As New York’s improbable mayoral race barrels toward its conclusion, Curtis Sliwa, the flamboyant Republican nominee running in third place, is pushing hard to convince voters he is a serious contender.
He has largely eschewed the stunts that marked his 2021 campaign against Eric Adams. He has at times doffed his trademark beret and swapped out his red bomber jackets for muted suits. And at a debate among candidates last week, he openly acknowledged his hope that New Yorkers would see him as someone who “exceeds all expectations and looks very mayoral tonight.”
Buoyed by a warm reception of that night’s performance, and defying his low polling numbers, Mr. Sliwa has now dug in, refusing calls to drop out of the race and insisting that his experience leading a once-prominent citizens’ patrol group has prepared him to run America’s largest city.
But a look at the state of that group, the Guardian Angels, reveals an organization marred by mismanagement: It has lost its tax-exempt status but continues to solicit donations online, all while exaggerating its presence around the United States and the world.
The most recent tax returns on file for the group, formerly a nonprofit charity, are for the year 2019. As a result, the government revoked its tax-exempt status in 2022, for noncompliance.
And although the Guardian Angels website claims dozens of chapters in cities like San Diego, Tucson and Milwaukee, as well as international branches in Spain, Italy, Mexico and South Korea, the reality is more complicated, records and interviews show. An email to the Tucson chapter bounced back. A phone number for the Los Angeles chapter had been disconnected, and, on its Facebook page, the San Diego chapter announced last year that it was no longer active.
Even its presence in New York City, where it once boasted of having more than 1,000 participants, has been diminished in recent years. It now claims just 150 members in the city, and 50 junior members.
Mr. Sliwa has defended his stewardship of the organization but, in an interview, acknowledged its recent management troubles. He blamed the loss of its tax-exempt status on a previous accountant, Rafael Alvarez, who he said had duped the Guardian Angels into believing its paperwork was in order for years. Mr. Alvarez, a Bronx-based tax preparer known to some customers as “The Magician,” was charged last year in a $145 million fraud scheme, and sentenced to prison in May.
The Guardian Angels, Mr. Sliwa said, are now working with a new accountant and petitioning the I.R.S. to reinstate their tax-exempt designation.
“We were not aware of it,” Mr. Sliwa said of the tax forms not being filed, adding that in 2020, 2021 and 2022, he had personally gone to the accountant’s office and reviewed and signed tax forms, which he said were never filed.
Michael Bachrach, a lawyer for Mr. Alvarez, said in an email that he was not able to comment on Mr. Sliwa’s version of events.
Even so, the group’s website still describes the organization as a tax-exempt nonprofit and prominently features a red button encouraging donations, potentially running afoul of the law and exposing donors to risk should they try to claim donations that are not legally tax-deductible, experts said.
As for any claims of a wide national and international presence, Mr. Sliwa also acknowledged that some information on the Guardian Angels site was out of date.
“Some of those chapters did lapse,” he said, adding that, since the pandemic, some groups around the world had lost volunteers while others pivoted from crime-fighting to passing out blankets and water to the poor.
“The kind of people that we attracted initially no longer seem to want to join because now we have become a group that is out there helping the homeless and emotionally disturbed,” he said.
Still, patrols have continued in a variety of locations.
In Gothenburg, Sweden, a group of seven Guardian Angels runs weekend safety patrols; the group once had 25 members, Mikael Liljeroth, who founded the chapter in 2020, said, but members continue to make citizen’s arrests, distribute clothing to the homeless and run a sponsored minibus for women who might need help getting home after a night of drinking or celebrating.
In Turin, Italy, a group of 15 volunteers runs patrols on weekends, calling the police if they see a crime and distributing food and clothing to the homeless, said Angelo La Torre, who founded the chapter in 2017.
“We’ve intervened in risky situations,” Mr. La Torre said of the group. “When we’re on duty, we’re always on high alert because something unexpected could happen at any moment.”
He said he had never met Mr. Sliwa in person but added that they had spoken several times on video calls. He said that he found Mr. Sliwa inspiring.
And in Mexico, there are four separate chapters, with a total of 50 members, Christian Dominguez Alcántara, Mexico’s Guardian Angels national director, said. The 20-member Mexico City chapter, he added, was the most active. The Mexican Guardian Angels are more careful about intervening in crimes, he said, focusing on youth outreach and assistance to the homeless.
“In Mexico, organized crime is in collusion with or part of the government, so it’s not safe to fight it directly because here they kill you just for speaking out about the issue,” he said. “But we have programs and campaigns to get young people off the streets and away from drugs and gangs.”
In the United States, some chapters, including ones in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, are smaller than they once were, but still hold frequent meetings.
“I’ve stopped crime with the Guardian Angels. That’s what we do,” said John Ayala, commander of the Washington division, which currently has about 12 members, he said.
Mr. Ayala said he has known Mr. Sliwa since Mr. Ayala joined a street patrol of the New York City Guardian Angels in 1984, at the age of 14. He said he had moved to Washington in 1989. Since then, he said, it’s become more difficult to recruit new members, but they continue to attract a handful each year.
“The Guardian Angels are a group of people who go out and if you snatch a purse, we will chase you,” he said.
If some claims on the Guardian Angels website stretch the truth, it would not be a first for the organization, or for its leader.
During the 2021 mayoral race against Mr. Adams, voters were reminded of Mr. Sliwa’s past penchant for falsehoods. In the 1990s, after riding high on tales of the Guardian Angels returning a wallet full of cash to its rightful owner, and personally kicking a gun from the hands of a criminal on a subway platform, Mr. Sliwa confessed that reports of his heroism were greatly exaggerated. The wallet’s return had been staged. The man with the gun was a fiction.
Decades later, he said, he told The New York Times in an interview that he regretted the falsehoods he told.
“If I could do it again, I would never do it,” he said. “It has followed me everywhere.”
Still, despite his long odds in the current race against the front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, and the former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, Mr. Sliwa has remained upbeat.
“I’m feeling very good,” he said after last week’s debate. “From the feedback I got, I did not wear my red beret, people felt I behaved — it looked and felt like I could be mayor.”
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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