Congress wants to make staging a truck crash a federal crime

Anybody operating a motor vehicle who intentionally causes a collision with a commercial motor vehicle can be fined, imprisoned for up to 20 years, or both.

Sen. Ashley Moody introduced the Staged Accident Fraud Prevention Act on July 22. It is four pages long. The bill adds a new Section 80505 to Chapter 805 of Title 49, United States Code. Anybody operating a motor vehicle who intentionally causes a collision with a commercial motor vehicle can be fined, imprisoned for up to 20 years, or both. If that collision produces serious bodily injury or death, the floor is 20 years, and the text sets no ceiling. Anybody who arranges for another person to cause one of those collisions faces the same penalties as the person behind the wheel. That last part is the whole point. It reaches the people who never leave the office.

There is a companion in the House. Reps. Mike Collins of Georgia and Brandon Gill of Texas introduced H.R. 2662 back on April 7, 2025. It has been sitting there since. The trade associations lined up behind the Senate version the day it dropped. ATA, OOIDA, TCA, NTTC, TRALA, NMFTA, ABA, TIA, IWLA, IFDA, NAMIC, APCIA, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, and the state associations in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. When OOIDA and ATA agree on something, you can usually assume the underlying problem is not in dispute.

Subsection (d) of the new section says a person cannot be prosecuted federally under it if that person has already been convicted or acquitted on the merits for the same act under state law. That is a real concession. Under the dual sovereignty doctrine, the federal government normally retains the right to prosecute the same conduct after a state does. Moody’s bill gives that up. Whether that is good policy or a drafting artifact is worth asking. It means a friendly state prosecution could function as a shield.

Why now

On March 20, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted two personal injury attorneys and their law firms of running one of these schemes for more than a decade.

The probe is called Operation Sideswipe. Sixty-three defendants have been charged. More than 50 have pleaded guilty or been convicted. The scheme ran from December 2011 through December 2024, which means it survived a global pandemic, a change in presidential administrations, an FBI investigation, and the public murder of a cooperating witness.

The machine

The people who drove the cars into the trucks were called slammers. They were paid roughly $1,000 per passenger for a collision involving a tractor-trailer, according to the second superseding indictment. The math there is not complicated. A slammer packs four people into a car and earns four thousand dollars for thirty seconds of work. The people who followed the slammers in a chase car and picked them up after impact were called spotters. The slammer would hit the truck, get out, and run. The spotter would collect him. The passengers stayed in the car and told police the driver had fled.

Recruiters brought fresh passengers into the operation. Runners referred crash victims to specific firms for money, which is illegal on its own. Some of the same people played more than one role. Damian Labeaud and Roderick Hickman worked as slammers, spotters, and runners.

Then the lawsuits got filed. Prosecutors said the attorneys encouraged passengers to undergo medically unnecessary neck and back surgeries to run up medical specials and inflate settlement value. Read that sentence again. People had their spines operated on to make a case worth more.

The attorneys and the slammers communicated through coded language. Fishing terms. Payments to slammers got disguised as loans, advances on future settlements, professional fees, or in one instance, compensation for construction work. When one slammer was told to expect questions about why he was being paid, he was instructed to lie about it.

By 2017, defense counsel on the insurance side started raising fraud as an affirmative defense. That is when the cover-up started. In November 2017, the indictment alleges, one firm manipulated Labeaud into stating on a secret recording that the crashes were legitimate. In October 2020, the same firm did it again with Hickman, who by then was a charged defendant represented by criminal counsel. They recorded him anyway, without his lawyer present. A document called a Verification of Facts got circulated for passengers to sign, and prosecutors said the firms knew those documents were false because they omitted the one fact that mattered.

Cornelius Garrison

In October 2019, a slammer named Cornelius Garrison started cooperating with the federal government. He was indicted on Sept. 18, 2020, and his indictment contained information he had provided during that cooperation.

Four days later, he was shot 10 times on his mother’s doorstep.

Ryan Harris, another slammer, was charged with the killing and pleaded guilty in exchange for a 35-year sentence and cooperation. In his proffer, he identified two other people. In April 2025, a superseding indictment charged Sean Alfortish and Leon “Chunky” Parker with conspiracy to commit witness tampering through murder, witness tampering through murder, conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder, retaliation against a witness through murder, and causing death through use of a firearm. Their trial is set for August. Killing a federal witness is a capital-eligible offense.

Prosecutors had already alleged that before the shooting, the group tried to buy Garrison off. The offer, according to reporting on the original indictment, was $500,000 to relocate to the Bahamas.

Everybody

Sean Alfortish is a former attorney. He is also a former magistrate judge. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, identity fraud, and health care fraud for rigging the 2008 election of the Louisiana Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, where he was president. He fraudulently marked ballots, used members’ Social Security numbers, and sent staff to four states to mail them. He was sentenced to 46 months and served 28. He was disbarred. An audit found hundreds of thousands of dollars of association money spent on personal items and Caribbean vacations.

He got out. He sued the Louisiana State Racing Commission and got relicensed. He got a seat on the New Mexico Horsemen’s Association board. He started training racehorses in 2022 and won 23 races. He ran for the LHBPA board again in 2020 and lost.

According to the government, he ran staged crashes the whole time while telling people he was still a practicing attorney.

Vanessa Motta was a Hollywood stuntwoman before she became a lawyer. Her firm’s advertising leaned on it. She and Alfortish were engaged. Jason Giles was a partner at The King Firm. Danny Patrick Keating, another New Orleans personal injury attorney, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted paying Labeaud to stage 31 crashes. Keating told investigators he represented 77 plaintiffs in the resulting lawsuits.

The indictment also references attorneys identified only as C, D, E and F. Four more lawyers who litigated cases alongside the charged firms have not been publicly named.

Motta, Giles and both firms were convicted on all counts March 20 after a three-week trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter. Both were remanded immediately. Both have moved for a new trial. Sentencing was scheduled for July 7 and July 14 and has been pushed. Legal analysts in New Orleans have put the exposure somewhere between seven and 20 years.

The FBI’s New Orleans field office said the investigation ran seven years and produced cases against more than 50 people. Trial testimony indicated the crashes named in the indictments are a fraction of the real number. Harris alone testified to staging more than 80.

This is not new, and it is not only Louisiana

Staged crash fraud has a taxonomy that predates most of the people reading this. The swoop and squat, where one car cuts off a second car so the second car brake-checks the victim into a rear-end collision. The drive-down, where somebody waves you into traffic and then hits you and denies waving. The panic stop, where a car packed with passengers slams the brakes in front of you. The T-bone with planted witnesses at an intersection.

Florida ran the last big federal sweep. Operation Sledgehammer, 2011 through 2013, out of the Southern District of Florida. Ninety-two defendants across six phases. Fifty-six charged federally, 36 by the Palm Beach County State Attorney. Twenty-one chiropractic clinics involved. More than $5 million in court-ordered restitution. Doctors, clinic owners, licensed professionals. Four defendants fled to Cuba.

The Florida version fed on personal injury protection coverage under the state’s no-fault system. The Louisiana version fed on something else entirely, and that difference is why we are talking about a federal trucking bill instead of state PIP reform.

Why trucks

The policy limits are bigger. A private passenger auto policy in most states carries a bodily injury limit measured in tens of thousands. A federally authorized motor carrier hauling general freight in a vehicle over 10,001 pounds carries a minimum of $750,000 in public liability. Most real carriers run $1 million primary with excess layers on top of that. Brokers and shippers frequently require it contractually.

So if you are in the business of manufacturing injury claims, a car full of passengers hitting a Honda Civic gets you a fight over $25,000 in coverage. The same car hitting an 18-wheeler gets you access to a seven-figure tower, a defendant with a national brand and a reputation to protect, and an insurer with a claims department that would rather settle a soft-tissue case for policy-limits-adjacent money than try it in Orleans Parish.

The prosecutors said the crashes clustered in New Orleans East and Gentilly, frequently near one particular truck stop. That is not a coincidence; it’s a hunting ground.

What it costs the rest of us

The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud put total U.S. insurance fraud at $308.6 billion a year in its 2022 study, the first update to a figure that had been stuck at $80 billion since 1995. The FBI estimates non-health insurance fraud adds $400 to $700 a year to the average household’s premiums. Industry estimates commonly put staged crash losses specifically around $20 billion annually.

Louisiana is the case study for what happens when it goes unchecked in one market.

Research cited by the Council for a Better Louisiana found that 49% of accidents in the state produce a bodily injury claim, against 26% nationally. Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple has said the state averaged roughly 64,000 bodily injury claims a year over the past decade, totaling $10.26 billion in bodily injury losses. Full coverage auto in Louisiana has run above $4,000 a year, at or near the most expensive in the country and roughly 50% above the national average.

The state passed a tort reform package in 2025. Comparative fault at 51% now bars recovery. No-pay, no-play thresholds went from $15,000 to $100,000. Damages are limited to medical costs actually paid rather than billed. More than 40 insurers have filed rate decreases since. Statewide auto rates are down about 6%.

Six percent. After all of that.

On the commercial side, the American Transportation Research Institute recorded insurance at $0.102 per mile, the highest ever measured. For a truck running 120,000 miles a year, that is $12,240 per unit before anyone files a claim. Marathon Strategies counted 135 nuclear verdicts against corporations in 2024, up 52% over 2023, totaling $31.3 billion, with a median award of $51 million. Commercial auto liability has been unprofitable as a line for 14 consecutive years.

Every one of those numbers gets paid by somebody. It gets paid by the owner-operator whose renewal came back 18% higher for no reason he can identify. It gets paid at the grocery store. It gets paid by the family in Metairie writing a $340 check every month for coverage on a paid-off sedan.

Cars cause most car-truck crashes. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute reviewed 8,309 fatal car-truck collisions and assigned fault to the car driver 81% of the time, compared with 27% for the truck driver. An earlier Blower analysis of more than 5,400 fatal crashes found the car driver solely responsible in 70% of them against 16% for the truck driver. FMCSA’s own Large Truck Crash Causation Study put it at 56% passenger vehicle and 44% truck in two-vehicle crashes. The AAA Foundation found 80% of passenger vehicle drivers in those crashes had at least one unsafe driving act identified, against 27% of truck drivers.

The people in the car are the ones who die. Roughly 70% of the fatalities in large truck crashes are occupants of the other vehicle. Both things are true. The car is usually the cause, and the car is usually the casualty. A staged crash weaponizes exactly that asymmetry.

Trucking has its own insurance fraud problem, and it does not run through a personal injury firm. It runs through the front door of the registration and financial responsibility system. Carriers self-attest a fleet size to get an instantly issued policy, file the BMC-91, activate authority, and then run a great deal more equipment than they declared. I have looked at one-truck filings with hundreds of distinct VINs behind them and inspection counts in the four figures. Median policy life in one cluster I pulled was 92 days. When the crash comes, the driver and the tractor are not on the schedule; the insurer pays anyway because of the MCS-90 endorsement, and then subrogates against a shell that has nothing. Then the same people file a new authority.

Staged crash fraud and carrier fraud are the same disease presenting in two organs. Neither one gets caught, because nobody verifies anything at the point of entry.

So does the bill matter

Some. Not as much as we’d like. Sixty-three people got charged in Louisiana without this statute. Prosecutors used mail fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 1349, obstruction, witness tampering and, ultimately, murder charges. Those tools work. What they require is a mailing or a wire, which is easy in an insurance case, and a lot of investigative runway.

What Section 80505 would add is a direct substantive offense that does not require a predicate mailing. It also explicitly reaches arrangers, which puts a lawyer, doctor, or recruiter squarely inside the elements rather than requiring the government to build a conspiracy. That’s nothing.

What the bill does not do is fund anything. There is no task force, no FMCSA data mandate, no requirement that insurers report suspected staged claims into a shared repository, no hook into crash data. Collins wrote Attorney General Bondi in 2025 asking for a dedicated staged accident task force. That has not materialized publicly.

Deterrence only deters people who expect to get caught. Operation Sideswipe took seven years, an FBI field office, a state police detail, the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a U.S. Attorney’s office, and a murdered witness to produce 63 defendants out of a scheme whose participants testified the real number of crashes was much higher.