The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : On a Collision Course With The Law

Richard Siddons was riding his bicycle, minding his own business, when all of a sudden-- Wham!--he was sideswiped by a car making a right turn from a freeway exit in Woodland Hills.

But like a broken record, the accident repeated itself again and again, at least 20 times, authorities said. Each time, he allegedly pressured the auto driver into paying him $20 to $75 in “damages” on the spot.

And the last couple of times the Tarzana man’s bike was hit, Los Angeles police officers Humberto Fajardo and Theresa Gordon were watching.

Fajardo and Gordon work undercover for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Traffic Division’s Staged Collision Unit, a 2-year-old outfit that investigates suspicious traffic accidents in cooperation with the state Department of Justice and the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an industry agency that serves as liaison between insurance companies and law enforcement.

In the two years since the LAPD established staged accident units at each of its four bureaus, the Valley unit has made 60 arrests--including Siddons--and many more cases are under way.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau, which investigates suspicious claims and accidents, estimates that about 40% of more than 8,000 suspicious accidents in its 13-state western regional area occurred in Southern California, according to Bob Chambers, the bureau’s regional manager.

The bureau’s database includes customer information from most major carriers, an invaluable investigative tool, Fajardo said.

Take the case of a Central California woman: the computer information showed that 14 members of her family had collected damages from traffic accidents in just two years. The woman was a “capper,” working for an unholy doctor-lawyer alliance often found at the base of such insurance scams, Fajardo said.

“She would come down here for about half the year and stage accidents, then she would go back home and run a private business she owned,” Fajardo said.

Fajardo learned that the woman would often gather all the participants at the parking lot at Valley College, where she would instruct them in what story to tell while their cars were taken away and “wrecked”--with artful damage that was often inflicted in cooperating auto body shops.

Using information obtained through an informant, Fajardo met the woman in the summer of 1992. Although she sometimes jokingly accused him of being a cop, he finally persuaded her, after six months, to let him make some money.

So, one day in November, 1992, he met her and her associates at a Van Nuys restaurant. While he waited, his car was taken away. It was returned not more than two hours later with a brand-new dent.

Then the woman laid out the scenario for the detective: “The accident was your fault, you just weren’t watching the road. This is the gas station you called the police from, but they refused to respond to a non-injury accident. We exchanged information and went our separate ways,” she told him.

The scam was aimed at Fajardo’s insurance company, which would get hit with claims from other people in the ring, claiming to have been involved in the “accident” with him.

The woman, convicted of fraud, served eight months of a three-year state prison term, Fajardo said, and was ordered to pay $292,000 in restitution to insurance companies for 180 accidents staged between 1984 and 1992.

The detective refused to identify the woman, even after her conviction, because he is still investigating members of her ring.

Simple watch-and-arrest cases, like Siddons’ comparatively crude scam with faked bicycle accidents--he is awaiting trial on 20 counts of extortion--are rare, the officers say. Most of their investigations involve doctors, lawyers and a web of co-conspirators that can take years to unravel, Fajardo said.

“You can’t arrest everybody right away,” Fajardo said. “It takes time to collect paperwork from the insurers, review the documents and then find out the incriminating facts of a case.”

Chambers estimated that losses from staged accidents in Southern California will cost insurers $65 million this year. “It’s a big business,” he said.