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“I’ve slept three and a half hours a night since June,” Mermigis told me, when I called him recently. “It’s like a John Grisham novel, to be honest with you.” I’d asked how he’d ended up being the lawyer for all these small businesses. “It’s crazy how I’m the only one really that’s doing this,” he said. “In Michigan, you have actual politicians who have sued the governor. A similar thing in Pennsylvania. I have not been approached by one politician in New York to sue the governor.” Mermigis said his anti-shutdown work began with the gyms. In mid-May, the owners of Atilis, a gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey, hired Mermigis as they prepared to stay open in defiance of their state’s shutdown orders. (According to the owners, Atilis has since racked up more than a million dollars in fines.) Not long after, Charlie Cassara, a Long Island man who owns two gyms not far from Mermigis’s office, called him, too.

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