Baby you can drive my TAXI

Chiu, though, is truly a cabbie. Several hacks we interviewed say he's a veteran driver, and according to DeSoto General Manager Cindy Ward, Chiu has been on the driving roster there for eons — "I know he's been driving for more than 25 years," she tells us.

Then there's Eugene Shu, an engineer with the city Water Department, who earns a $71,000 yearly salary and owns an $850,000 home and roughly $30,000 in securities, according to public records. Shu also claims to be a full-time cabbie.

Last fall when his name came to the top of the medallion waiting list, he handed over a pile of waybills to the Taxi Commission, a paper trail supposedly documenting his career as a cabbie. Like the others, Shu's waybills don't square up with airport records. "I did drive," he maintains. "I'm a long-term driver."

Shu admits his waybills are screwed up, but says that's because he filled them out at the end of his shifts and didn't always remember precisely where he'd gone that night. The Taxi Commission didn't buy that — in a public meeting two Commission members said they thought he'd falsified his records — and the body voted to reject his application in October because of the waybill discrepancies.

One well-placed industry source, who asked not to be identified, says certain cab companies routinely help out medallion holders by forging their waybills, to make it appear they put in drive time.

Sure, this might all seem a tad esoteric. Why should anyone care if people are trying to make money by allegedly circumventing some arcane bureaucratic rules erected three decades ago?

In Machen's opinion, the scamming "is unfair to the medallion holders who are really driving. It's unfair to the drivers who are on the waiting list for a medallion and would like to get one." The fraud, she adds, tears at the fabric of civic life, thwarting the will of the voters who passed Proposition K and have refused to tinker with it since (modifications to the law have been voted down at least a half-dozen times since 1978, most recently in 2003.)

Other industry figures are skeptical, questioning whether medallion fraud is as widespread as Machen believes. Mary McGuire, a longtime cabbie and former taxi commissioner, says all this talk of fraud is overblown."Fraud isn't rampant," says McGuire. "Most medallion holders drive their cabs because we have to" — the money made from renting a medallion doesn't go that far in the Bay Area.

McGuire, an outspoken critic of Machen, figures the most important aspect of the taxi business is providing the populace with safe, pleasant, reliable transportation — about 50 percent of the time cabs don't bother to pick up the customers who call for them, according to a recent survey. "Isn't public service the No. 1 issue?" she asks. "I mean, come on."

Sitting in a cluttered suite in the Redstone Building, an aging office complex on 16th Street in the Mission District, Ruach Graffis takes the medallion fraud issue more seriously. Graffis views the taxi trade through the lens of class conflict — a three-way grudge match between company owners and higher-ups, medallion holders, and, at the bottom, drivers like herself who don't have medallions.

To Graffis, former chair of the United Taxicab Workers, an activist association affiliated with the AFL-CIO, medallion scammers are exploiting the people on the rung below them. Graffis claims they're unjustly enriching themselves on the labor of underpaid and underappreciated hacks.

For drivers without medallions, working conditions are hazardous, the pay is paltry, and "there are no sick days, and there are no vacation days," she says.

When it comes to medallion fraud, Graffis says, "the companies know these people aren't driving," and estimates that "certainly a third" of all medallion holders aren't complying with Proposition K. Stories of medallion holders living overseas in exotic locales and collecting monthly rental checks abound, she says.

According to a May 2006 study by UC Berkeley graduate students at the Goldman School of Public Policy, while the typical cabbie without a medallion earns $24,000 per year, the average medallion holder makes about twice that much. Figures for company bosses are harder to come by, but the San Francisco Controller's Office does collect some taxi business data, and those figures, for 2005, show the bigger firms are posting profits on average of 20 percent per year.

An old court case gives a snapshot of the volume of cash banked by some company bosses. In the mid-1990s Emory W. Speck, then-head of Arrow Cab and Veterans Cab, pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in Marin County court and entered a diversion program. Court documents related to the bust indicated he was pulling down "$20,000-plus" per month from the company at the time.