As the rusty, mud-colored Toyota Camry puttered into the driveway of the South Los Angeles motel, an acrid gasoline odor wafted through the air.
Scanning the parking lot, the driver stopped for the woman he thought had called for a taxi and beckoned her inside.
Within moments, police motorcycles ablaze with flashing lights zoomed up. Sheriff's deputies and the woman -- an undercover city investigator -- arrested the driver and dispatched a tow truck to impound the sedan, a suspected illegal taxi.
The Camry was among at least 1,500 illegal taxicabs roaming the streets of Los Angeles every day, from the northeast San Fernando Valley to San Pedro, according to city estimates. Also known as bandit taxis, gypsy cabs or piratas -- Spanish for "pirates" -- they take business away from licensed cabbies, depress bus ridership and pose safety risks for passengers, officials say.
"It's got a huge gas leak; whee-ew!" Deputy Bill Cody said as he stepped away from the Camry, which had carpeting damp with fuel and a center console flowering with loose electrical cords connected to a hot-wired CB radio. "All this ... can cause a spark. It's a death trap."
Last year, authorities arrested or issued citations to more than 1,400 suspected illegal cabbies and impounded more than 800 bandit vehicles. The number was more than twice that of the year before, in part because of their proliferation during the transit strike and partly because the city's Department of Transportation and Police Department received enforcement help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which patrols the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's bus and train lines.
Yet despite such repeated crackdowns, the illicit business continues to thrive.
At bus stops, street corners and taxi loading zones and outside bars, hotels and nightclubs, bandit cabbies are scooping up passengers -- sometimes a dozen or more at a time. In some Yellow Pages, the listings for suspected bandits outnumber city-approved companies by more than 10 to 1.
"It's an easy crime to get away with. All you need is a vehicle, and you're in business," said Tom Drischler, the city's taxicab administrator. "We've just not had the resources available to clamp down on them effectively."
But bandit cabbies say they are popular because their transportation service is valuable to their customers, many of whom are poor.
