"Hey, lady," yelled the man in the New York Yankees baseball cap yesterday. "You wanna take a ride in my cab?"
We were not in Manhattan, the Bronx or Brooklyn, but a little slice of the Big Apple had landed outside a shopping centre in Blackrock, Co Dublin. The only appropriate response to the in-your-face driver comes courtesy of de Niro: "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?".
Peter Franklin, New York taxi driver better known as the gabby cabbie, is holding court from what he says is "a genuine, authentic New York cab". Passing Dublin taxi drivers could only gaze wistfully at the glamorous yellow Chevrolet Caprice.
Motor-mouth Franklin is here on an eight-week tour of Ireland, invited by Green Isle Foods to promote pizza. The adopted home of their Goodfellas range is Little Italy, New York. Who better than Peter Franklin, (as New York as outsize pretzels and steamy sidewalks) to do the job.
Franklin is having a ball. Back home he is a cab-driver with an impressive sideline in global broadcasting. He talks about life in New York to around 400 radio stations in 70 countries. One is the Pat Kenny Show, where he has been a regular guest for 10 years.
"Last week I just told all the stations that I would be reporting from Dublin instead of New York, they couldn't believe it," he says. "I gotta tell ya, they are so happy that I am going to be able to report on the Clinton visit for them".
He has a mobile phone and a laptop and phones his wife every night - and he has had 110 emails from listeners since arriving. He is taking requests from people who want him to make surprise phone calls to loved ones in Ireland.
The US President - "He only came 'cos he heard I was going to be here," says gabby - is a source of serious annoyance to Franklin who says he and fellow Americans feel let down by his behaviour.
"It will be interesting to see if Irish people line the streets to see him," he says.
Over the next two months Franklin will visit most of the major shopping centres in the Republic and in the North. His cab - hired from a film studio in London - has been fixed up with a TV showing images of pizza and New York.
It is billed as a virtual tour of the Big Apple but those who join the gabby cabbie on this three-minute odyssey would be better served ignoring the video, munching on the free Goodfellas pizza and simply listening to him.
This week he has spoken to stations in Johannesberg, the UK, Hong Kong and Australia. Bord Failte should be slipping him a few dollars, he jokes, for all the positive publicity he has been giving the country. Departing from usual tourist criticism, Franklin reckons that the city is "beautifully clean".
In Blackrock, men, women and children approached him saying "you're the one who talks to Pat Kenny". Others asked: "Are you really from New York?"
"I usually tell them, no, I'm a sheep farmer from Galway," he says.
One woman was annoyed with him. She said she didn't like the way he talked about President Clinton on radio. "He did so much for peace here, people in Ireland are sick of this sex talk," she said.
Franklin thinks Clinton is "a bum" for telling the American people a lie. "The guy is a bum," he says when the woman is gone. "You ain't gonna yell at me as well are ya?" asks the original goodfella. "Good. Now hold onto your hats."
The gabby cabbie will be at Dunnes Stores Cornelscourt in Co Dublin today and tomorrow.