DETROIT – Mike Grimes pleaded guilty last year to pocketing more than $1.5 million in bribes while he worked as a United Auto Workers union aide.
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Grimes will learn Wednesday how long he will spend in prison for the crime.
He retired from the UAW in 2018, and now he has admitted he spent years getting wealthy by fleecing a vendor he helped get a UAW contract to sell union watches in exchange for a $60,000 mortgage on a Rose Township home he bought. Grimes then insisted the vendor pay him a monthly consulting fee. Federal investigators estimate that was more than $900,000.
When Grimes left court in September he was met by about a dozen UAW retirees.
“Shame on you Mike Grimes,” Frank Hammer, a former UAW colleague of Grimes, shouted. “I am angry with him. We worked together at the GM department. But I’m really angry at the culture that has been bred at the top levels of UAW leadership that felt so insulated from the rank and file.”
Grimes is facing about 20 years in prison, but the plea deal he struck with prosecutors would limit his prison term to about four or five years.