Will Thomas June 2, 2007, 10:33 AM

Michael McGee is always being misunderstood.

The alderman for the sixth district of Milwaukee, McGee was arrested Monday on state and federal charges. The federal investigation started back in May 2006, when the FBI caught wind that McGee was strong-arming small businesses in his constituency by threatening to withhold liquor licenses unless they paid him cash.

But federal investigators hurriedly arrested McGee on Monday after, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, they recorded him and two friends conspiring to murder a man named Pierre. The allegations of murder conspiracy have since been changed to substantial battery after the tapes showed one of the defendants deciding he didn’t want Pierre dead but merely to receive a “head-busting.”

McGee’s lawyer Glen Givens calls the whole situation a misunderstanding; at fault is not McGee, but rather the FBI’s complete lack of street cred. Givens maintains that planning to have Pierre get “bust up and beat down” is, at best, a misdemeanor charge. “You have to look at who’s using the language, what community it comes from before you can draw conclusions about what it is that’s being communicated,” says Givens.

Indeed. After all, McGee has been misunderstood before. Like when authorities didn’t think it was constructive political discourse to give out a former School Board Member’s number and say the man should be “hung” for his “betrayal of the community.” Or the time that McGee allegedly told the mother of his child “if you drive by my house, I’m going to kill your ass” during a court hearing in which she was pursuing a restraining order against him.

Unfortunately, the local district attorney John Chisholm is unconvinced. Although he doesn’t believe that McGee intended to commit murder, neither does he look kindly on McGee and friends saying they would be “peeling [Pierre’s] wig back” and “sew his cap together.” Says Chisholm, “I don’t have a degree in street terminology, but the intent is pretty clear…. That is a substantial battery.” The final nail in the coffin for Chisholm is a recording of McGee saying, “that n——r needs some quicksand.” The feds just don’t understand.