The taxi kingpin who poured tens of thousands of dollars into Mayor de Blasio's campaign is being sued by the state for allegedly paying drivers as much as a month late, failing to repay false wage deductions, and falsifying documents to throw law enforcement off the scent, the Attorney General's Office announced today.
Evgeny Freidman raised nearly $50,000 for the mayor's election from 11 donors, including his wife, and personally gave the maximum allowed to the campaign, the Daily News reports. Freidman controls 860 of the city's 13,231 taxi medallions, according to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and he has already run afoul of the state's top lawman.
In December, 2013 Freidman agreed to pay $746,000 in fines and restitution to drivers who the state said he charged inflated rates to lease cabs, including fraudulent healthcare deductions. Now Schneiderman's labor team says Freidman has failed to pay back all of the healthcare money, that he is late to pay drivers what they're owed from credit card payments, and that he gave drivers receipts for the credit-card money with bogus dates on them, to make the payments look aboveboard.
Evgeny Freidman, second from right, with former mayor Michael Bloomberg and other notables at the 2009 Russian Heritage Festival (Getty).
Freidman has been frantic to secure the value of his medallions, once worth more than $1 million each, as loosely regulated ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft make inroads in New York. In a recent interview with Capital New York, Freidman recalled a speech he gave at a conference to a bunch of taxi regulators gathered on a steamboat in New Orleans:
“I said, ‘Who’s going to destroy Gene Freidman?’” he recounted three months later, over a breakfast of eggs, kale and stewed tomatoes at fashionable restaurant in Williamsburg. “You’re coming at me, you’re gonna come, I’m gonna come harder, you gotta kill me to destroy me, and I’m ready for you. I’m here. I’m coming. And I was and I am. And I’m coming from all sides. We’re waiting for swords and bullets and machine guns and tanks and ISIS to attack,” he said, adding, “How can we just sit by and let the world dictate what we’re going to do as far as taxis?”
In February, when he gave the doomsday prediction, he said he wasn't sure what his plan of attack would be. Now, it appears he has figured it out. The Observer reports that Freidman arranged a meeting in Midtown this morning for taxi-medallion bigwigs to ask the city to give Big Taxi a bailout. Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez is scheduled to attend.
Given the bailout summit, the timing of the lawsuit announcement (one hour before the gathering was supposed to start) is striking. But Freidman is ready for ISIS, and owns about $688 million worth of medallions, so what's a lawsuit from the State Attorney General?
A woman who answered the phone at Freidman's Taxi Club Management said he was out for the day and directed a call to a voicemail with no name attached to it. The call was not returned. The Mayor's Office did not respond to a request for comment about Freidman's latest bout of legal trouble, nor did Rodriguez's office respond to our comment requests.
