Gene Freidman

Gene Freidman, a cabdriver’s son who schemed his way to become the nation’s biggest taxi mogul and came to personify both the inflated ascent of the industry in New York City and its crushing financial collapse, died on Sunday October 24 2021 in Manhattan. He was 50. Mr. Freidman, who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his parents in 1976, was widely known as the swashbuckling “Taxi King” and just as widely regarded as a piratical entrepreneur who did for the cab industry early in the 21st century what greedy lenders did for the nation’s savings and loan associations at the end of the 20th. Mr. Freidman, a lawyer by training, was once flush with $525 million in assets, personally owning 250 taxi medallions worth $1.3 million each, a 4,000-square-foot townhouse off Park Avenue in Manhattan, an estate in Bridgehampton, N.Y., two villas on the French Riviera and a $400,000 Ferrari. Most of the 900 medallions he managed were owned by others, to whom he paid a fee for the right to operate their cabs and keep the profits. He wound up being disbarred in New York, evicted from the headquarters of his cab empire for owing $170,000 in back rent in 2017 — the same year that the city’s taxi commission refused to renew hundreds of his licenses — and legally bankrupt. In 2017, Mr. Freidman and Andreea Dumitru, the chief financial officer of his company, Taxi Club Management, were charged with first-degree tax fraud. They were accused of bilking the transit agency of $5 million. In 2018, Mr. Freidman pleaded guilty to one count of criminal tax fraud and agreed to pay the state $1 million. Mr. Freidman avoided prison by cooperating with a federal investigation into one of his partners, Michael Cohen, who gained notoriety as former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer. Mr. Freidman had managed Mr. Cohen’s medallions. When Mr. Freidman was divorcing his wife, Sandra, Mr. Cohen found him an apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Freidman had been able to use the inflated value of taxi medallions as collateral to borrow against and invest in taxi companies in Chicago and Philadelphia, in commercial properties elsewhere and in a chain of whimsical stores selling pajamas and beach wear. Evgeny Alender Freidman, known as Gene, was born on Nov. 29, 1970, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), in the Soviet Union. Emigrating in 1976, the family settled in the Jackson Heights area of Queens. He said that his father, Naum, had been a thermonuclear engineer back home but that in New York he became a cabdriver and eventually ran a garage with a fleet of taxis. Gene graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, then earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (after being suspended for one semester for overdue parking tickets). He received a law degree from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. He returned to the Soviet Union to represent a private investor. But in 1996 he doubled back to New York after his father had a heart attack.