Leaders of a key New York City bodega and restaurant group are taking the rare step of speaking out about the mayoral election and throwing their support behind Andrew Cuomo — just days after a rival group got rocked over a Zohran Mamdani endorsement, The Post has learned.
“We don’t endorse candidates,” said Francisco Marte, founder and president of the Bodega and Small Business Group, which represents some 3,000 bodegas, barber shops, beauty salons, mechanics and restaurants in the Big Apple.
“But we favor Andrew Cuomo,” Marte told The Post. “He’s the best of what we have now.”
At issue for many of these small businesses are Mamdani’s plans to open city-owned grocery stores that would offer customers wholesale prices. Small business owners, especially retailers, have likewise been rattled by Mamdani’s past comments about defunding the police.
Cuomo, the business owners believe, will be tougher on crime and shoplifting.
He is “guaranteeing more public safety and is not coming with this crazy idea to compete with us with city owned grocery stores,” Marte said.
Marte’s group is taking a stand after a rival organization, United Bodegas of America, blindsided its members this week, including its co-founder Fernando Mateo, by endorsing Mamdani. In response, Mateo angrily resigned from the trade group, which The Post exclusively reported on Wednesday.
Now, United Bodegas’ President Radhames Rodriguez, who made the surprise endorsement at a local eatery in the Bronx this week, is losing members, according to Marte and other grocers.
“I think a quarter of the United Bodega Association’s members will leave because they feel betrayed,” Marte told The Post, adding that several have already told him that they are jumping ship to his group.
Rodriguez did not immediately respond for comment.
His group has about 2,000 members in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, out of roughly13,000 bodegas in New York City.
“We are planning to ask Mateo to sit with us and to bring members with him to the real association,” said Carlos Collado, who owns two Fine Fare supermarkets in the Bronx and is a vice president of the Bodega and Small Business Group.
Earlier this week, Mateo called Rodriguez’s Mamdani endorsement a “betrayal” and a violation of the trade group’s bylaws as a nonprofit, which is not supposed to publicly back a political candidate.
Mateo also told The Post on Wednesday, “Hundreds of bodega owners already reached out expressing their discontent. I had to explain to them that I had nothing to do with it.”
An outspoken conservative, Mateo unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 2021’s mayoral race.
But Mateo and Marte were not always on the same page.
They operated under the same umbrella – Bodega Association of the USA – until 2017, when they had a beef over who would take the lead at a press conference on crime at bodegas, according to Marte.
Mateo and Rodriguez split off to form the United Bodegas of America.
“If we see that we have common ground, we can find a way” to work together again, Marte said.
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