Pearl Transit a Symptom of Nationwide Fraud
6th October 2026
Since 2019, the Pearl Transit Company has received more than $1.6 million in federal funds to carry around elderly and disabled riders in California, Georgia, and North Carolina. The problem is that none of the people Pearl claimed to transport received rides — in fact, some of them were dead — and the drivers Pearl claimed to employ did not work for the company — their identities were stolen by the company. Instead of moving people, the money went to renting Porsches ($100,000), Loro Piana clothing (where a jacket can cost $9,900 and a wool hat is $500), and international travel.
For some reason, the U.S. Justice Department took exception to this and has successfully prosecuted the owners of Pearl Transit, a husband-and-wife team named Luis Pino-Copete and Jael Watts, for fraud. But I have to wonder why this fraud gets prosecuted when the much larger fraud that is the U.S. transit industry is ignored by the Justice Department.
Between 2019 and 2024, the amount of federal dollars spent on operating transit grew by $7.9 billion, a 186 percent increase. Nearly 63 percent of that increase went to “general administration,” i.e., bureaucratic overhead, the functional equivalent of renting Porsches and buying luxury clothing. Yet the number of people carried by transit declined by more than 22 percent.