F in ethics: Zohran Mamdani laughed off stealing a table in college
NYC socialist mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and a pal stole a table while an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine — only admitting to the heist in the campus newspaper after security had him dead to rights.
“I would occasionally use the table in my room. You know, for that game with the red Solo cups and a few ping-pong balls,” the future defund-the-police Queens assemblyman recalled in a Sept. 16, 2011 column for The Bowdoin Orient, titled “Idiots Steal Table.”
“Not a drinking game though, because that would be against the rules, so we play with water. Just as much fun with twice the hydration.”
And the “crime” was premeditated — Mamdani admitted to eyeing the piece since he was a freshman the year before, he wrote.
He claimed he grew so fond of the furniture that he plotted with a buddy to “borrow the table for a few nights” at his new campus living quarters by carrying it “in broad daylight” from one building to another, The Maine Wire first reported.
Mamdani wrongly assumed there were no security cameras along his getaway path, so his jaw dropped the following day when he got a call from Randy Nichols, a retired Maine State Trooper who then ran the nearly $65,000-a-year college’s security.
“I thought it had to do with a crime to report, since I also cover the crime beat for this paper. In a way, I wasn’t wrong,” he wrote.
“His first words to me on the phone: ‘Zohran, do you have any knowledge on the whereabouts of a bench from second floor West?’ I couldn’t believe it, and yet I kind of did. But before we established ourselves as the worst borrowers in history, I needed clarification: ‘A bench or a table, Mr. Nichols?””
“By the end of the conversation, I had admitted to having taken a table from [the] second floor [of the] West [building] without asking anyone, and also to having been an idiot in the process.”
Mamdani, however, insisted in his column he still had “nothing but love” for Nichols — and was ready to deal with the consequences, whatever they would be.
“Here’s to the man with the deepest voice I’ve ever heard and the trendiest wrist-bands on campus, continuing to catch idiot table-snatching thieves for years to come. And to my meeting with my dean next week,” he wrote.
It is unclear if Mamdani received any punishment.
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