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When the indictment of four Massachusetts state troopers was unsealed in late January, Kevin Weeks, like many of his fellow truckers, thought it might be just a case of police buddies helping buddies, but maybe bending the rules a little.

It was more serious.

alleged that between May 2019 and January 2023, Massachusetts Police Sgt. Gary Cederquist, troopers Calvin Butler, Perry Mendes and Joel Rogers, and two others, conspired to give preferential treatment to commercial driver license applicants by giving them passing scores on their skills tests, even if they had actually failed the tests — or even had not shown up for the test.

Members of the police unit were responsible for administering the CDL skills tests, which first required that applicants have a commercial learner’s permit.

The four police officers and the two friends were charged with conspiracy to falsify records, conspiracy to commit extortion, honest services mail fraud, falsification of records, false statements and perjury.

All four officers have since left the force, retired or been let go. All CDL recipients identified as not qualified in the course of this investigation have been reported to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

The investigation remains ongoing.

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“In Massachusetts, the Registry of Motor Vehicles is responsible for CDL testing, which is run by the Massachusetts State Police trooper CDL testing team,” said Weeks, executive director of the . “Cederquist allegedly had been the team’s driving force. But apparently nobody knew he and his team were running a scam.”

But to the tight-knit group of officers, the fake CDL holders they created and allowed on public roads, were known as “golden” or “golden boys.”

The indictment alleges that Cederquist described one such applicant as “horrible,” and “brain dead,” but gave him a passing score in exchange for a snowblower.

By helping his friends, and the friends of his friends, illegally obtain their commercial driver license, Cederquist, the leader of the state’s CDL testing team, had his driveway paved for free, received a nearly free $1,900 snowblower and free 5-gallon bottles of water, plus a “stream of other benefits,” according to the indictment.

But when the indictment first went public Jan. 30, some folks felt like it was an “I’m helping out my buddies kind of thing,” Weeks said. “The officers kind of ran their own little kingdom.”

But from the outside, it seemed like in the last year before the indictment, as the state was recovering from the effects of the pandemic, the police unit was helping speed up a backlog that was delaying qualified drivers from being issued their CDLs.

“That was great for us,” Weeks said in an interview. “But nobody saw this kind of thing coming. As it turned out, it was scary; and we got a lot of calls and questions when it first popped up.

“Should we be concerned that there’s people out there with CDLs that really don’t know what the hell they’re doing? So I needed to try to assure people that it doesn’t appear to be the case.

“When a legitimate trucking company hires somebody, just because they have a CDL doesn’t mean they just flip them the keys and say ‘go’. They’re going to train them, send out people with them to make sure they know what they’re doing. These guys are driving around in $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 vehicles.”

Weeks added, “Certainly it didn’t come back on any of the training schools, which was my fear initially. It hasn’t implicated any of the training schools, and it hasn’t implicated any of the major companies that actually train themselves.”

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