The Gold Coast files, part two. 15 civil cases, five states, and the real “Catch Me If You Can.”
The federal government declared Gold Coast unfit to operate in August 2023. Three DOT numbers later, the same trucks are still pulling freight, financed by the same trust, defended by the same silence
Read part one if you have not. This is a Brian Beckom case out of Texas for the crash, and that's where the videos come from, but there are countless other attorneys working on Dragos-related matters across the country, from unpaid civil debt to wage and worker claims and injuries. Nick Kreitman in Chicago is also one of those.
If you have, the short version. On April 15, 2023, a truck operating under DMG Consulting and Development Inc., d/b/a Goldcoast Logistics Group, DOT 2190975, killed Brandon Rogers on Interstate 10 in Beaumont, Texas. Seventeen people were hurt or killed. The company belonged to Dragos Sprinceana. Its registered agent was Rocky Chhean, a company driver who died in a Gold Coast truck in 2019 and whose name stayed on the corporate paperwork for years afterward. FMCSA hit DMG with 150 crashes, 10 fatalities, and $889,630 in fines it never paid. On August 27, 2023, the agency declared the carrier unfit and removed it from service. On September 12, 2023, it did so again for nonpayment. Neither order has ever been rescinded. Marian Visan, a man who actually drives trucks, was installed as president of what came next. This is what came next.
The chameleon chain
After the August 2023 revocation, the trucks kept rolling. The chameleon chain is confirmed by FMCSA records and state corporate filings, and it runs as follows.
DMG Consulting and Development Inc., d/b/a Goldcoast Logistics Group, DOT 2190975, became Freight Transportation Group Inc., d/b/a FTGI, DOT 3008326, initially registered at 1801 Ruby Drive in Pingree Grove, Illinois, a residential subdivision address in Kane County. Then came Goldcoast Carriers Inc., DOT 3014047, with Visan as nominal president, at 350 S. Northwest Highway, Suite 300, in Park Ridge, an address where an office manager told a process server in 2024 that the company no longer accepts service. Same trucks. Same VINs. Same plates. Different DOT numbers. Still pulling freight.
The FTGI paper trail shows how deliberate this was. From its incorporation in April 2017 through at least April 2025, Freight Transportation Group Inc., Illinois file number 71256391, listed Anderson Taborda as president, secretary, and sole director at 2540 Carlisle Lane in Hampshire, Illinois, roughly 12 miles from Sprinceana’s former Elgin terminal. Alexandru Sirbu, identified on LinkedIn as Director of Operations at GoldCoast Carriers, served as registered agent at that same address. Sprinceana’s name appeared nowhere in the corporate records. Yet throughout that period, trucks bearing GoldCoast branding and pulling GoldCoast-marked equipment operated under FTGI’s active DOT authority. In a June 2025 media profile, Sprinceana publicly claimed Freight Transportation Group as one of his current transportation businesses. Then, on February 12, 2026, he signed an Illinois BCA-4.15/4.20 form as CEO of Freight Transportation Group Inc., formally adopting the trade name FTGI and placing his name on a corporation he had publicly claimed to operate for at least 8 months, even as it remained legally registered to another man.
The FMCSA record for FTGI at the time of that reporting: no federal insurance filing, operating authority status not authorized, and a 46.2 percent vehicle out-of-service rate over 24 months, more than double the national average of 22.26 percent. Genlogs sensor data showed FTGI trucks without authority still hauling supposedly sold Gold Coast trailers as recently as this year. The same trailers under civil judgment for non-payment.
The second claimed powerhouse, Cargo 247 Inc., DOT 4304928, was registered as a freight broker, not a carrier, with zero power units, zero drivers, no inspection history, and an address of record at a residential apartment at 714 Gardens Drive in Pompano Beach, Florida. Its broker bond, number 101354706 with Merchants Bonding Company, was canceled on April 10, 2026. Listed under Mrs. Sprinciana, it is now closed. Both entities filed their MCS-150 forms on the same date, October 3, 2024, a same-day coordination pattern familiar to anyone who has reviewed the DMG corporate network. BOLT ELD, which Sprinceana described as a nationwide hours-of-service compliance app he owns, does appear on FMCSA’s registered ELD list under ID BLT416, operated by Bolt ELD LLC. The Wyoming corporate filing shows the company was formed on July 15, 2024, roughly 10 months after his carriers were shut down, at 1309 Coffeen Avenue in Sheridan, a commercial registered-agent address used by entities with no physical presence in Wyoming, and organized by a man named Andrew Pierce. Sprinceana’s name appears nowhere in the filing. Bolt was white-labeled but runs on a RingCentral backend and was built by a group of ELD manufacturers, most of whom have since closed.
Then there is the Pony Express. Ioan Ursu was the Gold Coast’s chief operating officer for seven years. He donated to Sprinceana’s Romanian United Fund, the nonprofit Sprinceana created for his self-described diplomatic work on behalf of the Romanian government. Ursu is now listed as CEO of Pony Express Group in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. A Kenworth T680, unit 92057, photographed by the Genlogs network, now carries Pony Express Group. That truck is traceable by VIN through asset locator records to vehicles involved in Gold Coast crashes before the revocation. Two crashes involving Gold Coast equipment occurred after the August 2023 revocation, and the trucks involved were transferred to Pony Express. The transfer is documented through VIN matching.
What Ursu and Pony Express represent. An Illinois UCC filing dated July 13, 2018, lists Pony Express Inc. at 638 N. Walnut Lane in Schaumburg, secured by VOLUNTAS 218 TRUST at 9300 Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park, Kansas. That is the same financial trust vehicle simultaneously holding liens against Gold Coast and the Sprinceana family. Five years before the revocation, Ursu and Sprinceana’s Gold Coast were already sharing the same financial infrastructure. That is documented coordination predating the shutdown by half a decade, not a former employee striking out on his own.
Follow the money
The financial architecture behind the Gold Coast network is documented in UCC filings across Illinois, Arizona, and Florida, revealing a structure that goes well beyond that of a single carrier with a bad safety record.
Starting in April 2017, a trust vehicle called NOTARIUS 117 TRUST, registered at 9300 Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park, Kansas, filed a UCC lien against Dragos Sprinceana personally. That Overland Park address is Shamrock Trading Corporation, one of the largest freight factoring companies in the United States, operating under the brand RTS Financial. Shamrock creates special-purpose trust vehicles to hold lien positions against carrier clients, and four of them appear in the Sprinceana records: NOTARIUS 117 TRUST from 2017, VOLUNTAS 218 TRUST from 2018, MOTION 120 TRUST from 2020, and QUANTUM 222 TRUST from 2022. All four at 9300 Metcalf. All four holding security interests against Sprinceana, his wife Gabriela, his sister Gherghina, Marian Visan personally, and every carrier entity in the network: DMG Consulting, Goldcoast Carriers, GCG Logistics, United Global Freight, Goldcoast Expediting, Goldcoast Global Inc., Goldcoast Brokerage, and Cargo 24 Inc. RTS Financial was factoring Goldcoast’s freight invoices from 2017 forward, advancing cash against Gold Coast freight bills while the carrier accumulated fatal crashes, unpaid federal fines, and the shell structure that courts in five states are now trying to pierce.
The Compass Truck Rental sticker on that Pony Express Kenworth brings in the final piece. Compass Funding Solutions LLC is a freight factoring company at 115 55th Street in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, the factoring division of Compass Holding LLC, founded in 1997 by Radovan Roy Dobrasinovic. Compass Holding reports $73 million in annual revenue and provides truck sales, truck rentals, factoring, insurance, and fuel programs, essentially everything a new carrier needs to operate. The Arizona and Illinois UCC records show Compass took assignment of the VOLUNTAS 218 TRUST lien position in February 2024, six months after Gold Coast’s federal authority was revoked, and maintained the secured creditor relationship across the entire network and against Sprinceana and Visan personally. Goldcoast Carriers filed a new Compass-backed UCC on February 11, 2025, 18 months after the OOS. The factoring infrastructure that financed the revoked network continued operating after the trucks were ordered off the road. Compass Attorneys acknowledged that they got the short end of the stick working with Dragos, and he owes them money too. This is a vendor Dragos used to facilitate his financial needs and yet another vendor just trying to get what they’re owed.
One more UCC filing belongs in the accounting. On January 25, 2023, in the same week as a burst of UCC activity across multiple states, mapping precisely to when civil lawsuits were closing in and federal enforcement pressure was building toward revocation, Dragos Sprinceana filed a UCC lien against himself. He is simultaneously the debtor and the secured party, at two different addresses. By perfecting a first-priority lien against his own assets, he placed a prior encumbrance on them ahead of any judgment creditor. Any creditor who tries to reach his assets finds someone already has first claim. That someone is him.
The asset protection picture is consistent everywhere you look. A July 2025 court order by Judge Reid P. Scott documented how Sprinceana attempted to transfer a Rolls-Royce into his wife’s name to evade creditors. Centennial Bank sued him in the Southern District of Florida in March 2025, naming him personally, DMG, and GCYC Sirena 88 LLC, the yacht entity. A bank is suing him over a superyacht while his trucking creditors cannot find him for service of process. Bank Capital Service documented 13 attempts to serve DMG and 11 attempts to serve Sprinceana personally, all unsuccessful, and reported that after his wife was finally served, the defendants refused process servers access to their residences and offices. A third case was closed because Sprinceana could not be located for service for 120 consecutive days.
He is at Mar-a-Lago all the time. His home address in Boca Raton is not difficult to find.
The courthouse tour: litigation in five states
Civil litigation against Sprinceana and his entities reads like a national tour of wronged parties. Inland PacLease v. DMG in the District of New Mexico, an equipment leasing case in which the plaintiff spent months attempting service through private investigators and process servers before securing court-approved alternative service. Palmer Leasing v. DMG in Marion Superior Court, Indiana, another equipment lease dispute naming multiple affiliated entities. Proventure Capital v. DMG in Miami-Dade, a creditor action in the state where Sprinceana actually lives, naming him personally. Centennial Bank v. My Olympus in the Southern District of Florida, the case that brought the yacht entity to light. Mr. Advance v. DMG in New York, a merchant cash advance action with a $2.7 million personal guarantee on Dragos himself. The Fresno County, California, personal injury case in which the court denied summary judgment and sent the alter ego and undercapitalization theories to trial. Leaf Capital Funding in the Northern District of Illinois, final default judgment on equipment finance. Transport Enterprise Leasing in Cook County. Constellation NewEnergy in the Northern District of Illinois, unpaid utilities. Equify Financial, more equipment finance debt. Scott v. DMG and Thompson v. DMG, both in the Northern District of Illinois, both involved unpaid workers. Sprinceana’s own offensive filing, a Miami-Dade suit against Jacob Arabo, “Jacob the Jeweler,” founder of Jacob & Co. and a man who previously served two and a half years in federal prison for money laundering tied to the Black Mafia Family drug organization, over two unique watches Sprinceana says Arabo took and never paid for.
Fifteen active civil cases across five states at the time of our reporting. The alter ego argument at the center of the California case rests on undercapitalization, the idea that a corporation was deliberately structured too thin on assets to pay its debts so the owner could walk away while victims and creditors hold the bag. Courts take a dim view of that when the evidence supports it. Here, plaintiffs produced evidence of exactly that.
There is also the broker side. DMG operated as a licensed freight broker and ended up on the industry’s bad-broker lists. Trans Recovery Solutions posted a public collection notice for unpaid freight charges. Baxter Bailey & Associates, the oldest trucking collection agency in the industry, lists DMG in its debtor database. Brokers that pocket the shipper’s money and never remit to the carrier are running freight theft by corporate structure, and small carriers are the ones left underwater.
The broker in Moldova and the family behind it
Now go back to Beaumont and look harder at the broker.
ArcherHub is incorporated in Colorado and presents publicly as a Denver-based digital freight broker with a backup fleet of 50 tractors. ArcherHub Moldova is listed on rabota.md and delucru.md, the two primary employment portals in the Republic of Moldova, as an employer with more than 200 employees in Chisinau. The office phone carries a plus-373 Moldovan country code. The office email is archerhub.office@gmail.com, a Gmail address distinct from the US-facing corporate email. Active postings on those boards include Freight Broker Agent, Account Manager, Operations Lead for the US Market, and After Hours Dispatcher, all working the American freight market from Chisinau. The company is incorporated in the United States while maintaining its labor base in a country where labor costs a fraction of what it does in Denver.
Founder and CEO Nick Darmanchev is not the only member of his family in the FMCSA system. Nikolay Darmanchev holds DOT 1057164 and operates a one-truck operation in Warrington, Pennsylvania. Mariya Darmancheva holds DOT 1188803 at 6075 Standard View Drive in Duluth, Georgia, the same address as CDI Logistics LLC, DOT 1197492, operating under Nikolay Darmanchev and placed under a federal out-of-service order on September 7, 2011, with an Unsatisfactory rating. The family’s carrier history includes a prior federal OOS dating back to before ArcherHub’s 2020 rebranding as Archer Atlantic Global Logistics. The current carrier arm, HickoryTranz LLC, DOT 3033777, registered to Nick Darmanchev in Asheville, North Carolina, was flagged with an authority transfer signal, an old MC paired with a new DOT showing a six-year gap between eras, consistent with purchased or transferred authority rather than a company built from scratch. A third family member, Maksim Darmanchev, appears in FMCSA records with two active DOT numbers at two different Asheville-area addresses, the same phone number on both, and the same Berkley Casualty insurance on both.
The broker who selected the carrier that killed Brandon Rogers was dispatching from a 200-plus-person office in Chisinau, on behalf of a family that has been moving through federal carrier registrations across multiple states for nearly two decades. The vetting that should have surfaced what was sitting in SAFER on DOT 2190975 was that office’s responsibility. The question in the Beckcom litigation is not whether Gold Coast was legally permitted to operate on April 15, 2023. It is what ArcherHub’s carrier file on DOT 2190975 showed when the dispatch decision was made, and whether any reasonable carrier qualification standard would have approved that truck for an Anheuser-Busch load given what was already publicly documented.
The insurer with skin in the game
One institutional player in this story has not been asked to answer for its role, and that is the insurance company covering Gold Coast when Brandon Rogers was killed.
Ace American Insurance Company was the insurer of record for DMG at the time of the April 15, 2023, crash. Pull Ace American up in FMCSA insurance data, and the book of business is not clean. As of March 31, 2026: 3,542 carriers insured; 354,755 total crashes across the portfolio; 10,954 fatal crashes; 204,327 injuries; and an average of 100.16 crashes per carrier. 49% of the carriers in Ace American’s book carry a high- or critical-risk concentration flag.
This is not the first time Ace entities have appeared in this context. Ace Property and Casualty, a related entity in the Chubb family, insured AJ Partners LLC, part of the Sam Express chameleon network involved in the February 3, 2026, Indiana crash that killed four Amish men, including a father and his two sons. And as documented in our March 24, 2026, reporting on the insurance-safety gap, no federal or state law requires an insurer to evaluate a motor carrier’s safety fitness before binding a commercial trucking policy. Every for-hire interstate carrier must carry minimum liability coverage. How that coverage gets bound runs the full spectrum, from rigorous underwriting with safety audits to instant-issue platforms where a policy binds without a single question about crash history. By the time Gold Coast hauled that Ghost Energy load, it had already settled a $791,640 federal fine, already produced a prior out-of-service event, and was already accumulating the record that would reach 150 crashes and 10 deaths. Ace American was at risk the whole time. The policy was there. The premium was paid. The safety record that should have prompted underwriting intervention or non-renewal was publicly available information.
The insurance industry, like the brokerage industry, operates on the assumption that minimum legal coverage equals adequate safety screening. It does not. It never has. The data now exists at a national scale to prove it.
The Mar-a-Lago years
While federal regulators documented all of the above, Sprinceana was not lying low. He was going to Washington. He was going to Bucharest. He was going to Mar-a-Lago. And he was not registering any of it with the federal government.
Federal campaign records show Sprinceana and his wife, Gabriela, who is listed in FEC filings as GoldCoast’s Safety Manager, donated a combined $134,992 to candidates, party committees, and PACs between 2020 and 2024. He personally donated $91,821 of that while owing nearly a million dollars in unpaid federal safety fines. The RNC received $35,500. Matt Gaetz received $9,500, including a $2,800 contribution on July 29, 2020, four days after Gaetz headlined a private fundraiser at the Sprinceana home in Boca Raton. The most revealing line items involve Michael Waltz. Dragos and Gabriela together directed more than $20,000 to Waltz’s campaign and his Warrior Diplomat PAC, including same-day coordinated contributions in March 2022 and again in April 2023. Those April 2023 donations were made while Sprinceana was already in active default on $889,630 in federal fines. The government could not collect. Carriers could not collect. Waltz’s PAC could. Eighteen months later, Waltz was named National Security Advisor.
The access timeline, drawn from Sprinceana’s own social media, his published biography, and Romanian press: Election night, November 2024, he was part of the “close circle team” celebrating inside Mar-a-Lago, not watching from afar. January 13, 2025, seven days before the inauguration, he met with Waltz at Mar-a-Lago to discuss Romania’s relationship with the incoming administration, per his own X account. February 13, 2025, he attended a veterans’ gala at the club hosted by General Michael Flynn. On April 3, 2025, he hosted the “Making America Clean Again” event at Mar-a-Lago, with approximately 700 guests, including Trump, per Romanian press and the event promoter. In April 2025, the baptism of his daughter Anais at Mar-a-Lago was described as a full Romanian-style party with accordion music and guests from Constanta, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump reported to be among those present. And on November 20, 2025, he posted to his verified Instagram account, 4,812 likes and 1,018 shares, describing dining at Mar-a-Lago alongside United States Secret Service Director Sean Curran and then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, writing that conversations centered on national security and the protection of the American people.
The head of the Secret Service and the sitting Homeland Security secretary, at dinner with a man who owes nearly $900,000 in unpaid federal safety fines, whose company killed ten people on American roads, whose authority was canceled, whose safety rating is Unsatisfactory, and who carried two active federal out-of-service orders with no rescission date. That doesn’t include all the people and businesses he hasn’t paid. His newest judgment is a wage claim in IL, where he must pay nearly $100,000 in unpaid wages for time worked. Either the people responsible for screening access to that room knew exactly who he was, or they had no idea, and he played them like everyone else. The question is worth asking. At the end of the day, the money that bought his way into that room was money earned from stacked bodies and unpaid vendors, drivers, and employees.
By his own public statements, Sprinceana was acting as an envoy to the Trump administration on behalf of the Romanian government, serving as Prime Minister Ciolacu’s explicit envoy to Trump’s inner circle, and attending the Romanian presidential election as an embedded member of a U.S. government delegation. There is no FARA registration on file for any of it. Not for him personally. Not for United Strategies of America, the Florida nonprofit he incorporated on June 13, 2022, at 13175 Chadwick Court, Suite 35, in Wellington, the same mailbox address he later assigned as DMG’s principal address. Not for DMG Consulting. The FARA registry is public and searchable. The absence of a filing is a documented legal fact.
The nonprofit’s own paper trail completes the picture. On May 16, 2025, weeks after Prime Minister Ciolacu publicly distanced himself from Sprinceana following a live incident on Romanian television, Sprinceana filed an amended annual report that removed his own name from United Strategies of America entirely. The new president and registered agent of record became Aaron Gentry. Gentry is the secretary of DMG Consulting & Development, the same Illinois corporation where a dead man serves as registered agent, and his address on every filing is the same Wellington mailbox, same suite number, as Sprinceana’s. On March 4, 2026, two formal letters were transmitted to Romanian President Nicusor Dan at Cotroceni Palace, one signed by Sprinceana as a “political advisor within the organization United Strategies of America,” one signed by Gentry as an “independent political observer,” both describing a 2025 meeting with AUR party leader George Simion and both invoking the authority of the Federal Election Commission. The problem: the delegation’s FEC credential, former commissioner Trey Trainor, had resigned from the FEC on October 3, 2025, and had been a private citizen for five months when those letters were written and transmitted to the sitting head of state of a NATO ally.
A man whose company killed ten people created a nonprofit as institutional cover, embedded himself in a U.S. government delegation to Romania, scrubbed his name off the nonprofit when the relationship soured, installed his own corporate officer as its nominal head, and then used the nonprofit’s name and a lapsed federal credential to transmit formal accusations to a foreign president. He was not just accessing power. He was purchasing it, and he appears to have used it, unregistered, on behalf of a foreign government.
Where it all stands in July 2026
Three years and 189 days of documented federal warning signs separated Rocky Chhean’s death on October 8, 2019, from Brandon Rogers’ death on April 15, 2023. In between, the first enforcement case was opened, the first fine was settled for $791,640, the crash count kept climbing, and the trucks kept moving.
Today, the ledger reads like this. The fines remain unpaid, with a FOIA request pending to establish what FMCSA has actually collected. Both out-of-service orders remain in effect with no rescission date. DMG’s registered agent remains a man who died in 2019, at an address the company sold in a $20.5 million sale-leaseback fifteen days after the first OOS order. The successor fleet has run through FTGI, Goldcoast Carriers, and Pony Express, on the same VINs, with Goldcoast Carriers itself picking up its own federal out-of-service order in August 2025 and relocating to Arizona under Visan. The Fresno alter ego case proceeds to trial. The Beaumont case, with its 17 plaintiffs, moves toward trial before Attorney Brian Beckcom, while Nick Kreitzman and an army of attorneys for other civil plaintiffs drill down to get blood out of a Romanian gypsy turnip. Sprinceana has not been charged with fraud, and no court has found him guilty of a scheme to defraud anyone. What the public record documents is a pattern of access, image construction, civil judgments, and unpaid obligations that raises serious questions, and a man who cannot be found by 24 process servers but can be found at Mar-a-Lago.
The Trump administration has arguably been more active on trucking safety, fraud, and bad-actor foreign operators than any administration in history. Secretary Duffy has been active, not just vocal. FMCSA Administrator Barrs has moved on bad actors, often visiting and immediately closing them. That enforcement record speaks for itself. So does the record of a man who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting close to the people running it. Chameleon carriers do not register as Republicans or Democrats. Fraud does not discriminate, and bad actors get close to powerful people for no other reason than perceived indirect protection. The people seeking that access deserve scrutiny regardless of political affiliation.
What this case demands of you
If you are a shipper, a broker, an insurer, or a litigator, here is what the Gold Coast record proves, in operational terms.
An Unsatisfactory safety rating is free, public information on FMCSA’s SAFER website. Any broker that tendered freight to DMG after August 27, 2023, knew, or should have known, it was dealing with a federally declared unfit carrier. Corporate entity proliferation is a deliberate tactic, and every additional entity between a beneficial owner and a plaintiff makes a judgment harder to collect. Virtual office addresses are a red flag that should immediately elevate scrutiny in any due diligence process, because when a carrier’s registered address is an executive suite where the principal is never present, that is not an accident. Same-day MCS-150 filings across supposedly unrelated entities are a signal of coordination. Plate and VIN continuity across DOT numbers is how you catch a chameleon in the act. The alter ego doctrine exists for exactly this scenario, and courts can and do pierce corporate veils when an owner uses an undercapitalized entity to evade personal responsibility for safety failures. Minimum insurance coverage is not a safety screening, no matter how much the industry wants to believe otherwise.
None of that infrastructure helped Brandon Rogers. He drove through it at the wrong moment on the wrong highway on April 15, 2023. Jennifer Rogers is raising three kids. The Beaumont court has 17 plaintiffs. Rocky Chhean’s family buried him with money from GoFundMe while his name went on working for the company that employed him. The trucks are still rolling.
The next time someone asks why carrier vetting matters, why underwriters need intelligence tools, why litigation teams need FMCSA enforcement records before they take a trucking case, you show them this story.