NYCYellowCabTaxi.com

Morning rush hour was in full swing, yet the deafening bang that came from Douglas Schifter’s vehicle cut through the noisy clamor of New Yorkers hustling to make it to work on time. Inside a rented Nissan sedan, the 61-year-old professional driver put the barrel end of a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger at the eastern gate of City Hall.

It was a shot heard round the city, where drivers are increasingly feeling the pinch brought on by an influx of new ride-for-hire vehicles. With the taxi industry in the midst of transforming into an app-driven business, Schifter’s suicide was a call to respect the human behind the wheel.

“I cannot survive any longer with working 120 hours [a week]!,” Schifter, who had over 40 years of driving experience, wrote in a Feb. 5 Facebook post shortly before leaving this world. “I am not a Slave and I refuse to be one.”

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A 61-year-old livery driver posted on Facebook early Monday that city and state politicians were to blame for his financial ruin — then pulled up to the gates of City Hall and shot himself dead with a shotgun, authorities said.

The driver, identified by sources as Douglas Schifter, blamed Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo as well as former Mayor Bloomberg for making it impossible for him to earn a living behind the wheel because of an increasing number of taxis and black cars in the city, and because of over-regulation of his industry.

“Now the politicians have flooded the streets with unlimited cars and some 3,000 new ones every month still coming. There is not enough work for everybody that pays a living,” Schifter posted around 4:30 a.m.

“This is SLAVERY NOW. … I don’t know how else to try to make a difference other than a public display of a most private affair.”

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A cab driver from New York City was busted with $800,000 worth of methamphetamine in his vehicle after he was stopped in New Jersey, prosecutors alleged Monday.

Gerardo Camilo-Nolasco, a 42-year-old cabbie from the Bronx, was pulled over in Fort Lee — a stop stemming from a narcotics probe run out of Bergen County — and cops found 10 pounds of meth and 4 grams of cocaine in the vehicle, prosecutors alleged.  

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A fleet of Evgeny “Gene” Freidman’s foreclosed taxi medallions sold on Monday in a closed-door auction taking place in a Queens, New York hotel.

All 46 medallions — the metal plates on yellow cab hoods allowing them to legally pick up street-hails — were won by a group identified in bankruptcy court documents as MGPE Inc. for a total of $8.56 million, or $186,000 per medallion, according to Crain’s New York. Business Insider was able to verify those numbers with an industry source as well.

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Notorious “Taxi King” Gene Freidman was arrested at his Manhattan home on charges he ripped off the state for millions of dollars in taxi surcharges, authorities said Wednesday.

Freidman, who has been subject to a slew of criminal charges, civil suits, and professional penalties over the past two years, has been indicted and will be presented this afternoon in Albany to face four counts of criminal tax fraud in the first degree and one count of first-degree grand larceny, said a spokesman for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison.

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