New Orleans       I had mixed feelings when I opened The New Yorker when I saw there was a long piece by Patrick Radden Keefe with the eyebrow “Letter from New Orleans.”  On one hand, it was crack, there was no way that I wasn’t excited to read whatever it might have been about.  In the past, I had read two of Keefe’s books, one Say Nothing, a troubling book about the time of troubles in Ireland, and his magisterial dissection in Empire of Pain of the Sackler family’s exploitation of opioids for the riches they gained.  I was under no expectation that this was going to be a story touted by the local tourist bureau.  Keefe’s signatures are crimes, pain, and the impacts on regular, low income and working people who are part, witting or not, in the confluence of these interests.

This mess has been headlines in New Orleans for years, so it was inevitable that it would not be a story easily put under wraps.  As Keefe notes, 5000 are killed in the collision of big 18-wheelers and smaller cars annually in the US.  Driving recently on I-10 between New Orleans and Houston, one billboard after another from lawyers was soliciting business from what they called “big truck collisions.” These collisions also became opportunities for other lawyers willing to shakedown insurance companies as well, but doing so crookedly by compensating people desperate for money.  These were the “slammers” willing to risk death and disability to collect in these literal “ride and die” crashes.

Briefly, here’s how this fraud played out.  Drivers with virtually racecar skills who knew where to hit an 18-wheeler relatively safely would look for trucks trying to change lanes, where they could speed up and get in position to hit them and claim the truck was at fault and didn’t see them.  They would recruit passengers and use their vehicle.  The favored number was three, so they could up the claim.  A disbarred lawyer and a woman, fairly recently out of law school and trying to cash in quickly, combined to represent slammers in suits against the truck companies, looking to fleece the insurer.  In some cases, they would convince passengers to have surgeries to increase the take, most unnecessary, but soft tissue with compliant doctors, so harder to debunk.

That’s pretty much the formula.  Keefe’s not wrong that it seems tailor made for New Orleans and Louisiana generally.  All the elements were here.  Great wheelmen, poorer people desperate for the money, dishonest and greedy lawyers, truck companies able to pass insurance costs off to customers, and insurance companies able to raise the cost of insurance and willing to settle the cases, rather than risk a jury trial in Louisiana before panels of very sympathetic peers in our broke ass city and state.

It was hard not to bristle at some of Keefe’s characterizations of the New Orleans East community, a now largely Black middle income of home owners and apartment blocks of lower income families, as well as the city and state’s reputation for corruption, including a number of insurance commissioners indicted, plaintiff-friendly juries, and lax law enforcement.  Despite feeling he was a bit wide on some of this, I can’t exactly say he was dead wrong.

Eventually, the fact that there was a particular stretch of the interstate in the eastern area of New Orleans that was a popular and repetitive crash site and that too many connections of the supposed victims of these crashes were part of large family networks forced the trucking companies to finally take this seriously and recognize the patterns, forcing law enforcement to put two and two together.  Video of the super driver getting out of a crash car into the pilot vehicle was also pretty devastating.  He flipped on the lawyers to the cops and was murdered at his mother’s house as the indictments of the lawyers went to trial.

There’s no happy ending.  Most of the guilty pleas are from the passengers, who are either doing their time or got suspended sentences.  None of the doctors have been charged.  No other lawyers aside from the principal woman have been charged.  If they hadn’t all gotten so greedy that they couldn’t restrain themselves from being addicted to crash dummies and this con, they likely would have gotten away with this.  After this story went to print, there was front page headline recently in the local paper that the woman lawyer at the heart of the crime had asked for a new trial.

I guess this is a kind of New Orleans story after all.  The Wall Street Journal featured an article about police chiefs in the central part of Louisiana being indicted for creating false crime reports to sell to immigrants for $5000 a piece so they could get U-visas as crime victims.  I guess this is kind of a Louisiana story as well.

What can I say, home is where the heart is.