After Wyoming’s most famous diesel delete mechanic Troy Lake won a pardon Nov. 7 from President Donald Trump, he started advocating for other mechanics who, like him, were hit with prison time, fines or both for tampering with diesel emissions systems.
Trump pardoned nine more diesel delete mechanics Friday.
Lake, who spent seven months in prison before he was pardoned, had advocated for six of those:
Ryan and Wade LaLone, Tim Clancy, Matt Geouge, Mac Spurlock, and Joshua Davis.
Wyoming-based lobbyist Jeff Daugherty and Colorado-based attorney Stewart Cables, who work with Lake and his fledgling group Diesel Freedom Coalition, had represented five of those six (not Davis).
Besides pardon-related advocacy, Lake said his group is working to provide sound emissions evidence and mechanical strategies to policymakers, to persuade them to pivot toward emissions regulations that don’t crush small-time trucking businesses and other fleets.
“Sometimes it makes you think, are we really making any traction? Are we really going anywhere? Because government moves at a snail pace,” Lake reflected in his Monday interview.
Then came Friday, and the news of pardons.
“And all of a sudden, it’s there,” the Cheyenne man said.
Lake said U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, is another key advocate. Sullivan had taken up Spurlock’s case and written a March 12 letter to the president urging a pardon.
The other three delete mechanics pardoned Friday were: Jonathan Achtemeyer, Aaron Rudolf, and Barry Pierce.
“It’s a small community,” said Daugherty of the diesel mechanic world. “A lot of these folks know each other.”
Daugherty and Cables, who work together, both told Cowboy State Daily they search specifically for small-business techs with non-notable or zero criminal history who have been convicted of Clean Air Act violations under an interpretation that they call invalid.
The Biden administration invoked a statute long used to prosecute people for tampering with big stationary emissions monitoring systems – such as on a chemical plant – to charge people who’d tweaked or reprogrammed trucks’ computers instead.
The Trump administration withdrew from that interpretation earlier this year, and told the U.S. Department of Justice to stop charging delete mechanics criminally. Civil penalties may still apply.
In They Came
Geouge always loved diesel pickup trucks.
He told Cowboy State Daily he started tinkering with diesel engines because his first vehicle was a Ford with a six-liter Power Stroke engine. He learned to tune it at age 17, which would have been in about 2004.
He was hooked.
In June 2007, at age 20, he started his own repair business, Spartan Diesel Technologies, in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
One year later, manufacturers started adding diesel particulate filters to the stock engines.
Expensive, recurring repair jobs limped into Geouge’s business, he recalled.
“Small business owners, farmers, emergency service people, hot shot haulers that had these trucks – these were failing left and right,” said Geouge. “They were defective from the moment they rolled off the assembly line.”
Geoge helped by installing alternative software – a process called “tuning.”
Back then, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency didn’t pursue criminal charges against delete and tune mechanics who worked around emissions systems.
Emissions systems grew more complex and expansive. Trucks kept breaking down, Geouge said. Looking back, he said, the timing was “both great and terrible.”
He got into diesel work because it was fun. But problems from what he called volatile and problematic emissions systems found him.
“It wasn’t where I expected the business to go. But it went there out of necessity,” Geouge said.
In 2013 the EPA filed a civil case against him, which continued for about a year and a half.
“That was incredibly expensive,” said Geouge.
A notice of violation hit him in 2015. Spartan Diesel shut down in 2017.
During the Biden administration, the EPA tilted toward pursuing criminal prosecutions against delete mechanics.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office of North Carolina charged Geouge in 2021 with two felonies: conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and another charge of tax evasion.
Geouge maintains he did not commit tax evasion. He and Cables both cast that charge as a leverage move by prosecutors to get him to plead guilty.
“That was great evidence of weaponization,” Cables said. “I think the U.S. Attorneys will use whatever leverage they can to bully people into taking a plea deal.”
Cables said the “tax evasion” comprised past-due IRS obligations – normally something that would prompt a repayment plan or civil penalty.
Geouge said it was fallout from his business going broke.
“They also threatened to charge his fiancée with felonies for aiding and abetting and tax evasion to get Matt to plead guilty to the felonies,” said Cables.
Geouge did plead guilty, in early 2022.
He was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. He was also fined about $2.5 million, he said Monday.
One month before his June 2022 sentencing hearing, Geouge’s and his fiancée, Caroline, learned that she was pregnant, Geouge recalled.
He checked into prison at USP Lee, Virginia, July 28, and prepared to miss his baby’s birth.
But at the end of August 2022, Geouge’s body went into diabetic ketoacidosis and he was hospitalized in intensive care for eight days, he said.
After the medical incident he returned to prison and learned there how to use insulin. He was 35.
Geouge was released to home confinement on Dec. 13, 2022. Forty-three days later, his son was born.
Felon
The fallout from being a convicted felon brought surprises.
Geouge went to start a new business with a colleague once he was out of prison, and found banks were hesitant to work with him. Unable to possess firearms, he also lost his gun-building business, which he had run out of Spartan Diesel while the shop still lived.
Ryan LaLone had a similar experience, he told Cowboy State Daily in his own interview Monday.
He lives in northern Michigan. Hunting affinity runs in his blood, he said.
“And I think I’ve voted in every election since I’ve been able to vote. I’m proud to be an American; I want to vote,” said LaLone.
He said he walked into a bank with an 810 credit score after his conviction, hoping to buy a camper.
“And they were like, well, but you’ve got a felony,” LaLone said.
The Raid
Geouge’s shop wasn’t raided.
Ryan LaLone’s was, on Nov. 2, 2018, he said.
“Probably 30 agents, I mean, guns blazing, riot gear, I mean you’d have thought we were cooking meth in there. It was unreal,” LaLone said.
That got his small hometown of Gaylord, Michigan, stirring, he recalled. The reputational hit hurt his shop, Diesel Freak, as did the criminal case, he said.
LaLone started his shop in 2007 in Gaylord – a small, conservative-leaning town. His brother Wade came to work for him in 2012, LaLone said.
Ryan said his goal was “just keep the trucks running. We didn’t blow smoke. We weren’t into this crazy stuff you see on the internet.” He said the Michigan Department of Transportation hired him one spring to repair striper trucks for the short work season.
But the criminal case didn’t start until after Trump’s first administration ended.
That’s a similar account to Lake. His wife, Holly, told Cowboy State Daily in an interview last year that the investigators essentially vanished after federal agents raided their shop – which was then in northern Colorado – in late 2018.
Pressure from the federal prosecutor’s office mounted in the autumn of 2022 and LaLone was formally charged April 26, 2023, with one count of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act and two counts of violating it – all felonies.
LaLone said his attorney told him Vice President Kamala Harris had made such violations a priority, and that it was futile to fight. He took a plea deal as soon as his charge surfaced publicly.
LaLone didn’t do time in prison. He said he was offered the choice between prison or a hefty fine and took the fine: $750,000 for his business and $7,500 for him.
Voided Warranty Tuning
Achtemeier learned how to tune a vehicle, meaning reprogram its on-board diagnostic system, remotely.
He told Cowboy State Daily that he started reconfiguring diesel systems to ignore emissions flags because some of the emissions sensors and parts shot to eight times their normal price during COVID, or became unavailable. Tractors stalled in the field during harvest time, he said.
Through his shop Voided Warranty Tuning he gained a national following as an expert engine tuner and the nickname “diesel engine software god,” says a prosecutor’s Feb. 7, 2025, filing urging a judge to give him a harsher sentence, in part because of his sophistication in the trade.
In late 2025, Achtemeier spent four months in federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky, and was fined $25,000.
It could have been worse. His original charges called for up to 31 years in prison and potentially millions in fines.
He shuttered his diesel shop Voided Warranty Tuning years before his criminal prosecution started. He’d taken to driving a truck instead.
Achtemeier was still on supervised release until Friday, when he got news of his pardon. He cared for his horses, and cleaned out their stalls, in an unprecedented heat wave Friday afternoon, he told Cowboy State Daily. Then he collapsed onto the couch, sat with his dogs, and nodded off.
The phone rang.
“I almost didn’t answer it. I thought it was spam,” said Achtemeier.
It was the White House. Achtemeier struggled to rationalize what the person was saying.
“It’s still kind of surreal, you know?” he said Monday. He said he never expected to be pardoned, adding, “I’m just some small-town guy.”
Like LaLone, Geouge and Lake, Achtemeier described his lost gun and civic rights as dear to him. He lives in New Jersey, but explains his rural environment as, “We’re in a big farm area. ‘Friday The 13th’ New Jersey not ‘Sopranos’ New Jersey.”
He’s from the West Coast, and was charged in the federal U.S. District Court for western Washington in March 2024.
While on probation he couldn’t leave the state, which makes it “hard to do oversized trucking.”
Achtemeier said he had filed his pardon request paperwork for himself. He said he’s unaware of anyone advocating for him but grateful if someone did.
Still, Achtemeier said he was inspired by Lake – whom he and others cast as a celebrity of the diesel tech world.
Without Lake and another mechanic and activist, Kory Willis, “I don’t think this would have happened,” said Achtemeier.
“Troy put a spotlight on how bad these (prosecutions) were,” he said. “I’m just thankful for Trump seeing this, and thankful for anybody that directly or indirectly made this happen.”
Each of the mechanics who spoke with Cowboy State Daily on Monday said they understand the air cleanliness objective. But the manufacturers’ emissions systems, which cripple small businesses, are a heartless way to chase it, they said.
“It’s not an either/or situation,” said Geouge. “Automotive technology has gotten to the point where the electronic controls are so accurate, you can have a clean-running truck without these excessive, unreliable, and expensive components bolted all over it.”
Cables echoed the mechanics’ gratitude, saying, “We are very thankful that the Trump administration is taking an interest in our cases and we are very thankful to President Trump for granting these pardons.”
The president, said Cables, “is rightfully spending his time and attention on these domestic issues, like the emissions weaponization cases.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
