Michael Wolff's journey from local media scourge to national newsmaker

Michael Wolff has, for years, been a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond, using his caustic columns to tear into his lunchmates at Michael’s, the Midtown mogul canteen, and cutting a memorable figure at star-speckled dinner parties, clad in Charvet ties and shirts by the London haberdashery Browns.

His arsenic-laced prose was well known among powerful figures like Rupert Murdoch, whose life Wolff chronicled in a 2008 biography that left its subject displeased. But his nose for first-class gossip kept the machers circling.

Now, the Wolff formula has been applied to a far bigger canvas: presidential politics. It is proving to