'It's a business model': Chicago area carrier allegedly scams, strands driver

Joseph Caprarulo has been driving trucks since 2006 and has seen good times and bad under a variety of carriers, working alternately as an employee and a contract driver with an eye toward going owner-operator some day.

Caprarulo, now 68, rides with his son Anthony, who takes care of the non-driving tasks. Recently, with the freight market bottoming out and the last company he pulled for shuttering just before Christmas, Caprarulo signed on to a contract-driving gig with Daniel Krizanac, someone he'd known for years from other fleets in the Chicago area, and someone who promised him steady work and pay.

But on Monday, the Caprarulos found themselves essentially facing homelessness, stuck in a motel they were paying for as one of Krizanac's fleet Cromex's trucks disappeared in the Chicago area. Caprarulo had initially been promised he'd be paid that very day, yet now approaching a week into the ordeal the Caprarulos haven't heard from Krizanac since Friday, and the $3,000 or so they say he owes them looks unlikely to materialize.

"It was an older KW with a lot of mileage on it, and we were always bringing it into the garage getting it fixed," he said. "It had the smallest tank and wasn’t getting good fuel miles, burning almost faster than we could put it in." 

According to Caprarulo, texts from Krizanac show he had been promised payment to come this past Monday. It never came as he and Anthony lived out of a motel over Easter weekend. Later on in the text thread, the promise of payment was withdrawn -- New equipment never came, though. In fact, according to Caprarulo, Cromex had imploded from at first a reported 30 trucks, to around 15, then down to just a handful, until finally his family was told the last one had been taken by the bank, leaving them stranded in Chicago. (The Cromex company's snapshot in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration still shows Cromex as an active property carrier with 15 power units and 16 drivers, with a couple of inspections having occurred in March.) 

There in that fifth day in a motel, on Monday, in Elgin, Illinios, the younger Caprarulo fired off a cry for help on Twitter, which eventually made it to the desk of the Truckers Emergency Assistance Responders, a nonprofit group that serves as a lifeline to drivers suffering from carrier abandonment, accidents, medical episodes and wage theft of the kind that appeared to be happening to the Caprarulos. 

Fellow driver and Real Women In Trucking President Desiree Wood heads the TEAR group, and she said Caprarulos' story bears all the hallmarks of a ring of serial offenders in the Chicago area who seem to prey on vulnerable drivers.