You Paid $6,500 and Got a CDL. No Expereince Required.
A New Orleans restaurant owner allegedly bribed his way through every single checkpoint in the federal CDL process. The people who were supposed to stop him were the ones cashing the checks.
A Louisiana bribery ring didn’t crack the CDL system. It walked right through the front door. A restaurant owner, two state motor vehicle employees, two federally certified testing operators, and a phony score sheet maker stand indicted for selling Class A commercial driver’s licenses to people who never sat behind the wheel in a test setting, never completed a day of training, and couldn’t pass the written exam without Googling the answers. This is what the self-attestation economy looks like when it fully collapses.
So you want to buy yourself a Class A CDL in Louisiana?
You walk into a restaurant. You hand over $6,500 in cash. You give the man behind the counter your name and some basic information. You go home. A few weeks later, according to federal prosecutors, you have a valid Class A Commercial Driver’s License issued by the State of Louisiana, recorded in federal databases as having passed a written knowledge test, completed entry-level driver training, and passed a skills examination. You have done none of those things. Not one.
That is what the indictment handed down on August 28, 2025, in the Eastern District of Louisiana describes. And the most disturbing part of the whole thing isn’t that someone tried it. It’s that it worked, and it worked because the people operating every single checkpoint in the CDL process were on the payroll.
Mahmoud Alhattab, a New Orleans restaurant owner, sits at the center of the federal indictment announced by Acting U.S. Attorney Michael M. Simpson. Prosecutors allege that, starting no later than August 2020 and continuing through February 2024, Alhattab built a bribery network that touched every federally mandated step of the CDL qualification process. Knowledge testing. Entry-level driver training. Skills testing. Each one had a price. Each one allegedly had someone willing to take that price. All six defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Here is how the machine allegedly worked.
Step One: The Written Test
Before you can get a commercial learner’s permit in Louisiana, you have to pass a written knowledge test at an Office of Motor Vehicles location. The test covers vehicle safety systems, emergency procedures, extreme driving conditions, and the kind of foundational knowledge that separates a trained commercial driver from someone who has never been within arm’s reach of an air brake.
Alhattab allegedly took an applicant’s information and handed it to two OMV employees at the Donaldsonville office, Jenay Davis and Shakira Millien. The two state employees are accused of sitting down at a government computer and taking the knowledge test on behalf of the applicant. According to the indictment, Davis and Millien were not confident enough in their own knowledge of commercial vehicle operation to answer the questions from memory. They reportedly performed internet searches to find the correct answers.
The government employees administering the CDL knowledge test were Googling answers for applicants who were not even in the room.
Davis and Millien received a portion of whatever Alhattab collected from the applicant. The applicant walked away with a commercial learner’s permit that they had not earned.
Step Two: Entry-Level Driver Training
Federal law requires most CDL applicants to complete entry-level driver training before they can take the skills test. The training is supposed to include classroom instruction and supervised time operating a commercial vehicle on a public road. It exists because operating an 80,000-pound truck is not intuitive, and because the consequences of getting it wrong at highway speed are measured in human lives.
Alhattab allegedly bribed Christopher Bryan Burns, who owned a truck driver training company, and Jonathan Parsons, who worked for Burns. According to prosecutors, Burns and Parsons reported in the FMCSA’s Commercial Skills Test Information Management System (CSTIMS) that applicants had successfully completed entry-level driver training. The applicants had not trained. Not a classroom hour. Not a minute behind the wheel. The federal database said otherwise because someone typed it in and got paid to do so.
Step Three: The Skills Test
The CDL skills test is where it all gets real. You demonstrate a proper pre-trip inspection. You show basic vehicle control. You perform safety-related maneuvers. It is the final gate between an untrained person and a legal right to operate a commercial vehicle on public roads.
Burns and Parsons were not just trainers. They were also state-certified CDL skills test examiners. That dual role, trainer and examiner, is the structural conflict of interest I have been writing about for years, and here it is in federal court documents doing exactly what that conflict enables. According to the indictment, Burns and Parsons falsely reported to the State of Louisiana that applicants had passed the skills test. The applicants had not taken it.
On some occasions, Parsons allegedly brought in additional help. Marline Roberts, another certified skills test examiner, is accused of creating phony score sheets to back up the fraudulent reports already entered into the system. Prosecutors say Parsons paid Roberts $400 per false score sheet. Roberts worked for Burns’ company. The paperwork looked right because the people responsible for the paperwork were the ones falsifying it.
The result was a Class A CDL, issued by the State of Louisiana, recorded in federal databases as legitimate, held by someone who had demonstrated zero competency at any stage of the process.
What We Know and What We Don’t
The indictment names three individuals, identified only as Individual A, B, and C, as having received CDLs through this scheme. No specific total count of fraudulently issued licenses has been publicly disclosed. When Transport Topics pressed the U.S. Attorney’s office for that number, the spokesperson’s response was direct: no additional information beyond the filed indictment.
That silence is its own answer. When prosecutors know the number and choose not to say it, the number is usually worse than the indictment implies.
No confirmed crashes or fatalities tied to licenses obtained through this specific network have been publicly identified as of this writing. That absence of confirmed harm is not comfort. It is a question that has not yet been fully answered. Three people identified only by letters of the alphabet received Class A CDLs through this scheme and got behind the wheel of commercial vehicles. Where they drove, what they hauled, and what the inspection record attached to their licenses looks like are all private. The investigation is ongoing. A pretrial conference was scheduled for February 12, 2026. The case is working its way through the Eastern District of Louisiana with no guilty pleas announced as of publication.
All six defendants face conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, punishable by up to 20 years. Alhattab and Parsons face additional wire fraud counts on top of that. Alhattab, Millien, and Parsons each face four counts of bribery involving federally funded programs, each punishable by up to 10 years. Burns, Davis, and Roberts each face one bribery count. The fines run up to $250,000 per count. The math on potential exposure for the primary defendants is staggering.
This Is What the Third-Party Examiner Problem Looks Like
I need to stop here because this case is not just a Louisiana story. It is the inevitable outcome of a structural design flaw that exists in every state in this country.
When FMCSA implemented the Entry-Level Driver Training regulations in February 2022, the agency built a system that allowed private entities to self-certify as training providers and list themselves on the Training Provider Registry with minimal verification. Those same entities, in states that permit it, can also be certified as third-party skills test examiners. One company. One set of employees. They train you and they test you. The incentive to pass everyone who walks through the door is built directly into the business model. Pass rates drive referrals. Referrals drive revenue. The examiner who maintains standards loses business to the examiner who doesn’t.
Louisiana law permitted exactly that arrangement. The same people who were supposed to train these applicants were certified to administer the final exam. When Alhattab came looking for someone to close the loop, Burns and Parsons were structurally positioned to do it. They controlled both the training record and the test result. All they had to do was type.
FMCSA removed nearly 3,000 providers from the Training Provider Registry in December 2024, in a mass purge the agency had been building toward for years. The Louisiana scheme ran from August 2020 through February 2024, meaning it operated for most of its lifespan before that purge. Whether Burns’ training operation was among the removed providers has not been publicly confirmed.
The Washington State case involving Skyline CDL School ran a similar model. Gold envelopes with $520 to $530 in cash per student were delivered to an independent examiner named Jason Hodson. When investigators retested 74 drivers Hodson certified, 80 percent of them failed. The examiner in New York’s 2013 bust handed applicants a coded pencil with answers to the audio test inscribed on the sides in dots and dashes. California’s ongoing non-domiciled CDL audit found that 25 of every 145 reviewed licenses were improperly issued. These are not isolated incidents. They are the same system producing the same outcome in different states, each with a different name attached.
The Self-Attestation Chain in Full Collapse
What makes the Louisiana case particularly instructive is the completeness of the fraud. Most CDL schemes crack one checkpoint. A bribed examiner here. A ghost training school there. The Louisiana network cracked all three simultaneously, revealing that the three checkpoints in the CDL process are not independent of each other. They rely on the same underlying assumption that the people operating them are honest. When that assumption fails at the OMV, at the training provider, and at the testing examiner simultaneously, there is nothing left. The system has no redundancy. It has no cross-check. It has no biometric tie to the applicant that would allow anyone to verify that the person who showed up for training is the same person whose results were entered into CSTIMS.
Every step in the CDL process is either self-attested or delegated-attested. The applicant attests they are who they say they are. The trainer attests that the applicant completed training. The examiner attests that the applicant passed the test. The OMV employee attests that the test was administered. The federal database records what it is told. Nobody in the chain is independently verifying anything against a biometric anchor that cannot be faked, purchased, or Googled.
A restaurant owner in New Orleans figured that out. He built a business around it. According to prosecutors, he charged $6,500 a head to walk someone through every checkpoint without touching a single one of them. That’s not a sophisticated criminal enterprise. That’s a man who read the manual and found every place where the system trusted people to do the right thing and decided to exploit every single one of those places.
The FBI and DOT OIG caught it, but only through a criminal investigation, not through a system designed to prevent it. The system itself never flagged a thing.
There are drivers on the road right now holding Class A CDLs they did not earn, issued by state agencies that were defrauded, recorded in federal databases that were falsified, operating commercial vehicles that require genuine skill and training to handle safely. Some of them are in Louisiana. Some of them are likely in states we haven’t investigated yet.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. A CDL is supposed to mean something. It is supposed to mean that the person holding it sat through the training, demonstrated the knowledge, proved the skills, and earned the right to operate the most unforgiving piece of equipment on the American highway system. When you can buy one for $6,500 cash at a restaurant, it doesn’t mean any of that. It means you knew the right person and had the money.
The people who died on American highways because of unqualified drivers didn’t know any of that. Neither did the carriers who hired those drivers in good faith, the shippers who tendered those loads, nor the public who shared the road with them.
Six people are indicted in New Orleans. A pretrial conference is on the calendar. The case moves forward.
The system that made it possible is still running. Same structure. Same conflict of interest. Same self-attestation chain. The same federal database that records whatever it is told.
Fix the system or keep reading the indictments. Those are the options.