Long before Curtis Sliwa became the Republican nominee for mayor of New York, long before his multi-decade career as a talk radio host preaching law and order, long before he launched the beret-sporting volunteer crimewatch group known as the Guardian Angels, he was a high school student at Brooklyn Prep in Crown Heights. Heading to school in the early '70s, Sliwa would sometimes spot the Maccabees, a mostly Hasidic organization that patrolled the area to protect Jews from muggings and other assaults.
A couple blocks from Brooklyn Prep, Sliwa would watch Black Panthers serving free breakfasts to undernourished kids. Passing through East Harlem, he'd see the Young Lords, a militant group aligned with the Panthers; they impressed him, he recalls, by trying "to convince Puerto Rican gang members to serve the community, not war against one another." He liked something else about those last two groups too: "The beret that the Black Panthers and Young Lords wore," he says, "gave them an organized look."
And in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Sliwa's half-Polish, half-Italian family lived, there were the Concerned Citizens of Canarsie. They were militant too, but in a different direction—this was a white group best known for protesting plans to bus schoolkids across town for racial balance. But the organization would also discuss other issues affecting Canarsie, Sliwa remembers, "such as what to do with garbage in the streets, rabies-infected wild dog packs which were menacing people, and also teenagers drag racing." Like the Maccabees and Panthers and Young Lords, they were "highly organized and results-oriented."
