The judge declared von Habsburg to be “not a good candidate for probation” and sentenced him to three and a half years in prison. “Good luck to the family,” she said.

Michael Grimm found himself on a more auspicious path. He is now featured regularly on cable news, and he was recently chosen to chair the House Republican Policy Committee’s Task Force on Foreign Policy. When I spoke to Grimm’s former F.B.I. colleagues, some applauded his undercover work, which also included public-corruption investigations in New Jersey and Florida. “I wouldn’t question his integrity,” Lawrence Ferazani, an agent who worked closely with him, said. “And he never, ever challenged the rules.” Others were taken aback that he had used his career as an agent to help him gain higher office. “He was not thought of very highly,” one former agent told me. Another agent called Grimm “a very good undercover” with “a big ego.” “He was an F.B.I. agent whom I would classify as a maverick,” he said. “Mavericks bring you big cases, and they can bring you big trouble.”

During Grimm’s congressional campaign, an F.B.I. spokesperson publicly chastised him for using Bureau imagery in his political ads. Recently, James Margolin said that Grimm’s contention to Van Susteren—which he repeated to me—that he was the first successful undercover agent on Wall Street was false. “Maybe he just doesn’t know the history,” Margolin said.

Not long ago, I finally found information about the night-club altercation that Santoro’s lawyers had been looking for when he pleaded guilty. It involved a lawsuit filed in the summer of 2000 against Grimm by a Guyanese-American former N.Y.P.D. officer named Gordon Williams. This winter, I spoke with Williams about the incident. “It was one of those days that I will never forget,” he said. “You lose a loved one and you remember the day. It was like that.” When I spoke with Grimm later, however, he declared that Williams’s account is a fabrication, that he had acted with professional probity, and that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing.

On July 10, 1999, Williams said, he was working off duty at Caribbean Tropics. Shortly after midnight, Michael Grimm walked in with a woman of Caribbean descent. The woman’s estranged husband, who is also of Caribbean descent, was at the club and confronted Grimm. The two men began to argue. Williams escorted Grimm away. Williams recalled, “He said to me, ‘Thanks a lot man, he don’t know who he’s fucking with.’ Then he said something frightening. ‘I’ll fuckin’ make him disappear where nobody will find him.’ ” (Grimm calls this allegation “insane.”) After that, Williams said, Grimm and the woman left, as did the husband.

Around 2:30 A.M., there was a commotion on the dance floor. According to Williams, somebody was shouting, “He’s got a gun!” Following a crowd into the club’s garage, Williams discovered that Grimm and the husband had returned, and Grimm was holding a weapon. Grimm was “carrying on like a madman,” Williams said. “He’s screaming, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him.’ So I said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He put the gun back in his waist and said, ‘I’m a fucking F.B.I. agent, ain’t nobody gonna threaten me.’ ” (Grimm said he only moved his gun from an ankle holster to his waistband.) The bouncer at the front door told Williams that, when he patted Grimm down and found his gun, Grimm had showed his F.B.I. identification. The bouncer then let him pass through the club’s metal detector.

Grimm left the club, but at 4 A.M., just before the club closed, he returned again, according to Williams, this time with another F.B.I. agent and a group of N.Y.P.D. officers. Grimm had told the police that he had been assaulted by the estranged husband and his friends. Williams said that Grimm took command of the scene, and refused to let the remaining patrons and employees leave. “Everybody get up against the fucking wall,” Williams recalled him saying. “The F.B.I. is in control.” Then Grimm, who apparently wanted to find the man with whom he’d had the original altercation, said something that Williams said he’ll never forget: “All the white people get out of here.”

Nirmilla Jitta, a retired N.Y.P.D. officer who was at Caribbean Tropics that night, confirmed that Grimm “left and then he came back.” Grimm, she said, “forced everyone to stay in the club, saying that he was an F.B.I. agent. He was using his authority when he shouldn’t have been.” An employee of the club who was working that night remembers Grimm telling the white people to leave. Grimm “was really aggressive and really violent. You know, you put on a badge and you really think you are above everybody else,” the employee, who is white and who was allowed to depart, said.

No one was arrested, but later that morning Williams was informed that he was being investigated for “interfering with an F.B.I. investigation.” Grimm had told the N.Y.P.D. that Williams refused to help him. After Williams provided his account, the D.A.’s office declined to press charges. But Williams was suspended for moonlighting without department approval. Grimm “should have been arrested,” Williams told me. “People that night were petrified.” He’d filed the lawsuit against Grimm for slander because, “when the N.Y.P.D. and the F.B.I. have a fight, the N.Y.P.D. loses.” The U.S. Attorney’s office successfully filed a motion to shift the case to federal court, claiming that Grimm had been “acting within the scope of his employment.” It then moved to dismiss the suit. Williams chose not to reply, and the suit was dismissed. In 2003, he retired from the N.Y.P.D.

Recently, in his Washington office, Grimm told me that he’d been jumped by his date’s husband and four other men that night. He said that he approached Williams, who had refused to call 911. Grimm said that he then went outside, found a patrol car, and reëntered with the police. Although weapons were not permitted in the club, Grimm said that he’d been carrying his gun the whole night, and had flashed it only when pulling out his badge. As for threatening to kill people, he said, “That’s not my personality. I don’t need to speak that way. A guy with a gun who knows how to use it doesn’t need to say anything.” He denied that he had forced everyone to stay or declared an F.B.I. operation, saying that the N.Y.P.D. had been in charge. He suggested that witnesses may have confused him with the other F.B.I. agent. The police report, he said, would show that he was assaulted and acted with “incredible restraint.” Later, he sent an e-mail adding that the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility had cleared him in an investigation. (I repeatedly asked the N.Y.P.D. about the incident, and attempted to obtain the police report under New York’s freedom-of-information laws, but by mid-April the N.Y.P.D. had turned over no files about the incident; this winter, the Justice Department denied a freedom-of-information request for files concerning Grimm.) “I was a hundred per cent by the book and fully exonerated,” Grimm said.

Albert Santoro served his prison sentence and was released in 2008. The following year, Judge Griesa terminated his supervised release early, so that he could return to work. Santoro moved to Miami, where he got a job as the interim C.E.O. at a helicopter-sales company, and then started his own marketing-consulting firm. He also spent hours with the Consequences Foundation, a group run by Lea Black, the wife of the prominent Miami attorney Roy Black, which steers juvenile delinquents away from jail. Lea Black told me, “He’s a guy that always wants to help people. I think he has learned his lesson that way, and he is committed to keeping other people from having that experience.”

I met with Santoro last year at the Pink Pony, a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Now thirty-eight years old, with shoulder-length blond hair parted down the middle, he said he hoped eventually to reclaim his New York reputation and his law license. He seemed chastened by the experience. “I was guilty of lacking sensible judgment,” he said. But he added that his chance encounter with von Habsburg and then Grimm had cost him years of his life. “This would never have happened, any of it, if I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time and met this scumbag Josef Meyers,” he told me.

“They had this guy out there,” he said. “They didn’t monitor him, they created a crime that didn’t exist.” He had been “broke and stupid, and paid for it,” he said. “But the government is not supposed to be a moral pressure point. They’re not supposed to push you to see how far you will go.” ♦