You know, I’m totally okay with that.
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I’m sure this is going to be quite the subject to discuss during that GOP meeting, on Thursday.
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I still don’t know what the word “medallion” means in the taxi business?
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Wait…time out…Mueller said 1.5-2.0 TERAbytes of discovery in that Russian corporation case? Does anyone here have any fucking idea the sheer volume of MSWord, PDF and other documents that represents? Holy fuck is Trump screwed.
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Wonder if this is the guy who threatened Stormy Daniels with bodily harm.
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You know, I’m totally fine with that, too.
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A medallion is the right to operate a taxi cab under NYC statutes/regulations. A gypsy cab does not have one, and therefore operates illegally. They are hard to get (I think the numbers are limited), so are worth a lot of money when they come up for sale. Hence the trade in them, with the concomitant opportunities for graft and corruption.
ETA: That is my layman’s understanding of this; others probably know more.
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He’s been in this stance for some time now. The heat is only getting hotter. Thus, just a matter of time before the inflames begins.
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“Gene Freidman, the Russian-born ‘Taxi King’ of New York…”
“…and business partner of Michael Cohen, the American-born ‘Shat Pants King’ of Underbusberg…”
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In New York and some other cities, you can’t operate a cab without a medallion. Numbers of medallions are fixed, so existing cab owners are essentially a monopoly. In places where they’re scarce, medallions can be worth a pile of money, and you can rent them out to people who actually drive the cabs.
(The original idea may well have been not-corrupt, since the idea was to make sure that cabs and drivers met some minimum regulatory standards, and that zillions of people pretending to be cab drivers didn’t flood the streets to fleece tourists. But capture soon followed.)
Meanwhile, I also think that they may be playing a bait-and-switch on Friedman. He’s going to have to do a lot of testifying to come up to the standards for the deal.
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There’s a great scene in The Wire where the high-level drug dealer Stringer Bell and the detective Jimmy McNulty are having a whispered conversation in a courtroom about the veracity of the witness on the stand who’s giving devastating testimony on one of Bell’s muscle guys. Bell says the word on the street is the witness was nowhere near the alleged murder at the time. And the detective says, “That’s the word on the street, huh? Well, trouble is, String, we ain’t on the street. We’re in a court of law.” And then he sits back, smirking.
That’s the thing with all this b.s. Trump and his people are pulling. They may have some traction on the street. But in courts of law, they’re getting their asses kicked. And it’s the court that sends you to jail. The street doesn’t have much say.
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A “medallion” is a badge thing that you hang in your cab that means you are duly registered with the city as a legally permitted taxi. The competition for buying one used to be so fierce that they’d go for millions if dollars, and there was probably a lot of mobbish skullduggery involved with who got them.
Since the advent of Uber and Lyft, which are essentially unlicensed “gypsy” cabs in competition with the legal ones, the value of a medallion has declined precipitously. They’re still in the hundreds of thousands though, IIRC.
ETA: wow, I was too slow on the uptake I guess!
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Order your Mueller Egg Cracker now!
Yours for only $19.95 and don’t forget the tax!
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Added to @drtv s explanation. They used to be about $1 million, but with the rise of Uber and Lyft and the rest, one can be bought for around $275,00. Think of a medallion like a license to operate a business. Movie from 1956 called The Catered Affair, Bette Davis, E. Borgnine was about his struggle to raise money to buy one and set himself up an independent driver while she wanted to use the money to pay for a daughter’s elaborate wedding. They were invaluable.
@juliagrey As someone raised in NYC I got to hear and read about medallions regularly.
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BTW. he turned at the state level. Looks like Mueller setup the screws for Cohen at the State level so that he would be beyond the reach of a pardon…
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may generate a question but it doesn’t beg one. You’re welcome.
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So each cab in NYC had one medallion at a million each! There must be thousands of cabs in NYC (before Uber and Lyft).
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He totally doesn’t look like a Russian mobster.
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Neither does Trump.
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That cooperation deal must include Trump crimes -big ones.
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