A Mount Crawford-based trucking company and four of its executives were sentenced this week in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Harrisonburg for conspiring to commit wire fraud and other charges, according to a release from U.S. Attorney Rick A. Mountcastle. The sentencing ends a case that had dragged on for more than seven years.
Beam Bros. Trucking Inc. and its holding company had been accused of wire fraud as part of a scheme to defraud it drivers by falsifying mileage logs and other records. Prosecutors claim the company falsified the logs to make it look like their drivers worked fewer hours than they actually did. That put drivers and others on the road at risk by making them work far more hours than they were allowed by law, the government said.
But an attorney for Beam Bros. Trucking said the case was essentially a witch hunt that epitomized “government overreach of the highest order” and did nothing more than ruin a decades-old family business that employed more than 600 people in Rockingham and Augusta counties.
