A week ago, Noureddine Bitat watched helplessly on West 36th Street as rowdies trashed his yellow taxi following a Knicks win — and worried about how he would keep making a living.
“The crowd was really wild,” he said in Arabic through a translator. “I was scared.”
On Wednesday, the father of three sat in front of a row of television cameras in Queens to thank those who have come to his aid in the wake of a scare that has, for now, driven him out of a job he has held for more than two years.
“This has made me feel like I have another family here,” said Bitat, whose wife and children live in Algeria.
The 59-year-old Queens cabbie became a reluctant symbol of the outbursts that followed the Knicks’ 29-point comeback in Game Four of the NBA Finals, when crowds swarmed his leased 2026 Toyota Sienna, shattering the vehicle’s windshield, destroying its meter and stomping on its roof.
“I couldn’t imagine that this could happen to me,” he said. “Especially in a country where I feel like I’m home.”
The NYPD this week announced that a 21-year-old Florida man has been charged with criminal mischief for allegedly damaging the taxi.
Bitat singled out The City Reporter for a story that detailed how he was punched in the head while being dragged out of the taxi at 36th Street and Seventh Avenue — and for later helping to connect the New York Taxi Workers Alliance with representatives for hip-hop superstar French Montana.
Born in Morocco and raised in The Bronx, Montana is known for his charitable work and for bringing online attention to causes he champions.
The Bronx-raised rapper posted a video to X late Sunday of the cabbie standing dejectedly outside of the taxi, writing “Somebody find him for me so we can help him back on his feet.”
By Tuesday, a GoFundMe account went live, established by Montana, the Canadian TikTok influencer Zachery Dereniowski and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. A day later, the fund was closing in on its $75,000 target.
“He’s taken notice of the good in the people, especially, I think, in a moment of such darkness and trauma for him,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
After being sidelined, Bitat received a full week’s pay for last week and for this week from Signal Taxi, the company from which he leases the wheelchair-accessible Toyota.
The funds being raised for him by the taxi union and his bold-faced-name supporters are designed to prop him up while he figures out what to do next. But getting behind the wheel again, he repeated Wednesday, is out of the question.
“We want Noureddine to have a different choice, a choice to be able to say, ‘I don’t want to drive anymore from this trauma and I’m going to have enough financial resources to make a different choice,’” Desai said.
The encounter left emotional scars on Bitat, who broke down in tears multiple times last Friday while detailing what happened to The City Reporter.
“I’m still traumatized,” he said Wednesday. “But it’s not like the first day.”
The outbursts that followed the Game Four win offered a preview of the violence that followed days later when the Knicks finished off the San Antonio Spurs in Game Five. The title-clinching win Saturday set resulted in a Times Square shooting, five World Cup shuttle buses set on fire along 42nd Street, a dozen MTA buses being vandalized and 62 arrests.
Desai pleaded with New Yorkers and tourists to be aware that the damage comes with a heavy cost for workers trying to keep the city moving.
“Help keep our drivers safe,” she said. “They keep you safe and what we ask for in return is that you respect the men and women that do this job.”
Bitat congratulated the Knicks for the team’s first NBA championship since 1973, while adding that he hopes the ticker-tape parade Thursday up the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan will be an uneventful gathering. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that more than 10,000 police officers will be assigned to parade duty.
“I want people to celebrate in a peaceful way,” he said. “Not in the way that happened [last week] and put my life at risk.”
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