In the wee hours of Saturday, January 25, taxi driver Walid Ziada was cruising west on Belmont toward the six-way intersection with Ashland and Lincoln. The bars had just closed, and he expected to find plenty of fares.
So Ziada told him again, more forcefully. The man smirked, as Ziada tells it, and kept shooting, saying “It’s my fucking camera, I can do what I want.” He took photos of the cab’s license plate, and then, according to Ziada, circled around to the driver’s side and through the open window hit Ziada hard in the left eye with the camera.
Ziada made a U-turn on Belmont and followed them. At Barry Avenue, a block south, Ziada pulled in front of the Focus at a red light and stopped. The Focus bumped his cab, he would testify, then pulled around him and kept going. Ziada followed it another block to Nelson Street, and then into the parking lot of a shopping plaza with a Dunkin’ Donuts and a China Buffet.
About seven years ago he opened a hookah bar and cafe on the 5000 block of West Lawrence. A social, outgoing guy who likes cooking, he enjoyed running the place. But Chicago’s smoking ban threw a wrench into the works—it meant he couldn’t serve both hookahs and food. So about two years ago Ziada sold the business and started driving a cab. He figured it would be a good way to be his own boss and save up money for another project—possibly a 24-hour Greek restaurant.
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“I’ve had them run off without paying, smoking crack cocaine in the backseat,” he says. A few months ago a passenger racked up a $24 fare and then said he had no money to pay. Ziada took him to the police station, where, he says, officers found $7 in the man’s pocket and gave it to Ziada, telling him he shouldn’t bother pressing charges. The passenger called him a loser, and as Ziada drove by the man he threw the money back at him.
“People think the dangerous areas are where the black, Puerto Rican, Mexican people live,” says Enger. “But we suffer the most violence in the most highly trafficked areas. It’s the drunks and rowdies who perpetrate violence on the cabdrivers. Is it because [drivers] are immigrants, because of prejudice? We don’t know. But what we do know is they do it because they can.”
