Curtis Sliwa, instantly recognizable by the red beret he wears everywhere, has been in the public spotlight for more than 45 years — but he remains, in many ways, an enigma to the city that he has loved, protected and hopes to lead as New York’s next mayor.
Voters looking for a simple, down-the-line liberal or conservative politician will be disappointed — or, at least, confused — by a candidate who resolutely refuses to adhere to any rigid ideology or pre-cooked political platform.
He wants to run our city’s education system, but dropped out of high school himself. As mayor, he’d be in charge of the same NYPD that, by Sliwa’s count, has arrested him more than 75 times.
Sliwa’s gritty, sing-song accent clearly comes straight from the streets, but the ethnic twang isn’t from Brooklyn. It hails from the place where Sliwa spent his earliest years: the Back of the Yards, a working-class community near the slaughterhouses and stockyards on the South Side of Chicago. The neighborhood — the setting of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s novel about the appalling work conditions of the meatpacking industry — is famous in political circles as the place where legendary activist Saul Alinsky first developed strategies that community organizers have been using since the 1940s.
Sliwa, it turns out, got more than just his accent from the Back of the Yards.
“My father was a radical. He raised me on Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals,’ ” Sliwa told me. “He was a delegate from the National Maritime Union, a merchant seaman for 55 years. And so I was immersed in all that radical ideology — unions, solidarity. That was a day where you never crossed a picket line.”
After his family moved to Brooklyn, young Sliwa enrolled in Brooklyn Prep, a rigorous all-boys Catholic leadership academy with Jesuit instructors and famous alumni like John Sexton, the president of New York University; Joe Califano, a top aide to President Lyndon Johnson and a Carter cabinet secretary, and Arthur Browne, who went on to become publisher and editor-in-chief of the Daily News.
Young Sliwa showed early promise as a leader — he was elected president of his senior class — but got expelled for supporting a rebellious student effort to scrap the school’s jacket-and-tie dress code.
“They were kind enough to invite me in, and said: ‘There will be consequences for your actions, Curtis. If you continue with this, we’ll have to kick you out.’ “
And that is exactly what happened.
“I came from the era where you didn’t trust anybody over 30,” Sliwa says now. (Our full conversation is online at “You Decide,” my podcast). “The Berrigan brothers [two famous Catholic antiwar activists] regularly appeared and lectured in Brooklyn Prep. And I would go to some of their lectures about nonviolent passive resistance in the anti-war movement.”
So Sliwa took a series of menial jobs, including as night manager of a McDonald’s restaurant in the South Bronx, where he convinced a group of coworkers — first, the Magnificent 13, later the Guardian Angels — to begin doing safety patrols in a neighborhood overrun by street crime.
“Community organizing is one of the toughest things that you can do out there, because you have to motivate people. You have to convince them, oftentimes through selfless service, to get involved in their community, where at times they may be putting themselves in harm’s way,” he says. “I’ve done this now in 13 countries and 130 cities. I’m a volunteer. I don’t get paid for this. You have to constantly keep motivating men and women of all different backgrounds and young adults to go out unarmed to basically provide peace and security, care for the homeless and the emotionally disturbed in their areas.”
We could do worse than listen to a candidate who has mastered the tricky art of persuading hardened New Yorkers to risk their safety and comfort to make the city better.
Even as a top radio talk show host, Sliwa has put his body on the line, most famously when he used his show to taunt John Gotti and John Gotti Jr. of the Gambino crime family on the air almost daily — and was nearly killed in response, shot five times by in a surprisingly complex assassination attempt.
For several years, I had the pleasure of working with Sliwa when he was a regular on my television show, “Inside City Hall.” He would don costumes and do hilarious mini-skits to mock New York’s political class. It wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it was the kind of satire that required brains, guts, and insight into how the city works.
The Republican and Independent candidate for mayor is a man who has spent a lifetime tangling with street crooks, politicians, mobsters and bureaucrats. New Yorkers who complain that all politicians are dull and predictable have no excuse this year.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
