The Fuzz

To the best of my knowledge we've had a couple of drivers become cops, and we had one who claimed he was a former cop. The guy who claimed to be a former cop, I'll call him WF, he never had anything like a nickname and without his written permission I wouldn't use his name here.

It's my understanding that Mario is a cop up north somewhere. Sheriff's deputy or something like that. Mario was one of my night drivers when I first started driving. Like all the night drivers back then he figured he owned the car until he was tired of driving. If it stayed busy late, he just wouldn't bring the cab in, and the five bucks for every fifteen minutes late, you are kidding right? Mario pay me for being late? Roy Boy would tell me it was the dispatchers job to kick Mario off the road, the dispatcher was usually Louie, and he would NOT kick Mario off the road. Dave, where ever you are, DO NOT come back. Mario did other cute stuff, now that I think of it, he was fond of doing doughnuts on fresh snow, for ten dollar bills, and he bragged about it. Doughnuts? Spinning the cab 360 degrees in the middle of the street.

Gwench is a sheriffs deputy locally. She was a good dispatcher, there was a piercing quality to her voice, and you could hear her perfectly at 60 mph with all the windows down. She once told me she either wanted to be a cop or a lawyer, or was it cop or a judge, now that I think of it I don't recall, but judges are lawyers. Her long time boyfriend, Jumbo, is a lawyer I'm told. We all liked her, she was good people, and to her credit she never came back and applied being a cop to anybody in the cab business. As Sandy Van Sycle once wryly said, "Everybody's doing something, all the time." And of course, legally, some of it is kind of sketchy.

Back to WF............. I'm not sure when he left, I only know he's not around now. This leads me to believe more confidently that he was never a former cop at all, he was current, and what ever he was supposed to be researching was found to be insufficient to justify him being here. He always had one of those blue tooth ear pieces going and he made a lot of phone calls while he was driving. When I found out he was a cop, I asked him why somebody with a generous pension would go out and try to get himself killed 4 or 5 nights a week. His reply lead me to believe he carried a gun. He said something about it being very unlikely someone would survive trying to rob him. How does that work? He went on to explain he was entitled to defend himself. Yeah right. If I punched the ticket of some poor under priviledged minority youth who was trying to rob me, I KNOW I'd be given the burden of proving he was trying to rob me. I'd need a bullet hole or a serious knife wound in me to keep from going to jail. Ah, he said, it was a question of credibility. Yeah, he'd pull out a badge, show it to the cops that came to the scene, end of story.