After he had left the FBI but before he ran for office Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) asked a federal judge to keep a friend convicted of bribing former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) out of prison, the New York Daily News reports.
Grimm asked a judge to go soft on real estate developer Thomas Kontogiannis, who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to Cunningham. The Daily News reports that Grimm “wrote that he met Kontogiannis through ‘mutual friends’ while in the FBI, and that their initial acquaintance was ‘purely social.’ Later, he told the judge, ‘the relationship merged’ with Grimm’s work as an undercover agent.” From the report:
“Mr. Kontogiannis consistently provided me with whatever I asked for to assist me in brandishing the appropriate ‘props’ to ensure my cover,” Grimm wrote.
He said Kontogiannis let him “use his family’s construction company’s name to mention to corrupt politicians in Atlantic City, while bribing them for contracts”; let him “state to various bad guys and targets that I built a nightclub in Manhattan that was actually built by his son-in-law’s construction company,” and schooled Grimm in the shipping business for a terrorism probe.
