Show notes
Curtis Sliwa became famous by stepping in where the government was falling short. As the New York mayoral candidate told Reason's Jesse Walker, the Guardian Angels—the anti-crime patrols that Sliwa launched in New York City in 1979—were born because "the government completely failed us….We filled the gap." In the years since then, Sliwa has expanded the Guardian Angels to cities around the world, launched a multidecade career in talk radio, confessed that some of his organization's early crime-fighting exploits were hoaxes, and survived a very real assassination attempt allegedly ordered by the Gotti family. Now he's aiming to be mayor, running both as a Republican and on an independent Protect Animals ballot line against the self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the scandal-plagued incumbent, Eric Adams. Sliwa's thoughts don't always follow predictable lines. On immigration, he cheers crackdowns on "the bad hombres, the drug dealers, [and] the gangbangers" but warns that "everybody should be afforded due process….You don'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." He shrugs at market solutions for housing—"I don't trust the developers, I don't trust the realtors"—while blasting the city for mothballing thousands of public apartments. He thinks marijuana should be legal and fast food should be more tightly regulated. He's fine with President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to police D.C., but "if he would've tried to do it in New York City, I'd say, 'Whoa.'" Walker interviewed Sliwa twice in August for a Reason profile—once while Sliwa was campaigning on the subway and in East Harlem, and once in the Manhattan building that houses the candidate's campaign HQ. This is the second of those conversations. Transcript This interview is edited for style and clarity. Jesse Walker: You're listening to Reason. My name is Jesse Walker. Our guest today is the founder of one of the best-known organizations of crime-watching citizen patrols, the Guardian Angels. He's also a long-time veteran of AM talk radio, and now he's the Republican nominee to be mayor of New York City. So Curtis Sliwa, thank you for joining us. Curtis Sliwa: My pleasure. And let's not forget the first ever independent line Protect Animals, no-kill shelters. That's coming up later in the interview. But yes, you're also running as the Protect Animals candidate. One reason it's been especially interesting to watch you run a political campaign is because for a lot of your career, and especially at the very beginning, you felt like an almost anti-political figure. In 1981, you told High Times magazine, "I can have more of an effect on a person's day-to-day life, through the patrols, than I could as governor." You said, "I'm into getting people to do things for themselves, purely and simply." So tell me what's changed, in the world or in you or in both, that's led you to think, in fact, now you can have an effect in office—maybe not as governor, but as mayor. Having been a student and watching the body politic from the outside first. When I started the Guardian Angels, government completely failed us. We were at the point in New York City, we were imploding from a fiscal mess, which was based on the corruption in New York City. We wanted to be bailed out by the federal government because of our own greed. And Gerald Ford, who was the president who had taken over after [Richard] Nixon fled after Watergate, was on the cusp of actually granting New York City a Chapter 11, which would've had a dramatically negative impact on all the municipal bond markets, on the economy, and would've given others an opportunity to basically say, because we were corrupt and we had our beak in the trough, we too can just slash budgets. At that point, especially at night, there were no visible transit police patrolling from five at night to five in the morning, which are the off-peak hours. We filled the gap. Now, since, obviously, government got back to doing what they were supposed to do with the tax dollars. And I observed it from the Democrats, I observed it from the Republicans, because I've been involved with both, and I saw that, yeah, you could make a change because the political process now is stagnating the city. I view myself as the mayor of all the people because I've earned that right by the fact that I've been out in the subways and the streets for so many years, constantly talking to people, which is something these candidates just won't do. A lot of the press coverage so far has presented this race as you, [Mayor Eric] Adams, and [former Gov. Andrew] Cuomo sort of competing to be the anti-socialist candidate, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I think it's also true that we're watching you and [Democratic candidate Zohran] Mamdani sort of competing for the anti-establishment vote. How are you reaching out to the undecided voter who may be sick of people like Adams and Cuomo, but they're not sure if they want to go with Mamdani or with Sliwa? I view the three of them almost the same. To me, Mamdani is Coca-Cola, the real thing. He says, "I'm a socialist." I understand socialism and communism. Most other people don't. But when it comes to Eric Adams, and especially Andrew Cuomo, now the way he…free bus fare, free subway fare, free college free, free, free, free, free. He's trying to become the uber Zohran Mamdani in his rebirth as the zombie politician. I look at them like Diet Coke. They have more in common with Zohran Mamdani than they do with me. I am the outlier. I don't have friends who are funding me who are billionaires or millionaires. I have raised now $2 million in matching funds, the average donation being $119. I will match that again at the end of the month. I am truly the candidate of the people. I don't think you can say that any longer of Zohran Mamdani because he has gone through a metamorphosis. He was out in the streets; now he's protected by armed [New York Police Department] officers driven around in an SUV. How is he different from Adams or Cuomo or any of the other traditional politicians other than his politics? I think I'm more of a people's candidate than anybody else. Although I disagree with all three of them on policy issues. Obviously, I don't fear Zohran Mamdani like the rest of society. As a student of history, which none of these candidates are, we've had socialists in elective office in New York, we've had communists in elective office. Somehow, our society has survived. In fact, when we look at Fiorello La Guardia, he was a liberal Republican who ran in the American Labor Party as a socialist. He ran as a Socialist for Congress. Exactly. So the point is, oh, the fear, fright. We've had communists in the city council. In fact, I remember a guy named Michael Quill, head of the [Transport Workers Union] Local 100, who spoke with a brogue from Ireland, he represented all of the Bronx when the electoral process was you could have city council people representing a district and also boroughwide. He was a registered member of the American Labor Party, which was the party of Henry Wallace, who was thrown out of the Democratic Party to make way for Harry Truman to become the vice presidential and true candidate for [Franklin D. Roosevelt]. So we've had a history of this and people are fear, fright, hysteria, hype. It's enough already. We have [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [I–Vt.], we've had AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)], we have now Zohran Mamdani, we're going to have other socialists. That's a problem for the Democratic Party. If they don't want socialists in the Democratic Party, why did they let Bernie Sanders run for the presidential nomination when he's never been a Democrat in his entire life, never had the D in front of his name? That was to benefit Hillary [Clinton], who didn't want to be seen as having a coronation. A lot of people have called you a NIMBY ["not in my back yard"] candidate. Do you think that's a fair description of you? I wouldn't say that. Because I do represent the interests of the outer boroughs, the blue-collar working class, people who have homes who've invested everything into that house, the American dream. Now we're being told by developers and realtors who were wined, dined, and pocket-lined [by] Eric Adams, and obviously Andrew Cuomo, that they don't have to live up to any restrictions any longer. When I was a kid, I learned in public school that there was something called the community board that Robert Wagner created because he realized city hall had too much power. You had a community board you had to deal with. You had a local City Council person you had to deal with. And more importantly, you had zoning restrictions. Under Eric Adams and Cuomo, and to a degree Zohran Mamdani on a different level, they don't believe in zoning anymore. You shouldn't have to go to the elected person that you put in charge. You shouldn't have to deal with a community board. You shouldn't be able to bring in the bulldozers, put up a 40-story apartment building in the middle of a residential area. And guess what? No parking, even though the infrastructure can't support it. To me, that's insanity and it will force the blue-collar working class to finally leave the city. Without them, we cannot survive. We can survive without the billionaires because they're hedge fund guys. They're always half out, half in. They go to Florida, they have a pied-à-terre apartment here in New York. They have a shingle in New York. They have a shingle in Florida. They know how to work the system. Blue-collar working class people don't. If they lose their house, if they don't have their house or they don't want their house any longer, they're out of here. And we must keep them here. That's why my whole campaign is based on: improve, don't move. I'm trying to convince people not to flee. Do you think they need to build more housing somehow in the city? I mean, if you're going to bring the costs down, you're going to want to build more buildings. Whoa. Whoa. Really? Yeah. When has it ever brought costs down? One of these greedy developers and realtors who have been given tax abatements for 40 years promises that they're going to have affordable housing, and then all of a sudden….Look at the Barclays Center, a perfect example. Who developed the Barclays Center? [Bruce] Ratner. He said, "I'm going to make sure that people have affordable housing here." [Letitia] James, to her credit, when she was a city councilwoman, member of the Working Families Party, stood up to him and said, "We will never have affordable housing." To this day, they are in court because they promised that they would create affordable housing. They never did. I don't trust the developers, I don't trust the realtors. I do trust homeowners and those who own properties in the outer borough, small properties, who have decided not to sell and leave. And, in fact, abide by the rules. The big developers and realtors, they're always trying to influence their ability to make money by backing up candidates, and it's never to the benefit of the people in the outer boroughs, who really are the backbone of the city. What about being able to convert commercial properties to residential and increase supply that way? Do you think that can be done? Can you change zoning in that way? It has to be done. I walk through the canyons of Manhattan every day, and about half the actual commercial property above the street level is empty. They're never going to be able to get tenants any longer. They don't need the square footage. They can operate without it. It's a virtual world. It's an economy that can operate globally out of Waterloo, Iowa. They don't need to be in New York City. They don't need to have a shingle. We haven't recognized the fact that we have a lot of this empty space, and now finally there's a move to convert it to residential housing, which is important, but I don't think that's the end-all and be-all. We have 100,000 apartments that are already mothballed in warehouses. The city is sitting on 6,000 in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] public housing. How could this city mothball 6,000 available apartments for people? Only 30 percent pay rent. The others can't afford to pay rent. How do they keep 6,000 apartments off the marketplace and then tell everybody else they can't mothball their properties? It's, again, a process of "Do as I say, not as I do." The big battle now is [between] Cuomo and Zohran. The rich kids on the block [are] battling. Wait, you have a subsidized rental apartment, Zohran, that you don't qualify for? And it turns out Cuomo, as governor, created that caveat in the law that would allow Zohran and others at their income level to have this property, that is a subsidized rental property. And you say to yourself, this is not what the people want to be talking about. We want to find out why 35,000 of these units are mothballed and why in the surrounding boroughs that I'm more interested in—Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx—you have people who own two-family, three-, four-, five-family homes. Now, when somebody dies or leaves, or they finally get rid of a squatter, [they] will not rent the apartment. And they need to be talked to. What can we do to get those units back on the market, because those could be readily available? All these other gargantuan ideas. In five years, we'll have 5,000 apartments. In 10 years, a million apartments. Get out of here. What drug-induced psychosis is Eric Adams in, or Andrew Cuomo, to just constantly be the propaganda vehicle for developers who want to be able to develop and don't care what the results leave in the outer boroughs of the city of New York. There's something else that gets called a NIMBY issue, though I don't think it really fits in this case, which was the community gardens. You told The Village Sun last year you'd be willing to be arrested to protect the Elizabeth Street community garden. As far as I'm concerned, those people took a patch of land that nobody was using and they built something there, and it should be their property—it shouldn't even be the city's property. What can you do to establish people's right to urban land that they've transformed like that? There are other magnificent examples. I would say Elizabeth Street Gardens stunned me. Because I was used to walking over to [Sarah D.] Roosevelt Park along Chrystie Street of the Bowery. It's a mess, a disaster now, because it's a haven for drug users, drug dealers, homeless, those who are destitute, those who are emotionally disturbed, and the city's done nothing for them. A block over, my wife said, "Why don't we go over to Elizabeth Street Gardens?" I had never heard of it. I walk halfway down the block, I think I'm in, oh my God, this is like Europe, the way it's structured. I've been to Europe. I've seen some of their parks, which are magnificent. And it's a haven. It's a refuge for people in the area, especially the elderly, the young, the millennials, the Gen Zers; they all come together. It makes you feel better. Just sitting there, I felt so much better. And I said, What? You…
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