A Donaldsonville bribery scheme ran undetected for 3.5 years. Three defendants have pleaded guilty. Three more are awaiting trial. Every CDL from it is still on the road.

On September 10, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana announced convictions stemming from a commercial driver’s license bribery scheme that prosecutors say ran from August 2020 through February 2024 and produced at least 124 fraudulent CDLs. Three defendants, Mahmoud Alhattab, Jonathan Parsons, and Marline Roberts, each pleaded guilty on July 29, 2026, to one count of Bribery Concerning Programs Receiving Federal Funds, according to U.S. Attorney David I. Courcelle’s office. Three co-defendants, OMV employees Jenay Davis and Shakira Millien and training business owner Christopher Bryan Burns, are awaiting trial. All charges against Davis, Millien, and Burns are allegations; they are presumed innocent.

That is not a small case buried in a district court docket. It’s a detailed map of every seam in the federal CDL qualification system, and someone exploited every single one of them simultaneously for forty-two months.

The CDL process has three mandatory gates. First, a knowledge test, a written exam administered at a state Office of Motor Vehicles covering vehicle safety systems, emergency situations, and extreme driving conditions. Second, entry-level driver training, which requires you to demonstrate proficiency in operating a commercial vehicle on a public road. Third, a skills test, administered by state-authorized examiners, covering pre-trip inspection, basic vehicle control, and safety-related on-road maneuvers. If you pass all three, you get a commercial driver’s license. You skip any one of them, you’re not qualified to operate a truck on a public highway. Federal law has required this since well before Alhattab opened his restaurant.

According to prosecutors, Alhattab charged applicants an average of roughly $5,000 each and delivered all three bypasses as a package. The knowledge test gate fell first. Prosecutors allege Alhattab bribed two employees at the Donaldsonville, Louisiana OMV office, Jenay Davis and Shakira Millien, to take the knowledge test on behalf of applicants. The applicants didn’t sit down at the terminal. Davis and Millien did. According to the indictment, the two OMV employees weren’t confident enough in their knowledge of commercial vehicle operation to answer the questions from memory, so they searched the internet for the correct answers. Government workers, at government computers, Googled answers to a safety exam so that people who weren’t in the room could receive a commercial learner’s permit. The federal database recorded that as a passed test.

The training gate fell next. Alhattab allegedly bribed training business operators Christopher Bryan Burns and Jonathan Parsons to enter false completion records into CSTIMS, the Commercial Skills Test Information Management System, the federal database that tracks whether a driver has actually completed entry-level training. Parsons admitted that he reported successful training completions for people who never trained at all. According to his plea, he did this for at least 118 people. The system accepted the entries. The applicants moved to the final stage.

The skills test gate fell last, and this is where the operational details get specific. Parsons and Burns weren’t just trainers. They were also state-certified skills test examiners, meaning they held the authority to administer the final exam and report results to Louisiana. Alhattab admitted that he bribed both of them to pass applicants who never appeared at the test site. Early in the scheme, Alhattab sometimes drove the commercial vehicle himself during the test window so it looked like someone was taking a test. Eventually, prosecutors say, Alhattab and Parsons decided that precaution was unnecessary. Parsons routinely entered passing skills test results without Alhattab or any applicant present. On some occasions, Parsons paid Roberts, a separate skills test examiner, to create false scoring sheets to support the false reports. Roberts admitted creating seven phony score sheets during early 2023.

Many of the applicants couldn’t speak English. Alhattab admitted in his plea that many lacked English language proficiency and that he regularly told OMV employees about the language barrier when presenting applicants. That detail matters beyond the fraud itself. Under 49 CFR § 391.11(b)(2), a driver isn’t qualified to operate a commercial motor vehicle in interstate commerce unless they can read and speak English sufficiently to converse with the public, understand highway traffic signs and signals in English, respond to official inquiries, and make entries on reports and records. The CDL in the wallet doesn’t waive that requirement. The carrier who hires the driver is separately prohibited under 49 CFR § 391.11(a) from permitting an unqualified person to drive. A valid-looking CDL, obtained through this scheme, doesn’t make the driver qualified. It makes the driver look qualified, which is a different thing entirely, and that difference creates liability exposure the hiring carrier absorbs without knowing it.

The English proficiency angle lands harder now than it would have three years ago. On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing FMCSA to strengthen enforcement of the ELP requirement under 49 CFR § 391.11(b)(2), according to NEFI reporting on the order. A 2016 FMCSA guidance memo had effectively downgraded the requirement to a civil penalty; that memo has been reversed. Effective June 25, 2025, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance added English language proficiency to its official Out-of-Service Criteria, meaning a driver who can’t demonstrate English proficiency at a roadside inspection can be placed out of service on the spot. FMCSA’s 2026 Unified Agenda lists a proposed rulemaking under RIN 2126-AC99 that would formally codify the out-of-service consequence in federal regulation, though that rule is still proposed, not final. The enforcement environment when Alhattab’s scheme was running is not the enforcement environment these drivers operate in today.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General conducted the investigation, with assistance from the Louisiana State Office of Inspector General and Louisiana Public Safety Services. Assistant U.S. Attorney Chandra Menon of the Public Integrity Unit is prosecuting the case.

Alhattab, Parsons, and Roberts are each scheduled to be sentenced on October 28, 2026. The offense carries up to ten years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and a $100 special assessment. Davis, Millien, and Burns remain charged with conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, honest services wire fraud, and bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds, according to the DOT-OIG indictment announcement from August 28, 2025. Those charges are allegations. Each defendant is presumed innocent.

The record doesn’t establish where the 124 CDL holders are working today, which carriers hired them, or whether any of those carriers knew the credentials were fraudulent. Those questions belong to the civil docket, and they’re coming.

If you’re a fleet safety director or a carrier vetting team, pull your driver qualification files for anyone hired out of Louisiana between August 2020 and February 2024 who received CDL training through a third-party examiner in that period. A CDL issued through this scheme is documented as valid in the state system. It isn’t. The difference between a license in a database and a driver who is actually qualified to operate the equipment is exactly the distinction your insurer’s lawyer will make if something goes wrong. Make it first.