The founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa, asserting, “I am the only candidate with the onions to take back the city,” is running for mayor of New York City.
Sliwa tweeted on Sunday, “I am the anti-de Blasio candidate. The part time Mayor ‘Dope from Park Slope’ has single-handedly destroyed our city. Roll with Sliwa through the subways & streets & you’ll see why I’m the only one who can #SaveOurCity.”
I am the anti-de Blasio candidate. The part time Mayor "The Dope from Park Slope" has single-handedly destroyed our city. Roll with Sliwa through the subways & streets & you'll see why I'm the only one who can #SaveOurCityhttps://t.co/pDQ0nGTb0a via @nypost @karol #mta
— Curtis Sliwa (@CurtisSliwa) March 9, 2020
Sliwa, who is now 65 and plans to register as a Republican, told the New York Post, “I am the only candidate with the onions to take back the city. I have the street cred. I have bled in the streets. I’ve given seven lives. I have two left. I’ll use them for the City of New York.”
Sliwa founded the Guardian Angels 40 years ago in order to patrol the subways and streets around New York City. He has said, “When I started the Guardian Angels on February 13, 1979, I thought we’d be earning the Congressional Medal of Honor. I just felt nobody was really doing anything; everybody was just gripped in depression, a lot of anxiety. I said, ‘Look, I’m single; I don’t have a family; I have to ride these trains; I’m coming from Brooklyn,’ which was renamed Crooklyn into the Bronx, which was the belly of the beast. Why not give a try and begin patrolling the trains late at night when we’ve closed the McDonalds and I’m on my way back to Brooklyn? And for years we began to patrol as we do every time this season, right through the summer.”
Citing the city’s new bail-reform law, which has been blamed by the NYPD for the city’s rising crime rate, Sliwa stated, “It took us a long time to crawl out of the belly of the beast of the 1970s through 1990s. Bill de Blasio and the Democrats are bringing us back in.”
Sliwa said he would get rid of the mayor’s security detail, add more police, bring back “pro-active” foot patrols and encourage more organizations like his own to cooperate with the NYPD. The Post added, “He also wants to keep open and refurbish Rikers Island and thwart plans to open jails in the boroughs, as well as opening more psychiatric facilities to aid mentally ill homeless people — calling it an ‘absolute sin’ to leave them in the streets.” Sliwa would champion charter, vocational and trade schools and eject bullies from public schools.
Noting that incidents from his past might work against him, he said, “The only skeleton I have left is the one under my skin.”
Sliwa was shot and seriously wounded in 1992; he claimed that the shooting was prompted by his criticism on his radio show of crime family boss John Gotti Jr’s father. The Post noted. “He’s also survived prostate cancer, painful colitis and Crohn’s disease, which he blamed on the gunshot wounds to the stomach. He underwent stomach surgery after his weight plummeted from 220 to 140 pounds. He said he is now a healthy 200 pounds.”
Sliwa, who has hosted various shows on WABC radio since 1996, concluded, “I feel great. I’m ready to go. I took a licking but keep on ticking.”