Is There Any Actual "News" In The Michael Grimm Sentencing? Not For Our Brilliant Journalists

Friday, Brooklyn Federal District Court Judge Pamela Chen gave Mafia thug-turned-congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, a very harsh dressing down-- very harsh. No one can ever accuse Pamela Chen of not being one harsh dresser-downer. "That this type of crime is common does not lessen its significance," the judge said. "Your moral compass, Mr. Grimm, needs some reorientation." She then gave him an astoundingly-- criminally-- light sentence, a mere 8 months, starting in mid-September.

My sister and her family live on Staten Island, and in 2010 redistricting seems to have put our childhood home in Brooklyn within one block of NY-11, the district that had elected and reelected Grimm, not despite his Mafia status but, at least in part, because of it. Growing up, my neighborhood diversity could be measured between Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews and cultural Jews. And there were also a few Italians. Role models among people I knew ranged from successful Jews like Albert Einstein, Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Arthur Miller, Jonas Salk, Sandy Koufax, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Berlin, Golda Meir, Samuel Goldwyn, George Gershwin and Jacob Javitz to, for a few, Bob Dylan. "The Italians" had a different set of role models: the Mafia. These were the days that the biggest names in New York were Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese... Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno, Profaci, Gigante... "Fat Tony" Salerno... I'd have gravitated to Fiorello LaGuardia, Arturo Toscanni, maybe Enrico Fermi if I was looking for a role model. But even many of the entertainers and politicians-- from Sinatra to slimy U.S. Senator Alfonse D'Amato-- were Mob-connected.

It wasn't until I became friends with now infamous murder victim Susan Berman that I came to grips with the fact that the Jewish immigrant experience included a hefty Mafia participation as well. Back to the earliest 1900s there were brutal Jewish crime organizations in NY, like Harry Horowitz's Lenox Avenue Gang, as violent and vicious as any other street gangs operating in the city. By the 1920s Arnold Rothstein was one of the country's top gangsters, the first to turn a variety of criminal enterprises into corporate endeavors. Detroit's top bootlegging gang, the Purple Gang, was run by the Jewish mob. Murder Inc. was a large Jewish-run group of killers for hire. And names like Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Red Levine, Bo Weiberg, Moe Dalitz, Charles "King" Solomon, Abner "Longy" Zwillman, Jacob Shapiro, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, Hyman "Curly" Holtz, Louis "Shadows" Kravitz, Harry Teitelbaum, Philip "Little Farvel" Kovolick and Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg, Hyman Abrams, Alex "Shondor" Birns, Israel "Ice-Pick Willie" Alderman (a Minneapolis associate of my murderded friend Susan's murderer father David "Davie the Jew" Berman) and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the head of Murder Inc., became notorious nationally.

Almost no one ever gets tried for being in the Mob-- not Al Capone, not Lucky Luciano and not Michael Grimm. But at least the prosecutors had a plan to make Capone and Luciano pay for their crimes. Long before Grimm ever thought about running for Congress, he was a Mafia mole inside the FBI, but he is also a mole for right-wing factions of the Israeli government and has been protected to a great extent by Bibi Netanyahu himself. Oh, and with all the talk about about the Jewish mobsters who helped build and run Las Vegas, how could I have not mentioned that long after the death of my friend Susan's father "Davie the Jew" Berman, who ran the Flamingo Hotel for the Mafia, the frontman for the Mob in Vegas is still Jewish: Republican kingpin Sheldon Adelson, who is determined to get another organized-crime-friendly Republican, Marco Rubio, into the White House.

No one calls Adelson a vicious mobster,  just a casino mogul