Taxis line up while drivers await customers at McCarran International Airport this month. Tourists traveling between the airport and the Strip have at times been victimized by "long hauling" or "tunneling," where taxis take longer routes than necessary. Such acts have made some visitors increasingly wary of the Las Vegas Valley taxicab industry. Photo by Jane Kalinowsky.

Steve Lenett has been a Las Vegas cabby for many years. But it's not his experience telling him that his industry's reputation is swirling down the toilet. It's his customers.

"More and more, I'm hearing, 'Airport, please, but don't take the highway,'" said Lenett, a Whittlesea Bell Transportation driver better known to peers as "Cab Man" on his weekly local radio show. He was referring to the practice of taking unaware tourists the long way between the Strip and McCarran International Airport, known as "long hauling."

"That's uncomfortable," Lenett said. "I'm just trying to give good cab. I'm apologizing before I can say, 'Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas.'"

Las Vegas has forever been a place where yokels from Palookaville get picked clean by all sorts of cheats and flimflammers. But while corporatization has dulled the dark side a bit, old Vegas lives on in its cabs.

"There's lots of stuff like that going out there that the (cab) companies aren't responding to," said Richard Land, administrator of the Nevada Taxicab Authority.

One time, an appreciative customer gave Lenett $50 for a $19 fare just for not long hauling the passenger. Then there's the cabby he knows as "Long Way Ray." "He's proud of the fact he long hauls people. It's just incredible."

To be sure, there's plenty of decent people working in the cab biz. Drivers work a job where they're statistically more likely to be murdered than a cop, get paid worse than teachers and have to act as an impromptu tour guide/baby sitter/social worker/detoxification expert while hoping for a fair tip.

"There's a lot of good folks out there," Land said. "Some of them are strictly out there for the bucks and don't give a damn."

The taxicab industry brought new terms to the Vegas vernacular, such as the aforementioned long hauling or "tunneling" (the latter is long hauling via the airport tunnel).

A new one is "cold piping," where a smog test is done to one car but illegally credited to another cab.

There's "diversions," where cabbies will talk you out of one destination in favor of another, like a strip club where they might get a kickback. When the governor considered outlawing such gratuities, drivers went bonkers, protested and actually won the fight.

Then there's "blown shifts," where a company can't put its promised number of cabs on the street. Curiously, in a typical month well over 90 percent of blown shifts involve geographically restricted cabs that ply neighborhoods, and rarely is a shift blown for cabs serving the higher-profit Strip.

There's no name I know of for what happened at the Las Vegas Convention Center earlier this year, where dozens of cabs were licensed solely to serve that facility during a busy show, but never showed up and plied for more lucrative fares elsewhere.

And authorities still are unsure of what to make of dozens of radios stolen from Clark County school buses that somehow ended up in some cabs. In the end, you have a biz that seems just a bit less sleazy than the North Korean nuclear industry.

"We've had some very tough times," said Bill Shranko, operations manager at the valley's biggest cab company, Yellow Checker Star Transportation. Still, he said, "I don't think there's a credibility problem" with cabs here.

In fact, he thinks those very public woes are proof that the industry is cleaning itself up.

"These things that are brought to public knowledge reinforce my personal belief that regulation works," Shranko said. "When you have a Taxicab Authority that does its investigations, the DMV (investigating), it makes it very, very difficult for companies to play games."

As of late, authorities have cracked down on shady games by auditing driver logs and cross-checking cab records for telltale signs of irregularities, and assigning police to watch for tunneling, all in hopes of making cab scams just another colorful facet of the town's rowdy past.

But Land said his enforcers can't keep up with every shady driver, profit-mad owner or knowing manager who's looking the other way. It's up to industry leaders to create working climates for good drivers to prosper, and not set a tone for bad drivers to cheat.

Lenett agrees.

"If the owners are robbing, and the owners are doing cold-piping, the drivers feel, 'If my owner is doing this, maybe I have the authority to do that.'" Lenett said.

The shame of the scamming, Lenett said, is that it's unnecessary.

"It's a great industry," Lenett said. "There's room for everybody" to make a buck honestly, if they want to.

If left to fester, Land and Lenett fear the ramifications of taxi scams will go far beyond the cab business.

"I'm the first one you see and the last one you see. If I make it enjoyable and pleasurable, you might come back" here, Lenett said. "If you had a bad experience and I was part of that bad experience, it may just be the little push that pushes you elsewhere."

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