Taxi Nights - as NY, NY as it gets.(Albanian Louie And Me- A New York Taxi Tale)

Part Two - The Garage, And Other Stuff

2008-07-31T18:28:00.001-04:00

about the sound track
The garage stretches around 30 yards wide and fronts on a side street off Pleasant Avenue. It's next to the storage place, a laundro mat and a luncheonette. IT has three big portals that cars roll through and at shift change two and sometimes all three are in use, though usually you have an old unused taxi sitting in one.

The bottom floor is the repair shop and it has two of the three portals. In the repair shop you have four bays with lifts, piles of tires, yellow taxi doors, and bumpers. There is a bay that is used for washing the cars. Although I am writing this in August I am going to date the whole story in July. In true blog style the first entry is last, the last entry is first, but I edit from day to day.

(more to come)

Part 1 - A Little Bit Of Who's Who (In The Book)

2008-07-31T18:07:00.026-04:00

about the sound track

The story takes place in New York City during the summer of 2008.

Here I am trying to write my book. I am a sixty-two year old taxi driving small time blogger from New York. I am overweight. People who do not need to flatter me tell me I look younger than I am and have a still pleasant face. I have a head of gray hair. I'm married to a wonderful woman from Venezuela who just can't master the English language and so when she speaks to you it's in Spanish but it's been dubbed or subtitled for you into English. I'll call her Minerva. Call me Oscar, Oscar Katz. I never was a world traveler though I have been to a few places, I don't know the insides of the clubs I bring people to at night and have only been inside Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall a very few times each. Ditto the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Musem, Natural History and Whitney. I've driven across Central Park scores of times but haven't actually set foot in it and smelled a rose there in over a year or so. Anyhow here is my lovely wife, Minerva. Minerva knows the story well and she will tell you about it.
Some Of The Characters
Albanian Louie

Minerva introduces you to Albanian Louie. Albanian Louie is taxi driver who seems to wear the same shirt and pants every day, but that isn't true. He is thin, with angular facial features and bucked teeth. Non brand blue jeans, a yellow tee shirt, black and white sneakers with white socks is his daily warm weather uniform. Oh, and a ski hat. Louie appears to most people to be a duffis. And he lives in a room in the Pleasant Avenue Storage, and he does his laundry every day at Jennie's Laundro-Mat across the street, over there, right next to the storage, and he eats breakfast every day at Gustavo's Luncheonette that's over there, right next to the Laudro-Mat. All these places are on the same block as Gordo's garage.
Al Chin

Another cabbie. A happy go lucky nut job, big, jolly and Chinese American.
Al Chin gets into trouble when the police finally bust the Lapdance 'teria. That was something! It became a big deal. You see, he was there when the detectives and cops swooped in and being as big as he is Asian they figured he was a door gorilla, a sumo or karate guy working the door so they busted him. His hack license got suspended while the case is going on and he has no way to make a living. Al is inventive, resilient, and crazy like I told you, and he doesn't have much choice but to wait for the trial to begin. He should have been let loose with the suits, but he wasn't.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Al tried to leave the joint with the other customers and a cop stun gunned him.
We live in the projects here on Pleasant Avenue in Spanish Harlem, across the street from Gordo's garage. Not Gordo's garage, Gordo only works there. It's Buddy's garage. It's on a street that looks very tranquil. I sometimes look out of the window listening to Gustavo Dudamel conduct the London Philharmonia doing Shoshtakovich's Fifth Symphony. I look down and see Pleasant Avenue and all the comings and goings. Oscar says that when he was a little boy this was an italian neighborhood. Now other people are starting to move here.
I sleep in the room with my kids. When Oscar Fantastic, mi judio bello, mi judio gordo comes home he sleeps in his own room and I walk on eggs so he can sleep. It's a tree lined street, the houses have driveways and garages that are rented out. There is not a lot of parking around here. Sometimes there is noise on the street and that wakes Oscar up. He needs his sleep so I leave melatonin and that allergy medicine that knocks you out on the night table next to his bed. He has his computer and he writes things that I cannot understand much of. He's crazy but he is my Gordo Bello anyhow.

Sex, violence, drugs, cops, fantasy, reality. suits, hookers, judges.
funny people. Oscar says that's what his novel is about. And a strong moral base that might sneak up on some of you.

It's Oscar again, The Fat Old Jewish Guy who Lives In the Projects and drives taxi.

There are incidental characters who pop up briefly like Steve Urban and Stephanie Smith, taxi passengers who come and go. Various cops pass through the story as do passers by.

There's Albanian Louie, my co star. He has sharp angular features, bucked teeth and a perpetual smile.

There's Alicia Schwartz, the Maoist New York cabbie.
There's Momadou, a taxi garage chief mechanic and shift change traffic director (which is quite a job, you'll see.), lover of great music and frustrated orchestra conductor.

The garage takes up around thirty yards across and it has two floors and three gates, you know, doors where cars come in and out. You get a bunch of taxis crowding in and out and parking and double parking and coming and going and sometimes getting into little fender benders, you have delivery trucks, cop cars, ordinary people and taxis that are not Itzik's just trying to get past the garage. Mamadou directs this every day with his dipstick/baton and the same Shoshtaovich's Fifth Symphony in the air. You have to see this maybe to appreciate Mamadou.

Ahmed and Sekou are taxi dispatchers. Because whites all more or less look alike and because they had three white Louies on the night shift at one time and because these Louies' last names were not pronouncible Ahmed and Sekou wrote "A" for "Albanian" on our Louie's hack license, "U" for "Ukrainian" and "L" for "Lithuanian" on the other. When Ahmed or Sekou call out the names of the drivers for them to come to the window and get the trip card for their taxi du jour they call out "Albanian Louie" and so forth. You get the picture, right?

(Picture three white Louies, One is tall and thin, one is round and has a small round nose and the other is Albanian Louie.)

There are the two foster kids, Laurie and Shaniqua who live across the street in the project where I live with Minerva and the kids. Also their foster mother Vivian.

Hersch and Mersh are Hasidic Jews, brothers, who own the Lap Dance 'teria.

Itzik is the owner of Pleasant Avenue Yellow Cab Management. He likes to be called Buddy. His son, Gregory, is twentyish, a skinny young Harpo Marx looking guy who smokes cigarettes and weed. He drove taxi around four nights a week and now hangs out at the garage pretending to work. He got into a jam with some Taxi and Limousine inspectors and got his license pulled for six months. He wears a Barack Obama "Yes We Can" tee shirt.

The Marx Brothers

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You've already met me and Minerva, and the fly on the wall.

Sunday Imomotime is a child welfare investigator. Not very nice and not very smart.

That's nice, honey

Picked up two couples, all good looking people I'd guess in their late twenties or early thirties. So good looking I had noticed and was visually tracking the women before they hailed me. I'd rate from "model material" to "once in a lifetime" (but not in Manhattan where such beauty is abundant.)

The two women and one of the guys sit in the back and one guy sits in the front. His woman is behind me and she is talking.

"He's watching the television and I come out of the shower dripping, wearing a towel and I sit next to him and snuggle up. He says 'I love you honey, could you move over?'

"I get in front of the television and drop my towel. I'm doing this yoga contortion standing right in front of the TV. My foot is up on my shoulder! He says'That's nice honey. Would you move over?

The other woman in back says "ask the cabbie, ask the cabbie"

The scorned one says "Driver do you think there's anything wrong with me?"
A Fly on the Wall

And a fly is always buzzing around seeing things her own way.
Narrated by Oscar Katz:

Steve Urban and his live in girl friend Stephanie Smith were indeed having problems. Stephanie really had first sat next to Steve on the sofa wet and in a towel and snuggled and she indeed got nowhere with that. It was no exageration either that she had taken a difficult yoga stance in the nude and right in front of the TV and was gently shooed away. A fly sat on the wall watching the whole thing, seeing everything more than Yossarian's twice. The fly saw Steve grab a newspaper and roll it up. When she saw Steve look her way she flew off to the kitchen and hid under the stove.

I should describe myself more so you can visualize me telling you all of this. I'm getting old, have a full head of poorly cut ten dollar haircut three weeks ago) gray hair and an unevenly trimmed salt and pepper beard. I don't smile much mainly because my teeth and gums are ugly. I mean I do smile Mona Lisa style but you never see what's behind my lips. Even when I laugh. I'm five ten and weigh around 250. Like most cabbies and working poor men I dress more like a boy than a man. You could say I'm a Peter Pan man in boy's clothing.

Now the opening scene with the opening credits:

You have an aerial view of a bunch of taxis speeding up the FDR Drive at night. In the first second the view is like a fly eye view, segmented and multiple. The Background Music-
.
Wagner - Die Walküre: "The Ride of the Valkyries" (Boulez

Okay, the fly is hovering in front of the window of my taxi (I'm in the opening screen credits scene) and you get the fly eye view (many fragmented identical images) of me driving the taxi with a big chocolate chip cookie in one hand a a diet soda in the other, sort of driving with my wrists and elbows while I snack and Wagner is blasting over WQXR. The fly buzzes inside and sits on the rear view mirror and looks at the passenger seat, where you see the fly eye view of the back of a woman with long blonde hair. She is on top of some guy whose hands are massaging her back. Then back to the formation of rolling taxis going up the FDR Drive, zooming out, credits finished.

There will be a scene With Soshtakovich's Fifth In the Background. Mamadou is directing or rather conducting taxi traffic, dipstick baton in hand as Minerva looks out on the scene from her kitchen window on the seventeenth floor. Shoshtakovich's fifth is the background music, but loud, maybe foreground music is a better term. Mamadou has the same music coming through his earphones. Yeah, I know. What a coincidence. Oh, Minerva already told you about Mamadou and his dipstick. Something, isn't it?

Gustavo Dudamel Is A Young Venezuelan Classical Music Superstar. Here He Is Seen Working With The London Philharmonia. I like to know when I am listening to him conducting, especially the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, because that orchestra is made up of mainly poor young Venezuelans who learn to play through something called el sistema. I relate to el sistema, not because I am a music buff. Truth is lots of time I do not know what piece, what composer I am enjoying, though I do recognize more and more.

You see, I Listen A Lot To WQXR through most of my twelve hour shift. I went to public school in the days when Housing Project kids were taught to play instruments, to paint, and even taught musical theory. In the Taxi I rediscovered Classical Music. WQXR 96.3 FM, thank you even if you are part of The New York Times.

There will be a scene featuring our Maoist taxi driver set to Music like this, Reggaeton from Venezuela. I Listen a lot to Mo'Glo music hour which is on the air midnight to one am New York time on WNYC 91.5 FM (in conjunction with kexp.org). Oh, seven nights a week.

Alicia the aging fortysomethingish Maoist cabbie wears her Palestinian shawl (her keffiyeh) and stands in front of the supermarket around the corner from the garage before shift change, saying "see Bill Pardavian explain what's happenin' to you." handing out flyers as the Reggaeton provides background (she is wearing earphones). Itzick, dressed way down, like a dumpy man with a bad haircut and cheap slacks t throw off possible robbers and who is the garage owner walks by shows a wry grin, shakes his head in the negative and asks Alicia if she is going to work tonight. She affirms and continues handing out flyers proclaiming a youtube broadcast of Bill Pardavian, long exiled leader of the US Maoist Movement who gives a talk about food and gas prices, that, the flyer says, is "essential for understanding the beast ane what is happening to you." Flyers litter the ground around her as the housing project women get a look at Pardavian's image (his fat sixtyish self in silly looking Sergeant Pepper style cap is on the flyers) and most then drop it to the ground.

Albanian Louie Discovers the Lap Dance'teria

Albanian Louie was cruising empty down Ninth Avenue and just for no reason he hung a left on 32nd Street. Coming out of a loft building on that rainy 3:00 am Wednesday morning were two pretty young white women, in their early twenties or maybe younger, in jeans and blouses. wearing knapsacks and they flag him down. Louie notices two gorilla looking guys behind the glass door of the loft building. One would absolutely not get into any sort of a dispute with either of them. Louie drops off his fares and jets back to the spot. The gorilla looking guys are still there when out come these two Hasidic Jewish guys and they flag Louie down too. One asks Louie if he is Jewish and when Louie says "no" the two start a conversation with each other in Yiddish and Louie can't understand a word of it.

The first one Louie cues in is Al Chin because Louie knows that Al is a fun loving guy. Al tells me about it and before you know it you have a line of taxis forming outside this industrial loft around two thirty in the mornings. Al has no family or responsibilities and he wanted to go in the joint and party with the big guys, and that he did.

The Ladies Dance to Reggaeton At Hersh and Mersh's Lapdance 'teria.

This you tube video has nothing to do with the story here and I just found it and it fits if you wait two minutes and fifty six seconds. (Actually the whole thing is pretty cool.) They party at Hersh and Mersh's Lapdance 'teria. Seventy bucks to get in, bring your own bottle, twenty bucks a five minute dance, extras on request and subject to negotiation. En la noche hay locura.

Rub the Buddha For Money

Al joins the Times Square freak show like the cowboy, the topless cowgirl and Harry Krishna's dancers.

He's "The Buddha" that you can rub for money. The idea is you rub his head or his belly for good luck and you pay him. He also lets people pose with him for tips too. Al says he's not doing so bad but he hopes he gets his taxi license back before the cold weather comes.

Al met Hersh and Mersh before the cops came. They were sitting at the bar where sodas were being served and people were paying some guy to open the beer bottles they had brought. There was a big mirror behind the bar and you could see the reflection of the lesbian show, and these guys were watching the show's reflection, but not the show, they told Al when he asked. Al was a bit surprised to meet two such guys in such a place and he asked them if they were sinning. They explained that they are not watching the women in the show.

Now this blog is not affiliated with South Park and the Joosyans depicted are not supposed to be Hasidic. It's a funny video that apparently is permitted to reproduce in this form. Any New York night cabbie who's been working long enough has seen Hasidics emerging from strip clubs. This is not to say that they represent all or everything that is hypocritical, just that they are seen in "uniform" and so are hard not to spot.

Mersh explained to Al that he is not looking at the nearly naked young women, he is looking at a mirror. Hersch explained that when he auditions a dancer he keeps his eyes closed and never touches her. If she decides to touch him, well...

Who Is This Taxi Driving Blogger? Why Is He Blogging? Why Is He Driving A Taxi?

2008-07-29T16:24:00.000-04:00

I'm not trying to bring you down. I want this blog to be lots of fun and it will be.
First of all I enjoy blogging and I enjoy taxi driving.
Some people tell me that I'm just tilting at windmills.

I never was much of a student. Some people tell me that I probably have ADD. I spent over ten years working as a child abuse investigator here in NYC. The way that system is run is a crime against God, and I tried in my imperfect way to make it something else. At any rate I have a website about that system called http://www.acsmustbestopped.com

This is me a soldier in the army at Fort Jackson South Carolina, summer of 1967. My Army career was actually quite funny and I have linked the picture to a story I wrote about part of that.

This is a recent portrait photo of me. Maybe you'll spot me on the Street.

visit

http://www.acsmustbestopped.com/

Anyhow, I want to thank you for reading this far. I hope you enjoy this blog and get laughs out of it.

What is and is not my copyright

2008-07-28T03:23:00.002-04:00

The written stuff is mine. You cannot reproduce it without my permission. The posters belong to allposters.com and I am an affiliate of theirs. The youtube stuff presumably is posted with permission on youtube. If anyone feels I have violated their copyright please post a comment to that effect and email me at ecsredeye@yahoo.com and I will take immediate action to repsect your copyright.

Shoshtaovich's Fifth Symphony plays a role in this book but Bach is The Man.

2008-07-27T22:05:00.011-04:00

I drive taxi eleven or twelve hours a night almost every night. I stay out of trouble, and although I probably am insane I am not dangerously so and remain in that relatively healthy state with the aid and assistance of good New York Radio, mainly classical music but I do enjoy stuff like Reggaeton

I like Steve Reich too, he's often om WNYC 93.9 FM at night.

JS Bach, especially his harpsichord conciertos give me peace and help me meditate. My favorite soundtrack or background music.

The Posts Below This Are Not Part of the Book

2008-07-27T18:06:00.001-04:00

visit

www.acsmustbestopped.com

Playing Leapfrog In The Night

2008-07-27T18:05:00.002-04:00

This is a cell camera video taken from the frontseat of a taxi. Notice this poor woman alone in the
cold and rain looking for a taxi ride. This reminds me of a real story.

A couple of weeks ago early Wednesday morning at around 4 o'clock I was headed down West 28th Street.
A comely young woman was flagging me down. Now in context, I had just overheard a conversation
between two
women passengers in which one reminded the other that she would have to kiss a lot of frogs before she
got to kiss her prince.

This startling young woman, standing in the wet and cold, could have been a princess. Three men dashed
past her, I would say just about leapfrogged over her to get to the right passenger door of my taxi. Now,
when I drive I do not know who on the street is who, who is with who or much of anything else about the
people who populate the sidewalks. I thought, well perhaps these men are dashing to be the first to open
the door for the princess. I was wrong in my guess. They beat her to the cab.

To top it off, and I must say here I have no prejudice against people of any nation, these guys were speaking
French to each other. As I passed the club they had emerged from I noted the flag reading "French Tuesdays."
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Priceless

2008-07-27T18:04:00.000-04:00

(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again

2008-07-27T18:02:00.002-04:00

I have spoken here about my former life as a taxi driver and how I am now once again working in that noble occupation. I spoke about how even when I was a convinced atheist it did seem odd that my "luck" was so good, that when bad a thing happened to me (and it was never that bad) something pretty good would soon follow, that at the least evened things out. I had half in jest decided that there is a God of Taxi drivers, or an angel or saint working with God that looked after at least me and probably other taxi drivers who worked the night time streets of New York.

My wife tells me that God was watching over me because although I was not a believer I was doing honest work, not robbing anyone or insulting anyone and in the prcess I was feeding, housing and even at times doing more for a wife and two children, these two children who were working hard at becoming adults and who needed me and the small but sufficient money I could wring out of the night time streets. I still have a problem believing in such a personally involved God. I once had a conversation (in a taxi I was driving, naturally) with a Reform rabbi who admitted to me that God must either not be omniscient or else God is not omnipotent, because a just God (and God is Love and God is Justice and God is That Which is right) would not permit the worst injustices that befall His (for want of a better word) children, who the rabbi did say he believed are all human beings and not just this rabbi's tribe of them.

It seems to me that the universe, or the multiverse of universes that exists, that life, that growing and beautiful trees , life forms that fit together on this planet, could not just have happened, that some force had to be involved in making sure that it happened. The big bang theory to me does not explain much, as far as I know it does not explain how apparent nothingness, or one atom or whatever it was, could explode outward and here we have galaxies, stars, planets and life forms that feed each other, give each other what is needed to breathe, and are so perfectly symetrical. Coincidence? As we New Yorkers would say "you're kidding me."

So these things seem to happen. That on the worse night I earn what is at least minimally acceptable to justify the labor, even with a car that breaks down, even with being dispatched at six instead of five. Then one night last week I got further evidence that some force or power is on my side, for whatever reason I cannot explain. It was a night that had started badly, I got dragged out to Brooklyn during the rush hour and as the trip progressed my passenger got to complaining that the meter was running to fast, that she did not beleive the forty cent increments were the correct fare, that the last time she took this trip it had cost about half what it was costing now. (This has to be either a lie or a reference to a taxi trip she took when she was a little girl on her mother's lap.) I girded myself to be stiffed or to have to negotiate a partial payment. In the end she did pay what was on the meter, part of it in nickles and dimes, but pay she did.

I got back into the city and got a fare outside the criminal court/ overnight lockup at 100 Centre Street. I think the passenger was a cop of some kind, a jail guard or court officer. Anyhow he pretended not to understand the one dollar rush hour surcharge and left me forty cents short of what was on the meter. It would not have paid in any sense to have argued with him. I was not looking forward to a decent night. I struggled on, brought someone who wanted to go to Greenwich Avenue to Greenwich Street, corrected that for free. It was not looking too good.

Near the end of my shift, which is five in the morning, at three o'clock, I was tooling up Amsterdam Avenue and there was not another car within two lights behind me. I was on the left and I spotted a block ahead a man standing outside a bar waving at me. I put on my right turn signal and carefully, with no other vehicles around (I thought) made it to the right hand lane, stopped, waited for my green light and got to the passenger. As he leaned towards the window to ask me something a cop car pulled up out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and the officer at the passenger side indicated that I should roll down my window, and he asked I give him my trip sheet, which was happily all filled out with no blank spaces. "I want you to tell me why you went through that red light" he said. I told him that quite frankly, in my mind's eye and to my memory I had not done that. His partner, in the driver's seat looked at my trip card. He said to the other officer "this poor bastard's been working all night. Leave him alone." The first officer handed back my trip card and told me to be more carefull in the future. The passenger requested a long out of town upstate New York trip. I had enought time to make it back to the garage by five, and got paid really almost the margin of what was my profit for the night, and not too shabby at that.

Last night I brought two moms and two kids from close to Penn Station to Harlem, they paid me and thanked me and went on their ways. I was heading west looking for my left turn to downtown when I saw another mom with some kids standing on the corner with lots of bags and valises and a shopping cart. She waived at me. Almost any other cabbie would have passed her up it was so obvioulsy going to be a losing propostion. I guess it was the social worker in me, I stopped and did not put the meter on till the van taxi I was driving was loaded (maybe ten minutes waiting for free). I took her where she needed to go, she had just been booted out of homeless shelter because, she said, the staff had gone into her room and robbed her of sixty dollars and she had called the police who came to the shelter, run by Hale House and took her complaint. (My wife fully believes this story, and she is a shelter veteran, and I, an old CPS worker find it rings true also.) I turned off the meter before I went back and started to help her unload all the stuff, and there was plenty, and her eight year old daughter refused for a few minutes to leave the taxi saying only that she was too tired and that she wanted to sleep. Well, maybe a whole hour was gone for the ten bucks which the lady insisted on paying, not even enough to cover an hour's lease and gas, let alone pay me, but once in a while one is called on to do little things that matter. Somehow, I came out of the night with my barely acceptable minimum profit in spite of this.

Maybe tonight will be better.

White Night In the Ghetto From the Front Seat Of A Taxi (Originally Posted 8/06/06)

2008-07-27T17:59:00.002-04:00

I've been working almost every night these past two weeks and have become re acclimated to driving and all it entails.

Sunday night for some reason I got five different fares who were young adult whites going to their residences deep in formerly Black neighborhoods (well, Crown Heights is a neighborhood that is mainly Black but has a large number of Lubavitcher Jewish cultists also, and I won't count Williamsburg in Brooklyn an area long shared by the Satmar hasidics and Puerto Ricans because it's been getting filled up with these generic whites from the interior of North America for a long long time now.) I got to talk a bit with two of these passengers. Let me digress here for a moment though. In the old days I had more conversations with passengers than I do now. Back then cell phones were not for everyone as they are today and these days I ignore it when I hear a passenger speak because nine times out of ten they are calling ahead to their destinations or calling their spouses to explain their whereabouts, and so forth.

Anyhow one of these kids (I call them kids, they must be in their twenties or thirties) was a bit concerned that I would not know how to get to where he was going (real "Do The Right Thing" territory - Bed Stuy, do or die as they say) and I told this kid that the corner where he was going to is where my parents had a small apartment on the day they brought me from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital sixty years ago.) Anyhow these two kids are very aware that they are the forward wedge of white power in the ghetto, that their presence alone makes it more difficult for the people already there to stay there. Each said he was "guilty." In my mind these kids are good kids but they should not feel "guilty" that they also need a place to lay their heads at night and they cannot afford to live in Manhattan or in any white enclave anywhere near New York City. It's a gift to have a conscience. I told them what matters is what they do with their understanding of how things are in order to change the world and make it a place where everyone has a place to be in.

Since I am a Jew who lives in General Grant Houses I am also I guess part of this forward wedge. General Grant Houses is on the Western border of Harlem, rubbing right up against Columbia University's neighborhood which clearly begins one block south of my apartment. Columbia University has bought up the land right across Broadway and they plan to destroy the low density buildings over there, gasoline stations (there are very few remaining in Manhattan) warehouses and so forth. St. Mary's Church is one center of resistance to this spread.

I had reason yesterday to look over the legal definition of genocide and the historical 1951 petition to the United Nations that charged the United States with genocide against "The Negro People of the United States" which was at that time the accepted usage.Looking at it onc e could say that Administration for Children´s Services here in New York is a mechanism of genocide. Check it out:
ARTICLE II, CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
Adopted December 9, 1948"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

ARTICLE III:
"The following acts shall be punishable:

A. Genocide;
B. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
D. Attempt to commit genocide;
E. Complicity in genocide."

-xii-
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712

Article II of the Genocide Convention
A- ACS knowingly has a policy now of overloading its caseworkers and making them take parents to court in cases that really don´t merit this level of intervention which wastes caseworkers´s valuable time and energy. They know well that this policy actually results in the neglect of cases, some of which actually are legitimate abuse situations that cry out for intervention. This is why the number of children who die while on ACS caselods increases during removal panics which are dictated by the media barons Sulzberger (New York Times), Zuckerman (New York Daily News), and Murdoch (New York Post) . Almost entirely these children are Black and Latino. ACS illegally turned over approximately 465 Black and Latino foster children for drug experimentation and it was reported that the experiments killed two of these children.

B and C- ACS harasses Black and Latino families needlessly. Black and Latino families are rousted in predawn raids and ACS awakens entire apartment buildings in which members of these two groups reside. ACS harasses and interferes with family functioning even when allegations against them are clearly known to be false. ACS frightens and traumatizes Black children and Latino children on a daily and nightly basis. Black and Latino children often witness their parents being placed in handcuffs and taken away at these hours, for so the called crimes of disciplining their children by customary and religiously sanctioned means. These tactics, often initiated by anonymous accusations, smack of what we once were taught took place in Hitler´s Germany and Stalin´s USSR.

My Biloxi Blues, And Ours

2008-07-27T17:58:00.001-04:00

Funny, the main character in Neil Simon's flick Biloxi Blues was a
Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Eugene who goes through changes
in Combat Basic Training on an Army base in the Deep South and
by golly I also was a Jewish kid whose name was (and still is)
Eugene who did Basic Combat Training down South, (Fort Jackson,
South Carolina, right near Columbia, South Carolina.

I saw the movie for the first time in my life a couple of days
ago on HBO. I knew I'd have to say something here about it.
While the main character is named Eugene I related to the
other Jewish guy in the platoon, Arnold Epstein about as
much. My personality and my Basic Training Experiences
were something of a blend of those of the Hollywood Eugene
and Arnold, who I believe also hailed from Brooklyn.

I went into the Army a virgin like Eugene did but unlike
Eugene this was not changed during my Basic Training.
Not to digress, I know that the sixties were the years of free
love, sexual revolution, do your own thing, if it feels good do
it, etc. And I had been as a radical Jewish kid in New York
on the fringes of all that before I got drafted, but I was
socially retarded, and held back by this strange religious
upbringing I got in my nominally Jewish-atheist-strangely
Orthodox family.

This didn't stop me from getting the crabs before my second
weekend pass home, and that is a funny story. I probably
was the only soldier at Fort Benjamin Harrison, or maybe
in the whole Vietnam Era Army (this was after basic training,
at another Army post) who got the crabs without getting laid,
probably from dirty sheets in a motel that I stayed in while
on a twenty-four hour pass.

Unlike Eugene and unlike Arnold I was a conscious opponent of
the system and I had wreaked enough havoc at my induction
into the Army to have earned my own "fifteen minutes of fame"
on the front page of The Village Voice during the summer of 1967.
That's a whole long story that I might tell here some day, but
suffice it to say Military Intelligence was quite aware of me the
whole time I was in The Army, most intensly during my months
at Fort Jackson.

The Drill Sergeant in Eugene and Arnold's world was a hard
drinking mentally unbalanced guy named Sgt. Toomey who
had some sort of a Jewish problem. This Eugene (me) had a
similar Drill Sergeant but with a twist. My Drill Sergeant's
name was Greenwald and his main Jewish problem was me,
because I was known to be a communist and a Jew from Brooklyn
and another Jew from Brooklyn, a doctor named Levy, an
Army Medical Captain, (another draftee) was undergoing
courts-martial for refusing to train Special Forces troops in
First Aid procedures because they were war criminals nad
were going to use the skills he might provide to forward an
ongoing string of war crimes in Vietnam. Levy was an oddball
in other ways too. He had spent his off duty time working on
registering Black voters in Columbia South Carolina. These were
the early days of the Voting Rights Act. Only a few years previously
Black people just could not vote period in South Carolina or for
that matter in most of The South. (How everything old becomes
new again! Including in Ohio, in The North.)There was a lot of
fear remaining among Blacks who knew that their rulers did
not want them voting. People like Levy and I were the classic
Jewish trouble makers who put Sgt.Greenwald in a very bad spot.

Greenwald might have been the only Drill Sergeant on Fort
Jackson with so Jewish a name. I don't know to this day if
he was Jewish himself. What we knew was that he had grown
up in an orphanage in Illinois and that he was one very angry
and dangerous man.

Some differences between Neil Simon's basic training and mine:

I will not forget getting off that bus that took me to Company E
6th Training Batallion, Second Training Brigade. They were in
our faces without mercy and I remember crawling with my
duffle bag on my back (or was I pushing it? it is a bit fuzzy) to
my barrack. (Not just me, we all did.) We met Greenwald who
gave us his welcoming speech: "I've been training troops for combat
for twenty-one year, and every man I've sent into battle has been
killed in action."

The story we heard was that Greenwald had been an E-7 whose
promotion orders to E-8 had been cut but waiting for signature,
that he had sewed his E-8 stripes onto some of his fatgues already
when he got arrested by MPs in a bar fight in the NCO Club and
was busted down to E-6.

Training at E-6-2 was tougher than in Neil Simon's Basic Training
company, I can tell you that. Our Company Commander was a
short muscular body builder named Lieutenant Michini
(the spelling may be wrong but I'll stay with one "n") a First Lt.
who had no ribbons to show ever having served overseas and
who in fact soon went on to become a Captain and become Batallion
Executive Officer at Sixth Batallion, Second Training Brigade.
Michini liked to run backwards alongside the company on those
pre breakfast one mile runs.

It's funny how I have a hard time remembering the names of the
other trainees but not such a hard time remembering Greenwald
and Michini's names. Anyhow my Army was racially integrated
unlike Neil Simon's. In my Army the Drill Sergeants were profane.
In my Basic Training, (during the first four weeks of it) they'd harass
us while we tried to eat and would not allow any of us to finish a meal.
We ran miles justa bout every day up "drag ass hill" with rifles and
full packs, followed by physical training. Yes, push-ups were ordered
as informal punishment.

It might sound perverse to you but these were happy days, as well
as very scary ones.

Along with KP duty, which was posted and was given out in rotation
with exception of acting platoon leaders, etc., they had another kitchen
duty that was given out as punishment and was not rotational, the
name they gave this duty I do not remember but it was essentially KP
(Kitchen Police, or kitchen clean up) by another name. Greenwald gave
me this duty just about every day, after dinner. This turned out to be a
boon to me because some of the left overs that the NCO's didn't steal,
and I mean steal by the car load, (and there were plenty of left overs)
were available to me and I brought goodies back to my platoon when I
could, helping me in the PR war that was going on in the company regarding me.

Because I had refused to answer the Loyalty Oath and had smuggled into
Fort Hamilton Progressive Labor members and pacifists to help me disrupt
my induction into the Army I was at times pulled out of regular training and
taken to the Military/Intelligence office downtown Columbia, South Carolina,
sometimes in civies and sometimes in Dress Greens. This made me stand out.
Remind me to tell you about those interviews.

It's getting late I have more to say about our Biloxi Blues and more reminisces too.

I will pick up on this riff another time...

this post is my intellectual property and cannot be copied
without my permission. copyright 2006, Eugene Weixel.

St, Mary and The Queen Of Sheba. (Originally posted in August of 2006).

2008-07-27T17:56:00.002-04:00

I was walking, or should I say drifting, or floating along 125th Street yesterday on my way home from the Taxi and Limousine Commission offices (where everything went great) and I was floating across Amsterdam Avenue when approaching at one o'clock was The Queen of Sheba, or her direct descendant. My breath taken away for a quick minute I quietly and appreciatively and to myself mouthed the words "well hello." I'm sure these words were not loud enough to bother her. Then coming towards me at two thirty was a priest! First I thought I was going to hear something about the little sin I had just committed.

NO, he asked me if I am The Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects and told me I'm doing great work. He gave me his card too and told me he's with St. Mary's Chruch which I recognized right away as a center for good community activities and activism.

Yesterday everything went right.

Google For Fun, Giuliani and formaldehyde. (I posted this when I was still working for "Children's Services")

2008-07-27T17:53:00.002-04:00

Fun Searches - Googling Giuliani and Formaldehyde and Children...Yes, the great Children's Center that was opened by Giuliani is a renovated morgue located right next to a shelter for men straight out of jail or mental hospitals, and neither group of people are restrained from leaving or meeting up. (I tried to tell everybody, but I could not get across)....Fun Searches Giuliani and foster children and 600 homeless men, etc....

Email to New York City Mayor Giuliani
... health and Safety Director Arnie Goldwag tells me that formaldehyde levels exceed EPA and NYOSH standards ... EPA standards for formaldehyde and that is right next to 600 homeless men ...www.fightcps.com/oldsite/letters/nycmayorgiuliani.htm - 5k - Cached - More from this site - Save
gggggggggggggggg
Ask mayor Giuliani ecsredeye2001(M/New York City) 3/23/01 1:57 pm
Ask the mayor about plans to locate foster children in a building that exceeds EPA standards for formaldehyde and that is right next to 600 homeless men! http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/mail/html/mayor.html
-----------
Message 3 of 3
Re: Ask mayor Giulianilinda_mom2five(48/F/California) 4/28/01 9:41 pm
I followed up on this, and received this response:
--------------------------------
Dear Ms Martin,
I write on behalf of Mayor Giuliani in response to your recent E-mail. Thank you for writing. Please provide us with the name of the facility you refer to so we may address your inquiry.
Sincerely,
Carmela Piazza
Assistant to the Mayor
-----Original Message -----
From: Martin, Linda Sent: 2001-04-14 15:43:33.293To: The Mayor of the City of New YorkSubject: Youth Services
Hello there,
I was surfing the internet today and came across some information about a new child welfare holding facility in your city that is actually a remodeled morgue, with formaldehyde levels beyond EPA standards.
Please let me know if any part of this is factual information.
Linda MartinCalifornia
-----End of Original Message -----
If you would like to send another message to the Mayor, please do not use the REPLY key. You may send another message to Mayor Giuliani by using the new web form located at: http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/mail/html/mayor.html or at: http://nyclink.org/mayormail Thank you for using NYC LINK, the OFFICIAL New York City Web site.
--------------------------------
LOL -- don't tell me NYC is such a big city you have more than one of these places!!
LindaFight CPS And Winhttp://www.geocities.com/fightcpsandwin

HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES IN NYC> PURGES AND GAG ORDERS
The dead children on Nicholas Scopetta's watch

Me, the Inspector General, Ramon Vargas and the Whitick Case (Posted while I was working for ACS)

2008-07-27T17:52:00.001-04:00

Would You Believe It? No Reply! Why I do not trust the Inspector ...

Would You Believe It? No Reply! Why I do not trust the Inspector General's Office, or if you'd rather think so, it's just fiction.....

Whatever happened to the investigation of the Whitick case ?

Eugene Weixel, Child Protective Specialist
Administration for Children’s Services
Emergency Children’s Services
492 First Avenue Unit 579 Ground floor
New York, New York 10016-9103

BEN W. DEFIBAUGH
ACTING INSPECTOR GENERAL
180 Water Street, 2nd Floor,
New York, N.Y. 10038
Fax: 212-331-3308
Dear Mr. Defibaugh:
I am writing you first in regards to an ACS case that I believe your office is investigating, the (media case that faded away prior to the election Whitick case ) case. I communicated to the ACS Commissioner that there were memos sent by management to certain supervisors that set arbitrary limits on the number of cases that Emergency Children’s Services would classify as “visits” per shift. ----Whitick case ) case came to Emergency Chidlren’s Services and may account for why a telephone call was made to Ms. XXXXXXX rather than a visit to her home to assess her children’s situation. My communication with the Commissioner also regarded another case that you might want to look at I am including the relevant e mail communications between Mr. Mattingly, Ms. Chahine and me:
Subject: From Eugene Weixel re: IRT case of this morning
Date: 2/11/05 1:18:42 P.M. Eastern Time
From Eweixel (@AOL>COM)
To: John. Mattingly@dfa.state.ny.us
At the risk of receiving additional disciplinary charges I am bringing a case to your attention that demonstrates the extreme of irresponsible casework decisions by those who issue directives in ECS. Rather than name this case here in the Internet email I will simply say that I worked on an IRT case last night (this morning) and I carried out directives that left three children in a dangerous situation.
1. I have documented the case thoroughly, and I have sent a memo to Mr. Jean - Philippe as well as the supervisors and managers involved.
I must say also that I have followed the recent media case. I would hope that you are aware of the memos regarding limitations of case visits that were sent by management to the supervisors who were involved in that case, both before and after the media "blowup."
In my humble opinion these kinds of fiascos will continue as long as ECS supervisors and managers enjoy the impunity they are accustomed to. (End)
I received a reply from Ms. Chahine which I answered (both are included):
Subject: Email Sent Commissioner
Date: 2/12/2005 12:37:56 A. M. Eastern Standard Time
To: Eweixel@aol.comMr. Weixel,
It would be helpful if you could forward to me the memos that we mentioned in your e-mail to the Commissioner for follow up. Thanks
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

My reply was as follows:
Subject: Re: Email sent Commissioner
Date: 12/12/2005 9:37:27 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
From: Eweixel
To: Zeinab.Chahine@dfa.state.ny.us
In a message dated 2/12/2005 12:37:56 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Zeinab.Chahine@dfa.state.ny.us writes:
Mr. Weixel,
It would be helpful if you could forward to me the memos that we mentioned in your e-mail to the Commissioner for follow up. Thanks
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
These memos were sent to supervisors xxxx,xxxxxx Mr. xxxxxx and I believe also to Mr. xxxxxx. I doubt they'd actually give them to me because they'd fear getting into some sort of trouble. They were sent by CPM Mr. xxxxxxxxxx (Spelling?).
Thank you for responding as you did to this concern and also for the speedy action to place one of the children in my IRT case of Thursday night / Friday morning.
The case in which I was involved is summarized in a memo I sent to my supervisor, manager and director:
ADMINISTRATION
for CHILDREN’S
SERVICES
Memo
To: xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx
From: Eugene Weixel
CC: XXXXXX XXXXXX
Date: 02/11/05
Re: Redacted case SCR 214xxxxxx et al.
I must express my grave concerns regarding this case. This is a case in which a xxxxteen-year-old girl alleges that her stepfather sexually fondled her and “attacked” her. This child’s mother believes the child and moved the child into a rented room in someone else’s house to keep her away from the stepfather. This mother however was not willing to cooperate with police in identifying the stepfather in order that he be arrested. In an interview the mother stated her preference to have this xxxxxeen-year-old child taken from the home in order that the marriage to the alleged subject stepfather be preserved.This mother told the CPS that the father had threatened to kill her and had thrown objects around and “talked about killing people” in front of the two younger children.
The child disclosed to hospital staff as well as to her own mother that the father had fondled her vaginal area at least two times. This child, when asked by this CPS if she felt herself safe in the home where she was returned to the stepfather answered, “I don’t know.”
I objected to the decision to take the family out of the EAU gateway to the shelter system where the mother had agreed to take her children and I also objected to leaving the children in the home with this subject father.
The family was being accepted into the shelter system and was taken out of this system abruptly and placed into a high-risk situation.
A false entry was made in the case record: “worker has not obtained any information from child nor the mother to assess risk. All information are from various Sources including social worker and doctor.” This is contradicted by my case entries, it does not reflect anything I told you or any other supervisor or manager, and police and hospital staff can dispute it. While the child could not be interviewed at any depth because she had been asleep (after one in the morning, when her mother had brought her to the precinct at around 3:00 PM) and because of a language barrier, the child would not tell the CPS that is not afraid at her home. (She speaks and understands limited English). The mother had a lengthy interview with CPS that was facilitated by xxxxxxxxx Hospital translation service and there was another discussion with medical staff, police and CPS with the mother that was facilitated by a (Native language) speaking nurse. I had no reason to misrepresent these facts, nor did I do so to you, to Mr. xxxxx, or to Mr. xxxxxxx.

To clarify the situation for you , Mr. Inspector General, I emphasize that I was in telephone communication with my supervisor and with supervisor xxxxx xxxxxxx, night administrator at ECS, throughout the case from the xxxxxxxxx General Hosptal Pediatric Emergency Room, From the Emergency Assistance Unit, while in transit to the Emergency Assistance Unit and from the home of the subject family. I carried out their instructions to the letter while I made my objections clear.I hope I have helped in shedding light onto the BIG MEDIA CASE THAT WENT AWAY WHILE BLOOMBERG FOLLOWED IN THE POLLS Whitick case and a similar matter that you might wish to look into. (As you may know xxxxx xxxxxxx was the Child Protective Manager directly involved with both of these cases).
Thank You,
Eugene Weixel
917-680-5034
CC: John Mattingly
Zeinab Chahine

YES, THERE WAS THIS BIG MEDIA CASE AT THAT TIME, AND THE PRESS WROTE THAT AN INVESTIGATION WAS UNDERWAY AND NEVER REVISITED THE STORY (THE ELECTION WAS IN THE FUTURE AND AT THE TIME THE MAYOR'S STANDING WAS SHAKY) Whitick case

Bloomberg's Fix -It Plan for ACS (Child Protective Services) Two thumbs down.

Dear Fellow ACS workers who are members of local 371:

Baby Snatching Fools- Giuliani time returns.

Me to Bloomberg and the media: Where were you for all the other Nixzmary Browns?

Special Victims, Nixzmary, Instant Responses, Emergency Children's Services- The New York Post is Lying When They Say Giuliani Fixed CPS in New York

ACS worker to The Commissioner - My Boss Says Some Things to The New York Daily News - And I React.

CPS Marijuana "Cure" Shakedown Racket

2008-07-27T17:50:00.002-04:00

Did you know that child protective services runs this racket that forces moms to go to programs paid for with your tax dollars to "cure marijuana addiction? "

I feel very strongly about this subject for a very good reason: I was once ordered to remove four small children from the home of their grandmother where they were staying along with their mother and father This order was to be carried out at around three o'clock in the morning in a housing project in Rockaway, Queens.

While my partner and I objected prior to being sent out and also from the scene we were not heard.

These children were not in any imminent danger and there was no court order to remove them.

We took them away from their mother, who had admitted to smoking marijuana on New Year's Eve and their grandmother who did not smoke marijuana and kept an orderly if crowded home that lacked for nothing the children needed.

We called back to our supervisor Ramon Vargas who said that he consulted with Celia Garrett our manager and that she had told him that "she doesn't want to hear it. Tell them to remove them."

In looking at the records later I learned that the same grandmother's home from which they were removed became their foster home.

I complained to ECS Director Joycelin Jean-Philippe about this in wiriting and was thanked for doing so. I vowed at that time never to be an instrument of blind stupid cruelty again, no matter who ordered me to do it.....God Help the Children of The Poor (by Eugene Weixel) - Media ...

I do not advocate marijuana use. I do advocate that people not be imprisoned and not have their children taken from them simply for the use of marijuana. Let's free the hundreds of thousands of marijuana prisoners who have harmed no person and let's take the power to force people into "drug treatment for marijuana" under the coercive threat of child removal away from the government!
Legalize marijuana, or at least de criminalize it in small amounts!

Experts call for legalization of marijuana
Colleen Corkery
Posted: 11/21/03

Marijuana is not universally legal in the United States, so Ken Larsen, adjunct professor at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, says he feels that the country is certifiably insane and belongs in an asylum.

Larsen and Sheriff Richard Mack, former undercover narcotics officer and sheriff of Graham County, Ariz., spoke about legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes on Thursday in the Union Theatre.

"I do not advocate the recreational use of marijuana, chocolate, Twinkies, caffeine and alcohol, but I am for the freedom to choose," Larsen said.According to Larsen, a drug composed of marijuana and aspirin, called CT3, is a "wonder drug" for pain-related conditions such as arthritis...

CBC News:Fraser Institute study calls for legal pot

:: Suburbia :: :: Poll: Both Coasts Favor Letting States legalize marijuana ...

FOXNews.com - US & World News - Denver Residents Legalize ...
FOXNews.com - US and World News - Denver Residents Legalize Marijuana Possession . Residents of the Mile High City have voted to legalize the possession of ...

Canadian Senate Says Legalize Marijuana Now Swiss Government Committee Says Legalize Marijuana - NORML
The Swiss government should legalize the sale and use of marijuana, a federally appointed panel urged last week. Their recommendation responds to a ...

Newsbrief: Belgium to Legalize Marijuana Possession, Use

Marijuana Mother Can Keep Kids - child protective services
Akron- Smoking marijuana daily does not make a woman an unfit parent and her four children should not have been removed by a county agency, an appeals court ...

Reefer Madness?
Angela Took A Hit. And Children's Protective Services Took Her Babies Away.
Angela Jenkins grabbed her common-law husband by the shoulders and shook him from his sleep. It was time; the baby was coming. At three in the morning on September 22, Aaron Asher rushed Jenkins to the Memorial City branch of Memorial Healthcare System, where she gave birth to their second child, Sylvan Asher. It should have been the joy of motherhood and a growing family. Instead, a week later, the couple couple had no children...

Starasia's Nightmare (Originally Posted While I Was Working for Administration for Children's Services)

2008-07-27T17:47:00.002-04:00

This is fiction, of course, but it's about a reality for the poor and working people of my city:

Starasia is a very good girl. She is eight years old. She lives with her mother in the projects. Starasia's mother's name is Jessica and Jessica works at a McDonald's that has replaced a hospital cafeteria in The Bronx.

Starasia gets up every morning and takes a shower and brushes her teeth. Starasia puts on the school uniform her mother has laid out for her before she goes to sleep. Starasia's mother fixes her breakfast and walks with her across the street to her school. Jessica catches the D train and goes to work. She comes home at six thirty every day.

Starasia is, like I told you, a very good girl. Her mother told her that she could watch cartoons when she comes home for half an hour and Starasia usually does just this, and then she does her homework and cleans her room, because she knows that she and mom are a team. Starasia heats up some ravioli or spaghetti in the micro wave, eats it and drinks a glass of milk. Then she does her homework. I was a city kid like Starasia, only not such a good kid, but for a while both my parents had jobs and I was, like Starasia, a latchkey kid. Millions of us were, and millions of them are.

This is how Starasia has been doing things since September, when she got into the third grade. Last year mom's best friend Gloria, who lived across the hallway, would take Starasia into her home until mommy got home, but Gloria's kid Humberto was taken by ACS because Gloria tested positive for marijuana at the municipal hospital and Humberto was a preemie. Gloria sort of lost her mind and her apartment soon after that.

So now Starasia takes are of herself till mommy gets home.

Alfred is the manager of the McDonald's where Jessica works. He likes Jessica. He thinks she is very pretty. Alfred likes pretty women. Jessica does not like Alfred. She does not want to sleep with him.

One day Alfred told Jessica that she would be very sorry if she did not come home with him. Jessica told him to leave her alone.

That evening, while Jessica was coming home on the D train, Alfred called 911 to report that Jessica's six year old child, name unknown, is home alone without supervision.

The police came and knocked on the door. Starasia looked through the peephole, (her big mistake) , and went back to her bedroom. Officer Sonia Ortiz saw the peephole open for a second and told her partner, Jimmy McMahon, that the kid was home. McMahon took his nightstick and started pounding on the door very hard. Staraisa was very scared, but her mother had told her not to open the door for anyone.

McMahon picked up his pace and now the door had dents in it. "Open up or we'll break it down!" McMahon shouted. Neighbors came to the hallway to see what the commotion was about.

Starasia called mommy on her cell phone and got the words about leaving a message. The pounding kept up.

There was a problem on the D Train that evening. A man on the train in front of Jessica's had thrown up and fainted and the train was being held at the station in front 'till the cops and EMT's got there.

Ms. Hendricks, the downstairs neighbor who Jessica called "the quiet lady" because she would come knocking on the door whenever mommy would listen to music on the weekend and tell her to make it lower, and because when Starasia had her friend Tania from school visit on a playdate on no school nights she'd be banging on the door saying that the kids are too loud. The quiet lady asked Ortiz and McMahon what the problem was. She told them that Starasia's mom was always making noise and letting Starasia run wild.

The quiet lady came to the peephole and McMahon stopped for a minute. With the quiet, Starasia came back to the peephole. The quiet lady was there and she told Starasia to open the door because the police were going to break it down if she didn't and that she knew that mommy would say it's okay because if the police break down the door the bad people would come inside at night.

Starasia called her mom one more time and there still wasn't an answer. Starasia opened the door.

When Jessica got off the train and out of the subway station it was dark and her pager went off. She heard the messages from Starasia, that the police were knocking on the door and that they said they would break it down.

Jessica ran home and took the stairway the ten floors because the lobby was packed with people waiting for the one elevator that works.

Starasia wasn't there and there was a notice on the door saying the police had taken her into protective custody.

Jessica got to the precinct a few minutes later. The sergeant said that her kid wasn't there, that she should try at the housing cops stationhouse a mile away.

When Jessica got to the housing cops stationhouse she was put into the holding pen before she could even see Starasia, who was in a room with Ortiz and McMahon. Ortiz was typing out the child abuse report and McMahon was calling up the hotline. One of the cops ordered a cheeseburger for Starasia from the Burger King across the Avenue. The police were very nice to Starasia. They also gave her some Pepsi and told her what a good kid she is.

Two hours later a nice man called the stationhouse from the child welfare office and he asked to speak with Starasia. Star told him that mommy is a good mother. She told him that mommy doesn't give her pow pow. She told him that she knows how to microwave ravioli and that she never opens the door for anyone. The man told Star that he would call aunt Naisha if he could get her telephone number.

Star watched and listened while Oritz got on the telephone with the man. Officer Ortiz was telling the man that he could not talk with Jessica. She said that she would ask Jessica for Naisha's telephone number. Star watched as Ortiz came back from the holding pen. She heard Ortiz tell the man that Jessica didn't remember Naisha's telephone number, that it was on her cell phone and that the cell phone was already vouchered and that she couldn't give it to Jessica.

Two nice policemen brought Starasia to a pretty clean building in the city. Nice people asked Starasia a lot of nice questions and let Star sleep in a very nice bed. But Starasia couldn't sleep.
Read Stop Locking Up Good Parents!

Administration For Children's Services, A Thuggish Subculture

2008-07-27T17:45:00.001-04:00

BRONX MELEE, ACS official charged in fight, Deputy director also charged with forgery after argument outside night club escalates to stabbings
[CITY Edition]
Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.
Author:
LINDSAY FABER. STAFF WRITER
Date:
Nov 1, 2004
Start Page:
A.08
Edition:
Combined editions
Section:
NEWS
Text Word Count:
289
Abstract (Document Summary)
Donald Antonetty, 44, deputy director of the agency's Bronx field office, was arrested yesterday at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center after a group of men told police that Antonetty had been involved in an assault earlier in the morning, police said.
The fight occurred around 4:45 a.m. at Prospect Avenue and Dawson Street as a group of men were leaving P.J. Lounge. The incident left two people, one of whom was Antonetty's friend, with stab wounds, police said. Antonetty did not wield a knife and did not stab anyone, police said.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

&&amp;amp;&&&&&&&&&&&

They say he didn't pull a knife on anyone but try to envision the scene. What time was it? Oh and that "forgery" thing is a forged police parking permit. Antonetty was once a honcho in the fabled ACS/NYPD "Instant Response Team" leadership. I guess fake parking permits sort of would come with the turf, right?

This guy Antonetty is still in the ACS management serving at the pleasure of Michael Bloomberg and John Mattingly.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Okay so I'm a bit sensitive. Read the email exchange I had with Commissioner Mattingly. Yes, he emailed me at my house to my AOL account. Read the whole thing! Any wonder I felt like quitting? Administration for Children's Services has a beef with me.
)))))))))))))))))))

Jocelyn Does 'Domingo.

It's no big mystery and no one needs to be a trained investigator to know why New York men fly to The Dominican Republic without their significant others. The kicker I guess is when the director of a major operation charged with protecting children, serving at the mayor's pleasure goes around his office boasting to his staff about the fact. Yeeeesh. Crude people you have to work under at ACS! Crude ones at Emergency Children's Services too!

Jean-Philippe has nothing to worry about, he's in his element.href="http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/newsday/access/727033601.html?dids=727033601:727033601&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Nov+1%2C+2004&author=LINDSAY+FABER.+STAFF+WRITER&pub=Newsday&edition=Combined+editions&startpage=A.08&desc=BRONX+MELEE%2C+ACS+

How I Tripped Over A Wrinkle In The Uniform code Of Military Justice

2008-07-27T17:36:00.004-04:00

(Special thanks to two racist cops and George Corley Wallace). It was October 1968, a strange time to be alive. I was an unwilling member of Lyndon Baines Johnson's army, back home in New York on a thirty day leave, under orders to go back to Fort Lewis in November for transport to the Republic of Vietnam, where I was going to be a replacement.

That was the year three men were running for the White House. The most despicable of the three was a man who had said this: Today I have stood where Jefferson Davis stood and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom. . . . In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!(1) George Wallace, 1962 Governor's Inaugural Address

I didn't like politicians, and I especially didn't like that one. Little did I realize as I sat on the plane taking me from SeaTac Airport in Washington State that this man and a racist cop named Scheiskopf would be keeping me safe and sound. I had been home a while, moping, sweating, fretting and worrying, making plans and alternate plans, losing myself in Alice's Restaurant fantasies, flipping out. I was sitting in front of my parents' TV watching a newscast (me being very downcast I was not doing the standard "boy's night out" kind of 30 day leave in New York.) Paul O'Dwyer was there standing in front of a crowd of Garment Worker Union members urging them and "all decent New Yorkers" to come to Madison Square Garden to show the world that New York rejects George Wallace, who had a big rally scheduled there that night. I decided to go there, by myself. I was depressed but wanted to make my little statement. I expected to get there and be herded behind a police barricade with a few hundred others, walk around shouting slogans, and go home. This was not to be.

As I made my way from the Herald Square subway station along 34th street I could see a crowd forming up. As I got closer I saw that there were no police barricades. I hung around a while but things started to get ugly in a way I had never seen first hand, and frankly had never expected to see in the middle of Manhattan, ever. The crowd continued to grow and horse mounted cops were making individual forays into the crowd, swinging night sticks, trampling people and shouting obscenities. I had two impulses, one to run and the other to refuse to run. This was outrageous. I found myself being chased east down 33rd Street by a mounted cop at full gallop. Thanks to my good GI training I was able to hurl myself over a parked car and onto the sidewalk, relatively safe from him. I looked around, and saw two black men sprawled out on the staircase of the 34th Street 8th Avenue subway, their heads bleeding. I could hear sirens and shattering glass. I decided on a strategic retreat. As I ran towards the East, I collided into Bob Riley, a long time neighborhood fixture, known to many affectionately as "the black Irishman." I don't know who was more surprised, Riley or me. We didn't have much time to catch up on old times at that minute. We both agreed to head north at 7th Avenue, find a tavern, and empty a few glasses. This was not to be.

As we reached Seventh Avenue we could see that the Avenue itself was lined with parked buses, that had brought the Wallacites from points along the East Coast to their rally in "enemy territory." Before we could cross 34th Street a Navy Blue unmarked cop car pulled up and two beefy men jumped out. Another cop car, this one a squad car, pulled up quickly alongside, and we found ourselves being shoved against a parked bus, our faces pounded by two plainclothes cops where were shouting "ni@@er" and "f***in' ni@@er lover!" Before I knew what happened I was in the back of the squad car handcuffed to Riley. A Sergeant and a plainclothes were in front. Another plainclothes squeezed into the back alongside of us. Several blackjack whacks to the kneecap and several punches in the face later we pulled up outside the Midtown South precinct. Of course we had been promised on this short ride that we were going to "wake up in the fucking hospital." This also was not to be.

There were about five or six photographers outside the precinct and the Sergeant muttered "shit if they walk in they have to walk out." I quickly found myself on a staircase tumbling on top of Riley, still handcuffed to him. The next morning we stood before a judge at the Tombs on Center Street after spending the night standing in a packed cell with a few dozen black men who were in varying states of injury. (There was one toilet without the inside this cell or more appropriately bullpen.) The judge was shouting something at me about my demeanor as I heard that we were being charged with Riot I, Encitement to Riot, Reckless Endangerment, Attempted Felonious Assault and of course, Resisting Arrest. To my surprise the Military Police were not waitng for me. I realized later that this was because I had not (yet anyhow) violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I got bailed out by my parents that night, and Riley got out the next day. A clerk gave me a piece of paper directing me to return to Manhattan Criminal Court on November 15. The only problem was, I had another peice of paper issued by The Army ordering me to return to Fort Lewis on November 6, to the US Army Replacement Station there, for transport to Vietnam. The next morning I packed my things and headed down to the infamous Whitehall Street, where this particular dream had begun a year earlier. I thought that for sure, my 30 day leave had been cut short. This was not the case:

UNIFORM CODE OF MILITARY JUSTICE "814. ART. 14. DELIVERY OF OFFENDERS TO CIVIL AUTHORITIES (a) Under such regulations as the Secretary concerned may prescribe, a member of the armed forces accused of an offense against civil authority may be delivered, upon request, to the civil authority for trial. (b) When delivery under this article is made to any civil authority of a person undergoing sentence of a court-martial, the delivery, if followed by conviction in a civil tribunal, interrupts the execution of the sentence of the court-martial, and the offender after having answered to the civil authorities for his offense shall, upon the request of competent military authority, be returned to military custody for the completion of his sentence. "

;)

All this meant that I was not going to stand court-martial prior to conviction in the civilian court, and that the military was going to produce me for trial at 100 Center Street, New York, New York on November 15.

I walked in to Whitehall Street dragging my duffle bag behind me expecting to be whisked away to the Detention Center at Fort Monmouth. I walked up to the desk in the lobby, handed the Sergeant there both of my pieces of paper and waited for the MP's. The Sergeant brought me in to see the Lieutenant, and the Lieutenant brought me in to see a Captain named Fubar. After it was all over they had me wait in the lobby. The Sergeant called me to his desk and gave me a mimeographed order to report to Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn in two weeks! He told me to enjoy the rest of my leave. that was that.

At Fort Hamilton they put me on a bus to Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, a satellite base of Hamilton. They assigned me to be a clerk (I had Army Personnel Records training - another story.) I had permission to live off base (at my parent's apartment) and reported every morning at 6:00 AM to formation. Well, folks, back in those days when cops and Assistant District Attorneys wanted to hurt political demonstrators they would contrive to delay the trial. For the average defendant this meant repeated court appearances. Riley finally lost his job, inspite of all the lies he had to tell his boss to explain the days he would have to take off . If Officer Scheiskopf would show up at a hearing then Dreksau would be out sick. If Dreksau showed up Scheiskopf would be on vacation, and on and on it went. Now this had a salutory effect on my situation. The long and the short of it was that I didn't actually stand trial until I was out of the Army. I was home free. I was convicted of disorderly conduct, appealed that one and won. And that's my war story.

BAD KARMA IN THE HOUSE OF DREKSAU

Every once in a while I still get a sharp wince of pain in my left knee, the knee that Officer Dreksau hammered with his blackjack on that night in October of 1968. Nevertheless Officers Scheiskopf, Dreksau and George Wallace had taken an enormous burden off my shoulders on that night. I didn't have to go to Vietnam, or exile, or jail. A few years after that night I was back in college in Staten Island, in a rented campus near the ferry.

One afternoon after class as I was walking to the ferry I heard someone shout my name. I looked around and immediately recognized Officer Dreksau, with Scheiskopf standing right there beside him, gesturing towards me as they walked in my direction. Dreksau was not in uniform, just as he had not been in uniform the night he became my Arresting Officer. We strode towards each other and as we got close, he threw his arm around my shoulder and asked me with a big grin on his face "How ya doin' buddy!? Are ya stayin' outta trouble? how's that other guy, what's his name, Riley?!" "I'm fine" I answered. "Been out of trouble since that night. I don't know where Riley even is." "Well, if ya run inta him again, tell him I said hello."

Around ten years later...... I'm driving a taxi down Seventh Avenue with a busted headlight and I pick up a frantic woman with lots of luggage in front of Penn Station. I tell her that I have to get the headlight replaced, it should take only a couple of minutes and I head for the 24 hour service station at 27th and 11th. I pull in to the place and it looks like no one's there, even with the big sign that says "Open Seven Days A Week, 24 Hours A Day." I blow my horn and no one moves. I head out of the gas station onto 11th Avenue (this is where I turned on the meter) past the cop car that's sitting by the driveway when the cop hits his siren. This real young cop comes out, takes my license and registration and sits in his car talking with his partner. Fifteen minutes later he hands me three tickets: 1- Going through the gas station to avoid a red light. 2-Broken headlight ( that's an easy one to fix). 3- Red light. I look at the scrawl on the tickets and this name jumps up at me : Dreksau. Now, he's not my Dreksau, he's much younger than my Dreksau. He could be his son, nephew, cousin or just a guy with the same last name. The lady was ticked off but she was nice enough to give me her name and her address at work. It took more than a year though for her to reply to my plaintive requests for a letter describing the events of that night. In the meantime this same Dreksau bags me once again, this time he is in a big cop van with maybe six other cops in there with him and they're crawling along blocking the driveway on the 45th Street side of the Marriot Marquis. I swing around and there goes the siren. Now here comes Dreksau the younger, big grin on his face. "It's you again (you couldn't miss me with my beard) You cut me off." He takes my stuff and comes back around fifteen minutes later with a ticket for cutting him off. This one I paid. After a year of adjournments I get the lady's excuse letter and go for trial on the three tickets. (The headlight one had been taken care of by a letter from the garage.)

Now we get to court and he lies. He says the red light and the avoiding red light tickets were the only ones he wrote. He says I had no passenger. I demolished the sunuvabitch. The guy was shaking, really trembling and on the verge of tears and he asks the judge for a "do over!" Now I know this is not just another traffic stop for this guy, this is important to him. The judge gently reminded him that The State doesn't get the opportunity to appeal findings of "not guilty." A few weeks later I saw in the papers that a young cop named Dreksau had put a service revolver into his mouth and blown his brains out.

copyright Eugene Weixel all rights reserved
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No Fuckin' Cameras

2008-05-29T04:59:00.001-04:00

Taxis Have Rules In New York City. You Can Read Them Here.

2007-04-16T07:46:00.000-04:00

Click to see driver rules, owner rules, all the rules. (Lots of rules).

Taxi Economics I

2007-04-11T19:43:00.000-04:00

My wife finally succeeded in making me sit down and do our taxes.It's something I've rued and not wanted to do, what with my wages from "Children's Services" that ended in June, the couple of thousand I got from the union annuity fund, the pension loan I never repaid, the paltry pension itself, the insanitizing work sheet the IRS has for all that - it all seemed a very complex mess even to organize it and bring it to someone else to "do" so now that I've organized it I'm "doing" it myself.

In figuring out the self employment bit I came upon some rare knowledge - what I have actually been paying not to lease a taxi per shift, but that part that is strictly for the medallion. While my receipts show a sales tax of $3.18 every night I work, the lease itself varies and averages out for me to $126 per shift. Obviously the variable is not the car(s) although they vary greatly. By deduction the variable must be the medallion, though they all are pretty much the same, their market values fluctuate throughout a week, pricier on Friday night, cheaper on Monday night and so forth.

I called up the calculator on my old Dell and figured it out. - On average I rent the car(s) - different each night- for $37.97 per shift average. Then there is the sales tax - $3.18 every night, leaving an average nightly medallion lease of $84.85.

This is a lease by the shift. Other deals have slightly lower per shift costs for the medallion, but you get the idea. Gas averaged $35.00 a night. Let's say my gross, tips included, more or less (for me a slow old man, it's a bit less) matched these expenses. That would be about right. Probably if I were younger, stronger and less scrupulous I could make more. Before the last fare increase of late November TLC was saying the cabbies made an average of $150 profit per shift. I don't know what their figures are for now.

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Canadians Are the Greatest

2007-04-11T14:26:00.000-04:00

I've often thought it and said it to people but now I can really tell the world- Canadians are the greatest people there are. Friendly, outgoing, conversant, polite, laid back. Certainly the Canadians who visit my city, New York and hail my cab and ride are.

Canadian Flag

Photographic Print

Adams, Peter

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He'll Never Learn...

2007-04-10T18:32:00.000-04:00

Lyceum, Don Quixote

Art Print

Nicholson Pryde,...

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Framed

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To dream the impossible dream
to fight the unbeatable foe...

Yup, I Passed A Test To Get This Job- Taxibiz Questions (I)

2007-04-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

People are always asking me about the workings of the taxi business. While I want this weblog to be entertaining and fun and frankly I want to sell you posters and prints I will from time to time try to post some Q and A type stuff about the workings of the taxi business. Here I have a link to a sample test all drivers of Yellow Medallion taxis in NYC must pass before they get their licenses.

Taxi drivers go to school to prepare for this test and some go to school to prepare for the school to prepare for this test. The real school however is the job itself, the streets and the passengers who often end up teaching the cabbies geography of New York City.

Later I will explain the money workings of the business, including how much cabbies typically earn.

Sample Exam

Sample Exam - Answers Taxi drivers in New York City are tested and required to attend a class of at least 24 hours duration prior to getting licensed to drive yellow taxis. Yellow taxis are the only taxis licensed to pick up passengers without pre arrangement (street hails).
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Driving A Taxi Is Like Going To School/I Get Schooled On The Hays Act, Jazz and Betty Boop

2007-04-09T23:32:00.000-04:00

A couple of nights ago I had this passenger who told me she is working on a Phd. on Betty Boop and the Hays Act. She was fascinating and I decided to go google this stuff up. I learned that the Betty Boop cartoons were more or less equal to today's music videos. The cartoons featured the greats of Jazz. She was one hot wild and crazy young woman until they outlawed marijuana. Now I am not an advocate of marijuana, nor alcohol nor overeating. Marijuana is illegal and as a licensed taxi driver and before that a Child Protective worker I don't smoke the stuff. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has though and he said he liked it just fine.

jumpy vague blurry otherworldly nighttime cell phone videos from taxi frontseats

2007-04-09T17:31:00.000-04:00

Passengers have been kind enough to sit in front and take these for me.

Lost And Found/Drunkwagon Chronicles (II)

2007-04-08T20:00:00.000-04:00

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My wife calls Saturday Night la noche de los borrachos (night of the drunks.)

A few Saturdays back I took a young lady from a club downtown to her place in Brooklyn and I scooted over the Brooklyn Bridge and caught another fare near Church and Canal. He was standing up straight and didn't seem to be overly impaired so I raced the other three cabs to him and got him.

He gave me his address at 90th near Columbus and then he dropped off the radar for a while. I was listening to the great jazz on WBGO anticipating going home soon, as this was going to be my final fare of the night.

I heard a cell phone ringing and ringing. There was no answer. Finally after about five calls the guy answered the cell phone. He said "Honey I don't know where the f_ck street I am but I'm in a taxi. Be home soon."

He fell off the screen again so to speak but the phone rang again and again till I stopped and got out of the taxi. The guy was sprawled out over the back seat and the cell phone was on the floor. I picked it up and it rang again. I answered it. It was the young lady I had dropped off in Brooklyn. She was not happy. I explained that I was transporting a drunk and that I would call her when the job got done.

The guy vomited politely out the passenger door, paid me plus a good tip and staggered towards his apartment house.

I arranged to meet the lady on Sunday. My wife was ticked off because I never move a bone on Sunday for her. I gave the lady her phone she gave me ten dollars.

Two passengers out of an upscale strip joint./Drunkwagon Chronicles (I)

2007-04-08T19:56:00.000-04:00

Outside an upscale strip club at around 4AM one freezing cold windy morning. His face was a mixed message of "better living through chemistry" and "where the f$ck am I?" Her face was very plain in its message> "It's cold out here. Show me a taxi and show me the money."

He was in his white business shirt and power tie, shirt undone, belt lost, no jacket, no coat, no hat and that blank blank face. She was dressed only a little better, having chased after him to the street and now guiding him to my taxi. Through the rear view mirror and by words and noises I could tell she was priming him - getting him to a point where he would have to have sex, with her, right now. She wsa talking about "$500" and he was talking about "Where is the other one? I thought you said $300."

She said to me. "Two stops, one at tenth and Broadway the other in Bayside." At tenth and Broadway he said "I can't do $500." and she said "Bayside." We left him on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. There is a doorman so he didn't freeze to death that night.
new york

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I Knew The Real Ignatowski

2007-04-08T19:29:00.000-04:00

>

Saturday, December 17, 2005

I Knew The Real Ignatowski

People may think that that old TV show Taxi is all made up. Well, it is fiction but there is a shadow of reality to it. I know. I drove out of the Dover Garage for years and the real Ignatowski ( and the real Reiger and the real Mr. Cunningham) were still there. The show had already been a hit for years but it dawned on me when I learned the real boss's name was Cunningham that there was maybe more to it than met the eye.

The scene in Taxi where the cabs roll into the garage was shot on Hudson Street in the West Village. (A high rise stands on the spot today) but for years Villagers would hike a couple of blocks at shift change time and get a sure cab to anywhere they wanted to go.

Driving on the night line out of Dover had to be an education for anyone, and it was one for me. This was the last bastion of the educated English as a first language New York cabbie. Shape up was the time we sat around waiting to be called for our cars to go out into the evening and try and make our hundred dollars, or if we were lucky or extra hard working, more. There was a crew of old timers who would come around the garage at around ten at night. They'd play poker and wait for the early quits to come in. They'd go out off the books, no trip cards, behind a bribe to the night dispatcher and go hustle for a few bucks between one or two and five in the morning. Several of these guys slept in the parking garage upstairs.

Everet was a big fat aging cabbie with a gray stubble and a faint bad odor who usually ran the poker game that he held in the shop late at night. He would also provide the night dispatcher with a gratuity and then, as the house, he would proceed to fleece the hapless oldtimers, compulsive gamblers receiving various pensions and disability checks from other lives, and who came faithfully because to them, it was the only game in town.

Everet was the real Ignatowski. You might say at this point it couldn't be but Everet hadn't always been a panting, wheezing morbidly obese old man. No, I had the privilege of seeing Everet's earliest hack license and it was the spitting image of the TV character Ignatowski, or should I say the character was the image of Everet.

Now I was no psychiatrist, I was only a nightshift cab driver, but I knew not only that Everet was nuts, but that he was paranoid. I knew this because he would hold forth as to how the cops, Cunningham and "the 'mafiosi' from around here" were tracking his movements with microphones and satellite devices (this was 1983). As a student of life at that time, I took it upon myself to get to know the real Ignatowski. He would drive one or two nights a week and never be out of cash.

As time went on Everet told of his former life as a professional criminal. How he had been in on a fake billing scam that ripped off one of the Fortune 500 companies that used to populate Manhattan, and how he and two confederates got off with almost a million dollars before they got caught. He also told me about his younger days as a break and entry man, and his knowledge of locks and safes sounded impressive to the ears of this novice. Everet lived in a rent controlled apartment in a building next to the precinct on Charles Street, around the corner from the garage. I visited there a few times.

He had around ten cats, and the place stank. He had piles and stacks of old porno mags that he would buy from the second hand hawkers on Second Avenue near Saint Marks early in the mornings. He had boxes and cartons of cat food, spaghetti, jars of spaghetti sauce and cartons of powdered milk. He said his rent was faithfully paid a year in advance. Twice in those years I accompanied him to the big Pathmark down on Pike Street (actually that's the foot of First Avenue by another name) near the East River and the New York Post plant. He would stock up on his stash items and head back to Charles Street. Somewhere Everet had buried several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everet could not hold a conversation without touching on the following topics; The Italians of the West Village, their collective connections with the precinct and his landlord, the microphones that were always placed in the taxis he would get (and it was a different cab every night). And the satellite trackers he said they all had. Cunnigham would look at a screen and know where all his taxis were at any given moment, Everet assured me and anyone else who would listen. Another pervasive theme of conversation was the two dollar daily fee to the union, and how he hated it. When the garage failed in its first attempt to shake the union off time Everet began another steep decline. For a few months the garage had stoppped collecting the fee, which was payment to the Lease Drivers Benefit Fund, but the union got a judge to order the fleets to collect and turn over the money, including retroactively. Everet refused to pay up, and so Cunnigham had no choice but to send him away. (He still loitered on most nights and ran his poker game.)

In those days there were Israeli and Russian run garages up Ninth and Tenth Avenues that ran yellow painted old police cars and were not very selective as to their driver staff, as the cars would continually break down, and the owners were reputed to routinely refuse to return deposit moneys. There was a cohort of drivrers with very bad records (some with fake hack licenses) who circulated among these garages. These were the wide open days of Mayor Ed Koch, when the streets of Manhattan had become an open air crack bazaar. But I digress.

Everet joined this sad crew rather than ante up the few dollars he owed the union. You could not honestly say that most of Cunnigham's cars were death traps. The legit fleets, like Dover were in fact the desired places experienced cabbies would want to work out of, even with the brutal hours long shape up and these fleets could be selective. But again, I digress.

One evening I was drivng down upper Fifth Avenue from a run to Harlem when I saw Everet standing in the second traffic lane next to a broken down yellow painted cop car. He abandoned the heap and got into my cab. He had a mission at Pathmark. It was on this trip, to Pathmark that Everet told me some intersting things about his past life: After the scam got busted, he was sued civilly by the corporation as were his partners. One paid up, and another one was found in the Hudson River wearing a suit of bicycle chains. His share of the stash, Everet said, had never been found. But Everet inherited this friend's girl and car.

One day I was talking with Dan Monohan, the last full time Irish driver in Dover about the folklore of the place, it's history and the television show Taxi. He asked me who I thought had hit Everet's friend and put him into the river. The answer was unavoidable to me.

Two years later I got a passenger who was telling me about the bizzare cabbies he had met in his years in New York. One was an old fat guy with a gray stubble who wheezed and stank. He handed to the passenger a leaflet denouncing the Taxi and Limosine Commisssion for allowing the mafia to hound him and ignoring his complaints. The leaflet urged the passengers to call the Commisssioner and demand an explanation.

I met Dan again and he told me that Everet was out to get me because I had taken polaroid snap shots of him laid out on a sidewalk drunk and was handing out copies to all of the Italians on Hudson Street.

I knew the real Ignatowski.

Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

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(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again.

2007-04-08T19:25:00.000-04:00

Monday, July 17, 2006

(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again.
I have spoken here about my former life as a taxi driver and how I am now once again working in that noble occupation. I spoke about how even when I was a convinced atheist it did seem odd that my "luck" was so good, that when bad a thing happened to me (and it was never that bad) something pretty good would soon follow, that at the least evened things out. I had half in jest decided that there is a God of Taxi drivers, or an angel or saint working with God that looked after at least me and probably other taxi drivers who worked the night time streets of New York.

My wife tells me that God was watching over me because although I was not a believer I was doing honest work, not robbing anyone or insulting anyone and in the process I was feeding, housing and even at times doing more for a wife and two children, these two children who were working hard at becoming adults and who needed me and the small but sufficient money I could wring out of the night time streets. I still have a problem believing in such a personally involved God. I once had a conversation (in a taxi I was driving, naturally) with a Reform rabbi who admitted to me that God must either not be omniscient or else God is not omnipotent, because a just God (and God is Love and God is Justice and God is That Which is right) would not permit the worst injustices that befall His (for want of a better word) children, who the rabbi did say he believed are all human beings and not just this rabbi's tribe of them.

It seems to me that the universe, or the multiverse of universes that exists, that life, that growing and beautiful trees , life forms that fit together on this planet, could not just have happened, that some force had to be involved in making sure that it happened. The big bang theory to me does not explain much, as far as I know it does not explain how apparent nothingness, or one atom or whatever it was, could explode outward and here we have galaxies, stars, planets and life forms that feed each other, give each other what is needed to breathe, and are so perfectly symetrical. Coincidence? As we New Yorkers would say "you're kidding me."

So these things seem to happen. That on the worse night I earn what is at least minimally acceptable to justify the labor, even with a car that breaks down, even with being dispatched at six instead of five. Then one night last week I got further evidence that some force or power is on my side, for whatever reason I cannot explain. It was a night that had started badly, I got dragged out to Brooklyn during the rush hour and as the trip progressed my passenger got to complaining that the meter was running to fast, that she did not beleive the forty cent increments were the correct fare, that the last time she took this trip it had cost about half what it was costing now. (This has to be either a lie or a reference to a taxi trip she took when she was a little girl on her mother's lap.) I girded myself to be stiffed or to have to negotiate a partial payment. In the end she did pay what was on the meter, part of it in nickles and dimes, but pay she did.

I got back into the city and got a fare outside the criminal court/ overnight lockup at 100 Centre Street. I think the passenger was a cop of some kind, a jail guard or court officer. Anyhow he pretended not to understand the one dollar rush hour surcharge and left me forty cents short of what was on the meter. It would not have paid in any sense to have argued with him. I was not looking forward to a decent night. I struggled on, brought someone who wanted to go to Greenwich Avenue to Greenwich Street, corrected that for free. It was not looking too good.

Near the end of my shift, which is five in the morning, at three o'clock, I was tooling up Amsterdam Avenue and there was not another car within two lights behind me. I was on the left and I spotted a block ahead a man standing outside a bar waving at me. I put on my right turn signal and carefully, with no other vehicles around (I thought) made it to the right hand lane, stopped, waited for my green light and got to the passenger. As he leaned towards the window to ask me something a cop car pulled up out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and the officer at the passenger side indicated that I should roll down my window, and he asked I give him my trip sheet, which was happily all filled out with no blank spaces. "I want you to tell me why you went through that red light" he said. I told him that quite frankly, in my mind's eye and to my memory I had not done that. His partner, in the driver's seat looked at my trip card. He said to the other officer "this poor bastard's been working all night. Leave him alone." The first officer handed back my trip card and told me to be more carefull in the future. The passenger requested a long out of town upstate New York trip. I had enought time to make it back to the garage by five, and got paid really almost the margin of what was my profit for the night, and not too shabby at that.

Last night I brought two moms and two kids from close to Penn Station to Harlem, they paid me and thanked me and went on their ways. I was heading west looking for my left turn to downtown when I saw another mom with some kids standing on the corner with lots of bags and valises and a shopping cart. She waived at me. Almost any other cabbie would have passed her up it was so obvioulsy going to be a losing propostion. I guess it was the social worker in me, I stopped and did not put the meter on till the van taxi I was driving was loaded (maybe ten minutes waiting for free). I took her where she needed to go, she had just been booted out of homeless shelter because, she said, the staff had gone into her room and robbed her of sixty dollars and she had called the police who came to the shelter, run by Hale House and took her complaint. (My wife fully believes this story, and she is a shelter veteran, and I, an old CPS worker find it rings true also.) I turned off the meter before I went back and started to help her unload all the stuff, and there was plenty, and her eight year old daughter refused for a few minutes to leave the taxi saying only that she was too tired and that she wanted to sleep. Well, maybe a whole hour was gone for the ten bucks which the lady insisted on paying, not even enough to cover an hour's lease and gas, let alone pay me, but once in a while one is called on to do little things that matter. Somehow, I came out of the night with my barely acceptable minimum profit in spite of this.

Maybe tonight will be better.

White Night In the Ghetto

2007-04-08T19:20:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

White Night In The Ghetto From the Front Seat of A Taxicab.
I've been working almost every night these past two weeks and have become re acclimated to driving and all it entails.

Sunday night for some reason I got five different fares who were young adult whites going to their residences deep in formerly Black neighborhoods (well, Crown Heights is a neighborhood that is mainly Black but has a large number of Lubavitcher Jewish cultists also, and I won't count Williamsburg in Brooklyn an area long shared by the Satmar hasidics and Puerto Ricans because it's been getting filled up with these generic whites from the interior of North America for a long long time now.) I got to talk a bit with two of these passengers. Let me digress here for a moment though. In the old days I had more conversations with passengers than I do now. Back then cell phones were not for everyone as they are today and these days I ignore it when I hear a passenger speak because nine times out of ten they are calling ahead to their destinations or calling their spouses to explain their whereabouts, and so forth.

Anyhow one of these kids (I call them kids, they must be in their twenties or thirties) was a bit concerned that I would not know how to get to where he was going (real "Do The Right Thing" territory - Bed Stuy, do or die as they say) and I told this kid that the corner where he was going to is where my parents had a small apartment on the day they brought me from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital sixty years ago.) Anyhow these two kids are very aware that they are the forward wedge of white power in the ghetto, that their presence alone makes it more difficult for the people already there to stay there. Each said he was "guilty." In my mind these kids are good kids but they should not feel "guilty" that they also need a place to lay their heads at night and they cannot afford to live in Manhattan or in any white enclave anywhere near New York City. It's a gift to have a conscience. I told them what matters is what they do with their understanding of how things are in order to change the world and make it a place where everyone has a place to be in.

Since I am a Jew who lives in General Grant Houses I am also I guess part of this forward wedge. General Grant Houses is on the Western border of Harlem, rubbing right up against Columbia University's neighborhood which clearly begins one block south of my apartment. Columbia University has bought up the land right across Broadway and they plan to destroy the low density buildings over there, gasoline stations (there are very few remaining in Manhattan) warehouses and so forth. St. Mary's Church is one center of resistance to this spread.

I had reason yesterday to look over the legal definition of genocide and the historical 1951 petition to the United Nations that charged the United States with genocide against "The Negro People of the United States" which was at that time the accepted usage.Looking at it onc e could say that Administration for Children´s Services here in New York is a mechanism of genocide. Check it out:
ARTICLE II, CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
Adopted December 9, 1948" In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

ARTICLE III:
"The following acts shall be punishable:

A. Genocide;
B. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
D. Attempt to commit genocide;
E. Complicity in genocide."

-xii-
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712

Article II of the Genocide Convention
A- ACS knowingly has a policy now of overloading its caseworkers and making them take parents to court in cases that really don´t merit this level of intervention which wastes caseworkers´s valuable time and energy. They know well that this policy actually results in the neglect of cases, some of which actually are legitimate abuse situations that cry out for intervention. This is why the number of children who die while on ACS caselods increases during removal panics which are dictated by the media barons Sulzberger (New York Times), Zuckerman (New York Daily News), and Murdoch (New York Post) . Almost entirely these children are Black and Latino. ACS illegally turned over approximately 465 Black and Latino foster children for drug experimentation and it was reported that the experiments killed two of these children.

B and C- ACS harasses Black and Latino families needlessly. Black and Latino families are rousted in predawn raids and ACS awakens entire apartment buildings in which members of these two groups reside. ACS harasses and interferes with family functioning even when allegations against them are clearly known to be false. ACS frightens and traumatizes Black children and Latino children on a daily and nightly basis. Black and Latino children often witness their parents being placed in handcuffs and taken away at these hours, for so the called crimes of disciplining their children by customary and religiously sanctioned means. These tactics, often initiated by anonymous accusations, smack of what we once were taught took place in Hitler´s Germany and Stalin´s USSR.

Taxi Drivers Have Ears ( I )

2007-04-08T19:17:00.000-04:00

Monday, October 30, 2006

Taxi Drivers Have Ears
A few days ago I picked up a man and a woman on the Upper East Side. They were clearly Democratic Party operatives, speaking of Nancy Pelosi as though they knew her and mixing "the party" and "us" in their dialogue. They were arguing whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing for "us" to take back the House of Representatives. The young lady was all for it. The gentleman had deep reservations. He felt that Ms. Pelosi has an unpleasant personality and that this would harm "the Party" were she to become Speaker of the House. He was also very concerned with what Representative John Conyers might do to embarass "the Party." "Conyers having hearings could really hurt us."

The gentleman also thought that it would be preferable for the Democrats to be able to go to the public on 2008 saying that they had been powerless and not responsible for anything that had happened over Bush's (p)residency at the White House.

The young lady got out at Grand Central Station and the gentleman went on, to the meatpacking district if I remember correctly. He got onto his cell phone and scolded someone for indulging in cocaine at a party in the home of someone who could be hurt were it to become known.

He got out, paid me and tipped me and went on his way.

Homage To My Day Driver (Why I Hate Gay Bashers)

2007-04-08T19:10:00.000-04:00

Sunday, December 18, 2005

HOMAGE TO MY DAY DRIVER (WHY I HATE GAY BASHERS)

Ralph and I were taxi drivers. We worked out of that once famous taxi garage in the West Village, Dover. Dover by the way was used for the exterior shots for the TV show Taxi, and some of the drivers there had uncanny resemblances to the characters on the show. (But I digress.) Dover closed long ago, changed its name to Glenties and relocated to the South Bronx, and when they did that my day driver Ralph and I went with of them. (Many"Village type" drivers scrambled to stay based in Manhattan-that was the eighties-and there are no more "Village type" cabbies around).

The deal was this: Ralph took the car for the day shift and I took it for the night shift. I'd meet Ralph on the Northeast corner of 74th and Amsterdam at 4:00 AM and drive up to the garage and gas up. Ralph would pay his lease, get his trip card, I'd turn in my trip card and Ralph would drop me at my furnished room on East 7th Street and then go to work. I'd get the car around 4:00 PM, (I would pay my lease once a week, on Friday, thereby buying 6 consecutive days of "seniority",) take him to the area of 74th and Amsterdam and head out to work.

Now cabbies don't often trust each other. Yellow cab drivers live after all by cutting each other's throats. Ralph must have felt that if I had his phone number I'd abuse it by calling him to announce that I'm bringing the car to him late, as I would then (he probably figured) be out there hustling that (extra) last ten dollars (that would be his ten dollars). So when I got broadsided by a drunk from Massachusetts who didn't have a license one night I couldn't call Ralph to tell him I wasn't coming. The car was undrivable. (I was okay thank goodness.)
Ralph of course went to the assigned corner at the assigned time. As he waited for me he went into the Korean deli there on the corner, got a cup of coffee and stood there, waiting for me. A few doors up the block there is a famous gay bar. It lets out at 4:00 AM, New York's statutory "last call for alcohol." As Ralph was standing on the corner sipping his coffee the patrons of that establishment were streaming out, many headed south to the corner and to the deli.
As Ralph told the story a car pulled up and stopped at the corner. A big white guy who Ralph says he didn't know from Adam (and Ralph's white) got out, ran up to Ralph and punched him square in his left eye, ran back into the car and took off into the night. Now this creep was wearing either a bunch of big rings or brass knuckles. Ralph was a bloody mess. He took a taxi down to Saint Vincent Hospital (he didn't trust any other) and they stitched him up, but the vision in his left eye was mainly gone.

Now back then one re applied for his/her hack license every year. There is a question on the form that asks if the driver saw a doctor since the last reapplication. If you check off "no" they don't bother you. There were cabbies who according to this record had not seen a doctor in 25 years. Ralph, for reasons I couldn't understand, checked off "yes.". Now they wanted a letter from a doctor saying that he was fit to work. An old prescription that had never been filled was the key here. The Rx got whited out, the form was brought to a copy place and blown up to letter size and the "doctor" wrote his medical release.

Ralph could tell, though, that his driving days were truly over. Now why Ralph had this thing for Reno, I can't say. I never knew him to even buy a lotto ticket. He never talked about cards, or dice, or roulette, or professional sports. Ralph, who had years and years with no accidents and no tickets, was having both. Ralph told me that if he was going to be poor he would be poor where it was warm year round, and he took off for Reno, he said, to become a security guard or a non union construction laborer.

I got a letter from him a couple weeks later telling me how great everything was out there. He had this furnished apartment in this condo type place, he said, it was filled with model types who lounged at the pool all day and he was loving it. He urged me to quit my job, leave my furnished attic apartment on University Avenue (I had finally moved to the Bronx just before he headed out west) and come join him. He was living he said in the lap of luxury for $400 a month. He said that he had a job as a security guard and was working on his gun permit and then he'd be rolling in dough.

I wrote him back telling him that I'd take it all under advisement.

One day a few months later Ramon the dispatcher asked me to come into the office. The coroner from Reno was on the phone. He told me that Ralph was dead. He had been found hanging from a light fixture. He was broke. The room was littered with beer cans. They found my name, stuff with the garage phone number too, and they were trying to figure out his story. Some names have been changed to protect privacy but this is fundamentally a true story. The bar mentioned is Candle Bar which was seen in the movie Six Degrees of Separation.

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED TO DEMOCRATS IN AIRPLANES UNDER THE PSEUDONYM BERNARD MARX. IT IS THE WORK OF AND PROPERTY OF ME, EUGENE WEIXEL.

Poets Are Ridiculous

2007-04-08T19:05:00.000-04:00

Check out
www.acsmustbestopped.com

Through the rear view mirror I could see the two guys I had picked up at Savalas on Bedford Avenue. They were talking "film." I zoned out of their conversation until I heard one of them say rather loudly, "Metaphor!" That's poets and we all know poets are ridiculous."

Thank You For Picking Me Up

2007-04-08T19:03:00.000-04:00

Friday, June 30, 2006
In the 1960s, the black comedian Godfrey Cambridge used to tell his audience that there was only one way a Negro man (that was the correct wordage of the time) could get a taxi in New York.You take all your clothes off. You wrap yourself in a bedsheet. You go downtown and stand in front of the United Nations. And you go "Oooga booga booga." Back then we thought that was pretty funny.

It's been known that in New York City taxi drivers pass by black people and particularly black men who hail them. It happened to David Dinkins, our former mayor. It's happened to other celebrities, and incidents have gotten into the media from time to time. The Taxi and Limousine Commission and the NYPD run sting operations to catch taxi drivers who do this. The penalties are pretty severe, and they ought to be so, and yet it still happens.

Rumor has it, I read it ages ago but cannot find reference on the internet, and it might have been a malicious lie, that Godfrey Cambridge himself got a few tickets for doing just this, back when he was a struggling taxi driving comedian/ actor and a driver could get caught doing this a few times and keep his license (not true now) . Sometimes black taxi drivers, usually immigrants, do get caught doing this.

Now I never made it my practice to not pick someone up because of his race. I think lots of taxi drivers can honestly say that. I never made it my practice to refuse to pick someone up for the various real and honest reasons that are not legal excuses and that can sure look like racism - the passenger wanted to go to a dangerous area, and my car is bright yellow, an advertisement that I have money and no weapon; the passenger wanted to go to an area where people don't take yellow cabs and I'd be stuck for half an hour empty burning gas and paying rent on an empty moving taxi. Hasidic Jews are routinely passed up by cabbies who love to ferry other Jews between the Upper West Side and the theater district or Wall Street or Greenwich Village twelve hours a day. The Hasid has "Brooklyn" written all over him, and during busy heavy traffic times the above excuses or reasons apply to him. People trying to stop a yellow cab in Manhattan while in religious Muslim garb will have the same experiences as the Hasid and for the same reasons.

At any rate, because I am one of the many taxi drivers who do respect the law and decency I have black passengers in my cab every shift. So, a few times a week people thank me for stopping for them. I wish they wouldn't. I go where they want me to go. Usually, once I drop them off I seek the fastest route back to Manhattan if I find myself in one of the "outer boroughs", or back to downtown, where my customers are waiting, if I find myself in Harlem. Wouldn't you?

Also I try to know when hockey games, rap concerts and heavy metal concerts are letting out of Madison Square Garden. I don't want to be caught within a quarter mile of there when they do. This has nothing to do with anyone's race. it's based upon hard learned lessons, the kind of lessons one does not want to learn more than once.

I've been back driving taxi this week, for the first time in a decade and the business has changed. I do fewer rides in an hour and they tend to be for longer distances, so I remain busy (with a passenger) about the same proportion of my time. The fares are much higher. The fare structure seems to be designed in part now to do what taxi drivers risked tickets to do in the past, that is to keep inconvenient passengers on the sidewalk, heading for the subway station, or the bus stop.

I've learned a few things these few days I've been back driving. I should check "Gridlock Sam" on the internet before I go to the job and take a printout with me.

I've read that in Tokyo there are no street and building addresses as we know them here. New York is becoming a bit like Tokyo. Many of my passengers are generic whites who were born in the interior of the continent who perhaps went about their lives going from landmark to landmark instead of from address to address. This wasn't so often the case even ten years ago. All the hundreds of restaurants and nightclubs and even hotels have changed names probably twice since 1996. So even I get that "I can't find the place you want to go to" feeling. This too shall pass.

Venezuela Matters

2007-04-06T16:07:00.000-04:00

visit

www.acsmustbestopped.com

Buy Posters at AllPosters.com
I have friends and family in Venezuela - in the not too distant future I'd like to retire there with my wife. The Venezuelan people have a right to decide what sort of government they want. I ask of my country- leave Venezuela alone!

Venezuela matters.