Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out what happened to one of the oldest taxis on the streets after it stopped carrying passengers in New York City.
It logged more than 550,000 miles as a taxi in New York City before going into forced retirement in April.
Since then the vehicle has traveled another 4,000 miles but not with its king-size V-8 engine revving under the hood. The taxi went to Italy in a container ship, having been sold to a tech industry project manager in Milan for $7,000.
“Everybody thinks it’s crazy,” said the car’s new owner, Mauro Marroncelli. “I actually agree with them, in a way.” He is 38, which he described as “turning almost 40” before saying: “Maybe when you approach that age, you start doing this.”
He said the decommissioned taxi, a 2011 Ford Crown Victoria, would be a “weekend car” that would look as it did in New York. He is keeping the bright yellow paint job and the black taxi symbol on the driver’s side door. He plans to put the old medallion number, 6D76, back on the light atop the roof. The major difference between the taxi’s old and new lives: There’s no meter inside.
Marroncelli had his eye on the car for years. He used to live in Lower Manhattan and took down the vehicle’s number after he decided he wanted a Crown Victoria, a model that Ford discontinued in 2011. From medallion records on the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s website, he figured out that the taxi belonged to a driver named Ravinder Sharma.
“I went to his house,” Marroncelli said. “I knocked on the door.”
Sharma wasn’t there, so he went back another time. “I said, ‘If you want to retire your car, let me know.’ ”
By the time Sharma took the car’s last fare to Kennedy International Airport in April, Marroncelli had moved to Milan. But he kept in touch and still hankered for the car.
“I wanted to have a piece of New York,” he said. “I’m not a collector, but to me it was a way to get something iconic.” He said he did not know, when he started “following the car,” that it would be one of the last two Crown Victorias on the streets in New York.
The taxi was well past retirement age when Sharma stopped driving it. The city agency that regulates taxis has set a seven-year age limit. The vehicle was twice that age when, Sharma said, the Taxi and Limousine Commission deactivated his medallion, making the car undrivable as a taxi. (The other Crown Victoria that was still on the streets at the beginning of the year has been garaged, and the driver, Haroon Abdullah, has given up a newer Toyota that he was leasing. “I’m not driving at the moment,” he said.)
Crown Victorias were old-school sedans, and they were thirsty, averaging 16 miles per gallon in city driving, according to federal fuel economy rankings. Sharma, who replaced the Crown Victoria with a Toyota RAV4 in May, said last summer that he was spending a third of what he used to pay for a fill-up.
Marroncelli liked the Crown Victoria’s relative simplicity. “It’s an analog car,” he said. “It doesn’t have that much tech” — no touch-screens — “and I like that iconic shape.”
The Crown Victoria is larger than most cars on the road in Europe, including the one he already owns, a Volkswagen T-Cross, a subcompact crossover sport utility vehicle not sold in the United States.
“It’s very big,” he said of his taxi. “Actually, that was a problem when it arrived.” The vehicle was longer than the flatbed truck he called in for unloading from the ship container. “They told me, ‘Look, this is the size of a van by European standards, so you should get a flatbed for a van.’ But we were able to manage.”
He managed in a way that he said was not legal: He got behind the wheel, even though the car had not been registered in Italy. “I drove it to the shop, which was just on the other side of the road, a one-minute drive.” A few relatively minor modifications will be necessary to make it street legal, he said.
As for the price, he said he might have overpaid. At first, he said, he offered $3,000. Sharma told him that was too low.
“Then I offered him $6,000,” Marroncelli said. “He didn’t answer to the $6,000, so I offered $7,000” — slightly more than the top end of the Kelley Blue Book’s range for a Crown Victoria in excellent condition. “So I think I outbid myself for the $7,000. But when you get close to 40, you do silly stuff.”
Hunting for a gunman after a C.E.O. is shot to death in Midtown
It was, the police commissioner said, “a brazen, targeted attack” that was “premeditated” and “preplanned.”
Even so, the fatal shooting of an insurance executive on a Midtown street sent shock waves through the city. The police, already on alert for the scheduled lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center later in the day, began a sprawling manhunt with officers, dogs and drones.
The executive, Brian Thompson, 50, was shot as he walked by himself along West 54th Street near the New York Hilton Midtown, where his company was holding an investors’ conference. The gunman appeared to have been “lying in wait for several minutes,” the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said. The assailant was apparently aware of the route Thompson was taking, down to which door of the hotel he was heading for.
The 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol jammed after the gunman opened fire, but he cleared the jam and continued shooting. A woman who was standing nearby ran off. The gunman ignored her, moving closer to Thompson, by then crumpled against a wall.
The gunman left behind three shell casings, breaking into a run as he crossed the street and cut through a pedestrian passage to the next block. There, he climbed onto a bike and rode off into Central Park. The police were analyzing a cellphone found in the passageway to determine any link to the shooting.
The police were also exploring Thompson’s background for clues. He recently received several threats, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, but exactly what they were and where they came from was not clear. High-level executives in health care companies often receive threats in the course of their work.
Thompson, known to colleagues as “BT,” spent more than 20 years at UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. He managed a division that employs about 140,000 people and presided over significant growth in one of the company’s key businesses, the sale of private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage, a program mainly for people 65 and older.
But lawmakers and federal regulators have accused UnitedHealthcare of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments. Officials also scrutinized its parent company after a cyberattack that compromised the private information, including health data, of more than 100 million people.
Weather
In the morning, expect rain showers and possible snow, with cloudy conditions giving way to sun and breeze in the afternoon. Temperatures will reach the mid- to high 30s. The evening is predicted to be clear, with gusts as high as 40 m.p.h., and a temperature dip to about 30.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Dec. 9 (Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception).
The latest Metro news
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Proposed tax cuts: Amid voter concerns over the cost of rent, food and child care, Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan to eliminate city income taxes for 400,000 low-wage earners.
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Senior center fire: A blaze at a senior center in Edison, N.J., left a 101-year-old man dead and displaced more than 70 residents, who were offered hotel rooms.
Style and culture
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Steamy nights preserved on Polaroids: Outfitted with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, Sharon Smith spent the years between 1980 and 1988 photographing people at storied New York City dance clubs.
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Gotham Awards: At the 34th annual iteration, “A Different Man,” a dark indie comedy starring Sebastian Stan, was the surprise best-feature winner.
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Lives lived: Thirman Milner, who in 1981 became the first popularly elected Black mayor in New England and went on to serve three terms in Hartford, Conn., died at 91.
METROPOLITAN diary
Beyond the grave
Dear Diary:
I brought some impatiens to plant at my friend’s grave at St. John Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. After placing the container of flowers on the ground, I realized I had nothing to dig the holes for them.
I left the plants where they were and went to a nearby store to buy a gardening trowel.
When I returned to the gravesite, I discovered that someone had already planted them. Who it was, I’ll never know.
— Cathi Venis
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali, Bernard Mokam and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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