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Cuban citizen pleads guilty in CDL bribe scheme

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A man recently pleaded guilty to charges related to a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) bribery scheme involving a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) employee.

On May 21, 2021, Marino Maury Diaz Leon, a Cuban citizen who was living in the San Antonio area, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to conspiracy to commit mail and honest services fraud.

The charges are connected to a multiple-year long scheme to help people fraudulently acquire CDLs by bribing a state licensing office worker.

Authorities say that from January 2017 through June 30, 2019, Leon and two co-conspirators paid a Texas DPS worker to assert that applicants had passed their skills test when they had actually failed the test or had never taken the test in the first place.

The DPS worker reportedly supplied Leon and a co-conspirator with temporary CDLs and then mailed permanent CDLs to be given to the applicants.

Shortly after the scheme was discovered in 2019, the FBI said that the DPS employee issued 215 fraudulent CDLs, mostly to people of Cuban descent, in exchange for thousands of dollars worth of bribes. These CDLs were revoked by officials in Texas after the fraud scheme came to light.

Leon is scheduled for sentencing September 1, 2021.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, DPS Texas Rangers Division, and the U.S. DOT Office of Inspector General assisted in the investigation into the scheme.

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