For much of New York City’s business community, it’s hard to take Curtis Sliwa seriously.
He seems to sleep in his trademark red Guardian Angels beret.
His high-octane rants in a heavily accented outer-borough brogue can be distracting.
The largest sources of campaign cash barely know he’s running for mayor as the fat cat class courts Eric Adams, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and even the Marxist Zohran Mamdani, who upended the race by winning the Democratic primary.
Yet the last I checked, most Big Apple voters aren’t fat cats.
Sliwa, red beret and all, is within striking distance of frontrunners Mamdani and Cuomo, at 22%, and beating Adams handily in a four-man race, according to a recent Harris poll.
“You guys always say follow the numbers. In a four-way race, I have a path to victory because people actually like me and they have problems with the others,” Sliwa told me in an interview.
Suffice to say, it’s been an uneven trajectory to Sliwa’s current role as the GOP mayoral candidate in a decidedly Democratic city.
I have covered Sliwa’s rise since I was a reporter for the Pace University newspaper back in the mid-1980s, following him and his crime-prevention troops, the aforementioned Guardian Angels.
We have mutual friends and have broken bread over dinner.
And yes, he was wearing his beret throughout our meals.
Ever the showman, he once staged his own kidnapping to drum up publicity.
He was once really kidnapped and shot three times, allegedly as payback for repeatedly attacking the mob for drug dealing.
The shooting nearly took Sliwa’s life, but it didn’t slow him down.
He kept trudging away on TV, as a radio-show host and with the Angels.
He remained relevant as violent crime came back to the city during the Bill de Blasio years and then under Adams, whom Sliwa ran against and lost to by a wide margin.
Money deficit
He’s back at it again and, according to the latest polls, has a shot.
While Sliwa trails in raising money — by a lot (having pulled in just $169,000 compared with $1.5 million for Adams in the latest reporting period), his style of in-person campaigning, not in the Hamptons like Cuomo but on subways and around the five boroughs, seems to be working.
In other words, he’s earned the business community’s attention.
He says that he hasn’t registered with Kathy Wylde of the NYC Partnership, the city’s largest business group, who has been meeting with every candidate except Sliwa — even spending the past week listening to Mamdani’s weird explanations of past socialist ravings about seizing the means of production, defunding the police and refusing to disavow globalizing the intifada.
Sliwa tells me the city’s power brokers are making a big mistake snubbing him because he’s the only true business candidate.
(Wylde says Sliwa, unlike the others, has yet to ask for a meeting.)
He plans to return Midtown to a true business mecca through enhanced crime prevention and by ditching congestion pricing that is reducing retail foot traffic and hurting property values.
He will cut taxes and eliminate swaths of government, like the city’s education bureaucracy that does a horrible job educating kids and does a good job employing loads of bureaucrats.
“Big business is hedging its bets and moving to Florida, Texas, even Tennessee,” Sliwa said.
“It’s impossible to keep them from diversifying but you have to convince them to keep what they have by getting rid of the homeless and making sure women are safe from pervs in the subway when going to work.”
Brooklyn native
Sliwa is a real New Yorker, a Brooklyn native who has never lived outside the city, unlike Adams or Cuomo, the son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo.
He comes from a working-class family in Canarsie, which is far different from the privileged Manhattan upbringing of the silver-spooned Mamdani.
Sliwa’s pro-business policies are why he insists it “behooves” the fat cats in Wylde’s group “to treat me with a modicum of respect. I am here to support small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as the Fortune 500 guys and gals who pay the bulk of our taxes.”
One way to do just that is to address rising crime and keep Adams’ very capable police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, in her job, he says.
“She’s a saint in a cauldron of corruption,” Sliwa said, referring to the scandals that engulfed the Adams administration.
“Zohran would never exist if Adams had been a halfway decent mayor, and I’m the only person standing in the way of a complete socialist takeover of New York.”
Cuomo, in Sliwa’s view, is just as bad, having lost badly to Mamdani in the Democratic primary because of his own skeletons, his handling of COVID chief among them, the Republican candidate said.
“Cuomo’s approvals are as bad as Adams’. People don’t like them. But they like me,” he said.
Mandami might be superficially likable, but he will turn the Big Apple into “a sea of socialism and destroy the city,” according to Sliwa.
More than anything, Sliwa wanted to make clear he isn’t dropping out despite reports he might get a job in the Trump administration to narrow the field and prevent a Mamdani mayoralty.
“No one is going to bribe me from leaving the race,” he said.
In fact, he’s so committed, he pledged to put away his trademark red beret if elected.
“We realize that the beret is a recurring question,” he said.
“When elected mayor, I will retire it.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
