Is this familiar ?
Illinois Drivers Face Retesting After U.S. Inquiry Finds Licenses Had Been Sold
URBANA, Ill., Nov. 7 — One driver stopped at green lights instead of red. Another did not know how to start his car. Both were among 470 licensed drivers ordered to retake their road tests this fall after the owner of a suburban Chicago driving school was convicted of bribing state examiners to pass his students.
The conviction and its fallout are the latest results of a year-and-a-half federal investigation into accusations that while Gov. George Ryan was Illinois secretary of state, officials under him sold driver's licenses for political contributions.
The governor, a Republican, has not been implicated in the inquiry, but earlier this year, Dean Bauer, who was inspector general under Mr. Ryan while he was secretary of state, was indicted on federal racketeering charges, accused of trying to cover up investigations of wrongdoing in the office to protect Mr. Ryan from embarrassment.
Thirty-eight people have been indicted in the inquiry, with 32 convicted. The investigation has involved workers in the secretary of state's office and the license office and driving schools.
Dave Druker, a spokesman for Secretary of State Jesse White, said today that 218 of the 295 drivers who had retaken the driver's test this fall failed. An additional 175 did not show up to be re-examined, and their licenses were canceled.
Some of the drivers had been on the road with fraudulent licenses for as long as two years, although others apparently used their licenses only for identification. Many had attended the New Delhi Driving School, now closed, in a suburb west of Chicago.
The school's owner, Bharat Patel, was sentenced to 37 months in prison last week after being convicted of paying bribes of $10 to $50 to state examiners from December 1997 to November 1999. Eight licensing examiners from the state licensing office on the west side of Chicago have pleaded guilty. Officials say they doubt the students knew about the bribes.
Mr. White's office, which has ordered that all drivers who obtained licenses under questionable conditions be retested, may have to test 10,000 people, Mr. Druker said.
The federal investigation, called Operation Safe Road, began in spring 1998 and is being conducted by the United States attorney in Chicago, Scott Lassar, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal and state agencies.
Federal prosecutors have said in court that unqualified drivers connected with the case have been responsible for fatal accidents, although they have not said how many.
The first such accident to come to light was a fiery crash that killed six children of the Rev. Duane Willis and his wife, Janet, on Interstate 94 near Milwaukee on Nov. 8, 1994.
Ricardo Guzman, the truck driver involved, testified in a civil suit that he disregarded another truck driver who had tried to warn him that his trailer's tail-light assembly was bouncing dangerously. Mr. Guzman said he did not stop to inspect his rig because he feared that the police would find something wrong with it and he would not get paid for his trip.
Moments later, a weld broke on the taillight assembly, which fell onto the highway and was hit by the Willis family's minivan. The assembly punctured the gas tank, which exploded in fire, trapping and killing the children. The oldest was 13; the youngest was 3 weeks.
Gonzalo Mendoza, who was a middleman in the licensing payoffs, said Mr. Guzman was one of more than 80 truck drivers who had paid him bribes of $800 to $1,200 to obtain a passing grade on written and road tests for a commercial license.
Mr. Mendoza, who pleaded guilty to federal racketeering conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, told prosecutors that he passed along most of the payoffs to two managers at a licensing office in McCook, Ill., who used them to buy tickets to political fund- raisers for Mr. Ryan, who was then secretary of state.
In all, prosecutors have said, about $170,000 collected by examiners in driver's licensing offices around Chicago went into the coffers for Mr. Ryan, who has denied knowledge of the scheme.
In 1999, when Mr. White became secretary of state, he ordered a retesting of 550 truck drivers and other holders of commercial licenses in cases where there was a possibility of bribery. Of these, only 171 passed the test.
Illinois has notified officials in New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania of potentially unqualified truck drivers with fraudulent Illinois licenses.
Another result of the grand jury that has been investigating the Illinois license office has been the indictment in June of two employees of a Tampa, Fla., driving school on charges they demanded bribes of up to $1,300 from more than 1,200 Russian and Eastern European immigrants, who were then allowed to pass the Florida tests for commercial driver's licenses without getting behind the wheel. Some were licensed to haul hazardous materials. The school was licensed by the state to test commercial drivers. That license has been revoked.
Most of these truck drivers spoke little or no English, and were able to exchange their licenses for valid licenses in other states without additional testing, officials from each state said. The practice came to light when an employee in an Illinois driver's license office noticed a large number of truck drivers exchanging Florida licenses for Illinois ones. The license office employee tipped off Illinois prosecutors.
David Laing, a senior management analyst at the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, said the agency had received the names of 1,977 truck drivers who got licenses from the school.
The 1,214 Florida residents were told to take another test there, Mr. Laing said. Of these, 223 passed. Another 204 failed or voluntarily downgraded to an automobile license. The 787 truck drivers who did not appear had their licenses canceled. Florida has sent the names of the other 763 potentially unqualified truck drivers to officials in the 26 states where they live, Mr. Laing said. |
