The Appalling Career of Michael Grimm

By Evan Ratliff, The New Yorker

2 January 15

ichael Grimm’s pugnacious career in government service ended with a whimper on Monday night, with an after-hours statement announcing his resignation from Congress. It had been a week since Grimm, the Republican congressman from Staten Island, pleaded guilty to one charge in a twenty-count federal indictment for tax fraud and perjury. Outside the courthouse that day, he declared that he had no plans to step down. It was easy to imagine that Grimm would keep his word, if only because of the sheer volume of allegations that the congressman had already beaten back—including those recounted here in 2011, in which Grimm, while serving as an F.B.I. agent, was alleged to have pulled his gun in a Queen’s night club and instigated a racially charged incident (acts that he denied).

But step down he did, bringing an end to a congressional tenure consisting of equal parts bluster and farce. Grimm will probably be best remembered for his on-camera threat to throw a NY1 television reporter off of the Capitol Rotunda balcony after he’d dared to ask a question about the Justice Department investigation into Grimm’s fundraising. And no collection of Grimm’s greatest hits can leave out the interview in which he recited almost verbatim a speech from “A Few Good Men” as if it were his own. The Grimmest of Grimm moments occurred, however, during his 2012 campaign, when he publicly insinuated that political forces arrayed against him had broken into his office to gain access to computer files. The break-in turned out to be the work of a troubled teen-ager. The computers, police concluded, hadn’t been touched.

Grimm previously worked as an undercover F.B.I. agent, and he cited that fact repeatedly on the campaign trail—at one point drawing a rebuke from the bureau. In November, he won reëlection in the shadow of his federal indictment and a potential trial. While some Democrats accused him of shamefully holding his guilty plea until after Election Day, he may have done his constituents a favor by saving them from an opponent so inept that he earned more mockery than even the congressman himself. (“In Domenic Recchia, the Democrats have fielded a candidate so dumb, ill-informed, evasive and inarticulate that voting for a thuggish Republican who could wind up in a prison jumpsuit starts to make rational sense,” the Daily News observed in one of the most comically underwhelming endorsements ever published.) Now each party will have a new chance to field a less-bad-than-the-other-guy candidate in a special election.

Ultimately, though, Grimm’s plea and resignation will prove unsatisfying to anyone but political partisans. He has admitted to paying undocumented workers under the table as the owner of a Manhattan restaurant called Healthalicious, filing false tax returns to profit from it, and then lying about all of it to investigators. These are not trivialities, but the public will likely never obtain answers to more serious questions around Grimm’s conduct as an elected representative. In 2012, the Times reported extensively on hundreds of thousands of dollars Grimm raised from the followers of the New York City rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, detailing allegations that Grimm advised contributors on how to exceed legal limits and that he collected donations in envelopes full of cash. (Pinto, in an absurdly complicated investigation spanning New York and Israel, later reportedly accused Grimm of blackmailing him.) By 2014, a federal investigation was underway, and one of Grimm’s campaign contributors (and former girlfriend), Diana Durand, was soon under indictment for using straw donors to exceed contribution limits. The U.S. Attorney’s office had assigned Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky, known for his success in public-corruption prosecutions, to Grimm’s investigation. But Kaminsky left the case in May to run for state assembly, Durand pleaded guilty without implicating Grimm, and no campaign-finance charges were ever brought against the congressman.

Federal prosecutors were left with the Healthalicious tax fraud, which, depending on one’s political affiliation, came off as either Capone-like in its catch-them-for-what-you-can-prove approach or evidence of the “political witch hunt” Grimm had invoked against the allegations all along.

Grimm has long made a habit of leaving such problematic connections in his wake, and then chalking up any accusations of impropriety to conspiracy. I first became interested in him while investigating one of his F.B.I. informants, a scam artist named Josef von Habsburg who helped lure a lawyer into a dubious sting operation. “I am an F.B.I. agent, I took an oath,” the then aspiring congressman railed at me when I asked him questions about his F.B.I. past, including the night-club incident. “You’re trying to do a chop job on me.” When I asked him why he left the F.B.I. when he did, just after having helped build a large and successful case against fraud on Wall Street, he said, “I was really at the top of my career. If I was gonna leave, leave at the top.” Later, the Times reported on Grimm’s post-F.B.I. business ties to a convicted fraudster and former F.B.I. agent in Texas, along with the campaign-finance questions and the allegations that Grimm’s partner in Healthalicious had connections to the Gambino crime family. “This attack is politically motivated,” Grimm responded.

Federal prosecutors have not made clear whether any of their investigations remain open. One former Assistant U.S. Attorney with whom I spoke—who did not have direct knowledge of the case—found it unlikely that Grimm would have taken any plea deal that didn’t include at least tacit agreement from prosecutors to no longer pursue such charges.

Grimm now faces a federal prison sentence of up to thirty-six months. Whether he ends up alongside the convicts he once took great pride in cornering will be left to U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Chen. What we do know is that Michael Grimm is a man who betrayed the laws he once made such a show of upholding.

Lessons From 2014: If You Care About Green Cities, You Must Care About Justice Too

By Greg Hanscom, Grist

02 January 15

hat’s the old saying about life being what happens while you’re busy making other plans? Right. Well, that came to mind this week as I was taking stock of Grist’s coverage of cities in 2014. Suffice it to say that the stories that unfolded this year were not the ones we thought we’d be writing.

Sure, we hit some familiar themes. We ran stories about how a young generation is looking for vibrant, car-free, city living. We lavished praise on towns that build bicycle freeways rather than the usual kind, and mocked Grist’s hometown of Seattle for creating what Staff Writer David Roberts dubbed “an unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck.”

We told stories about how, for better or worse, cities are leaving national governments in their dust when it comes to dealing with climate change. I even went to that blazing desert metropolis of Las Vegas in search of the climate apocalypse, and came away impressed with how much that city has done to prepare for even hotter and drier times.

But the stories that really defined Grist’s cities coverage this year were not the ones we went looking for. They were the ones that found us, and forced us to look at our urban conundrums in a different light. At their core, these were stories about how far U.S. cities still have to go if we’re going to build not only a green future, but a just one as well.

Take the Motor City’s water crisis, for example. In May, the Detroit Water and Sewerage District sent out 46,000 shutoff notices to customers, many of them low-income, who were behind on paying their water bills. This, while ignoring golf courses that owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The move sparked street protests, a condemnation from the United Nations, and, as Grist writer Heather Smith reported from the ground, a goodwill mission from Canada.

Ultimately, activists were able to eke out at least some semblance of a victory, but the episode was a stark reminder of how, when times get tough, it is often those with the least who are hit the hardest.

No story demanded our attention more, however, than that of police killing unarmed African-American men — and the forceful, racially diverse, and largely nonviolent movement that rose up against it.

Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson sparked that conflagration in August, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown following an altercation over Brown’s right (or lack thereof) to walk down a city street. A small suburb of St. Louis, Ferguson is two-thirds African American, but only three of its 53 cops are black. Factor in that all but one city council representative are white, as is the mayor, and you have what Grist Justice Editor Brentin Mock called, flat-out, apartheid. Mock explained that this did not come about by coincidence; it was the result of a long history of racist housing and zoning policies — policies that also result in heavy burdens of toxic pollution on communities of color.

Brown’s killing sparked protests throughout the fall that exploded briefly into violence after a grand jury declined to indict Wilson. When another grand jury failed to indict a New York City cop who strangled Staten Island resident Eric Garner to death during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes, the protests raged nationwide.

If there is a silver lining to these tragedies, it is this: The killings of Brown and Garner have forced progressive activists out of their corners. They have made it clear that if you care about cities, if you believe that cities and the democratic process are crucial to addressing the climate crisis, you must care about people, too.

After all, how will we attract a new generation to our cities, and keep them there, if some days it seems that we’ve just replaced violent crime with violent cops? How will we build resilient, green cities if large portions of our population are relegated to environmental sacrifice zones, their children stuck in a pollution-to-school-to-prison pipeline, their young men put behind bars?

Recognizing this, green groups ranging from 350.org to the Sierra Club have come out in support of the movement that has sprung up under the banner, “Black Lives Matter.” More big green groups are throwing their weight behind environmental justice initiatives, despite pushback from some members who fear the standard-bearers of environmentalism are straying too far from their central purpose.

But if 2014 taught us one thing, it’s that, while cities hold tremendous promise as the source and drivers of climate solutions, unless and until we deal with underlying injustice and inequity, they will never realize that potential. The good news is, thanks to some brutal news in 2014, we are now poised to address those issues in a real and concerted way. If, that is, we don’t lose sight of what is important, and how all of these things fit together.