Bid $10,000, Tell the Driver $7,500: Owner-Operators Sue a Michigan Carrier Under RICO, Alleging It Ran Two Dispatch Systems So Drivers Paid by Percentage Never Saw What the Load Really Paid

If you haul for a percentage of the load, the one number you can never check yourself is the one you are paid on. A group of owner-operators in Michigan says that is exactly where their carrier took its cut. In a proposed class action filed September 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Adis and Denisa Bajgoric, Sasa Susa doing business as ASP Logistics, Mensud Topic, Edin Topic and George Ureche accuse Red Line Logistics Inc. of Sterling Heights and its two officers, president Zaim Bajgoric and secretary Anel Penava, of repeatedly telling drivers a load paid less than the customer actually paid, and pocketing the difference. The case is Bajgoric et al. v. Red Line Logistics, Inc. et al., No. 2:26-cv-13533. It is a lawsuit, not a verdict: nothing in it has been proven, and as of the docket review FreightWaves published Thursday, Red Line and the two officers had not filed a response, which at this stage may simply reflect service timing. But the complaint describes the alleged mechanism in enough detail that every percentage-paid driver should read it.

Two systems, two numbers

According to the complaint, Red Line bid on loads from third-party customers and, when it won, assigned them to owner-operators working under exclusive lease agreements. The leases split the load's gross value between driver and carrier, minus fuel and listed costs; the split varied by driver, and the one agreement the plaintiffs attached gives the owner-operator 80 percent and Red Line 20. The plaintiffs allege the carrier kept the real numbers in a transportation management system called Apex, which drivers could not access, and ran a second system, Sylectus, for assigning loads and paying drivers. The carrier, the complaint says, would 'instruct the dispatcher to reduce the value of the load by a certain amount, and report that fraudulently reduced amount into Sylectus for Plaintiffs to see.' Drivers accepted the loads believing the Sylectus figure was the whole load. The emailed settlement statements that followed, the plaintiffs say, showed the reduced number as the amount the customer paid.

The complaint's own illustration: Red Line bids $10,000 for a load, tells the owner-operator it is worth $7,500, keeps the $2,500, and then takes its contractual 20 percent of the $7,500 on top. For the driver, that is $6,000 on a load that should have paid $8,000. The plaintiffs say this was 'repeated for each trip for each truck driver over a period of years,' that the operation ran across 'virtually all the states of the United States, Mexico and Canada,' and that the number of emails, texts and VoIP messages carrying the false values 'could exceed thousands of separate events.' Because the leases were exclusive, drivers 'had to take the loads for the amount offered lest they be blackballed and offered no more loads.'

The alleged thousands of messages are the reason the case is framed as racketeering. Each transmission of a false load value, invoice or settlement, the plaintiffs argue, is a separate act of wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. 1343, and together they form a pattern under the civil RICO statute, which allows actual damages to be tripled. The complaint also pleads breach of contract, conversion, unjust enrichment, promissory estoppel and fraudulent concealment in the alternative, and asks for an accounting of profits, punitive damages, attorney fees and injunctive relief. It puts the class at 'approximately 50-plus truck drivers,' citing Red Line's USDOT number 2418970, and the amount in controversy above $1 million before trebling. One wrinkle the plaintiffs flag themselves: some of them have arbitration agreements with Red Line, and they say the carrier refuses to arbitrate on a class basis even though nothing in those agreements bars it. That is likely to be the first fight.

Red Line, based at 13842 Lakeside Circle in Sterling Heights, holds active interstate authority and is listed with 38 power units and 46 drivers in current carrier data, per FreightWaves. The company, Bajgoric and Penava did not respond to FreightWaves' requests for comment on September 25 and October 1; neither did plaintiffs' counsel Jeff A. DeLaunay of Miller Cohen. The exhibits attached to the complaint, a lease and a driver pay sheet listing four trips totaling $7,000 in trip-related pay before deductions, document the relationship but do not themselves show the gap between what customers paid and what drivers were told. That gap is what discovery would have to prove.

What to ask before you sign a percentage lease

Percentage pay is supposed to align driver and carrier: a better rate, a bigger check for both. It only works if both sides are looking at the same number. The Red Line plaintiffs say they were not. A federal judge in Michigan will decide whether they can prove it, and whether they get to do it together.