An Upper East Side man attacked in a vicious subway beatdown — who watched the perpetrator walk away with barely a slap on the wrist from Manhattan’s soft-on-crime district attorney — is warning that Zohran Mamdani’s criminal-justice agenda will unleash even more chaos.
Matt Conley suffered a concussion and two broken teeth after an enraged attacker repeatedly struck him in the face with a cell phone on the Q train platform at East 86th Street after a verbal argument last May.
The NYPD arrested Fadil Kolenovic, 46, in June and charged him with felony assault.
But DA Alvin Bragg’s office knocked down the charge to third-degree assault – a misdemeanor – and Kolenovic walked away with just 10 days probation and a one year conditional discharge – meaning he won’t get a criminal record if he meets conditions, Conley, 58, told The Post.
“The assistant district attorney said, ‘The case has been taken care of, we settled it – this is great,’” Conley recalled of his bizarre conversation with Bragg’s office. “Great is not a word I have been using about any of this.
“They’re not advocates for the crime victims,” he continued.
“The mentality we have right now is this Marxist socialist mentality that the victim is the bad guy and the perpetrator is the victim because in order to get to that point where [the attacker] would hurt somebody, things must have been bad for him. This is not normal.”
“We take all assaults, whether on the street or in the transit system, extremely seriously,” a spokesperson for Bragg told The Post.
“Our full and thorough investigation into this matter, which included reviewing all available evidence, determined that assault in the third degree was the strongest possible outcome under the law.”
Mamdani this week tried to distance himself from the radical national Democratic Socialists of America platform, after drawing outrage last weekend when it emerged that his party’s national umbrella had adopted a platform to wipe out criminal repercussions for all misdemeanor crimes.
Mamdani’s campaign did not reply to The Post’s request for comment.
