New Yorker article about the crooked lawyer car crash scheme in NOLA

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About a decade ago, however, the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries. In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.

Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision. When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.

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The whole staged-accident conspiracy required a close relationship between slammers and attorneys. Alfortish had worked as a lawyer himself. His e-mail address was LawQB@aol.com, and when Garrison first met him he got the impression that Alfortish was still a practicing attorney. The truth was more colorful. Alfortish had been disbarred after pleading guilty, in 2011, to a conspiracy charge relating to his tenure as the president of a nonprofit, the Louisiana Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association, which advocates on behalf of professionals in the horse-racing business. In that role, he had been “a showman,” one association member told me, strutting around tracks with a racecard sticking out of his back pocket. One press account described him as “the peacock of the paddock.” But a financial audit revealed that Alfortish had been skimming money, some of which had been earmarked for hurricane relief, to pay for vacations to Aruba and to Grand Cayman, and for a new sound system at his home. He was also found to have clinched his second term as president through a ballot-rigging scheme.

“Ever since I was a kid, I took up for people who couldn’t fight for themselves,” Alfortish proclaimed at his sentencing, unwilling to let the contrition he was supposed to be expressing entirely drown out his self-regard. The judge, unmoved, observed that some people commit crimes because they’ve been “kicked around by society,” but that Alfortish—with his law degree—was not such a person. “Society has a right to expect more from you,” the judge said.

Alfortish served more than two years in prison before returning, quite unreformed, to New Orleans. According to authorities, he soon started working with Garrison to stage accidents. Although by this point Garrison had already been plying the slammer trade for several years, Alfortish wasn’t shy about offering him tactical advice. Garrison would later recall, for example, that Alfortish had cautioned him to limit the number of passengers to three, because four might raise “red flags.” Alfortish, who is white, tended to code-switch with Garrison, slipping into a Black American vernacular, and when referring to the passengers who rode in the slammers’ cars he drew on his equestrian past, calling them “horses.” According to Garrison, Alfortish sometimes recruited passengers himself. And, through the medical-factoring company, he lined up financing for post-accident procedures.

Motta’s role in the scheme was to initiate lawsuits against trucking and insurance companies in accident cases brought to her by Alfortish and Garrison. Her paperwork was sloppy—her court filings were riddled with typos—but she compensated with performative dudgeon. “A commercial driver is not a normal driver,” she would tell a jury. She said that her many clients were “like family,” and tended to speak to people in a register of exaggerated familiarity, calling them “my love” and touching their arm or shoulder. Motta took on dozens of cases involving crashes with large trucks, many of them linked to Garrison, and she was soon earning sums that were improbable for a newly minted law graduate. In 2018, Alfortish and Motta bought a home for $1.25 million on a cul-de-sac in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. According to later testimony by Motta’s accountant, her annual income abruptly “jumped into the millions” after she started handling large-truck accidents.

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A car crash, the novelist J. G. Ballard once suggested, is “probably the most dramatic event in our lives apart from our own deaths.” After the murder of Garrison, his sister, Andrea Garrison-Robertson, reflected glumly, “When people love money, they do things.” It is tempting to wonder whether Motta’s conviction, and the murder trial this summer, might give rise to any sustained policy reform. For all the resources that the U.S. government devoted to Operation Sideswipe, the case is notable for the many implicated parties who have not been indicted. No doctors appear to be facing consequences. As Peter Strasser, the former U.S. Attorney, explained to me, it can be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a clinician knew a procedure was medically unnecessary, even if the same surgeons repeatedly worked with the same nefarious lawyers, conducting gratuitous surgical procedures again and again. Jason Giles, the bent lawyer at the King Firm who worked with Garrison and with Damian Labeaud, was tried in the same proceeding as Motta, and was also convicted. The two other partners who founded the King Firm with Giles were implicated in trial testimony, suggesting that they were either aware of or active participants in fraudulent accident cases. But they have not been charged and are still licensed to practice law in Louisiana. (Neither responded to requests for comment.)

The prospect of serious tort reform in the state seems unlikely. Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s governor, has claimed that he wants to “rein in” the ubiquitous advertising of trial lawyers, but the state legislature, which is generously subsidized by the plaintiffs’ bar, has a history of stymieing such correctives, and more than one local attorney suggested to me that Landry’s comments are no more than lip service. By many measures, Louisiana now has the second-highest auto-insurance rates in the country, trailing only Florida. And the business of litigating accidents has become so lucrative that, earlier this year, one Baton Rouge personal-injury firm announced a novel partnership with a private-equity fund. It’s a queasy indication of what may lie ahead.

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