When Eric Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges last fall, resulting in the city of New York being left more or less unmanaged, Jim Walden decided to run for mayor. It was a quixotic idea, one in which even his family did not see an instant logic.
While it was true that Idris Elba had played a version of him in the film “Molly’s Game,” the character was not, in fact, named “Jim Walden.” Beyond the members of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the mob guys he consistently relocated from high ranches in Staten Island to the low-rise federal penal system, Mr. Walden remained largely unknown.
The first question for New Yorkers, he reasoned during an evening with potential supporters in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse a few weeks ago, was surely “ ‘Who is Jim Walden?’ ” The gathering was one of 85 he had planned all over the city through mid-March in the hope of answering that question sufficiently enough to quickly raise the money that would qualify him for the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s matching funds program. In this instance, the crowd — wealthy, well-connected, civic-minded — was familiar with him. Mr. Walden and his wife and children live a few blocks away. With a view of Manhattan as his backdrop, he laid out the path by which he believes he can become mayor as an independent.
The answer to the question “Who is Jim Walden” is not easily distilled. When he announced his candidacy in late November, he was flanked by older firefighters — he has the support of the union representing retired municipal workers — and also Jonovia Chase, a Black trans activist. For several years, Mr. Walden served in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District, where he put away Anthony Spero, a Bonanno crime boss. Like many prosecutors, he is profoundly opposed to any vilification of the police. At the same time, he told me, he would not permit federal immigration agents in city jails, something Mr. Adams said he is preparing an executive order to allow.
“It’s just a bad public policy to basically announce to all of the prisoners, ‘Hey, those of you who are illegal, ICE is coming for you!’ They know they are going back to a country where there may be extreme violence, where there may be a price on their head,” he said. “You just don’t want collateral enforcement in the secure domain of a jail,” the risk of rioting and needless violence being too great.
When I asked people who have attended the Walden talks what they came away with, they remarked on his air of competence and his personal story, which can seem self-mythologizing and contrived to inspire but has the virtue of being true. Mr. Walden grew up poor in Levittown, Pa., enduring the torments of an alcoholic father. After high school, he moved into a friend’s basement. He dropped out of community college. When a high school friend, Sara Silver, came home for Thanksgiving break from Yale, she was determined to see Mr. Walden get into a four-year college.
She did some research and helped him apply to Hamilton, in upstate New York, where he did well but felt alienated by the money and preppiness. He proceeded to law school at Temple University, graduating in 1991.
“We went to a terrible, terrible high school,’’ Ms. Silver told me. “Jim says I saved him from a life of pumping gas. But no; I think I saved him from being a personal injury lawyer in Philadelphia,” she said. Ms. Silver is now the chief of staff on his campaign.
When he is questioned about crime arising from what can seem like an epidemic of psychological unraveling, he approaches the problem from an intimate vantage. He had a mentally ill sister who would become very aggressive when she was off her medication. She died 14 years ago in an altercation on the streets in Pennsylvania when she was living in an SRO and refusing treatment. Mr. Walden explained he believes in removing people with severe mental illness from the streets and providing them with compassionate care.
If that sounds like progressive boilerplate, he would also like to keep wealthy people in New York, to loosen regulations on small businesses, to see some property taxes lowered. He has a plan to rethink public housing, in need of so much repair, and work to make neighborhoods more economically integrated. The idea is modeled on the project for the Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan where residents voted in favor of private developers first erecting new apartment buildings on the site, incorporating market-rate units and then demolishing the old.
“The community has a very justifiable fear of dislocation,” Mr. Walden said. “You would take that off the table by using ‘build first’ and giving tenants a bill of rights enforceable in courts.” Public housing residents would have the opportunity to buy into a plan like this rather than have something imposed on them. Some of his ideas, like developing Hart Island, a gravesite for the indigent, seem more mercurial.
Mr. Walden has never held elected office, but he has watched the mechanics of city governance from a short distance. Over two decades in private practice, he has sued the city over various troubling practices, in one instance bringing a class-action suit against the Department of Education on behalf of the parents of 23 bullied children. He also sued in the name of beleaguered tenants of the New York City Housing Authority, which resulted in lead inspections in thousands of apartments where children lived.
Other cases he has handled would not so easily win liberal admiration. He represented opponents of a bike lane on Prospect Park West (he lost) as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his attempt to stay on the ballot in New York State during his short-lived presidential bid.
That the city is in freefall — plagued by crises around housing, mental health, migrants and now a mayor who seems to have betrayed his constituents in order to avoid a trial — has emerged as a viewpoint from those with a particular set of grievances shared by both liberal New Yorkers and those on the right.
We are in a moment in which the traditional alliances no longer seem to hold. This could not have been clearer than it was last week, when the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District — a member of the Federalist Society — resigned rather than submit to a Republican Justice Department’s insistence that the charges against a Democratic mayor be dismissed.
“Voters are not necessarily ideological,” Stu Loeser, the media strategist and long-serving City Hall spokesman under Michael Bloomberg, told me when we talked about Mr. Walden’s prospects. “We know for a fact that there were A.O.C. Trump voters. What does an A.O.C. Trump voter do in a mayoral election?” The adoption of ranked-choice voting adds only more variables, less predictability. There are several strong progressive candidates in the Democratic field who could cancel each other out.
“If you had a choice between an assemblyman who led an anti-Israel march through Astoria four years ago and Curtis Sliwa and a moderate, technocratic lawyer who has worked for Democrats and Republicans,” Mr. Loeser said, “it could work for the moderate, technocratic lawyer.” That was his characterization of Zohran Mamdani, who took part in a rally in Queens, two years before the events of Oct. 7 in the name of a free Palestine. Curtis Sliwa has been talked about as a likely Republican nominee. Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor, is leading in certain polls, even though he has not yet entered the race. He could run away with the Democratic nomination or find that voters are unwilling to overlook past transgression.
Mr. Walden likes to talk about Kathryn Garcia, whom he supported in the last mayoral election. She was largely unknown when she entered the race but survived eight rounds of ranked-choice voting. In the end, she lost to Mr. Adams by only 7,000 votes.
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