By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2026-08-19 22:10:50 | Updated at 2026-08-19 22:22:58
18 minutes ago
The top DSA leader whose parents set him up in cushy Brooklyn digs short-circuited as a union electrician — and then convinced his socialist party comrades to pay him a near-six-figure salary, The Post has learned.
Former Yale University liberal arts student Gustavo Gordillo, 38, was fired from his apprenticeship program in March after ghosting his employer for months, meaning he never made it as a fully-credentialed electrician, the IBEW Local 3 union confirmed Wednesday.
“After learning of Mr. Gordillo’s prolonged absence from and failure to participate in required work and classes, the trustees of the Joint Apprentice Training Committee terminated Mr. Gordillo from the program,” the IBEW said in a statement.
A source close to the union said “he didn’t have a strong work record to begin with” and took the job “just for show,” while hogging “a slot from someone who probably really needed the opportunity.”
But Gordillo failed to mention that he’d gotten canned when sources said he made an emotional appeal to Democratic Socialists of America rank-and-file for full-time pay and benefits last month.
“Both of them [Gordillo and his co-chair Grace Mausser] went into detail on their day jobs on how since [Mayor] Zohran [Mamdani] won they were getting so much national attention,” one attendee of the July Queens DSA meeting recalled.
He even regalled the audience with stories about the struggles of him having to do media interviews, using an ear piece on construction job sites, telling the crowd it was too “distracting,” the source said.
The measure to pay Gordillo and Mausser each $95,000 a year with benefits ended up passing.
“This appeal to a struggle that he is facing doesn’t seem real at all. It’s a lie,” the source said — in light of The Post’s Wednesday front-page story detailing how Gordillo’s wealthy parents bought him a row home in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“It just seems like a ploy.”
Neither Gordillo nor the city’s DSA chapter returned requests for comment.
Gordillo, who was born in Peru and grew up in Florida, moved to New York City in 2016, after studying at the Ivy League university, and has said he found work at a high-end Chelsea gallery and that President Trump’s election that year inspired him to join the DSA.
The Yale registrars’ office confirmed to The Post on Wednesday that he studied literature there between 2006-10, but did not earn a degree. He also studied sculpture at Yale’s graduate School of Art a couple of years later, records show.
Gordillo’s dad admitted Tuesday that he paid his son’s $2,600 a month rent on the Lower East Side, through a dummy corporation, Chucuito LLC, until 2019.
His parents then purchased the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy for him and his brother for just under $1 million in 2019 through the same LLC.
The socialist became a member of the Local 3 union in April 2024, but stopped showing up to work around the time fellow DSA-member Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected in November 2025, according to the union.
His social media profile on X — where his handle is @unionGustavo — still described him as a “@nycdsa co-chair, union electrician” as of Wednesday.
One DSA source scoffed at the far-left nonprofit group deciding to pay its co-chairs a cushy salary to spread their socialist gospel.
“None of these people are ready for prime time,” the source said, mocking Gordillo’s recent appearance on Fox News as a trainwreck.
Folks were “openly complaining” about the interview, the source said.
Federal non-profit paperwork shows that the NYC-DSA did not pay its co-chairs previously, with Mausser and Gordillo receiving zero money in exchange for five hours a week of work in 2025.
None of the leaders that year collected a salary.
The resolution states that the co-chairs will have to raise 15% of their salary. They will be responsible for pushing the NYC-DSA agenda and presenting it to the city and state government and promote the group’s endorsed slate of political candidates.
Meanwhile, renovations continued Wednesday at Gordillo’s house, where workers have been redoing the interior, the entire front facade and adding two decks on the roof.
“I think it’s really counter [to] everything that he’s supposed to represent,” said one neighbor, Kristen Singleton-Ferrari, 59.
“It seems more and more expensive” to live in the neighborhood, she added.
Another neighbor had nothing but praise for the Florida transplant.
“Gustavo? He’s a really nice guy! He’s quiet. He gave us all free stuff.”
— Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan, Hannah Fierick and Carl Campanile
