When fiction tells the ugly truth

You could easily get the impression that Cameron B. Ritter has no respect for truckers. But you would be wrong. Very wrong.

Ritter is the guy who wrote “Confessions of a Freight Broker,” a 2024 book that lifts the lid on a fictional brokerage called Dinkum Logistics where brokers, often people still in their 20s, work the phones in high-pressure, boiler-room offices. Turnover is high.

Brokers make up to 200 phone calls a day cajoling shippers to give them loads. Dinkum isn’t fussy about how they cajole. “Say whatever you have to to win loads. We don’t hand out brownie points for being honest,” says Dinkum’s sales manager, something less than a moral guy.

“Down along the border, try not to worry too much about what the coyotes might stuff in the trailers,” the sales manager continues, referring obliquely to illegal immigration and human trafficking, “because brokers have plausible deniability. So just pick up the phone and cover the loads.”

After they’ve pried the freight loose from a shipper with a bid the broker prays is not too low, the brokers hit the phones again calling carriers, looking for one who will haul the load for even less than they quoted the shipper. The difference is their margin.

“The whole industry is fueled by margin – from the shipper, to the broker, to the dispatcher, and finally – down to the trucker. The trucker gets paid last. Everybody takes a little slice along the way,” explains Chris, the young freight broker who serves as the book’s main character and narrator.

Yet Chris and his fellow brokers at Dinkum Logistics often trash truckers. “If a trucker tells you the truth, he’s doing so by accident,” according to an excerpt from the fictional Dinkum Logistics training manual.

One of Chris’ fellow brokers puts it this way: “If the government did anything about fraud in trucking, there wouldn’t be enough truckers left.”

A few of Ritter’s truckers are from Eastern Europe. The Dinkum brokers call them vlads, presumably short for Vladimir. Sometimes, they’re controlled by dispatchers who actually work in places like Romania or Ukraine. In the book, if not in real life, they’re a shifty bunch – but hardly the only troublesome truckers.

As one example, another veteran broker tells young Chris an individual trucker might claim to be a team in order to snag a better-paying load. “Even if they give you two phone numbers, it’s usually just one driver with two phones. You call his burner phone and he’ll answer in a different voice, pretending to be the other driver. It’s just another one of those everyday scams you see in trucking.”

Or a trucker might “bounce” a load. That’s when he accepts a load only to learn of, say, a better-paying trip or one that will take him close to home. He has to get out of the contract he just signed, so he fakes a breakdown or a sudden death in the family, and the load “bounces” back to the broker.

More often, though, brokers get the better of truckers. Take what they call “turn ’em and burn ’em.” It’s “all about finding a backhaul for a trucker,” broker Chris explains in the book.

“For example, if you’ve got a trucker who lives in Lyons, Illinois and you manage to find him a load back to Chicago – a few miles away – you can beat his rate down quite easily because he’s desperate. And when the trucker’s desperate, you just might score a 50% margin from an air-conditioned office while the trucker gets forty cents a mile pissing in a bottle.”

“This is a fictional story, written in a state of delirium, after a long day of slinging freight,” Ritter writes in a brief preface to the book. “Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

But, boy, are there coincidences. For a book of fiction, much of it feels real. “This felt like a play-by-play of my day-to-day when I worked for a freight brokerage,” one reviewer says on Amazon, where “Confessions of a Freight Broker” is available.

Ritter, upon whom the character Chris is loosely based, spent five years as a freight broker in Austin, Texas, where the fictional Dinkum Logistics is located. He knows what he’s writing about and delivers a narrative that, while about only one brokerage, seems to capture the entire unforgiving truckload spot market.

“When it comes to the supply chain, there are many ugly truths. It’s a totally free market bordering on anarchy, where we push the legal limits just enough to not get caught,” Chris says in the book.

Those ugly truths are made uglier by the refusal of freight brokers to provide the rate transparency that regulations require. The spot market is like a high school study hall where the teacher stepped out and someone launched a single paper airplane. In the moment, as one broken rule undermines all the others, the room is filled with paper airplanes, spitballs and general havoc.

Rate transparency is more than a convenience for individual carriers and shippers. It could provide a modicum of rate constraint across the industry. Without it, we have Dinkum Logistics and the daily pandemonium that Ritters depicts so well.

Ritter himself was only vaguely familiar with the current debate over transparency and offered no opinion in a recent phone interview.

“My goal with this novel was to capture the experience of what it feels like when you’re a freight broker. And when you’re in it, when you’re down in the trenches, it feels like a knife fight. I mean, you’re at war because it’s a zero-sum game,” Ritter said.

Of course, in a zero-sum game, any player’s gain necessarily involves another player’s loss.

At Ritter’s fictional Dinkum Logistics, that ultimate loser is often the trucker – and despite his stories about dishonest drivers, Ritter has great respect for truckers. In fact, “Confessions of a Freight Broker” is dedicated to truckers “for doing an honest day’s work.”

“They’re the ones away from their family. They’re the ones physically doing the work and really keeping the supply chain duct-taped together,” Ritter said. “They’re one of the handful of professions where people have a lot of pride in what they do. … There’s a lot of pride in being a truck driver. There seems to be an identity there, which I think is a really good thing. I think it’s missing from most professions.”

How about freight brokers? In “Confessions of a Freight Broker,” Chris describes a speech to the Dinkum brokers by his boss, a sales manager.

“He said that we brokers are ‘the middlemen’ of the economy, which is true. But then he said we’re in the business of ‘providing solutions’ for shippers, which seemed pretty phony. He said we brokers are a ‘necessary and vital component of the industry,’ which couldn’t possibly be true. How could brokers be necessary and vital? We don’t have any trucks and we don’t haul freight. We’re just middlemen. Why does there need to be thirty thousand freight brokerages across America, chewing dip, drinking Lone Star, and earning more commission – in many cases – than the truck drivers who actually deliver the loads?” LL