“Our investigation found that T&E Driving School blatantly flouted the laws and procedures that are necessary to ensure the public safety on the road.”
So declared investigator George Ioannidis with regards to a rather brazen pay-for-play scheme in a long-term sanctuary city.
However, even this particular scheme is going a tad too far.
Ioannidis – who serves as assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations – discovered that hordes of Chinese nationals were receiving driver licenses in New York.
Troublingly, several of the Chinese nationals reportedly could not even drive … yet they were still given official driver licenses following massive payoffs of apparently disgruntled DMV employees.
As if that doesn’t have the Chinese Communist Party’s hands all over it.
According to a stunning report from the New York Post, an entire driving school was enmeshed in the scandal.
“A Big Apple driving school paid off DMV examiners to fraudulently fast-track driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants — even if they had no clue how to drive, Staten Island prosecutors said Tuesday. T&E Driving School in Queens took cash from Chinese immigrants — many of whom didn’t even speak English — and paid off a crew of Department of Motor Vehicles employees on Staten Island to illegally obtain driver’s licenses … The crackdown, dubbed Operation Road Test, took down the ring in a joint investigation with state investigators and the US Department of Homeland Security,” the New York Post detailed.
Apparently, four different individuals associated with T&E were in on the scam: Weixian Tan, the owner; Weiwen Tan, the secretary; Winnie Yang, an employee; and Wenfeng Yang, a school road test driver.
These four apparently paid off three guileless DMV examiners: Aji Idicula, Tianna Rose Andolina, and Edward Tarik Queen.
Per the New York Post, this trio “would … rubber stamp the wanna-be drivers without even having them take a road test.”
Lovely.
“As alleged T&E utilized social media and strategic advertising to Target exploited members of the Chinese community and guaranteed individual driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status, language, and even their ability to operate a vehicle,” Ioannidis grimly detailed.
In other words, not only have multiple Chinese nationals been endowed with New York driver licenses, despite not knowing how to drive, but they have also received identification suggesting that they are legally present in the United States … even if that is not the case.
Heck, many of them apparently do not speak English either, which unfortunately means that more than one was likely victimized by the joint T&E-DMV scheme.
“Moreover, these individuals were those who did not speak or understand English and may have believed that they all were taking necessary and legitimate steps,” Ioannidis continued.
Moreover, who knows how many ill-begotten driver licenses exist in the state of New York?
District Attorney Michael McMahon certainly seems to think that quite a few ill-begotten driver licenses exist.
McMahon blasted the “corrosively corrupt” scheme undertaken by DMV employees who “brazenly” betrayed their responsibilities, suggesting that several thousand New York licenses may well be totally illegitimate.
“The numbers, as we go through this investigation, as we go through the materials that have been seized, we think that we are going to find hundreds if not thousands of people that have been part of this scam. The number of tests given by an individual examiner can be about 1,500 a year … Two out of the three examiners have been working for four or five years, so we think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” McMahon grimly remarked.
No kidding!
Apparently, the despite the seriousness of the crimes, none of the defendants had to post bail, courtesy of “the state’s controversial 2019 criminal justice reforms.”
Which resulted in a wholly absurd outcome for all of the defendants thus far.
“The defendants were arraigned on a slew of fraud, tampering and theft charges and were released,” the New York Post added.
Well then.
Seems such an outcome encapsulates the real New York state of mind … one that is perpetually laden with constantly criminal chaos.
Author: Jane Jones
