On September 17, 2025, C.H. Robinson published its Carrier of the Year winners. In the category for fleets of more than 1,000 trucks, the list read “Super Ego, Chicago, IL.” It was the kind of announcement a company posts, a few people like, and everyone forgets.

A year later, six family-owned trucking companies put it in a racketeering complaint.

That complaint was filed September 23 in federal court in Marshall, Texas. It accuses C.H. Robinson and Total Quality Logistics of routing freight through carriers that cut corners on driver hours, logbooks and labor, then using the savings to undercut honest truckers. The plaintiffs want treble damages under RICO. Freymiller Trucking alone says it lost $51.2 million in sales across 63 customers. Their lawyer, Trey Duck, said the brokers “have knowingly enabled and profited from forced labor.” C.H. Robinson’s chief legal officer, Dorothy Capers, answered with a line I have reread several times since: “No freight broker sets rates. The marketplace does.”

The trade press, understandably, added it to the pile. In May, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that states can hold freight brokers liable for negligently choosing carriers. The broker in that case was C.H. Robinson. In July, a Dallas County jury returned a verdict of about $604 million over a 2021 crash in Mississippi that killed three people, and it assigned C.H. Robinson 23 percent of the fault. FreightWaves ran the headline “C.H. Robinson: Nuclear Verdict’s Existential Threat to Brokers.” When the racketeering suit landed, The Loadstar went with “CH Robinson in hot water again.”

I have some sympathy for C.H. Robinson. That is an odd thing for me to admit, since I am currently suing Expeditors.

The verdict and the lawsuit are being read as one story. The verdict came after a trial, with witnesses, cross-examination and a jury charge. Even so, as of early September it still was not final, and C.H. Robinson has promised to appeal. The company points out that the carrier “had safely delivered nearly 270 loads for our customers and held a Satisfactory FMCSA rating when we selected it.” The racketeering complaint is sixty-six pages of one side’s allegations, filed on day one. Nobody has tested a word of it yet.

Here I should confess something. In Carrabes v. Expeditors, a case I am still litigating in federal court in Boston, I asked the court for permission to add RICO claims. The court said no. I won’t discuss that case while it is pending. I did come away knowing where civil RICO claims usually die, and I learned it from the plaintiff’s side of the courtroom.

From that side, my approach to RICO is simple. Plead everything, expect the court to whittle it down, and fight to get one claim in front of a jury. The truckers’ lawyers did exactly that. They pleaded every subsection of the statute, then added a false advertising claim for good measure. If I represented Stevens Trucking, I would have done the same thing.

That also tells you what the brokers should do first. They should make the court do the whittling.

The tool is a 2006 Supreme Court case, Anza v. Ideal Steel Supply Corp. Ideal Steel sued a competitor, National Steel Supply, whose owners were accused of not charging New York sales tax to cash customers and filing false returns to hide it. The untaxed sales let National cut its prices, and Ideal lost business. The Court threw out the main RICO claim. Justice Kennedy wrote that the cause of Ideal’s harm was “a set of actions (offering lower prices) entirely distinct from the alleged RICO violation (defrauding the State).”

Hold that sentence up against the truckers’ complaint. A carrier overworks or underpays a driver, and quotes a low rate. A broker buys capacity at that rate and bids for a shipper’s business. The shipper weighs price, service and its own history with each bidder, and picks one. Somewhere downstream, a family trucking company loses a lane. Every link in that chain is a separate decision by a separate company, and the alleged crime sits at the far end of it. It is Anza’s problem with more trucks.

In fairness to the plaintiffs, the complaint is strongest where it names customers. It alleges that Johnson Controls, Armacell and Bridgestone moved freight based on compliance promises. In a 2008 case about tax-lien auctions, the Supreme Court held that a RICO plaintiff does not have to be the one who was lied to. Those allegations deserve to be taken seriously. They are also a small slice of a complaint that otherwise asks a court to treat a whole freight market’s pricing as the proceeds of racketeering.

So I drafted the motion to dismiss I would want to see filed first. It argues that the market-wide theory runs straight into Anza. It argues that the fraud allegations lump four C.H. Robinson entities together without saying who said what. And it argues that the forced labor allegations describe what carriers did without showing what the brokers knew. You can read it below.

A word about what it is. The draft is for informational purposes only. It is based largely on my own work in Carrabes v. Expeditors, and it has not had the rigorous checking a court-filed document would get. I don’t represent C.H. Robinson, TQL or anyone else in this case. I wrote about where the complaint breaks, and where it could hold, for The Loadstar this week.

The next time C.H. Robinson publishes its Carrier of the Year list, I suspect someone in Eden Prairie reads it twice before it goes up.