North Bayou Black Drive wasn’t built for big rigs, though neighbors along the two-lane backroad west of Houma have had their share of run-ins with 18-wheelers.
Many of them couldn’t resist a sketchy invitation that made its way down the road in Gibson, where swamp tours and moss-laden oaks dot the bayou 70 miles from New Orleans.
“’You’re gonna get a bunch of money. You can come up off of this, and the legal firm is gonna make sure you get it,’” one resident said recently, reciting a pitch heard in 2017.
The task, according to a series of federal indictments, was as simple as it was chancy: take a ride to New Orleans; get in a car; brace for impact with a tractor trailer; seek medical treatment, including surgeries; and lie about it. The lawyers would handle the rest.
Interest was high along the two-lane country road in Gibson, and word spread. Some passengers admitted paying a recruiter $250 for a seat on the gravy train.
Nine neighbors along North Bayou Black Drive have pleaded guilty in federal court, admitting to roles as recruiters or passengers in a broad scheme to bilk insurance companies -- thus ultimately ratepayers – out of millions.
They are among 44 of 52 charged defendants to plead guilty so far to a series of federal indictments since 2019 that reference scores of bogus wrecks staged by a handful of “slammers” and “spotters,” allegedly paid and advised by local lawyers.
But the splashy federal case has raised doubts about the end-game for federal prosecutors.
The drumbeat of indictments through 2022 had all the trappings of a classic “food-chain” investigation – in which prosecutors flip smaller targets to bring down bigger ones.
Now it’s less clear if a case followed anxiously in New Orleans legal circles will progress from the shallower waters of Bayou Black to the depths of the state bar.
The only attorney charged to date, Danny Patrick Keating Jr., pleaded guilty back in June 2021. He’s now scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 1 after several delays.
Prolific slammer and organizer Damian Labeaud is due to be sentenced Feb. 22. Labeaud pleaded guilty in August 2020, admitting he staged at least 40 accidents for Keating alone.
Federal prosecutors have identified several other local attorneys they claim worked with Labeaud or another accused slammer, Cornelius Garrison, in cases involving staged crashes. But none have been charged.
The parade of indictments slowed last year to one, accusing five more people of joining in orchestrated wrecks as passengers.
After Keating’s guilty plea, “I thought there would be a domino effect for other professionals, whether doctors or lawyers,” said former U.S. Attorney Harry Rosenberg.
“The whole thing has been moving at a glacial pace. I keep thinking that something will turn into an inquiry into professionals. It hasn’t happened.”
Garrison, one of the 52 defendants, was gunned down at his Gentilly doorstep in 2020, four days after his name appeared atop a federal indictment. Garrison was communicating with the feds at the time, and prosecutors described it as a “targeted” killing.
But they have yet to charge anyone more than three years later. An FBI New Orleans spokesperson declined to comment or confirm an investigation into Garrison’s slaying, citing longstanding agency policy.
Charges against one of the 52 defendants were dismissed. Three others, from the most recent indictment handed up in August, are slated to plead guilty this week, court records indicate.
As Rosenberg suggested, the investigation has raised pointed questions about the conduct of certain doctors as well as lawyers. Prosecutors allege that some defendants underwent surgeries they didn’t need, including spinal fusion, to hike the insurance payouts. But they have not seen fit to implicate any doctors as part of the alleged scheme.
Civil court records indicate a host of doctors and medical groups were involved in the care of more than a dozen defendants who underwent surgeries from wrecks that prosecutors have called staged. Among them are three area surgeons each linked in court records to at least seven of those cases.
U.S. Attorney Duane Evans’ office declined to comment about the status of the case and whether more indictments are expected.
Rosenberg said he’d still be surprised if the prosecution has stalled out, given the details laid out in various indictments about lawyers working with slammers to shepherd fresh crash victims into their offices.
“Late at night, multiple patients, payoffs to the runners,” he said. “It just went on and on.”
Some legal observers see a pivotal moment in the approaching court dates for Keating and Labeaud. Prosecutors typically prefer to delay sentencing for government cooperators until their testimony is no longer needed.
But if Keating winds up the only lawyer to face charges, some of those who were convicted say, the scheme’s real masterminds will have skated.
According to one neighbor on North Bayou Black Drive, Keating was a brazen copycat. He’d learned of Labeaud’s work steering crash victims to attorneys for The King Firm, and of his steering vehicles into tractor trailers.
Keating sought an introduction, made by a relative of the clan from Gibson. At a restaurant in New Orleans, Keating claims he agreed to match a $1,000-per-passenger fee that Labeaud said he was receiving from another lawyer. Coded text messages between attorney and slammer, before and after staged crashes, pointed to a prolific scheme.
Keating “got the short end of the stick,” said the Gibson convict. “He wanted to live like The King Firm was living.”
The firm has acknowledged it handled some referrals from Keating but has denied any wrongdoing. David Courcelle, an attorney representing the firm, declined to comment.
North Bayou Black Drive is among a few locales, including a New Orleans apartment complex where Labeaud once lived, that furnished numerous passengers to fuel the fraud, according to court records.
Attorney Gary Wainwright, who represented a passenger who was charged in the scheme after undergoing surgeries after a staged wreck, argued that nobody is holding doctors accountable, though prosecutors found some of the surgeries to be gratuitous.
It was a scheme based on greed, top to bottom, Wainwright said.
“All they needed was a warm body they could cut on. As long as they could get you into the car,” he said. “They used my client like a human cadaver.”
Former U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser, whose office unfurled the first indictments in the case, including those of Labeaud and Keating, said doctors were never in the direct crosshairs. It would be too hard to prove fraud, he said.
“We didn’t have anything on any doctors and didn’t expect to,” Strasser recalled. “A patient comes in and says, ‘Doctor, I was involved in an accident. My back hurts.’ You do an MRI or an X-ray on somebody’s back, the average person has got all sorts of little issues in there.”
The convicted from North Bayou Black Drive trended older, ranging in age from 40 to 72.
“Going after doctors was always going to be a tall stretch,” Strasser said. “That was never on my radar screen. Only attorneys.”
On the latter score, he added, “I would have expected more.”
Along with Labeaud, two associates accused of participating as slammer or spotter in bogus wrecks -- Roderick Hickman and Mario Solomon -- have pleaded guilty.
Solomon received 21 months. Hickman was handed a 42-month sentence. He reports to prison on Monday. His attorney, Clarence Roby, described Hickman, 52, as a “foil.”
“You’re prosecuting people who are at the bottom. How are you not holding the lawyers to account?” Roby asked. “You get the slammers and the spotters. You get people. But the lawyers and the doctors made out with millions.”
Some defendants from Gibson and Houma pleaded guilty to allegations that they recruited passengers for fake crashes for a fee.
Joseph Brewton, 58, of Houma, however, insisted that prosecutors miscast him and others as major fraudsters.
Brewton pleaded guilty to a mail-fraud conspiracy charge as a recruiter, accused of funneling friends and family into crash vehicles. Brewton said he entered his guilty plea only because of the weight of the charges against him.
“You cannot tell a grown adult to get in a wreck,” said Brewton, 58 , who is due to report to federal prison in Oakdale later this week to serve an 18-month sentence. “I didn’t receive anything. I don’t know how to get to New Orleans without a GPS.”
Brewton had previously hired The King Firm to represent him in a wreck, in 2015 in New Orleans. He later was represented by Keating in the case, records show.
Federal prosecutors claimed Brewton enlisted family members and friends in 2017 to ride as passengers in a pair of staged wrecks at the same locale: Chef Menteur Highway and Downman Road in New Orleans East.
Brewton allegedly drove a sister, a friend and others to New Orleans in March of that year, calling lawyers with The King Firm and texting Labeaud that morning, according to his admission. Three hours later, Hickman rammed a 2007 Mercury Mountaineer into a Freightliner.
His four passengers, all from North Bayou Black Drive, filed lawsuits over the crash. Two were represented by an attorney with The King Firm, and two by Keating, civil court records show.
The same lawyers also represented plaintiffs from the second crash, in August, this time with Labeaud behind the wheel. Brewton received a $500 check days later from The King Firm.
“Nobody made any money. The lawyers made money, the doctors,” Brewton said. “I was not the mastermind behind something that large. I got to do 18 months for what I don’t know.”
Another convicted defendant, sentenced to probation, sat under a covered porch in Gibson on a recent morning. If they were big shots in a major fraud, she said, hardly any insurance proceeds made it home.
“Where’s the Lamborghini?” she asked.
