Curtis Sliwa believes New York City is his to lose.

“I’m the next mayor of the city of New York,” Sliwa told The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview. “I’ll bring law and order, quality of life back to the city of my birth.”

The 71-year-old talk show host and founder of the Guardian Angels, the city’s famous volunteer subway patrol group, is the sole Republican candidate in the Big Apple’s mayoral race this November. He’s facing a pressure campaign to step down and clear the way for a more moderate Democrat to defeat self-professed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Curtis Sliwa marches in the 27th annual New York Chinese Lunar New Year in 2025 (Photo by Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images)

Mamdani won the Democratic primary in a bombshell upset last month, and critics argue Sliwa will take away votes from other candidates — like current Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent — who would otherwise have a good chance to beat Mamdani.

Sliwa is certainly facing an uphill battle in his long-shot bid for Gracie Mansion.

Mamdani leads the pack at 35% according to a recent poll, a 10-point lead over former governor Andrew Cuomo with 25%, while Sliwa is in third place with 14%, Adams struggles at 11%, and attorney Jim Walden trails at 1%.

READ MORE: Andrew Cuomo Falls To Radical Socialist Zohran Mamdani In NYC Mayoral Primary

Sliwa takes a different view. He agrees that Mamdani will split the Democratic vote — but he thinks that works in his favor.

“I got 30% of the vote [in the 2021 election]. That’s a lot for a Republican in New York City,” Sliwa said, “and now I’m at the threshold of becoming the mayor because there are now five candidates, and when you consider five candidates, and I start with 30%, you do the math.”

In other words, the Democrats are in chaos, and you’d be wrong to count him out.

Sliwa grew up in Brooklyn in a Polish-Italian Catholic family of five. Even as a teenager, he wanted to make the crime-ridden New York of the ’70s better. At just 16, Sliwa made national headlines for collecting five tons of trash to recycle. Just a few weeks later, he was credited with saving six people’s lives from a fire he saw on his way to work as a newspaper delivery boy, and he was invited to the White House to shake hands with President Richard Nixon.

In his early twenties, Sliwa was a manager at the McDonald’s on the Bronx’s dangerous Fordham Road. He organized the Rock Brigade — Sliwa’s nickname was “Rock” — a trash clean-up crew made up of his McDonald’s workers that would eventually become the Guardian Angels.

“I was a night manager of McDonald’s, Mickey D’s in the Bronx, and I was the closing manager, and it was just chaos and anarchy in the evening hours,” Sliwa said. “I had to take the subways home, and there was such an enormous amount of crime, mostly by gangs. There were no cops because of fiscal cutbacks, so I had to engage young men and young women, many of them Black and Hispanic in the Bronx, and convince them to go out and voluntarily patrol a situation that was completely out of control.”

CANADA – CIRCA 1900: Curtis Sliwa (Photo by Jim Wilkes/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

The Rock Brigade first grabbed headlines for a 60-hour “Marathon Sweep” clean-up of the city that started in Staten Island and ended at Rockefeller Center on New Year’s Day, 1979.

Later that year, Sliwa sat the group down and made an announcement. It was time to take back the subways.

Arnold Salinas, an original Guardian Angel who has worked alongside Sliwa for 48 years and is the group’s senior director of operations, remembers that meeting.

“People were scared,” Salinas told The Daily Wire. “Gangs ruled.”

“You didn’t have the nice flashy trains that are resistant to graffiti. You had blacked out trains. You had gang members defecating right on the train. It was dark. It was scary. It was every bit a horror movie. And Curtis sat us down, a group of us, and basically said, we’re gonna take the trains back from the criminals and give it to the hardworking, decent New York people. And we were like, okay, how are we going to do this? And he literally laid out a plan. He says, we’re gonna patrol the trains.”

The Rock Brigade became the Magnificent 13, which Sliwa later renamed the Guardian Angels — the red-beret-wearing volunteer task force that cleans up and patrols the subways to this day.

A team of “Guardian Angels” meets on subway stairs in 1980

One of the group’s original members, Tom McArdle, remembers how the Guardian Angels “saved lives and shook the political establishment in the city.”

“There was a widespread belief at that time, when Ed Koch was mayor, that the disastrous crime situation just had to be tolerated,” McArdle told The Daily Wire. But Sliwa was “a natural leader and displayed amazing charisma even when he was in his early twenties. He inspired loyalty. He was also tremendously likable and humorous.”

Dominic Serra, an original Rock Brigade member, agreed, saying he was a “really poor kid” from the Bronx whose dad had died, and Sliwa inspired him and gave him the tools for a successful career.

“His heart was in it from the beginning,” Serra told The Daily Wire. “I was impressed with someone who wanted to do the right thing. I was an impressionable young guy and I wanted to do something that was bigger than just working in the McDonald’s, and Curtis provided that for me.”

“He knew how to talk to street kids, very tough street kids,” Serra said, “and he could talk to the press. He was fearless in that he wasn’t afraid to fail.”

Nearly half a century later, the Guardian Angels span 130 cities and 5,000 men and women. Former Guardian Angels have worked everywhere from the White House to Siemens.

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

But as the Guardian Angels grew, so did the target on Sliwa’s back.

In one larger-than-life incident, Sliwa was kidnapped and shot in a stolen taxi by gunmen prosecutors said were connected with mobster John Gotti’s son over comments Sliwa made about the mafia on his AM radio show. The charges against the mob boss’s son were ultimately dropped.

Still, Sliwa never shies away from a fight.

Sliwa said the scene in New York today is reminiscent of 1979. He decided to run for mayor in 2021 in response to the “chaos, mayhem, and corruption” introduced by the last three Democratic administrations.

“When you come to New York City now, they don’t lock up criminals, they lock up toothpaste in retail stores,” Sliwa said. “Mail is being stolen. Anything that can be stolen is stolen, and there are no consequences for those who get caught by the police because of DAs, no cash bail courtesy of Andrew Cuomo, and they get turned right back into the streets. So there are no consequences for your actions.”

New Yorkers appear to agree.

Only 30% of residents said their quality of life was “excellent or good” last year, down from about half who said so in 2017, according to one poll.

More than 60% say the city is on the wrong track, while only 20% believe it is headed in the right direction, according to the Manhattan Institute, and nearly 50% have considered leaving the city over the high cost of living, another survey found this year.

Crime, housing costs, and affordability are their top concerns — and also the issues closest to Sliwa.

“Growing up in New York City was quite the experience,” he recalled. “It was blue collar, working class families that I grew up amongst, and they were all Democrats, and I was taught by my father and mother that the Republicans were the party of the rich, the wealthy, the privileged, the country club class.”

Sliwa said things have changed.

“Wow, when I walk those same streets where I grew up and what they call the outer boroughs, those blue collar working class sons and daughters and grandchildren are now increasingly Republicans,” he said.

Curtis Sliwa in 1982 Photo by Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Democrats have “lost that blue collar identity, and so they’ve lost the soul of New York City. They just can’t identify with average everyday people,” the Republican mayoral nominee said.

One of Sliwa’s top priorities is beefing up the NYPD.

Mamdani wants to replace police with mental health professionals. Sliwa would increase the NYPD by 7,000 cops. He wants to get the force back to where it was in 2000, at its peak, with 40,000 officers. He also wants to deploy 500 undercover cops in the subway and boost police morale after years of anti-cop sentiment by giving officers better hours and bringing back qualified immunity, which protects officers from lawsuits.

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani attends the 2025 New York City Pride March on June 29, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Sliwa has a plan for how to pay for that, too. He says Madison Square Garden, Columbia University, and New York University have to start paying their fair share of property taxes, which he says will bring in $843 million for taxpayers.

“That’s where the money is,” he said. “They need to pay for that because what are they gonna do, leave New York City? No.”

Sliwa takes a hard line on illegal immigration, which brought the city to its knees during the Biden administration.

He was arrested at a protest of New York’s migrant crisis at the mayor’s residence. He also attended a protest against the city’s plans to convert a residential building that had been previously set aside for an affordable housing project into a 169-family homeless shelter.

“We’ve had enough. Manage the shelters that we have,” Sliwa said.

He also has a big heart for the homeless though, Serra, the original Rock Brigade member remembered.

“He’d bring out a bag of McDonald’s to them. He would do that all the time,” Serra said.

In 2021, during his first run for mayor, a homeless man interrupted Sliwa’s press conference at Penn Station. Sliwa responded with kindness, inviting the emotionally disturbed man to stand with him and calling the incident a “perfect example” of Democrats’ failures.

Sliwa has also promised to repeal the “City of Yes” zoning legislation implemented by Eric Adams last December, saying it will destroy the outer boroughs with high-rise apartment buildings and lithium-ion battery warehouses that start fires.

“There’s no zoning restrictions now,” Sliwa said. “You have a mini Chernobyl. Nobody’s gonna wanna insure your house after that. So that is leading to the destruction of the outer boroughs.”

He disagrees that socialism is the solution to New York’s problems.

“Mamdani wants to give everything away for free. Free the rent, free bus fare, free this, free that. It’s very appealing, obviously, to his supporters, but he has no way of funding it,” Sliwa said.

READ MORE: PolitiFact Says Mamdani Is Not A Communist. The Expert They Cite Is A Socialist.

“To the people who wanna know how this might work out, just go to Chicago. Look at what the socialist Mayor [Brandon] Johnson has done there. It is a failed experiment,” Sliwa said, noting that Johnson’s popularity rating has plummeted — it sank to 14%, the lowest in Chicago’s history.

In New York, businesses “have one step out the door,” and Mandami’s plan to tax the wealthy to fund his socialist policies will only lead to a mass exodus, Sliwa said.

“Under Eric Adams, the mayor, there has been the greatest flight of equity, wealth in the history of New York City down below the Mason-Dixon line,” Sliwa said. “If you remember the movie done by Kurt Russell, ‘Escape From New York,’ he’ll have to do the sequel, because everybody will want to flee.”

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 05: New York City Mayor Eric Adams testifies during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on sanctuary cities' policies at the U.S. Capitol on March 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. The hearing comes as President Donald Trump looks to implement key elements of his immigration policy, while threatening to cut funding to cities that resist the administration’s immigration efforts.

Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

When asked why Mamdani, who has been called “too extreme to lead” by his own party won the primary, Sliwa said, “I actually agree with AOC.”

“It’s a generational divide. We’re in an age of rebellion. People are saying, ‘We want change. We don’t want the same old faces. We don’t want Adams. We don’t want Cuomo.’ That’s why they went in the direction of Zohran Mamdani,” he said.

He considers this one of his strengths in the upcoming election.

“I’ve never been in elected office. I’m a fresh face. I’m not a professional politician, and thank God I’m not,” he said.

Last month, a report spread that political donors were trying to push Sliwa out of the race by getting him a job in the Trump administration.

Salinas, the Guardian Angels’ operations director, said Eric Adams was behind that rumor.

“I personally called Curtis when I got that. I’m like, ‘yo, Rock, what’s up with this?’” Salinas said. “But he ain’t going nowhere.”

READ MORE: Eric Adams Takes Shot At Zohran Mamdani As He Launches Reelection Bid

Asked about polls, Sliwa said he isn’t worried.

“Every candidate gets to do their own polls, but the only poll that counts is on November 4th,” Sliwa said. “I haven’t walked in any of the five boroughs or the 350 neighborhoods that make up the City of New York and sensed that anyone is abandoning me from the previous election. The Democrats are gonna cut it up three ways, and that gives me my pathway to victory.”

Even former New York Governor George Pataki thinks he has a chance.

“Curtis knows the city better than anyone else,” Pataki said last month. “This is the weakest Democratic field ever.”

“I very much think he’s the man for the job,” McArdle, one of the original Guardian Angels, said. “So many of the residents of New York City are so far left that he is very much the underdog, but he definitely should not be counted out. He’s been connecting with New Yorkers of every background and ethnicity for four and a half decades.”

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EXCLUSIVE: Why Curtis Sliwa Thinks He’ll Be The Next Mayor Of New York City