Bill DeBlasio, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer, says he just decided to go with the gag when Britain’s illustrious newspaper, the Times, contacted him for an interview, mistaking him for the former New York mayor, Bill de Blasio.

“It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print,” Mr. DeBlasio, of Huntington Station, told the news site Semafor. He said he had just assumed the reporter would “have all his people check it out.”

But the reporter didn’t, and the U.K. newspaper of record went to print with a seemingly explosive interview, in which Mr. de Blasio — the one with a small d in his name — seemed to backtrack from his prior endorsement of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

The interview quickly caught the attention of the real ex-mayor, who went on X to denounce it as “entirely false and fabricated.”

“I never spoke to that reporter and never said those things. Those quotes aren’t mine, don’t reflect my views,” Mr. de Blasio wrote.

“It is an absolute violation of journalistic ethics,” he added in a follow-up post, demanding that the Times immediately retract the article – which it did. “The truth is I fully support @ZohranKMamdani and believe his vision is both necessary and achievable.”

As for Mr. DeBlasio – the one with a capital D – he insists that he did not go out of his way to mislead the Times when its reporter, Bevan Hurley, reached out to him with an email intended for the former mayor.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” he told Semafor.  “I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

But, he conceded, “I could have corrected him.”

Mr. DeBlasio said the reporter had written that he was working on “an article looking at Zohran Mamdani’s policy plans and their estimated costs. I would greatly appreciate your insights on Mr. Mamdani’s ambitious agenda, potential obstacles, and whether the sums add up.”

The wine importer says he used ChatGPT to craft his response, in which he criticized Mr. Mamdani’s tax plans as unworkable.

Now, Mr. DeBlasio is fuming at the Times over its retraction, which said its reporter had been “misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.” He is also irked at the other Times – the New York one – which reported that the British journal had been taken in by a “de Blasio impersonator.”

Nor is the confusion anything new, he said, claiming he has been receiving sometimes “brutal, vicious hate mail” aimed at the former mayor for a decade.

As for the difference in how the two men spell their name, he said, “Low-class Italians use a little d.”