NEW ORLEANS — Another defendant has pleaded guilty in the federal case that exposed a long-running scheme in which people intentionally rammed 18-wheel trucks and faked injuries to collect insurance settlements based on bogus claims.
Antoine Clark, 34, became the 49th defendant to plead guilty out of 52 defendants in the sprawling and ongoing case. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote that Clark and his co-defendants “filed a fraudulent lawsuit, lied during deposition testimony, and sought unnecessary medical treatment.”
Among the three defendants who are still awaiting trial is Ryan Harris, 35, charged with witness tampering through murder in the fatal shooting of Cornelius Garrison, an accused fellow scammer who was gunned down in a barrage of gunfire when he stepped out of his Gentilly apartment.
Harris’ co-defendant became the 48th defendant to be convicted when she accepted a plea bargain in June, pleading guilty to a lesser charge of witness tampering.
Garrison was shot 10 times in his Gentilly apartment, with the trail of bullet casings tracking from his porch into his front living room. As the shooting began, Garrison’s last words were directed to his mother, who was in another room, “Get down.”
While the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office tried to develop evidence against attorneys and law firms who handled many of the bogus lawsuits filed by the repeat accident scammers, only a single attorney – Danny Patrick Keating – has been charged.
In WWL-TV’s long-running investigative series “Highway Robbery,” updates in November featured several attorneys who portray the federal case as falling woefully short of exposing the full extent of the scheme, in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid out in scores of intentionally staged wrecks.
Three so-called “slammers” who organized the participants and communicated with the accident attorneys were indicted, two of whom pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities. The third was Garrison, whose murder was described in the Harris case as a “targeted killing.”
Several other recent guilty pleas had been signaled for years. Three defendants, Dimitri Frazier, 31, Tiffany Turner, 52, and her daughter, Adonte Turner, 25, filed a lawsuit after their 2017 staged accident in eastern New Orleans, but counter-claims by the trucking company and its insurers laid out a case of fraud.
Ultimately, the plaintiffs dropped the suit and filed affidavits pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Those three defendants pleaded guilty in January.
Clark faces up to five years in prison.
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