Former US Rep. Michael Grimm Sentenced to 8 Months in Prison

Mr. Grimm, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had faced up to three years in prison, is scheduled to surrender Sept. 10.

The former congressman apologized in court Friday morning, and his attorneys asked US District Judge Pamela Chen to issue a sentence that didn’t include prison time, according to  a report by The Wall Street Journal on Friday. 

But Judge Chen said she was troubled by Mr. Grimm’s “somewhat belated” apology.

“Your moral compass, Mr. Grimm, needs some realignment,” she said.

Mr. Grimm, 45 years old, was charged in April 2014 in a 20-count indictment that alleged he schemed to hide more than $1 million in earnings and employees’ wages at a Manhattan restaurant he ran before becoming a congressman in 2011. The charges stemmed from a probe into Mr. Grimm’s campaign financing.

In December, Mr. Grimm admitted that he had underreported to federal and state tax authorities what the restaurant, Healthalicious, earned between 2007 and 2010, court records show. He also admitted using a portion of the underreported receipts to pay employees off the books.

In an impassioned statement to the court, Mr. Grimm described himself as an ambitious but unsophisticated businessman who didn’t know when to walk away from a failed restaurant.

Mr. Grimm said he had served the country for two decades and he was “ashamed to fail.”

“I was a darn good congressman,” Mr. Grimm said. “I can’t tell you how terribly I felt that I walked away from my constituents.”

Mr. Grimm’s attorneys pleaded for leniency in light of Mr. Grimm’s service with the US Marines and his work as an elected official.

“Mr. Grimm made a terrible choice,” said Daniel Rashbaum, his attorney. “A prison sentence does no one good here.”

But James Gatta, an assistant US attorney, urged prison time, saying that Mr. Grimm continued to “impugn the integrity” of people investigating him, suggesting he hadn’t “truly come to grips” with his crimes.

“It is Mr. Grimm who embraces, even wraps himself in the oaths he has taken when it suits him, and then turns his back on those oaths,” Mr. Gatta said.

Judge Chen disputed Mr. Grimm’s claim that he had been sufficiently punished for his crimes. “Everyone falls from grace” when they are caught committing crimes, the judge said. “Some people fall further than others.”

Guy Molinari, a former Staten Island Borough President who first helped propel Mr. Grimm to office, said he was devastated. Mr. Molinari is one of Mr. Grimm’s fiercest defenders, describing Mr. Grimm as being “like a son.”

“It’s a sad day for me to watch this young man who has so much promise and helped so many people to stand before a judge and be sentenced in a criminal trial,” Mr. Molinari, 86, said.

“He’s a Marine. So he can handle this. He can but I can’t,” Mr. Molinari, said. “It’s very painful. I haven’t felt this bad in a long, long time.”

Mr. Grimm won election to Congress in 2010 touting a straight-arrow image, campaigning on his career as a Marine and an agent at the FBI from 1995 to 2006. Mr. Grimm has said he spent five of those years at the FBI “deep undercover,” conducting investigations of financial corruption.

In November while under indictment, Mr. Grimm won re-election to New York’s 11th congressional district, which covers Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn. Seven weeks later, Mr. Grimm pleaded guilty to a single felony count of tax fraud.

Mr. Grimm initially said he had no intention of stepping down, but a week after his guilty plea he changed course and announced he would step down in early January. Former Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, a Republican, won a special election in May to fill the congressional seat.

Last year, Mr. Grimm drew national attention when he physically threatened a television news reporter following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Mr. Grimm told NY1 reporter Michael Scotto that he would throw him off a Capitol balcony after the reporter attempted to ask him about the federal investigation into his campaign fundraising. “I’ll break you in half, like a boy,” Mr. Grimm told the reporter. Mr. Grimm later apologized.