NEW ORLEANS — Three more defendants have pleaded guilty in the sprawling federal case that exposed a long-running scheme in which people intentionally rammed 18-wheel trucks and faked injuries to collect fraudulent insurance settlements.
The confessions, made in court Wednesday, bring the number of guilty pleas in the case to 47 out of 52 people who have been indicted since 2019, when federal authorities issued the first of a series of indictments.
Dimitri Frazier, 31, Tiffany Turner, 52, and her daughter, Adonte Turner, 25, each pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud. The three defendants were among five people charged in August in the most recent indictment in the case.
And that indictment could be the last in the case the feds call “Operation Sideswipe,” which had been dormant for more than a year before the new activity in August.
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. A third, Cornelius Garrison, was fatally shot in his home in an unsolved murder that authorities describe as a “targeted killing.”
The recent guilty pleas were signaled for years. Frazier and the Turners 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.
The three defendants are scheduled to be sentenced on Apr. 10.
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