Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder, flamboyant radio host and Republican nominee for mayor, has been an inescapable fixture of life in New York City for decades.
But when he strolled into the Lower Manhattan offices of an important business group recently, its chief executive literally did a double take.
Mr. Sliwa had swapped out his familiar sateen Guardian Angels jacket for a dark suit. And on his head, where a swooping red beret has sat almost every day of his adult life, there was only a cap-shaped tan line and balding pate.
“He stuck out his hand, and I looked at him and said, ‘Oh my god!’” said Kathryn S. Wylde, the longtime leader of the group, the Partnership for New York City. “‘I didn’t recognize you.’”
In a city rich with sartorial symbols, few have been more memorable than Mr. Sliwa’s ruby red headpiece. It helped the Guardian Angels, his subway patrol group, gain notoriety in the 1970s; was his uniform for a career in television and radio and provided an unofficial motif for his unsuccessful first run for mayor in 2021.
Yet as he takes a second, seemingly more viable run at City Hall, Mr. Sliwa, 71, is beginning to show up without it. Certainly not always, but especially for meetings with business leaders, union officials and others he has deemed to be serious people. He has pledged to keep it off permanently if he is elected in November.
In an interview, Mr. Sliwa was candid about his motivation. Unlike four years ago, he now believes he could win a race in which Democratic voter might splinter among Zohran Mamdani, the party’s nominee, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who are running as independents. The question is whether Mr. Sliwa can convince New Yorkers, including prominent members of his own party, to take him seriously.
It starts with the hat.
“For some people, the beret is a defining issue,” Mr. Sliwa said, volunteering that it could evoke a certain Che Guevara-style revolutionary look. “Guys and gals, I get it. If taking my red beret off will help you just to listen to me, no problem.”
It may be a more difficult task than that. A rabble-rousing son of Canarsie, Brooklyn, Mr. Sliwa has spent decades cementing his image, not always favorably, in the public mind as a subway populist far more sensational than sober.
In 1992, he admitted that the Guardian Angels had fabricated crimes and injuries to burnish his and their reputation. He was once suspended by NY1 for making lewd remarks about a female City Council speaker. The most memorable moment of his 2021 campaign may have been when he tried to take one of his rescue cats with him to vote. (He had 17 living with him in a studio apartment then; the number is now down to six.)
Still, math may be newly tilting toward Mr. Sliwa. When he won 28 percent of the vote against Mr. Adams, it was a wipeout. But a similar level of support — from Republicans, white independent voters in Queens and Staten Island, Asian voters and animal lovers (he will also run on a Protect Animals ballot line) — could put him in striking distance of victory in a crowded field.
Recent polls have shown Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state lawmaker, with a comfortable lead. But Mr. Sliwa is polling better than Mr. Adams and in some surveys nipping the heels of Mr. Cuomo, who finished a distant second in the Democratic primary.
Some influential New Yorkers who ignored Mr. Sliwa four years ago appear willing to at least consider him now, as they search for a way to defeat Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist. Ms. Wylde invited hMr. Sliwa to address the chief executives and other business leaders in her group. Unions have requested meetings. Next week, Mr. Sliwa, who has spent decades denouncing the city’s “fat cats,” has been invited to address some them on their summer turf, at a breakfast in Southhampton.
Ms. Wylde said she had a frank conversation with Mr. Sliwa about his history of mocking business people. She came away impressed, though, by his command of policy issues.
“We had a conversation about the difference between his role as a performer and entertainer and his serious persona,” she said. “He was quite convincing that he has both sides. He’s the father of three kids. He pays a lot of attention to public policy issues. That he’s a pro-business candidate and that the business community should acknowledge him.”
When Mr. Sliwa sat for a WABC radio podcast interview a few days later with Suzanne Miller, the head of a real estate firm, she encouraged his beret-free transformation. The hat had been “kind of cultlike,” she told him. “Now you look mayoral. It’s going to take this to a whole new level.”
As his showmanship advertises, Mr. Sliwa is not your average Republican. He is more conservative than most New Yorkers on policing and wants to end the city’s sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants. But he also rails against the real estate industry and said in an interview that President Trump’s Medicaid cuts would hurt the city “real bad.”
He readily admits that he is not Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate. When rumors began to circulate this summer that Mr. Trump might offer Mr. Sliwa a job in his administration to help Mr. Adams or Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Sliwa declared preemptively that he was not interested.
He is sharply critical of Mr. Adams, whom he calls “the Swaggerman with no plan” and a “puppet” of Mr. Trump since the Justice Department intervention and dismissal of federal corruption charges against mayor.
(Mr. Adams, in turn, called Mr. Sliwa a “buffoon” and, in a statement, urged New Yorkers not to take him seriously.)
Mr. Sliwa is comparatively sanguine about Mr. Mamdani, discouraging fellow Republicans from attacking the Democratic nominee’s Muslim faith, and pointing out that New York has had socialist leaders in the past. “We will survive,” he said.
Prominent Republicans are divided. Edward F. Cox, the patrician state party chairman, has accompanied Mr. Sliwa to important meetings. George E. Pataki, the former governor, is a major booster, and one of Mr. Pataki’s top former aides, Rob Cole, is among those advising Mr. Sliwa to ditch the beret.
Others want him to drop out of the race altogether.
“Republicans, don’t waste your votes,” former Senator Alfonse D’Amato said in an interview. “I’m not saying Curtis Sliwa is a bad guy, but he can’t win.”
Despite Mr. Sliwa’s sartorial changes, it still seems that he is running a campaign based more on his big personality and hard-to-check stories than on politics.
On Monday, he spent part of the day in South Ozone Park, Queens, handing out “wanted” posters for a man accused of setting a dog on fire.
To a man riding the F train last week who told him he had attended Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Mr. Sliwa said: “When I was growing up, Newtown, all gangs. Some really treacherous gangs. It was rough. But it’s much better now.”
To a woman in a nearby car visiting from London: “Where you from? London! I’ve been to London. I’ve been to Wandsworth! I got stabbed.”
Mr. Sliwa makes a point of wearing his beret underground — he tries to campaign in the subway two hours a day (“It’s the only way”) — and on the streets. It makes him more visible.
“I saw him in the corner of my eye,” said one rider, Hualy Li, a pharmacist from Queens, confirming the beret’s power. She said that despite voting for Mr. Mamdani in the Democratic primary, she was open to supporting Mr. Sliwa in November.
Mr. Sliwa said he has six berets in rotation. On hot summer days, the wool can create its own small heat dome. “I don’t mind shvitzing, but my wife does,” he said. “She says, ‘oofa, this beret, it can walk on its own by the end of the day.’”
He is also hearing from friends who think it is worth more on than off.
One was Richard A. Dietl, widely known as Bo, another media personality who once ran for mayor. He recalled seeing Mr. Sliwa without his beret recently at the funeral for Bernard Kerik, a former police commissioner. Mr. Dietl has known Mr. Sliwa for 42 years, but that day he said he spent more than a minute speaking with him before realizing, “It’s Curtis.”
“First, I was all for taking his red hat off,” Mr. Dietl said. “But now I think when Superman came to save everyone, he didn’t take his cape off.”
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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