"Committing crimes".  Have proof?  I heard all those stories, too.  I also heard all the stories about Larry Fowler.  Specifically, he would regularly get blind drunk at a certain redneck bar on the Old Seward, get in the cab and only say "Potter", then terrorize the driver when they drove past the turnoff to Potter Drive and headed towards Potter Marsh.  It just so happened that he played that game one night with the wrong person, a driver who was very close to a fellow driver / immigrant from the same country who was found murdered at the top of Upper Huffman, and paid for that mistake with his life.  I'm pretty sure that this driver's self-defense claim prevailed in the end, even though it ruined his chances of further success in Anchorage.