Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team misspelled names of two controversial picks



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.

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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.

Zohran Mamdani listed some 400 people to his 17 transition committees — but forgot to hire an editor to spell check it. Andrew Schwartz/SIPA/Shutterstock

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 the apparent typos didn’t end there, according to a review by The Post.

Sarita Daftary of the Freedom Agenda — a group that describes itself as “dedicated to organizing people and communities directly impacted by incarceration to achieve decarceration and system transformation” — had her last name spelled “Dafarty” in the release naming her to the same 20-member committee as Linen.

Mary Travis Bassett — or “Basset,” according to the same announcement from Mamdani’s team — a prominent professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was named to the transition “Committee on Health.”

Mysonne Linen, at left, with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 2016, is a controversial pick for Mamdani’s transition team.

Among the other misspelled names were: “Committee on Community Safety” appointee Justine Olderman, from Bronx Defenders, had an “n” thrown in at the end of her name; “Committee on Social Services” member AnnMarie Scalia was listed with the first name “Ann Maria”; and “Committee on Youth & Education” pick Mary Vaccaro had an “r” added to her last name.

The Mamdani team even spelled the names wrong on the transition’s website — until abruptly fixing the typos there Monday.

Black Nationalist Lumumba Bandele was one of several names misspelled on Mamdani’s transition team list. Lumumba Bandele/X
Mysonne Linen, 49, served seven years in state prison for a pair of armed robberies in the last 1990s, records show. Getty Images

Both Linen and Bandele’s appointments have drawn outrage from critics.

Linen, 49, was on awaiting the release of his first album on Def Jam Records when he was convicted in 1999 for a pair of armed robberies of Big Apple cabbies — sending him upstate for a stint in prison.

Bandele, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, has a history of backing cop killers, including Assata Shakur, who escaped from prison, where she was serving a life sentence for killing a New Jersey cop. The convicted killer fled to Cuba, where she was granted asylum until her death in September.

A rep for Mamdani didn’t comment Monday.


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