Because he removed emissions controls from diesel engines, a 65-year-old Wyoming man is bracing for his sixth month in federal prison.
Troy Lake will also live out the rest of his days as a convicted felon, unless he receives a pardon from President Donald Trump.
Lake’s wife Holly and son TJ both hope the president does just that. Holly and others have been writing letters to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials, urging them to recommend Troy Lake for a presidential pardon.
Recent changes in the regulatory landscape fuel that hope. The president’s administration released a plan this week to relax rules around tailpipe emissions.
But tampering with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-required emissions systems remains a federal felony.
Lake pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act on June 12, 2024.
He was sentenced Dec. 5, 2024, to 12 months and one day in prison, and he and his business Elite Diesel were together fined $52,500.
Troy Lake reported to prison Feb. 10 and remains at the FCI Florence correctional complex in Colorado – where he’s instrumental to the prison’s diesel shop.
Breakdown
Through his business Elite Diesel, Troy was for years the go-to mechanic for over-the-road truckers and others running diesel engines, according to multiple trucking business owners who spoke with Cowboy State Daily.
In about 2007, customers started approaching Lake because their trucks had problems “brand new off the lot,” recalled Troy Lake’s son TJ, who was in high school at the time.
That coincided with the EPA tightening emissions standards on heavy diesel trucks in 2004, and again in 2007.
Removing or “deleting” emissions control systems wasn’t Troy Lake’s main business at that time. Not even close. He ran a successful shop with six service trucks and jobs in the gold mining industry, Holly Lake told Cowboy State Daily.
“But customers of ours, quite a few of them, would buy new trucks every year and start running into those issues — and they’d ask Dad if he could fix it,” said TJ. “And we found a way.”
The culprits at that time were systems in trucks that recirculated exhaust into the engine’s “breathing,” or intake air supply.
They were built to limit exhaust particles. They also slashed engines’ lifespans by feeding them filthy air: “Like you’re breathing in your own fart,” said TJ.
Troy Lake disabled those systems. His ability to do so spread via word of mouth and customers came to him — no advertising needed, TJ recalled.
In the years that followed, manufacturers started adding diesel particulate filters to meet emissions standards. Then they added selective catalytic reduction filters and called for diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), a chemical treatment, usually urea-based, used to reduce nitrogen oxide output.
As the EPA heightened its emissions restrictions and manufacturers built more complex filtration and recirculation systems around them, Troy Lake’s “deletes” grew more sophisticated too.
The business spent around $350,000 on research and development. That wasn’t just for performing the deletes, but for determining how the techs could make the engines run even cleaner through their tuning, said Holly. They spent $325,000 on an EPA test bench.
And they put more than $1 million into other sophisticated equipment like engine and chassis dynamometers. But those don’t count strictly as investment into deletion technology, Holly clarified, since the shop used them for numerous other jobs.
Other mechanics had Troy finish their own deletions. They sounded him for help on tricky problems, and they referred their customers to him, court documents say.
He performed or helped with at least 344 deletes from 2017 through 2020, according to testimony transcribed at Troy’s sentencing hearing.
The Raid
On Oct. 18, 2018, the federal government under Trump’s first administration executed a search warrant on the Elite Diesel shop, which was then based in Windsor, Colorado.
To the Lakes, it was a raid.
“It looked like a military operation,” Holly recalled.
Black SUVs converged on the block; agents emerged “in tactical gear” and rifled through the business, the equipment, the personnel files, she said.
The Lakes and an Elite Diesel employee were eating at the local Olive Garden at that time, said TJ, who was then working remotely for NASA while also helping at the diesel shop.
They watched the operation in horror from a video surveillance application on their cellphones, he added.
U.S. Attorney’s Office staffer Rebecca Weber, the federal prosecutor who secured Troy’s prison sentence six years later, characterized it as a fruitful operation.
“And what that search warrant revealed and later investigation revealed was that Elite Diesel was really the epicenter in this region for heavy-duty emissions tampering,” said Weber.
The investigation led to eight other “intermediary diesel shops” where techs would remove emissions systems hardware from trucks.
Doing that would throw the computer systems of the trucks off and send the truck into “limp” or disabled mode.
“But Elite Diesel and Mr. Lake knew how to rewrite that code to override that limp mode,” Weber continued. “And that is not knowledge that most other people and most other truckers around the country have.”
She reasoned that the court should make an example of Troy Lake.
Depending on the operation, said Weber, Elite Diesel would charge about $2,000 per delete and brought in roughly $800,000 by doing them.
That was enough to yield a profit, but it was also offset by the shop’s investments and expenses, Holly countered in her own interview.
Troy Lake was a regional mastermind for deletions, but the procedure itself was commonplace, even rampant, Troy’s defense attorney Richard Kornfeld said at the sentencing hearing.
That's a notion lifelong trucker Cole Stevens, whose family owns Oklahoma-based Stevens Trucking, noted in his own interview with Cowboy State Daily.
Stevens is an industry expert who doesn't know and hasn't worked with Troy Lake.
"Almost everybody I know that’s like a conservative, three-quarter-ton owner deletes their just, regular day-to-day pickup trucks," he said.
But because his business is so high-profile, added Stevens, he doesn't indulge in the practice.
"When the federal government started to regulate all these emissions deals, there’s all these evaporators and all these sensors that are just overkill; it actually makes the engines burn so hot you actually have way more engine problems," he said.
It's tough to tell if the new systems' particulate treatments are worth the damages they've wrought on the industry and the hazards they've caused, he said, because the major manufacturers have sunk billions of dollars into them to appease what Stevens cast as a rushed government pipe dream - "and nobody's doing any tests for non-DEF systems anymore. Nobody's making that argument."
Moving To Wyoming
After the search operation at Elite Diesel, four years of pregnant silence passed.
“We didn’t hear hide nor hair from them until 2022, really,” said TJ. “We kept more in contact with them, letting them know we were moving the business operation.”
The Lakes moved Elite Diesel to their home state of Wyoming.
Troy was born in Newcastle and raised in Rawlins, where his dad ran an automotive shop. The Lakes lived for years in Dubois, Wyoming public records show.
By 2023 under President Joe Biden’s administration, federal prosecutors were reaching out — seeking information from Troy on how he performed the deletes and pressuring TJ to get a defense attorney himself, TJ said.
Troy haggled with federal authorities to keep TJ and one of Elite’s employees from being charged, the son recalled.
The father also explained the deletions to the EPA, Kornfeld had said in court.
“They were looking for a silver bullet on how to tell if a truck has been deleted or not, but they don’t even know what they’re looking for,” said TJ. “They have no idea.”
Troy Lake was charged in the U.S. District Court of Colorado on April 12, 2024, with conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act.
That’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or a fine calculated by doubling any “gross gain” from the operation.
Criminal stigma and the pressure of the case both took a toll on the shop.
By December, Elite Diesel was “a shadow of its former self,” Weber said in court.
Rumors circulated that Elite Diesel was closed, though it wasn’t. That also ate into the Lakes’ savings for Troy’s legal defense, Holly recalled.
Going Away
U.S. District Court Judge Regina Rodriguez handed down Troy’s 12 month and one day sentence Dec. 5.
Rodriguez noted at that hearing that she’d served prior as counsel for engine manufacturer Cummins.
It was a fact the Lakes and some of their customers cast as significant: since a common feeling among truckers is that government requirements of costly, high-maintenance emissions systems cripple small business owners and small shops, whereas large manufacturers can absorb the cost shock.
Rodriguez declined Thursday to comment, via her court's office.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office of Colorado also declined to comment.
A Call From Prison
On July 20, Troy called Cowboy State Daily from FCI Florence.
The phone reception was dismal and the call truncated. Static interference and blips of silence were due to the call being monitored as per prison policy, Troy noted.
Troy and Holly’s 40th wedding anniversary passed April 20. His 65th birthday was June 8.
He said he goes outside several times a day, “unless we’re locked down.” The food is questionable, but he’s allowed to work in the prison camp’s diesel shop.
And he’s good at it, according to a letter bearing the signature of the prison’s automotive worker supervisor Bobby Knutson.
“He treats every piece of equipment as if it were his own and holds himself to a personal standard,” says the letter, which Holly Lake provided to Cowboy State Daily.
The outlet was unable to contact Knutson directly by publication time, but was able to confirm that he's a U.S. Bureau of Prisons employee.
The prison’s diesel particulate filter on the prison’s Blue Bird bus broke, and Troy “took the lead on resolving this complex issue,” the letter says, adding, “I wholeheartedly support Inmate Lake’s request for a pardon."
As for Troy, he said he’s surprised at how quickly his deletion career escalated.
“I wasn’t trying to be, like, a Robin Hood or anything,” he said. “I was just trying to help people — and the word got out all over the country that I could do it right. Because that’s a lot of it.”
The ’09 Paper
The EPA in 2009 released a paper finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health and the welfare of future generations.
New motor vehicles drive that danger, the paper added. Agency rules aimed at mitigating the hazard followed.
Diesel exhaust is a mixture of gases and particulates, some of which cause cancer when tested in animals, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration added in its own finding.
The Trump Administration is now seeking to rescind the EPA’s 2009 finding.
Cyrus Western, the new EPA administrator overseeing Wyoming, Colorado and other mountain states under Trump’s second administration, declined this week to comment to Cowboy State Daily.
Calves On The Interstate
For Wyoming-based livestock hauler Duane Rankine, Troy Lake’s modifications were literally lifesaving for hundreds of calves.
He hauls livestock “from coast to coast,” running hard across tough terrain, he said.
When his three brand-new trucks kept breaking down and leaving him at the mercy of warranty issues and recurring repair costs, Rankine grew frustrated.
But not as frustrated as in 2020, when his machine’s emissions system entered a heated regeneration, or burn, mode as he scaled Elk Mountain in southeast Wyoming with 120 head of baby calves in tow.
That’s when the system cooks the caught exhaust particles to burn them down into gas and ash, a process Rankine characterized as trading one form of waste for another, and overheating a valuable engine in the process.
The truck nearly caught fire. Purple smoke billowed from under the hood, Rankine said.
He was able to get the rig off the road, arrange for alternate transportation and get the calves to Texas as planned, he said.
That’s when Rankine decided to spring $3,000 to have Troy tune the engine after Rankine himself removed the filter, he said.
To replace the whole filter system “and make the truck run like the government … wants you to, it’s $27,000” after labor, he said.
Other Elite Diesel customers, like Kaycee-based cattle hauler Mark Malli and trucker-turned-rancher Cody Clark, echoed those frustrations with the emissions systems in their own interviews. They both touted the better fuel mileage and longer engine life of a post-deletion machine.
Even In Wyoming
Deletion prosecutions aren’t common in Wyoming, but they aren’t unheard of.
Just ask Levi Krech, a South Dakota-based shop owner formerly of Gillette who just reached a plea agreement with the U.S. District Attorney of Wyoming.
That agreement stipulates three years’ probation, a $20,000 fine, and 100 hours’ worth of community service in fines, Krech told Cowboy State Daily in his Wednesday interview.
Both the plea agreement and documents underpinning the government's charge against Krech remained inaccessible to the public as of Friday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Wyoming declined Friday to comment.
Krech didn’t mince words in his interview. He called the emissions regulations a racket geared toward shutting down small shops and businesses by doling out cost burdens that large manufacturers can weather, and from which they can even profit.
“All politics set aside, it’s extremely corrupt. It’s for nothing but money,” he said.
Prosecutions abound, but people keep performing deletions anyway because the emissions systems are so hard on equipment and businesses, he said.
Krech conceded that curbing exhaust particulates in a big city has value in big cities, where people suffer from smog inhalation.
“But (they’re harmful) when we’re up in Wyoming and we have oil field trucks needing to be running every day of the week,” he said.
Troy Lake acknowledged that difficulty as well.
“(I’d see) school buses stuck out in snowstorms in the middle of winter for six, seven hours because this stuff quit,” he said. “I wasn’t doing (deletes) out of malice. I think all of us want cleaner air. But when we’re putting people out of business, there’s got to be a common ground.
“Somewhere, there’s got to be commonsense.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
