The Gold Coast files. 150 crashes, 10 deaths, $889,630 unpaid FMCSA fines. Part 1.

Three years after a Gold Coast Logistics truck killed Brandon Rogers on I-10 in Beaumont, the network that built Dragos Sprinceana is still rolling under new DOT numbers, this is the long record.

At some point on April 15, 2023, on Interstate 10 in Beaumont, Texas, a Gold Coast Logistics truck ended the life of Brandon Rogers. This video is from Attorney Brian Beckcom, who is doing the best he can to represent Jennifer Rogers after her husband was killed by a Temp-licensed CDL driver working for a Romanian carrier hauling a Moldovan brokered load. This is why we do what we do. The driver was charged, but the Romanian carrier is doing all he can to buy the influence he needs to walk away from Jennifer Rogers, the other ten people his company killed, and countless other financial victims who have millions in judgments against him. Not to mention the $1M he owes the FMCSA.

Jennifer Rogers is raising three children without him. Seventeen people in total were hurt or killed that day. A tour bus was pulled into the wreck. The driver, Leandre Sime, is under criminal indictment. And the load that put that truck on that highway, a trailer full of Ghost Energy drinks moving from Arizona to Florida for Anheuser-Busch, was dispatched by a broker whose 200-person operations floor sits in Chisinau, Moldova.

We have written about this crash before. We have written about this carrier before, three times, across a three-part FreightWaves investigation. And yet when the Gold Coast name comes up in industry conversations today, the most common response is a blank look. People have forgotten. Many have never heard it in the first place. That is a problem because everything that made April 15, 2023, possible is still operating right now, in July 2026, under different names, at different addresses, on the same trucks. Your spouse, mother, daughter, son, or even you personally could be operating next to a foreign-owned, illegally operating, chameleon carrier that has no concern for the well-being of those they share the road with. If they kill you, they close, they transfer assets, they use the saved money to buy into political circles at the expense of your loved ones, put the company into the name of a driver who died driving for them, and your loved ones are left holding the bag.

So this is the story. More than that, it’s the record, assembled in one place. The crash. The carrier. The dead driver whose name is still on the corporate paperwork. The chameleon successors. The money. The broker. The insurer. The politics. All of it is documented in enforcement files, state corporate registries, UCC filings, workers’ compensation dockets, campaign finance records, and court records across five states.

People died for every paragraph of it.

The chain that ended in Beaumont

Start with the mechanics of the load; the mechanics are the indictment of how this industry actually works.

The shipper was Anheuser-Busch. The freight was Ghost Energy drinks. The lane ran from Arizona to Florida. The carrier originally assigned to the load failed to show, and ArcherHub, a Colorado-incorporated digital freight broker that markets itself as the broker whose algorithm never stops looking for trucks and whose backup fleet guarantees no load goes uncovered, scrambled to fill the gap.

ArcherHub put a Gold Coast truck on that load. That’s what companies do when they hire spot-rate carriers based on the lowest rates to optimize their margins.

The truck belonged to DMG Consulting & Development Inc., doing business as Goldcoast Logistics Group, DOT 2190975, MC 748469, of Elgin, Illinois. On April 15, 2023, DMG technically held active federal operating authority. The formal revocation would not come until August 27, 2023, exactly 134 days later. But operating authority is a license, not a safety record, and the safety record was sitting in FMCSA’s free, public SAFER system for anyone who bothered to look. What it showed on that date: a closed federal enforcement case settled for $791,640 less than a year earlier. Carrier-level violations for knowingly allowing drivers to operate without valid CDLs. A finding that the company put a driver with a known positive drug test behind the wheel. Hours-of-service violations. A prior out-of-service event and a crash count that would eventually total 150 reported crashes, 10 fatalities, and 86 injuries.

Operating authority can exist alongside a carrier record that should disqualify a carrier from selection by any broker or shipper conducting basic due diligence. That is the gap Brandon Rogers drove into.

The driver behind the wheel of that 80,000-pound vehicle was Leandre Sime, an immigrant holding a Florida temporary Class A commercial driver’s license, issued January 3, 2023, expiring June 30, 2024, with restrictions for automatic transmission and corrective lenses.

Anheuser-Busch appeared on the bill of lading as the motor carrier. The company calls it a clerical error. We shall see. A bill of lading and its language have consequences.

Who is Dragos Sprinceana

Born in 1979, Dragos Sprinceana is a Romanian immigrant who has been in the United States since 2002. What legal status he holds, what visa category he entered under, and whether his business operations formed any part of the basis for legal residency or citizenship are questions that have never been publicly answered. Given what those operations became, they are questions worth asking.

He built his trucking company in the Chicago suburbs and scaled it to 350 power units and 334 drivers, collecting freight revenue nationwide under the polished brand name Goldcoast Logistics Group. He was photographed with U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz at private fundraisers in South Florida. He lived in Boca Raton, zip code 33496, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country, at 17686 Circle Pond Court.

A California court, examining his own deposition, confirmed that he founded DMG, was the only person with management responsibility, and was the sole officer, director, and shareholder, with sole authority over corporate distributions. That finding matters more than it sounds. When things go wrong at most 350-truck fleets, there is a board of directors to question, a compliance committee to subpoena, and a VP of Safety to depose. Here, there is no board. There is no committee. There is no VP.

There is only Dragos.

In that same deposition, Sprinceana described how his company actually managed its drivers: no probationary period, no logbook monitoring, and no one assigned to ensure drivers were following federal safety regulations. At a company with 334 drivers and 350 trucks. The California court found this sufficient evidence of a conscious disregard for safety, denied his motion for summary judgment, and sent him to trial on an alter ego theory that would hold him personally, not just his corporate shell, responsible for the damages.

While all of this was on the record, his company’s registered addresses were virtual offices. His fleet manager, Mike Bryson, accepted legal documents on his behalf because Sprinceana was, in the fleet manager’s words, “often not at the building.” The principal was somewhere in South Florida. Also listed as a company contact: a person identified only as “IRYNA.” Courts have referenced family members Gabriela Sprinceana and Gherghina Sprinceana as registered agents for affiliated entities.

The corporate web

DMG Consulting & Development is the flagship, but Sprinceana never built just one company. He built a web, and the shape of the web is the strategy. Every entity found connected to the Sprinceana network tells the same story. Just like every other Chmeleon entity, trucking or not. Work everyone to death, pay them little to nothing, borrow money and equipment, don’t pay, make all the money you can, then close, move on, and start again, rinse, repeat.

DMG Consulting & Development Inc., d/b/a Goldcoast Logistics Group, DOT 2190975, MC 748469, canceled March 22, 2023, of Elgin, Illinois, is the core motor carrier. GCG Logistics Inc. lists Gherghina Sprinceana as registered agent and Sprinceana as president and CEO, operating from a virtual office at 7272 E. Indian School Rd., Suite 540, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a second address at 1248 N. 2nd Ave., Ste. G, in Ajo, Arizona. Goldcoast Expediting Inc. lists Gabriela Sprinceana as registered agent at 341 Dartmoor Ave. in Romeoville, Illinois, the family’s Illinois base. United Global Freight Inc. also runs through Gabriela Sprinceana, whose address was changed in August 2024 to 100 Illinois St., Suite 200, in St. Charles. Goldcoast Financial LLC lists Dragos himself. Goldcoast Carriers Inc. lists Marian Visan at 363 N. Grace St. in Lombard, and we will come back to Marian Visan because his story is one of the strangest in this file. Then there is 1425 Madeline Lane LLC, a real estate holding entity in Elgin, and GCYC SIRENA 88 LLC, a Florida entity named in a 2025 federal lawsuit alongside Sprinceana and DMG. GCYC stands for Gold Coast Yacht Company. A Sirena 88 is an 88-foot, five-stateroom superyacht built in Turkey, a vessel in the $3 million to $4 million range.

Later UCC records revealed even more of the web: Goldcoast Global Inc., registered at the same Ajo, Arizona address used throughout the network and never previously reported. Goldcoast Brokerage, operating from the Romeoville family address. 7915 N. Glen Harbor LLC, a real estate entity in Peoria, Arizona, pledged as collateral in March 2023. And a name that had never before appeared in public reporting on this network, Cezar Abramiuc, surfaced alongside Visan and Sprinceana in 2019 Arizona UCC filings tied to United Global Freight.

Every one of those registered addresses, when process servers went looking, turned out to be a virtual office, an executive suite, or a location where the principals were never present. Create multiple entities. Put family members on the paperwork. Use virtual office addresses. Keep the beneficial owner at arm’s length from any single point of legal contact. Whether by design or circumstance, the result is the same: a structure that makes service of process difficult, dilutes liability across entities, and keeps the beneficial owner insulated from any single point of accountability.

What FMCSA found, violation by violation

THE TEA Highway Intelligence platform shows two FMCSA enforcement cases on DMG’s record, and the violation codes inside them are worth reading in full, because these are not paperwork infractions.

Case one, IL-2021-0097-US1688, closed May 17, 2022, settled for $791,640. The violations: 49 CFR §383.37(a), knowingly allowing or requiring a driver to operate a commercial motor vehicle without a valid CDL. FMCSA defines “knowingly” under this section to include what a carrier should have known, and at an operation with 350 trucks and 334 drivers, the agency found that the standard was met twice. And 49 CFR §395.3(a)(3)(i), hours-of-service violations, drivers exceeding the maximum allowable driving time under the property-carrier rules. Fatigued drivers. Trucks moving when they should not be. A settlement of $791,640 on a single case means one thing: FMCSA was treating this company as a systemic offender.

Case two, IL-2023-0120-US1713, closed October 19, 2023, settled for $97,990. The violations: 49 CFR §382.215, using a driver known to have tested positive for controlled substances. Read that again. DMG knew a driver had a drug test failure and put him behind the wheel anyway, in direct violation of federal return-to-duty requirements. Then §383.37(a) again, unlicensed drivers, a repeat. Then §392.2, operating a CMV in violation of state or local law, moving violations at the carrier level. Then §395.3(a)(3)(i) again. Hours of service. Again. Still.

Total settled across both cases: $889,630. It is the largest single-carrier fine settlement in THE TEA intelligence database. It went unpaid. Like everyone else, he owes money to. Federal regulations provide 90 days from the date of a final agency order to pay. DMG did not. Total actually collected by the federal government: a question this publication has a pending FOIA request with FMCSA to answer definitively.

150 crashes, 10 fatalities, 86 injuries, year by year

The crash data on THE TEA platform shows an all-time record of 150 reported crashes involving DMG Consulting & Development vehicles. Ten fatalities. Ten people. Ten families. Eighty-six injuries. The incidents are not clustered around a single bad terminal or lane. Crash records visible in THE TEA show events in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Maine, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Texas. This was not a regional carrier with a local problem. These crashes were spread across the national freight network.

Broken down year by year, the data reveals something more disturbing than a static count. It reveals a trajectory. Eleven crashes in 2019, the company’s tenth year, including two fatal events. Twenty-five in 2020, the COVID year, still accelerating. Twenty-eight in 2021, the year FMCSA’s first enforcement case opened. Then 2022: 44 crashes, three deaths, 20 injury events, the single worst year in the company’s documented history, and, not coincidentally, the same year GoldCoast Warehousing Inc. was dissolved. The company was simultaneously at its most dangerous and beginning to structurally dismantle itself.

The crash count drops to 21 in 2023, not because the Gold Coast got safer. The federal government finally pulled the plug. By the time the first out-of-service order was issued on August 27, 2023, 130 documented crashes had already occurred. The trucks had already killed ten people.

The plate-level data tells a second story. Specific trucks, identified by license plate, appear in the FMCSA crash record more than once. The same vehicles crashed, were apparently returned to service, and crashed again. Sometimes years later. Sometimes in different states. Sometimes fatally the second time. Sometimes operating under new entities with different names but having an owner who was formerly the 7-year COO of Gold Coast.

Plate 2910364 crashed in Durant, Oklahoma, in May 2021, with no fatalities recorded. FMCSA had opened its first enforcement case against DMG the month before. The truck kept rolling. Seven hundred ninety-one days later, on July 10, 2023, the same plate appeared at an intersection in Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania, where it struck and killed Leonard G. Mortorff, a 74-year-old motorcyclist. That was 37 days before FMCSA issued its first out-of-service order.

Plate 2927594 crashed in Waterbury, Connecticut, in June 2020 and again in Sinclair, Wyoming, in January 2023, 936 days apart. Plate 2910788 crashed in Morgantown, West Virginia, in June 2021 and again in Gaston, North Carolina, in May 2023, injuring two the second time. Plate 3169136 crashed in Laramie, Wyoming, in December 2021 and again in Virginia 44 days later.

Plate P962101 is the ghost crash. August 14, 2024, Greenwich Township, Pennsylvania. 352 days after the first out-of-service order declared this company unfit to operate. The trucks had been ordered off the road.

The injuries

The 86 injuries in DMG’s fed data reflect crashes on public roads that were serious enough to require a police report. They do not count what happened inside GoldCoast’s yards, on its loading docks, in its warehouse, on the terminal property. Those injuries live in a different database, in a different state agency, in a courthouse system most trucking people never look at.

The Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission CompFile portal shows seven cases filed against DMG Consulting & Development Inc. d/b/a GoldCoast Logistics Group, with accident dates spanning March 25, 2021, through January 3, 2024. Not one of these cases generated a single news story. Not one of these workers or their families had ever been named in coverage of this company until this investigation.

Five of the seven cases used a Petition for Immediate Hearing Under Section 19(b)/8(a), Death, Permanent Total Benefits. Under Illinois law, 820 ILCS 305, a 19(b) petition is an emergency escalation mechanism, the legal tool an injured worker files when an employer or its insurer is refusing or delaying legally required benefits. The death and permanent total disability designation means the worker or their representative alleged either a work-related fatality with dependents claiming death benefits, or injuries so catastrophic the worker may never work again.

Five workers at the same employer. Five emergency petitions. Five separate allegations that DMG Consulting failed to pay what it was legally owed. The pattern is the finding.

Look at two of the accident dates: Darryl Glass, April 14, 2022. Michael Hayes, April 10, 2022. Four days apart at the same employer, both generating death or permanent total disability petitions, neither generating a single news story, neither appearing in the FMCSA crash record with an exact date match, which indicates both injuries likely occurred off public roads, inside GoldCoast’s own operations. April 2022 was also the peak of the company’s worst safety year on record. All of it is happening in the same month. None of it is visible to the public.

Then there is the post-shutdown injury. FMCSA declared DMG unfit to operate on August 27, 2023. That order has never been rescinded. On January 3, 2024, 129 days later, a worker named Rachel Goodrich was injured at a GoldCoast facility. The real human cost of this operation, counting both databases, is larger than any single public source shows.

Rocky Chhean: the dead driver who became president

On October 8, 2019, a GoldCoast Logistics driver named Chheanrem Chhean, known to everyone in his life as Rocky, lost control of his truck on Interstate 81 in Shenandoah County, Virginia. He struck a guardrail, then an embankment, then a bridge pillar. He was 45 years old. He died at the scene. He was working. The truck wore a Gold Coast plate and DOT number 2190975 on the cab.

Illinois law mandates workers’ compensation coverage for all employees. When a worker dies on the job, the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act requires death benefits paid to surviving dependents, calculated at 25 times the worker’s average weekly wage, plus burial expenses of up to $8,000. If Sprinceana’s company carried the legally required coverage, Rocky’s family should have received that burial benefit automatically.

Instead, his daughter-in-law, Solida Vaun, opened a GoFundMe the next day. The goal was $10,000 to cover funeral expenses. The family raised $4,922 and closed the page short. A man who spent his working life driving for Dragos Sprinceana was buried with money raised in $25 increments from 86 strangers online. As of March 11, 2026, the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission and Transguard Insurance Company of America advised that no workers’ comp death claim had ever been filed for Chhean under policy TWC035497301. OSHA has no death or injury filing for either company.

That would be damning enough for a criminal indictment. What happened next is worse.

On March 21, 2025, five years and five months after Rocky died in one of Sprinceana’s trucks, someone filed Illinois Form BCA 5.10/5.20 with the Illinois Secretary of State. The form changed the registered agent for DMG Consulting & Development Inc. from Dragos Sprinceana to Chheanrem Chhean. The address listed was 1425 Madeline Lane, Elgin, Illinois, the terminal property Sprinceana had sold in September 2023 and no longer controlled. The signature line reads “CHHEANREM CHHEAN, PRESIDENT.” The document was filed under penalties of perjury. Chhean died in October 2019. He did not file that form.

Then, on December 23, 2025, the annual report was filed, listing Dragos Sprinceana as president in Wellington, Florida; Aaron Gentry as secretary in Wellington; and Sprinceana as director in Boca Raton. Nobody corrected the registered agent. Rocky Chhean is still listed in the Illinois Secretary of State’s active corporate records.

A registered agent is the person who receives legal process on behalf of a company. Lawsuits. Subpoenas. Regulatory notices. If you cannot serve the registered agent because he died in 2019 and his listed address is a building the company sold, you cannot serve the company. As of this writing, DMG Consulting & Development, the entity that employed Rocky Chhean and owes $889,630 to the federal government, is structured so that process service is routed through a dead man at an address that no longer belongs to it. Six years, three months, and change after Rocky died on the side of I-81, his name is still working for the company whose truck he was driving when he died. Not as a clerical error that slipped through. Someone put him there. Not as a driver but at the corporate level.

Marian Visan, the new guy

Chhean is not the only driver who became a company executive on the Gold Coast paperwork.

Marian Visan does not appear in any press release, industry profile, or public-facing material associated with the GoldCoast brand. On paper, he is the sole officer, sole director, and registered agent of Goldcoast Carriers Inc., DOT 3014047, a federally authorized carrier that reported 325 power units and 330 drivers to the federal government before relocating from Illinois to Arizona.

When DuPage County Sheriff’s deputies went to his home in Lombard in August 2024 to serve legal process on behalf of a creditor, a roommate told them Visan was an over-the-road truck driver who would not be back for two weeks. His sister, at the same address, accepted service on another occasion. A man described by his own roommate as a working truck driver was simultaneously listed as president, secretary, and registered agent of a 325-truck carrier. When process servers came looking on behalf of that carrier’s creditors, they found a virtual office that turned away service and a suburban house where the people who answered the door said he was out on the road. Oddly enough, Visan is also the listed official for Dreaman Inc. of Illinois, via Arizona, and for Rocko Transport of California.

Marian Visan actually drives trucks. That is the Gold Coast way.

Two out-of-service orders, still in effect

FMCSA shows two distinct federal out-of-service orders against DMG, neither of which has a rescission date on record. That means both remain in effect today. The company is not legally authorized to operate commercial motor vehicles in interstate commerce. Full stop.

The first order came on August 27, 2023, following a compliance review in which the FMCSA formally determined that DMG’s safety management practices were so deficient that the company was declared unfit. An Unsatisfactory rating is the nuclear option of federal motor carrier safety enforcement, next to imminent hazard, reserved for carriers with documented evidence that they cannot safely manage their operations. The second came September 12, 2023, an independent order triggered by a 90-day failure to pay the fines. After being told they were unfit, DMG still did not pay. The MC authority had already been canceled on March 22, 2023.

Here is what that means in practical terms. Any shipper that tendered freight to DMG after those dates, any broker that dispatched loads to them, any driver that operated under their authority, all of it was illegal. The trucks should not have been rolling. The loads should not have been moving. And yet the crash records in FMCSA show incidents continuing through 2024.