Alan Grayson, grew up in the tenements in the Bronx. It was a hard life. He had to be a fighter to survive.
His parents were teachers. They made great sacrifices, to make sure that Alan received the best education.
Alan was a sick child. His mother took him to the hospital four times a week, for treatment. Without health coverage, he would not be alive today. He remembers that.
Alan rode the subway to school each day, and he worked hard. He was the valedictorian of his junior high school. By passing a test, he was admitted to an exclusive public high school. In high school, he achieved the highest test score among almost 50,000 students who took the test. Harvard College saw something in him, and admitted him.
For Alan, life at Harvard wasn’t easy. Alan cleaned toilets, and worked as a night watchman. Yet he earned a bachelor’s degree in only three years, with high honors, and he was Phi Beta Kappa. Alan graduated from Harvard in the top two percent of his class.
Alan took economics classes at Harvard, and he worked as an economist after college. But he felt a calling, to learn more. He returned to Harvard. In only four years, Alan received a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, and a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Government, and Alan finished all of the course work and passed the general exams for a Ph.D. in Government.
Alan’s master’s thesis was on the important subject of gerontology – how to improve the health of older people. Alan called for the creation of an organization to support research on the health of seniors. Shortly after he left school, Alan formed such an organization: the Alliance for Aging Research. Alan served as an officer of the Alliance for 22 years. Alan’s Alliance has increased federal support for aging research by 500%, leading to breakthroughs in the treatment of blindness, weak bones, Alzheimer’s disease, and other afflictions of the elderly. The motto of the Alliance is “Living to 100 – and Loving It.”
Wall Street firms recruited Alan heavily when he graduated from Harvard Law School, but Alan chose to be a judge’s assistant instead. For two years, he worked with such luminaries as Judge (now Justice) Ginsburg, Judge (now Justice) Scalia, Judge Mikva, Judge Bork, and others. After that, he accepted an invitation to join the law firm where Judge Ginsburg’s husband was a partner.
From the beginning of his legal career, Alan gravitated toward the important question of how the Government spends the taxpayers’ money. He mastered the incredibly complex rules regarding government contracting, and represented hundreds of clients in that field.
In the early 1990s, Alan took leave from the practice of law, and started a business. Alan was the first President of IDT Corp., a telecom/internet company. The business started on the second floor of a funeral home. It grew to be a $2 billion-a-year business, on the Fortune 1000 list, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In short, Alan has lived the American Dream, starting a successful business and seeing it grow.
Later, Alan decided to leave that business, and return to the practice of law. Alan and his wife also decided to move to Orlando, and raise a family. Their first child, Skye, was born in 1995. Now they have five children: Skye, Star, Sage, Storm and Stone. Storm and Stone, twins, were born in 2005.
After Alan went back to the field of government contracts law, he began to represent whistleblowers, who witnessed fraud against the Government. Alan brought more and more False Claims Act cases on behalf of those whistleblowers, against fraudulent contractors. After the war in Iraq began, Alan was the only attorney who was willing to pursue such cases, in the face of hostility from the Bush Administration. Congress called on Alan four times to testify about contractor fraud in Iraq. Taxpayers Against Fraud named Alan Grayson its Lawyer of the Year. Public Justice also recognized Alan for his work. The Wall St. Journal lauded Alan, saying that he was “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” And Vanity Fair published an 11-page profile.
Alan’s mammoth struggle against contractor fraud has been applauded by liberals and conservatives alike. And now that he is in Congress, he can do even more to protect the taxpayers. He has joined the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittees of both the House Financial Services Committee and the House Science and Technology Committee.