New Haven Independent

In all, it was a costly day for taxi driver Kenneth Colucci (pictured) when he picked up his strangest fare — a man who turned out to be a bank robbery suspect.

Instead of driving fares in the West Haven area, as he had done for Metro Taxi for the past nine years, Colucci found himself giving a statement to the New Haven police Wednesday as a witness to what apparently turned out to be one of the most inept bank heists in memory, as his cab was being gone over by the cops for fingerprints.

Due to some confusion, he even ended up with parking tickets on his windshield. He also was left with a dark red splotch in the right rear seat (pictured above), the one most passengers use.

Colucci was back driving a Metro Taxi (a loaner) Thursday, one day after his encounter with a bank robbery.

Colucci, 56, a slim man with a weathered face who lives in West Haven with his wife and daughter, said he likes to drive around West Haven. New Haven has too many traffic lights, one-way streets and traffic delays for his liking, he said.

Seated in the drivers’ room at the Metro Taxi headquarters in West Haven Thursday, Colucci was animated as he recalled the adventure the day before.

He picked up the fare near Chick’s Drive-In by the beach in West Haven. The man asked to be driven to the TD Bank across from the the southwestern corner of the Green in downtown New Haven.

“He seemed to be a real nice guy.He said he lived behind Chick’s. He brought up something about the weather and how it was getting cold fast. He started coughing, and we started talking about how you had better be careful because this is cold season. You have to dress properly.”

(Police later identified the passenger as a 40 year-old from Meriden with an extensive criminal history. He was arraigned in state Superior Court Thursday on robbery and larceny charges.)

The passenger told Colucci he picked the New Haven branch because the fare was less than it would be to the bank’s branch on Campbell Avenue in West Haven.

“On the way, he mentioned that he had one more stop after TD Bank … the railroad station,” Colucci recalled. He said he’d wait for the passenger.

Colucci parked on the left side of College Street, which is one way south of Chapel, so he could look into the bank and be sure his passenger was really going to the bank and wouldn’t try to beat the fare. “We’ve all heard that, that I’ll run into the bank, I’ll be right back. I actually looked through the side window [of the bank] and I saw him in the bank.”

After a few minutes, his passenger returned, walking “nonchalantly” around the car. He got back into the passenger side, the rear seat where he had been sitting.

“He said, ‘OK, we can go to the train station now.’ I said OK, put the car in reverse and backed up a little bit” to ease into traffic, Colucci said

“All of a sudden, I got a smell just like somebody lit off a road flare … a strong sulfur smell,” Colucci said. It was the dye pack from the bank, set to go off to identify robbers and make their swag unusable.

“I didn’t hear a pop or a bang or anything. I said to him, ‘What’s that smell?’

“He said, ‘What smell?’ And it was so strong that he shouldn’t have been saying that.

“I turned around on my seat and said, ‘You don’t smell that?’ And then I just sort of noticed like a red haze in the car and caught a couple of streams of red smoke going up.

“I said, ‘What’s that smoke?’ He just sort of sat there dumbfounded and said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s like this guy isn’t noticing anything and the car is actually starting to fill up with smoke at this point.

“I looked down at this sweatshirt he was wearing that had a pocket with a hole. A all of a sudden I saw this smoke billowing out of the pocket, a stream of dark red smoke.

“I had lived in California, and I said, ‘Yo, dude, you got smoke pouring out of your pocket.’”

Colucci stepped out of his red-smoke-filled car. The suspect “just sat in the back seat calmly and very still, a minute, maybe two minutes. Then he opened the door very slowly, stepped out of the car — and just ran down the center of College Street.”

“At this time, a man ran by me coming out of what I assumed what was the bank, and chased him,” Colucci said. The suspect left the road and ran up on the sidewalk across from the Shubert theater. The man, a visitor from Wisconsin named Darren Dresser, followed him down the center of College Street. (Click here to read and watch his story.)

The alleged bank robber’s run of bad luck was just beginning. Colucci said when the suspect tried to mount the sidewalk, he literally ran into a man who was trying to put coins in a parking meter. They danced around for a few seconds, and the suspect continued south on College Street, but minus his wallet, which he had dropped during the dance.

Meanwhile, a cop crossed College Street to the cab and asked Colucci what happened. Colucci told him. The cop “went on the cell phone and I couldn’t get another word out of him,” Colucci said. After a few minutes, though, this officer told Colucci that the suspect had been captured.

According to Colucci, a police officer at the scene told him his car would be impounded to be processed for evidence. He didn’t know the officer’s name.

Eventually, police allowed Colucci to gather his briefcase, GPS, charge book and cell phone from the car. They brought Colucci to the third floor of police headquarters at 1 Union Ave., where they took his statement.

Communications Mix-Up

About 4:30, nearly three hours after the 1:42 p.m. heist, Colucci left police headquarters. An officer had returned his keys to him and told him his car was either “around back” or still impounded, Colucci said.

He walked to the train station and grabbed a cab to Metro Taxi’s West Haven offices to get a loaner car, because his taxi had been taken to a police facility for processing. Or so he thought.

The cabbie said police had inquired about how he was getting home, but he didn’t want to bother them asking for a ride. That’s why he took the cab. The driver offered to give Colucci a break in the fare to $9. Colucci turned down the offer from his fellow cabbie and paid the full $15.

Police spokesman Officer Joe Avery said there is no set policy about police giving rides to witnesses across municipal lines.

It turned out the police never had Colucci’s cab towed away to be kept as evidence. But neither Colucci nor Metro Taxi knew that until a cab driver discovered it Thursday morning right where Colucci had left it on College — only now it was decorated with parking tickets. Metro Taxi officials said police never notified them that the cops were done with the cab.

Assistant Chief of Police Kenneth Gillespie said the cabbie would not have to pay the tickets. He said he didn’t know why neither the cab driver nor Metro Taxi was told when his cab was no longer needed or where it was. He referred that question to Lt. Lisa Dadio, who runs the detective division. Dadio did not immediately return a call for comment Friday afternoon.

Colucci said the Metro Taxi mechanic told him he thought they would be able to remove the red stain from his seat.

Colucci said his nine-year career with Metro Taxi “this time around” had been quiet and without many incidents until Wednesday. He had been shot in the head during a fight in Florida in 1985 during a hiatus from cab driving. “I used to travel a lot,” he said. He said he had driven taxis in Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles and Hawaii. “I was bored,” he said.

He said New Haven is safe to drive in. “I rarely use my door locks these days,” he said.

Despite his one-day diversion, he’s happy with his lot at Metro Taxi, he said. The cabbies work six days a week and are not charged for Sundays, so everything they can pick up that day goes to them, he said.

He said he takes in about $100 “on a good day”, and many days are good. A fare to New York City, or an airport of the gambling casinos in Eastern Connecticut can guarantee a good day, he said.

Most days are between 12 and 13 hours long, however.

Thursday was a better day for him than Wednesday.

“All of a sudden, I pulled into a Mobil station on Saw Mill Road and a guy just walked up to me and said, ‘Can you give me a ride to Mystic?’” He said he called his dispatcher and was told the fare was $155.

“That made my day,” he said. “I got a lucky ride.”