Hero Cabbie Testifies, but TLC Judge Is Unconvinced

By DAN ACKMAN

There is a scene in "The Verdict" where Paul Newman, playing attorney Frank Galvin, tells his lady friend that the idea of a court is not to dispense justice.  The court, Newman says, exists to give people a "chance at justice."  In this the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has a problem, because, right or wrong, taxi drivers believe that in the TLC courts, they have no chance.

During the administration of Commissioner Diane McGrath-McKechnie, the TLC's administrative tribunals have been closed to the public.  As a result, no one was able to evaluate the drivers' view, near universal, that they are presumed guilty and that their testimony is routinely ignored. Soon after State Supreme Court Justice Stanley Parness ordered that the TLC courts be open, I visited the court and happened on a case involving prominent fashion designer Jeffrey Banks and veteran cabbie Mamoun Hammouri.

The May 9 hearing was the third in the case.  The first hearing was canceled because Mr. Banks had a scheduling conflict.  Administrative Law Judge Anna Lewis presided over the second, but ordered it adjourned when a key piece of evidence was not in court.   The issue was whether the cabbie had refused to serve Mr. Banks, who is black, "without reasonable grounds."

Last November, in response to a complaint by movie star Danny Glover, the TLC announced a crackdown on taxi drivers who refuse to stop for black or Hispanic passengers.  While the vast majority of TLC cases are initiated by the NYPD taxi squad or the TLC itself, this complaint was brought by Jeffrey Banks.  At the hearing, Mr. Banks said that he, like many black men, has been passed over by cabbies "more times than you'd ever want to know" and he wanted something done about it.

At the third hearing, Ms. Lewis was gone and replaced by Mr. John Dandola.  After he swore in the witnesses, it was left to Mr. Banks to tell the judge that they he and Mr. Hammouri had testified once before in front of a different ALJ a month earlier.  Mr. Dandola was ignorant of the prior proceeding. "As far as I'm concerned it's a brand new hearing," he said. (Mr. Dandola is a lawyer in private practice, whose office is in Flushing.  The TLC hires him, as it does its other administrative law judges, to hear cases against cabbies on a per diem basis.)

Mr. Banks testified that on January 11 at around 7:25 p.m., he was standing on the corner of 18th Street and 5th Avenue with two white friends.  They had tickets to the New York City Ballet and were trying to hail a cab to Lincoln Center. Peter Stamberg, one of Banks' friends, hailed a cab heading downtown.  The cab slowed, but when Mr. Banks and a third man, Paul Aferiot, stepped forward to get in, it sped off.

Mr. Banks, Mr. Stamberg, and Mr. Aferiot each admitted that they could not see the driver and made no eye contact, but that they were sure the cabbie saw them because of the way he came toward them and pulled up.  They did write down the license number, and Mr. Hammouri did not dispute he was driving that cab that night.  He did say that he had a passenger in the back seat already.

In his defense, Mr. Hammouri, a native of Jordan who is now a U.S. citizen, testified that during the pre-theater hour 5th Avenue is jammed with pedestrians, many of them hailing cabs.  He said he did not see Mr. Banks or his friends.  If he failed to respond to Mr. Stamberg's hail, Mr. Hammouri said, it was because he did not see them and not owing to animus, racial or otherwise.

Mr. Hammouri offered his trip sheet into evidence.  A record of trips and fares that cabbies are required  to compile as they go about their work, the TLC collects the trip sheet from the driver's garage as part of what it calls its "pre-hearing investigation."

At the earlier hearing, Ms. Lewis noted that the trip sheet in the court file was for January 11, 1999, not January 11, 2000.   Right date, wrong year.  She adjourned the hearing so the agency could secure the right document.

The agency never did so, but Mr. Hammouri presented to the court his own copy, having obtained it from his garage himself. 

The record indicated that at 7:22 p.m. Mr. Hammouri dropped off a fare at 19th Street and 5th Avenue, a block north of where Mr. Banks was standing, and picked up another one going to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.  Mr. Hammouri testified that the correct trip sheet refreshed his recollection that the Brooklyn fare was a black woman who asked him to go by a very specific route.  While listening to her, he must have forgotten to turn on his meter.

Since he had no way of contacting the woman he drove to Fort Greene, Mr. Hammouri had no witnesses that he had a fare already when he passed Mr. Banks.  But he did present one witness, a character witness named Sister Janet McCann. 

Last March, Sister McCann hailed Mr. Hammouri on 90th Street and Central Park West and asked for a ride to 31st Street. After a few blocks, she changed her mind and asked to be taken to St. Luke’s Hospital on 59th Street and Eighth Avenue.  She was having trouble breathing and urged the driver, “I really have to get to the hospital quickly. If you’re at a light and no one’s there, just go. If you get a ticket, I’ll pay for it.”

Mr. Hammouri did more than that.  He also saved the woman's life.

After a few blocks, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the woman had fallen backward and appeared unconscious.  “I could see something was really wrong,” he recalled later.  “Her face was blue. I thought she was dead.  I said ‘lady, lady,’ and tried to wake her.  She said something, but not very coherent.”

Mr. Hammouri, pulled over, got into the back seat, and gave the woman mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  Once she started breathing. Mr. Hammouri started again for the hospital.  Before he got there, he administered CPR a second time.

At St. Luke’s, Mr. Hammouri called over a security guard and told him to get a doctor.  He stayed with the woman and continued mouth-to-mouth until the emergency room medics took over.  He stood there with tears in his eyes. “I thought she was finished,” he said.

Sister McCann had suffered a ventricular cardiac arrest.  When she woke up in the hospital two days later, she testified, the doctors told her "that cabbie saved your life."

With documentary proof that he already had a fare and character testimony by a nun whose life he had saved, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Mr. Hammouri was judged guilty nonetheless.

In his handwritten decision, ALJ Dandola wrote that Mr. Banks and his friends had testified credibly that no one was in the cab when it passed them.  Mr. Hammouri's testimony to the contrary  was "not credible or convincing," the judge wrote.  As for the trip sheet indicating a pickup at 7:22 p.m., the judge questioned its authenticity on the ground that the handwriting was "somewhat neater than the older one [1999 trip sheet]." 

The judge concluded, "It is clear that the driver initially was going to stop for a single male passenger but refused to accept this fare when it became apparent to him that there were in fact three males about to enter his cab."

He acknowledged as "credible" Sister McCann's testimony as to "the driver's exemplary conduct in saving her life." But, the judge said, "the driver's good deeds on previous trips are not a defense," and he fined Mr. Hammouri $200.