The early history of the Guardian Angels and their controversial New York City subway patrols
(by Jere Hester nydailynews.com 8-14-17)
There was never a cop around when you needed one, especially in the subways, where these grim days they were needed more than they had ever been needed since, it seemed, the IRT opened for business in 1904. With the transit police force sliced from 3,600 to 2,200 in the wake of the mid-1970s fiscal crisis, the city's main mode of public transportation had become a festering Petri dish breeding violent young punks looking for quick cash and cheap kicks.
You could tuck the gold chain in your shirt, but you couldn't hide the swell $60 Pumas, which were like magnets for packs of teenagers carrying switchblades or worse. Fifty cents was the price of admission for a potential hell ride, an underground horror story waiting to be written in blood and graffiti.
Tasting the fear and seeing opportunity in this sorry state of affairs was a tough-talking Brooklyn kid with a sense of civic duty that was surpassed only by a talent for self-promotion. Cross Jimmy Cagney with Leo Gorcey, add a heap of P.T. Barnum and you had Curtis Sliwa.
Early in 1979, Sliwa, a 24-year-old high school dropout, formed the Magnificent 13, a volunteer patrol that rode the IRT at night particularly the No. 4 train, known to cops and riders alike as the Mugger's Express.
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Before year's end, the Magnificents' numbers had swelled far past 13, having drawn scores of mostly minority teenagers who were as fed up with the crime around them as anyone else. Sliwa Rock, he liked to call himself in those days rechristened his group the Guardian Angels and articulated what fast became a very popular philosophy as New York City's murder rate approached a frightening record 1,800.
"I have a very simple outlook toward problems," Rock mused. "Every problem can be attacked simply, without complex thinking. You are either right or wrong. If you're ripping someone off, you've got to be stopped."
And straphangers were only too happy to have the Guardian Angels riding with them karate-trained youths, fanning out through the night, anywhere from 12 to 40 eight-Angel patrols at a time. Mostly they were just deterrents to the bad guys and reassuring presences to frightened riders. But they fast jumped into action when they needed to chasing away predators, pulling to safety people who had been pushed onto the tracks, at one point even coming to the rescue of a policeman who was being beaten with his own nightstick.
The papers were full of their exploits.
"ANGEL ROUTS 3 MUGGERS. ANGEL AIDS COP IN BMT ARREST. NAB 2 AFTER SCUFFLE WITH ANGELS. RIDERS HAVE ANGELS LOOKING OVER THEM."
Every day was another chapter in the thrilling adventures of the multi-racial band of protectors in red berets and red-and-white T-shirts, making the subways safe for the people of the City of New York.
"I was born in this city many years ago," said 67-year-old John Caserno of Queens in a typical accolade. "Things have become almost impossible to deal with. But they help."
"God bless you," one elderly man told a band of Angels patrolling the No. 3 train early one winter's morning. "The mayor should give you a medal."
Mayor Edward Koch wasn't so sure about that.
As Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels began grabbing headlines faster than a speeding A train, there were those who had misgivings about what was, after all, a private army. "Paramilitaries," Koch denounced them, suggesting they should join the police force if they wanted to fight crime. But cops also were suspicious of them: the Angels had clashed several times with rank-and-file officers, and police brass and union officials did not welcome their help.
"We don't need 'em and we don't want 'em," said Capt. Gerald McClaughin, commander of the Central Park Precinct. "Historically, these groups have always turned bad. I think they'll probably assault somebody."
If City Hall was a little slow to grasp the social phenomenon that was the Guardian Angels, Lt. Gov. Mario Cuomo got it more readily. Still smarting from a 1977 mayoral primary loss to Koch and eyeing bigger and better things, Cuomo became the Angels' most eloquent champion. "They are a better expression of morality than our city deserves," he said.
Confronting the largely unspoken issue that these Angels were 80% black or Hispanic, he added: "If they were sons and daughters of doctors from Great Neck, would people be calling them vigilantes? Everyone would be giving them medals." New York City should be proud of the Angels, he said, kids who had been "born in troubled areas" and had "survived the test."
Sliwa himself missed no opportunity to make that same point: "We are taking kids who might have been committing the crimes and giving them an outlet to fight it. Before, while they were watching Superman and Batman on TV, they had no outlets for their good impulses to fight crime."
City Hall eventually started negotiations to work with the Angels but remained wary. "I don't know everything about the Guardian Angels," Koch said. "I do know they love publicity."
He was right, of course. Curtis Sliwa apparently had been born with built-in media radar. At 16, he had pulled several people out of a burning Brooklyn building one morning while on his Daily News delivery route; that earned him Newsboy of the Year honors and a photo op with President Richard Nixon, who presented him with a tie clip and a pen. In 1978, he won notice for starting an anti-litter campaign in the Bronx. That same year, he got some publicity returning a lost wallet packed with $300.
But with the Guardian Angels, Sliwa took a geometric leap into the big time and played it to the hilt. He did Tom Snyder. He did "Nightline." He was followed around by reporters from Japan and Norway and France.
There was talk about a movie of his life and he was adding to the script each day, with hair-raising tales of his narrow escapes from death. There were the three guys claiming to be transit cops who took him for a little ride and told him to disband the Angels or else. There was the gunman who opened fire at him and missed. There were the thugs who kidnapped him and tossed him in the river. You didn't have to be Ed Koch to be dubious about some of these stories
Meanwhile, as if New York weren't already a big enough stage, Sliwa, a one-time McDonald's manager, started franchising. Child killer in Atlanta? The Angels were there. Trouble in Detroit? Los Angeles? San Juan? You could count on the Angels.
By the end of 1980, some 700 Guardian Angels were roaming the New York subways, regularly racking up dozens of citizens arrests. The city, overwhelmed by a relentless publicity juggernaut, began moving toward an agreement under which the Angels would remain autonomous but would get police-issued ID cards and a modicum of police cooperation.
Koch sounded almost conciliatory: "It's like chicken soup," he said. "Have they hurt? No. Have they helped? Yes."
"The badges make the New York Times crowd feel good," Sliwa told the Daily News. "The people on the subways in Brooklyn never needed to see a badge. They were always happy enough just to see us get on the train."
