Randy Mastro Is Now Mamdani's Pied-à-Terrorist

Mayor Mamdani's wiliest legal opponent is at it again.

On Tuesday, a Staten Island judge sided with former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, ruling that New York City's rollout of the so-called pied-à-terre tax was deeply harmful to homeowners and should be scrapped and restarted. 

In a Zoom press conference on Tuesday afternoon, a windswept Mastro attempted a victory lap. "I don't like to be in a position of having to bring cases like this," said the man who just filed his seventh lawsuit against the Mamdani administration, "but clients come to us and present meritorious claims."

It was an admittedly small victory for Randy the Rascal and his fellow tax-haters. The judge didn't stop the second home tax itself, just the bureaucratic way it was being collected. Over the summer, the City issued notices to thousands of people with homes valued at more than $5 million and asked them to clarify whether their primary residence was in the city. It also published a list of nearly a million properties that could be subject to the tax based on public data. 

Mastro and a handful of property-owners sued, saying that even though they may not have personally gotten letters from the city (which Mastro calls "nastygrams"), the whole process was brutally victimizing for owners of multimillion-dollar homes.