A cursing cabby flung open the back door of his cab in Midtown and lunged at two young female passengers in a desperate bid to avoid taking them to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a disturbing video shows.
“Oh, my God!” one of the women screams. “Do not touch us! Do not f – – king touch us!”
“You, you have to take us to Brooklyn!”
The irate driver then scampered out the back seat, wildly flailed his arms, and desperately begged other cabs to take his fares off his hands.
“He just went crazy. It was really pretty scary,” said a passenger named Michelle, 31, who hailed the taxi with her pal, Amy, also 31, on Sixth Avenue and 44th Street around 2 p.m. Sunday.
TLC records show that Paul Efobi was the driver of record at the time of the incident. Efobi and another man named Mamadou Sene are both listed in TLC documents as drivers who regularly lease the cab involved in the incident.
“We have the 311 complaint for this unfortunate incident and will investigate it thoroughly and take the appropriate actions,” TLC chief David Yassky told The Post.
City officials recently said they want to increase the fines for drivers who refuse to take people to the outer boroughs.
The passengers — who asked that their last names not be used because they fear the driver — said the hack began yelling, “No. No. No!” the minute they asked to be taken across the East River after they hailed the cab near the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street.
“I kept saying, ‘You have to. It’s the law,’ ” recounted Michelle, who works for an Internet company. “He kept screaming at us to ‘get out, get out,’ but we wouldn’t.”
“Then he said, ‘You’re gonna be sorry!’ and took off up Sixth Avenue,” she added.
“He was driving erratically, doing the ‘gas-and-brake’ thing, going in and out of lanes,” said Amy, an editor. “He was swearing, calling us ‘bitches.’ He was very angry.”
The driver then turned onto 48th Street, the women said, and pulled over. He got out, popped his hood and tried to lure them out of the cab, telling them the cab was “broken,” they said.
When his passengers didn’t fall for it, he got back behind the wheel, drove another few feet and stopped again.
He flung open the back door and then lunged when he saw he was being videotaped on a cellphone.
After the hack backed off, he approached “four or five” other cabs to take the women to Bed-Stuy, and finally found one. They gave that driver $35 for a $25 fare.
The Queens company Efobi drives for said it wasn’t aware of the incident.
Additional reporting by Hannah Rappeleye and Ikimulisa Livingston
You may also like
You’re less likely to get in an accident in a taxi if it’s yellow
‘Cash Cab’ is filming in NYC again this summer, with a pop culture twist
Port Authority proposes $4 ‘access fee’ for taxi trips to city airports
Man’s ashes left in taxi for 2 days; family grateful for return
Taxi king Evgeny Freidman was evicted from his space for not paying rent
