BOSTON (AP) — A former Massachusetts state police sergeant was found guilty Friday of taking part in a scheme to take bribes, including a new snowblower and a driveway, in exchange for giving passing scores on commercial driving tests.
Gary Cederquist, 59, of Stoughton, was convicted of nearly 50 charges, including two counts of conspiracy to commit extortion, one count of extortion and six counts of honest services mail fraud.
Cederquist was one of three troopers along with two civilians accused of falsifying records and giving preferential treatment to at least 17 drivers from May 2019 to January 2023, who were taking their commercial driver’s license test
Even when the drivers failed a skills test, the troopers passed them and communicated they had done so with a text and the code word golden. Some troopers even joked in the text messages how badly a driver had performed on the test, according to the indictment.
Four of the five have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.
“It is never a good day when a member of law enforcement is convicted of a crime, especially when it is a crime that compromises public safety,” U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said.
“Gary Cederquist chose bribery and extortion over his oath to protect the community which he was sworn to serve,” she said. “His greed put the public at risk when he devised a scheme to issue commercial driver’s licenses to applicants who had never taken a real test to operate heavy commercial vehicles on the roads and highways of Massachusetts.”
Elise Chawaga, principal assistant inspector general for investigations with the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, said the verdict “sends a strong message to those who may be motivated by greed to abuse their positions — they will be met with the full force of the criminal justice system.”
A lawyer for Cederquist did not return a call seeking comment.
The bribery scandal is the latest trouble to hit the Massachusetts State Police.
Forty-six current and retired troopers who worked for the now disbanded Troop E, which patrolled the Massachusetts Turnpike, were implicated in a scheme in which they collected overtime pay for shifts they either did not work or did not complete from 2015 until 2017, authorities said. Often, they said, the troopers issued falsified traffic tickets to make it appear as if they had been on duty.
The bribery scandal also raised concerns about the integrity of a licensing system set up to certify commercial drivers because a majority of those taking the test in Massachusetts fail. The latest data from 2022, federal officials said, showed a pass rate of 41%.
In 2019, the system came under fire after Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a commercial truck driver, crashed into a group of motorcyclists in northern New Hampshire, causing the death of seven motorcyclists.
Zhukovskyy’s commercial driving license should have been revoked in Massachusetts at the time of the crash because of a drunken driving arrest in Connecticut about two months earlier. Connecticut officials alerted the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, but Zhukovskyy’s license wasn’t suspended because of a backlog of out-of-state notifications about driving offenses.
In recent years, state police have made a number of reforms to the commercial driver’s license unit, including requiring body cameras be worn during exams, increasing the frequency of unannounced visits to the unit by supervisors, having examiners at training sites, as well as developing new training procedures and a curriculum.
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