Bid To Topple Manhattan DA Gets Backing From Guardian Angels' Founder

NEW YORK CITY — Marc Fliedner’s underdog bid for Manhattan district attorney got an unlikely supporter on Wednesday: anti-crime crusader and state Reform Party Chairman Curtis Sliwa.

The founder of the citzen-patrol group the Guardian Angels encouraged Manhattan voters to write in Fliedner, a Democratic Socialist, on the Nov. 7 ballot, even if it’s "nothing more than a protest" against embattled DA Cyrus Vance Jr.

Fliedner, a former prosecutor who ran unsuccessfully for Brooklyn DA, launched a social media-fueled campaign against Vance last week. Vance has been under scrutiny since recent revelations that his decisions not to charge disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein and President Donald Trump’s two eldest children coincided with campaign donations from their attorneys.

"This guy accepts money from anybody who does business with his office, and now all of a sudden he's Pontius Pilate, acting like he's not going to do it anymore," Sliwa said Wednesday at a news conference outside Vance’s downtown office.

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Fliedner said he’s moving to Manhattan from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn next week with his husband and father. State law requires that he live in the borough by Election Day to be eligible for DA.

Vance, a Democrat unopposed on the ballot for a third term, has repeatedly denied that money from defense lawyers has ever influenced any of his legal decisions. He has stopped accepting campaign money as an independent group reviews his campaign’s practices.

Vance's office has said there was not enough evidence to charge Weinstein with groping an Italian model in 2015 (despite his admittance to doing so on a recording), or Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump with misleading investors in their Trump SoHo condominium project.

But Sliwa said there’s a pattern of gifts from lawyers representing high profile clients whom Vance decided not to prosecute — including the financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the attorney Sanford Rubenstein and Mayor Bill de Blasio. Vance and federal prosecutors concurred in not charging the mayor after a probe into his campaign fundraising efforts, but Vance said de Blasio violated the "intent and spirit" of state election law.

Fliedner pledged not to accept campaign money from any lawyer with a criminal or civil case before the DA's office. He also supports limiting prosecutions of many low-level crimes associated with "broken windows" policing, he said.

"We must demand and do the hard work to create a system of law where the most powerful walk into a courtroom on the same footing as the humblest of us," Fliedner said.

But Steve Sigmund, Vance's campaign spokesman, said nearly half of the donations to Fliedner's Brooklyn DA bid came from lawyers. He was also the only one of the six Democratic candidates that the New York City Bar Association said was not qualified for the job.

"Cy Vance's record fighting for survivors of violence against women and progressive causes is second to none," Sigmund said in an email, citing the DA's push to end the national rape kit backlog and his dismissal of 240,000 warrants for minor crimes.

Though Sliwa has a recognizable name in New York, he lives in Brooklyn and it’s unclear how much influence he’ll have in highly Democratic Manhattan.

Fliedner acknowledged that his partnership with Sliwa, a civilian crime-fighter with some conservative stances, is politically unorthodox. Sliwa’s Reform Party endorsed one of Fliedner’s opponents in the Democratic primary for Brooklyn DA, in which Fliedner finished third.

But such partnerships will be important to winning a highly unusual race, Fliedner said. He plans to educate voters on casting a write-in vote with flyers and on social media, he said.

(Lead image by Noah Manskar)