Auto Insurance claims crackdown

Police have arrested and charged more than 100 people with filing millions of dollars in fake auto insurance claims in Lawrence, in the largest investigation into auto insurance fraud in the state's history.



More than a year after the arrests began, the investigation is far from over: Authorities expect as many as 100 more arrests in the next year.



''It's a culture," said Daniel J. Johnston, executive director of the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts, which has three investigators devoted to the Lawrence fraud cases. ''We have so many other cases that we're still investigating that clearly the expanse of this is dramatic."

The sheer number of insurance claims from Lawrence in recent years has raised police suspicion. Across the state, according to 2002 statistics, for every 100 vehicle accidents, 43 people say they were injured, Johnston said. But in Lawrence, he said, the same number of accidents produce 141 people reporting injuries.



Authorities launched the task force after a 65-year-old grandmother, Altagracia Arias, was killed in an allegedly staged accident last year. Arias had paid $200 for a seat in a ''bullet car," the name schemers use for the vehicle that causes the accident by ramming into another vehicle, police said. She died when her car slammed into a telephone pole.

Arias had solicited friends at Lawrence Senior Center to buy seats in the two cars, allowing them to claim injuries and sue their insurance companies for amounts averaging between $2,000 and $3,000, police said at the time. Two drivers in the accident were charged with manslaughter in Arias's death.



There is no single group that ran the Lawrence fraud ring, authorities said. At the height of the scam, police say, at least a dozen people known as ''runners" oversaw the planning of each false accident and claim, Lawrence Police Chief John Romero said. Some of the runners have been arrested.



''It's not any one organization," he said. ''It's a number of people."

Police are still seeking Joel Vega, a 26-year-old alleged runner who police say coordinated several false claims.



The accidents were typically staged with well-choreographed precision. The runners would direct two vehicles to a certain street at a certain time, where they would hit each other with enough force to damage both vehicles. The passengers crammed into the vehicles would later complain that the collision had strained their necks and injured their backs.

Some chiropractors were allegedly involved in the fraud ring, collecting payments from insurance companies. And some lawyers have been arrested for their alleged role in helping their clients file fake claims.



In September, 16 people, including three lawyers and four chiropractors, were indicted by an Essex County grand jury on various charges, including conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. The lawyers indicted lived in Salem and Andover; the chiropractors lived in Weston and New Jersey. Continued...