Tuesday Morning Links and various Detritus
On the most recent Texas Crash, Automation Pimps, and more on the announcements from US DOT Secretary Sean Duffy.
G’day readers of Autonomous Truckers and listeners of the Voice Of GO(r)D podcast, and a Happy Belated Fourth of July to you. I’ve been away for the past week on a camping trip with my family, deep in the north of the Adirondacks at the type of campsite you have to carry portage everything in to enjoy your perch on the side of a lake. The kind of campsite with an outhouse and a firepit as the only modern conveniences, where a cell phone signal, wifi, and beer re-supply are a half hour drive away. It was lovely, and I just might do that again in August once the book manuscript is submitted.
Things keep moving, and oft move fast in the world of trucking, likewise in the world of media, and I wanted to highlight some more great work from friend and guest of the podcast Danielle Chaffin of
, who has done a deep and substantial dive into the carrier involved in that horrific collision just east of Dallas last week, which saw most of an entire family killed when a recent arrival from Cuba fell asleep at the wheel of his truck.It turns out that like so many other scammers parasitizing themselves on the trucking industry, this was a ‘Chameleon Carrier’ that passed equipment back and forth through layers of LLCs and entities owned by all of the same people, one who may or may not even exist, and most of them clearly not ‘founding stock Americans’.
They also have a terrible record of abusing drivers and equipment, and appear to have slipped through many cracks.
You want to read this from Danielle, and then consider that this type of carrier is not an aberration, rather, the new dumb ‘standard’ of trucking in 2025.
Some snippets -
This was a postal load, scheduled to run from Palmetto, Georgia to Avondale, Arizona. This trip is approximately 1,856 miles. The United States Postal Service statement of work requires a team load for any trip greater than 500 miles.
González-Companioni never should have been on this trip alone!
According to a former driver for Hope Trans LLC, the company has a reputation for altering shipment documents and manipulating driver ELDs (electronic logging devices) to avoid hitting the federal 11-hour driving limit.If true, this isn’t just a violation of DOT regulations. It’s violation of the USPS requirements and a deliberate act that puts drivers and the public at serious risk
The driver should have never been in America in the first place, nevermind behind the wheel of a truck.
Alexis Osmani González-Companioni entered the United States in 2020 on a 90-day ESTA visa, granted through his Spanish citizenship. He arrived in Miami with plans to pitch an energy-saving app. But instead, he ended up behind the wheel of a semi-truck.
Before emigrating to Spain and then the U.S., González-Companioni held a prominent role in Cuba’s political structure. He served as president of the University Student Federation (FEU) at the Central University of Las Villas’ Electrical Engineering faculty and was elected to the Provincial Committee of the Young Communist League (UJC) in Villa Clara. His affiliations marked him as a rising figure in the Cuban regime.
Although he entered the U.S. under the ESTA visa waiver program, which explicitly bars long-term stays, he settled in Miami and never returned to Cuba. According to Cubans Around the World, U.S. law (8 U.S. Code § 1182) deems foreign communist party members inadmissible, along with anyone who lies to obtain visas or immigration benefits.
5 foot 8 and 3 bills.
I would submit to you that if not at least Sleep Apnea, this fellow probably had enough other medical complications going on that his CDL Medical may have been issued fraudulently.
Danielle then looks into the companies who employed Mr Gonzalez-Companioni.
Thanks to Freight X, a photo surfaced showing the truck’s USDOT number, confirming that González-Companioni was driving for Hope Trans LLC at the time of the crash.
On the day of the crash, the listed primary officer/contact for the company was Aishat Magomedova. Before her LinkedIn profile vanished, it identified her as the CEO of Fiorito Trucking. The account disappeared within hours of the incident.
But that wasn’t the only thing that changed with this trucking company, or any of the others that will follow.
On June 2, 2025, four days after the crash, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) record for Hope Trans LLC was updated. And the changes were significant:
Primary Officer changed from Aishat Magomedova to Todd August
Email changed from aisha@hopetransllc.com to dispatch@hopetransllc.com
Physical Address moved from Tacoma, WA (a shared workspace) to Orlando, FL (apartment complex)
Truck Count dropped from 193 to 65
Driver Count dropped from 195 to 80
—
HOPE TRANS LLC has a Facebook business page, with a listed address in Florida. The page was created on June 20, 2024. The email address on the page offers another clue: it includes the name ‘beezone',’ which is tied to a related trucking company, Bee Zone Logistics (USDOT 3191514).
This connection suggests that HOPE TRANS LLC isn’t operating in isolation. It’s part of a larger web of companies, linked by shared addresses, email domains, and patterns of behavior that deserve serious scrutiny.
When a commercial truck is inspected by authorities, the vehicle identification number (VIN) is recorded. That VIN acts like a fingerprint, it tells us exactly which truck was involved. By analyzing inspection data, it's possible to track whether the same truck is being used across multiple companies.
In the case of Hope Trans LLC and Bee Zone Logistics, 88 trucks share the exact same VINs.
That’s not a coincidence. It suggests the same fleet of trucks has operated under two different company names. This common tactic used by carriers trying to avoid scrutiny, insurance issues, or regulatory penalties.
In fraudulent or high-risk trucking operations, there’s often a telltale sign: overlapping company lifespans. As one company shuts down, voluntarily or due to violations, a new one quietly takes its place, often with the same assets, people, and practices.
Bee Zone Logistics operated from September 24, 2018, to December 16, 2024. Over time, the listed company officers changed multiple times, cycling through:
Sarvar Muradov
Mariya Shavrova
‘Sam’ Muradov
Patina Magomedova
The whole thing is worth a read, and reveals how these bottom feeders operate and evade detection by authorities. One wonders what is going on at US DOT and FMCSA when Danielle, a private citizen using publicly accessible databases, is doing more to reveal these illegal and unsafe operators than those to whom we pay taxes for that very simple task.
Get these scumbags off of our roads and out of our industry!
Danielle has also graced the pages of FreightWaves, and recently opined on how a number of problems, brought together under the banner of ‘freight fraud’, are thereby obfuscated and nothing then done to solve them.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/when-everything-is-freight-fraud-nothing-is
Freight fraud is a trending topic, but ask what it means, and most answers stop at “stolen freight.” The term has been stretched so far and used so vaguely that it no longer points to anything specific.
Language shapes how we see problems and how seriously we take them. When a word or phrase gets used too often, too broadly, or too loosely, it begins to lose its meaning. Linguists call this semantic bleaching. It’s the phenomenon that turned the word “literally” into “kind of,” and made “love” something we say about a phone case or a cup of coffee.
This is precisely what the freight industry has done to “freight fraud.” We’ve used the term so often, in so many contexts, that it no longer means anything. It is a catch-all for every type of criminal or deceptive activity. Everything from double-brokering and identity theft to fake pickups, forged certificates of insurance, and compromised email accounts.
Danielle goes on into some detail about a number of related issues with the specificity required to mark them as unique and requiring of further attention. It’s a good read, and you should check it out.
US DOT Secretary Sean Duffy just published an Op-Ed today over at Breitbart, outlining what he and his Team are going to do to stop all of this, which follows his recent appearance on What The Truck? which I highlighted in my previous Substack.
Duffy goes on at length about the real shortage in trucking, that of parking, and what the Feds are going to do to fix it. For my peace of mind I’d avoid most truck stops and rest areas like the plague, given that the past decade has seen them turn into favelas and slums not unlike where all of our new ‘drivers’ are coming from. You really do risk having your hood or fender smashed in by an illiterate with no idea how to back up a truck, or stepping in a fresh bag of poop, probably dropped off by someone from a country whose Prime Minister had to encourage his citizens to use toilets in a massive public relations campaign a decade ago. You think I’m kidding?
I discussed the many issues with truck parking and a guy bringing free market solutions to bear on the problem, Mr Evan Shelley -
Parking Anxiety with Evan Shelley, CEO of Truck Parking Club
Voice Of GO(r)D is pleased to bring you an in-depth discussion about a problem in North American trucking that gets very little attention, with a man trying to solve it.
Duffy then gets into the meat and potatoes -
We are also protecting the value and integrity of truckers’ commercial driver’s licenses. Few industries are more vulnerable to the consequences of immigration than trucking. All anyone needs to start hauling are a vehicle and commercial drivers’ license. It’s not hard to see how foreign drivers can undermine American truckers by offering to carry the same load for less pay. After President Biden’s broken border policies flooded the country with more than 10 million illegal aliens, truckers have seen enough.
As transportation secretary, I ordered a nationwide audit of non-domicile licenses to prevent the exploitation of foreign labor. Let me put that in plain English. My department is reviewing states’ approval of commercial driver’s licenses for non-citizens to identify and eliminate patterns of abuse. We will not allow the last administration’s importation of cheap labor undermine hard-working American truck drivers.
Glad to hear it, and it remains to be seen if Duffy makes any headway with this, given that state governments are staffed by bureaucrats not always keen on submitting to the kind of scrutiny regular citizens are expected to endure, and sometimes are governed by members of the opposite party, who have their own priorities, which are clearly and completely at odds with normal working people in this country.
Good luck, Secretary.
I hope Duffy gives Danielle Chaffin a job; for as much as we would like to stem the tide of licenses issued to people that clearly have no idea how to drive and were encouraged to migrate here en masse by Corporatist Scumbags working in service of Global Homogeneity (or GloboHomo for short), we also have do something about those who employ them, directly, in the form of various ethnic gangsters such as those involved in so many collisions across the county, and then the people who hire them, like Amazon Relay … or the United States Postal Service. We can’t just punish or remove hapless migrants - a big stick must be taken to the people who use those migrants to engage in wage arbitrage against their fellow citizens, and then pawn off all of the other costs associated with that arbitrage onto the taxpayer, insurance companies, and God’s Own Roll Call.
Friend and former guest of the pod Mitchel Riesgraf sent this puff piece to me the other day, though I wasn’t given a warning to have a barf bag ready.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250702115332/https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/3460260/china-is-winning-the-trucking-arms-race/
It appears that the autonomous truck manufacturers, facing criticism from guys like me who see right through their marketing bullshit, are upping the ante by purchasing propaganda placement at various outlets, including the Washington Examiner. Perhaps it is because friend and fellow writer Farahn Morgan turned a critical eye towards the attempted forced extinction of truckers in the very same outlet?
This guy Stephen Moore at the Examiner really out here invoking fake shortages and OMG CHINA to advocate rendering millions of Americans unemployed.
Nearly 75% of all freight in the United States is moved by trucks. They deliver everything from construction materials to hospital supplies to the packages on your porch. But the system is overworked and under-resourced, which slows down deliveries and drives up prices.
Autonomous trucking — yes, self-driving big rigs — is the solution to this challenge. But this sector has been hamstrung by senseless and outdated regulations, resulting in China-based companies taking the lead in developing autonomous vehicles. And here’s the truth we can’t afford to ignore: If we let China win on this matter, we won’t just be buying their trucks. We’ll be buying our supply chain from them, too.
The U.S. is already facing a chronic driver shortage, an estimated 80,000 today, with a projected need for one million more over the next decade, according to the American Trucking Association.
The American Trucking Association continues to get enormous mileage out of a lie they have been telling everyone since 19fucking87, and idiots like Moore (and many others) simply accept it uncritically.
While some critics argue that autonomous trucks threaten jobs, the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study by the Department of Transportation, autonomous trucking is expected to create between 26,000 and 35,000 new jobs annually — not just software engineers but technicians, remote operators, and logistics managers, the kind of work that builds careers and feeds families.
Autonomous trucks won’t replace workers; they’ll help fill the gap. As the economy grows, we’ll need both human drivers and autonomous ones to keep up. With the proper training and transition programs, we can ensure that workers aren’t left behind but lifted by the next wave of innovation.
35,000 jobs … after we render unemployed over two million truckers? Who writes this shit? Better yet, who believes it?
As always, I have no doubt that this technology is coming, and is already here. But please for the love of God stop lying to us about the aims of these companies, or trying to dress up whatever bogus plan you have for the people you clearly seek to displace. It’s an afterthought for these guys, and for ‘journalists’ to repeat this dreck makes me want to cheer for AI to replace them first, because that is already happening. Who knows, maybe ‘Stephen Moore’ isn’t even real.
The Trump administration is correct in expanding the exemption program to include U.S.-manufactured vehicles. This will enable American companies to seize the autonomous trucking opportunity. Additionally, the program will strengthen our supply chain, create jobs, reduce costs, and boost safety — all while keeping the future of trucking in the USA.
What’s the point of a supply chain if no one has a job or the income that comes with it? Create jobs? LOL, this is the Fourth Industrial revolution, and will be unlike those previous, and enough people have discussed this problem now that ignoring it makes you look like the shill that you are.
Reduce costs, perhaps, but let us remember, every autonomous truck system manufacturer has been explicit about the fact that their technology will be tied to a subscription service that you must keep paying. Sure, maybe cheaper than a human driver, but they’re not giving it away for nothing.
Boost safety? We shall see - robot vehicles need to get four points east past the decimal point before they are any safer than human drivers and thus far enough incidents have taken place that we should remain skeptical of safety claims. And let us not forget, we can make the roads much safer by not handing out licenses to illiterates that showed up here yesterday and fully reforming state driver training and testing systems.
The next thing to hit your inbox after this email should be the next episode of the podcast featuring Mr Dale Prax, founder of a company called Freight Validate which is, like Danielle Chaffin, in a way, doing something the government is supposed to be doing, which is vetting carriers and making sure scammers and scumbags aren’t the guys you found through a likewise scammy and scummy freight broker or load board.
Dale shares his history in trucking and freight with us, and offers some advice to those who want to make sure they’re not dealing with crooks in hauling their loads.
Thanks again for reading - I look forward to being in your eyes or ears again very soon!
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are always welcomed and strongly encouraged! gordilocks@protonmail.com
5’8”, 310 is some good size