Yellow Peril: Good Cabbies Are Being Punished by the TLC

Good Cabbies Are Being Punished by the TLC

The Taxi & Limousine Commission was created in 1971, ostensibly to rectify abuses going on within the carriage industry. Prior to that, the NYPD's hack bureau took care of things. Back before the TLC, if you wanted to drive a cab, all you had to do was go down to your local precinct with your driver's license. They'd print you and do a background check, and if you came up clean, you were in. The NYPD took care of complaints and enforcement. But the politicians of the time felt that cabdrivers were too crafty and aggressive to be dealt with by mere cops, and in their infinite wisdom created a new bureaucracy that, like any bureaucracy, had absolutely no intention of solving the problem and dissolving itself.

By the year 2000, the process of getting a hack license had turned into a minimum eight-week ordeal costing the applicant about $500 and involving a six-hour defensive-driving course, a two-week course in the geography of the five boroughs and the labyrinth of esoteric and often counterintuitive regulations, an eight-hour examination in which every effort is made to trip the applicant up, a drug test and a background check, which itself can take anywhere from two to six weeks. That's a lot of time and expense for somebody looking for work.

Even the initial application procedure is a tribulation designed to test the patience of Job. The applicant is required to show up in person at TLC headquarters in Queens, a dismal, filthy building in Long Island City. If you get in line by 7 a.m., an hour before they open, chances are you might get to be seen by 11:30 a.m., if everything is running smoothly. No one there will give you any information whatsoever until you have endured this procedure. There is no "help desk," no informational assistance available that does not involve this four- or five-hour wait. When I did it, I was the only white, native-born American in a room with some 300-400 applicants. Apparently the appearance of someone of my ethnic background is quite rare. It took a good 10 minutes of conferencing between the women behind the bulletproof glass to determine just what the proper abbreviation for blond should be.

Once you get the license, you hook up with a fleet. That part is pretty easy, since the fleets send representatives out to the test site to recruit new drivers as soon as they have completed the exam. A smart driver will shop around a little, weighing the cost of the lease against the overall condition and appearance of the fleet's vehicles and the extent to which the fleet owner is willing to go to bat in any possible legal dispute.

There are at this time 12,187 yellow cabs in New York City, and an estimated 41,000 drivers. In the absence of the magnificent and irreplaceable Checker, the Ford Crown Victoria is the sturdiest vehicle available. This is an important consideration, because no matter how good you are, the possibility exists that some clod is going to do something really stupid in traffic, and you want to minimize the physical danger to yourself and your passengers as much as possible.

Most drivers work 12-hour shifts, the maximum allowed by law. By the end of a shift, you could be riding around with $200-$300 in cash in your pocket, sometimes more. Insurance actuaries maintain that pushing a hack is the occupation most likely to get you murdered on the job. According to a Columbia University study, a cabdriver is five times more likely to be murdered on the job than a cop. Cabdrivers do not qualify for gun permits, despite the necessity of a clean record and the fact of working alone carrying cash. Logic would seem to dictate that the driver should exercise good judgment and a certain amount of discretion in choosing fares. But logic never entered into Operation Refusal.

Operation Refusal was launched by the TLC in 1996 in response to heavy lobbying by the race relations industry alleging a pattern of discrimination by drivers against "people of color," an interesting suggestion considering that the majority of yellow-cabdrivers in this town are people of color themselves. It is a very basic sting operation, wherein a TLC inspector or a cop of the designated minority hails cabs as they go by. They often deliberately present themselves as hinky, adopting a very distinct "homeless" or "gangsta" pose.

Failure to stop is a violation, regardless of traffic conditions. If you do stop, the agent will generally ask to go to some genuinely scary neighborhood or some distant location in the outer boroughs. If you refuse, that's a violation.

At the present time, violations result in your hack license being suspended pending a hearing, which is usually set months after the alleged violation. TLC hearings were closed to the public and the media in 1994, but were reopened by court order in March 2000, as a result of an action filed by one Dan Ackman, a self-described "gadfly" who happens to be a lawyer and a journalist. More about him later.

A lot of good drivers lost their hack licenses in the early days of this exercise. From Nov. 1, 1998, through Oct. 31, 1999, 3494 drivers were run through the sting, and 412 got nailed. The new drivers, with pristine records, typically got off with a $350 fine and a half-day "Sensitivity Training" session administered under the auspices of the TLC. In a telling demonstration of its own "sensitivity," the TLC scheduled one of these sessions during Ramadan.

Any driver with prior violations or customer complaints had his hack license revoked on the grounds that the driver constitutes a "threat to the public," as if blowing past a potential fare is somehow equivalent to rape or murder. This took a lot of experienced drivers off the street, because the longer you drive, the more likely it is that you are going to get a complaint and rack up a violation or two, no matter how good you are.

Then, in the fall of 1999, Danny Glover got into it. The wealthy celebrity had a hard time hailing a cab one day on 116th St., and he decided it was because he was black. He decided to make a personal cause out of the issue, and hammered away at it for about a week. The result of this was that the TLC, at the behest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and TLC Chair Diane McGrath-McKechnie, ramped up Operation Refusal into a full-scale war on hacks. About a month later, there was a string of murders of Hispanic livery cabdrivers. It was noted by some that Mr. Glover was conspicuous in his absence at the funerals for these particular "people of color."

It was at about this time that Dan Ackman entered the picture. Ackman is a Ralph Nader type, an idealist with the tenacity of a pit bull. That he's both a lawyer and a journalist makes him an antithetical life-form to the bureaucrats of the TLC. He took umbrage at the Kafkaesque nature of the closed hearings and filed the suit to have them reopened to the taxpayers and the media. Even when he won, the TLC resisted public exposure for as long as it could. More than a month after the courts decided in Ackman's favor and ruled that the hearings should be opened, the TLC finally caved in and the hearings were once again a public affair.

Ackman wasn't finished with the TLC, by any means. In June of last year he filed a class-action suit against the commission on behalf of John Padberg and two other drivers, in an attempt to bring the TLC into compliance with its charter and its own regulations.

Prior to Danny Glover's high-profile involvement, the regulations stipulated that a driver's hack license could be suspended only after the second refusal offense, and revoked only if there were three such offenses in three years. McGrath-McKechnie altered those penalties by fiat, bypassing the required quorum specified in NYC Charter section 2301(e), which specifically grants the TLC "power to act by a majority of its members." There are seven commissioners, and they are required to vote on these matters. McGrath-McKechnie has, in effect, declared herself the commissioner and has, in practice, become a cartoon bureaucrat resembling nothing so much as Lewis Carroll's Red Queen.

John Padberg's case is typical of what happens under her new, improved Operation Refusal. Padberg drove a hack for 25 years, five or six days a week, 50 weeks of the year. He hadn't had a refusal complaint in 10 years. On Feb. 15 of last year, at 5:25 p.m., he was cruising Queens Blvd., headed into Manhattan. Two undercover officers were working the sting that night, positioned about 50 feet from each other on the boulevard. The first one, a Ms. Bonilla, a very large Hispanic woman, was standing in traffic with both arms up. Fifty feet west of her, her associate, a small black man named Alston, stood on the curb with his arm just barely raised. Padberg pulled over and picked up Bonilla, agreeing to take her to a hospital on Parsons Blvd., even though he'd been heading into Manhattan to catch the rush hour fare glut. They took his license on the spot for not picking up Alston, who maintained that he had made "eye contact" with Padberg.

Think about that for a moment. At 5:25 p.m. in February, it is getting dark. Alston was standing 50 feet away from Padberg, who was maneuvering through rush hour traffic on Queens Blvd., trying to get over to the curb to pick up Bonilla, and Alston claims he made "eye contact."

John Padberg's license was revoked on May 9, 2000. There is little room for doubt that if he'd blown past Bonilla to pick up Alston, the result would have been the same.

Padberg is white. Howard Green is black. He lives on 132nd St. He's been driving a yellow for about as long as Padberg. On Dec. 21, he was cruising up the middle of 1st Ave. in Manhattan. At 5th St. he was hailed by Officer Kenneth Padilla, working undercover. Surrounded as he was by traffic, there was no way that Green could have pulled over to make the pickup without causing an accident. He had his license grabbed, four days before Christmas. They set his hearing date in May.

This guy's been driving for 25 years. It's all he knows. So the upshot of Danny Glover's showboating is that a hard-working black man who lives with his mother in Harlem gets thrown out of work four days before Christmas.

Here's what Danny Glover doesn't know: like most drivers, I'll pick up anybody up and take him anywhere he wants to go. I live for the night some high-rolling drunk climbs in and insists on being taken to Atlantic City. And middle-aged black people are the best tippers of all.

But I won't pick anybody at all up in certain neighborhoods, I don't care what color they are. I don't cruise neighborhoods where the street is dominated by drug dealers or gangster types. I wouldn't pick Tony Randall up if he was trying to hail me at 163rd and Amsterdam. I'd probably think twice about picking him up on sections of 116th St. It's not who you are or what you look like so much as where you're standing. When I drop off a fare in a dicey part of town, that "Off-Duty" light is on before my passenger sets foot on the curb. This is my life we're talking about here.

It gets worse. There are allegations of thuggery on the part of TLC inspectors. Hisham Amer, an Egyptian doctor who was driving a cab to keep the rent flowing while awaiting his certification to practice medicine in the U.S., alleges that he was assaulted by four TLC inspectors following a routine TLC "spot check" back in December. This incident was reported in the Post on Dec. 20.

Amer's action against the city is being spearheaded by Sanford Rubenstein, the law firm that represented Abner Louima. Amer alleges that Inspector George Gernon whacked him in the back of the neck with a radio, then he was set upon by all four in attendance. He alleges that they then dragged him to the 17th Pct. station house on E. 51st St., where they chipped a couple of his teeth. According to Amer, the beating only stopped when an NYPD sergeant crashed in and told the TLC inspectors to scram. The sergeant then called an ambulance, says Amer. Amer was hospitalized and treated at Beth Israel for trauma to his head and back.

I decided to contact TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg to see what he might have to offer in the way of an explanation for all this. It took me four days to reach him, and in the interim I found an interesting item authored by the Red Queen herself on the Web. In her "Commissioner's Column" at www.ci.nyc.ny.us, Chairwoman McGrath-McKechnie goes on at some length about Operation Refusal and what she refers to as "this insidious problem," saying, "we must remain maintain [sic] our zero tolerance approach." She cites the declining refusal rate as documented by her Operation Refusal purge, and makes the following interesting statement: "Of note is the fact that, as is historically the case, the majority of failures were for reasons of destination or economic bias which of course must be treated with equal severity in the regulatory eyes of the Commission to service refusals for other, more personally hurtful forms of discrimination."

What, pray tell, is "economic bias," within the context of a cabbie's refusal to pick up a fare? The clear implication is that a yellow-cabdriver must pick up anyone who hails the cab, making no distinction between the elderly black woman in her Sunday best and the filthy crack-addled white panhandler in his rags.

Fromberg returned my call and said he couldn't comment on any cases involving pending litigation, which is basically all of them. I asked him if there was anything at all he'd like to say, and he said, "We have regulations in place to deal with these matters and those regulations will be enforced."

It is glaringly obvious to me that the TLC and its inspectors are sorely in need of oversight. The Padberg case is a very clear instance of a driver being placed in a position where no matter what he does, he's going to get busted. This case is not atypical. Howard Green has suffered terribly as a result of TLC persecution and presumption of guilt. Operation Refusal is being mishandled for purely political reasons, and drivers' rights are being trampled in the process. There is a deeply embedded flaw in enforcing political correctness on a population whose day-to-day survival is contingent upon instinct.

Driving a hack is a great occupation. You get to meet people, you are your own boss, and if you want to really work at it, the money can be pretty darn good. There are risks, but an alert driver can minimize those risks. McKechnie-McGrath insists that drivers refrain from prejudging potential fares "by virtue of their appearance." I'd submit that this is an absurd posture. Everyone prejudges others based on their appearance. Were I to show up at Ms. McKechnie-McGrath's office in flannel pajamas and a bathrobe wearing a colander on my head, I am 100 percent certain that I would be refused admittance even if I had an appointment.

This is not about racism, it's about discrimination. Racism is wrong, discrimination is not, and it's very difficult for me to believe that the Haitians, Africans, Russians, Pakistanis and other new immigrants who drive alongside me are discriminating against potential fares based on their race. Trouble comes in all shapes and sizes, and when you're on your own, you have to be discriminating for the sake of your own well-being. You have to trust your instincts. It's about time the TLC learned to trust the drivers.