NYT article on subway token suckers.
April 8, 2003
A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token
By RANDY KENNEDY
In five days, when the last New York City subway token
slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few
people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no
official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in
the background, it will not be taps; it will be the
bleating song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.
But off in a corner, hidden in the shadows where things
begin to smell bad, at least a few observers will notice
and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate
breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time,
one that will soon become as irrelevant as bootleggers and
horse thieves.
Officially, the crime is classified as theft of Transit
Authority property. But among transit police officers it is
more accurately and less delicately known as token sucking.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is exactly what it
sounds like.
The criminal carefully jams the token slot with a matchbook
or a gum wrapper and waits for a would-be rider to plunk a
token down. The token plunker bangs against the locked
turnstile and walks away in frustration. Then from the
shadows, the token sucker appears like a vampire, quickly
sealing his lips over the token slot, inhaling powerfully
and producing his prize: a $1.50 token, hard earned and
obviously badly needed.
Even among officers who had seen it all, it was widely
considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to
visit the subway.
"It gave you the willies," said Brendan J. McGarry, a
veteran transit police officer. "We've had cases every so
often, these guys would end up choking and swallowing the
tokens. Then what do you do? You've got to wait for the
evidence to come out?"
In truth, most token suckers usually had enough evidence
already in their pockets to warrant locking them up - some
of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50
worth of tokens a day. And deterrence, when dealing with
someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most
public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to
impossible.
"These guys were on their last legs," Officer McGarry said.
"If they were going to jail, it was just an inconvenience
for them." (In an interview with a reporter for The Los
Angeles Times in the early 1990's, one token sucker
acknowledged the depths of his desperation. "Hard times
makes you do it," he explained, adding: "Anyways, I've
kissed women that's worse.")
Eddie Cassar, a retired transit officer, recalled making
his first token-sucker arrests in the late 1970's, and by
the time he retired in 1982, there was already a dedicated
corps of inhalers, mostly teenagers and homeless men,
working the station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. By
1989, with the rise of the crack trade, token sucking
reached almost unbelievable proportions.
During a typical summer week, repair crews were sent on
1,779 calls to fix turnstiles in a system that had 2,897
turnstiles in all. More than 60 percent of the calls
involved paper stuffed into the token slots. (A related
subway crime involved people who disabled the turnstiles
and charged riders cut-rate fees to enter through the
gates, to which they had stolen keys. These criminals,
somewhat higher on the social ladder than token suckers,
were known affectionately as trolls.)
Occasionally, methods other than incarceration were
employed to dissuade the suckers. Token booth clerks were
known to sprinkle chili powder into the token slots most
often jammed. Some officers resorted to spraying a small
amount of Mace around the regular slots and keeping an eye
out for the usual suspects. The ones with bright red lips
were then arrested.
By the time the MetroCard was introduced in the mid-1990's,
token suckers could sense the beginning of the end. But
Officer McGarry said that even the introduction of advanced
new turnstiles did little more than thin their ranks. By
the late 1990's, he said, he was on a first-name basis with
many of the sad token holdouts, who would probably never
adapt to MetroCard crimes.
"It was almost like having some kind of rapport with these
guys," he said. There was one tall, thin homeless man, he
said, who was even pleasant about the whole process. "He'd
say, `Hi, Mac,' when I caught him. And I'd say `Hi' back,
and he'd just walk up to me like a poodle, and I'd tell him
to turn around and put his arms behind his back."
Lately, he said, he spots only three old-time token suckers
around the Midtown area and only one who is still known to
be at it occasionally. But Officer McGarry can't even
remember the last time he locked the man up. In the end, he
said, technology may have killed the token sucker. But the
crime itself did a pretty good job.
"These guys had a lot of various diseases," he said. "You
name it, they had it. You don't last too long in that line
of work."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company. |
