Too Many Trucks Were Crashing—It Wasn't Accidental

Something exceedingly strange began happening on a stretch of I-10 outside New Orleans about a decade ago—the 14-mile run of highway saw an improbable surge of crashes between cars and 18-wheelers. So many, in fact, that one LSU professor put the odds of the pattern being random at 1 in 750 trillion, writes Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker. As the story explains, it was anything but random. Instead, many of the crashes were part of a bizarre and disturbing insurance fraud scheme. Investigators eventually spotted the common threads: "slammers" who deliberately sideswiped big rigs for big insurance policies, "spotter" cars to play witnesses, and an informal network of personal-injury lawyers, runners, and doctors ready to turn faked soft-tissue injuries into high-dollar settlements—often padded by unnecessary surgeries.

The FBI's "Operation Sideswipe" ultimately tallied at least 246 likely staged wrecks and 63 indictments, but the case's star cooperator, veteran slammer Cornelius "Slim" Garrison, was murdered at his mother's front door after agreeing to help prosecutors. One headline defendant, stuntwoman-turned-attorney Vanessa Motta, was convicted in March of fraud and obstruction; her fiance faces a separate trial that includes charges tied to Garrison's murder. The piece digs into how poverty, aggressive injury-law advertising, and a plaintiff-friendly court system made the scam possible, and also how the improbable pattern of crashes went unchecked for years. Read the full story, which emphasizes that the profits flowed upward—to lawyers and organizers—while the risks fell on poor, often marginalized participants.