In the final stretch of the New York City mayoral campaign, Curtis Sliwa says he was offered $10 million by a group of unnamed billionaires to drop out of the race and clear the way for Andrew Cuomo—so great was their fear of a Zohran Mamdani victory.
What the people allegedly offering that sum couldn’t have known about Sliwa—a veteran of the cutthroat world of this city’s politics—was that he disliked Cuomo far more than he wanted to be a multimillionaire.
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“Zohran was the apprentice; he’d have a learning curve to go through if he got elected mayor. But Andrew was the institution of corruption, and what I reject the most is corruption,” Sliwa tells TIME in an interview one week after the election. “It came out of every pore of his body.”
Sliwa was insulted by the approaches for many reasons—democracy, the law, and his own integrity to name a few. But his experience of Cuomo was right there at the forefront.
Read more: On Patrol With Curtis Sliwa and The Magnificent 13. May 7, 1979
Sliwa, the 71-year-old founder of the vigilante group the Guardian Angels, is wearing his signature red beret and suit and shows little sign of fatigue from the gruelling campaign. Even in a small room in his now-empty campaign headquarters, he speaks in a booming staccato voice, likely a habit from a life spent on the loud streets and subways of New York City.
I keep referring to him as a Prince of Darkness, that’s a clue. I know how he operated. I used to deal with the Democrats, and they were in fear and fright of Andrew. He would hold vendettas, blood feuds and he would be unmerciful.
That is where he was when he first appeared in the pages of TIME on May 7, 1979. A reporter from this publication joined a night patrol of the then 23-year-old’s fledgling vigilante group, The Magnificent 13, in the Bronx. That rag-tag gang would later become the Guardian Angels and expand into dozens of cities across the country, even internationally, focusing on crime prevention and homeless outreach.
In the time since, he has been a talk radio host, survived an alleged Gambino family mafia hit, and devoted years of his life to animal welfare (he owns six cats, down from a high of 17).
He is such a fixture on New York City streets that he says people often mistakenly believe he has been running for mayor for years. He has, in fact, run only once before this year, in 2021, unsuccessfully, against Eric Adams. He received more votes in that two-way race, but significantly more attention in this one.
What might have been another long-shot Republican campaign in a heavily Democratic city took on unexpected weight when powerful interests mobilized against the young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
New York’s wealthy power brokers recoiled at Mamdani’s plans to modestly raise taxes on millionaires and increase the corporate rate.
They enlisted the second-placed candidate in the primary, former governor Andrew Cuomo, to run as an independent. They convinced the then-mayor, Eric Adams, to drop out and endorse Cuomo. They poured money into Cuomo’s campaign.
Standing in their way was Sliwa, who didn’t take kindly to being asked to withdraw.
“Every day was the dropout game,” he says. “I couldn’t answer a question without the first question being, ‘Are you dropping out? Why won’t you drop out? You’ve got to drop out for the good of the city. You’re selfish.’” Sliwa says.
The pressure was public and private. President Donald Trump called on Sliwa to drop out in early September and endorsed Cuomo on election day. There was talk of Republican insiders pushing to get Sliwa a job in the Trump Administration. Behind the scenes, Sliwa, who lives modestly in a 620-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with his wife Nancy, says he was receiving almost daily offers from various billionaires—starting at $3 million and rising all the way to $10 million. The offers were made through old friends of his, Democrats he grew up with in Canarsie and had worked with over the years.
“They would say things like ‘not for nothing, Curtis, you’ve run a great race, but we’ve got to defeat Zohran Mamdani. There’s no pathway to victory for you,’” he says.
Read more: The Billionaires Who Failed to Stop Zohran Mamdani, and How Much They Spent
“The final call, the seventh call, my wife was listening,” he says. The guy says to me at the end, ‘But Curtis Sliwa, everybody has a price. I know you, but you need to live. Why would you say no to this? You can’t win.’”
Sliwa says Nancy, a lawyer, convinced him he needed to go public or risk being accused of playing along.
“I said, okay, I got it. I know how to wire myself up like a Christmas tree. So I announced publicly: any more offers of bribery and they will be recorded… [District Attorney] Alvin Bragg will be listening to your conversations,” he says. “I never got another conversation. Nobody came near me because they figured I was wired up.”
TIME could not independently verify Sliwa’s account.
Sliwa insists there were many reasons he stayed in the race. He was offended to be asked to step aside for the Democrats. He also says he considered it an insult to the voters and to democracy—he believed in “one person, one vote, that’s the way I was brought up.”
But his antipathy toward Cuomo had grown over the years. Today, he can recount deeply disparaging, if unverified, stories about Cuomo’s role in his father Mario’s 1977 mayoral campaign, his time as New York Attorney General, and his years as governor.
Even a week after the former governor was roundly defeated and his political career dealt a deathly blow, it has not ebbed. In an interview that lasts less than two hours, he compares Cuomo to Macbeth, Cain of Cain and Abel, a mob boss, and the “Prince of Darkness.”
Such was Sliwa’s animosity towards Cuomo and the billionaires who rallied behind him that, at times in the campaign, it seemed as if Mamdani and Sliwa were on the same team. Both of them railed against the big money pouring into the race, both criticized the interference of the White House, and both wouldn’t miss an opportunity to mock Cuomo’s cozy relationship with the ultra-rich Hamptons set.
What was perhaps most confusing for Sliwa’s fellow Republicans, and for the billionaires trying to stop Mamdani, was that Sliwa did not fear a socialist mayor.
“Fiscally, I was along Republican lines. But the fear, the fright, the hysteria, is what drove this race,” he says. “I saw grown men and women shaking in the street…’I don’t know what I’m going to do about Mamdani.’ I would try to explain to them that in New York City— since I’m a student of our history—we’ve had socialists, we’ve had communists in our City Council. We had a socialist Congressman …It’s not at all unusual.”
On the debate stage, Sliwa’s most venomous attacks were reserved for Cuomo. Sliwa’s line, “I knew Mario Cuomo. You’re no Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo”—a call back to the infamous line from the 1988 Vice Presidential debate—seemed to sting, particularly since elder Cuomo was an early supporter of the Guardian Angels, once calling them the “best society has to offer.”
Mamdani, when asked how he would vote if the election were ranked-choice, said he would place Sliwa second. “Don’t be glazing me here, Zohran,” Sliwa replied, which caused Mamdani and the audience to burst into laughter.
There were serious disagreements between the two, however. In the same debate, just 15 minutes before, Sliwa accused Mamdani of making statements “in support of global jihad.” That prompted a terse denial on the debate stage and at a press conference in the following days, in which Mamdani condemned the Islamophobia he had faced in the campaign, and noted Sliwa’s comment.
Sliwa says it was proof that Mamdani didn’t really mean his endorsement. “He is deserving of an Academy Award. He is the actor in this campaign. He’s the thespian,” he says. “I protected Muslims for all the years and others in New York State, but it was advantageous at that moment. That gave him a boost.”
Sliwa compares Mamdani, disapprovingly, to former President Barack Obama, calling him a “smooth operator.”
He says he often ran into Mamdani’s supporters, whom he calls “the Zohranistas” (a play on the left-wing Nicaraguan revolutionary movement, Sandinistas), out on the campaign trail, and they praised him for his work with the homeless and with animals. “One thing I’m proud of is I’ve never lost being idealistic,” he says, when trying to explain his good relationship with Mamdani’s supporters.
When all the ballots were counted, Sliwa came away with roughly 7% of the vote. Mamdani won more than 50% of the vote in an election in which more than 2 million people cast ballots—the highest number since 1969. By the numbers alone, Sliwa could say that staying in the race made no difference. Many didn’t see it that way, however, and accused him of being a spoiler candidate.
In any case, there were no surprises for Sliwa: the game was up as soon as the billionaires came knocking.
“I already knew a month before, when the masters of the universe were already planting the seeds,” he says— a term he uses to describe Trump and Elon Musk. “Every day, the President would weigh in one way or another.”
After a combative concession speech in which Sliwa warned Mamdani against turning the city towards socialism, he says his concession phone call was more friendly.
“I said, ‘You should be proud of your Zohranistas. They did the impossible thing. And I hope you do well, because if you do well, the city does well. I wish you the best of luck.’”
Cuomo reportedly did not call Mamdani.
Sliwa is still figuring out his next move. He mentions talk radio, devoting more time to animal welfare, and the possibility of continuing in politics. But while he considers another run for office, he fervently hopes Cuomo isn’t doing the same.
His final message for his rival is blunt: “Slither back under your rock in the Hamptons with your billionaire friends and plan an apology tour to finally correct your revisionism. For the first time in your life, show humility.”
When asked if he has any advice for Mamdani, Sliwa says he should “beware of now all the institutional, long-term Democrats who are there because they have the knowledge.”
But does he have any hope for the young mayor?
“Yeah, because I have hope for anybody who just starts out. You want them to be successful,” he says.
“I believe always, whether they’re your friends or your foes, everybody is entitled to an opportunity, a grace period, to put their agenda into effect. He won a mandate.”