Guardian Angel Founder Offers Mayor Feral Cats & Insults In Bed-Stuy

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa is offering the mayor a private pussycat patrol to rout a recurring rodent residency at his Brooklyn townhouse.

In the wake of news that Mayor Eric Adams has received more tickets for rats at his Bed-Stuy property, Sliwa, who unsuccessfully ran against Adams for mayor in 2021, visited the mayors home to blast what he described as an ineffective strategy on rats.

“He is frustrated because he has tried everything to remedy the situation,” a press release from Maria Sliwa, Curtis’ sister and a PR professional, stated about Adams’ personal rat woes. “Everything except Feral Cats.”

As he stood on the sidewalk with his fellow Guardian Angles hovering about and a folding table displayed on example feral cat shelter — essentially an enclosed litter box — and two caged domestic cats names Tiny and Thor, Sliwa seemed to slip back into campaign mode as he critiqued Adams’ rat record.

Sliwa said when he got to the mayor’s block, the first thing he saw was a squished rat on the road.

“He’s not an expert at this,” Sliwa said, “he’s never had any success against rats.”

“The score is rats: 100, Eric Adams: 0, so he’s going: ‘no más, no más, leave it to the Sliwas,'” he said.

He called the mayor’s infamous boozy rat bucket traps “clockwork orange” for their inhumane dispatching of the small mammals.

“How are you gonna attack a rat problem in the whole city when you can’t even deal with your own rat problem?” the former mayoral candidate posited.

Sliwa also went out of his way to use an extremely dated reference to insult Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch, calling her “pass-the-Grey-Pupon-Tisch,” referring to a commercial that first aired nearly 42 years ago.

“You think she’s ever bent over and picked up a piece of garbage in her life?” Sliwa continued in his disparaging of a top Adams ally in his rat crusade. “Are you kidding — she had Jeeves, you know, the limo driver, do it. She has no respect for the men and women in the sanitation department.”

Sliwa even dismissed composting, which rodent experts say would have a big impact on rat populations since it would separate organic trash (rat food) from the main waste stream.

Joshua Goodman, Assistant Commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, told Patch that “I’m old enough to remember those commercials, and old enough to remember when people actually gave a shit about what Curtis Sliwa had to say.”

Goodman said that DSNY has the highest headcount in 20 years under Tich, and is “finally taking up the fight against the black [trash] bags.”

“He can bluster all he wants, but his condiment jokes don’t pass mustard.”

Sliwa also claims to be interested in becoming the rat czar, and even offered to do it for free in his press release.

“I will take him up on his offer,” Adams said at a Wednesday press conference, held prior to Sliwa’s. “You know, if he says he will be my rat czar for free, I’m going to call him and I would like for him to come on board to do it.”

“I will make sure we bring him on board, he can be part of our internship program because I know he’s probably looking for a job since he lost a job that he was trying to get,” Adams said, referring to Sliwa’s loss in 2021’s Mayoral Election.

In December, Mayor Adams received yet another set of tickets for rats at this Lafayette Avenue home, the New York Daily News reported.

One ticket was for garbage in the front yard, creating “harborage conditions” for the rats, and another ticket was for visible signs of a rat borrow on the property, including signs of rat droppings, the Daily News wrote.

The tickets carry a combined fee of $1,200, according to the Daily News.

Earlier this year, Adams was issued a ticket for rodent-related violations which was later dismissed.

He told a judge, just a day before the most recent set of tickets were issued on Dec. 7, that he had spent $7,000 combating rats at his Bed-Stuy home, including his controversial and questionable boozy rat trap.

Adams said at the press conference on Wednesday, he plans to fight the summons as he did with the previous one.

“I look forward to being the chocolate Perry Mason when I go into court,” he said.

While Sliwa called himself and wife Nancy “experts,” claiming that it would only take two feral cats to put the rats in their place, and the kitties would operate in tandem, “like Batman and Robin,” to clear the block of rats, most studies by researchers and scientists show this to be popular fantasy.

Cats much prefer smaller mice and will infrequently go out of their way to engage with rats, especially in urban settings because of the impressive girth of the city rat, according to researchers.

In fact, one such study was done in Brooklyn at an industrial waste site in 2017 and found that the cats were more likely to cohabitate with the rodents than attack or chase, much less kill, the pests.

“Our findings of low levels of predation support why ecologists believe the risks to native wildlife outweighs any benefits of releasing cats,” the study said.

Additionally, feral cats, according to the Audubon Society, kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year in the United States alone, and are considered by many to be an invasive predator.

The mayor has made a big show of his war on rats, a frequent and common complaint, but has still shied away from making major changes to sanitation practices — like universal composting or trash containerization — which, experts say, are they only way to manage populations.

Instead, City Hall put out a job posting rife with violent language looking for a “bloodthirsty” rat czar whose interests include “wholesale slaughter,” causing rat experts and concerned neighbors alike to shake their heads at the viral language and flawed strategy of not pursuing candidates with backgrounds in rodents or science-related fields.