Less than 30 minutes into his shift on a sunny Saturday morning, Miguel Diaz* is about to break the law.

The 43-year-old émigré from San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic has been driving his livery car in a loop for the past 15 minutes around the R.V. Ingersoll Houses project in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. Business is slow this morning. Diaz is looking to supplement the lack of calls from his dispatcher with street hails - pedestrians who flag down livery cars without pre-arranging a pickup.

Diaz drives a white 1995 Lincoln Towncar, but he keeps his attire casual. He wears an olive-colored ribbed T-shirt, jeans and white sneakers. A light breeze blows across the dashboard. Diaz, a thin man with a bit of a paunch, keeps his left elbow propped up on door's armrest and holds the steering wheel lightly with his fingertips. His two-way radio crackles softly below the dashboard.
Diaz's loop takes him to the corner of Carleton and DeKalb avenues. A man hails Diaz's Towncar. He pulls to the curb.

The two men make eye contact for an instant before the man climbs into the blue leather backseat. They both seem to know they shouldn't be doing this, but they do anyway. In New York City, it's illegal for any for-hire vehicle other than a yellow medallion taxicab to pick up street hails.
It's barely 7:30 in the morning, and before Diaz has his second cup of coffee, he's risked his livelihood and his life for a $10 fare.

If Diaz is caught by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the agency that licenses and regulates New York City for-hire livery vehicles such as the one Diaz drives for a living, the TLC can revoke his license and fine him up to $1,500. Worse still, Diaz could meet the same fate as Alpha Balde and Fausto Arias, two New York City livery drivers killed in January while on duty.
Street hails are a necessary, but dangerous, way for drivers to supplement their income when business is slow. "If a driver wants to pick someone off the street, I'm deaf," says one Brooklyn livery car dispatcher. "I don't hear."

The door to Diaz's car slams shut. Myrtle Car Service, Diaz's dispatch base, doesn't know he's taken a passenger. Diaz, married with three children, is on his own.

Despite the dangers that Diaz faces as New York City livery car driver, he believes he's still better off than he was in the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean country about twice the size of New Hampshire with 9 million inhabitants who share the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Diaz studied chemistry at the University of Santo Domingo and later taught at a secondary school for six years before leaving his homeland in 1993. Diaz's Dominican Republic of the 80's and early 90's was a country of limited natural resources and strict international trade restrictions that created a weak economy. Reforms came only after Diaz emigrated. The country in 1995 joined the World Trade Organization and has changed its legal system to promote international trade. President Hipolito Mejia's strategy since being elected in 2000 has been to promote free trade zones where companies can operate tax-free and import raw materials without paying import duties.

Diaz's options in his homeland were either to continue teaching or become a lab technician for local industry. Neither would provide Diaz with the economic independence he wanted for his family, so he moved them to 1,500 miles away to Brooklyn and began working at his brother's restaurant. A few years later, he bought himself a 1988 Ford Crown Victoria and began hiring his services out as a livery driver.

The livery car service industry emerged nearly 40 years ago, in part, as a reaction to crime in the city's outer boroughs. Yellow medallion taxicab drivers didn't want to pick up passengers in neighborhoods where they feared being robbed or assaulted. So residents in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island had to rely more on mass transit.

Enterprising immigrants identified a market for private transportation and began offering their services for a flat, albeit negotiable, fee. "They used to be called gypsy cabs because the drivers were here illegally," says Fernando Mateo, a 43-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "But they became so pervasive that the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission started to pay attention." Mateo is also president and founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, Inc., an organization that offers livery drivers legal representation and a venue for airing any grievances against the TLC.

Today, New York City is home to about 700 livery car services. There are about 50,000 livery cars and an estimated 100,000 livery car drivers working throughout the city's five boroughs, according to TLC registration records. The city created the TLC in 1971 to license and regulate its yellow medallion taxicabs, for-hire vehicles such as livery cars, commuter vans, paratransit ambulettes and luxury limousines. The TLC prohibits livery drivers from picking up street hails, arguing that these transactions take business away from yellow medallion taxicabs and put both drivers and passengers at risk.

Diaz drums his fingers on the blue leather-wrapped steering wheel as he waits at a traffic light in Bedford-Stuyvesant. DeKalb Avenue's French bistros have given way to Bedford-Stuyvesant's corner bodegas and soul food joints. The passenger Diaz picked up in Fort Greene is a wiry black man with a shaved head who's wearing a loose-fitting Mets jersey. He tells Diaz to head for the intersection of Empire Boulevard and New York Avenue. They're driving toward the southern end of Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, a couple of miles away.

If Diaz is worried about taking a street hail, he doesn't show it. The Towncar's digital speedometer flirts with 40 miles per hour, but never more. The passenger asks Diaz which route he's taking. Diaz looks at the man through his rearview mirror. "Nostrand," he says, without turning his head. He watches the passenger. The man responds from the back seat only by nodding.
Diaz doesn't say much to his passenger, except to ask him if he wants the air conditioning turned on. The morning air is still cool and the passenger says, "No." He asks Diaz to lower one of the rear windows a bit. The air rushing in the window provides the only noise outside of the sound of Diaz's sneakers on the car's pedals.

Diaz knows he has a dangerous job, but also one that calls for him to balance risk with the rewards of a steady clientele. He's been a livery car driver for the more than six years. Although he's driven for Myrtle Car Service for the past four years, he owns the Towncar. He's running his own little business. The money he makes goes toward the $7,500 fee to insure his car each year. He also has to stretch his income to cover the three car inspections required by the TLC annually, a $75 weekly charge from Myrtle Car Service to be on its dispatch roster, the maintenance on his aging car and any other costs of doing business, such as gas, car washes and tolls.

The risks of picking up street hails are well documented. A January 2002 study by Schaller Consulting and The Sam Schwartz Company reported that since 1990 more than 250 livery cab drivers have been killed while on duty. The study draws a correlation between picking up unscheduled fares and crimes committed against drivers. Similarly, statistics from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration indicate that livery and taxi car drivers are more likely to be murdered or become victims of violent assaults than any other type of U.S. worker, with the exception of police and security guards.

The fare in the back seat isn't the only risk Diaz takes this morning. The passenger side of Diaz's windshield is cracked. He says it started as a scratch from a stone kicked up from the road. Now it's getting bigger, and he could get a ticket for not having it fixed.
Under the thick leather armrest that separates driver and passenger in the front seat, Diaz keeps a black folder for The Executive Transportation Group. In addition to driving six days a week for Myrtle, Diaz has for the past two years been driving his Towncar four days a week for Executive Car Service, a subsidiary of Executive Transportation Group. He has three children to support and rent to pay for an apartment in Williamsburg, in addition to the cost of owning and maintaining his car. Every fare helps keep the bills paid. He admits that there was a time when he would take calls from both companies on the same shift, a practice discouraged by dispatchers, the TLC and Mateo's federation. He stopped when it became too difficult to juggle the two without being caught.

Diaz has no partition separating the driver from the backseat, nor does he have a camera mounted above his rearview mirror to photograph each passenger. The TLC requires livery car owners such as Diaz to have at least one of these measures in place to protect the driver or at least discourage criminals. He faces a $350 fine for his noncompliance as well as suspension until he installs one or the other.

But cameras are expensive, and some drivers resist spending between $700 and $800 to have one installed. Partitions are less expensive, but many car owners feel they're not appropriate for luxury cars. "It's not nice to drive a businessman home with a camera or a partition," Diaz says.
Diaz is unapologetic about breaking the law. He points to the costs of insurance, inspections and car maintenance. "Nobody takes care of you," he says. He gestures with a hand to the inspection sticker on his windshield. "If you don't pay, you park the car, and you don't work."
Diaz follows some basic rules of safety. If a potential passenger or a group of passengers looks dangerous, he doesn't pick them up. "It's dangerous, but I take a look at him," he says. "Even if the call comes from the base, you take a look. If you see three guys standing on the corner, you don't pick them up."

Another rule: don't fight with passengers, no matter how badly they behave. When Diaz listens to the two-way dispatch radio that sits in a metal bracket beneath his dashboard, he sometimes hears the arguments. Many of these arguments come from misunderstandings because the drivers don't understand or speak English very well. "Sometimes passengers get angry, but you have to manage this," he says. "You don't get into fights with passengers. They pay for all of this," he says, making a sweeping gesture with his arm over the dashboard.

While Diaz is far from a model citizen as far as compliance with TLC rules, other drivers can empathize with his need to fly under the commission's radar to make a living. On a Saturday afternoon during the summer, four drivers for Court Express Car & Limo Service in Brooklyn's Caroll Gardens neighborhood lounge in the dispatch office. Business is slow. Bugs Bunny cartoons play on the television mounted high on one of the wood-paneled walls.

"It's been a slow summer," says Nedal, who is reluctant to give much personal information. He says he's got all his licenses from the state and the TLC, but it's best that he be known by only his first name. Nedal has been driving livery cars for the past nine years, since moving to Brooklyn from his native Jordan, a small Arab kingdom of about 5.3 million people in the precarious position of supporting the U.S. while sharing common boarders with Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Although Jordan's King Abdallah has initiated economic reforms since taking over the throne in 1999 from his father, the late King Hussein, debt, poverty and unemployment are still fundamental problems in this country, which is roughly the size of Indiana.

Nedal came to the U.S. when he was 19 to study architectural engineering, but he dropped out of college so he could afford to make ends meet. More than a decade later, Nedal drives for Court Express so he can support his wife and children. He still thinks about returning to school and becoming an engineer, but he doesn't know when or if that will happen.

A livery-car driver typically works between 12 and 16 hours each day, six days a week. The wages for these long hours depend upon how many fares a driver gets. A rule of thumb is that a driver will make $100 per day, including the rare tip, after expenses.

Many immigrants use jobs driving livery cars to help pay their way in the U.S. Many drivers, including Nedal, continue to send money home to relatives even after they've lived in New York for years. "Everybody comes here to make a living," Nedal says.

Drivers at Court Express are predominantly Jordanians. Both Mateo and Diaz share a Dominican heritage. And drivers from Cadman Express River Car & Limo in Brooklyn Heights hail mostly from Russia and Turkey.

Alex Naggizade drives a black 1998 Lincoln Towncar on weekends for Cadman Express. The 13-hour shifts are hard on his back, but the 39-year-old immigrant from the former Azerbaijan uses the $100 per shift to help pay for his house on Staten Island. Azerbaijan is an oil-producing nation of Turkic Muslims with a population of about 7.8 million people who gained their independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. Azerbaijan is roughly the size of Maine, with the Caspian Sea as its eastern neighbor, Iran to the south and Armenia to the west.

Naggizade lives with his wife, three children and his wife's parents. During the week he commutes an hour each way between his home and his $13-an-hour job fixing electronic appliances in Freeport, Long Island. There he inspects damaged TVs and VCRs for insurance companies to see whether or not they're worth fixing. "It's easy money," he says.

Easier and more lucrative than the job used to have as an engineer for a Russian phone company in Azerbaijan. Naggizade studied at Polytechnic University in Azerbaijan's capital of Baku. Living there, he would earn the equivalent of $50 weekly for the same number of hours he now works. While his cost of living was much lower in Azerbaijan than it is in Brooklyn, the numbers didn't add up so Naggizade moved his family to the U.S.

Naggizade is easily mistaken for Arabic, although Azerbaijan is technically in Asia. He has full head of thick, dark hair, a deep olive complexion and speaks with an accent that's not easy to place. Like Nedal, Naggizade didn't speak English when he came to the U.S. and had to learn the language to broaden his economic opportunities. Naggizade says he hasn't been a target for anti-terrorist sentiments since Sept. 11, 2001, although he admits times have been tense. The best defense he and his co-workers have is to embrace their adopted homeland. Cadman Express's dispatcher hung a poster in the office that reads: "Bin Laden: Wanted Dead Or Alive." Naggizade says the Arabic drivers don't mind the sign. "Arabic or American, he's a terrorist."

Diaz and his illegal passenger wait at a red light at the intersection of Empire Blvd. and New York Avenue. It's a busy intersection, with several lanes of traffic in either direction.
"This is good," the passenger says. He asks Diaz the price. Diaz says nine dollars. The passenger gives Diaz a $10 bill but doesn't ask for change.

Diaz sits at the intersection and waits for the light to change. "He was probably a cop," he says as he watches the man in the Mets jersey jog diagonally across the intersection and over to the 71st Precinct.

The light turns green and Diaz shrugs, "That guy, if I don't take him to work, he don't get to work."

* The driver's name has been changed to protect his livelihood.