Curtis Sliwa’s tough-guy mien evokes an older New York

IT’S EVERY New Yorker’s lament: the city is full of yellow cabs, except when you really need one. And so, when Curtis Sliwa saw an empty one near his apartment just before dawn one morning in 1992, he felt like he had “hit the lottery”. The driver even called him by name, which he also took as a good sign: Mr Sliwa had been known city-wide since the late 1970s, when he created the Guardian Angels, a citizen-patrol group dedicated to stopping crime on New York’s subway system.

In fact it was an ill omen. Halfway through the ride, Mr Sliwa explained, “some gorilla pops up” from under the dashboard and starts shooting. Mr Sliwa tried to escape, but the handle came off in his hand. After fighting with the gunman, he launched himself through an open window, collapsed onto the pavement and wound up in intensive care: he had been shot in the stomach and legs. This was just days after he came out of a cast following a baseball-bat attack by three men who “rearranged my medulla and cerebellum”.

Mr Sliwa is unlikely to win next Tuesday’s mayoral election in New York. The latest poll shows Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, with 44% of the vote; he is ten points ahead of Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after Mr Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary. Mr Sliwa, the Republican nominee for the second straight election, has just 11%; 7% of voters are undecided. But he has had a more colourful life than both of his rivals combined.

Whereas Mr Mamdani is the expensively educated only child of a filmmaker and a Columbia University professor, and Mr Cuomo’s father was a three-term governor of New York, Mr Sliwa, born in 1954, was raised in Brooklyn by a merchant-marine father and a dental-technician mother. He worked at a petrol station, and was night manager of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Bronx in 1979, when he started “the Magnificent 13”, the forerunner to the Guardian Angels.

More than 1,700 people were murdered in New York that year. The city’s homicide rate was 22 per 100,000 residents—more than five times the rate last year, when it was one of America’s safest big cities. Around 250 felonies per week (13,000 per year) occurred in the graffiti-covered subway system. Mr Sliwa and his Angels, conspicuous in their red jackets and red berets, had some martial-arts training, but carried no weapons when they patrolled the trains in four-man teams. (Mr Sliwa still wears the cap.)

Although plenty of riders welcomed their presence, others thought them ineffective, inadequately trained or vigilantes stirring up trouble. Mr Sliwa says their numbers swelled quickly, though some accused the group of curtailing training to boost their ranks. Ed Koch, the mayor at the time, thought Mr Sliwa was more interested in publicity than in stopping crime—and indeed Mr Sliwa later admitted that some of their more famous early “crime-fighting” escapades were staged. Their ranks dwindled as New York grew safer, but had a resurgence after covid and some horrific attacks on the subways last year.

But Koch had a point: Mr Sliwa loves the limelight. He also loves to talk and loves a good scrap: he once chugged a container of salt on air to protest against Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s salt-reduction initiatives. He parlayed his Guardian Angels notoriety into a long career hosting radio talk-shows, where he discussed, among other things, “the geriatric, espresso-sipping psychotic killers of organised crime”.

He had a particular loathing for John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family, who died in 2002, and his associates. Mr Sliwa said they drove him into “an orgasmatic verbal frenzy…because I know they’re degenerates”. Gotti’s son, John junior, was charged with orchestrating the baseball-bat and taxicab attacks on Mr Sliwa but was not convicted. (The two have since crossed paths in—this will surprise precisely zero New Yorkers—Long Island and Staten Island.) Mr Sliwa has a softer side. He is an animal-lover; he lives on the Upper West Side with his wife and six cats.

With his tough-guy demeanour, Italian-American inflections and chin-jutting braggadocio, he seems an avatar of an older New York. His platform emphasises law and order: he wants to hire more cops, pay them more and put more of them on subways. His housing policy is anti-developer but pro-landlord—tailor-made for outer-borough neighbourhoods with a lot of single-family homes and a fear of greater density. And he wants to cut corporate taxes and streamline the permitting process for businesses.

He is closing his campaign in places where he is best known: the outer boroughs, the airwaves and the subway. He boasts that he’s the only candidate who presses the flesh each day on the city’s trains. And while he has faced intense pressure to drop out, and even claims to have been offered $10m to quit, he has vowed to fight to the end. ■