Add The New York Post on Google The controversial co-chair of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America can’t relate to the Big Apple’s working class and needs to quit, a group activists said Tuesday outside his $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse.
Co-chair Gustavo Gordillo has brought heat on himself by lying about immigrant working class roots — even though he’s the silver-spoon son of a Miami millionaire.
“The problem boils down to the lying,” civil rights leader the Rev. Kevin McCall said. “Because if a person that lives in public housing is looking up to you, is hearing things that you say that you, quote-unquote, ‘stand for,’ and then all of it’s a lie, it doesn’t make no sense.
“You can’t have leadership in this city, in Brooklyn, and think that it’s OK just to lie to New Yorkers and lie to public housing residents and people that face elevator issues, mold issues, high rents, people that face issues every day, and nothing happens,” McCall said.
McCall and the others left a letter for Gordillo calling for him to step down at his home, though he was not there as pricey renovations were underway.
Yale grad Gordillo was gifted a $1.5 million townhouse in Bed-Stuy by his wealthy dad — with another $1.4 million in upgrades underway. The operative cosplaying as blue collar then secured a $95,000 DSA salary for him and co-chair Grace Mausser, claiming there’s too mush socialist work to do.
Gordillo, 38, crafted a phony working class image of himself, claiming he was raised by penniless Peruvian immigrants — with his mom cleaning houses and his dad flipping burgers at Wendy’s.
But an unearthed 2021 obituary about his paternal grandfather, Manuel Gordillo, the first to emigrate to the US, tells a radically different story about his roots, The Post found.
“Manuel earned a medical degree from San Marcos University in Lima, Peru, and emigrated to the US in 1958 as a medical resident,” the obit reads. “He obtained his US citizenship in 1964. He built a long and respected career as a psychiatrist in the Cleveland area and reluctantly retired at 87 years old.”
The DSA co-chairs’ grandfather and his wife Ruth had nine kids, including his dad, who lives in Miami and is an engineer who founded a $90 million telecommunications firm, according to public records.
The elder Gordillo is founder and CEO of DraftPros, which hauls in millions every year from high-profile clients like AT&T and Verizon. The DSA boss’ dad confirmed to The Post he bought his son’s home.
Ramona Ferreyra, founder of the public housing tenant group Save Section 9, said NYCHA residents have already had difficulty seeing eye-to-eye with Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani on key issues, saying City Hall is “putting through policies that privatize and demolish public housing.”
Ferreyra, a former DSA member, said Gordillo just doesn’t have the cred to speak for her tenants.
“I think that he doesn’t represent true democratic socialism, right?” she said. “You cannot study your way into movement and power for people. You can’t simply go to an Ivy League school and read the ‘Little Red Book’ and turn around and think that you can deliver the policies that truly serve working class people.”
Other bigwigs in the Big Apple DSA chapter are reportedly living large, including Labor Coordinator Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, who sold her luxe Upper West Side triplex in a brownstone building for $2.4 million in 2022, then picked up a new $521,000 pad two days later, according to public records.
