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 want to give this to a developer? A greedy landlord to take a wrecking ball to it? We don’t have enough parklands to begin with. We don’t have enough wetlands. And I will not touch any community gardens. Those are labors of love. In the middle of urban development, you have these community gardens, which volunteers take care of. But you see, politicians, all of them, Republicans, Democrats, they’re on the phone all day shaking down contributors for money. And the people who are first in line to give you money are developers and the realtors. They’re not giving me money because they know I want to increase the park budget, I want to leave the wetlands alone, and I want to leave the community gardens alone. And that’s why I said with my wife, “If necessary, I’ll get arrested.” I’ve been involved in civil disobedience. Probably led to most of my arrests, of which have been many. When I believe in a cause, I’m ready to go to jail if necessary.
You said that you think federal cuts are probably coming for New York City. If that happens, how does the city economize?
You mean if [President Donald] Trump would ascend in and federalize the police department. Do what he’s doing in Washington, D.C.?
Well, that was my next question. But if the cuts are coming and you’ve got to start looking at a tighter budget, what should New York City do?
Oh, they are. And they’re coming from two sources. Tom DiNapoli, who’s the state comptroller, has warned Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature, you got a $34 billion gap in this state budget. Unlike the federal government that just keeps printing money, Democrats and Republicans, $37 trillion debt, and it’s rising every second, and they don’t care. Not Republicans or Democrats, they don’t care. You got to balance the budget of the state. You got to balance the budget with the city. Even though you can use creative bookkeeping to sort of push it up to the next year, a $34 billion gap means the state is going to have to cut back on its contributions to Medicaid and education, clearly, which is very important to the New York City budget.
Eric Adams, who’s trying to do anything to survive in this election process—he’s last in the polls—has an election-year budget in which he’s playing Santa Claus with money he doesn’t even have. No reserves. No rainy day fund. Spending money that we don’t have. And it’s sort of like you’re going to get $10 billion less from the Trump administration, we know that already, plus they’re going to cut their contribution to NYCHA, which is 60 percent. And the state is going to have to cut back. They’ll have no choice. And you have a $118 billion budget, with the Department of Education growing in leaps and bounds with 100,000 less students. One third of the students every day are truants. Two thirds of the students in fourth grade can’t read, write, or do arithmetic at grade level. Two hundred schools with 200 less students. And you’re not combining them, because the [United Federation of Teachers] runs the Department of Education, the union.
Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and then obviously learn to live within our means. Which we had to do years ago when we were on the brink of fiscally dissolving. And you had a financial control board, that still exists, it’s in mothballs, in which the bankers and the union leaders bailed this out and kept us afloat so that we didn’t dissolve. I don’t want to go back to then, I remember living through that. But these elected officials, Democrats and Republicans, they think they can just keep spending money. And that starts at the top with Trump in Washington, the Republicans, the Democratic minority, and naturally the Democrats who have a stranglehold on city government here and state government in Albany.
The last time New York was in that situation, that’s when the Guardian Angels came along. There were lots of people trying to do these little local self-help efforts to try to fill the gaps where the government wasn’t doing things. Do you think that’s going to be necessary to have that sort of thing again?
Absolutely.
Do you think there are ways local government can foster that, or get out of the way of that, or in some way help more of it happen?
Get out of the way. Government knows nothing about volunteer service because it’s a bureaucracy of 300,000 employees that’s based on civil servants. I get it. You got to have that. You got to have the professionals. You got to have the year-to-year, day-to-day government that really runs this city. You think the elected officials run this city? I know, from both Democrats and Republicans, all they do all day is have press conferences and pick up their phone and shake down contributors. The real work is being done by the staff of these men and women who are the permanent government of the city and state. What I’m going to do is elevate them, because a lot of them are dedicated men and women who have anonymity. No one’s ever put them on a platform and said this is the expert when it comes to fiscally being functional with common sense. I want to let that man or that woman speak on my behalf, I’ve got to sign off on it but I’m not omnipotent. I’ve lived through [Mayor Bill] de Blasio, who was a disgrace. I’ve lived through Cuomo, who fled Albany. And I have now lived through Eric Adams, who is corrupt. And they’re always the ones talking. It’s like sometimes you listen to them, and I happen to be an expert in some of these fields, and I say they know nothing about nothing. How about letting the people who do all the heavy lifting, who prepare the policy, to actually speak, the men and women who’ve dedicated their lives? That’s going to be a big change in government.
And volunteer organizations are going to be raised up on a pedestal. Give you a perfect example: auxiliary police in the city of New York—it’s about 4,000. When’s the last time they ever got any kind of pat on the back? They dress them in police uniforms. When there are parades and special functions, they put them out there amongst the regular police. This way, you think they’re more police than there really are. I have yet to see them give a ceremony where they’re acknowledging the volunteer service of these men and women who are very dedicated, who have other professions. Maybe they couldn’t be police or didn’t want to be police. But you create camouflage, you put them out there to give people the impression that there are more cops than you really have. That’s what I call “tricknology.” That tricknology ends when I’m the mayor. We’re going to give credit where credit is due. A lot of it is going to be to volunteer organizations that need a little bit of help from government, like rescuers of animals. A little bit of help. They don’t need a lot. They can do a hell of a better job than what government is doing in killing animals and euthanizing them and not really setting up structures that are animal-friendly.
This week, or at least the week we’re recording this, Donald Trump’s been talking a bunch about crime—often thought of as your signature issue. His solution is to federalize things, centralize things, send in the National Guard. What are you thinking as you watch that? What do you think of what he’s doing?
I have Guardian Angels in Washington, D.C. It is a federal city. They patrol southeast Anacostia. When you have 12-, 13-, 14-year-old kids who have guns doing carjackings and there are no consequences. And crime takes place. Now, the only reason that the Trump administration is doing this is that a number of people who work for government—and this has happened before when [President Joe] Biden was in control. I remember when [Rep. Grace] Meng [D–N.Y.] was robbed at gunpoint. This has happened on a regular basis. Well, guess what? Yeah, crime is out of control in D.C. and it affects mostly the poor, the indigent, and predominantly black population.
So, because it is a federal city, I don’t have any problem with Donald Trump doing that. Now, if he would’ve tried to do it in New York City, I’d say, “Whoa.” I know how bad New York City was in the ’70s: 2,100 murders a year when David Dinkins first became the mayor. Ten thousand unsolved shootings. I get that. That’s not where we are now. We don’t need to federalize the police. We don’t need the National Guard here. Although Kathy Hochul, that sanctimonious hypocrite said, “Oh, crime is down in the subways.” Well, why did you send in the State National Guard into the subways if things were so safe? Why did you send state troopers into the subways if things were so safe? And then you go on these occasional rides in which you’re taking selfies with 10 state armed troopers around you. Hey, Kathy Hochul, why not ride the subways like I do and see what your opinion is going to be afterwards? I would force all elected officials and their staff to ride the subways, take the buses. Within a week, things would be totally different because they would be forced to use it.
Looking at what Trump’s doing in D.C., do you think it’s going to make a difference or is it security theater? I saw footage of Drug Enforcement Administration people marching on the Washington Mall, which is not where drug crime happens. Do you think it’s going to actually make a difference or make things worse?
In the Southeast, where I’m very familiar with, and also in the Northwest, absolutely. I think it will. Obviously, Donald Trump, the president, likes to put on a show to show strength. And a lot of this is preemptive. It’s sort of like before they come into the neighborhoods: We are serious. Look at who we’re bringing in. We’re not playing around. We’re going to follow up on warrants that were never followed up on by the Washington, D.C., police, or the prosecutors were never actually charging you with crimes. We’re now going to throw it to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney of Washington, D.C., who does know how to do these things. You can complain about some of Donald Trump’s appointees, but I know Jeanine Pirro. She was the [district attorney] in Westchester. She’s knowledgeable about these kinds of things. And by the way, she ran against Andrew Cuomo for state attorney general, and she’s the one leading the investigation into them because he committed perjury when he was on the Hill talking about the deaths and needless deaths of 15,000 elderly because of his gubernatorial executive order during the lockdown and pandemic.
You’ve been critical in the past of New York’s status as a sanctuary city. At first I had the impression that you were supporting the feds’ attempt to end that, but then I saw you saying that you thought this was something for the people of New York to decide. It wasn’t clear to me if that meant you thought there should be a referendum or if you thought, well, they vote for you, then they’re voting against it. Where do you end up now?
I trust people. I don’t trust politicians, even if the people make a decision that does not jibe with my ideology. I personally am opposed to sanctuary cities. A mayor, though, has what they call charter revision ability. Eric Adams, for all of his bullshizzle talk—and that’s what it is—could have put it on the ballot these two past years. I would’ve loved it, because this is arguing principles, not politicians. It would’ve caused people on both sides of the issues to have town hall meetings, debates. It would’ve encouraged votes like we’ve seen in California and Arizona, where they do a lot of initiatives, a lot of referendums, and I think it’s good for democracy. Let the people vote.
They voted in term limits for the city council. A lot of people were complaining about that: If we had somebody who’s 90 years old, we wouldn’t have these socialists here. Well, guess what? As AOC said, this is a generational change. Baby boomers, you’re no longer in charge. Let the people make the decision. In fact, because there was an initiative referendum on ranked choice voting, people overwhelmingly voted for that. What has the opposition said? They didn’t even understand it. You see, whenever you don’t get what you want, you call the other side: “Well, they don’t know. They’re stupid.” Get out there and debate them. Let’s have nice town hall meetings, which is the basis of our country starting in New Hampshire. And then if one side prevails, you always have an opportunity maybe two years later revisiting it in an initiative and referendum.
The people who don’t like initiative and referendum are the professional politicians, because they want to make all the decisions after being wined, dined, and pocket-lined by the lobbyists. That’s when the lobbyists come front and center. If there is an issue, one way or another, they sweeten up the politicians, Republicans and Democrats.
On the subject of sanctuary cities, you’ve been critical of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] recently. I saw on Bloomberg Radio you said, “If you want to preserve business, you can’t be dragging people out of the backs of restaurants in the hospitality industry who are not criminals.” If the city doesn’t want to cooperate with ICE when the Trump administration tells it to do that sort of tactics, is that bad?
You have to sit down with [White House border czar] Tom Homan. You got to sit down with [Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem or people that she delegates to deal with the Northeast sector, and say, “Hey, look, I get it, bad hombres. We’re all on board.” When the Trump administration first went after the bad hombres, the drug dealers, the gangbangers, the narcoterrorists, the sex traffickers, people in the neighborhoods were applauding them. Finally, somebody is dealing with them. But they 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. You charge them in an American court. If they plead out, which most times they do, or they’re found guilty, then and only then you begin the proceedings of deportation. That’s the way our country exists. You want to change your laws, fine, change your laws. But the way it is now, everyone is entitled to due process.
You are snatching up a gangbanger, right? 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, and suddenly, “Oh, yeah, that’s MS-13.” “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s Trinitarios, the Dominican guy.” How do we know they’re not setting people up? Everybody should be afforded due process.
Now, I know that’s not what Tom Homan wants or the president wants or Kristi Noem, but that is the law of the land. We need to follow the Constitution. We need to follow what America is about. And if you’re not happy with it, you change it legislatively and then it works its way up to the United States Supreme Court. That’s the checks and balances. Executive, legislative, judicial, which I’m all in favor of. And, as mayor, I know with some of the decisions I make, the executive decisions, the next place is going to be the courtroom, civil libertarian union. Every group that has lawyers are going to want to go into court and sue me and sue the city. And I’m going to tell 1,000 corporation council members lawyers who get paid by taxpayers, you’re going to go in there and fight. We’re going to win some. We are going to lose some. But people want to know a mayor is trying to protect their tax dollars, which this mayor does not do, Eric Adams, he folds like a cheap camera.
Let me read you another quote from that old High Times interview from way back in 1981.
Sure.
You said 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”—meaning the Guardian Angels’ business. “Pimping, propositioning, none of our business….But God forbid someone should interfere with a person, harass them, rape them, beat them, savage them, steal their personal property, vandalize. We’re going to be there to deal with them on that.”
Now, that was in ’81. Later in the ’80s, it’s different; your views seemed to shift. At the same time that you had the Guardian Angels getting in fights with muggers and skinheads, they were getting in fights with crack dealers doing some citizen’s arrests.
Looking back now, of those two approaches, which do you think was better?
Well, crack, nobody had ever experienced anything like that. It hit the inner city hard. There were crack houses. The police didn’t know how to deal with it, and I saw whole neighborhoods being destroyed. And because the police were not engaging, I decided to mobilize the Guardian Angels, who were all volunteers. They didn’t have to do it. And we went into those communities and we cracked down on crack. So, yeah, my opinions did change quite radically at that point. We weren’t talking about hashish any longer. We weren’t talking about marijuana. We are talking about…
You did say cocaine in the first quote, though.
Yeah. But let’s face it, back then, to afford powdered cocaine, you had to have some dinero. You had to have some money. Crack, man, crack was wack. Remember the [Keith] Haring artistic piece, “Crack Is Wack.” And it destroyed a whole generation. What I said back then is there were studies saying we’re going to feel the ramifications of this well into maybe 30, 40 years from now, from the crack cocaine babies whose mothers may have been using crack when they were being birthed. Whatever happened to all those studies? The crack cocaine babies.
Those kind of got debunked, right? Because a lot of it was just women in poor circumstances, and that was not being accounted for when they were following the babies. Was it because of the crack, or was it because of the situation they were born in?
I followed up when I talked to the emotionally disturbed and the homeless in the subways, most of whom were African American, most of whom once I befriended them, and I do befriend many of them. “Did you grow up in a crack house?” “Yes.” “Were they using crack in your house?” “Yes.” “Was there traffic in and out?” “Yeah.” Remember, we’re not talking about people who are not in control of their mental faculties. They can have conversations; they’re people too. A lot of them can trace some of their problems to when they grew up in a crack house. Neurologically, we know it causes damage just like fetal alcohol syndrome. Nobody’s going to argue against that. But I noticed that all of those studies went away. And yet I’m dealing with men, 40, 50 years old, some women, who grew up in crack houses, there may be some linkage but they don’t even want to discuss it anymore. It’s like an Etch A Sketch, like it all went away.
But it could just be that you’re growing up in those circumstances and you’re not getting the parenting.
No, look, it could be any number. To just completely discount a 10-year era that plagued the inner city. The same thing in the heartland of America, meth, which affected the white poor. I remember being in Springfield, Missouri, you couldn’t find a black person. They were all whites. They’re scratching on the ground at four o’clock in the morning for meth. It was no different than what I saw in Hunts Point, or I saw in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. I’ll never forget that. Scratching for crack. I saw blacks in one area, Hispanics in another, whites in another, and I even saw Asians, who I never really saw, involved in the crack cocaine business at four o’clock in the morning scratching for little particulars of crack. That was an epidemic, and we never really adequately dealt with that.
I’ve got one more drug question for you before we move on. I read an interview you gave to the Daily News way back in 1971 when you were one of the Paper Boys of the Year and met Nixon. Then your employer interviewed you, and you started talking about marijuana, and you said this, “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.” I think that kid made a lot of sense. What do you think about what he said now?
Back then it was ragweed. Your parents would say, “Don’t smoke that marijuana.” It was really ragweed, oregano, or whatever, you thought you were getting a buzz. Now the strains are very scientifically created for what kind of a feeling you want.
The people have already made the decision. In poll after poll, plebiscite after plebiscite, they want the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana. It started with medical marijuana. I had to use that as an alternative to [oxycodone]. I mean, I was on severe oxys. I was using fentanyl because I had ileitis, colitis, and Crohn’s disease. Which, having been shot five times with hollow point bullets, I’d rather you shoot me with five hollow point bullets than Crohn’s disease. I was having no luck with the painkillers. The only thing that was working was medical marijuana. And when I was in the hospital after an eight-and-a-half-hour operation, and they gave me Tylenol with Percocet, and I had a violent reaction to it, my wife Nancy said to the doctor, a really good man, “Why don’t you just give him medical marijuana?” “No, they’ll remove our license here at the hospital.”
What? You can give fentanyl strips, which they could. They used that on me. Thank God, it gave me some relief. You can give Percocet laced with Tylenol. You can get oxy’s. But you couldn’t give medical marijuana. Finally, things are changing ever so slowly, but not fast enough. The people want the recreational use of marijuana. There’s no way to stop it.
I commented on that because Nixon had launched his war on marijuana, spraying poisons in the field of Mexico, Acapulco gold, everything we saw from Cheech and Chong movies. We never won that war. It’s very difficult to win a war on drugs. We’re starting to move in that same direction. And some of the leaders in these nations are saying to us, “You declare a war on drugs, and you’re really declaring a war on the government, because then we are left with the responsibility of dealing with these narcoterrorists.” If the Trump administration is going to be serious about this—they’re treating narcoterrorists as if they are a global terrorist organization—you better follow through. It better not be half-assed, and then you leave that country with a mess as a result. Because there are a lot of countries that are paralyzed by the narco terrorists that operate within the borders of their country.
When I was watching you campaign in East Harlem a couple of days ago, we passed by a restaurant. I think it might’ve been Popeyes, something like that. You told me you agreed with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about unhealthy food, that it’s almost as bad as drugs. Do you think that’s something regulators like RFK Jr. should be doing more about, or do you think that’s more for families, schools, communities?
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with RFK Jr. over the years. I’ve actually known him. We disagreed and agreed. But when he said sugar is a killer, he couldn’t be more hopelessly right. It’s a killer. And the fast food industry, of which I was a night manager of Mickey D’s, I know it well, has put more people in the intensive care unit and in the emergency room. Which is bad for them, bad for their families, and bad for our health care costs, and we just keep pumping that out. So I think what RFK Jr. is doing now and labeling sugar a poison, which it is, and labeling fried foods especially as an unhealthy alternative to healthier foods, absolutely has to be done. If I were the spirit of Ray Kroc or Popeyes or Kentucky Fried Chicken, all of these outlets, they made a lot of money, billions of dollars. But how many people have ended up going to the ICU and the ER?
Now, they make a choice to go. But I think in the inner city, there aren’t that many different choices that you have in terms of readily available food.
People are going to McDonald’s because they like McDonald’s. I mean, McDonald’s tastes good, right? It is not like it’s that hard to get something else if you don’t like McDonald’s.
The elite, they have Whole Foods. They have Trader Joe’s. There’s no Trader Joe’s in the hood. There’s a very limited supply of healthy foods in the hood, and most of your shopping is going to be done in your neighborhood. I myself, famished, I walked around Kennedy Fried Chicken, Kansas Fried Chicken. Oh my God. I’m saying if I only eat one piece, I’ll take the fried part off here, I’ll probably end up in Bronx Lebanon Hospital. The food choices are extraordinarily unhealthy, and you addict people to that. That’s part of an addiction process. Food is the number one thing you get addicted to, especially sugar. And they put sugar in everything. I’m blown away sometimes when they say look how much sugar is in….You are kidding. And I used to be addicted to Coca-Cola, two 68 ounce bottles of Coca-Cola a day when I would be doing all shifts on talk radio, a.m. and p.m. And I realized, my God, this is crazy. I’m surprised I didn’t get diabetes. I’m surprised I didn’t end up in the ER time and time again. That was just by luck. But especially black and Hispanics, even more so Hispanics now than blacks, incredible numbers of people with diabetes, who are sick, obese. Why? Because of the food they eat.
So white privileged people who are liberals, progressives, they got their Whole Foods, their co-ops, fresh food. You don’t see any of that in the inner city neighborhoods. I know, I’ve lived in inner city neighborhoods. I never saw it then. I don’t see it now.
Speaking of talk radio and your old Coca-Cola habit: Before I came up here, I called your old lefty co-host Ron Kuby to talk about you. He said you were a lot of fun to work with. He said that he learned a lot about doing good radio from you. And he also said this, when I asked whether he thought you had a chance of success in this election: “It depends a lot on what you mean by success.” He said you, Curtis, “have virtually no chance of becoming mayor. But he doesn’t want to be mayor. He doesn’t have the desire to do the work that a mayor has to do. 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.”
So imagine I’m the ghost of Ron Kuby, your old sparring partner. What do you say in response to that? And more broadly, that’s one of the things that people say when they criticize you—they say, “He likes publicity, but what does he do? Can he be a mayor?” What do you say to them?
Oh, and Ron Kuby doesn’t like publicity? Ha! He’s pointing at me and there’s two fingers pointing back, the protege of William Kunstler. So if publicity is a crime, let’s see. Growing up in my era, we would have to put his mentor, William Kunstler, and Ron Kuby in a jail cell with [civil rights activist] Al Sharpton, with [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D–N.Y.], with Donald Trump, and Curtis Sliwa. We would all be cellmates.
But you know something, I’m not just doing this for publicity. Publicity is important, because how do you get your message out, if nobody is covering it, to the mass majority of people? But I’ve been doing this service to the community for 46 years, and all across the world. And people seem to like Curtis Sliwa. You look at the favorable ratings. That’s really what polls are about. Not numbers. Numbers can change. Unfavorable Cuomo, 60 percent. Unfavorable Adams, 69 percent. Favorable Zohran Mamdani. Favorable Curtis Sliwa. We have the best chance of getting elected, because people like us. We have some people that really don’t like us. Obviously, with Zohran it’s an extreme of one or the other. But those two guys, the traditional politicians, they’re dead on arrival.
So Ron Kuby is entitled to his opinion, but this is the same guy who testified against me in the John Gotti Jr. trial. How do you testify against me when I was the victim of John Gotti Jr. and the Gambino crime family? That’s something that he’ll have to take to his grave.
The friendlier spin on that question that someone else might say, is that you’ve been a talk radio guy since 1990. And as you know, the best place for a radio host is in opposition, so you can be on the attack. How do you establish that you’re ready to have the mindset of the guy who’s not in opposition, who’s ready to be the person who’s responsible for decisions? And how do you convince the voters who think of you as the guy on talk radio and as the guy doing street theater, that I’m also ready to be a mayor and that this is a different mindset?
I am a follower of street theater. I think that is so important. Satire and lampooning elected officials, I’ve done that my whole life. That’s the beauty of America; you get to do that. When you are the guy in charge and you get to call the shots, you are going to be lampooned. People are viciously going to be attacking you, and rightfully so. That’s part of your First Amendment right of free speech, and we always want to preserve that. Because all around the world, where I’ve traveled, in most parts you can’t do that. Your life is threatened if you do that, or you are ostracized. And that helps keep you on point.
Because I’ll never forget the time I was with Henry Cisneros in San Antonio. He was the mayor. He was on his way maybe to becoming the first Latino president. Harvard-educated, very bright. Unfortunately, the FBI said he lied about having an affair when he was the secretary of HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development]. And it was Cuomo who replaced him. And then he became the head, I think, of Telemundo. I haven’t heard from him since.
He said, “Curtis, I want you to come with to what I have to do once a month as mayor of San Antonio in the bullpen.” I said, “What do you mean, they haven’t outlawed bullfighting here?” He goes, “No, no. We don’t have bullfighting. I have to sit there for four hours and every community organization just lays into me and I have to have dialogue with them in front of everybody.”
I thought that was the best. Talk radio will prepare you for that so you can be quick on your feet and answer. Now, if you’re throwing out there bullfeathers, the people are going to sense that and they’re going to get back to you.
That’s the kind of style of leadership that I’m going to give. I’m going to go into all these neighborhoods because they say, how are you going to deal with all these socialists, DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], Working Families Party councilpeople? They’re the majority. They are on the city council. But I learned that from Melinda Katz, who was the mother of my two youngest sons. When I was with her, she was a city council person, head of land use, borough president. She’s now D.A., Democrat. And she always told me, “You know what a councilperson needs? Discretionary funds.” I said, “Oh, so you can put your name on the garbage can that’s on the corner to say provided by Melinda Katz or this councilperson.” She said, “No, you got to understand we have certain capital improvement projects that the community wants. We’ve got to deliver or we may not get reelected.” And I realized that.
So you go into the belly of the beast when you’re not liked, you do a town hall meeting where you get lambasted, you’re beaten up. Then afterwards you have a meeting with the local city council person who piles on. Then you finally say, “You got it out of your system. Is everybody OK? I get it. I get it. I learned a lot today. But I know you have these capital improvement projects that you’ve promised to deliver on. How can I help you do that? And all I want is one vote from you. What’s that? I want you to vote to eliminate the horse carriages in Central Park, which the council refuses to do. I’m not going to be greedy and a pig. I just need your one vote on something that, come on, even you would admit it’s something we should outlaw. It’s barbaric.”
And again, you’ve got to pick your shots. You can’t be adversarial like the mayor is. He doesn’t even visit a city council district unless there’s a ribbon cutting for a new nightclub and then he stays till the break of dawn. That’s not visiting constituents. I learned that. Bill de Blasio, although a failed mayor, had been in the city council. He understood it. He did it better than Eric Adams. And I’ve learned from Republicans and Democrats what you have to do to make government work. Now, will it work all the time? Of course not. There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be times that I’m knocked down, technical knockout, and you got to take your lunch. You got to take a licking and come back ticking and not make it personal. It’s not personal. This is the business that we have chosen, politics. I understand what they need. I understand what I have to do for all the people, including those who don’t like me. And it’s up to me to control my temper and not be a talk radio show host when I’m mayor of the city of New York. And I know I can do that.
I’ve got a dozen more questions I want to ask but I know you need to go running to Fox News. But thanks for coming and I really appreciate it.
My pleasure. Anytime.
- Camera: Kevin P. Alexander
- Audio Production: Ian Keyser
