Mike Wallace, the man who has caused despots to blanch, left four-star generals apoplectic and brought CEOs to tears, yesterday played the "I'm just an old man, what could I possibly do?" card over his arrest Tuesday night on a charge of disorderly conduct.
It all started when the "60 Minutes" correspondent pulled up in a hired car at Luke's Restaurant on New York's Upper East Side to pick up the order of meatloaf he'd called ahead for.
The outlaw Mike Wallace: In case you haven't heard the news yet, he's an 86-year-old man.
(Jennifer Graylock -- AP)
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While he was inside, two Taxi and Limousine Commission inspectors began to interview his driver, who was illegally double parked.
According to various interviews Wallace gave, when he came out of the restaurant he asked what was going on, nice as you please, and the officers kept yelling at him to "get back in the car."
"And suddenly, I found myself up against the car with this arm and that arm being hammered, and cuffed. Hard," Wallace told CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley for a story that ran on "CBS Evening News" last night.
Wallace insisted to Pelley that throughout the fracas he was "as polite and respectful as a reporter trying to get a question answered." Which, when you think about it, coming from the man who turned ambush journalism into an art form, isn't saying much.
The two inspectors say Wallace became "overly assertive and disrespectful," interfering with their ability to perform their duties, the Associated Press reported. They said they asked Wallace to step away from the car but he refused and lunged at one of them, according to the New York Post.
"I'm an 86-year-old man," Wallace reminded a bunch of times yesterday. Besides, he told various news organizations, he's so old that these days he has trouble lunging into bed, lunging in the kitchen -- he apparently has trouble lunging.
Anyway, the inspectors took him to the 19th Precinct station, Wallace reports. He was released after being issued a summons for disorderly conduct and told to appear in court in October. Maximum penalty: 15 days in the slammer.
According to Wallace, the police at the station, unlike the two Taxi and Limo inspectors, knew who he was and treated him with proper deference.
"I sat there for an hour or so and [the police] said, 'Okay, we know who you are, we know what you do, we have no problems with you,' " Wallace told "Entertainment Tonight."
Yesterday afternoon, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg got into the act during his daily news briefing.
"Why a man in his eighties was so threatening that they had to arrest him, when they normally don't arrest anybody, certainly gives you cause to ask the question," Bloomberg said, from which we gather he doesn't watch "60 Minutes." The mayor added, "You can rest assured we will be looking into it."
Arrived at the office in a black and soured mood after teeth-and-savings-account cleaning by dentist, steeled for another of those dreary, slow-news August days that do so much to darken a daily TV columnist's outlook.
