SCANDALAPOLIS #3

Doug Grow: Did Green Dean take the long green?

Dean Zimmermann, a crook? A corrupt public official? It doesn't seem possible.

The Minneapolis City Council member is many things.

He can be an agitator. The Green Party member agitated the DFL so much a few years ago it banished him.

And he is a remnant of the 1960s. He's a 63-year-old hippie who still talks a lot about peace, justice and love.

Friday afternoon, for example, he gently agitated the news media gathered outside his home on the 2200 block of Clinton Av. S for a news conference.

"Welcome," he said to us. "It's hard to get the press down in this part of town."

He continued the gentle jab at the media with an invitation to supper.

"Supper's served across the street in about an hour," he said, pointing to a church where meals for the poor are dished out.

And Zimmermann, aka Zimmerperson, can be a wild-eyed futurist. He's furious, for example, because the City Hall crowd doesn't take him seriously when he talks about a personal rapid transit system as the answer to the city's transportation woes.

And he can be a really bad dresser. Friday, when meeting the media, he was wearing rumpled trousers and a shoe with a hole in it.

He's got other issues, too.

He likes country music. He was born in North Dakota. He's a handyman by craft, not some fancy college guy. He never distanced himself from convicted developer Basim Sabri. When biking to work, he sometimes goes the wrong way on one-way streets and often does not wear a helmet!

But a corrupt pol?

His friends can't believe it. And, truthfully, I don't want to.

Yet, the feds' affidavit appears convincingly damning. The feds claim to have recordings -- even video -- of Zimmermann willing to sell his City Council vote on a zoning deal for $7,200. In the end, Zimmermann is such a powerless council member he can't deliver anything to the feds' cooperative witness.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is this: If this stuff is true, it's dead-on, off-to-prison-you-go corruption.

So, here is my dilemma: There are the very bad, very specific allegations in black-and-white on one hand. On the other hand, there's the down-home niceness of Zimmermann and his spouse, Jenny Heiser.

Go back to Thursday afternoon. Out of the blue, 10 FBI agents had rumbled into the Zimmermann-Heiser household and grabbed every computer and every personal file and every bit of campaign material they could find.

After the FBI left, Zimmermann sat at his dining room table stunned, friends say. Heiser busied herself in the kitchen, cooking up a storm, because she knew people would be stopping by and it would never do not to feed guests.

And people did come by. Friends. Neighbors. Members of the Green Party.

Farheen Hakeem, the Green Party's candidate for mayor, was among those who went to give comfort to Zimmermann.

"People would just go up to him and hug him and say, 'We know you're a good person; we're with you,' " Hakeem said.

And there was this little view of Zimmermann at the session with the media Friday.

With his political life on the line, he was passionately reading a simple statement. "Speaking on behalf of the poor and oppressed and generations to come is not always popular, but it is necessary."

As he read, he was interrupted by an angry homeless man. (The modest Zimmermann-Heiser home is across from a shelter, a haven for abused women and the aforementioned church where the hungry are fed.)

"Why don't you talk about the homeless?" the man yelled angrily.

The man's interruptions continued.

Zimmermann didn't flinch. Instead, after finishing his statement, he took the man into his house and a few minutes later, the homeless guy came out wearing a "Zimmermann" campaign T-shirt.

(The new T-shirt didn't placate the man for long. While reporters tried to ask questions of a Zimmermann campaign worker, the homeless man started yelling again. He also tried to hustle money from reporters for food. He had no chance with the media crowd.)

There are a million nice little stories about Zimmermann.

But now there's one huge document filled with very brutal, very specific allegations. Source: Star Tribune, September 10, 2005