The lease model, the labor pipeline, the insurance game, and why the growth formula always ends in dead bodies
Rob Carpenter
Four Amish men from Bryant, Indiana, are dead because a system designed to keep dangerous operators off the road has been reverse-engineered into a growth engine for the people it was supposed to stop.
The Sam Express network. Super Ego Holding. The dozens of operations that don’t have names you’d recognize yet but are running the same playbook right now in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and every other metro area with a critical mass of immigrant labor and a Penske or Ryder dealership within driving distance.
These aren’t anomalies. They’re a business model.
I’ve spent the last several weeks documenting the Sam Express chameleon carrier network following the Feb. 3 crash in Jay County, Indiana, that killed Henry Eicher, 50, his sons Menno, 25, and Paul, 19, and family friend Simon Girod, 23. Secretary Duffy has confirmed the federal investigation. FMCSA went on-terminal. The scope is expanding.
This piece isn’t about Sam Express specifically. It’s about how many of them build their empires. Because until the industry understands the growth formula, we will continue to watch the same playbook produce the same body count, carrier after carrier, year after year.
Step 1: The Authority
It starts with a DOT number and motor carrier authority. That’s the license to operate.
Getting one is remarkably easy. File an OP-1 application with FMCSA. Pay a $300 filing fee. Obtain a process agent (BOC-3) in every state. File proof of insurance. Wait approximately three to four weeks. You’re a trucking company.
There is no safety audit at the gate. There is no site visit. There is no verification that you have trucks, drivers, a terminal, maintenance capabilities, or any operational infrastructure whatsoever. FMCSA’s new-entrant safety audit doesn’t occur until 12 to 18 months after the authority is granted, and historically, the agency has struggled to complete even those within the regulatory timeframe.
The ARCHI program, Application Review and Chameleon Identification, is supposed to screen new applicants by matching registration data against existing carriers, looking for shared addresses, phone numbers, officer names, email addresses, and VINs. It was established under Congressional authority and has reportedly been operating for 13 years. In 2021 alone, FMCSA granted 109,340 new carrier authorities, an 84 percent increase from the prior year. If just one percent have chameleon characteristics, that’s over 1,100 potentially dangerous carriers entering the system annually.
The bad actors know the math. Register multiple authorities like burner phones. Use them until they accumulate too many violations. Shut that one down. Activate the next one. The equipment, the drivers, the dispatch operation, the back office, none of it changes. Just the name on the door.
In the Sam Express network, we documented authorities registered one day apart that shared officers, terminal addresses, VINs, and the same stylized mountain logo on every truck, regardless of the DOT number under which it was registered. At an event in Orlando, a representative told attendees the operation had 500 trucks under a holding group. FMCSA data showed that individual authorities were far smaller. The holding group doesn’t exist in any corporate filing we’ve found. One operation. Multiple authorities. Presenting as unified to brokers. Presenting as separate to regulators.
Step 2: The Equipment
You don’t buy trucks. You lease them.
This is the financial engine that makes the entire model work, and it’s important to understand why.
Purchasing a new Class 8 tractor outright costs $150,000 to $200,000. That requires capital, creditworthiness, and a lender willing to underwrite the risk. Legitimate carriers build equity in their fleets. They have assets that may be seized pursuant to a judgment. They have something to lose.
Leasing eliminates all of that. A lease-purchase program through a manufacturer or dealer, or a full-service lease through companies such as Penske, Ryder, or other specialty lessors, places a truck on the road with minimal upfront capital. Some programs require as little as $1,000 down.
The real play isn’t the carrier leasing trucks from a dealer. It’s the carrier leasing trucks to drivers.
The carrier acquires equipment through whatever financing mechanism is available. Then the carrier offers that equipment to drivers under a “lease-purchase” arrangement. The driver makes weekly payments, typically deducted from their settlement. The driver is responsible for fuel, maintenance, tolls, and in many cases, insurance. The driver is classified as an independent contractor, which means the carrier doesn’t pay employment taxes, workers’ compensation, or benefits.
On paper, the driver is an “owner-operator” building equity toward truck ownership. In practice, the driver is absorbing nearly all operational costs while the carrier retains control of dispatch, load selection, rate negotiation, and the financial infrastructure.
The federal Truth in Leasing Act, 49 U.S.C. § 14102, requires carriers to provide transparent lease agreements and honest accounting. The Super Ego Holding class action lawsuit, filed in August 2022 in the Northern District of Illinois and now involving potentially 10,000 to 20,000 plaintiffs, alleges the company “fraudulently altered load confirmation documents to pay plaintiffs less than the rates specified in their work contracts.” The complaint alleges drivers were promised 88 percent of gross revenue but received falsified rate confirmations showing lower amounts. Drivers were overcharged for fuel. They paid for insurance that was voidable because they were operating under a different authority than the one listed on the policy. The companies operated as “alter egos,” with drivers being assigned loads for entities other than the company with which they had signed their lease.
The Super Ego network includes Kordun Express, Floyd Inc., Rocket Expediting, Haidar Dawood LLC, Trytime Transport, Windy City National Trans, Jordan Holdings d/b/a JHI Transport, and Twin Carrier. Sound familiar? Multiple carrier names. One operation. Drivers shuffled between authorities.
A federal civil complaint in the Sam Express orbit, Tsybikov v. Dovgal, describes a nearly identical scheme: 88 percent revenue promises with falsified rate confirmations, $14,000 in fuel deductions exceeding what was physically possible for the miles driven, a 12 percent dispatch fee for services never independently provided, and $250 per pay period for insurance policies that were voidable. When a driver was involved in a safety incident under one authority, the complaint alleges, they were simply transferred to a different authority, resetting the safety record.
The economics are elegant in their ruthlessness. The carrier has no capital expenditure because the equipment is leased. The carrier has minimal operating expenses because the drivers are absorbing fuel, maintenance, insurance, and tolls. The carrier’s revenue is the spread between what the broker pays for the load and what the driver actually receives, amplified by the deductions the carrier takes off the top before the driver sees a penny.
More trucks equals more cash flow. More drivers equals more deductions. The growth incentive points in one direction: scale as fast as possible, acquire as much equipment as possible, put as many drivers in seats as possible, and extract maximum revenue from every mile while the people doing the actual driving absorb the cost of doing business.
Step 3: The Labor
You don’t hire experienced, qualified, well-compensated drivers. You can’t afford to. The model doesn’t work with CDL holders who understand their market value, know their rights under the Truth in Leasing Act, and will walk when the settlement statements don’t add up.
The model works with people who have limited options.
Three populations are disproportionately targeted.
Foreign nationals. Nearly 19 percent of American truck drivers are foreign-born, according to census data, and the vast majority are hardworking professionals who keep the supply chain moving. That’s not the issue. The issue is that immigrant labor is recruited specifically because language barriers, immigration status dependencies, and unfamiliarity with U.S. labor law make them less likely to challenge exploitative conditions.
Sam Express filed a PERM labor certification with the Department of Labor, Case A-21127-83517, to sponsor a Kyrgyz national for a green card to work as a “Financial Analyst” at a five-employee trucking company paying $59,925 per year. The DOL’s Office of Inspector General has characterized the PERM program as “highly susceptible to fraud.” The certification requires two classified advertisements in a local newspaper to demonstrate that no American worker wants the job. In this case, that meant running an ad in the Chicago Tribune for a financial analyst position at a tiny Kyrgyz-owned trucking startup. The recruitment is designed to fail. The system certified it anyway.
The driver in the Indiana crash, Bekzhan Beishekeev, had been in the country for 14 months and held a CDL for seven. He had an ICE detainer. He was 30 years old, driving a Freightliner for a carrier in a network that recruits from Kyrgyzstan, trains through affiliated schools, and places drivers through its own pipeline. Whether he was adequately trained, supervised, and supported is a question the federal investigation will answer. But the pipeline that put him behind that wheel is the point.
Justice-involved individuals. People with criminal records face significant employment barriers. Trucking has historically been one of the few industries where a felony conviction doesn’t automatically disqualify you. This is, in many ways, a good thing. Giving people second chances is part of how society works. However, the operators running this growth model target justice-involved individuals not for rehabilitation, but because people with limited options accept worse terms, lower pay, and conditions that more experienced drivers would refuse.
Low-experience, low-skill drivers. This is where CDL schools enter the picture. The carrier either operates its own training school or partners with one. The school gets the student a CDL. The student gets a truck. The carrier receives a driver with no industry experience, no frame of reference for what constitutes legitimate operations, and a financial obligation to the school, the carrier, or both.
Secretary Duffy named “Aydana LLC” as a CDL training school now under federal investigation in connection with the Sam Express network. As of this publication, Aydana has no public website, social media presence, advertising footprint, or visible student testimonials. Its registered agent is associated with an address in the Philadelphia metro area, the same city where Beishekeev was based. We’ve previously documented the Dispatch Training Center in Schaumburg, Illinois, 15 minutes from Sam Express headquarters, which has graduated more than 4,800 students since 2019 and explicitly teaches people how to open new MC/DOT authorities.
The formula: recruit people who can’t get jobs elsewhere or don’t know better, train them through an affiliated or captive school just enough to pass the CDL test, put them in a leased truck with deductions that leave them netting a fraction of what was promised, and keep them moving freight because their alternatives are worse.
Step 4: The Insurance
Insurance is supposed to be the last real barrier to entry. It was designed to ensure that only carriers with adequate financial responsibility could operate on public highways.
It has largely collapsed.
I wrote about this recently. Will be writing about it again this week. The rise of instant-issue, non-underwritten insurance policies has fundamentally changed the risk landscape. A non-domiciled individual with no license, no office, and no particular concern for anyone’s safety can go online, enter information, self-attest to their qualifications, pay by credit card, and receive a policy within minutes. No safety program review. No maintenance standards verification. No driver qualification audit. Money in, policy out.
GEICO offers commercial truck insurance online. Progressive offers commercial truck insurance online. These are mainstream carriers that have effectively turned commercial motor vehicle insurance into a consumer product.
Below them sits another tier entirely: the subprime commercial carriers. The surplus lines insurers. The non-standard markets. The companies willing to write policies for operations nobody else will touch. Texas Insurance, Accredited Specialty, and others specializing in what they call “high-risk” coverage.
When I look at who’s covering a motor carrier, I can tell you almost immediately what kind of operation you’re dealing with. Subprime insurers cover subprime carriers. That’s not opinion. That’s pattern recognition from a quarter century in this industry.
Your reputable fleets, the ones with real safety programs, real maintenance shops, real driver qualification files, and real skin in the game, are not shopping for insurance on a website. They’re insured by Zurich. They’re in group captive programs. They’re in sole-member captives. Getting into one of those programs isn’t easy. It was never supposed to be.
A captive works like this: best-in-class motor carriers form their own insurance company. They own it. They control it. When claims remain low, profits accrue to members rather than to a corporate insurer’s shareholders. Entry requires underwriting. Real underwriting. Safety audits, loss runs, terminal visits, driver file reviews, and maintenance program evaluations. The barriers are high because the members have a financial interest in excluding poor operators.
The chameleon carrier doesn’t enter a captive program. The chameleon carrier gets an instant-issue policy from a carrier that didn’t ask questions, operates until there’s a catastrophic crash, folds the authority, walks away from the judgment, and opens a new authority with a new instant-issue policy. Often from the same insurer that covered them before.
In the Sam Express ecosystem, we documented an insurance broker operating out of Des Plaines, Illinois, whose agency entity showed no lines of authority on the NAIC Business Entity Search. No LOAs means no formal authorization from insurance carriers to place business on their behalf. The broker who sent me a Facebook friend request at 2 a.m. after my first article was published had held his individual license for barely a year. His agency’s owner has individual LOAs, but the business entity itself shows zero. The question of who is actually underwriting the policies in this network, and whether those policies are worth the paper they’re printed on, is one the federal investigation should be asking.
The federal minimum liability coverage for most trucking operations is $750,000. That number was set in the 1980s. Inflation-adjusted, it should be north of $5 million today. A single catastrophic truck crash can produce damages exceeding $20 million. The average nuclear verdict in truck crash litigation hit $36 million by 2022.
Minimum insurance. Maximum exposure. Zero assets. The entire model is designed to create a liability-proof shell that prints cash until someone dies, then dissolves and reconstitutes under a different name.
Step 5: The Growth
Now you understand the machine. Authority is cheap. Equipment is leased. Labor is exploitable. Insurance is a rubber stamp. Every component is designed to minimize the carrier’s capital at risk while maximizing cash flow.
The growth imperative is built into the model’s DNA. More trucks mean more settlement deductions. More drivers mean more dispatch fees. More authorities mean more flexibility to dodge enforcement. More entities mean more complexity for anyone trying to follow the money.
Sam Express Inc. has roughly 100 trucks on its FMCSA filing. KG Line Group claims 310. At the Broker Carrier Summit, they told brokers the holding group has 500. At the AITIM Awards in 2023, Sam Express was reported to have 350 trucks. The numbers don’t matter because the numbers aren’t the point. The point is that the operation is presenting different faces to different audiences: a disaggregated collection of small carriers to FMCSA, a unified fleet to brokers and shippers, a community success story to the diaspora, and a corporate growth engine to the consulting firm that takes a piece of everything.
Growth also requires infrastructure. Dispatch operations. Back-office support. Accounting. Marketing. AITIM Group, the consulting firm that gave Sam Express “Best Trucking Company of the Year,” claims a network of 70,000 trucks on its LinkedIn page. They offer consulting, safety services, TMS, ELD, and media services. The Hero ELD, developed by AITIM Inc., is the electronic logging device allegedly referenced in a federal civil complaint as having “backdoor” capabilities for remote manipulation of hours-of-service records.
PixelCo, an AITIM Awards winner, is described as “a leader in marketing in the trucking industry of the USA” offering “everything from brand formation and corporate identity to full-scale PR.” The Dispatch Training Center in Schaumburg has graduated 4,800-plus students in how to open authorities and run dispatch operations. The Silk Road International School has headquarters in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Codewise Academy trains IT professionals.
It’s a vertically integrated ecosystem. From recruiting drivers overseas to training dispatchers in Schaumburg to marketing carriers through a digital agency to logging hours on a proprietary ELD to celebrating the whole thing at a black-tie gala, every link in the chain has a dedicated service provider and every service provider is part of the same community network.
Step 6: The Crash
The model meets physics.
When you put a driver with seven months of CDL experience behind the wheel of a Freightliner on State Road 67 in Jay County, Indiana, and that driver fails to stop for slowed traffic and crosses the centerline into oncoming traffic, four people die.
The Government Accountability Office found that chameleon carriers are three times more likely to be involved in serious crashes than legitimate new entrants. From 2005 to 2010, 18 percent of carriers with chameleon attributes were involved in severe crashes, compared to just 6 percent without those red flags. From 2016 to 2022, fatal crashes involving large trucks increased 26.4 percent. Nearly 5,500 people die in truck-involved crashes every year. Eighty-two percent of fatalities are people in other vehicles, pedestrians, or cyclists.
Tutash Express Inc., one carrier in the Sam Express network, has recorded 57 crashes and over 1,800 inspections. Its Unsafe Driving BASIC score sits at 92.5 percent, meaning it ranks worse than 92.5 percent of all carriers in the country. Across the broader network, we’re approaching 100 crashes combined. Tutash Express 1, whose authority was involuntarily revoked in July 2024, reported 128,962 miles driven in 2025 , while operating under revoked authority , with a 100 percent vehicle out-of-service rate.
The crashes are the predictable output of a business model that prioritizes growth over safety, cash flow over compliance, and scale over human life.
The Pattern
Every major predatory lease carrier scandal in the past decade follows the same template.
Super Ego Holding: multiple affiliated carriers operating as alter egos. Drivers shuffled between authorities. Falsified rate confirmations. Predatory lease terms. Class action lawsuit now potentially involving 10,000 to 20,000 plaintiffs. Elmhurst, Illinois, hub generating chronic nuisance calls to police for violence and theft.
The Sam Express network: 20-plus affiliated carriers sharing VINs, terminal addresses, officers, and branding. Federal civil complaint alleging a “unified fraudulent enterprise.” Predatory leasing. Falsified rate confirmations. ELD backdoor allegations. Immigration pipeline. CDL school under federal investigation. Four dead in Indiana.
The details change. The geography shifts. The ethnic communities are different. The formula is identical.
Acquire authority cheaply. Lease equipment to avoid capital exposure. Recruit vulnerable labor to suppress operating costs. Obtain minimum insurance to satisfy regulatory requirements. Scale aggressively by replicating the model across multiple entities. Extract maximum revenue through deductions, fees, and falsified accounting. When enforcement catches up, close the authority and open a new one. Keep the trucks. Keep the drivers. Change the name.
Repeat until someone dies. Then repeat again.
What Breaks the Cycle
Insurance underwriting was supposed to be the filter. It failed when instant-issue policies rendered coverage trivial to obtain without scrutiny.
New-entrant safety audits were intended to serve as the filter. They failed when the volume of applications overwhelmed FMCSA’s capacity to conduct them.
ARCHI was supposed to catch reincarnated carriers at the application stage. It failed when the volume of registrations rendered screening through the process impossible.
The Truth in Leasing Act was supposed to protect drivers from predatory operators. It failed when enforcement was complaint-driven, and most victims didn’t know they had rights.
What’s left is what Secretary Duffy is doing right now: targeted, post-crash, on-terminal investigations with real consequences. Out-of-service orders. Revocations. Criminal referrals. Following the money, the corporate structure, the insurance pipeline, and the training school.
It shouldn’t take four dead Amish men in Indiana to trigger that level of scrutiny. But that’s the system we have. And until the barriers to entry actually function as barriers, the formula will continue to work for those willing to run it.
The growth model isn’t a secret. It’s barely even a strategy. It’s just math: minimize your costs, maximize your revenue, externalize your risks onto drivers, insurers, and the general public, and move fast enough that enforcement can’t keep up.
The people driving these operations know something is wrong. They feel it in their settlement statements. They see it when the truck they’re driving has a different company name on the door than the one on their lease agreement. They understand it when they’re told to keep driving after the ELD shows they should be in a bunk.
They keep driving because the alternatives are worse, they have families, and someone promised them a chance to own their own truck and the American dream.
The American dream doesn’t usually end on State Road 67 in Jay County, Indiana, with the coroner documenting multiple blunt force trauma injuries on four men who were just riding in a van on a Tuesday afternoon.
But this one did. As with Richard Hutchinson Wright, Danny Tiner, and many other drivers, the driver is often the one left bearing justice-related consequences, while the carrier closes and the owners move on with their lives and a pile of money.
