Bus companies urged to keep close watch on violations
By Rick Stoff
One Massachusetts state trooper has pled guilty to embezzlement and four others have been charged with crimes relating to skipping special overtime shifts but nonetheless filing time sheets. In some cases, troopers covered their tracks by writing phony citations that were submitted as work product but not issued to motorists.
Bill Torres has seen this crime drama before and warns fellow motorcoach operators to be sure they aren’t similarly targeted. About 15 years ago, a motorcoach company operated by his wife went out of business after a phony ticket was written by a scamming commercial vehicle enforcement officer.
Torres, himself a police officer at the time, smelled a rat and hired a private investigator. The investigation led to the errant officer’s dismissal from the police force. By that time, however, the carrier’s safety rating had been downgraded from satisfactory to conditional. Insurance rates soared. Too many customers were lost, and the operation folded.
Embezzlement a federal offense
Reporters from WCVB-TV in Boston examined Massachusetts State Police records for 2016 and found that supervisors and troopers assigned to one troop earned about $1 million in overtime for radar shifts.
The reports found no speeding tickets were written, however, during more than 100 of the overtime shifts. One lieutenant wrote no citations on 55 overtime shifts. Three troopers wrote no tickets during any shift they worked. During some overtime shifts, tickets were written only at the beginning, indicating the trooper then left duty early. One trooper filed tickets written weeks before with altered dates to make it appear they came during an overtime shift, police reports showed.
Overtime for these AIRE (Accident Injury Reduction Effort) shifts was paid from federal funds, making the ticket scam a federal offense. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts investigated, and in July, former trooper Gregory Raftery pleaded to “embezzling funds from a state agency receiving federal funds.” Four other troopers have been similarly charged.
Flashback
Torres is now president of the DC Trails motorcoach company in Washington, D.C. When he read the news about the Massachusetts trooper charges, he experienced an old-fashioned movie flashback.
“Something similar happened to me in Washington, D.C., in 2003 or so. An officer who was working with the DOT motor carrier unit was falsifying tickets without stopping buses,” Torres said. His investigator got the goods on the wise guy.
“Supposedly this went back quite a bit,” Torres said. “He would sit under a tree somewhere and look through his book for previous drivers he had stopped. He was just making up tickets for companies and drivers that didn’t even match.
“The federal government paid overtime for motor carrier units to enforce bus regulations. If guys are paid overtime they have to turn out some tickets. Rather than stopping and inspecting buses, he would write a couple of tickets and get paid for three or four hours of overtime.”
The charged inspector didn’t hit the carrier owned by Torres’s wife with a simple offense like a broken taillight. She was slapped with major offense: allowing a motorcoach to be operated by a driver with a suspended license.
“The DOT came to us saying we were using a suspended driver,” Torres said. “We insisted it was not our driver. We didn’t know who he was. DOT said they did have proof he drove one of our buses according to this policeman and the citation he turned in. Was DOT going to believe me or a policeman who was writing fake tickets?”
It took nearly a year to crack the case. By then, Torres said, “We went from a satisfactory to conditional rating. We lost clients and our insurance rates went up. We ended up closing that company down because of the rating and insurance costs.”
It is much easier to follow safety ratings and driver records today, Torres said. “If a driver gets pulled over and doesn’t tell me, I would know it shortly thereafter because it would show up on my federal CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability) score.”
The Massachusetts abuses, however, offer another warning to commercial vehicle operators to remain vigilant, he said.
“We have the tools to keep good control of what our drivers are doing with GPS and the way the DOT rates us,” he said. “My advice is to watch it as closely as you watch your money.”
