Mohammed Haroon’s throat was cut in the wee hours of April 16, as he sat behind the wheel of his taxicab.
“He was a good friend of mine,” said a guest in the studio, Raja Khan, of the Chicago Professional Taxicab Drivers Association. “We’d always go to [the Near North restaurant] Zaiqa and pray together late at night. He was a good father, and I love him so….I cannot explain how this person is good, hardworking for his family and how anyone can take someone’s life for nothing.”
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As a rule, Are You Talkin’ to Me? gets two or three phone calls a show, but that night the callers were backed up like cabs at closing time outside a four o’clock bar. Fallen police and firefighters get public funerals, callers pointed out. The city takes care of their families. Cabdrivers serve the public too–in fact, the city forces them to work high-crime areas whether they want to or not–but if they take a bullet or a knife, they don’t get jack.
Sniffling could be heard on the air.
Cabdrivers are an aggrieved, opinionated lot, perhaps because they’re three times more likely to be murdered on the job than any other occupation. As independent contractors, Chicago’s 17,000 cabdrivers get no health insurance, and unlike other blue-collar workers, they have no unified voice, nor a union, although many drivers belong to one of several competing “brotherhoods.” They come from dozens of countries, and they tend to eat, pray, and debate mainly with members of their own ethnic group.
To promote the show, Lutfallah and his cohost, Daniel Dorame, often spend Friday evenings canvassing the cab staging area at O’Hare, a giant parking lot where hundreds of drivers nap, read, and eat while waiting to be called to a terminal. The two tap on windows, announce “cabdriver radio show,” and slip flyers to the drivers.
