'Not looking for $350 tickets': Alarm raised over 'shakedown' traffic stops that net millions

On June 11, Florida-based trucker Tammy Votta set out to drive a heavy, pre-sealed load — 45,000 wobbly pounds — from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Hiawatha, Iowa, mostly along U.S. Highway 54. She stopped for the night in Stratford, Texas, had two cookies for dinner, and woke the next morning with no idea that her whole view of life in America was about to be shattered.

June 12 was a beautiful day, with no wind and clear sailing on U.S. 54. As she was passing through Goodwell, population 920, Votta said she was doing far less than the posted 45 mph because she was running heavy and U.S. 54 has some curves through town. Even beyond city limits, she said, she couldn’t get her rig up to the posted 70 mph. She maxed out at 68.

Nevertheless, red lights appeared in her rearview mirror. Roadside inspection. Had to be. Votta had never committed a crime and had 21 years as a trucker with a spotless record. But cops could pull you over for a roadside inspection without cause. It was a pain, and Votta said she wasn’t a fan but accepted it as part of the job.

That’s when it got weird, and Votta became part of a system of fines that produced no court records but brought more than $2 million to the district attorney’s office.

Officer Karan Gray, badge No. 79, came on hot, like Votta was a suspected serial killer, as the trucker described it. It didn’t make any sense. The truck logs showed she wasn’t speeding. Votta asked a few questions, and strangely, the officer told her not to worry; it was all going to be OK.

Gray returned from her cruiser with a slip of paper from the District 1 Drug Task Force, associated with the local district attorney’s office. The ticket, if that’s what it was, claimed Votta had been caught on radar doing 58 in a 45 mph zone. But the ticket was oddly primitive. There was no statute listed. No fine. No order to appear. Nothing even to sign. Gray told Votta to call the number listed there — there would be some costs, but then it would be like the whole thing never happened. To Votta, that just didn’t seem right. Over the next couple of days, she did some digging, and it started to look like some laws were being broken, maybe a violation of the Hobbs Act of 1951, which prohibits the obstruction or delay of interstate commerce. That included extortion, which is exactly how this felt. Now Votta’s back was up.

“This is America, last time I checked,” she said.

She called the number and got an email instructing her to pay $360, more than she would have paid for a ticket; the local fine for speeding 11-15 mph over the posted limit is $160. An attached document threatened Votta with a warrant for a criminal misdemeanor if she didn’t pay up.

No way, Votta thought.

“I will have no part in that. At all. Ever,” she said. “Integrity comes at a price.”

She tried the official channels. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol referred her to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which referred her to the attorney general’s office, which referred her to the FBI. The FBI called the local district attorney, which didn’t make much sense because the DA was the one running the alleged racket.

In the end, the FBI said the matter had been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office for review.

A Befuddling Practice

At first, attorney James Wirth of the Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, which handles many cases involving speeding tickets and moving violations, didn’t see a lot in Votta’s story that stuck out as suspicious. Sure, the ticket was strange — no court date, no statutory citation — but pretty clearly, it was a deferred prosecution agreement in which offenders are offered an opportunity to pay a higher fine to have an offense erased from their record.

But even that was strange for a few reasons.

First, deferred prosecution agreements are rare.

“Most of the time when we’re talking about a deferred prosecution, it’s in really unusual cases,” Wirth said. “The statute allows for it, so it’s legitimate, but it’s not very common.”

Second, it was strange for a drug task force to be giving speeding tickets. Based out of local DA offices and smacking more than a little of vigilantism, drug task forces have been around for decades. In Oklahoma, they’re more common in rural areas than cities, though one will soon be forming in Tulsa. Wirth said task forces pull people over for sketchy reasons all the time, then manufacture probable cause to conduct searches and seize money. Could they write speeding tickets? Maybe. But it was just so small time.

“They don’t care about speeding,” Wirth said. “Speeding is just a means to pull people over. And then they want to find something else so they can do the search. It’s all for bigger stuff.

“They’re not looking for $350 tickets,” he said. “They don’t even waste their time writing that stuff.”

"Something is very, very wrong here."
Tammy Votta

Last, Wirth said he didn’t see any motive behind the notice Votta received. It was all very odd, but it didn’t fit with the kind of police abuses the Wirth said his office sees regularly: vice squads using the images of innocent girls in prostitution ads to entrap men, traffic stops of minorities for forfeiture purposes, coercing minors into participating in dangerous drug stings.

Did the whole thing sound like a shakedown? Yes — Wirth agreed with that much. And, sure, Wirth said, it was a way to skirt the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, protecting against unlawful search and seizure. But without any evidence that the practice was widespread, it looked like Votta’s case was just a one-off.

The District Attorney

In 2007, former Carter County drug task force investigator Kevin McIntire was indicted on an embezzlement charge following a drug bust. McIntire pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of willful neglect of duty by a public official and was ordered to return $2,600 and relinquish his police certification.

In 2016, after a years-long probation period, McIntire took over as agent in charge of the District 1 Drug Task Force. District 1 comprises four panhandle counties whose populations total a little more than 31,000 people. The unit’s Facebook page includes recent posts about seizures of thousands of fentanyl pills, pounds of meth and cocaine, and a handgun. Documents indicate that in 18 years, the task force had seized hundreds of pounds of drugs with a street value of $117 million.

The District 1 Drug Task Force, composed of five agents, was the unit cited at the top of Votta’s ticket.

McIntire recalled what happened with Votta’s case. Votta had contacted Landline, the official publication of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association — a trucker magazine. McIntire spoke with Mark Schremmer, the senior editor of Landline,which had begun an investigation after Votta made contact and told her story.

McIntire described Votta’s case as a miscommunication from beginning to end. The problem started with the exchange between Votta and Officer Gray. There was blame to go around, but McIntire acknowledged the failure to tell Votta that she could choose between a deferred prosecution agreement and an ordinary ticket.

“Ms. Votta didn’t understand that she had the option of a court date,” McIntire said. “She thought it was like, ‘If you don’t do this DPA, we’re going to throw you in jail.’”

It nearly came to that. More miscommunication after the district attorney decided to drop the case — after Landlineand the FBIgot involved — resulted in a warrant being issued for Votta’s arrest. McIntire caught it, and asked District Attorney George “Buddy” Leach III, appointed by Governor Kevin Stitt in 2021, to dismiss the case two days later. McIntire wrote a letter of apology to Votta.

“That led to discussions of every step of what we’re doing,” McIntire said. “We made some changes based on that deal.”

For his part, Landlineeditor Shremmer refused to speak on the record about why the magazine did not continue its investigation after Votta’s warrant was dismissed.

However, he admitted that their investigation had not uncovered how many deferred prosecution tickets were being given out.

“We didn’t realize it was as prevalent as it is,” Shremmer said.

A Lot of Money

Even before he was hired in 2016, McIntire said, the exact role of the District 1 Drug Task Force had begun to evolve. At first, the mission shifted from direct drug trafficking crimes to things such as burglaries that were suspected of being drug-driven crimes. Now, practically speaking, the role of the drug task force was whatever District Attorney Leach said it was.

“I’ve always said my job is whatever the boss tells me my job is,” McIntire said. “So when he calls and says, ‘Hey I need you to go and do whatever,’ that’s what I’m going to do.”

The task force could always make traffic stops of the sort that concerned attorney Wirth. But part of the evolution of mission was the addition — before McIntire and Leach came along, when James “Mike” Boring was the district attorney — of what was described as either the commercial driver program or the public safety emphasis program, though neither designation was official. In short, the public safety emphasis program was an attempt to use deferred prosecutions to prevent serious accidents involving big rig trucks. Deferred prosecutions of truckers, McIntire said, had succeeded in reducing accidents in Texas County without affecting truckers’ driving records.

Statistics supplied by the district attorney’s office revealed the program's scope. From 2019 to 2024, agents of the District 1 Drug Task Force conducted 6,934 traffic stops, the vast majority in Texas County. Those included approximately 6,000 deferred prosecutions, with an average fine of $360.

That’s more than $2.1 million in six years — most of it during Leach’s tenure as DA.

Tammy Votta poses in her rig. (Courtesy photo)

Votta’s case came to an end when a local judge dismissed it. But her complaint was always broader than just one case. Votta argued that federal anti-masking laws, which prohibited deferred prosecutions to hide the convictions of commercial driver’s license holders, made all of those tickets illegal.

“Something is very, very wrong here,” Votta said.

The Landline investigation looked into it enough to realize that it was a murky area of jurisprudence.

“There were differing interpretations of the law,” Schremmer said.

Wirth agreed. Even if the total amount of money paled beside amounts seized in other districts, the numbers in District 1 made it seem like a systematic money-making machine. But was it illegal? Anti-masking laws specify that paying a fee or court cost amounted to a conviction that could not be masked or deferred. But was a payment to a district attorney — the document that threatened Votta with criminal misdemeanor specified that she should send $360 directly to the DA — a court cost?

That was the argument from District 1.

“The anti-masking statutes are all referencing citations that have been entered into the court,” McIntire said. “And so, in Oklahoma, until it hits the court, the district attorney holds the discretion just like he would in any other criminal matter.”

Or, put more simply, a well-masked violation does not violate anti-masking laws. That is, it is a bribe, and a crime, for a driver to offer a local police officer money to make a speeding ticket go away. But it does not violate anti-masking statutes — it does notamount to extortion — if law enforcement offers a driver a fee to make the same ticket disappear.

Or maybe it does.

A written statement supplied by the National Traffic Law Center, which has published the “Masking Quick Reference Guide” and provides training and resources nationwide to raise awareness of anti-masking laws, offered specifics on the origin of the law.

“Anti-masking provisions have been a part of federal law since 1999 when they were included in the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act,” the NTLC statement said.

The law says the state must not mask, defer imposition of judgment, or allow an individual to enter into a diversion program that would prevent a commercial driver’s license holder's conviction for any violation other than parking, vehicle weight, or vehicle defects.

Ironically, anti-masking provisions are meant to prevent injuries and fatalities involving large trucks and buses.

As to what’s legal and what isn’t, the NTLC statement put it simply.

“It is not uncommon for jurisdictions to use deferred prosecution as part of plea agreements for non-CDL traffic violations,” the statement read. “However, offering deferred prosecution for CDL holders violates federal anti-masking regulations. While some jurisdictions may be unaware of these requirements, others may prioritize revenue generation through fines and plea deals, leading to non-compliance.”

Jurisdictions that repeatedly fail to follow federal guidelines can lose federal funding.

"Offering deferred prosecution for CDL holders violates federal anti-masking regulations."
National Traffic Law Center

But did any of this, as Votta believed, amount to a violation of the Hobbs Act? Probably not. Proving extortion would require specific evidence of unlawful coercive practices beyond standard legal enforcement mechanisms and would need to be investigated by the FBI.

That’s exactly what had happened, Votta said, at least to the extent of the FBI having referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney. But Kayla McCleer and Adam Snider, public affairs specialists for the Oklahoma City office of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma respectively, would neither confirm nor deny that an investigation was underway.

Two days after Oklahoma Watchvisited Guymon to interview McIntire and retrieve official documents related to the warrant for Votta’s arrest, the district attorney chose — after internal discussions, according to McIntire — to end the public safety emphasis program.

Leach refused to comment for this story.

What remains unclear is how widespread the practice of deferred prosecutions for truckers might be in Oklahoma or beyond. McIntire was unaware of deferred prosecutions being used anywhere else in the state.

“I just know that that’s been our stance,” McIntire said. “I’m not aware of any other district that has that going.”

That hints at the heart of the problem. Without someone like Votta raising a stink and calling on authorities and the press, it would be nearly impossible to uncover the practice when the whole point is that nothing is filed in court.

“If it’s happening,” Landline editor Schremmer said, “it’s not being publicized.”

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.