to fade into the shadows as his congressional star began to rise.
Boys will be boys, though. In 2011, a reporter at the Daily News uncovered Grimm’s ties to a convicted felon in Texas named Carlos Luquis. A fellow former F.B.I. agent, Luquis had served as a director of an energy firm that Grimm co-owned. Prior to that, he’d served two years of a twelve-year federal sentence for fraud.
In 2012, another “boy”—in this case, a female reporter, Alison Leigh Cowan—reported extensively on allegations that an aide to a New York City rabbi had helped Grimm collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable campaign contributions, much of it in envelopes full of cash. Cowan later reported that yet another one of Grimm’s business associates, a partner in a failed Upper East Side health-food restaurant, had been accused of having ties to the Gambino crime family. Both the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department are reported to have opened investigations into Grimm.
Grimm again denied any wrongdoing, and coasted to reëlection in 2012. Since then, his only brushes with impropriety involved reports that he had sex with a woman in a Brooklyn bar bathroom and a strange incident in which Grimm claimed that vandals smashed the windows of his Staten Island office in order to wipe the hard drives on his campaign computers. After Grimm announced that the attacks were a “politically motivated crime” and an “assault on democracy,” police could find no evidence that the computers were tampered with at all. An eighth-grader later confessed to the vandalism.
Then, two weeks ago, federal authorities arrested still another of Grimm’s associates, a Texas woman who allegedly funnelled more than ten thousand dollars in illegal funds into his campaign. (Grimm denies any wrongdoing.) The arrest raises questions about what Grimm knew of her actions and whether federal investigators may be actively pursuing the congressman himself for fund-raising improprieties during the 2010 campaign. They are sensible questions for a local New York reporter to ask Grimm. And Grimm’s constituents might expect him to be man enough to answer.
Evan Ratliff is the C.E.O. of The Atavist.
Read the rest of our State of the Union coverage: John Cassidy on the power of Obama’s speech, Jeff Shesol on executive orders, Amy Davidson on Cory Remsburg and the meaning of war, and a live chat about the speech with Davidson, Steve Coll, Rebecca Mead, and Evan Osnos.
Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty
GRIMM: Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this fucking balcony.After Scotto signed off, Grimm, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and a former F.B.I. agent who worked undercover, came back into the frame with his chest puffed, backing Scotto out of the picture:
SCOTTO: Why? I just wanted to ask you…
(Cross talk.)
GRIMM: If you ever do that to me again…
SCOTTO: Why? Why? It’s a valid question.
(Cross talk.)
GRIMM: No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.
GRIMM: Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this fucking balcony.
SCOTTO: Why? I just wanted to ask you…
(Cross talk.)
GRIMM: If you ever do that to me again…
SCOTTO: Why? Why? It’s a valid question.
(Cross talk.)
GRIMM: No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.
In Grimm’s world, there are men of great character, whose conduct stands above questioning, and boys, who come—as Grimm once put it to me—only to “demean and belittle” it. The reporter “insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot,” Grimm said in a statement, so he “verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect.”
The exchange with Scotto had a familiar ring to it. In 2011, I travelled to Grimm’s Washington office to interview him about his work as an undercover F.B.I. agent with a paid informant and con man named Josef von Habsburg. I also asked Grimm about a 1999 night-club incident in which Grimm, who was an agent at the time, was accused by an off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer of threatening a fellow-patron (“I’ll fuckin’ make him disappear where nobody will find him,” Grimm is alleged to have said), waving a gun at the officer (“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him”), and using racially charged language in the fracas’s aftermath (“All the white people get out of here”).
Grimm denied all of these allegations—and did so again, later, through a spokesperson. He also called me a “liar” working on a “chop job.” “You don’t rate to come and question me on it, quite frankly,” he said, before dismissing me from his office. After The New Yorker published the story, in May of 2011, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate at the time, called for the N.Y.P.D. to release any files pertaining to the night-club incident—files for which I had also filed public-records requests. Those requests remain unfulfilled. Grimm, for his part, called the story “fiction,” “a witch hunt,” and “a hatchet job” perpetrated by the Democratic Party. For a moment, his past seemed to fade into the shadows as his congressional star began to rise.
Boys will be boys, though. In 2011, a reporter at the Daily News uncovered Grimm’s ties to a convicted felon in Texas named Carlos Luquis. A fellow former F.B.I. agent, Luquis had served as a director of an energy firm that Grimm co-owned. Prior to that, he’d served two years of a twelve-year federal sentence for fraud.
In 2012, another “boy”—in this case, a female reporter, Alison Leigh Cowan—reported extensively on allegations that an aide to a New York City rabbi had helped Grimm collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable campaign contributions, much of it in envelopes full of cash. Cowan later reported that yet another one of Grimm’s business associates, a partner in a failed Upper East Side health-food restaurant, had been accused of having ties to the Gambino crime family. Both the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department are reported to have opened investigations into Grimm.
Grimm again denied any wrongdoing, and coasted to reëlection in 2012. Since then, his only brushes with impropriety involved reports that he had sex with a woman in a Brooklyn bar bathroom and a strange incident in which Grimm claimed that vandals smashed the windows of his Staten Island office in order to wipe the hard drives on his campaign computers. After Grimm announced that the attacks were a “politically motivated crime” and an “assault on democracy,” police could find no evidence that the computers were tampered with at all. An eighth-grader later confessed to the vandalism.
Then, two weeks ago, federal authorities arrested still another of Grimm’s associates, a Texas woman who allegedly funnelled more than ten thousand dollars in illegal funds into his campaign. (Grimm denies any wrongdoing.) The arrest raises questions about what Grimm knew of her actions and whether federal investigators may be actively pursuing the congressman himself for fund-raising improprieties during the 2010 campaign. They are sensible questions for a local New York reporter to ask Grimm. And Grimm’s constituents might expect him to be man enough to answer.
Evan Ratliff is the C.E.O. of The Atavist.
Read the rest of our State of the Union coverage: John Cassidy on the power of Obama’s speech, Jeff Shesol on executive orders, Amy Davidson on Cory Remsburg and the meaning of war, and a live chat about the speech with Davidson, Steve Coll, Rebecca Mead, and Evan Osnos.
Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty
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