Fare play: for Winston-Salem's top two taxi companies, competition isn't a contest but a down-and-dirty fight to the finish.

• Author: Brown, Kathryn
• Position: Willard's Cab Co. and Blue Bird Cabs Inc.

Wearing navy-blue coveralls with his name embroidered on the front pocket, Coy Lee Willard Jr. fixes his eyes on the faux wood that panels his office. His dark hair, clipped short and neat on the sides, falls in a long matte of curls from his beefy neck to his shoulders. "It seems for a while it's been like a taxi war," says the owner of Willard's Cab Co. "Basically, we've got a competitor here who's trying to put us out of business, advertise us out of business, sell us out of business. But it don't work because we stick to our ground and do things honest here."

In his musty office, where a yellow mutt called Dog snoozes on green-gold shag carpet, the 5-by-7 of Jesus on the shelf lends him a shade of credibility. But his cross-town nemesis, Herman "Duffy" Mazzeo, owner of Blue Bird Cabs Inc., would disagree, as he does with almost anything uttered by a Willard. Winston-Salem's two largest cab companies have been duking it out in a seamy battle over who has the right of way in this tobacco town. They've sunk competition to its lowest level in a feud fraught with personal slanders and criminal allegations, from sex and drugs to bribery and theft. In short, the rivalry has personified the cabbie stereotype: Never pretty, never polite.

Among Mazzeo's allegations: The Willards destroyed five of his cabs in 1995 by pouring BBs into the engines; their cabs aren't insured; they hire convicted felons; their drivers sell drugs out of their cabs. One of his most persistent complaints is that the Willards have stolen Blue Bird radios to monitor its dispatches and intercept customers.

Is any of this true? "We wouldn't be doing those things and have the reputation we have," Willard, 41, answers. "This is a Baptist city." But a Willard's driver was charged with selling drugs from his cab in 1996 and is serving seven years in prison. And Jeff Willard, Coy Lee's 36-year-old brother, has a 1985 felony conviction for obtaining property under false pretense. He's not allowed to drive a cab.

The Willards have their own spate of accusations: In 1996, they say, Mazzeo offered a woman $5,000 to file a sexual-harassment suit against Coy Willard Sr., the family patriarch. They complain that Mazzeo has tried to steal away drivers with offers of cash and new cabs, and they claim he has hired private investigators to pose as FBI agents to dig up dirt on them.

In a mediation agreement signed a year ago, both sides promised to stop slandering each other, but that hasn't shut them up. "He's a piece of work," Willard says of Mazzeo. "While you're sitting there talkin' to him, he's got the...