Taxi commissioners give the Devil his due By Jesse McKinley Thursday, July 26, 2007 SAN FRANCISCO: It was a good day for the Devil here as the Taxicab Commission voted to keep the Dark Lord's favorite number - 666 - affixed to a cab that, according to its driver, is cursed. The vote, which came Tuesday after an amused period of public comment and annoyed looks from the commissioners, extended the satanic reign of Taxi No. 666, which is driven by one Michael Byrne (pronounced burn). Byrne, who did not appear at the hearing and was not reachable for comment, had lobbied to have his medallion number changed and had found an ally in Jordanna Thigpen, deputy director of the Taxicab Commission. In a memorandum distributed last week, Thigpen wrote that Byrne believed the number to be responsible for a series of calamities he had endured in a streak of bad luck that had led him to have his taxi blessed at a local church, to no apparent avail. "This medallion holder would prefer not to speak about the specific problems," Thigpen wrote, "but they are of great severity." Adding to the cab's sinister mystique was the fact that Taxi No. 666 caught fire on a Good Friday some years ago in a blaze that, as local legend has it, wrecked the car but left the offending medallion untouched. So it was that the commission had been asked to deep-six the number of the beast in the biblical Book of Revelation in favor of the less offensive 1307, a move that the commission president, Paul Gillespie, who is a cab driver himself, thought was only kind. "This is a very simple thing we can do to make one person's life a little easier," Gillespie said, adding that he himself had driven Taxi No. 666 in the past. "People do bring a lot of bad energy in the cab, and if people want to talk about the number, then the driver has to talk about it." But others saw the debate as a waste of time and money, two things the Great Deceiver would no doubt have approved. "If we don't have 666, what's next?" said Tom Stanghellini, 59, a longtime cabby. "What about Medallion 13? Or 1313?" Thigpen said she did not want to set a precedent but said the number in question had become increasingly difficult for her office to assign. In the end, the vote was 5-1 against changing the number. (The commission's seventh member was absent.) But Gillespie, who sighed deeply before casting the only dissenting vote, said he doubted this would be the last time the commission would have to take up the issue. "This guy," he said, "still has this problem."