New Orleans's Car-Crash Conspiracy
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.
Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.
It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze for bigco corporate developers (though they're not above doing something if perfect circumstances pop up) and the long tail of mom and pop investors, slumlord and "maybe you can rent my cousin's vacant storefront for your shop" type investment activity that would normally make those investments and over time uplift a community have been kicked out of the game by the regulation that municipalities have been forced by the states (who themselves are often forced by the feds) to adopt as a pre-requisite to qualifying for federal grant funding for the projects they need that funding to afford because without it they can't do so in a manner compliant with applicable law.
And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.
Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.
And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.
Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.
The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.
In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.
The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.
The point was > but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period
> And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming
There are economic cycles but the trend is clearly up. Funny enough, the 80's and the 90's which I think many people recall as great times were maybe more flat overall and the last 15 years feel worse. To be honest we also need to look at unemployment and perhaps other metrics. But the story that real wages were dropping is not supported by the data.
I don't see what this has to do with anything. For all of human history, it has been easier to steal than to earn.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
>And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit.
Maybe in Australia, but it was attainable in the US with home ownership in the 60%+ range.
I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.
It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.
So, how about the dozens of lawyers and doctors in the story? You know, the ones who made 90% of the money and never got charged? The ones who set the whole thing up because they knew they could convince desperate & uneducated people? The ones who orchestrated a murder (the thing that finally got two of them caught)?
What're their "traits?" Did you even read the article?
Ethics make people live in poverty? That would be news to a lot of people.
> the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy
My point is that people with high time preference and low impulse control, who naturally will tend to be poorer than people without those traits, will also naturally be more drawn to the "lottery economy", whether or not bad actors exist who will take advantage of that. Just look at who buys literal lottery tickets!
- Terry Pratchett
The poor have ethics just like the rest of us. They just can’t afford to keep it.
You can see an example in the rural poor who refuse to take “government cheese”.
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths
> Almost all of the references to the “law firm hired by trucking companies” refer to my firm.
He's been telling me about this scammy former stunt woman attorney since before covid.
LA has kinda a dual legal system that it inherited from the French and Spanish codified law system out of Napoleon (yes that one), and ultimately from Roman law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Louisiana
Just the first paragraph there is a confusing mess and the rest of the article doesn't get any better (to me at least).
Suffice to say, having to pass the bar is tough enough, but having to do it while 'speaking two languages' in terms of law systems is so much more harder.
> Things that are not true: not every Louisiana lawyer is smart. Some of them are very dumb.
> You don’t have to speak 2 languages.
> Louisiana has a mixed jurisdiction, just like everywhere else in the United States. The difference is that common law relies on stare decisis, and Louisiana relies on the civil code as the basis for law.
> It is true that Louisiana originally took different parts of the law from historical bases that are uncommon for America. Our property law comes from the visigoths or something.
> However, the Napoleonic code did not actually arrive in Louisiana until two or three years after the civil code of Louisiana was officially adopted, so it is not based on Napoleon code, though that is frequently asserted.
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/witness-in-louisian...
> Ryan Harris and Jovanna Gardner were indicted Monday for witness tampering through murder and conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder in addition to mail and wire fraud for their alleged participation in the staged wrecks.
> The pair are accused in the Sept. 22, 2020, execution-style shooting of Cornelius Garrison, who had secretly been cooperating with the FBI, was a major setback as authorities tried to climb the ladder from small-time scammers and street-level organizers to the attorneys and doctors whom they say raked in millions of dollars through bogus lawsuits and even unnecessary surgeries.
> So far, the case has led to 52 people being indicted and 44 of them pleading guilty, but only a single attorney, Danny Patrick Keating, has entered a guilty in exchange for his cooperation.
How do we know that’s how they discovered Garrison was cooperating?
> On September 18, 2020, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-count indictment charging Garrison with “staging over fifty accidents.” Alfortish and Motta weren’t indicted or named in the document, but they were described, respectively, as “Co-Conspirator A” and “Attorney B.” Garrison’s coöperation with the F.B.I. wasn’t referenced in the text—and it might have seemed that charging him in such a public fashion would be a good way to conceal his role as an informant. But a close reading of the filing encouraged certain inferences. One stray sentence asserted that “Co-Conspirator A instructed Garrison on the number of passengers to include in staged collisions.” Alfortish might have made some unconventional life choices, but he wasn’t a total idiot. He certainly hadn’t supplied that information to the Feds—and the only other person who could have done so was Garrison.
> Four days after the indictment was made public, Garrison had dinner with his mother, Sandra Fontenette, who was seventy-four, at the tidy condominium that she owned, on Foy Street. They ate gumbo and talked. Garrison had been texting with a woman named Kim that afternoon, and they had made plans to hang out after dinner. At around eight-thirty, the doorbell rang, and Garrison went to meet her. But, upon opening the front door, he shouted to his mother, “Get down!” Ten shots rang out, and Garrison collapsed on the floor, dead.
Nonsense. Almost no vehicle even comes with anything like this installed. Some carriers will add driver monitoring computers, and they will emit tones under certain conditions, hard breaking, lane departure, too little following distance; however, to compare these simple alerts to the level of automation in an aircraft is just daffy.
Just finding a GPS that understands vehicle heights and bridge underpass limits is still a significant challenge. So these are never built into any truck I've ever seen. Every driver has a third party device connected up for this purpose. Since those do a terrible job with satellite views most drivers _also_ use a cellphone for the additional navigation assistance it can provide.
On top of that you have things like Jake Breaks, Air Suspension controls, and Differential controls that are important for operating the vehicle but are not at all automated.
Another factor is weight distribuiton. The truck has nothing for this. After you pick up your load you're probably going to hit a Love's or other fuel station so you can use the CAT scale to weigh your truck. If there is too much weight on one axle you need to move your tandems to redistribute the weight. You can be underweight but still get an overweight ticket if you don't manage this correctly. California has specific limits as to how far your axle can be from your kingpin.
Could this be inferred from the air suspension controls?
https://www.airliftcompany.com/workshop/finding-correct-air-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicAdvice/comments/11iau0t/tpm...
Apparently for human drivers as well. Just this weekend, an overpass near my house had a rig stuck because the driver failed to realize his load was taller than the overpass.
The commercial (i.e. CDL requiring 26k+) fleet is fairly bimodal, two fleets if you will. You've got local and local-ish small carriers operating bottom dollar box trucks and tri-axle mack dumps from the 80s. Your average OTR truck is full of cameras and nannies and owned by a mega fleet. The owner operators in their long nose petes exist but are rare. Yeah I'm generalizing here and there's a continuum between all these but still.
I don't understand this analogy or distinction at all?
It's like they all read the same "criminal" forums to learn techniques. From the article:
> Garrison would later recall, for example, that Alfortish had cautioned him to limit the number of passengers to three, because four might raise “red flags.”
In any event, given the extreme danger of a crime like this, the penalties should be more like that of a kidnapping (e.g., life in prison) and not just the 6 months suspended they'll see for insurance fraud. But that would never happen in Louisiana.
The New Yorker was refreshingly frank in this piece. I expected them to tap dance around several things they hit head on.
It's also a good reminder that in this day and age 360 degree dashcams are a must. If I were a professional truck driver, I'd have a bodycam, too.
> Peter Strasser, the U.S. Attorney, was in his office when one of his prosecutors entered, looking shaken, and said that the key coöperating witness in the slammers case had just been murdered. “I would never have believed it, because this was a nonviolent case,”
> Tt was surprisingly easy to find locals willing to risk their lives for money. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans residents live in poverty, and the prospect of a substantial windfall for a few hours’ work apparently outweighed any fear of getting into a car that was about to take part in a high-speed accident.
In fact, the lengths to which some people will go to avoid working for a living is stupendous. I've heard tell of organized crime in my area that sure sounds like a lot of work for not that much pay, i.e. no different than a low-end job.
Like that old quote about entrepreneurs being people who work 100 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week, but some twisted parallel of that.
"60 Minutes, the storied investigative news program of CBS, Sunday night turned its cameras on one of the growing problems within the U.S. trucking industry: chameleon carriers."
These companies quickly shed any record of accidents and safety violations simply by changing their names and slapping new DOT numbers on their trucks. https://www.truckersnews.com/videos/video/15822044/60-minute...
Edit: Who the hell would downvote this?
- The Book of America, Hagstrom and Peirce