Recently indicted Representative Michael Grimm’s likes to talk about his years as an FBI agent, but the organization might remember the walking Staten Island joke less fondly: According to DNAinfo, Grimm is barred from visiting the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters, as well as a satellite office in Queens. An anonymous former FBI officer told the website that Grimm’s photo is hanging in the buildings’ security offices, along with around two dozen other images of “employees who were fired, or they were under circumstances where they were forced out or felt they should leave, and all are no longer welcome back.” The source said that the images are there to help guards recognize these people and “immediately notify higher authorities” if they show up.
Grimm, who is currently facing 20 federal charges over the many illegal things he allegedly did while running an Upper East Side health-food restaurant called Healthalicious, left the FBI in 2006. While Grimm has said that he decided to quit because he wanted to start a family, DNAinfo’s sources said that he was actually under “internal scrutiny” for telling a woman that he worked undercover, as well as some sketchy expenses he submitted. A few years ago, The New Yorker reported that, when Grimm was an FBI officer, he got into a fight with someone in a Queens nightclub and threatened him with a gun after telling someone else that he would “fuckin’ make [the man] disappear where nobody will find him.”
A Grimm spokesperson told DNAinfo that the congressman “was unaware that his photo was posted at FBI security checkpoints and he had no idea why it should be.” He also provided a 2012 letter written on FBI stationery that stated that Grimm “resigned his post in good standing with the FBI.” “False rumors and malicious lies relating to the congressman’s tenure in the FBI have been reported on since 2010 and have been repeatedly refuted,” said the spokesperson. Meanwhile, the FBI declined to comment. If Grimm really is banned from FBI, you’d think that it might have come up when he turned himself in to some of the organization’s agents last month, but maybe they felt it wasn’t a good time.
