NYC Mayor Appoints Two-Time Convicted Armed Robber to Lead His Criminal Justice Team
New York City used to pride itself on being tough—tough on crime, tough on corruption, tough on the predators who once stalked its streets. Today, under mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the city isn’t just soft. It’s inverted. It now extends more honor to violent criminals than to the people they terrorized.
And nothing proves that more than Mamdani’s decision to appoint Mysonne Linen—yes, the Mysonne Linen, convicted armed robber—to his criminal-justice transition team. Only a city that has fully surrendered to ideological vanity could hand the keys of public safety to the man who once shoved a gun in the faces of innocent taxi drivers just trying to make rent.
For those who don’t know the backstory, Mamdani is a self-described socialist who ran on the kind of platform that reads like a TikTok fever dream: defund this, abolish that, turn every criminal into a misunderstood philosopher-king. And to signal just how serious he is about reshaping New York’s justice system, he’s brought in Linen—a former rapper who served seven years behind bars for robbing cab drivers at gunpoint.
One of those drivers was a man named Joseph Exiri. Another was Francisco Monsanto. Ordinary men, grinding out long hours in traffic to support their families, suddenly faced with a pistol and a beer bottle broken over their head and the chilling realization that this might be the night they don’t go home.
Imagine what they felt. Imagine what their families felt. Imagine what it does to a man to have a stranger decide—on a whim, with a weapon—that your life is negotiable. Violent robbery doesn’t just empty wallets. It scars souls. It rewires the brain into a permanent state of vigilance. For Exiri and Monsanto, this wasn’t a statistic. It was a horror they lived through.
And now, decades later, the man who inflicted that terror isn’t just walking free. He’s being elevated, applauded, and handed a seat at the table where public-safety policy is crafted. He has influence over the very system he once shredded. He is being trusted with the reins of justice in a city that once feared him.
If Exiri or Monsanto opened the news today and saw Linen’s smiling portrait plastered beside official titles and glowing praise, what would they think? Relief that their assailant had “turned his life around”? Gratitude to a political class that seems determined to sanctify the violent and shame the victims? Or would they feel a bitter, familiar punch in the gut—the unmistakable sense that the world has forgotten them?
The brutal truth is that victims don’t matter anymore. Not in Mamdani’s New York. Not in a city that views violent felons as visionaries and law-abiding citizens as obstacles to the revolution. Linen is being celebrated because he fits the storyline the new ruling class loves. He can talk about “the system,” “restorative justice,” “lived experience,” and all the other buzzwords that light up the activist imagination. But Exiri and Monsanto? They represent the part of the story nobody wants to acknowledge—the human cost of crime, the people who never get book deals, speaking tours, or political appointments.
This isn’t mercy. This isn’t grace. This is moral derangement disguised as enlightenment. Rehabilitation is one thing; reinstating a violent offender into the mechanisms of civil authority is another. Public office—whether elected or advisory—is not a therapeutic exercise. It is a trust. And once you’ve threatened an innocent man’s life with a gun in your hand, you have forfeited certain forms of that trust forever.
Yet Mamdani is determined to prove that New York will not merely tolerate this madness—it will enshrine it. The message he sends is unmistakable—criminals are stakeholders, victims are footnotes, and public safety is a narrative problem, not a real one.
New York once cleaned up its streets. Now it hands them back to the very people who stained them with fear. And the political class nods along, congratulating itself for its moral sophistication as it drags the city deeper into dysfunction.
Somewhere out there, Joseph Exiri and Francisco Monsanto are reading these headlines. They’re seeing their assailant rebranded as an adviser. And they’re learning, once again, the same lesson violent crime taught them years ago: in New York City, your suffering is an inconvenience. Your trauma is outdated. Your story doesn’t advance the agenda.
But Mysonne Linen? He’s valuable now. He’s useful. He’s politically fashionable.
And that is how far New York has fallen.