The Red Line Inspector Was Supposed to Check the Tracks. Prosecutors Say He Was Running a Garage.

Andy Vicente, 37, of Bridgewater, a former MBTA track inspector at Cabot Yard, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to conspiring to falsify Red Line track inspection reports and to commit wire fraud through overtime, according to the Globe and the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Prosecutors say that from January to mid-October 2024, he and others faked inspection reports, partly with info found online, and padded how long the "inspections" took so the bosses wouldn't complain. Some of the time he was supposed to be on the tracks, prosecutors say, he was in the Cabot Yard garage, which court records describe as being run like "an automobile repair shop" for non-MBTA cars. There's surveillance video from Sept. 19, 2024, of him sitting in the garage holding his phone during a supposed inspection.

He got $80,000 in overtime in 2024, according to records cited by the Globe. That was the year the T paid out a record $126 million-plus in overtime and called it a "monumental, somewhat historical level of work." Some of it, apparently, was historical in a different way.

Here's what bugs me. These are the tracks. The thing millions of people ride on. The Red Line has had enough problems without anybody inventing the inspection reports. Credit to WCVB's 5 Investigates for digging this up in the first place. And that surveillance video is going to be hard to explain away.

What we still don't know: what sentence he gets on Jan. 13, how the four co-defendants' cases end (they're presumed innocent), and whether anybody checked the tracks those fake reports were supposed to cover.