Staten Island DMV Workers Arrested After Issuing Fake Licenses to Chinese Immigrants

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Your examiner records show road test results entered for applicants who were never physically present at this location.

[00:00:04]>> This operation had been in the [music] works for over a year.

[00:00:08]Edward Tarik Queen, Aji Adicula, >> [music] >> and Tiana Rose Andolina walked right into it, and they brought 12 others down with them. We need you to step away from the terminal.

[00:00:20]>> Well, those entries are all documented.

[00:00:21]Every test I process has a corresponding file. I don't know what records you're looking at.

[00:00:23]>> An undercover detective paid 1,600 The investigation [music] had started with a phone call from inside the building.

[00:00:29]A New York State DMV employee had been watching the testing [music] schedule for months, watching the volume of road tests assigned to three specific examiners >> [music] >> across three Staten Island offices, watching the pass rates, watching the patterns [music] that did not match the legitimate testing capacity of any of those locations.

[00:00:51]By July 2nd, 2025, that phone call had become Operation [music] Road Test. 14 indicted defendants, three Staten [music] Island DMV examiners, one Queens driving school, and an unknown number of New Yorkers now driving [music] on roads they had never been tested to navigate.

[00:01:12]The man on this footage [music] is allegedly at the center of it. Quick question.

[00:01:17]When you took your driver's test, do you remember the examiner's [music] name?

[00:01:22]Probably not.

[00:01:24]Most of us don't.

[00:01:25]Now, think about how much power [music] that person actually had over your life.

[00:01:32]Drop a comment with where you took your road test, and tell me how long it took.

[00:01:38]Subscribe if you're new here.

[00:01:40]>> [music] >> We cover government corruption cases every single week, and this one might be the most consequential [music] DMV case in New York in over a decade.

[00:01:51]Edward Tarik Queen was born in 1985 in the Elm Park section of Staten Island, New York.

[00:01:59]Elm Park sits on the island's north shore, wedged between Mariners Harbor and Port Richmond, a stretch of neighborhoods built for the dock workers and shipyard families that had filled them since the early 20th century.

[00:02:14]The Queens, no relation to the borough, were one of those families. His father worked maintenance at the city's Department of Sanitation garage on Jersey Street.

[00:02:26]His mother worked the front desk at a pediatric clinic on Forest Avenue.

[00:02:31]Edward was the middle of three children.

[00:02:34]Two sisters bracketed him on either side.

[00:02:37]Edward attended Port Richmond High School from 1999 through 2003.

[00:02:43]He was not an academic standout. He played defensive back on the football team for two seasons.

[00:02:50]He worked weekends at a corner store on Castleton Avenue, and by his junior year had moved on to a Saturday job at an independent auto shop on Forest Avenue called Mike's Auto Repair.

[00:03:04]The owner, Michael Pedone, would later describe him in a routine reference letter as punctual, mechanically curious, and respectful to customers.

[00:03:14]Edward graduated high school in 2003 with a Regents diploma and a vague plan to study automotive technology at the College of Staten Island.

[00:03:26]The plan did not last. By the fall of 2004, Edward had dropped out of the community college program and was working full-time at a different shop, Atlantic Auto Body on Richmond Terrace, earning $11 an hour repairing collision damage.

[00:03:44]He stayed at Atlantic for almost 3 years.

[00:03:48]He moved from collision work into general repair, picked up an ASE certification in brake systems and watched the older mechanics around him talk about retirement plans they did not have and pensions that no longer existed in the trade.

[00:04:04]By 2007, he had decided he wanted a city job.

[00:04:09]The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles was hiring motor vehicle examiners.

[00:04:14]The job did not require a college degree. It paid less than what Edward was making in the body shop, but it came with a pension, health insurance, and the kind of civil service protections that an auto body shop could not offer.

[00:04:30]Edward filed his application in March of 2008.

[00:04:34]He was 23 years old. He took the written civil service examination at a testing center in Lower Manhattan in May.

[00:04:43]He scored in the 78th percentile.

[00:04:47]The higher letter arrived in August.

[00:04:49]He reported for training at the Albany DMV Academy in October of 2008.

[00:04:55]Three weeks of classroom instruction on New York State vehicle and traffic law, road test administration protocols, scoring rubrics, fraud detection procedures, and the specific data entry steps required to enter test results into the DMV's central database.

[00:05:14]He passed every module.

[00:05:17]His first assignment was the Staten Island DMV office at 1755 South Avenue in Travis.

[00:05:25]He drove from his parents' house in Elm Park to the office, parked in the employee lot, and walked into his first shift on a Tuesday morning in November.

[00:05:34]His early performance reviews described him as professional, consistent in scoring application, and appropriately firm with applicants during corrective feedback.

[00:05:45]He moved up the seniority ladder methodically.

[00:05:48]He married a woman named Tasha Wilkins, a pre-K teacher's aide, in 2011.

[00:05:55]They had a son in 2013.

[00:05:58]He bought a modest house on Newark Avenue in Elm Park in 2015.

[00:06:03]Two stories, three bedrooms, vinyl siding, a small backyard with a chain-link fence.

[00:06:11]He paid $42,000 more than the asking price because the Staten Island market was tightening and he stretched the mortgage out over 30 years. He coached his son's youth basketball team at the Greenbelt Recreation Center starting in 2019.

[00:06:29]By 2022, he was a senior motor vehicle examiner.

[00:06:33]His base salary was just under $61,000 a year.

[00:06:38]He was 40 years old.

[00:06:40]That was the public version of Edward Tarik Queen.

[00:06:44]The version his colleagues knew.

[00:06:46]The version his son's basketball team knew.

[00:06:49]The version his neighbors on Newark Avenue knew.

[00:06:54]The version that the Staten Island District Attorney's Office would allege in the July 2025 indictment looked different.

[00:07:02]To understand what the indictment alleges, you have to understand what a New York State motor vehicle examiner actually does.

[00:07:11]The DMV runs more than 200 road test locations across New York.

[00:07:16]Three of them sit on Staten Island.

[00:07:19]Each location is staffed by motor vehicle examiners, civil servants in reflective vests, holding clipboards, sitting in the passenger seats of applicant vehicles, observing turns, stops, parallel parking attempts, and lane changes, scoring each maneuver against a printed rubric.

[00:07:41]At the end of the test, the examiner enters a numeric score into a handheld terminal or, depending on the location, a desktop system at the DMV office.

[00:07:54]That score, once entered, becomes a New York State record.

[00:07:59]If the score is high enough to pass, the applicant is issued a driver's license.

[00:08:04]The license itself is a federally recognized credential.

[00:08:09]It is accepted at airports as identification under the Real ID program.

[00:08:14]It is accepted at federal courthouses.

[00:08:17]It is accepted as proof of age, proof of residency, and proof of identity by every bank, every landlord, and every employer in the United States. The act of an examiner entering a passing score is, in a literal, institutional sense, the act that creates an American driver.

[00:08:38]The integrity of the entire system depends on a single assumption, that the examiner entering the score was actually present in the vehicle, actually watched the applicant drive, >> [snorts] >> and actually scored what they observed.

[00:08:54]There is no second examiner who watches the first examiner. There is no real-time supervisor riding along. There is no dash camera recording the test from the perspective of the dashboard.

[00:09:08]The examiner's signature on the scoring sheet and the examiner's log in in the DMV database are the only things separating a legitimate license from a fraudulent one.

[00:09:21]The Staten Island DMV system has three locations.

[00:09:25]The South Avenue office in Travis, the Veterans Road West Express office in Charleston, and the Highland Boulevard satellite office in New Dorp.

[00:09:35]According to the District Attorney's announcement, three examiners were allegedly working across these three different locations.

[00:09:43]Edward Tehrac Queen at one, Aji Adicula, age 43 of Willowbrook, at another, Tiyana Rose Andolina, age 30 of Arden Heights, at the third.

[00:09:57]The geographic dispersion was, the DA's office would allege, deliberate.

[00:10:03]By spreading the alleged fraudulent test entries across three different facilities and three different examiners, the volume at any one location could be kept low enough to avoid triggering an internal audit.

[00:10:17]The pattern would only emerge if someone inside the DMV started looking for it across the three offices at the same time.

[00:10:25]That is the alleged vulnerability the scheme is said to have exploited, not a broken system, a trusted one.

[00:10:33]According to the Staten Island District Attorney's indictment, the operation worked like this. T and E Driving School sat on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens, a 5-mi commercial corridor crowded with bubble tea shops, language schools, dental offices, accounting firms, and dozens of other small businesses that served the dense Chinese-speaking population of the neighborhood.

[00:10:59]The school's storefront was unremarkable from the outside.

[00:11:04]A pair of glass doors, a printed sign in Chinese and English, a small lobby with plastic chairs, a whiteboard with class schedules.

[00:11:15]The school's owner, identified in the indictment as Wakeson Tan, age 38, ran the operation alongside a woman identified as Weiwan Tan, age 40, serving as the school's secretary, and an employee identified as Winnie Yang, age 36.

[00:11:34]The school's advertised service was driver education.

[00:11:38]The school's alleged actual service, according to prosecutors, was something else entirely.

[00:11:45]T&E's marketing, the indictment alleges, was conducted primarily on Chinese language social media platforms.

[00:11:53]The posts were written in Mandarin and more specifically in the colloquial language used by speakers of the Fujianese dialect, the regional Chinese language spoken in China's southeast Fujian province.

[00:12:08]Flushing, Queens, has one of the largest Fujianese-speaking immigrant populations in the United States.

[00:12:15]Many of those immigrants do not speak English, do not have lawful immigration status, or do not have the documentation that a typical New York DMV applicant carries into a road test.

[00:12:29]New York's 2019 Green Light Law had opened the door to driver's license applications without proof of immigration status.

[00:12:38]The testing requirement, however, remained. An applicant who did not speak English well, who had never driven in the United States, who did not understand the scoring rubric, could legally apply for a license, but could not realistically pass the test.

[00:12:55]T&E Driving School, according to the indictment, positioned itself as the paid solution.

[00:13:03]The advertised price structure was specific. $1,600 for a driver's license if the customer already had a learner's permit.

[00:13:13]$2,000 for both, a learner's permit and a license, start to finish.

[00:13:20]The payments were allegedly made in cash, in money orders, or through transfers that the US Postal Inspector's Office would later trace as part of the broader investigation.

[00:13:32]What the customer received for that payment, according to the indictment, was one of two services.

[00:13:39]The first was an imposter test.

[00:13:42]A T&E Driving School employee, not the customer, would show up at the Staten Island DMV road test appointment, present identification that allegedly matched the customer's information closely enough to clear the examiner's verification, take the road test in the customer's name, pass it, and walk away.

[00:14:05]The customer would then receive an actual New York State driver's license >> [snorts] >> issued in the customer's actual name with their actual photograph attached at the license issuance stage on the strength of an imposter's driving performance.

[00:14:22]The second alleged service was simpler.

[00:14:25]The customer paid the fee.

[00:14:27]The customer was told not to show up.

[00:14:30]The driving school allegedly paid the DMV examiner directly.

[00:14:35]The examiner entered a passing score into the DMV database for a test that had never been administered to anyone.

[00:14:43]Not the customer, not an imposter, not anyone.

[00:14:48]The DMV record showed a passed road test.

[00:14:51]The license followed. The pricing was deliberately structured to make the service accessible.

[00:14:58]$1,600 is real money in any community.

[00:15:02]But for a Fujianese immigrant working in a Flushing restaurant or a Queens construction site, it was money that could be saved over a few months.

[00:15:11]The school, according to prosecutors, would then pay a portion of that fee to the DMV examiner who handled the back end.

[00:15:20]The remainder stayed with the school as profit distributed among the owner, the secretary, the employees who posed as imposter test takers, and the recruiters who brought customers in through the social media channels.

[00:15:35]The geographic architecture mattered.

[00:15:38]By splitting the alleged fraudulent test entries across three Staten Island examiners working at three different DMV offices, the operation could push volume through without triggering the kind of statistical spike that an internal DMV audit would catch at any single location.

[00:15:57]Each examiner's individual numbers stayed within plausible range.

[00:16:02]Across all three, allegedly, the volume was substantial.

[00:16:07]The indictment does not allege that the operation was sophisticated.

[00:16:11]It alleges that the operation was patient.

[00:16:15]Months of small-volume fraudulent entries.

[00:16:18]Three different DMV offices.

[00:16:22]A driving school in another borough that handled the customer-facing work.

[00:16:27]A targeted immigrant community that allegedly trusted the school more than it trusted the bureaucracy.

[00:16:34]The operation, prosecutors say, ran for years before anyone inside the DMV started looking at the testing schedule with the kind of attention that would catch it.

[00:16:46]We're about to get into how investigators actually cracked this case open.

[00:16:51]Before we do, if you've made it this far, you already know this channel covers stories that get buried under bigger news cycles. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

[00:17:03]We do this every week, and the next case I'm dropping is even harder to watch than this one. The case did not begin with a crash.

[00:17:12]It did not begin with a complaint from a passenger who had ridden with a licensed driver who could not actually drive.

[00:17:20]It did not begin with a journalist's investigation or a federal agent's tip or a customer who had paid the $1,600 and turned around to cooperate with authorities.

[00:17:32]It began with a phone call from inside the building.

[00:17:36]A New York State DMV employee whose identity has not been publicly disclosed in the available reporting had been watching the testing schedule.

[00:17:46]According to officials, the irregularities the employee noticed had to do with scheduling.

[00:17:52]Specific examiners were processing volumes of test results that did not match the legitimate testing capacity of their locations or scheduling appointments at times that did not match normal protocols or entering results in patterns that when laid out across days and weeks did not look like the normal rhythm of road testing at a Staten Island DMV office.

[00:18:17]The employee made the report internally.

[00:18:20]The internal report moved up through the DMV's administrative chain and according to the announcement, eventually reached the office of New York State Inspector General Lucy Lang.

[00:18:32]The Inspector General's office handles allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse inside state government.

[00:18:39]Allegations against three DMV examiners operating across three different offices in the same borough fit exactly the kind of multi-employee, single-borough fraud pattern that the IG's office is built to investigate.

[00:18:56]The Inspector General's office did not move alone. The investigation that followed pulled together a multi-agency coalition unusual for a DMV case.

[00:19:07]The Staten Island District Attorney's office took the lead on the state level prosecution.

[00:19:13]The New York State Inspector General provided the internal DMV records access.

[00:19:19]The US Postal Inspector's Office handled the financial tracing.

[00:19:23]Money orders, mailed payments, mailed credentials, the documents that travel through the US mail system and fall under federal postal jurisdiction.

[00:19:34]Homeland Security Investigations, through its El Dorado Task Force, joined the coalition because of the immigration status dimensions of the customer base.

[00:19:45]The NYPD provided the operational manpower, including the single most important investigative resource the case required.

[00:19:54]The investigators needed someone who could pose as a T and E driving school customer.

[00:20:00]That meant someone who spoke Fujianese, not Mandarin, not Cantonese.

[00:20:06]Fujianese, the specific regional dialect of Fujian province that the school's marketing was allegedly designed to reach.

[00:20:16]The NYPD has, among its roughly 36,000 officers, a small number of detectives who speak Fujianese.

[00:20:25]One of them was assigned to Operation Road Test.

[00:20:29]The detective's identity has not been publicly disclosed.

[00:20:34]What is on the public record is the operation that detective ran and the evidence it produced.

[00:20:42]The undercover detective contacted T and E Driving School through the channels the school allegedly used to recruit customers.

[00:20:51]According to the announcement, the contact was made through the social media platforms popular in the Fujianese immigrant community.

[00:21:00]The detective presented himself as a typical customer, Fujianese speaking, in need of a driver's license, willing to pay the school's fee to avoid the formal road test. The school, according to the indictment, accepted him as a customer.

[00:21:16]The detective paid $1,600.

[00:21:20]The money came from government tracked funds.

[00:21:23]Every bill, every transfer, every payment instrument was documented before it left the investigator's possession.

[00:21:30]The detective already had a New York State learner's permit, which the school's pricing structure required for the $1,600 tier.

[00:21:39]After the payment, the detective set up a road test appointment at a Staten Island DMV location.

[00:21:46]Then, according to the indictment, came the moment that made the entire case.

[00:21:51]The school contacted the detective.

[00:21:54]He was told not to show up. He stayed home.

[00:21:57]No one drove the test in his name. No impostor took his appointment.

[00:22:02]The DMV examiner did not see him in any car.

[00:22:07]The detective never sat behind the wheel of any vehicle on Staten Island.

[00:22:12]A few days later, the detective received an official New York State driver's license issued by the state DMV with his name and photograph, generated by the official DMV system, based on a road test result that had been entered into the database without any test having taken place.

[00:22:31]That license is, in the operational logic of a federal corruption investigation, the smoking gun.

[00:22:37]The transaction was complete, end to end.

[00:22:40]The advertising that recruited him, the payment that funded the bypass, the instructions to skip the test, the DMV database entry showing a passed road test that had never happened, the physical license printed and mailed to his cover address.

[00:22:57]Every [snorts] step was documented.

[00:22:59]Every step generated paper, electronic, or recorded evidence. The case against the alleged participants in the operation had moved from a pattern in the testing schedule to a controlled by transaction with the precision of a federal narcotics case.

[00:23:17]The investigation expanded from there.

[00:23:20]Financial records were subpoenaed.

[00:23:23]The flow of money from T and E Driving School's bank accounts to allegedly connected accounts associated with the three DMV examiners was traced.

[00:23:34]DMV database records were pulled showing the volumes of test results entered by each of the three examiners over the course of the relevant period.

[00:23:44]The social media records of T and E's advertising practices targeting the Fujianese community in Flushing and across Queens were preserved.

[00:23:55]Cooperating witnesses, some of them allegedly customers and others allegedly participants in the operation, began providing statements that filled in the operational details.

[00:24:07]By the spring of 2025, the investigators had what they needed.

[00:24:12]On July 2nd, 2025, Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon announced the indictment.

[00:24:20]14 defendants, three DMV examiners, the owner, the secretary, and an employee of T and E Driving School.

[00:24:30]Additional defendants whose specific alleged roles included posing as imposter test-takers and serving as recruiters or intermediaries.

[00:24:40]Charges including impairing the integrity of a government licensing examination, falsifying business records, tampering with public records, identity theft, and additional counts.

[00:24:53]A potential maximum exposure for the most serious counts of up to 7 years in state prison.

[00:25:00]The arrests were coordinated.

[00:25:03]At dawn on July 2nd, 2025, investigators moved on multiple addresses across Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. At a small two-story house on Newark Avenue in Elm Park, three vehicles pulled up to the curb at 6:40 in the morning.

[00:25:21]The lead vehicle was an unmarked Staten Island District Attorney's Investigative Unit.

[00:25:27]Behind it sat an NYPD patrol car and a New York State Inspector General's vehicle.

[00:25:34]Edward Tarik Queen, according to the available reporting, was at home when the investigators knocked.

[00:25:42]The conversation at the front door has not been recorded in detail in the public reporting on the case.

[00:25:48]But the basic shape of any pre-dawn arrest at a Staten Island home is the same.

[00:25:54]Knock, identification, warrant produced, the moment of recognition on the face of the person inside.

[00:26:02]Officer, "Mr. Queen, we have a warrant for your arrest. Charges have been filed by the Staten Island District Attorney's Office. We need you to step outside."

[00:26:14]Queen, "What is this about?"

[00:26:17]Officer, "Operation Road Test. The indictment was unsealed this morning.

[00:26:24]We need to put you in cuffs and transport you to the precinct for processing."

[00:26:29]Queen, "I want to call my lawyer."

[00:26:32]Officer, "You can call from the precinct. Right now, we need you to come with us."

[00:26:39]His wife stood in the doorway behind him in a bathrobe.

[00:26:43]His son was upstairs asleep.

[00:26:46]The neighbors on Newark Avenue watched from behind front curtains as he was walked from his front steps to the back seat of the patrol car.

[00:26:55]He did not run.

[00:26:57]He did not resist. He did not argue further.

[00:27:01]He went into the back of the vehicle in handcuffs and was driven to the 120th Precinct on Richmond Terrace for processing alongside the other Staten Island defendants from the indictment.

[00:27:13]His colleagues, Aji Idicula and Tiana Rose Andelina, were arrested at their own homes that same morning. The Queens defendants from T&E Driving School were taken into custody at addresses in Flushing and the surrounding neighborhoods.

[00:27:30]By mid-morning, 14 defendants were in custody across the city.

[00:27:35]The DMV terminated all three Staten Island examiners that same day.

[00:27:40]Edward Tarik Queens' 17-year career as a New York State Motor Vehicle Examiner ended on the morning of July 2nd, 2025 on the front steps of the house he had bought a decade earlier to raise his son in.

[00:27:57]The arraignments took place at the Staten Island Criminal Courthouse at 67 Targee Street on the afternoon of July 2nd, 2025.

[00:28:08]Each defendant was walked, one at a time, into the courtroom.

[00:28:13]Each was read the charges against them.

[00:28:16]Each entered a not guilty plea, the standard initial plea at arraignment, and the plea required to preserve the right to a full trial.

[00:28:27]Each was assigned defense counsel, some through private representation, others through the Legal Aid Society or Assigned Counsel programs.

[00:28:38]Bail was set at varying amounts for the different defendants based on their specific charges, their ties to the community, their employment status, and their assessed flight risk.

[00:28:51]Because the case is, as of this reporting, pre-trial with no convictions, no plea agreements, and no sentencing on the public record.

[00:29:01]The question of what happens next belongs entirely to the New York State court system.

[00:29:08]The indictment alleges the defendants are presumed innocent.

[00:29:13]The grand jury found probable cause to issue the indictment. The District Attorney's office will, in the months and years ahead, prove the charges in court or fail to do so.

[00:29:26]The defense will respond. The judges will rule on motions, on evidence, on plea offers, on trial dates. What is already on the record, though, is the institutional damage.

[00:29:40]District Attorney Michael McMahon, at the press conference announcing the indictment, used a single word repeatedly.

[00:29:48]Countless.

[00:29:49]He said it about the number of fraudulent licenses allegedly issued.

[00:29:54]He said it about the number of unqualified drivers now operating vehicles on New York roads as a result.

[00:30:02]The word was not a rhetorical flourish.

[00:30:05]It was a precise acknowledgement that the investigators do not know and may never know exactly how many people received licenses through the alleged scheme.

[00:30:15]Each license must be identified individually.

[00:30:19]Each license holder must be contacted.

[00:30:22]Each license must be reviewed.

[00:30:24]And each driver, presumably, must be retested under legitimate conditions if they wish to legally drive in New York again.

[00:30:33]The Department of Motor Vehicles has announced reforms, enhanced monitoring of test administration patterns across DMV locations, stricter background checks for examiner positions, new protocols for cross-referencing examiner workloads against scheduling capacity.

[00:30:51]The reforms address the operational vulnerability prospectively. They do not retrieve the licenses that have already been issued, nor identify the drivers who are now, on any given day, navigating the Verrazzano Bridge or the Staten Island Expressway or the Belt Parkway with credentials they did not legitimately earn.

[00:31:14]The broader structural lesson about state credentialing systems, about regional immigrant communities targeted by predatory schemes, about the gap between a green light law that provides access and the testing infrastructure that the law preserves, will be debated in policy forums for years.

[00:31:35]The defendants in Operation Road Test will face their accountability in courtrooms. The unknown number of New Yorkers driving on licenses obtained through the alleged scheme will continue to drive until the DMV identifies them, license by license. Edward Tarik Queen sat in the back of the patrol car at 6:40 in the morning on the 2nd of July, 2025.

[00:32:01]The house he had bought to raise his son in was behind him.

[00:32:05]The 17-year career he had built as a state employee was behind him.

[00:32:11]The road in front of him led to the precinct, the courthouse, the indictment, and a trial that has not yet happened.

[00:32:20]This case was institutional, but this next case on the right-hand side is even more outrageous.

[00:32:27]Click it now.