“Every night, before bedtime, Curtis Sliwa and his wife have a ritual: They watch an episode of The Office and listen to some EDM. “It’s just a real mood elevator,” said the two-time NYC mayoral candidate, who is partial to the German twentysomething deejay BUNT but listens to a wide range of artists in the”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Sliwa, 71, was sitting in an Upper West Side diner on a recent weekday afternoon. Fresh off a drubbing at the polls — his 7 percent was the lowest total for a Republican in nearly 50 years — the Guardian Angels founder bore the look of someone who won. In a way, he had. For decades known primarily to New Yorkers as a reassuring tough guy and — thanks to his sometimes-shameless antics on local TV and radio — object of parody, Sliwa has recently found unlikely national celebrity as a social media folk legend. Many of his stunts, both new and vintage, have recently gone viral on TikTok, and an SNL sketch in November satirizing his debate with Andrew Cuomo and mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani racked up more views on YouTube, 7.1 million, than any other clip from the show this season.
Sliwa is the latest product of this strange, authenticity-seeking moment: a Boomer who, just by being the same blusterily quotable guy he’s always been, has found the culture working its way to him. Die a hero, or live long enough to become Gen Z’s swaggering grandfather.
“They see that I’m a rebel with a cause,” said Sliwa, whose trademark red beret had returned after a brief, jarring absence during the campaign. “I’m an outlier; I’ve never been mainstream. I went out to the districts where the Zohranistas were,” he continued, using his go-to coinage for Mamdani supporters. “And even when they would say they didn’t vote for me, they would say they respected me. They would say ‘I get what you do.'”
What Sliwa has done involves a strange mix of caricature and crusader — he’s a pro-police economic populist — and contradiction. Whenever you think you have Sliwa pegged, he flashes a surprise. He’s a law-and-order Republican who worries about climate change and animal welfare; he’s a streetwise working-class kid who loves EDM. (He picked it up observing the 1980’s rave scene in Europe while training new Angels.) This reinforces the fame. Who cares you were eviscerated at the polls and recently quit your job? (Sliwa last month ended a decades-long run as a WABC radio host after clashing with station owner John Catsimatidis over the latter’s support of Cuomo.) Maverick sells.
A teenage boy outside the diner spotted Sliwa through the windows and burst in. “Mr. Sliwa, my parents voted for you,” he said excitedly.
“Appreciate that. What’s your name?” Sliwa replied, unfolding his imposing frame to stand and greet the boy.
“My name’s Leo,” the teenager replied.
“What school do you go to Leo?” Sliwa asked.
“I go to Wagner,” Leo said. Sliwa’s first question upon meeting strangers is where they’re from (if they’re not native New Yorkers) or what school they went to (if they are), a sorting mechanism that doubles as a bonding tool since he often knows a random fact about it.
“Wagner, right on 76th Street,” he answered. “Well I’m gonna give you a card Leo. Go ahead, scan that and it will tell you everything you need to know.” (The QR code takes you to Sliwa’s campaign page, still active with no signs of easing.) Leo asked for a selfie then breathlessly said “I wish you would have won,” which Sliwa disarmed with an even-keeled “It’s OK” as the boy ran out.
“The new generation had very limited knowledge of who I am and what I’ve done. But this election cycle introduced them,” Sliwa said after Leo left. “I’m at the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village every year, but this year there were all these Curtis Sliwa costumes. Even though they’re Zohranistas.”
The popularity has echoed farther than you’d think. “Anybody met Curtis Śliwa in real life?” a poster recently wrote on the askNYC reddit. “I am from Ireland but somehow over the last few weeks I became obsessed with the NYC mayoral race and I would love to hear some stories about people who might have met Śliwa in real life.”
Long before podcasting, Sliwa was practicing a proto form of the art on the radio. For 30 years he tirelessly gabbed with bravado, if not exactly nuance, about anything anyone wanted to talk about, often with an unexpected verbal flair. Perhaps not since HL Mencken has anyone roasted a politician as colorfully, or rhymingly, as Sliwa’s now-famous “slapping fannies and killing grannies” about the MeToo and nursing-home allegations against Cuomo.
Not hurting (except maybe him) has been a willingness to stand in the way of violent threats — the kind of gesture that plays well with a certain white working-class base. Sliwa went viral during the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 when he and a fellow Guardian Angel (they are not armed) sought to prevent the robbery of a Foot Locker; he ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw.
Sliwa may be the only politician ever to have a comic impersonate him, as Shane Gillis did in the SNL sketch, as a candidate “who has been dangled by my testicles off the Verrazano Bridge by a little-known gang called the Lords of Flatbush.” He hasn’t been, but he was shot by mobsters in the back of a cab in the early 1990’s, allegedly because John Gotti Jr. was upset over what Sliwa said about his father on the radio. And you thought the comments section was bad.
During the race, Sliwa said, he had offers of millions of dollars from no fewer than seven different mysterious callers, all pressuring him to drop out to help Cuomo. He knows who the calls came from but declined to identify them. “When the time comes I will reveal it,” he said. He certainly believes outgoing mayor Eric Adams, whom he repeatedly says is “corrupt and should be in jail,” accepted a payout of this kind before leaving the race. “You mean to tell me he went from calling [Cuomo] all kinds of names to embrace him in a matter of weeks for no reason? Give me a break.”
While Sliwa is concerned about Mamdani’s approach to law enforcement, he is remarkably undisturbed by critics’ biggest knock on the rising Democratic star. “We have to stop with this fear and hysteria. Trump called Mamdani a Communist. He’s not a Communist. He’s a Democratic Socialist, just like I’m a populist Republican.” Sliwa wields his throaty South Brooklyn accent as both comic enhancement and cred-booster, and he’s ratcheted it into gear now. “And it’s not like we haven’t had Democratic Socialists in New York City government. You know who was a Democratic Socialist? [1990’s-era mayor] David Dinkins. Can we stop this nonsense?”
Mamdani’s fiery acceptance speech took him back though. “What happened? This guy was all Sade ‘Smooth Operator.’ And then he comes out after he wins and he’s metal.”
A middle-aged woman spotted Sliwa at the diner and came in to greet him.
“You probably don’t remember me. You lived across the street from my mom on the Lower East Side,” she said.
“Where did you go to school?” Sliwa asked.
“Tilden,” she said, referring to the Brooklyn high school with a diverse alumni roster of Norman Lear, Al Sharpton, the founder of Snapple and the founder of 2 Live Crew.
“Tilden! That’s where my mom went,” Sliwa said. “Canarsie. All roads lead to Canarsie. Good and bad.”
The woman asks Sliwa “what’s going to happen,” seemingly referencing Mamdani. “Everything will be fine, everything will be fine,” he said.
Part of the reason Sliwa says he thinks Mamdani will not be a great disrupter is because he sees the new mayor becoming a part of the system he came to tear down. “Look at who he’s hired. All these institutionalists who worked for previous mayors,” Sliwa said, name-checking some staff appointments.
The Republican says he sees the incoming executive engaging with more special interests than the campaign would have led you to believe. “You saw it a few days later at Somos,” Sliwa said, referring to the Puerto Rico confab where New York pols decamped after the election. “All these guys who hated him couldn’t wait to meet him. They’ve all got their beaks in the trough.” He said he foresaw a rebellion from Mamdani’s base not too far into his term. “Because they were there from the beginning and they’re going to ask ‘where did all these billionaires come from?'”
But Sliwa’s real animus is reserved for Cuomo and those who he says gave him too easy a pass. “I call them the Cuomosexuals. It’s almost like they’re in love with this guy. Me, I felt soiled watching him. I had to take a hot shower.”
Sliwa remains unrepentant about not dropping out in the face of pressure from moderate Democrats — and, in particular, Catsimatidis and the hosts at the station Sliwa says he pressured. Even if his vote total would have exceeded the margin between Mamdani and Cuomo (it didn’t), he says he would have been fine with his choice.
“When I went to school my best teacher, Mr. Topol, in fifth grade at PS 114, said ‘one-person one-vote.’ It wasn’t ‘billionaires, influencers and insiders’ get more votes.’ Where is it written in a rule I have to drop out? What is this nonsense?” He added, “The time to challenge me was in a Republican primary. Why didn’t anybody challenge me? Because they knew they would lose.”
No kumbaya moment awaits with Catsimatidis, he said. “If I walked back into WABC now I’d be like somebody walking into a cage of Doberman Pinschers with porkchop pants on.” Sliwa said he actually wanted to quit WABC after the 2021 election when the Gristedes-owning Catsamatidis, then an Adams supporter, posted a note in the newsroom not to talk about Sliwa on air. But Sliwa needed the money. Now, however, he says an undisclosed source of income has freed him.
Sliwa has remained vague about how he’ll convert his newfound popularity into the next phase of his media career. If a run for Congress is in the cards, the throwback New Yorker is playing it cool; if there are podcast offers, he isn’t saying.
“Anything is a possibility. As long as it coincides with my mission. That’s what people don’t understand. It’s not money,” he said, cranking up the accent. “It’s about the Guardian Angels and animal welfare. If it’s something that helps that, I’ll do it. That’s why we’re here.” He adopted a reflective look. “My mother and father primed me, ‘Do good things and good things will come to you.’ There are the voiceless — animals don’t have a voice, homeless don’t have a voice, the emotionally disturbed on the subway don’t have a voice, veterans don’t have a voice. We talk about all of them but we don’t want to hear them.”
(Sliwa and his Millennial wife, Nancy, a lawyer and politician in her own right, rescued nearly two dozen cats during the pandemic, a fact which caused Donald Trump to snicker that Sliwa was “not exactly primetime” but endeared Sliwa to New Yorkers. “What Trump doesn’t understand is that people have a relationship with their pets like they do with their family,” he said.)
Animal rights is not the only point on which Sliwa criticizes the president. (“I’m no Trumper, and if you ask him he’ll probably not even say I’m a Republican.”) Sliwa offers a non-MAGA choice to GOP voters hungry for a candidate that’s conservative on cops and safety but who sees climate and jobs as issues that transcend partisanship. Sliwa also has driven into the AI-skeptic lane Trump has steered away from. “These billionaires say when they take away all our jobs they’ll take care of us with Universal Basic Income,” he said. “Yeah, right. Take care of us like indentured servants.”
Trump and Sliwa knew each other on the New York scene in the 1980’s, when both were media-savvy upstarts regularly soaking up tabloid ink. The two even found themselves as co-honorees at a dinner for a conservative political group. “I looked at Donald and said ‘you’re not a conservative.’ And he looked at me and said ‘you’re not a conservative.’ So we both just said let’s give good speeches and get the hell out of here.”
Sliwa looked around the diner. “I think today is the best day of my life,” he said, almost out of the blue, quoting BUNT’s summer 2025 remix hit. “Those lyrics say it all. I got up, I’m alive, I feel good. None of the rest matters.”
A moment later a woman in her twenties ran into the diner almost giddy with excitement.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m meeting you Mr. Sliwa. You really put it all out there for us,” she said quickly and nervously, in Spanish-accented English.
“Where are you from?” he said.
“Colombia.”
“And you did you go to high school here or in Colombia?”
“I studied at college here,” she continued, almost hyperventilating. “I’m so sorry, I’m very nervous right now; it’s amazing to meet you.”
“And where are you from in Colombia?”
“Cali.”
“I know Cali, I know Medellin.”
“Thank you so much. It’s amazing Mr. Sliwa, thank you so much,” the woman said, as he handed her a card.