Two New Orleans attorneys and their law firm have been found guilty of charges they faced in connection with a long-running fake accident scheme targeting tractor-trailers and the carriers that operate the.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday, March 20, Vanessa Motta, age 44, and Jason F. Giles, age 47, were found guilty of all charges pending against them, following a three-week jury trial presided over by Chief U.S. District Judge Wendy B. Vitter. The jury also convicted law firms Motta Law LLC an the King Firm LLC and co-conspirator Diamanike F. Stalbert, age 35.
The jury found Motta, Motta Law, and the King Firm guilty of all counts against them. Stalbert was found guilty of making false statements to federal agents.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the defendants participated in a long-running scheme to defraud insurance companies and commercial trucking companies by staging and litigating fraudulent automobile collisions to collect insurance payouts. That scheme began in December of 2011 and continued until December of 2024. It involved New Orleans area personal injury attorneys Motta and Giles and their law firms paying “slammers” to recruit passengers to participate in purposeful collisions with automobiles, especially 18-wheeler trucks with large commercial insurance policies.
The attorneys would then litigate those cases on behalf of the passengers, often encouraging them to seek medically unnecessary neck and back surgeries to incur medical costs and increase the size of future insurance company settlements. Along with slammers, attorneys, and passengers, the scheme also included “spotters,” who drove getaway cars for the slammers, and “recruiters” like Stalbert, who the U.S. Attorney's office said facilitated numerous staged collisions by bringing new passengers into the scheme.
Including this jury trial, 63 defendants have been charged in the federal probe into the staging of automobile collisions with other vehicles in the New Orleans metropolitan area.
