I was sitting eating a bland Panera sandwich, at the decidedly bland corner of Arch and Twelfth Streets in Center City Philadelphia, when I spotted a row of familiar red berets out the window. The Guardian Angels are in town!

Curtis Sliwa, whose vigilante efforts to protect New Yorkers from threats real and perceived made him into a local celebrity, is focused on a new danger: Melinda Katz, his ex*, against whom he is considering running for Queens Borough President.

This was how things worked, as Curtis Sliwa recalls it, back in the heyday of the Guardian Angels, from the late ’70s through the early ’90s: In one subway car, Sliwa might break up a fistfight, then move to the next car and find a domestic dispute in progress. In the following car, there might be a drug dealer pushing his product, and in the car after that, a group of young men openly drinking malt liquor 40s and smoking blunts.

Washington Post style reporter Dan Zak wrote a dispatch for the section's "Night Lives" column about D.C.'s Guardian Angels.

While finding an anonymous tip about Paris Hilton in our inbox is certainly not an uncommon experience, it's rare that we receive one composed entirely in a foreign tongue, from a self-professed "guardian angel" who signs their correspondence, "The french." We're suckers for some Euro-style cloak and dagger, however, so we put our best minds to work translating the contents of the cryptic message: