Hey, Mikey Suits! Your picture here?
"A perp walk is a common custom of American law enforcement, the practice of taking an arrested suspect through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb. . . . Law enforcement agencies often coordinate with the media in scheduling and arranging them."
-- Wikipedia
"As a former FBI agent, Representative Grimm should understand the motto: fidelity, bravery and integrity. Yet he broke our credo at nearly every turn."
-- from a statement by FBI Asst. Director George Venizelos
by Ken
So the big day finally arrived! DWT congressional fave "Mikey Suits" Grimm, the only Republican in NYC's congressional delegation, turned himself in to the feds, as planned, for the unsealing of what turned out to be a festive 20-count indictment.
Howie, who of course has been keeping tabs on Mikey, wrote about the progress of his case Saturday and will have a good deal more to say about where it's headed, probably tomorrow, so let me just note that, as sources have been suggesting, the charges in the indictment deal not with the investigative activity (including indictments) swirling furiously around Mikey's campaign-financing carnivals but with a whole heap of alleged naughtiness centered around Beefcake Mikey's Manhattan eatery, Healthalicious. Here's how Christian Science Monitor Washington Editor Peter Grier's shorthands the legal fun 'n' games on CSM's "DC Decoder" blog:
According to court documents unsealed Monday Representative Grimm engaged in a complex scheme that hid more than $1 million in Healthalicious receipts from tax authorities. Employees were paid with bills skimmed from the restaurant cash register; some got more than half their pay in cash, according to federal authorities. Grimm kept a separate set of books that tracked the restaurant’s true financial condition, and lied under oath when questioned on the matter after former employees sued, saying they had not been paid minimum wage.Not surprisingly, the lying liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine are squealing their piggiest squeal about poliitically motivated prosecution -- not so much in defense of their boy Mikey as in squealy dudgeon about the timing of the indictments, suspiciously soon after the deadline for candidates to file for the congressional primary, meaning the GOP in Staten Island and Brooklyn is stuck with their Mikey on the ballot.
I guess RWNM-ers would have preferred to have Mikey indicted after being reelected.
What I really want to talk about today is the denial of our rights as citizens to be showered with pictures, lots of pictures, of Mikey doing some sort of traditional perp walk. You know, in handcuffs, maybe with his jacket pulled up stylishly over his head? Leg irons, while not traditional, would have been a suitably jolly touch.
Pay no attention to the whining about perp walks being "criticized as a form of public humiliation that violates a defendant's right to privacy and is prejudicial to the presumption of innocence." Seriously now! This is America. Do we really believe in any stinking "defendant's right to privacy"? As for "the presumption of innocence," get real -- that's just artsy-fartsy Ivy League elite talk.
Focus instead on this:
Within the United States the perp walk is most closely associated with New York City. Originally only those accused of violent street crimes were subjected to it, but since Rudolph Giuliani had accused white-collar criminals perp-walked in the 1980s, it has been extended to almost every defendant.I assume we can expect to hear from Rudy G any moment howling for Mikey Suits perp-walk pix in the grand tradition he established in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office.
Or maybe not, now that Rudy G has pretty much gone over to the other side, with his massive consulting empire devoted to showing people how to use the law to get around or simply vault over, you know, the law. You could say that Rudy G blazed the path of using our legal institutions, and the criminal justice system in particular, as a sort of White-Collar Crime Academy -- to help train the Right Kinds of Criminals to do the Right Kinds of Crimes.
It's the path followed by such criminal luminaries as NJ Gov. Kris "NJ Fats" KrispyKreme, who used his time running his NJ U.S. Attorney's office as a training ground for organizing the kind of intimidation and corruption he would make his trademark as governor (cf. NJ Fats's Guys and the Port Authority of NY and NJ). And then there's Mikey Suits himself, who seems to have used his time in the FBI to prepared himself for his future approach to "the law."
A Fairly Grim Mikey Suits speaks at a press conference after leaving the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse in New York today. Mikey pled not guilty and vowed to fight "tooth and nail until I am fully exonerated.” Still to be announced is which of his antagonists he has designated for being broken in half like a boy and which for being thrown off a balcony -- apparently his preferred threats for those who disrespect him.
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