The Man in the Red Beret: What Curtis Sliwa Brings to New York's Wild Mayoral Race
The Guardian Angels founder battles Zohran Mamdani for the anti-establishment vote while he fights Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo for the anti-socialist vote.
Long before Curtis Sliwa became the Republican nominee for mayor of New York, long before his multi-decade career as a talk radio host preaching law and order, long before he launched the beret-sporting volunteer crimewatch group known as the Guardian Angels, he was a high school student at Brooklyn Prep in Crown Heights. Heading to school in the early '70s, Sliwa would sometimes spot the Maccabees, a mostly Hasidic organization that patrolled the area to protect Jews from muggings and other assaults.
A couple blocks from Brooklyn Prep, Sliwa would watch Black Panthers serving free breakfasts to undernourished kids. Passing through East Harlem, he'd see the Young Lords, a militant group aligned with the Panthers; they impressed him, he recalls, by trying "to convince Puerto Rican gang members to serve the community, not war against one another." He liked something else about those last two groups too: "The beret that the Black Panthers and Young Lords wore," he says, "gave them an organized look."
And in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Sliwa's half-Polish, half-Italian family lived, there were the Concerned Citizens of Canarsie. They were militant too, but in a different direction—this was a white group best known for protesting plans to bus schoolkids across town for racial balance. But the organization would also discuss other issues affecting Canarsie, Sliwa remembers, "such as what to do with garbage in the streets, rabies-infected wild dog packs which were menacing people, and also teenagers drag racing." Like the Maccabees and Panthers and Young Lords, they were "highly organized and results-oriented."
Sliwa started thinking about ways someone might combine the parts he liked from all those groups into an effective organization. The result debuted in 1979, when Sliwa—by then a 24-year-old high school dropout managing the night shift at a Bronx McDonald's—convinced 12 friends to start patrolling the subways with him. They didn't call themselves the Guardian Angels yet: They were the Magnificent 13, named for the gunslingers hired to protect a village in the old western The Magnificent Seven, though these particular protectors didn't sling guns or any other weapons. The multiracial formation did its first patrol on the No. 4 train on February 13, 1979.
Forty-six years later, I follow Sliwa as he steps onto another subway. He's still sporting a red beret, but today he's wearing it with a coat and tie, not a Guardian Angels shirt. He's riding the No. 6 train to meet the voters.
"Public transportation is the way to find out what's going on in the nation," says Sliwa, who is running for mayor not just as the GOP's candidate but on an independent Protect Animals ballot line. "It's a great focus group. Anybody who has any complaints, they're gonna bring it to you."
Some of the commuters here have an issue or two that they want to get Sliwa's views on. (Among other plans, he wants to hire more cops, rein in developers, slash taxes on small businesses, raise taxes on Madison Square Garden, audit city agencies, roll back bail reform, double the parks budget, and crack down on cruelty to animals.) More often, they just want to talk with Sliwa. The Guardian Angels' fame peaked in the 1980s, but the group is still active and the man is still something of a celebrity, especially in New York. Lots of people want selfies. The older folks call him Rock, his nickname when he started the Angels, and shout things like "I remember you!"
In an election that's already been shaken up by one outsider candidate—Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist assemblyman who upset former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary—Sliwa is yet another wild card. In his earlier bid for mayor, in 2021, he lost to Eric Adams by a 40-point margin. But this time he's running in what is essentially a four-way contest, and the dynamics are different. With both Cuomo and Adams staying in the race as independents, Sliwa frequently polls ahead of the man who beat him four years ago, and he sometimes comes within a few points of Cuomo. A July survey from HarrisX had him just one point behind Cuomo and four behind Mamdani, all three within the margin of error.
"I'm hearing a lot less 'Curtis needs to step aside because we can't have Mamdani,'" says Margaret Powers, secretary of the Rockaway Republican Club. She reads me a recent text from another activist: "I feel like if everyone would get in line and vote, we could win."
Granted: Most polls haven't been as favorable for Sliwa as HarrisX, and not every Sliwa fan is as optimistic as the leaders of the Rockaway Republican Club. A Siena survey in August showed Mamdani getting 44 percent of the vote and Sliwa in a distant third place, with just 12 percent. But the sheer volatility of the numbers is reason enough not to ignore this candidate: Even if he doesn't win, he could help determine which of the other men will.
That's not the only reason to keep an eye on Curtis Sliwa. While his signature issue will probably always be public safety, there's a larger worldview lurking behind the crime talk: an instinctive localism that can't always be contained by those familiar political boxes of left and right or libertarian and statist. Mix that with his offbeat history and his talk-radio style, and you've got the most interesting character in the race.
Newspaper Boy
By the time the Magnificent 13 started patrolling the subways, Sliwa was already a media veteran. He had gotten his first taste of stardom at age 6, when he appeared on a 1960 episode of the kids' show Romper Room. In 1970, as he was preparing to deliver the morning edition of the Daily News, he reportedly saved several people from a burning building; that helped earn him an invitation to the White House the next year for President Richard Nixon's annual proclamation of National Newspaper Boy Day. When Sliwa started gathering recyclable trash from Brooklyn's sidewalks and vacant lots, the Associated Press took note and his name appeared in papers around the country. When he organized some kids into a litter pickup crew called the Rock Brigade, the papers paid attention yet again.
But Sliwa's biggest contribution both to civic activism and to filling the news columns came when he turned his attention to crime. New York City had veered up to the edge of bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, then started cutting back services in a desperate attempt to balance the books. So there was plenty of room for citizens' groups to fill the gaps, whether by collecting garbage or by preventing assaults. Recruiting from the Rock Brigade and his McDonald's staff, Sliwa formed what became the Guardian Angels.
With time, the organization was much larger than that original band of 13. The Angels—young, usually black or Hispanic—started showing up on more trains, then aboveground as well. Chapters popped up in other cities. Some groups got aid or training from the Angels but maintained their own distinct identity, like Seattle's Q-Patrol or the San Francisco Street Patrol, both formed by LGBT activists to guard against violent gay-bashers.
It's hard to quantify how much these efforts deterred crime, but ordinary commuters certainly seemed grateful for them. Several press accounts from the time feature grateful New Yorkers approaching Sliwa's crews to thank them for their work. I find it easy to believe those accounts are true, because I can see the same thing as I watch Sliwa campaign. ("I love you!" one older black woman yells as the candidate walks through Harlem. "Oh, God bless you. I remember back in the day, we couldn't go in the subway, we couldn't do nothing, and you cleaned it up with your Guardian Angels!") Once people knew who the Guardian Angels were, just having them around made a lot of folks feel safer.
But first those people had to find out who the Guardian Angels were, and here things could get a little dicier.
A couple months after that first patrol, the Daily News reported that three members of the Magnificent 13 had foiled a gang rape at the Livonia Ave. station. "It was right out of a kung fu movie," Sliwa told the paper, saying that he had kicked a six-foot-six "gorilla" in the head before falling from the elevated platform and hurting his back and leg. "I tried to jack-knife to my feet but landed on my tailbone."
If that sounds more cinematic than realistic, that's because it wasn't real in the first place. This was one of a half-dozen hoaxes that Sliwa later confessed to concocting in the early days of the Angels, partly to get publicity for the group's less glamorous work but also, after a while, because he got high on it. ("It became like an intoxicant, a narcotic," he told the A.P.) The most notorious lie—and, he insists, the final one—came in 1980, when Sliwa claimed that a trio of transit cops had kidnapped and threatened him.
The irony is that by November 1992, when Sliwa admitted that some of those early headlines hadn't been true, some far more harrowing things had happened. Like in 1981, when a confused New Jersey policeman killed a Newark Guardian Angel named Frank Melvin, an incident that inspired the Clash song "Red Angel Dragnet." Or in 1992, when Sliwa himself survived an assassination attempt allegedly ordered by the Gotti mob family.
Sliwa says he made up the kidnapping because some of the transit police really had been harassing his patrols and he wanted to get them off his back. It's not hard to believe the harassment was real. Sliwa has fans on the police force—his own sister worked as an undercover officer for a while—but he's had his share of detractors there too. And he in turn has never been shy about criticizing cops when he thinks they aren't doing their jobs well or have been obstructing his organization.
"Who have been the hemorrhoids most often to Guardian Angels?" Sliwa asked angrily on The Morton Downey Jr. Show in the late '80s. "The criminals, who we're risking our lives without weapons to stop? Why is it that the police have been our major adversaries in the cities around America?"
It wasn't the only time he aimed his fire at the authorities. One reason it's interesting to watch Sliwa run a political campaign is because he started as an almost anti-political figure. In 1981, he told High Times that he "can have more of an effect on a person's day-to-day life, through the patrols, than I could as governor….I'm into getting people to do things for themselves, purely and simply." That same year, he complained to Libertarian Review that government funds can destroy self-help groups if those funds bring bureaucracy and political patronage. "We do not want a program," he said, "where we are located in midtown Manhattan, in a skyscraper office on the 98th floor, with 50 secretaries madly typing paperwork, and with two Guardian Angels (who are the patrol, the entire patrol) who are patrolling the lobby of that building with two $10,000 walkie-talkie units."
Sliwa's vision was more organic, and maybe a bit nostalgic. In "Granddad and Grandma's time," he waxed on that episode of Morton Downey Jr., "whether they were black and people of color coming here in chains and shackles, or ethnic whites seeking political and economic freedoms, or WASPs who were already here, they went through the Depression. We all recognize the Depression was the worst of times for everybody, yet…you could walk through a park at 3 in the morning, you could sleep on the rooftop." And you could do that, he said, "because the criminals were afraid of the community. If some huckleberry came up and bothered an elderly person, just verbally abused him, there'd be 30, 40 people surrounding him ready to rip 'im limb from limb."
These days Sliwa does think he can help people by getting elected to office—in part because he saw crime come down in the 1990s and thinks public officials deserve some of the credit for that. But he's still driven by that vision of rooted communities capable of repelling potential threats, criminal or otherwise.
The Law-and-Order Alinsky
Sliwa hops off the No. 6 train in East Harlem, where he quickly becomes the most popular man on the block. People call out his name. One guy offers him a bag of marijuana. ("No weed, no weed," says Sliwa.) He has a simple formula for making connections with potential voters: He asks where someone's from, then asks where they went to high school, then probably has a story to tell about that part of town. When he walks past a city-funded venue where addicts can shoot up under supervision, a woman outside the center doesn't recognize him at first. But then he says "You know me, I'm the Guardian Angels man" and she goes "Oooohhhh—Sliwa!"
Sliwa isn't a fan of the site. "Why put an injection center here, in this neighborhood?" he declares as we walk up the block. "The people who direct the program and make money from the program don't live in the neighborhood here, I guarantee you that."
"Are you against the idea of an injection center," I ask, "or you just don't think it should be in a residential area?"
"Look, I understand transmission of HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C. I've seen it when they share needles. Very bad. But I also realize that if you're gonna go to the point of giving them a clean needle and safely finding a vein to inject them so that they don't end up with all kinds of diseases and infections, you gotta figure out a way on the drugs." The addicts still have to buy the narcotics they use at the centers—and that, Sliwa says, means trouble: "These people who need a fix are going to get a clean injection, but they're not leaving the area until they can scam some money and come back and get another injection. How they haven't figured this out, how this destroys this neighborhood, is beyond me."
Sliwa is sometimes called a NIMBY candidate—"Not In My Back Yard"—and while he doesn't like that label, he understands why people use it. It usually comes up in the context of housing. Sliwa backs some sorts of zoning deregulation: He wants to loosen rules that keep people from converting commercial property to residential. ("I walk through the canyons of Manhattan every day," he tells me, "and about half the actual commercial property above the street level is empty.") When it comes to areas that are already residential, though, he's a vociferous opponent of Mayor Adams' efforts to give developers more leeway. "They don't believe in zoning anymore," he complains, pledging to restore more power to the local community boards.
But that NIMBY tag isn't just about whether developers should be allowed to put a 40-story apartment building next door. If a group of neighbors doesn't want an injection site, a lithium-ion battery storage facility, or a migrant encampment in their backyard, Sliwa will probably join their protests. When the government threatens to bulldoze one of the community gardens that homesteaders have planted on city-owned land, Sliwa will show up to support the gardeners. If a lot of neighbors see something as an unwelcome intrusion—whether it's public or private, coercive or voluntary—there's a good chance the candidate will take their side.
When Sliwa was little, he lived briefly in Back of the Yards, the Chicago neighborhood that the leftist activist Saul Alinsky helped organize in the 1930s and '40s; he once told the journalist Errol Louis that his father "raised me on Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals." And there is a bit of Alinsky—a law-and-order Alinsky—in Sliwa's willingness to show up for neighborhood groups and let them take the lead in issuing demands.
Not that Sliwa's support is built entirely around hyper-local issues. Almost all the Sliwa backers I spoke with mentioned crime first when I asked why they liked the candidate. It's the issue that made him famous, and it's been on a lot of New Yorkers' minds since the city's pandemic-era spike in violence. (It's on his critics' minds too. The New York Libertarian Party, which lost its ballot access a few years ago and isn't fielding a candidate in the race, posted in June that Sliwa "plays the part of the populist outsider, but his proposals reek of state overreach. From expanding surveillance to promoting police crackdowns, Sliwa's campaign is a love letter to government power masquerading as 'law and order.'")
"I feel like Curtis is going to clean up the city and make it safe like it was when I was 19, 20, 21—1999 through 2002," says Margaret Campione, a homeschooling vegan Republican nanny who plans to start knocking on doors for Sliwa soon. "It's gonna turn back into a golden era of safety on the trains and the subway, and walking around the city at 3 at night, getting some pizza going out late at night with your friends."
Campione lives in one of the city's more interesting enclaves: Breezy Point, a middle-class beach neighborhood with its own brand of local self-reliance—a cooperative owns the land and contracts with private companies for trash collection, road repairs, security, and other services. The population is mostly Irish and mostly MAGA, and a lot of the residents are first responders. When I stop for a Guinness at a Breezy Point bar called the Blarney Castle Tavern, a handful of afternoon customers are drinking while the Little League World Series plays over the bar. I ask them what they think of Sliwa running for mayor.
"Curtis? Why not?" says one.
"Better than any of the other guys," says another.
"You want to talk with Curtis? He'll come in here," says the first. "He's been in here a few times."
But that's about all they have to say. "Not too many people here are into politics," the bartender tells me apologetically. "We'll vote, but that's it."
Far from Breezy Point, both physically and politically, I meet an old friend in the East Village who has a long history of left-wing writing and activism. She has no love for Mamdani, despises the liberal nonprofit complex, thinks the city went overboard housing migrants in hotels and rec centers, and tells me the left has its head in the sand about crime. At one point she says, "I realize I sound like the classic liberal who's been mugged. But I'm not a liberal. I guess I'm like an anarchist who's been mugged." (She clarifies: "A small-a anarchist. The big A is for 'Asshole.'")
You don't sound so far from Sliwa on some of these issues, I tell her. Do you think you might vote for him?
She sighs. "I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for Curtis Sliwa." And then, after a pause: "Where is he on pot?"
'That Gulag in El Salvador'
Sliwa has his complaints about cannabis—he wishes the city would enforce the regulations that vendors are supposed to follow—but he doesn't want to ban the drug. "The people have already made their decision," he tells me. "In poll after poll, plebiscite after plebiscite, they want the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana." He smoked medical marijuana himself nearly a decade ago, when he was suffering from Crohn's disease, and he remembers how hard it was to get permission to use it rather than taking oxycodone or fentanyl. "Things are changing ever so slowly, but not fast enough."
That isn't far from Sliwa's original position on the issue. After he met Nixon at the National Newspaper Boy Day ceremony in 1971, he gave the Daily News an earful about marijuana: "I really think it should be legalized to take the profits out of the hands of organized crime and to give the consumer some protection. The way the situation is now, we're doing crime a big favor." He changed his mind later, opposing the legalization of any illicit drugs in a '90s debate tour with Timothy Leary, before coming full circle to his present position.
The Guardian Angels' broader position on victimless crimes shifted too. In 1981, Sliwa told High Times that a pusher "could have a whole barrel full of cocaine and be walking down the train, walking through the cars and shoveling it into people's noses and giving it away. It's none of our business….Pimping, propositioning, none of our business." By the end of the decade, though, Guardian Angels were getting into fights with crack dealers. And Sliwa doesn't regret that change in policy. As far as he's concerned, sending the Angels to crack down on crack meant protecting neighborhoods from yet another threat.
With immigration, Sliwa's rhetoric may seem to have shifted in the opposite direction, though that might just be a matter of which element of the issue he's debating at the moment. When asylum seekers poured into New York in the early 2020s even as the feds barred them from working, he constantly criticized city authorities for taking public space to house the new arrivals and he sided with neighborhood groups protesting their presence. But now that the outside force is President Donald Trump's crackdown, Sliwa has been aiming fire in a different direction. "Everyone is entitled to due process," he says. "How do I know they are a gangbanger? How do I know they don't have tattoos from five years ago? You know, through rumor, innuendo, or maybe somebody who's a rat, a confidential informer who doesn't like that guy." You shouldn't "just pick them up, put them on Air Con, and take them to that gulag in El Salvador. That's not the American way."
Sliwa's willingness to criticize Trump is not a new development. His voting record crosses partisan lines—he cast his first presidential ballot for Democrat George McGovern, he strongly backed Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and in the 2010s he took over the New York remnants of Ross Perot's old Reform Party. When Trump first ran for president in 2016, Sliwa flirted with voting for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, but he was turned off by Johnson's "What is Aleppo?" gaffe and wound up writing in himself. When Trump ran for reelection in 2020, Sliwa voted for an independent, the child actor turned crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce. He might not have joined the GOP at all if then-Gov. Cuomo, angered over the Working Families Party's support for Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 gubernatorial primaries, hadn't pushed through stricter ballot access rules, decimating the state's third parties.
"The Reform Party, that I was chair of, whacked," says Sliwa. "The Independence Party, whacked. The Libertarian Party, whacked. The Green Party, whacked. They were all good parties. All because of his desire for blood feud and vendetta." (Ironically, the Working Families Party survived.) So Sliwa joined the Republicans, won their nomination in the 2021 mayoral race, and now is carrying their banner again.
He finally did vote for Trump in 2024, preferring the Republican's positions on crime and the migrants. But he hasn't exactly been rushing to associate himself with the man in the White House. When a rumor circulated that Trump might endorse Cuomo for mayor, Sliwa put out a statement asking the president to "stay neutral, like Switzerland." Not to back Sliwa—just to butt out of his backyard.
The Anti-Establishment Vote
Before I came to New York to meet the candidate, I called Ron Kuby, a leftist lawyer who spent years as Sliwa's talk-show foil on WABC-AM and MSNBC. Sliwa "has virtually no chance of becoming mayor, but he doesn't want to be mayor," Kuby contended. "But if success is defined by more people paying attention to Curtis than have ever paid attention to Curtis before, even at the height of the Guardian Angels and the various hoaxes that propelled him into the public eye, Curtis has succeeded. This is what Curtis wants: people to pay attention to him."
Sliwa responds with some animated words about his old co-host ("Oh, and Ron Kuby doesn't like publicity? Ha!") and a defense of chasing headlines ("Publicity is important, because how do you get your message out, if nobody is covering it, to the mass majority of people?"). And he insists he isn't in this just for the attention. "I'm not just doing this for publicity," Sliwa says. "I've been doing this service to the community."
Kuby, I should add, had a grudging compliment for his former colleague too. "He has managed to do something that I did not think was possible," he said. "This campaign has become so crazy that Curtis occasionally manages to sound sane."
Jeff Cohen, who used to fill in for Kuby as Sliwa's progressive sparring partner on MSNBC, goes further than that. Cohen supports Mamdani, but he clearly has a higher opinion of the man he used to debate on TV than he does of Adams or Cuomo. "I think the billionaires have their hooks completely into the two alleged independents," he says. Whereas Sliwa "really can speak to any group. He's always been able to speak to various communities of different colors. He's great at that, and he really cares about New York City."
Cohen recalls that the candidate had an economic populist streak that sometimes came out on their shows together, and he likes Sliwa's proposal to end the exemptions that Madison Square Garden and the big private universities enjoy from property taxes. He's less enthusiastic about Sliwa's plan to spend the money he raises that way on police—"If more cops could bring down the crime rate, the crime rate would have been down years and years ago"—but like I said, Cohen is for Mamdani. He still sees a spark of dissent in the Sliwa campaign.
And he's not wrong about that. A lot of coverage has framed this campaign as Adams, Cuomo, and Sliwa competing for the anti-socialist vote, and clearly there's a lot of truth there. But Sliwa is also competing with Mamdani for the anti-establishment vote. The two men have rather different platforms: Mamdani wants to make the city buses free, Sliwa wants to crack down on passengers who don't pay their fares, and you can extrapolate two whole worldviews from those competing promises. But both are aiming their campaigns at New Yorkers who are sick of a governing class that produces politicians like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo.
There is a way to get a free ride on public transit from Sliwa, by the way. After that campaign stop in East Harlem, when he heads back to the No. 6 train, he pulls out a pack of Metro cards and starts swiping in one traveler after another (including—full disclosure—me). "I'm Santa Claus!" he shouts merrily.
The train carries us into the Bronx. By now the other reporters have left and Sliwa has shaken every interested voter's hand. And so the candidate stands at the end of the car, chatting with a campaign aide and me. The talk turns to how Mayor Sliwa might deal with coming cuts in federal funds for the city.
"Having lived through the '70s," he says, "I'm not going to make draconian cuts that force the quality of life just to be so bad that people just pick up and leave."
"What do you cut instead?" I ask.
"You've got to get people together," he says, "and you gotta be realistic with them. Say: 'Look. We're gonna need a lot of people coming together and volunteering to try to fill these gaps. We want to probably have to just allow people to retire without replacing them, and maybe even ask for early retirement. So get prepared. There's no reason why some of this work in the projects can't be done by the people who live there.'"
"Kind of the Guardian Angels model?" I ask.
"Exactly. But it's also what you would always have when you had squatters." He doesn't mean people moving uninvited into someone else's home; he means unauthorized settlers transforming abandoned property. "Sweat equity. Everybody does a little bit of something in order to make the facility run."
It's not the sort of vision I'm used to hearing from a mayoral candidate. But it doesn't sound surprising coming from Sliwa, a man whose worldview was forged by watching Panthers and Maccabees doing grassroots self-help projects; a man who started his civic activism at a time when the city left plenty of gaps for a Rock Brigade or a Magnificent 13 to try to fill.
The good news is that whether or not Curtis Sliwa wins—whether or not you want him to win—there will always be people ready to step up and provide some DIY public services. New York elects a mayor every four years, but some jobs are always open.