| Notes |
- New Yorker Magazine, 25 Mar 1939:
"Asst. D.A."
"We have just conducted an investigation of Charles P. Grimes, Dewey's assistant in charge of the Hines investigation. We find that he generally prepares for anything important by staying up all night. He stayed up all night before his marr, in 1933. Last year he stayed up all night before leading the raid in Philadelphia in which Dixie Davis, Hope Dare, and George Weinberg were captured. Accompanied by a sergeant and two detectives, Grimes drove from New York late at night (he had stayed up at a party the night before this) and was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia for going eighty M.P.H. He and his men flashed their badges and were permitted to proceed after some scathing remarks. As they were circling the apartment house where their quarry lay, another Philadelphia cop came along and stood right in front of the house under a street lamp. He suspected something interesting was up and didn't want to miss it. A Grimes detective finally drove him off by whipping out a gun and threatening to shoot him. The raiders got into the building when Grimes rang the house telephone of a doctor tenant and told his wife there's been a bad accident. She clicked the electric lock on the front door and the raiding party burst into the Weinberg-Davis suite. Dixie was speechless with fright. He thought someone had sent some of the boys down to knock them off.
"The Asst. D.A. is tall, wide, handsome, and reticent, and is called Charlie by most people. He comes of a long line of Virginians but was born, thirty-four years ago, in Tacoma, Washington, where his father was Episcopal Archdeacon of theese of Olympia. At nine he made up his mind to be a lawyer, being moved to this decision by the fact that around that time a crooked lawyer stole a valuable water-power site from his father. Charlie wanted to become a lawyer not to steal power sites but to keep them from being stolen. Most of his father's money was lost in the power site episode, and Grimes went through the Taft School and Yale on scholarships. He was impatient with the New Haven curriculum and took the regular four year course and a half year of law in three years. The college dean, thinking this was a reflection on Yale, tried to discourage him by stipulating that he maintain an honors' average. Grimes did this and on the side won letters in wrestling and crew, read all of Proust, and tutored small, wealthy children in the summer. He graduated with the class of 1927 and still feels a greater spiritual kinship with '28.
"After law school, Grimes worked for Cravath, De Gersdorff, Etc., and later was in Washington as counsel for NRA and PWA. He joined Dewey's in 1935. One of his jobs was the extradition of Alexander Pompez, the Harlem numbers banker, from Meo. A Mexican army officer whom Grimes met at a party in Mexico City offered to have Pompez bumped off and delivered for 200 pesos, or $50. Grimes said he wanted him alive. The Mexican officer couldn't get this point of view, Grimes was further astonished in Mexico by the politness of a secret agent with whom he and the Chief of Police of Mexico City drove around a good deal. The agent, a stout, elderly fellow, always insisted on sitting up front with the chauffeur, leaving Grimes in the more comfortable seat with the Chief of Police. Grimes remonstrated at this excessive consideration on the part of an older man. The agent explained that he knew of six criminals who had taken an oath to kill the Chief of Police, and he felt happier in front.
"Grimes is a member of the Yale, Union League, and Seawanhaka-Corinthian Yacht Clubs, and of the Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders & Helpers Union of America, Mt. Tahoma Lodge, No. 348. He joined the union while working summers during the. He likes to sing old sea chanteys he learned during this period, and accompany them by dancing a hornpipe. He did this at the last annual New Year's Eve ball at Tuxedo, raising himself considerably in the estimation of a good many people who had hitherto looked on him simply as an assistant district attorney."
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1904 - 1957 (53 years)
