The Man in the Red Beret: What Curtis Sliwa Brings to New York's Wild Mayoral RaceThe Guardian Angels founder battles Zohran Mamdani for the anti-establishment vote while he fights Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo for the anti-socialist vote.
Jesse Walker
8.27.2025
Long before Curtis Sliwa became the Republican nominee for mayor of New York, long before his multi-decade career as a talk radio host preaching law and order, long before he launched the beret-sporting volunteer crimewatch group known as the Guardian Angels, he was a high school student at Brooklyn Prep in Crown Heights. Heading to school in the early '70s, Sliwa would sometimes spot the Maccabees, a mostly Hasidic organization that patrolled the area to protect Jews from muggings and other assaults.
A couple blocks from Brooklyn Prep, Sliwa would watch Black Panthers serving free breakfasts to undernourished kids. Passing through East Harlem, he'd see the Young Lords, a militant group aligned with the Panthers; they impressed him, he recalls, by trying "to convince Puerto Rican gang members to serve the community, not war against one another." He liked something else about those last two groups too: "The beret that the Black Panthers and Young Lords wore," he says, "gave them an organized look."
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Sliwa started thinking about ways someone might combine the parts he liked from all those groups into an effective organization. The result debuted in 1979, when Sliwa—by then a 24-year-old high school dropout managing the night shift at a Bronx McDonald's—convinced 12 friends to start patrolling the subways with him. They didn't call themselves the Guardian Angels yet: They were the Magnificent 13, named for the gunslingers hired to protect a village in the old western The Magnificent Seven, though these particular protectors didn't sling guns or any other weapons. The multiracial formation did its first patrol on the No. 4 train on February 13, 1979.
Forty-six years later, I follow Sliwa as he steps onto another subway. He's still sporting a red beret, but today he's wearing it with a coat and tie, not a Guardian Angels shirt. He's riding the No. 6 train to meet the voters.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2025/08/27/the-man-in-the-red-beret-what-curtis-sliwa-brings-to-new-yorks-wild-mayoral-race/
