New Orleans's Car-Crash Conspiracy
newyorker.com86 points by Geekette 10 hours ago
86 points by Geekette 10 hours ago
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a book about the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy.
Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.
Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.
It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.
Exactly how many investors do you think are investing in New Orleans East? I drive around and I see signs on telephone poles for people promoting renting cars so you can rent it to other people for income like Uber or something.
Probably none? I certainly didn’t mean to imply there is significant investment.
You might enjoy The Wire
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths
I do not buy this. There is plenty of money in “traditional” work, and immigrants from all over the world find it and do it. If uneducated people, who may speak English as a second language at best, can move around the US and find their footing, then surely almost all who grew up here with access to the language and public schools can.
And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.
Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.
America might have been booming, but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period.
And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.
Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.
The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.
In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.
The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.
> Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work.
I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.
It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.
Thats bs...it says right in the article that the payout for a trailer truck accident can be a million usd. Pretty sure that is a major attraction to the 25% of NO that lives in poverty.
The traits in a person that lead them to a life of perpetual poverty are the same traits that make this type of "lottery" winning seem desirable.
HAHAHAHA
So, how about the dozens of lawyers and doctors in the story? You know, the ones who made 90% of the money and never got charged? The ones who set the whole thing up because they knew they could convince desperate & uneducated people? The ones who orchestrated a murder (the thing that finally got two of them caught)?
What're their "traits?" Did you even read the article?
Traits like ethics? Yes, that was my point.
‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said.
- Terry Pratchett
The poor have ethics just like the rest of us. They just can’t afford to keep it.
I'm talking about traits like high time preference and poor impulse control.
Ethics make people live in poverty? That would be news to a lot of people.
It’s a really good article if you read it. The people who got rich were not the poor people.
We must be talking at odds here. I'm neither claiming that being ethical is a sufficient condition to getting rich, nor that the ethics of the poor people described in the article played a significant part in their being and remaining poor. The article seems replete with unethical behavior at every level of wealth.
> the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy
My point is that people with high time preference and low impulse control, who naturally will tend to be poorer than people without those traits, will also naturally be more drawn to the "lottery economy", whether or not bad actors exist who will take advantage of that. Just look at who buys literal lottery tickets!
My best friend is an insurance attorney in New Orleans, and has been telling me this saga for years now. It's wild to see this coming out.
Note the owner of the auto body shop and alleged leader of the fraud ring was indicted for murdering one of his co-conspirators who flipped and was becoming a witness:
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/witness-in-louisian...
> Ryan Harris and Jovanna Gardner were indicted Monday for witness tampering through murder and conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder in addition to mail and wire fraud for their alleged participation in the staged wrecks.
> The pair are accused in the Sept. 22, 2020, execution-style shooting of Cornelius Garrison, who had secretly been cooperating with the FBI, was a major setback as authorities tried to climb the ladder from small-time scammers and street-level organizers to the attorneys and doctors whom they say raked in millions of dollars through bogus lawsuits and even unnecessary surgeries.
> So far, the case has led to 52 people being indicted and 44 of them pleading guilty, but only a single attorney, Danny Patrick Keating, has entered a guilty in exchange for his cooperation.
It really feels like the FBI got this man killed with a sloppy indictment. The fact that information that only could have come from Garrison was directly the reason he was executed
> the FBI got this man killed with a sloppy indictment
How do we know that’s how they discovered Garrison was cooperating?
Garrison was killed four days after the indictment was released. From the text:
> On September 18, 2020, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-count indictment charging Garrison with “staging over fifty accidents.” Alfortish and Motta weren’t indicted or named in the document, but they were described, respectively, as “Co-Conspirator A” and “Attorney B.” Garrison’s coöperation with the F.B.I. wasn’t referenced in the text—and it might have seemed that charging him in such a public fashion would be a good way to conceal his role as an informant. But a close reading of the filing encouraged certain inferences. One stray sentence asserted that “Co-Conspirator A instructed Garrison on the number of passengers to include in staged collisions.” Alfortish might have made some unconventional life choices, but he wasn’t a total idiot. He certainly hadn’t supplied that information to the Feds—and the only other person who could have done so was Garrison.
> Four days after the indictment was made public, Garrison had dinner with his mother, Sandra Fontenette, who was seventy-four, at the tidy condominium that she owned, on Foy Street. They ate gumbo and talked. Garrison had been texting with a woman named Kim that afternoon, and they had made plans to hang out after dinner. At around eight-thirty, the doorbell rang, and Garrison went to meet her. But, upon opening the front door, he shouted to his mother, “Get down!” Ten shots rang out, and Garrison collapsed on the floor, dead.
Harrowing. That said, excellent journalism. I loved the artwork.
Interesting read. This may be unfair to Louisiana based on this case, but I've heard the USA described as a federation of a bunch of states and some 3rd world countries.
New Orleans native here. It's not unfair. We're consistently one of the worst states in the nation in so many measures. Corruption is rampant.
It’s a Republic of states that are Democratic. Some states have cities with terrible poverty but never the case where the whole state can be categorized as such.
Well, when tourism is in decline, all those clowns and fake psychics in Jackson Square still need to eat.
I've heard the USA described as "a third world country wearing a Gucci belt"
I've read about similar fraud rings in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
I think you can find something bad in every state, even "rich" ones.
Edit: Who the hell would downvote this?
> and today’s large trucks are so computerized that they operate almost like airplanes
Nonsense. Almost no vehicle even comes with anything like this installed. Some carriers will add driver monitoring computers, and they will emit tones under certain conditions, hard breaking, lane departure, too little following distance; however, to compare these simple alerts to the level of automation in an aircraft is just daffy.
Just finding a GPS that understands vehicle heights and bridge underpass limits is still a significant challenge. So these are never built into any truck I've ever seen. Every driver has a third party device connected up for this purpose. Since those do a terrible job with satellite views most drivers _also_ use a cellphone for the additional navigation assistance it can provide.
On top of that you have things like Jake Breaks, Air Suspension controls, and Differential controls that are important for operating the vehicle but are not at all automated.
Another factor is weight distribuiton. The truck has nothing for this. After you pick up your load you're probably going to hit a Love's or other fuel station so you can use the CAT scale to weigh your truck. If there is too much weight on one axle you need to move your tandems to redistribute the weight. You can be underweight but still get an overweight ticket if you don't manage this correctly. California has specific limits as to how far your axle can be from your kingpin.
> Just finding a GPS that understands vehicle heights and bridge underpass limits is still a significant challenge
Apparently for human drivers as well. Just this weekend, an overpass near my house had a rig stuck because the driver failed to realize his load was taller than the overpass.
Might be an incorrect sign. It does happen. A road gets paved and now is a couple inches higher and nobody bothers to change the sign. Any new bump, even one not directly under the bridge, can cause a collision. We cannot expect drivers to get out and measure every underpass ... thats what the signs are for!
Or look up 11foot8 videos and watch a multitude of dingbat drivers rip the roofs off their vehicles despite correct signage and a flashing warning.
Yes this jumped out at me too. It isn't remotely true. The opposite is more accurate: I'd wager that at least half the trucks on the road are built more like small planes from the 60s WRT to operational systems.
Mixing and matching local-ish trucking vs OTR is like mix and matching "shootings that happen at schools" with "shootings that target a school". You lose resolution on both issues and it's counterproductive if your goal is to understand either.
The commercial (i.e. CDL requiring 26k+) fleet is fairly bimodal, two fleets if you will. You've got local and local-ish small carriers operating bottom dollar box trucks and tri-axle mack dumps from the 80s. Your average OTR truck is full of cameras and nannies and owned by a mega fleet. The owner operators in their long nose petes exist but are rare. Yeah I'm generalizing here and there's a continuum between all these but still.
> weight distribuiton. The truck has nothing for this
Could this be inferred from the air suspension controls?
https://www.airliftcompany.com/workshop/finding-correct-air-...
The fancier modern trucks have air pressure sensors calibrated to the weight of the truck, so any extra airbag pressure must be your load.
The "three people in car" is a very useful tell for criminal activity. I've seen in home burglar rings (one driver, one lookout, and one person to enter the home), catalytic converter thieves (driver, lookout, and "saw man"), etc. Not sure why they need the same patter of three here, but I guess one person will be the one who goes to the hospital, etc.
It's like they all read the same "criminal" forums to learn techniques. From the article:
> 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.”
In any event, given the extreme danger of a crime like this, the penalties should be more like that of a kidnapping (e.g., life in prison) and not just the 6 months suspended they'll see for insurance fraud. But that would never happen in Louisiana.
The New Yorker was refreshingly frank in this piece. I expected them to tap dance around several things they hit head on.
It's also a good reminder that in this day and age 360 degree dashcams are a must. If I were a professional truck driver, I'd have a bodycam, too.
Three people in a car is not a tell for anything except three people in a car.
Nor should it. You have to be realistic here - if we send everybody who ever did murder two up to Angola for life you would need like two more Angolas. Let’s not even get to kidnapping.
The prosecutors see slamming as "non-violent". Something is seriously wrong with them.
> Peter Strasser, the U.S. Attorney, was in his office when one of his prosecutors entered, looking shaken, and said that the key coöperating witness in the slammers case had just been murdered. “I would never have believed it, because this was a nonviolent case,”
It sure would be nice if we had an actual economy around here. That being said, I have definitely been given a speeding ticket by state police on that stretch of I-10 well before this all happened, and when I had a car crash under the Claiborne expressway on the Sundays when people drag race under the bridge I assure you these "runners" were nowhere to be found. Possibly because the local biker gang whose bikes the other party hit before me dragged him back to the scene of the accident for the responding officer to interview. I do remember someone in the crowd that helped me open my door saying “oh you hurt? Oh you got hurt you got hurt bad you got hurt in your spine, etc..” kind of prompting me and/or fishing for a response so who knows if that was them or just that the general mentality has permeated the community.
People will do anything but work for a living.
> Tt was surprisingly easy to find locals willing to risk their lives for money. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans residents live in poverty, and the prospect of a substantial windfall for a few hours’ work apparently outweighed any fear of getting into a car that was about to take part in a high-speed accident.
> People will do anything but work for a living. It's just engrained in certain cultures.
In fact, the lengths to which some people will go to avoid working for a living is stupendous. I've heard tell of organized crime in my area that sure sounds like a lot of work for not that much pay, i.e. no different than a low-end job.
Like that old quote about entrepreneurs being people who work 100 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week, but some twisted parallel of that.
Or the Freakonimics article that points out most drug dealers make less than minimum wage (Summarized in this talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_the_freakonomics_of_...)