Tuscaloosa County Freight Broker Charged With Bribing Guard Officials To Get Transport Contracts

Topics:  Daniel Boyd

U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Alabama
8 September 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BIRMINGHAM -- Federal prosecutors have charged a Tuscaloosa County freight broker with bribing two National Guard officials to steer military transport contracts totaling $441,698 to the two Alabama companies he represented, announced U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard D. Schwein Jr. and Frank Robey, director of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command's Major Procurement Fraud Unit.

The U.S. Attorney's Office late Friday charged DANIEL BOYD, 60, of Vance, in a four-count information filed in U.S. District Court. The information charges Boyd with two counts of bribery and two counts of mail fraud in the scheme to illegally obtain shipping contracts for Crimson Express and U.S. Transport. He has entered an agreement with the government to plead guilty to the charges.

One of the National Guard officials Boyd is charged with bribing, Timothy Wooten, 52, a traffic management specialist for the Guard Bureau's U.S. Property and Fiscal Office in South Carolina, pleaded guilty in June to three wire fraud counts and one count of accepting bribes to steer freight contracts to an Alabama broker. Boyd's information and plea agreement reference Wooten as T.W.

Boyd also is charged with bribing a traffic management specialist for the Guard's U.S. Property and Fiscal Office in Florida. The Florida official is identified in the court documents as K.T.

K.T.'s and T.W.'s duties with the National Guard Bureau included procuring funding for and arranging the movement of personnel, items and equipment. Their duties also involved managing the transportation with their respective states, in coordination with the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, National Guard Bureau and active duty installations.

According to Boyd's plea agreement, he and K.T. agreed in January 2011 that Boyd would hire K.T. when he left his National Guard service at the end of February 2011. During that February, K.T. used his position to award transportation contracts to Boyd's Crimson Express, and Boyd paid K.T. about 50 percent of the commissions he received on those contracts.

Boyd reached his bribery agreement with Wooten in October 2011, according to Boyd's and Wooten's plea agreements. In exchange for Wooten using his position to award contracts to Boyd's companies, Boyd paid Wooten about 25 percent of the commissions he received on the contracts.

Boyd received total commissions of about $156,386 on the $441,698 in transportation contracts the two Guard officials awarded to Crimson Express and U.S. Transport, according to Boyd's plea agreement. In exchange, Boyd paid bribes of about $20,252 to K.T. and about $29,742 to Wooten, Boyd acknowledges in his plea agreement.

The two Guard traffic management specialists were able to steer the contracts to Boyd's companies by overriding the government's electronic system that generated a list of "Best Value Carriers" for a freight shipment so that they could manually select a company for the contract, according to court records.

Boyd acknowledges in his plea agreement that he had his wife write checks to Wooten's wife to pay the bribes he promised. The U.S. Postal Service delivered those checks from Alabama to Lexington, S.C., where Wooten lived.

The FBI and Army CID, MPFU, investigated the case, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Tamarra Matthews Johnson is prosecuting.