450 Minutes With Michael Grimm

Out of prison, looking to get back into Congress.

- Olivia Nuzzi

IT WAS FRIDAY, which meant it was Michael Grimm’s cheat day.

The muscle mass he carried during his time as a Marine, as an undercover FBI agent, and even as a congressman has, at age 47, become more difficult to preserve on his naturally slight frame. To fight the atrophy—made worse by the strain of an investigation, an indictment, a guilty plea, a felony conviction, seven months in prison, and another month under house arrest—he exercises diligently. On a high-protein, low-carb diet, he ingests a notable quantity of meat, from chicken cutlets he breads and fries, to filet mignon he grills, to his mother’s meatballs, which she also makes in miniature for Sebastian, her son’s not mysteriously fat Yorkie, whom he calls “a bad boy” in a singsong voice.

On Richmond Avenue in Staten Island on October 13, he sat in a diner booth wearing a subdued-blue suit lined with bright blue silk. His cropped hair was sculpted with product. In Crayola terms, his skin was somewhere between Raw Sienna and Atomic Tangerine. Two weeks earlier, he had entered the Republican primary in the 11th Congressional District, which spans all of Staten Island plus the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, and Dyker Heights. It’s where he was elected in 2010, with no experience but with support from the tea party and prominent Republicans—George H. W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani—who shrugged at his anodyne anti-Washington platform. The New York Post noted his lack of “specifics” when it came to issues.