USAO, District of Connecticut - Press Release

Summary

On February 21, 2014, Dariusz Szteborowski, manager of Wisla Express, LLC (Wisla), New Britain, Connecticut, was sentenced in United States District Court, Hartford, Connecticut, to a 14 month prison term, 3 years of supervised release and a $20,000 fine for his role in the falsification and destruction of driver logbook entries which were submitted to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Szteborowski was ordered to divest himself of all ownership interests in Wisla and may not reacquire any ownership interests during the duration of his supervised release. Moreover, neither Szteborowski nor his wife is permitted to work for Wisla or any other DOT regulated entity during the supervised release period.

The investigation disclosed that Szteborowski often created and maintained false and fraudulent driver time records or caused others to create false and fraudulent driver logs in order to meet the prescribed reporting requirements and that Szteborowski submitted logs to the FMCSA that were not only false, but in many cases had not been created by the driver as required under the federal regulations. Szteborowski and others working with and for Szteborowski and Wisla often assigned drivers to trips knowing that the drivers would be exceeding the regulated limits of on-duty driving time. In order to hide these violations from FMCSA inspectors, Szteborowski often instructed the drivers and/or other Wisla employees to record falsely in the logs that the driver was off-duty during those times, and then Szteborowski submitted the falsified logs to FMCSA during its inspection.

The investigation was conducted with assistance from FMCSA.