In the latest act of what’s fast becoming City Hall’s traveling sideshow, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has rolled out the red carpet for Mysonne Linen, a convicted armed robber, occasional rapper, and now freshly appointed policy adviser. This is the same Linen who, back in 1999, when Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD was aggressively locking up violent predators under broken-windows policing and CompStat, slashing the city’s crime rate by over 50% and making subways safe again, managed to earn himself seven years in prison for two brutal stick-ups. Now, a quarter-century later, he’s been handed a front-row seat on the Criminal Legal System Committee, perfectly positioned to lecture the cops on how to keep the city safe. Step right up, folks, nothing screams safer streets like putting a former gun-waving robber in charge of telling the NYPD how to do its job.
On June 8, 1997, 22-year-old Mysonne Linen and his crew held Bronx cabbie Joseph Eziri at gunpoint, then pistol-whipped and bottle-smashed his face until he was left permanently disfigured. Ten months later, on March 31, 1998, they did it again, this time to driver, Francisco Monsanto, sticking a pistol in his ribs and stripping him of cash and jewelry. Both victims stared Linen down in a Bronx courtroom and pointed him out, the jury needed little time to convict on robbery, weapons, and stolen-property counts, acquitting only on a separate assault charge because the bottle beating was already baked into the robbery. Linen has spent the last quarter-century insisting he was innocent, that he “took the fall for friends,” but the judge still sent him to serve his sentence in an upstate NY penitentiary for seven hard years. Come January 1, 2026, when Zohran Mamdani raises his right hand, this same stick-up artist will be handed a prime seat on the Criminal Legal System Committee and officially positioned to shape how the NYPD polices the very streets he once terrorized at gunpoint, how it handles the stick-up artists he used to run with, and how New York stays safe without the aggressive tactics that finally put him behind bars for seven years. Step right up, New York, the clown car is idling, and the doors just swung open.
Since his 2006 release, Mysonne Linen has built a public second act as a redemption-story activist, leveraging his armed-robbery convictions to co-found Until Freedom, mentor at-risk youth, and position himself as a “formerly incarcerated expert” on criminal-justice reform panels and in media appearances. Yet that polished new chapter still managed to rack up a fresh rap sheet with a string of civil-disobedience arrests between 2018 and 2020 that kept him in zip-ties, mug-shot lineups, and viral protest videos long after the gun-waving stick-up days were supposedly ancient history. He was detained at a February 2018 Black-immigrant rally outside the White House, twice cuffed during anti-Kavanaugh Supreme Court protests in September and October 2018, and, most seriously, hit with felony charges of tampering with evidence and criminal mischief, along with misdemeanors, during the July 2020 Breonna Taylor protest on a Louisville, KY, highway blockade alongside YBN Cordae, Trae tha Truth, and dozens of others. These charges were later dismissed or reduced amid accusations of prosecutorial overreach. None of these incidents involved violence like his 1999 armed robberies, but they’ve kept his name cycling through arrest logs and mug-shot galleries all the while, perfect ammunition for anyone wondering whether the man now advising New York City on criminal-justice reform has truly left the chaos behind.
This full-blown sideshow act heralds four years of chaos barreling toward the nation’s largest city like a runaway clown car, leaving New Yorkers scratching their heads and clutching their wallets once again. What should they expect from Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democratic socialist who stunned the political world by clinching the 2025 mayoral race with 50.78% of the vote? He rode a wave of progressive fervor, promising equity, affordable housing, and sweeping reform, that fired up young voters fed up with the status quo and ultimately toppled Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. With a little over one month in, the honeymoon is already over as his transition team, meant to signal competent governance, is now flashing neon signs of trouble, further cementing his image as a DSA-backed radical with a record of voting to defund the NYPD and fierce anti-Israel positions that had business leaders and other local politicians sounding alarms long before Election Day.
The Linen appointment isn’t the only jaw-dropping pick in this big-top extravaganza. On November 24, 2025, Mamdani unveiled a 400-plus-member transition team stacked with the city’s most outspoken police abolitionists and anti-police activists prompting immediate outrage from law-enforcement unions, who warn the incoming administration would rather burn down the system than give those who keep it running a voice. Alex Vitale, the Brooklyn College sociology professor who wrote The End of Policing (2017) a manifesto for defunding specialized NYPD units like gang task forces, dismantling broken-windows tactics, and replacing cops with community-based “pods” for crises, now advises on “community safety.” Officers are dubbing him “the arsonist handed the firehose,” noting that shootings plunged 20% in 2025 under the very enforcement strategies he seeks to scrap. Tamika Mallory, Until Freedom co-founder and former Women’s March co-chair who resigned in 2019 amid antisemitism allegations tied to her praise of Louis Farrakhan was named co-adviser to Mamdani’s Committee on Community Safety. In 2020, she openly called for defunding and ultimately abolishing the police, endorsing “defund the police” 100% on Democracy Now! and equating police actions with state-sanctioned violence and terrorism in speeches and interviews. Her viral megaphone rallies demanding “charge the cops” and “dismantle the system” became signature staples of the George Floyd protests. Lumumba Bandele, a Malcolm X Grassroots Movement organizer and CUNY instructor, sits on Mamdani’s Community Organizing committee. For decades, Bandele has campaigned to free Assata Shakur and Herman Bell (convicted of killing police officers), calling them “political prisoners,” and supports total prison abolition. He has labeled Zionism a “crime against humanity.” Police advocates and critics have reacted furiously, recirculating his old statements and branding him a “cop-killer apologist.”
As Mamdani prepares to take the oath, his choices reek of inexperience, desperation, and delusion unleashing misguided policies that will turn Gotham’s bustling streets into no-go zones, prioritizing offenders over victims in a city still jittery from prison reform’s uneven aftermath. New York’s 8.5 million residents are now the unwilling lab rats in the next failed experiment, Linen’s influence threatens to sink any sensible reforms, pushing instead for a restorative-justice model that treats low-level theft as no big deal while turning a blind eye to the armed robberies that often finance it, transforming Mamdani’s past “defund” rhetoric into a full-blown campaign to disarm and defang the NYPD.
As Mamdani prepares to swear in, critics say his appointments reek of inexperience and ideological delusion, choices that will unleash reckless policies, turn Gotham into a no-go zone, and prioritize offenders over victims in a city still scarred by past reforms. For answers, we must look to the precedents, San Francisco’s Prop 47 fueled brazen smash-and-grabs and a retail exodus; Seattle’s 2020 “defund” push abandoned the East Precinct for weeks, let CHOP take over, and left non-emergency 911 calls waiting hours; Portland’s “reimagining” brought nightly riots, torched squad cars, and a business flight that never reversed. Same utopian playbook, same result, skyrocketing crime, shuttered stores, fleeing residents, and voters begging for the police back. Sadly, New York is next in line, this time with a former armed robber helping write the recipe.
On policy, the damage is immediate and concrete, transition teams are supposed to draft workable blueprints, but Linen’s presence threatens to poison the criminal-legal-system committee, potentially stalling tweaks to bail reform. Mamdani’s Gen Z appeal, is the engine of his massive turnout, but will evaporate the moment his administration looks like a revolving door for ex-cons. Socially, this hire deepens divisions in a city held together by fragile threads of diversity. Mamdani ran as the great unifier, now Linen’s violent past is ripping open old wounds in the very immigrant communities that have spent decades living in fear of armed robbers. Taxi drivers, many of whom have been robbed or assaulted, could easily see it as a betrayal, hiring their potential assailant to “reform” the very system that once jailed him. Community leaders in Queens and the Bronx, Linen’s home turf, are already livid, warning that it risks glamorizing criminality behind the shield of “lived experience.”
Before Zohran Mamdani even raises his hand on January 1, the Mysonne Linen appointment has already branded him a radical obsessed with progressive policies, so much so that he’s ready to burn public trust the moment he walks into City Hall. The warnings were everywhere, Mamdani’s campaign drew fire for socialist ties, with multiple PACs raising $50 million in attack ads labeling him a radical threat. Linen’s past extends beyond the 1997–1998 armed-robbery convictions that sent him to prison. His subsequent arrests for civil-disobedience protests between 2018 and 2020, widely covered in the press and accompanied by public mug shots provide opponents with a ready trove of material that is already being archived for potential use against Mamdani in the 2029 re-election cycle, from police union broadsides decrying his “anti-cop” pattern to conservative media recirculating Louisville felony charges as proof of ongoing chaos. National Democrats, terrified of socialist branding post-2024 losses, will keep City Hall at arm’s length. They’ll let New York serve as the cautionary tale while Republican operatives watch the circus unfold from a safe, gleeful distance.
