A suburban Chicago man who caused a fatal truck-car crash last year in Tennessee has been charged with fraudulently obtaining a license in Wisconsin to drive a truck by falsely claiming to be a Wisconsin resident at the time.
A criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Chicago charged Nasko Nazov, 45, with lying to the Operation Safe Road federal grand jury. He is the 79th defendant charged in the six-year investigation.
Last March, one year after he fraudulently obtained a commercial driver’s license in Wisconsin, Nazov slammed his tractor-trailer into a car on Interstate Highway 81 in Tennessee, killing a family of four. He faces four counts of reckless homicide in Tennessee in connection with those fatalities, Assistant U.S. Atty. Brandon Fox said.
Federal prosecutors in Chicago have alleged that hundreds of immigrants living in Illinois traveled in recent years to Wisconsin to skirt tougher Illinois regulations imposed because of the bribes-for-licenses scandal, obtaining licenses to drive trucks by fraud.
Within the past year, federal prosecutors have supplied Wisconsin authorities with a list of about 500 drivers suspected of obtaining licenses in Wisconsin despite living in Illinois.
More than half of those licenses have been suspended after the holders either failed to respond or didn’t adequately prove they lived in Wisconsin, said Gary Guenther, the director of the bureau of field services for the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles.
Nazov, a Macedonia native, needed an interpreter in court Tuesday. Prosecutors sought to keep him in custody, saying he is a flight risk, but Nazov’s court-appointed lawyer, Steven Hunter, didn’t oppose detention because immigration problems would have kept Nazov from being released.
Hunter said authorities in Tennessee originally considered the fatal crash to be an accident until Safe Road prosecutors in Chicago became involved.
“It seems to me that the supposed reckless homicide was deemed an accident by the Tennessee authorities until the federal government investigated the validity of how he obtained his driver’s license,” Hunter said.
Nazov has also been charged with driving without a valid license in Tennessee, Hunter said.
According to Hunter, Nazov stopped driving a truck after the fatal crash and now works in a warehouse. He lives with his son and daughter and her husband in Downers Grove, Hunter said. He formerly lived in Willowbrook.
“He’s very, very upset about the accident and has gone through a fair degree of trauma,” Hunter said. “He has no desire to go back to driving a truck.”
According to published accounts at the time, Nazov’s rig plowed into a car stuck in traffic because of an earlier wreck on Interstate Highway 81 near Bristol, Tenn., on March 7, 2004.
“The car looks like a bomb hit it; there’s nothing left,” a state trooper told the Associated Press.
Killed were Edward D. Armstrong III, 32; his wife, Melissa, 26; and his children, Brittany, 10, and Edward IV, 6, all of Waynesboro, Tenn. Nazov was uninjured.
According to the charges unsealed Tuesday, Nazov lied to a grand jury last June when he said he had been living with a girlfriend in Greenfield, Wis., for two to three months when he obtained the commercial driver’s license. However, Nazov could only recall his girlfriend’s first name.
Federal investigators discovered that at least four other drivers had listed the exact same address in Greenfield as Nazov when they applied for Wisconsin commercial driver licenses.
One of the drivers admitted to authorities that he paid $500 to a middleman for assistance in obtaining a Wisconsin commercial driver’s license. The same middleman assisted Nazov, authorities said.
According to the charges, Nazov failed the first time he took the required road test but passed on a second try. A translator also assisted Nazov, who doesn’t speak English, on the written test, a practice barred in Illinois as a result of the bribes-for-licenses scandal.
Last year, four Chicagoans were charged as part of the Safe Road probe with pocketing bribes from hundreds of Eastern European immigrants. Illinois had cracked down on cheating as a result of the highly publicized scandal, prompting Adam Babul, the alleged ringleader, to go to Wisconsin to fraudulently obtain licenses, allowing unqualified applicants to drive trucks.
Guenther said the suspended licenses involved a mixture of commercial licenses and regular licenses, and most of the motorists’ names appeared to be Eastern European.
Guenther said Wisconsin has tightened its requirements for proof of residency. The state no longer accepts rental lease agreements, checkbooks or cell phone bills to prove residency. Generally, authorities require bank statements and utility bills–with a name and address–that establish residency for at least 30 days.
“We continue to find people trying to illegally get a license,” Guenther said. “We have to keep our eyes open here in Wisconsin, like any other state.”
