TAXI KING ‘MEDALS’ STRIPPED

Must give up 46 cabs

Embattled city “Taxi King” Gene Freidman must hand over all of his own cabs — and the lucrative medallions that go with them — to pay off creditors, a judge has ruled.

Freidman (inset), who owes money to everyone from the state and city to a former landlord who evicted him, has to turn over the 46 cars and medallions by Jan. 9, said US bankruptcy Judge Carla Craig.

“This strikes me as a crisis that Mr. Freidman has created,” Craig said during an emergency hearing this week.

“I don’t have much sympathy with Mr. Freidman in this situation,” she said of the flailing businessman, who also manages hundreds of cabs for others.

The judge warned that Freidman will be held in contempt and possibly jailed if he doesn’t do what she ordered.

The taxi mogul filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year in a bid to get out from under massive debt owed by his 22 companies, whose holdings include the 46 cabs and their medallions. Freidman’s companies have fanciful names, such as Hypnotic Taxi, Bourbon Taxi and Vodka Taxi.

The taxi medallions are worth far less than they were a decade ago, when they sold for north of $1 million. But each one will still net hundreds of thousands of dollars on today’s market.

Freidman, 46, who manages more than 800 taxis in New York City, has been on a downward spiral in the past two years — and managed to alienate nearly everyone and get hit with a number of lawsuits and sanctions in the process.

The state attorney general’s office appointed a trustee to oversee his businesses earlier this year, saying he can’t be trusted to run them himself.

And he owes millions to both the state and city because he collected taxi surcharges on behalf of the owners of the cabs he managed and never turned them over, angering the taxi proprietors, who were then forced to pay thousands of dollars to keep themselves out of trouble.

Last year, a judge ordered the seizure of all Freidman’s medallions for back payment to the state, but a state jurist later overturned the ruling.

Also, Freidman’s landlord evicted him from his longtime business offices after he hadn’t paid for years, and his 24-year-old wife sued him for divorce. She subsequently stole chandeliers out of his home and sold them for a fraction of their value.