Sean Alfortish ran a sixty-three-person ring of slammers who staged wrecks with eighteen-wheelers to file fraudulent insurance claims, and when one of his confederates started talking to the FBI, prosecutors say he paid to have the man killed in his mother’s front door. On Thursday a federal jury in New Orleans convicted him on conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. After more than thirty hours of deliberation across a three-week trial, that same jury could not agree that paying for a man’s death was murder. Sixty-three people have already been convicted in Operation Sideswipe. Alfortish is the sixty-fourth. The slammer-in-chief took five federal counts the same afternoon his lawyer was telling the cameras the killing did not happen.
His attorney, Shaune Clarke, climbed the courthouse steps and said so. “They couldn’t prove it this time,” Clarke said. “And they’re not going to be able to prove it the next time because it isn’t true. It didn’t happen.” The defense gets paid to say that. Cornelius Garrison noticed, and the noticing was done at his mother’s doorway, with the door still open behind him. Five counts of federal conviction, sixty-three prior pleas, and a federal witness in the ground say what happened.
The five murder counts the jury could not finish read like a law school outline of itself: conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder; witness tampering through murder; conspiracy to commit witness tampering through murder; retaliation against a witness through murder; causing death through use of a firearm. Ninety years pending on the counts that did stick. The state will retry the deadlocked counts. Leon “Chunky” Parker, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and two counts of mail fraud and faces sixty years, sits beside Alfortish now as a co-defendant facing the murder counts a second time. The next jury will sit through the same boxes and decide whether the man who allegedly signed the check did, in fact, sign it. That is a narrow question. The larger one — what kind of person runs a sixty-three-person insurance-fraud ring and arranges the killing of a cooperator at his mother’s front door — the record has already answered. The record calls it witness tampering, and the record was made by a jury of his peers after thirty hours of looking.
I have watched insurance-fraud rings come and go since the first one I read about at my mother’s kitchen table, and they all run on the same machinery. Find a vulnerable thing — a truck on a highway, a small business, an old lady’s house — and pretend to crash into it. File the claim. Collect the money. Repeat until somebody notices. When somebody notices, pay somebody else to make the noticing stop. The machine produces wrecks. When somebody talks, the machine produces a witness who can’t talk anymore.
The pattern is older than the FBI. You will find it in the Lincoln Savings collapse, where Charles Keating’s savings-and-loan ate three-point-four billion dollars in taxpayer money and a man who had given about one-point-three million to five United States senators was asked whether the money had bought influence and answered, “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I hope so.” You will find it in the HSBC deferred-prosecution agreement, where a bank admitted laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and sanctioned regimes and paid roughly one-point-nine billion dollars in fines and forfeiture, and no individual walked into a cell. Senator Chuck Grassley said HSBC had “quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card.” The slammer-in-chief has bought himself another trial. Don’t tell me it’s the same thing.
I won’t mention that the defense also complained the government brought five assistant United States attorneys and a “phalanx of FBI agents” to convict him. I’ll mention it. Five prosecutors and a small army of agents were what it took to convict Sean Alfortish of being Sean Alfortish, and even then a jury could not reach the top count. That is not proof of innocence. That is the price of doing business in a courthouse where the crime is so large it takes the full weight of the federal government to lift it onto the docket, and even then the largest piece — the killing — has to be tried twice. We’ve seen this procedural handoff before — the Palisades Fire arson case ended in mistrial in June after a jury deadlocked — but the difference is that the man on trial here was convicted on five other counts the same afternoon.
The fraud counts stuck. Ninety years on Alfortish if the convictions hold, sixty on Parker. The murder counts will be retried. The witness is still in the ground. And Sean Alfortish is the next entry in the Operation Sideswipe ledger — sixty-three down, and counting.