Silk's not just blowing smoke

May 3, 2005
By Dennis Duggan

Retired cop Audrey Silk puffed on a Parliament in her Cape Cod-style home in Marine Park and said she is running for mayor because Michael Bloomberg is a "Puritan who has taken the gusto out of New York City."

"How many of those do you smoke every day?" I ask.

"I hate that question," she said in a mind-your-own-business voice.

Silk knows she's the longest of long shots as the candidate of the Libertarian Party, which was burned in 1994 when it chose radio talk show host Howard Stern to run for governor against George Pataki. Stern left party officials high and dry by quitting before the election.

"He was only running for the publicity it gave to a book he had just published," said Jim Lesczynski, who is the Libertarian candidate for public advocate. Lesczynski said he is not a smoker, but has become a "political smoker" to protest the smoking ban.

But Silk says she is in the race to stay. For her, the smoking ban is personal and so is the mayor, whose voice drives her nuts - "It's like nails in my head." She has a poster in her living room of the mayor that shows him with his pants at his ankles and the line "Bloomberg Butt Out!!"

Silk, a cop for two decades in the 67th Precinct, was a community activist long before she went into politics - this is her first run at any elective office and she says the Libertarians sought her out.

"I don't come with any baggage," she said, "and it helps that I am a former police officer."

It is Bloomberg who rattles her chains the most, she admits. In a magazine interview in July 2002, Silk said everyone has an addiction, including the mayor.

"He's addicted to money," she said.

"He is ruining the city," said Silk, 41, who unlike Bloomberg, grew up in the city and went to public school.

Silk, who is divorced, is the founder of NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment or NYC CLASH. It isn't just the smoking ban that began in March 2003 that angers her. It's all those increased traffic fines and the higher taxes, including the one on cigarettes, that made her decide to try to oust Bloomberg from office.

Silk, who has a no-nonsense manner about her, wears a miniature diamond-topped replica of her police badge around her neck - a gift from her diamond-cutter father when she graduated from the Police Academy in 1984.

In the 67th Precinct, Silk was the election officer, meaning she ran police postings at the 14 voting places in her precinct.

Until a few weeks ago, when she was chosen as the party's mayoral candidate at its convention in Bohemian Hall in Astoria, her only other brush with politics was voting.

"I will speak forcefully on the issues important to us and will never say I believe something that I don't," she told the convention. She admitted she was inexperienced, but said "one thing I do know is that there are a lot more libertarian-minded people out there than we are led to believe."

One of them is Sidney Zion, an author, columnist and former federal prosecutor, who leaves a trail of crushed cigars wherever he goes. Another is smoker Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine, and a social critic of renown.

Both attended a "Bye, Bye Bloomberg" party that NYC CLASH held on the first day of the smoking ban at Frankie & Johnnie's bar and restaurant in Hoboken.

I asked Zion if he planned to vote for Silk in the fall election.

"Yeah, I'll vote for her. Even if she loses, she's raising an issue everyone else is afraid to raise," said Zion, who added that the "ban has gone too far" and is "the stuff of dictators."

Zion said he talked to a World War II veteran who said his VFW club was complying with the ban.

"I got through Normandy and now they tell me I can't smoke in my own club?" Zion quoted the veteran as saying.

Silk said she is appalled at how easily New Yorkers have submitted to having their behavior enforced by law.

"I don't like busybodies like this mayor or his health commissioner [Thomas Frieden] telling me what to do," she said. "I like the idea of smaller government."

In a year when the media are panning the four drab Democrats running for mayor, Silk seems about right when she calls herself "the real deal."
http://www.nynewsday.com/

MANHATTAN-- LIBERTARIANS NOMINATE AUDREY SILK AS MAYORAL CANDIDATE

04/13/05

Community Activist Urges Personal Responsibility, Freedom; Convention Also Taps Lesczynski, Moore For Citywide Offices

Audrey Silk, community activist and founder of NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (NYC C.L.A.S.H.), was nominated as the Libertarian Party candidate for Mayor of New York City on Saturday, at a convention at the Bohemian Hall in Astoria, Queens. The convention also nominated businessman Ron Moore, president of Marketing Technologies Group, for New York City Comptroller, and Jim Lesczynski, Manhattan Libertarian Party chair and veteran activist, for Public Advocate.

http://www.ny.lp.org/

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