Sliwa in defiant dips vs. DeB
Mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa flouted Mayor de Blasio’s beach swimming ban twice on Sunday when he went for dips off Coney Island — as a crowd cheered him on and Parks Department cops helplessly eyed him.
Hizzoner warned last week, “Anyone tries to get in the water, they’ll be taken right out of the water,” while also threatening summonses for violators as the city battles to keep the coronavirus under control.
But Sliwa, dressed in a wet suit and his trademark red beret, strolled into the surf two separate times and swam around for a total of about an hour without consequence .
People on a pier near the old Parachute Jump cheered.
Up to eight Parks officers tried ordering the Guardian Angels founder to stay out of the ocean when he went in the first time.
“I slowly walked into the water, and the parkies are apoplectic, they don’t know what to do,” Sliwa recalled to The Post. “They start blowing their whistles as if they were lifeguards, screaming, ‘Come back!
Come back!’ And I just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper.
“The whole concept is, this is our beach, not de Blasio’s.”
His first act was staking out a place on the sand — which he did quite literally, using an effigy of de Blasio’s head on a stick.
Sliwa, who announced in March that he is running for mayor, buried the life-size likeness “right up to his head, so you could see his whole face. And I started kicking sand in his face, because of his edict that you could not swim in the water. His Parks Department people were staring.’’
Sliwa said he then headed into the surf the first time. “Then finally I came back [out] . . . and I said, ‘OK, what are you going to do? You can either lock me up or write me up,’ ” he said. “They said, ‘We’re just advising you: You can’t swim, because there are no lifeguards.’
“And they were perplexed, didn’t know what to do. They just watched me go back in,” he said.
Mayoral rep Jane Meyer said, “Curtis Sliwa should be ashamed of himself.”