Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels on the Lower East Side, New York City, 2023 (detail) © Matthew McDermott/Polaris

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When I moved to New York City in 2008, I carried with me a dog-eared copy of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was relocating from Florida, where the civitas was thin on the ground, and I had grand dreams of putting down roots in a lively neighborhood where my civic spiritedness could bloom. I wanted to be a real citizen, you understand.

I can’t say that the transformation ever happened in the intervening decade and a half. I lived in but was not of Washington Heights, Inwood, Flatbush. That my local community should be the nexus of my public affections—I still believed this. I just never put that belief into practice. I didn’t even like going to the farmers market.

I developed a rationalization for this inertia. By letting these neighborhoods be, I was preserving them as they were. What possible benefit could I, a transplant and a gentrifier, have brought to deepest Brooklyn? Better that I interact with these communities like a thoughtful conservationist, leaving no trace as I passed on through.

In time, I got married. I grew up a bit. My wife and I settled into life on West 84th Street, where we read the West Side Rag, volunteered at our local church, and carried on a mystifying and possibly sexually charged acquaintanceship with the bodega guy (or at least I did). Lately my wife and I have also begun to lament the decline of the nabe, which has become categorically grodier since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contra my previous rationalization, I now understood that leaving a neighborhood alone meant leaving it open to a torrent of change. In the same way that I must repaint my window box to keep it evergreen and not soot-black, so would I have to get involved in my neighborhood’s upkeep if I wanted it to remain a nice place to raise a kid.

I was thinking along these lines one summer day while strolling the Coney Island boardwalk with my wife. We were discussing our future in the city—what it might look like, what sacrifices it would entail once baby made three. As we walked hand in hand, my eye was drawn to a moisture-bloated printout pasted to a lamppost: guardian angels. There was an image of a winged Eye of Providence, as well as a précis: “The Guardian Angels is a volunteer Subway and Street Patrol serving NYC since 1979. Our presence helps to deter crime and keep our city safe.” Following the group’s contact information, an imploration: dare to care!

Now, the Guardian Angels I knew from pop culture, as a punch line. They were supposed to be a bunch of overeager goons in red berets who did more harm than good when they tried to foil a purse snatching or citizen’s-arrest a jaywalker. But I’d never actually seen one in real life. I guess I had assumed they’d ceased operations years ago. Judging from the state of the flyer, they might have.

On any other day, I would have found their motto to be cringe-inducing in the manner of McGruff the Crime Dog. Somehow, though, dare to care resonated with me. I thought back to the subway odyssey my wife and I had just undertaken: ninety minutes, three transfers, and two discrete (yet indiscreet) gentlemen who had stalked our train car shouting threats and counter-threats at each other. Knowing the drill, my wife and I had lowered our eyes and entered a dissociative fugue.

There on the boardwalk, I thought to myself, We shouldn’t have to live like this. I was unhappy with the state of public order in New York City—who wasn’t?—but I sided with neither the left nor the right when it came to solutions. We had tried radical leniency, and that wasn’t working, yet I didn’t think a glut of cops would fix things either. The idealist in me believed subsidiarity was worth a shot: ordinary people at the hyperlocal level deciding not to ignore dysfunction, refusing to allow it to metastasize. After all, if it is axiomatic that citizens of a democratic society must govern themselves, then they must govern their public spaces too. And wasn’t that what the Guardian Angels were all about?

That evening, I emailed them. When my message yielded no reply, I called their headquarters. The line was disconnected. I tried messaging their Facebook pages. Nada. A week passed before I received an email instructing me to contact the leader of the Upper West Side and Hell’s Kitchen patrol—a woman named Juli.

On the phone, Juli asked why I wanted to join the Angels. I told her I was daring to care. This sufficed. The phone interview was, I believe, a rudimentary psych evaluation. So long as I didn’t say, “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown”—I passed.

Sliwa on the subway, New York City, 1985 © Bettmann/Getty Images

Juli explained that her chapter usually patrolled the West Side of Manhattan once a week, most often Wednesday or Thursday night, for a couple of hours. They stick to the streets when the weather permits; they tour the subway when it’s cold and/or precipitating; and they provide security at certain municipal events. I was welcome to join them at the upcoming San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy. I could consider it a ride-along, Juli said.

In order to understand the Guardian Angels, one has to first understand their founder and talisman, Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa is many things: a seventy-year-old gadfly, a blowhard of the old school, and a New Yorker’s New Yorker. He has been in the public eye for more than a half century. Most recently, Sliwa could be seen getting handcuffed at a number of protests against the influx of asylum seekers into New York City. Before that, in 2021, he led a brash and deeply weird campaign for the mayoralty against Eric Adams, in which he got trounced. Sliwa has been a talk-radio host for three decades. He lives in a 320-square-foot studio apartment with sixteen rescue cats and his fourth wife. (Sliwa’s third wife is reportedly suing him for more than $530,000 in unpaid child support. She has also alleged that he cheated on her with the Queens district attorney.) In other words, although Sliwa is an incredibly charismatic man, he is a man of greater enterprise than discretion.

Sliwa was born in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn in 1954 to a Polish-American father and an Italian-American mother. She finagled a spot for her son on Romper Room when he was six, at which point “Curtis was very impressed by his brief experience with fame,” according to the author James Haskins’s 1983 history of the organization.

In high school, Sliwa happened upon a burning house while working his newspaper route. For helping rescue several people, he was presented with an award by Mayor John Lindsay and was invited to the White House to shake hands with Richard Nixon. It was around this time that he developed a reputation as a brawler and earned himself a nickname: “The Rock.” It was a reputation that would serve him well when he was hired as an assistant manager of a McDonald’s in the Bronx in 1978. This was the Bronx of the “benign neglect” years, many parts of it violent and anarchic. In his telling, Sliwa encountered crime everywhere.

Inspired by the vigilante heroes of films like Taxi Driver and Death Wish—and by the gang epic The Warriors—Sliwa put together a crime-fighting brigade drawn from local volunteers. He outfitted them in white T-shirts (because they were cheap) and red berets (because they would stand out in a crowd). For the brigade’s symbol, Sliwa decided on an Eye of Providence, to represent vigilance.

He dubbed these volunteers his “Magnificent Thirteen,” and they performed their inaugural subway patrol in February 1979. They rode the so-called Muggers’ Express, the No. 4 IRT train that ran from Woodlawn in the Bronx, down through Manhattan, and on to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. According to Sliwa, he’d had to “brainwash” the members of his original crew, who worried they would get killed on the job. He also went to lengths to make sure the group was racially diverse.

The group, as Haskins recounts, was “prepared to sacrifice [their] lives if necessary,” according to the press release composed by Sliwa and distributed to local media outlets by his mother. “In the same spirit that our nation’s forefathers resisted the tyranny of the Crown, so shall we resist the tyranny of fear that rules our subways.”

Sliwa forbade the carrying of weapons. If his group came across a crime in progress, they would alert the transit police, or make a citizen’s arrest if they thought they could do so safely. But their primary goal was deterrence. Sliwa hoped that the mere presence of his Magnificent Thirteen would force petty criminals to think twice before snatching a woman’s necklace or rolling a drunk.

That first night, according to the group’s own reports, they thwarted a mugging at 167th Street and River Avenue in the Bronx. They restrained the assailant, alerted the train’s conductor, and handed the mugger over to police officers.

The Magnificent Thirteen reported more heroics as they patrolled nightly from 8 pm to 4 am. One volunteer suffered a broken arm in the line of duty; another, with Sliwa alongside him, rescued a subway clerk who had fallen onto the tracks at Union Square. News of these exploits spread, and soon Sliwa was flooded with eager applicants. He vetted them carefully, by his own account turning down more than he accepted. Prospects had to have a job or be enrolled in school. They had to be physically capable, and they had to show equanimity in the face of abuse. They had to be zealous, but not overzealous—Sliwa didn’t want anyone coming in with a grudge.

By late April, thirteen had become forty-eight. By May, they were featured in Time. Soon they had a new name: the Guardian Angels. Bad press followed good. Many city officials remained skeptical. They thought the Angels a reckless mob of vigilantes and attention hounds. Sliwa organized a three-day hunger strike at city hall to protest the mayor’s refusal to credit the Guardian Angels with the rescue of a transit officer from an attack at the Bowling Green subway station. Eventually, the civil authorities softened their stance somewhat. Even the New York Times endorsed the Angels, sort of:

Guiding this spontaneous and admittedly risky movement to constructive service is simply another challenge to New York. It certainly beats the alternative—leaving restless but organized youth to make trouble.

That year, 1981, the Angels’ ranks had reportedly swelled to nearly a thousand. Sliwa had long since quit his job at McDonald’s and was supporting himself with the help of friends and relatives while directing Angels patrols from a telephone booth at Manhattan’s Columbus Circle subway station.

The relationship between the Guardian Angels and the police was fractious to begin with and remained so. In 1980, following months of low-level scuffles, Sliwa was approached at a subway station in the Bronx by three off-duty transit cops, who kidnapped him and dumped him in Long Island with a warning about Angels taking their jobs.

An investigation into the kidnapping conducted by the Bronx district attorney produced no suspects. The president of the Transit Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association scoffed at the story, according to Haskins’s account, saying:

Curtis Sliwa knows by heart the phone numbers of every newspaper, radio and television station, reporter and editor in the city. It seems incredible that he should not remember the license plate of the car or the badge numbers of the officers.

Early the following year, around a dozen on-duty Guardian Angels were arrested by the transit police on assorted charges of riot, assault, and resisting arrest. Not long after, the Office of the Mayor announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding by the Guardian Angels, the NYPD, and the transit police that would allow all parties to “work together cooperatively.”

In August 1981, Sliwa was kidnapped again—this time in Washington. According to news reports at the time, he was walking near the Washington Monument late at night when three men identifying themselves as police officers approached him and detained him for several hours, during which time Sliwa was beaten and then tossed into the Potomac River. The case fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Park Service, which could neither corroborate Sliwa’s story nor locate any suspects.

A decade later, Sliwa admitted to the New York Post that he had lied about this incident and several others, including his first kidnapping, in order to juice publicity for the Angels during their early years. Sliwa remains adamant that neither he nor his Angels have faked anything since. Their raids on crack houses in the Eighties and Nineties were legit, as were at least a few of their interrupted muggings. When a responding officer mistook the Newark Angel Frank Melvin for a burglar and shot him in the chest in 1981—that was real. As were the shooting deaths of Juan Oliva in the Bronx in 1983 and Sherman Geiger in Yonkers in 1987. According to the organization, six Angels have been killed in action and thirty-six seriously injured.

Sliwa is one of them, and he has the wounds to prove it. In June 1992, he was shot several times at point-blank range in the back of a New York taxicab during an attempted Mob hit orchestrated by the Gambino crime family. Sliwa hailed the cab around dawn on his way to the WABC radio studios, at which point a gunman emerged from under the dashboard “like a jack-in-the-box,” according to Sliwa. “Take this, you son of a bitch,” Sliwa recalled the gunman saying before plugging him with hollow-point bullets. Realizing that the cab’s door handles were missing, Sliwa said he sprang from the back seat “like a trampoline,” launching himself past the gunman and halfway through the open front passenger window. Stuck and flailing, Sliwa’s clothing snagged the bumper of a parked car and he was yanked onto the street, barely conscious but miraculously alive.

John A. Gotti, the Mafia family’s scion, was later charged with ordering the hit in response to Sliwa’s radio-show trolling of his father, the late John J. Gotti. A patsy was charged with the attempted murder. Even then, Sliwa was viewed as less than sympathetic by many New Yorkers. Gotti’s defense attorney argued that Sliwa might have fabricated the details of the incident. “Short of death,” the attorney asked Sliwa, “is there anything that will stop you from giving a press conference?”

Guardian Angels patrol the subway, New York City, 1980 © Stephen Shames/Polaris

Today the Guardian Angels claim chapters in thirteen countries and more than a hundred cities. This is a bold claim, and a dubious one, because the federated structure of the Angels makes it easy to start a chapter and easy to let one go dormant. Also, recordkeeping has never been the Angels’ strong suit. When Sliwa was asked early on for a list of the ninety-two culprits the group had supposedly placed under citizen’s arrest over the years, neither he nor his lawyer, Murray Schwartz, could produce a single name. The group’s headquarters—once located in Times Square—is now registered at the modest Canarsie home Sliwa was raised in.

Though he still sports his red beret, Sliwa’s involvement in the Angels has waned as his political ambitions have waxed. Day-to-day operations are coordinated via WhatsApp by his second-in-command, Arnaldo Salinas. Patrols are carried out under the discretion of deputized leaders like Juli. And membership—membership is open to all comers, it would appear.

I was to meet Juli at 7:30 pm at the southwest corner of Mulberry and Houston Streets, in front of the REI. The Angels were easy to spot: six of them milled about the adventure store in red berets and glimmering sateen jackets. I recognized Juli because I had googled her: a tall, thin, curly-haired woman who accented her Mediterranean features with bold makeup. Juli, who was raised upstate, has worked for decades as a professional organizer; prior to that, she was a nanny for the well-to-do. She was inordinately proud of her neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, and a fan of the hashtag #ILiveInHell. Tonight she wore big boots and her posture was bad, like a slack bowstring.

Once I had presented myself, Juli handed me a white Angels T-shirt and a fresh beret. Then she introduced me to the crew. There was K.C., a squat and bespectacled French bulldog of a woman whose beret was spangled with rainbow-flag pins; she had been a Guardian Angel for twenty-five years, serving in various positions of authority. She looped a surgical mask around her ears before telling me, “I don’t do hugs.” We bumped elbows instead.

Next I met Jeff, a densely muscled man with a gray chinstrap beard and a couple of teeth missing from the smile he rarely flashed. Jeff was, by his own admission, “an OG.” After him was S.K., a lithe and stylish father of two who matched his red glasses to his Angels gear. Lingering at the edge of the group was Suzie, a petite woman with wild, white-blond hair as well as the spry yet disdainful affect of an inner-city nun. Last was R.V., a beefy young man who used to be or still was a bouncer.

Our small talk over with, we braced ourselves for patrol. But before we could set off, a woman who looked to be four foot eleven in all directions tripped against the curb and ate it hard at my feet. I gaped at her, as is my wont. R.V. sprang into action, helping the woman up while the rest of the Angels crowded around her, rubbed her back, and offered her water.

“Oh my God, I fell in the right place!” the woman exclaimed. “I can’t believe this!” She requested a selfie with the Angels, and Juli had to remind me to join the back row.

“You’ll get that a lot,” K.C. told me. Then she instructed me on the finer points of beret care. This was important, she said, because a mussed beret was viewed as an embarrassment.

“She mean you look like a Spirit Halloween costume,” Jeff clarified.

For the next two hours, we wriggled through the San Gennaro street fair in a single-file line, combing eleven blocks of Little Italy and then combing them again. I had received no training nor signed any waiver, but I did my best to swivel my head back and forth along a 180-degree ambit like a CCTV camera. Stacked chest-to-back, our column prized apart the crowd of outer-borough wise guys, Jersey émigrés, street vendors, and tourists. I asked Suzie if there was anything in particular I should be looking out for. “Just Juli,” she said. Behind me, Jeff added: “Whatever your leader do, you do.”

Festivalgoers under the age of forty appeared to be baffled by our presence. I got the sense that they mistook us for an unconventional dance troupe. Those older than forty were surprised and delighted to see us; they acted as though they had stumbled across a beloved character actor, or a species believed to have gone extinct.

“Guys, thanks so much for your service,” one goombah said to us in passing. “Curtis! We love Curtis!” others cried out. Some looked up from their cacciatore long enough to lock eyes and raise a fist. Far and away the most popular response, though, was a question: “Where’s Curtis?”

R.V. handed out Guardian Angels business cards to our supporters, informing them that Sliwa would be “reelecting in two years.” K.C. pulled R.V. aside to correct him: “He’s running again in two years. Remind them to vote.”

K.C. told me that this was possibly the most pro-Angels crowd I could have encountered on my first night. “But there’s going to be a lot of stuff,” she said. “You know, verbal abuse. People are going to have a lot of comments. ‘F you’ as they walk by, drive by, whatever. You need to have that backbone, where you don’t even think of responding. Do what we call verbal judo. Try to talk people down, before it gets to the point of actual physical contact.”

I told her I could handle it. Then I sidled up to Juli. While performatively scanning the thoroughfare for mincing pimps or rowdies in fingerless gloves, I asked her why she’d joined. She said her interest had been piqued during COVID lockdowns, when residents of Hell’s Kitchen requested the presence of the Angels after several violent incidents in the area, and the Upper West Side patrol stepped in. Juli tracked their progress; then, in 2022, she “did a patrol like you’re doing right now, then I did another one, then I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing this.’ ” She rocketed up the ranks to become patrol leader—at one point the sole female leader active.

As Juli readied us to hit the bricks once again, Suzie announced: “I am going to puke.” The air—the air was too thick with adipose food-truck fumes. Suzie had to depart. The rest of us patrolled for another forty-five minutes, retracing our steps through the festival, fielding kudos and remaining vigilant.

At the end of the night, S.K. asked for one last group photo to complete his set of twelve thousand. As we posed and smiled, a nasally young guy groaned, “Oh Jesus, these guys are still around? The Guardian Angels?”

I handed over my probationary beret to Juli, promising I’d be back. Before I descended into the Broadway–Lafayette Street subway station, I asked to be added to the group chat.

What people usually mean when they use the term “vigilante” is someone who has taken the law into his own hands. From a legal perspective, vigilantism is unlawful because it is extrajudicial. From a philosophical perspective, vigilantism is problematic because it is the righting of a wrong by wrongful means.

Psychologists have tended to class vigilantes as misguided if not delusional individuals who believe their actions are necessary to rectify a structural flaw in society. The rule of law is not functioning as it should, so the vigilante becomes the law, like Batman. His vigilantism is the shadow cast upon society by a failed justice system. According to this line of thinking, two wrongs can make a right, so long as the intent is the restoration of order. The vigilante is acting as any upstanding citizen should.

What the vigilante is after is the criminal’s just deserts. He wants to turn the tables. He does not want to think of himself as a victim, so he becomes a victimizer. The vigilante rationalizes his actions as self-defense, social defense, lex talionis. It’s the ethic of the frontier—do-it-yourself justice. Which makes vigilantism American, or American-coded, for better and for worse.

What separates vigilantism from self-defense is the spontaneity of the latter and the premeditation of the former. Vigilantes have a target in mind and a plan of action to follow. When Bernhard Goetz shot four men he believed were about to mug him on the 2 train in 1984, the question of whether he was a vigilante rested upon intent. Why exactly had he brought a .38-caliber handgun onto the train in the first place?

Before heading out on my second patrol, I browsed some online archives to see whether the Guardian Angels had supported Bernie Goetz. They had. Sliwa had reportedly marched a detachment of Angels to the courthouse to offer their services to Goetz as bodyguards. This tarnished their image in the eyes of some New Yorkers but burnished it for others. If the Angels weren’t exactly vigilantes themselves, thenceforth they were vigilante-adjacent.

This was an interesting tack, because a couple of years prior to the Goetz case, Sliwa (along with Schwartz, his lawyer) published a book entitled Street Smart: The Guardian Angel Guide to Safe Living. Sliwa adopted a reproachful tone toward his reader:

Obviously, we—the people who live and work in the cities of America—are to blame—not so much for the creation of street crime but for permitting it to continue, for abdicating our responsibility to deal with it. . . . We must understand that we cannot shift the cause of our problems or its cure upon anyone but ourselves.

As for packing heat in “self-defense”—Sliwa was dead set against it.

The use of weapons to protect yourself against punks is not the answer. . . . When we hear someone say, “If anyone breaks into my house, I’ll shoot him dead,” we wonder why doesn’t he say, “If someone breaks into my home, he’ll never get out of this neighborhood because my neighbors and I are so fed up that we will grab him for the cops and he will never return again.”

In a line that could be read as his stance on vigilantes, Sliwa concluded that “acting alone, [a gunman] solves nothing. He cares only about himself and is really out of touch with reality. That is the truth, and Mr. Gun Toter, we want you to know it.”

The Angels still forbid members from carrying weapons on patrol, which was fine by me. Adrenalized and afraid, I would misuse mine; the brass knuckles or pocket cosh would almost certainly redound upon my own head and genitals in the event of a brawl. Plus, my years of New York experience had taught me not to engage with shady characters even when their behavior shifted from erratic to threatening. Better to avert my gaze and wait for the moment to pass.

But I was an Angel now. I had a white belt in verbal judo. And so, for this reason and others besides, my mouth went acidic with apprehension as I boarded the southbound train to Columbus Circle for my second patrol.

Waiting for me outside the station were K.C., Jeff, and a fellow named Josh, the erstwhile leader of the Upper West Side patrol. Josh was about five foot seven and bore a striking resemblance to the man himself, Curtis Sliwa. The first thing I learned about Josh was that he’s a toucher. Every word he spoke came accompanied by a squeeze of the shoulder or a tap to the chest. The second thing I learned about Josh was that he had handed the reins of the patrol to Juli some months prior because, as he put it, he “had some personal issues going on.” I won’t speculate as to what those were, and I don’t intend to tell tales out of school, but on this patrol, Josh had a hint of the sour mash on his breath. I couldn’t fault the guy. I would have liked three fingers of Dutch courage myself.

K.C. gave me a beret to keep. The tag on the inside read berets.com, and it was at least two sizes too small for me. I was also given my own sateen jacket, as red and lustrous as a dog’s erection. It did well to insulate me against the evening chill.

Because Juli couldn’t make it that night, leadership reverted to Josh, who wanted to head north into Harlem. “It’s a neighborhood that needs us,” he said. He turned to me. “Assuming you’re up for the fun?”

I nodded, but before we could move out, an older woman approached us and addressed Josh as though he were Sliwa. “I don’t remember you being so short, Curtis?” she said.

“Curtis is not short,” K.C. corrected her. “He is not. He’s six feet tall.”

“It’s good to see you anyway, Curtis,” the lady said. She smiled and took a long drag from the cigarette holder between her fingers. “Today is my birthday,” she added. “I would like to donate money to you.” Josh told her that we couldn’t accept cash on behalf of the organization, but if she went to the Angels’ website, she’d find instructions on how to make a charitable donation.

To get to Harlem, we would take the 1 train to 96th Street and walk from there. Josh ordered me to stick with Jeff, who’d teach me how to patrol a subway car. “You’ll love it,” Josh assured me. “You’ll love Harlem! Harlem loves us!” Then he mock-whispered, “Don’t worry, you’ll have Jeff with you.”

“Why shouldn’t he worry?” Jeff wanted to know. “Because I’m black? Maybe he should worry.”

Our presence did not deter three teens from jumping the subway turnstiles. We did nothing about it because the MTA employees five feet away did nothing about it. We deferred to their professional indifference. Then we made for our train.

Jeff paced the length of the car while I stood at one end. Occasionally he seemed to be signaling me with his eyes, but I had no clue what he was trying to communicate. The car was about three quarters full, and quiet. I was as self-conscious about my presence as I had been when I first boarded a subway decades ago. I could feel eyes on me, but when I turned to meet them, everyone’s gaze was averted.

I had to remind Jeff to disembark at 96th Street. We stood at attention on the platform as the train departed, then turned to watch it go until its brake light had receded from view down the tunnel. Alongside K.C. and Josh, we walked two abreast out of the station. Along Central Park West, Jeff told me that maintaining this tight formation was a defensive tactic left over from the bad old days when the Angels had to be on guard against attacks from gangs. For the same reason, each of us had to keep watch in a different cardinal direction whenever we waited for the light to change at an intersection. “You just never know where it’s gonna come from,” Jeff said.

The greatest danger we encountered along this leg of our patrol was an unleashed pit bull–Chihuahua mix that had worked itself into a lather while pursuing a couple of rats in the bushes. Josh lamented the fact that he could fondle none of these creatures. He stopped us in front of a Rasta man who was walking a splendid malamute and spent ninety seconds haggling with the man over the price point at which he’d sell his dog.

K.C. prodded us onward, smiling apologetically. But this would be Josh’s attitude toward all passersby—slightly manic, slightly comic, and on the whole disarming. He pressed everyone’s palm, from the crustiest street sleeper to the wariest power walker, and he asked in good faith if there was anything we could do for them. Most said nothing, but the point was taken. What Josh was doing was community outreach and brand rehabilitation rolled into one. He was like a deputized Ronald McDonald acting on behalf of corporate HQ, reassuring the populace that the Angels were neither auxiliary police nor the white-shirted Freikorps of a reactionary politician.

At 110th Street we turned right onto Central Park North, the location of a stretch of benches on which the homeless and the addled liked to spend warm nights. “We’re a little early,” Josh said. “When 8 pm comes around . . . ” He puffed his cheeks.

We strolled from bench to bench, Josh glad-handing the occupants, asking, “How you doing, man? All good?” Before we could turn north from the park onto Malcolm X Boulevard, our services were requested by a topless, hairless middle-aged woman. She, too, had assumed that Josh was Sliwa, and she wanted to know what he was doing to prepare for the next mayoral election. Josh tried to disabuse her of the mistaken identity, but the woman wasn’t having it. She had sage electoral strategy that she wished to impart.

“I called Magneto,” she told Josh, “and he said, ‘Lock them up.’ I called Leatherface, and he told me, ‘Deport the migrants.’ ” She contorted her body as though she were the snake winding around the Rod of Asclepius. The four of us looked anywhere but at her pendulous knockers. “I talked to Hitler,” she said, dropping her voice. “And I said, ‘Hitler? Heil Hitler!’ ”

“Nope,” Josh said, disengaging. “Nope, nope. You can be topless, but you can’t say ‘Heil Hitler.’ It’s a simple rule.” For once, we didn’t wait for the light to change before crossing the street. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Josh said over his shoulder to the woman. “But stay safe.” She demanded to know what he meant by “stay safe.”

We patrolled Harlem for a spell; then Josh announced that he had to pee. Jeff and I kept guard outside the coffee shop he ducked into. I tried to make small talk. Jeff told me he had joined up in ’86. His commitment to the Angels was total, at first. After he became a father, however, his priorities shifted, and he didn’t patrol as often. Jeff detailed his lengthy struggle with pneumonia, which I didn’t quite follow. The fifth case of pneumonia landed him in the hospital, where Sliwa visited him. “I loved that,” Jeff recalled. “I loved that day. Came and spent a couple hours with me. Chilled.”

Jeff’s worshipful attitude reminded me of something I’d read while researching the Angels. Back when the group was starting out, Mayor Koch sent the city’s coordinator for criminal justice, Robert Keating, to embed with Sliwa and get a read on this rabble-rouser. After several weeks, Keating acknowledged that he was impressed. “There is no question about Curtis’s charismatic power over the Guardian Angels,” he reported. “He’s a tough kid and someone the Angels respect. Most of the kids come from such bad areas that Curtis might be the first real leader they have encountered.”

I could see that Sliwa still inspired loyalty in Jeff. “I’m a Guardian Angel,” he reiterated to me. “Guys coming from all walks of life, all different colors, all different ethnicities, all because of one concept,” he said. “Our motto was: Dare to care.”

He swiveled to address me directly. “You might come from the gold, the silver spoon. I come from the trenches of the ghetto. But we came together, because why? We dare to care.”

On Halloween morning, I received new orders via WhatsApp. “ATTENTION: 🚨. Curtis needs whoever is available to meet him at WABC (49th street & 3rd ave) tonight at 7pm Sharp. The patrol will then head to the Village Halloween Parade!!!!!”

I arrived five minutes early, wearing every bit of Angels regalia I possessed, as the night was bitterly cold. No one from the Hell’s Kitchen patrol joined me, but I did meet Captain Sal, a self-described “tunnel rat” who preferred to patrol alone. “I don’t look the other way, man, fuck that shit,” Sal told me approximately thirty seconds after shaking my hand. His outer-borough accent belonged in the Library of Congress.

Joining us was Alex from Flushing, a short, tanned middle-aged man with an Indonesian-flag patch ironed onto his beret. Alex’s English was makeshift but enthusiastic, and he had with him a taller and entirely silent young man whose name was Pincas, maybe? Spilling from Pincas’s beret were long fine jet-black locks. He had the mien of a guy who should be able to absolutely shred on guitar.

We waited ten, fifteen, thirty minutes for Sliwa to finish his radio show inside the WABC building. Alex was anxious to get going; he flitted about with the spring-loaded vigor of a dad on his way to Costco. He asked if I’d “been into any incidents” with the Angels, and I had to admit that no, I had not. Alex seemed desperate to get into an incident. The four of us craned our necks, keeping a lookout for an incident.

At last Sliwa hobbled from the building wearing his beret and Angels windbreaker. Older now, and vitiated by the injuries sustained during the attempt on his life, Sliwa was nonetheless imposing. Energies seemed concentrated in him, as though he were the essence of an even larger man. Sal greeted him warmly, and Sliwa moved to shake our hands.

Afterward, Sal took us aside and whispered, “We’re going to play all of this by ear, all right? The main goal is to watch Curtis, guys.”

We arranged ourselves into the formation of a Praetorian Guard and walked Sliwa to Grand Central Terminal. One nebbish hurried toward us and said, “Have a good night, Curtis! Thank you for everything that you’re doing.” To us he added, “Keep up the good work. Keep the faith, all you guys.”

Sliwa paid our subway fares, and then we flanked him on the shuttle to Times Square. So terribly nervous was I, standing at my appointed subway door, pantomiming vigilance, that I thought I could hear Sliwa groaning inwardly, looking at me, beholding the decay of his dream. Once we’d pulled into the station, Sliwa made a beeline for the NYPD’s new Knightscope K5 Autonomous Security Robot.

Sliwa held up his cell phone to film a video for social media. Then he snapped into character. “We need these cops patrolling the trains!” Sliwa fulminated. The two officers chaperoning the hydrant-shaped robot seemed to concur. They thanked Sliwa once the phone had been put away.

We transferred to another train before escorting Sliwa to Canal Street and 6th Avenue, where he cut another promo at the Halloween parade’s starting point. The Angels were here, he said, because of credible threats of terrorism. In the clip that was posted on Facebook, you can see the cognizance suddenly flash into my eyes: the sateen jacket would be used to identify my smoldering remains.

Sliwa ordered us to stand guard as long as we thought necessary. Then he disappeared into the crowd. For another hour and a half, Sal kept us stationed at the parade’s point of departure. I nodded indiscriminately at the steady flow of ghoulies; one movie-quality Predator dapped me up. Sal had to remind me to pace back and forth, like a sentry in a video game, to keep my legs from locking up.

There were many cops about, and I couldn’t help but feel redundant. I worried that we might be getting in the way. To allay my concerns, Sal grabbed a young officer whose nameplate read lawrence. “Now, we don’t want to move in on your spot or disrespect you,” Sal said to Lawrence.

“We don’t take it like that at all,” Lawrence said. He hooked his thumbs under the straps of his Kevlar vest. “Seen you guys growing up, so I know how it goes.”

“Appreciate that,” Sal said. “We should probably be thanking you.”

“Nah, you guys put it out there,” Lawrence said. “Go out there, nothing on, just go out and do your thing. I respect that.”

“Hopefully when my boss becomes mayor, your job will get so much easier,” Sal said. Lawrence snorted a couple of laughs.

“Trust me,” Sal said. Then we all bumped fists.

The parade was still going strong when Sal dismissed us. His watch wasn’t over, though; he would be descending into the Midtown subway tunnels. “I’m doing good down there. I clean out those tunnels,” he said to himself as much as to us. “I work with the cops. They let me use their bathrooms. They look at me as part of their team.”

Alex said, “Uuuuaaahhh, okay, okay.”

Sal turned to me specifically. “I don’t suck their dick. I take the homeless out ahead of time so the cops don’t have to. I’ve done it so consistently that they don’t fuckin’ come back much anymore.”

Sal gave me his card. He told me to text him as soon as I got home. I said I would, and I did. On the way, I received a news alert on my phone. Someone had been shot in Hell’s Kitchen.

The patrols began to blur together. Once a week, some combination of me, Juli, Josh, K.C., S.K., and Suzie walked the streets and rode the subways like peripatetic monks of a dying order. The homeless would ask us for money; we would tell them we don’t carry wallets on patrol. Schizophrenics would declaim the Eye of Providence on our jackets, or they’d give us messages to pass along to Sliwa re: rigged voting machines. One or another bridge-and-tunnel bro would approach us with a twenty in his outstretched hand, dangling it as though offering a fish to a trained dolphin, and we would demur, saying something along the lines of, “Service is our reward.”

We witnessed plenty of misdemeanor crime but managed to avoid the felonies. If we were meant to be a deterrent, then we were working as intended, so long as one didn’t dwell too long on the logical fallacy of cum hoc ergo propter hoc. That is, just because two variables coincided (our patrolling and a dearth of sidewalk murder), it didn’t mean the one resulted from the other.

Really what we were doing was performing a ritual of sympathetic magic. We donned the vestments and we projected intentionality into the universe. We dared to care, and we hoped that, like shamans going through the motions of a rain dance, our ceremonial observance would bring down from heaven the absent phenomenon: civic spirit.

This was quixotic, to put it mildly. Daring to care meant acting as though I still lived in a high-trust society, or a society that could at least build trust. It meant believing that I had something in common with millions of disparate people—something other than our occupying the same city at the same time while trying to extract as much money from it as possible, like marks at a casino. Most of all, the Guardian Angels felt anachronistic. Like a relic of the immediate post–civil-rights movement heyday when a motley crew of individuals could come together in voluntary association to uphold and embody a color-blind ideal of justice, order, and community.

Most of the New Yorkers we encountered on the street—their eyes darted away from our approach like startled baitfish. But there were those few who seemed to appreciate (if also pity) our little Tocquevillian platoon. Speaking with these supporters, I got the sense that they agreed with what Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961:

The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.

A plurality of New Yorkers grasped that no amount of cops could maintain order, or even the rudiments of civilization, if the people themselves did nothing to preserve it, either. That didn’t mean they were ready to do anything about it, though—anything other than thanking us and encouraging us as they might thank and encourage Sisyphus at the bottom of his circuit. We accepted their support, but if and when they launched into jeremiads about the dire state of the city, the country, the world—we begged off as politely as we could.

We practiced this circumspect civility among ourselves, too. To this day, I haven’t the faintest idea what my fellow Angels thought about politics, the broken-windows theory—anything, really. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the first principles of your average Guardian Angel are somewhat at odds with the more urbane, cosmopolitan truisms that predominate in polite Manhattan society. These truisms posit that, for example, all human beings are inherently good. They do “wrong” only in response to unfair norms and institutions. Recidivist lawbreakers steal and murder not because of some personal failing or congenital defect; they are hapless victims of an unjust system that has driven them to act out of desperation. Furthermore, hard disincentives like prison do not defend civilization against the entropic impulses of human nature. No—prisons and the arbitrary, illegitimate “law and order” they uphold are the primary cause of injustice, hence of violence.

If a Guardian Angel suspected this were true, he or she would never have donned the beret in the first place. Because according to the logic of these truisms, it is our unjust society that is at the root of crime. Therefore, crime is like a judgment visited upon our society. Or, to use a physiological metaphor: crime is akin to a fever, a somatic response to a diseased body that will dissipate once the underlying pathologies—racism, inequality, etc.—have been cured.

If an Angel really believed this, he wouldn’t dare to care about upholding the current order. He’d want to overturn it.

Juli granted us leave over Christmas. During that time, Sliwa sent out a New Year’s video message to all of us Angels. It was shot in his WABC studio. He looked haggard. “All we have to do is recommit,” he said. “The world needs the Guardian Angels more than ever before. America needs the Guardian Angels.”

In the meantime, a serial street stabber prompted a citywide manhunt. Then a group of recent immigrants were filmed fighting with two cops in Times Square. Some weeks later, New York governor Kathy Hochul announced that one thousand members of the state police and the National Guard would be called into the city to set up bag-search checkpoints at the busier stations in the subway system. My fellow Angels and I appreciated the backup, but we understood full well that this was political theater. (And a couple of weeks later, as if to prove the point, a man snuck a gun onto the A train, pulled it on another man, then was shot in the head with the selfsame gun during the fracas that ensued.)

In order to stoke his own political relevance, Sliwa appeared with some regularity on Sean Hannity’s nightly Fox News program. During one such appearance, live from Times Square, Sliwa ordered his escort of Angels to apprehend a man he claimed was a migrant shoplifter.

“He had been shoplifting first, the Guardian Angels spotted him, stopped him—he resisted, and let’s just say we gave him a little pain compliance,” Sliwa told the camera. “His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations.”

The next day, the NYPD announced that the man was not a migrant but a twenty-two-year-old Bronx resident. They found no evidence to suggest he had been shoplifting, either. The blowback against Sliwa and the Angels was swift and full-throated. “Washed-up comic book villain instructed his herd of wannabe vigilantes to beat up a guy they decided ‘looked like’ a migrant. A hate crime,” wrote the New York City councilman Justin Brannan on Twitter. Governor Hochul took to CNN to decry vigilantism. “This is not the Wild West,” she said.

The Angels’ second-in-command, Arnaldo Salinas, doubled down, alleging that he had “walked over to de-escalate—and the gentleman simply was not de-escalating. He was ultra-aggressive, saying he was going to shoot us.” Shortly after the incident, the Bronx man announced his plans to file a civil suit against the Guardian Angels in Manhattan Supreme Court.

On patrol two days later, Juli seemed embarrassed by the imbroglio. She didn’t know the details, and she didn’t want to know them. She spoke as if coached by a lawyer, stressing the federated nature of the Angels. “Curtis does what he does, and that’s Curtis. I’m me. And you’re you.”

She advised us against speaking to reporters. “We will have more confrontations, as we are getting threats on a daily basis,” she said. There was to be no cursing at the public and “only defensive acts, should we be assaulted.” The Angels would weather this controversy as they had in the past.

That night, Juli steered us clear of Times Square. The side streets were quiet, but the vibe was off; we could hear sirens and helicopters in the middle distance. Josh smelled faintly antiseptic again, and Suzie walked with her keys in her right fist. She maintained a low-roiling, Travis Bickle–esque monologue pertaining to the city’s ongoing migrant crisis: “Almost two hundred thousand since 2022!” She buttonholed a cop outside an Au Bon Pain, then fell back into formation, claiming that he said, “This city is going to burn in five years!” She cackled.

At the end of our patrol, I kept guard on the subway platform while my fellow Angels boarded their trains home. I stood at attention and watched the brake lights disappear down the tunnel. Then I checked the notifications on my phone. The sirens and helicopters had been responding to a shooting in Times Square that occurred about ten minutes into our patrol. A fifteen-year-old kid had fired at a security guard inside a sportswear store who was trying to stop him from shoplifting. The bullet missed the guard but struck a thirty-seven-year-old Brazilian tourist. Nearby cops gave chase; the teen fired two more rounds at one of them before ducking into the subway station. “The suspect is still on the loose,” my phone read.

I told myself I’d keep my eyes peeled.