Swagger courses through Grayson’s every word, delivered in the accent of his Bronx upbringing and with the exacting nature of a lawyer who first made his name taking on — and taking down — contractors and war profiteers in Iraq.
“I don’t need the job for income or satisfaction,” said Grayson, sitting on a bench outside the House chamber in between votes. “The truth is, it’s really a hardship. I took an enormous pay cut to take the job. Every week, I leave five young children and my wife to come up here.
“I don’t owe anything to anyone here. I don’t owe anything to lobbyists. I don’t owe anything to leadership. The only thing I owe to anybody is the well-being of 800,000 people who depend on me.”
This spring Grayson played tough with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by holding up his vote for a global-warming bill until he was promised a $50 million hurricane research center that some in Central Florida say is wasteful, a brazen move for any lawmaker, let alone a rookie.
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Grayson’s life story has the makings of a Horatio Alger novel. He grew up in a cramped Bronx tenement, the asthma-inflicted son of public school educators. Sickness and death are common themes.
As a boy, a bully threw him under a moving bus but he pulled himself free just in time. In Sri Lanka in 1984, he sat under a 2,200-year-old tree, a sacred Buddhist site, where guerrillas later slaughtered 200 people. He used to wake up in the middle of the night covered in his own blood, for no apparent reason. He was nearly killed in a car accident.
You wonder if he’s putting you on, but he does not flinch. “I seem to have nine lives,” Grayson said. “I’ve given a lot of thought to what I wanted to do in life.”
Grayson got into Harvard and to cover expenses worked as a night watchman and cleaned toilets. He finished in three years, “and pretty close to the top of my class.” He went on to work as an economist but returned to Harvard for a law degree and master’s in public policy. Took him four years. “And I was working at the time.” Then, he said, he went on to work for some of the titans of the legal field — Ginsberg, Bork, Scalia.
In 1990, Grayson and a college friend rented space over a funeral home in the Bronx and founded IDT Corp., a telecommunications company. Grayson did not stay long but made a fortune and said he invested smartly in airlines and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Today he has a net worth of $31 million, according to financial disclosure forms, though he lost $34 million in a Ponzi investment scheme this year.
Grayson met his first wife at a Halloween party in Boulder in the early 1980s. He dressed as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish). He remarried in 1990 and he and his wife, Lolita, have five children under age 15, all with names beginning with ‘S:’ Skye, Star, Sage and twins Storm and Stone. They live not far from Disney World.
Well, that's not something you see every day.