There’s no doubt that Representative Michael Grimm, the Staten Island Republican who was recently charged with tax evasion and other crimes committed while running an Upper East Side health food restaurant, has led an interesting life. Perhaps the most colorful aspect of his past is the time he spent working as a FBI agent, when he posed as mobbed-up stockbroker Michael Garabaldi — better known as “Mikey Suits,” thanks to his eye-catching wardrobe — in order to investigate insider trading schemes. (The New Yorker chronicled some of Grimm/Garabaldi/Suits’s adventures back in 2011.) On Thursday, the New York Daily News reported that Grimm seems to have remained quite attached to his FBI alter ego.
Daily News notes, Grimm’s campaign website still boasts of his undercover exploits: “Living the lives of a ‘made’ member of La Cosa Nostra, a nefarious land developer, a struggling actor/model, a corrupt Wall Street financier, an international money launderer and other personas, Grimm relentlessly fought corruption.” And, according to recently unsealed federal documents, his cell phone number was listed under “Michael Garibaldi of Centurian Consulting” until at least 2012, well after he entered Congress. But, given the way things turned out for Grimm, who can blame him for living in the past? (Especially when he was reportedly [and mysteriously] banned from entering the FBI’s New York offices.) After all, “Mikey Suits” still sounds better than “that nutjob congressman who threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony after the State of the Union address.”
