NEW YORK CITY — Michael Macko hasn’t been a New York City voter for about a decade. But if he were, he said, he probably would have voted for front-runner Zohran Mamdani. Then he saw the photo that Mamdani posted of himself grinning next to Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of a Brooklyn mosque with “historical ties to terrorism,” according to a New York City federal court filing.
“I was shocked,” said Macko, 61, about Mamdani’s photo on Friday. “If I were going to vote, he would’ve just lost my vote.”
To Macko, a fashion stylist living in northern New Jersey, this wasn’t just a political miscalculation by the democratic socialist. It was personal. Thirty-two years ago, Macko dropped off his father for work at the World Trade Center only to never see him again. That afternoon, Islamist extremists detonated a bomb in an underground garage, killing six people, including his father, William J. Macko, then 48 and a supervisor for the Port Authority.
