Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver

2 Big City Crime

Well, I hope you’re happy. You wanted sleazy stories about sex in taxicabs and now you’ve gotten them – plus a nice, sentimental one I’ll bet you weren’t expecting. So now let’s get down to business and move along to another much-requested type of story: crime.

‘Have you ever been held up?’ is a question I am often asked by passengers. After all, driving a taxi in New York City is a job that’s more dangerous than being a cop and unfortunately we do often hear stories about taxi drivers who are victims of crimes. My answer to that question, which is, happily, ‘No’, seems to do little to cancel out the lingering suspicion in the minds of some that New York is an unsafe place. But this sense of unease is not really based on actuality. Statistically speaking, New York is one of the safest cities in the United States. What’s bothering these people, I believe, is the perception of the possibility of crime. With so many iffy-looking people walking around, so many dark, deserted streets, and a media that heightens our fears with an insatiable appetite for crime, crime, CRIME!, we may lose sight of the fact that, generally speaking, people are getting along quite well with one another. But not always…

Swallowed

I was cruising along on West 75th Street on a pleasant evening in October, 1984 when I spotted a young man emerging from a brownstone, waving his hands frantically in the air, and calling out for me to stop.

‘Please wait here a minute,’ he pleaded as he came running up to the side of my cab, ‘I’ve got to help my friend get down the stairs.’ And then he ran back up the steps to the brownstone and opened the door there.

When I saw his friend my jaw dropped. He was also a young guy, medium in build, but he was completely covered in blood, his white t-shirt a red rag. As the two of them carefully navigated the steps and approached my cab, I could see that his face had been severely beaten, with his mouth, nose, and maybe even his eyes bleeding. He was indeed a horrifying sight.

‘Please get us to Roosevelt Hospital as fast as you can,’ the first one begged as the two of them slumped into the back seat. I tore out of there like the ambulance driver I had become and headed for the hospital, a sixteen-block journey. Of course, I wanted to know what had happened, and it was the explanation of the event, even more than the blood, which made a lasting impression on me.

What had happened was this: the guy had been walking on the sidewalk on the park side of Central Park West just as the sun was setting. There is a four-foot-high stone wall there that runs the length of Central Park, separating it from the sidewalk. As the soon-to-be-victim walked along, he passed another, somewhat larger, man who was leaning against a parked car. Suddenly this larger man grabbed him from behind and shoved him up against the stone wall. Behind the wall – actually inside the park – was another man who grasped the guy and pulled him up over the wall, into the park. The first thug then scaled the wall himself and proceeded, with his partner, to beat their prey to a pulp, as well as robbing him of his money and watch.

This incident became, in my mind, a metaphor for the condition New York City was in during those years. It was as if the young man in my cab had been swallowed by a monster – the city itself.

But by the time the nineties came around, the crime situation in New York started to show a noticeable improvement. Not only were the crime statistics down, the city actually began to look safer. Local politicians stood in line trying to take credit for the improvement, ignoring the fact that it was part of a national trend. But as someone who has been down in the trenches for a long, long time and as someone who might be considered to be sort of a professional observer, I formed my own opinion. Not to take anything away from police work that is sensible and on-target, nevertheless I attribute the drop in crime to three broader social factors.

1. AIDS – the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the eighties and nineties should not be forgotten. I remember once having a passenger in my cab in 1989 who told me that he personally knew thirty-six people who had died of AIDS. The two principal groups affected were gays and intravenous drug users (‘junkies’). Well, guess what? The guy who broke the window of your car so he could steal the baby seat and whatever was in the glove compartment was a junkie. It may not be politically correct to say so, but if an epidemic is wiping out the junkies, the crime rate sure as hell is going to go down.

2. The cell phone – that’s right, the cell phone. By the time the millennium passed, nearly everyone in New York City owned one. Today, if a person sees a crime being committed, he can immediately alert the police. I once had a passenger tell me that her nephew had been held up by a young thug who pulled a knife on him while he was walking down a street in Manhattan. As the mugger jogged off, the nephew followed him from a distance while calling the police on his cell. The cops showed up instantly and the thief, seeing them, tried to escape by running into a subway station where he made the mistake of attempting to sprint across the tracks to the other side. He managed to avoid the third rail but did not manage to avoid an oncoming train which struck and killed him. Not that the guy deserved to die, of course, but the truth is his demise did bring the crime rate down.

3. Now here’s the big one, and it is surprising to me that I’ve never heard this mentioned as a reason for the drop in the crime rate nationally: race relations are improving. It seems to be human nature to become annoyed or outraged when things are going wrong, but to take no particular notice of it when things are going right. I believe the efforts of many, many well-intentioned people going back to the 1950s are bearing fruit – race relations are improving.

A kid growing up in the inner city today is not as likely to feel that, since he’s not allowed to be a part of the mainstream of society, it’s okay to commit crimes against it. He’s more likely to feel that he has a part in the game, too. Due to a gradual leveling of the playing field in economic and educational opportunities, the boundary lines between the ghetto and the rest of the city are disappearing. It’s no longer unusual for me to take a white guy to his apartment house in Harlem or to drop a black, urban professional off at his building in the Financial District.

But you’re not going to see any politician get up and say, ‘Well, the reason the crime rate is down isn’t really because of anything I am doing – it’s being caused by trends in the society that I have no control over.’ To the contrary.

In the late nineties Mayor Giuliani, riding on a crest of popularity as a crime-stopper in his first administration, decided to take it a step further in his second and final four years in office. Seizing upon a dubious philosophy that if you can stop the little crimes you will also somehow be nipping the big crimes in the bud, he set an army of police officers out to seek and destroy sin at even its smallest incarnation.

Hounded

A woman of perhaps seventy years entered my cab one evening in September, 1998 whose destination was her apartment building on 96th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. In her arms she held a cute little Cocker Spaniel whose name, I learned, was Terrence. It took only a few words of admiration from me about her pet to set her off on a tirade. This woman was a firecracker ready to explode.

She told me she had started the day, as she always did, by taking her dog for an early-morning walk in Central Park. Not too far from where she enters the park, she said, there’s a wide-open field where she lets Terrence off the leash for a few minutes to get some exercise before they head back to the apartment house. That day had been no different – she had let little Terrence off the leash.

But this is technically against the law and the violation was spotted by a cop in a patrol car who swooped down on her, she said, like a hawk zeroing in on a mouse. The cop informed her of the infraction and told her he would have to write her a summons for a hundred dollars.

Identification, please.

She didn’t have any.

At this point the policeman could have taken her off to the police station if he’d wanted to, but, she said bitterly, instead he opted to do her a ‘favor’ by hauling her and Terrence in the cruiser to her own building. After they rode up in the elevator to the 6th floor, she showed him the necessary papers, he wrote her out the ticket, and he departed, leaving behind one pissed-off septuagenarian.

One has to wonder what ‘bigger crimes’ are prevented by cracking down on old ladies who let their dogs off the leash. But one does not have to wonder why, after a few years of this, Mayor Giuliani’s popularity plummeted like a stone and he began to be known as ‘Mayor Crueliani’ in my taxicab.

Upon reflection, I found that I had acquired a new metaphor. This incident symbolized for me what New York City had become – not quite a police state (thank you, the Constitution of the United States), but a too-heavily-policed state. The trauma of being victimized by a thug had been replaced to some degree by the trauma of being victimized by agents of the municipality itself.

But that is not to say that the city has become a place where crime is at such a minimum that you no longer need to have ‘street smarts’. You do. And the most important street smart in a city of strangers is simply good manners.

The wrong guy

I had someone in my cab on a Saturday night in March, 1999 whom you know. Or at least know of. You have never seen his face, but you have wondered what he looked like. And you have spoken of him from time to time.

Let me explain. Has something like this ever happened to you? You are walking along on a crowded city sidewalk and you’re in a pretty good mood, just minding your own business, when someone walking in the opposite direction bumps into you so hard that it knocks you off balance for a moment. You look at the person who did this and expect to hear some kind of an apology, but instead you hear this: ‘Watch where you’re going, asshole.’

Or this? You are waiting in line at the Quikcheck and someone a foot taller than you blatantly cuts right in front of you with his beer just as you were about to step up to the cashier. You think of saying something to the guy but he looks like a thug, so you just keep your mouth shut and stand there with your half-gallon of milk.

In both cases your urge to react in a forceful way is suppressed by the consideration of what the consequences might be if you did. You might be injured. Hell, you might be killed. You might be arrested and charged with assault. You might have a lawsuit on your hands. So you just stand there and take it. But you soothe your anger by thinking this thought: ‘Someday that guy is gonna meet the wrong guy.’

But the wrong guy is not you, so the moment of retribution has not arrived. Nevertheless, you know he’s out there somewhere and it’s just a matter of time before he evens the score with this subhuman who was just so rude to you.

It was the ‘wrong guy’ who got into my cab that night in March, 1999. I had taken a fare out to Jackson Heights in Queens at midnight and was heading back toward Manhattan on Northern Boulevard when I was hailed by a man who came suddenly running out to the street. I stopped the cab, he got in, and we drove off.

He was a stocky, Hispanic-looking man, maybe five foot six or seven, and he was in a state of extreme agitation. Without any prior conversation, these alarming words came out of his mouth: ‘FUCKING BASTARD! DAMN FUCKING BASTARD!’

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked (of course).

His answer startled me again. Not only because of what he said, but the way that he said it. He actually started to cry.

‘Oh my God,’ he sobbed in a lowered voice, ‘I hope I didn’t kill him.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘THAT STUPID FUCKING BASTARD!’ he screamed. ‘WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE’S TALKING TO? I WAS IN ’NAM, I DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!’

‘What happened?’

And then he began crying again.

‘I think I killed him,’ he sobbed as he covered his face in his hands. ‘Oh God, I hope I didn’t kill him.’

To say that this guy was upset would be more than an understatement. He was riding on a wave of emotion that went up to anger and down to grief like a yo-yo, back and forth, and was literally inconsolable. It took the full ten minutes of the two-mile trip to Astoria for me to piece together what had happened.

He had been sitting in a bar, alone, just minding his own business, having a couple of drinks, and brooding to himself about his own troubles. Three rowdy young men entered the bar and sat nearby. One of these guys decided it would be a good time to have some ‘fun’ at my passenger’s expense. He began making belittling comments to him while his buddies laughed. He wouldn’t let up and it led to a brawl.

The fight was no shoving match. It became an outright slugfest which ended with the other guy collapsing on the floor from a chop to the neck which may have crushed his windpipe. He gasped desperately for breath before finally slumping over, unconscious, and possibly suffocating. My passenger ran out of the bar to the street and jumped into my cab which happened to be approaching on Northern Boulevard.

What the moron in the bar didn’t know when he decided to forget his manners was that he had finally met ‘the wrong guy’. His object of ridicule was an ex-marine who knew martial arts and was in no mood to take crap from some punk.

When we arrived at his place, I gave him this advice: talk to no one else about this incident other than a priest. Don’t let your feelings of guilt put you in a jail cell. The guy muttered something that might have been a thank you, got out of my cab, and disappeared into the night.

I found it a bit odd in myself that, although my passenger had just committed a serious crime in the eyes of the law, I felt sympathy for him and was actually rooting for him not to get caught. This was partially because I had seen how remorseful he was and I did not deem him to be an evil person. But it was also because the person he may have killed represented to me an aspect of humanity that is begging for correction – the psycho who takes pleasure in intimidating strangers. This person, in my mind, is more of a danger to society than the guy with a short fuse who strikes him down.

Of course, New York, the city which prides itself on its variety, also has great variety in its types of criminals. There’s the overt bully mentioned above; marauders who commit impulsive crimes like grabbing pocketbooks and running away; husbands who commit adultery; wives who put nail polish in their cheating husband’s soup; and even the occasional sociopath who doesn’t clean up after his dog (although this is rare, indeed).

But the one type of criminal we seem to be endlessly fascinated by, the one we can’t get enough of, is, of course, the professional. Grouped together, they are the subjects of countless movies and TV shows.

You know who I mean…

They were hit men

These people don’t go around telling you who they are. You have to figure it out for yourself. One Friday afternoon in February, 1985 I had two of them in my cab taking a trip to Newark Airport.

They didn’t tell me who they were.

I figured it out for myself.

I’d been cruising lower Manhattan in the late afternoon when they hailed me from the street. One of them was tall and thin, the other shorter and a bit on the chubby side. They told me immediately that they had to go to Newark Airport in New Jersey; that they wanted me to take the Holland Tunnel; that they were getting a 5.30 p.m. flight to Chicago; and that they did this trip every week on Fridays. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these bits of information were to become pieces of the puzzle needed to understand exactly who they were and what they did for a living.

I was glad to get a fare to Newark Airport – it was about a $25 run at the time – but I was concerned about the traffic. From where we were in lower Manhattan I would indeed have to take the Holland Tunnel and the rush hour congestion in the tube can be a nightmare, both leaving and returning to the city, and especially on a Friday. So I turned the radio on to the news station so I could learn as much as possible about road conditions in the area.

My passengers were engaged in continuous conversation, going back and forth from English to Italian. I found there was something about them which stuck my attention on them and aroused my curiosity. It wasn’t just the Italian – it was a certain demeanor they had. When you do a job continuously over a long period of time, the types of particles you deal with fall into familiar categories. These two guys didn’t quite fit. There was something about them.

I found myself wondering if maybe they were Mafia and I immediately scolded myself for even thinking that. I’m not the kind of person who goes around making bigoted assumptions. Still, I just couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that they seemed like they could be Mob. It was not a thought I would normally have had.

Of the two of them, the one who really grabbed my attention as I glanced at them in the mirror was the taller, thinner one. He appeared to be in his late forties and had slick, black hair that was combed straight back. His face was noticeably pale and tight. This was a man who could have been cast as Dracula if he’d been an actor – he had a vampire kind of look. His companion was much younger, a bit heavy-set, with sleepy-looking eyes, brown hair and a protruding lower lip.

I engaged them with some small talk about the traffic. The younger one had some feeling in his voice, I noticed, but the older one had a voice and a manner in the way he spoke which I found disturbing. There was a hollowness and a solidity about him that wasn’t quite like anyone I had encountered before. I couldn’t seem to get free from an intuitive feeling that this guy was the real thing.

We approached the Holland Tunnel in traffic that really wasn’t as bad as I’d expected and, as we entered the tube, the sound waves of the cab’s radio went temporarily dead, not returning again until we were nearly at the end of the tunnel on the Jersey side. Then, as the radio kicked in, a story started to come on about a criminal trial which was taking place in Manhattan at the time and had been receiving quite a bit of publicity. It was called the ‘pizza connection’ trial because pizzerias were said to be laundering drug money. About twenty Mafiosi were being tried together as a group on various charges. As the broadcast began, the older one heard what it was about and jolted forward in his seat.

‘Turn that up, please!’ he blurted out in his heavily accented voice.

I turned the volume up. The latest details about the trial, which had been going on for several weeks, were given. For the twenty seconds or so that the story was being broadcast, my passengers both listened intently to every word. Then, when the piece was over, they sat back in their seats and began talking to each other with great animation in Italian.

As I turned the volume back down, there was something akin to a lump in my throat. I had suddenly realized exactly where it had been that I had picked them up – it was in Foley Square, the very place where all the courthouses were located. And they’d gotten in my cab at four o’clock, the time of day when a trial would be recessing. And they had told me that they make this trip to Chicago every Friday. They were going back home for the weekend until the trial picked up again the following Monday!

I knew at this moment as well as I could ever know that these guys sitting five feet behind me were card-carrying members of the Mob. Not Mob wannabees like the blowjob conversationalist whom we’ve already met – they were the real thing and were either on trial themselves or associated with others who were.

It took me a minute or two to digest this reality and still keep my eyes on the road. After a couple of minutes I began to wonder where in the Mafia echelon these two might fit. Were they big shots or thugs?

I ran that through my mind. I’d glance at them in my mirror and try to visualize them either as bosses or underlings. Did they give orders or take orders? I concluded that they must be low in the scheme of things simply because they were taking a cab to the airport instead of a private car. A big wheel would have some kind of a limo. But aside from that, how did they seem?

I looked at the younger guy. He wore an ordinary-looking leather jacket. He appeared to be a bit dull, actually. Definitely not a boss of any kind. I could envision him, however, as a muscle boy without conscience, perhaps hijacking a truck on I-95. He looked like he could play that part, but that was about it. He didn’t have a perceptible sinister demeanor about him but nevertheless he was somebody who could inflict real brutality at the behest of others.

But it was the older guy, once again, who stopped me in my mental tracks. I tried to imagine where he was in the Mob. Possibly a middle-level boss of some kind, but without flamboyance or spark. I didn’t find it difficult to picture him, however, knocking on a door which is opened by someone he’s never met before, calmly pulling out a gun, firing it into the stranger’s head, and then going home and enjoying a hot bowl of linguini.