Feds say California DMV employees traded cash for licenses

[alp227]

Source: AP

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — As many as 100 commercial truck drivers paid up to $5,000 each to bribe state Department of Motor Vehicles employees for illegal California licenses, federal authorities said Tuesday.

Up to 23 traffic accidents could be related to the fraud, officials said, though there were no fatalities.

Emma Klem, a 45-year-old Salinas DMV employee, and trucking school owner Kulwinder Dosanjh Singh, 58, of Turlock, both pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit bribery and identity fraud, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner said.

Two other DMV employees in Salinas and Sacramento and two other Central Valley trucking school operators have been arrested on similar charges.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/33bd983084ef49d2b27f4deb86bcb85c/feds-say-california-dmv-employees-traded-cash-licenses

[HassleCat]

1. The interesting part

It's not that difficult to learn to drive a truck and get a CDL. I'm guessing Mr. Singh's truck driving school was just a front, and he charged his "students" $10k for a license, without any training at all.

[PoliticAverse]

3. How does that compare with what it would cost for a real driving school? n/t

[HassleCat]

4. About the same

In states where the exam is easy, a driving school might charge $3500 to $5000. It's more in California because they have to do more practice for the road test. I think it would be $5000 to $$8000. Of course, if you run a "school" where there is no studying and no test, you get to charge a little more.

[Xithras]

8. I've wondered the same thing for years.

I learned to drive a truck when I was ELEVEN. One of my uncles and a couple of older cousins are truck drivers, and I was driving old Mack cabovers around on my uncles farm by the time I was 12. At 15 I was helping to haul cattle between rented pastures a couple of miles from each other. Legally? No chance in hell, but when you're in the open rangeland halfway between Nowhereville and Bumblefuck, nobody gives a damn.

It took me an hour to learn to drive the truck. An hour. I'm sure over the road drivers have to learn a lot more laws than I did, but I've always believed that the whole "six weeks and $6,000" thing that most truck schools charge is just a scam to extort money from students. There's no way that it should take that long, or cost that much, to learn to drive a truck.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. This is about a truck school fraud but watch the Right claim it's about voter fraud.

[seveneyes]

5. Say it ain't so

[love_katz]

6. Wow! My mind just boggles at this.

Another line from the article: the fraud "may be connected to 23 accidents..."

Scary! Those big rigs easily weigh enough to kill multiple people if the driver loses control or just flat is incompetent. This kind of thing is why the whole CDL program was started back in the 1980's. Just, wow.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

7. We had something similar in Illinois

In the early 1990s, before George Ryan became Governor, he was Illinois Secretary of State, in charge of (among other things), the Department of Motor Vehicles. In 1994, a Baptist minister from Chicago was going with his wife and their six kids to Milwaukee on Interstate 94. The van they were riding in was rear-ended by a semi and all of the children were killed. During the investigation, it was discovered that the truck driver had a valid Illinois license, but could only speak Spanish. This was odd because the written test to get an Illinois truck driver's license is only given in English. So how did the man get his license?

An investigation was started, and it was quickly discovered that examiners in the DMV were accepting bribes in exchange for giving licenses to unqualified drivers. What infuriated people especially was that the reason the DMV examiners were taking the bribes was that they were expected to contribute very generously to Ryan's political war chest -- 10% of their salaries. So they were taking these bribes in large part to give (forced) campaign contributions to Ryan.

Because of this, Ryan spent several years in the Federal Pen at Terre Haute, Indiana. (I was hoping that Ryan's successor as governor, Rod Blagojevich, would be Ryan's cellmate. Alas, when Blago was found guilty of corruption, he went to a different federal penitentiary.) When Jesse White became Secretary of State, one of the first things he said was that he would not accept campaign contributions from anyone who worked for him.

[love_katz]

9. That story is a jaw dropper!

This explains why the federal government got so much stricter regarding CDL tests. I won't go in to detail, but their requirements have gotten much tighter over the last several years, and those requirements are to prevent fraud.