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Did Mamdani's Team Deliberately Misspell the Names of Controversial Transition Team Picks?

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  December 10, 2025 8:30 AM

Last month, Zohran Mamdani appointed anti-police, pro-crime Janos Marton to his Criminal Legal Committee. Marton, who once ran for Manhattan District Attorney, wants to reduce the city's jail population by at least 80 percent. Mamdani also hired Alex Vitale, a man who wants to abolish all police.

Mamdani has now added two more controversial picks to his transition team, including Mysonne Linen, a convicted armed robber, and "Black nationalist" Lumumba Bandele.

Mamdani defended his selection of Linen, saying his team would "build a city for each and every person," which apparently includes convicted armed robbers but not police officers.

"We put together a team of more than 400 New Yorkers who are on 17 different committees," Mamdani said. "And these are New Yorkers who bring with them both a fluency of the policies and politics of the city...and we will take all of their experiences and analysis into account as we build a city for each and every person."

But keen-eyed critics of Mamdani noticed some very convenient typos in the names of those controversial appointments.

Here's more:

Zohran Mamdani is off to a sloppy start.

The democratic socialist mayor-elect’s team misspelled the names of several appointees to his transition team — including two of his most controversial picks.

Among them was controversial rapper Mysonne Linen, an ex-con who served seven years in state prison, whose first name was botched as “Mysoone” when his appointment to Mamdani’s “Committee on the Criminal Legal System” was announced last month.

The first name of Black Nationalist Lumumba Bandele was also butchered in the Nov. 24 press release, spelled “Lumuumba,” as the mayoral transition announced he’d serve on Mamdani’s “Committee on Community Organizing.”

But those aren't the only misspellings on his staff, according to The New York Post (NYP). Mary Travis Bassett, appointed to the "Committee on Health," had her surname misspelled as "Basset. Other errors included Justine Olderman on the "Committee on Community Safety" (an extra "n" was added to her last name), AnnMarie Scalia on the "Committee on Social Services" had her first name spelled Ann Maria, and Mary Vaccaro of the "Committee on Youth & Education" had an extra "r" thrown into her last name.

The NYP also noted that those names were misspelled on Mamdani's website, an error that was "abruptly" fixed on Monday.

What's more likely: did Mamdani hire an illiterate to run his website and information on his transition team, or were those misspellings deliberate to hide his controversial appointments?

As we noted above, Linen was busted for armed robbery. Bandele, who is a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, has a history of supporting cop killers like Assata Shakur, who killed a New Jersey police officer. Shakur escaped prison and sought asylum in Cuba, where she died this past September.

Mamdani is a socialist determined to make NYC a "city of international law" and usher in the anti-cop, anti-capitalist agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. No better way to do that than to appoint anti-cop, anti-capitalist people to your transition team, and then hide it from voters.