The New York subway system has never exactly been a cosy place, but the past six months have seen two crimes take place there that appalled even its most hardened travellers. Three days before Christmas, a man approached a woman sleeping on a stationary F train at Coney Island, Brooklyn, at around 7.30am – and set her on fire. Surveillance video captured Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, an undocumented Guatemalan migrant, nonchalantly walking up to 57-year-old Debrina Kawam and using a cigarette lighter to ignite her clothes.
Horrific CCTV footage showed Zapera-Calil – who told police he was a heavy drinker and smoker of a synthetic cannabis known as ‘spice’ or ‘K2’ – sitting on a station bench and watching as the woman burned to death.
The killing was the 11th in New York’s subways last year, the highest figure in decades, and it came just after state governor Kathy Hochul had sent 1,000 National Guard troops into the subway system to maintain public order after a rise in crimes.
No soldiers were around to stop an even more disgusting incident in April this year, when CCTV captured a man sodomising a corpse on an empty train in Manhattan’s Financial District at around midnight. Felix Rojas, 44, another undocumented migrant, was charged with attempting to rape an unresponsive Jorge Gonzalez, 37, who was later determined to have been dead. Rojas allegedly first robbed his victim then returned 25 minutes later to have sex with his body.
Violent crime is rising sharply in the subway – last year’s felony assaults were triple the figure in 2009. Thanks to New York’s Left-wing policy of drastically restricting the courts’ practice of demanding cash bail for less serious crimes, many repeat offenders are now simply released – while many violent offences are treated as ‘misdemeanours’, even though they can still be vicious attacks.
And even if commuters and tourists on the subway don’t find themselves becoming a new statistic, they’re still highly likely to experience so-called ‘quality of life’ offences such as aggressive begging and open drug use, along with seriously mentally-ill people living permanently on the subway – problems to which New York police nowadays turn a blind eye.
The situation is not much better above ground where, thanks to the obsession of New York’s prosecutors with cutting incarceration rates (especially among ethnic minorities whom they claim experience discrimination in the justice system), has led to a crime upsurge that included a shoplifting epidemic prompting retailers to start locking away even toothpaste and shampoo.
And, as I wrote in these pages last year, it also sparked a terrifying spate of random street attacks involving men randomly punching young women in the face as hard as they can.
A Shia Muslim born in Uganda and of Indian extraction, Mamdani moved to New York when he was seven and became an American citizen only seven years ago
‘The streets in the city where I have lived for 18 years now reek of illicit cannabis,’ writes Leonard
The housing crisis and overcrowded shelters in New York have left individuals facing financial hardship, substance abuse, or mental illness with no choice but to live on the streets
The streets in the city where I have lived for 18 years now reek of illicit cannabis. Since 2021, the drug – now conclusively shown to cause schizophrenia and other serious mental health disorders – has been legal.
But rather than being purchased from licensed shops as pro-drug advocates imagined, it is mostly sourced from hundreds of unlicensed ‘smoke shops’ that sell it far cheaper than official dispensaries and have made a mockery of attempts to remove criminals from the trade.
As with the city’s ‘progressive’ criminal justice reforms, New York’s legalisation of weed was appallingly executed because it was designed chiefly to address the disproportionate jailing of black people for cannabis crimes.
Politicians pushed ahead with an absurd and impractical system in which the first people offered licences to sell the drug were those previously jailed for cannabis offences.
New York’s litany of problems caused by its Democrat leaders continues with its status as a ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal migrants, meaning it cooperates as little as possible with federal authorities searching for those with no right to be in the US.
This piece of do-goodery has backfired spectacularly since 2023, when the Biden administration’s wholesale lifting of border restrictions prompted a tidal wave of Latin American migrants to cross the Mexican border. Around 10,000 a month were soon arriving in New York, completely overwhelming the city’s ability to house and support them. Some 550,000 are now estimated to live here.
Crime, drugs, migrants – and let’s not forget New York’s crumbling infrastructure, from criminally rutted roads to the decrepit subway – experts say it will take years to clear up the mess, assuming there is a political will do it.
Which brings me to a high-minded young politician who may soon be in charge of New York City and will – many well-established residents fear – only make its problems far, far worse.
New York’s litany of problems caused by its Democrat leaders continues with its status as a ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal migrants
In 2023, around 10,000 Latin migrants a month were arriving in New York, completely overwhelming the city’s ability to house and support them. Some 550,000 are now estimated to live there
National Guard troops and police have been deployed across the city’s subway due to surging violence on the network
So much worse, say those with long memories, that he might drag the Big Apple back to the nightmarish years of the 1970s, when the city’s fiscal crisis was so dire it nearly went bankrupt.
A toxic combination of chronic overspending, economic downturn and investors losing confidence in the city led to it essentially defaulting on $1.6 billion in debts. Crime rocketed along with arson and unemployment – a bleak and violent dystopia captured in Hollywood films such as Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
Needless to say, Zohran Mamdani – proud socialist, savvy social media user and charismatic darling of the wokerati – remembers none of these horrors, as he is just 33. However he has just pulled off a stunning and entirely unexpected victory in the election primary to become the official Democrat candidate for New York mayor.
That means, barring a major upset, he seems set to be elected to the hugely influential and powerful post in November.
To do so, Mamdani will probably have to defeat the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams – accused of accepting bribes and illegal campaign contributions – and ex-New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been accused of sexual harassment by 13 women. Both men deny the claims, but their campaigns have nevertheless been tarnished as a result.
An obscure member of the New York state assembly for four years before he ran for mayor, Mamdani seemingly came from nowhere. His victory has been hailed as a ‘political earthquake’, that might shake up the Democratic Party across the US.
A Shia Muslim born in Uganda and of Indian extraction, Mamdani moved to New York with his parents when he was seven and his father became a professor at Columbia University. He became an American citizen only seven years ago.
Steeped in the ‘privilege’ he says he stands against, he is the privately educated son of a successful film director mother and ultra-Left-wing father, whose post-colonialist views are required reading in many UK university politics and history departments.
Mamdani’s own beliefs seem even more radical. He was educated at Manhattan’s Bank Street School for Children, where annual fees range from £27,500 to £50,000, and Bowdoin College, a private ‘liberal arts’ college in Maine.
In 2021, he gave a speech to the Young Democratic Socialists of America in which said that the ‘end goal’ was ‘seizing the means of production’ – language straight out of Karl Marx – while he has also described capitalism as ‘theft’. No wonder Donald Trump characterises him as a ‘100 per cent communist lunatic’ and a ‘total nut-job’.
To be fair to Mamdani, he does at least admit he is a nepo-baby. As a younger man, he boasted the sort of connections that allowed him to recruit the well-known TV chef and actress Madhur Jaffrey to appear in a rap video he made when his ambitions ran in that direction.
His CV – which includes being a fanatical Arsenal supporter and keen cricketer – hardly screams horny-handed son of toil, although he does live in a small apartment in Queens.
In a sign of how political campaigning is shifting, Mamdani benefited enormously from putting out endless slick campaign videos on social media, some published within minutes of being filmed and going viral instantly, leading some to call him ‘a TikTok savant’.
Fellow millennials were also no doubt impressed that Leftie celebrity fans like the supermodel Emily Ratajkowski and Sex And The City actress Cynthia Nixon backed him, the former joining other young women in donning ‘Hot Girls For Zohran’ T-shirts.
The bearded Mamdani, who won the ‘Biggest Smile’ prize at middle school, has inevitably drawn breathless comparisons to Barack Obama.
He has virtually no relevant experience for the job but his younger fans hardly care when they find him so handsome and charismatic. Sadly for the female ones, he’s married, to 27-year-old Syrian Rama Duwaji, a fiercely pro-Palestinian artist.
Like innumerable socialists before him, he has made endless promises – money no object – to New Yorkers struggling to afford to live in an expensive city.
His long list includes free public transport, free college tuition, universal free childcare, freezing rents for two million people and a $60 million (£44 million) scheme to set up government-run grocery stores that he says will be exempt from paying rent or property taxes and so be able to sell food more cheaply.
He’s called for a subsidised housing building programme that alone would cost $100 billion (£73 billion) over ten years.
When it comes to crime, he previously endorsed plans to ‘defund the police’ amid the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. He’s even suggested violence is an ‘artificial construction’ (not so ‘artificial’, perhaps to someone who’s been shot or stabbed).
As the health risks of cannabis have become clearer, some New York politicians who backed legalisation are starting to reconsider their positions. Not Mamdani, who has never denied reports that he enjoys cannabis personally. Implying that political opponents who don’t share his enthusiasm for the drug may be racist, he accused them of using ‘coded language’ when criticising cannabis smokers.
Opponents say one of his stupidest ideas is to convert empty retail spaces in the subway system
into city-run facilities for the homeless, thereby further worsening, they say, the problem of violently mentally ill people roaming
the network.
On the delicate question of how to pay for everything, Mamdani has an easy answer – higher taxes. He said he intends to ‘shift the tax burden’ to ‘richer, whiter neighbourhoods’, an ugly remark that sparked accusations of racism.
Predictably, New York’s business leaders have said they are ‘terrified’ of his rise. Senior Democrats of the old guard – including governor Kathy Hochul, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer – have refrained from endorsing him.
Mamdani believes that billionaires ‘shouldn’t exist’ – but the truth is he needs the rich New Yorkers, who haven’t already fled to lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas, to pay the taxes that will fund his vast spending plans.
He hasn’t panicked only businesspeople. New York has more than a million Jews, 12 per cent of its population, who typically vote Democrat. But they are deeply wary of their mayor being a Muslim who relishes his record of anti-Israel activism.
Although he insists he is not anti-Semitic, Mamdani has questioned Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and has repeatedly refused to condemn the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’, which many believe is an open incitement to violence. Some Jewish commentators have said many Jews will feel they have to leave New York, so long a safe haven for them, if Mamdani takes over.
There is no shortage of experts arguing that Mamdani’s ideas are more likely to hurt the poorest New Yorkers than help them.
Freezing rents, for instance, typically discourages landlords from putting properties on the market and makes it less likely they can maintain them properly. Making public transport free has been shown to encourage vagrants and troublemakers to use it, while cutting police numbers primarily hits poorer, high-crime areas.
US political commentator Rob Henderson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, calls Mamdani a ‘poster child for luxury beliefs’: that is, opinions that make wealthy, privileged people feel good at very little cost, but make life difficult for the poorest.
As for Trump, he seems to be rubbing his hands with glee at what Mamdani running New York would likely do to the Democrats’ reputation. ‘We’ve had radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous,’ said the president, a long-time New Yorker.
For once, many Democrats may be inclined to agree with him.
