Summary

On February 25, 2013, Wisla Express, LLC (Wisla), New Britain, Connecticut, pled guilty in U.S. District Court, Hartford, Connecticut, in connection with its role in presenting falsified documents to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in response to FMCSA’s demand for documents during FMCSA’s 2010 inspection of Wisla. Wisla is a commercial passenger carrier operating vans, mini-buses, and tour buses. Wisla’s office Manager, Dariusz Szteborowski, of Rocky Hill, Connecticut, also entered a guilty plea on February 22, 2013, in connection with the scheme.

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.