A knife-wielding scourge who robbed four taxi drivers in Brooklyn and Queens, stabbing one of them in the process, got five years behind bars Tuesday.
Choudary Virk, 22, targeted four cabbies over an eight-day stretch in February 2023, holding a knife to each driver’s neck as he demanded cash. He pleaded guilty to a federal robbery charge in September, admitting to all four crimes.
On Tuesday, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Margo Brodie sentenced Virk to 60 months, followed by two years supervised release, ordering him to undergo outpatient drug treatment for his full-blown opioid addition.
Choudhary Virk allegedly committed a string of four violent, knifepoint
robberies of taxi drivers in Brooklyn and Queens in February 2023. Here, a cab driver who was stabbed multiple times, is pictured at a hospital on Feb. 25, 2023. (USDOJ / EDNY)
Prosecutors were asking for seven to nine years, while Virk’s lawyer argued he should be sentenced to time served for the nearly three years he’s already spent on Rikers Island and in Brooklyn MDC.
“Give me the money or I’ll kill you,” Virk told his first victim on Feb. 17, 2023, after he had the hack take him from Sunset Park to Brighton Beach. He took $150 and ran off.
On Feb. 20, 2023, he took a cab from Brighton Beach to Jamaica, then held a knife to the driver’s neck and made off with $450.
Five days later, on Feb. 25, Virk cabbed it from Gravesend to Jamaica, and again pulled out a knife and put it to the driver’s neck. But the cabbie said he only had $50, which he handed over, then tried to hit Virk with a bottle to defend himself. Virk responded by repeatedly stabbing the driver in the arm and back, with one wound needing six stitches to close.
Virk then got another cab to pick him up around the corner from the stabbing, then robbed that driver at knifepoint, too, stealing $60 and the victim’s dashcam.
Choudhary Virk (pictured) allegedly committed a string of four violent, knifepoint
robberies of taxi drivers in Brooklyn and Queens in February 2023. Here, Virk is pictured shortly before putting a knife to a cab driver’s neck and demanding money on Feb. 25, 2023. (USDOJ / EDNY)
Virk’s lawyer, David Gray, said his client committed the robberies out of desperation, while in the throes of a full-blown opioid addiction at age 19.
“This was a very tragic but brief window of desperate behavior on the part of my client,” Gray said.
Virk, who came to Brooklyn from Pakistan at age 12, was essentially forced into indentured servitude by his uncle, the attorney said.
“Life in Brooklyn was bleak,” Gray wrote in a sentencing memo. “Instead of going to school, and benefiting from the social and emotional adjustment it would have provided, for the next three years young Mr. Virk was forced to work at Hot Bagel, a deli owned by his uncle’s son, alongside his two older brothers.”
He lived in his uncle’s basement, forbidden to leave without permission, gave up all of his $12-an-hour wages to his uncle, who frequently beat him, Gray wrote. Three years later, he was finally allowed to go to high school, where he was introduced to Percocet and soon became addicted to the painkiller, Gray said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kamil Ammari agreed that the court should take Virk’s youth and his drug addiction into account, but pointed out, “Whatever the defendant’s motivation in committing these crimes, none of that makes it any easier to be held at knifepoint.”
Ammari also pointed out that Virk committed several infractions while locked up in MDC Brooklyn, including fights with inmates, plus a March 1, 2025, incident where he yelled at a correction officer, “I know your family! I’m gonna catch you outside and shoot you in the head! I know where you are from!” because his meal was late, and a May 9 jail phone call when he was recorded acknowledging that he was shaking down his cellmate for cash.
Virk apologized to the victims, the court, his family and his lawyers Tuesday, and said that being jailed likely saved his life.
“I had two times overdosed,” he said, “and if I had three times I could have died.”