The ongoing trial of a disbarred city judge and a man accused of helping him kill an FBI informant culminates a yearslong federal probe into an alleged conspiracy to stage wrecks with big-rig trucks.
The investigation began in 2019, progressing at first as a white-collar fraud probe of trial attorneys and collaborators accused of staging crashes to file bogus lawsuits. Dozens of people were indicted.
Then, in September of 2020, a man named Cornelius Garrison III was shot to death in his mother’s entryway. Garrison had been a “slammer” — a professional driver paid by lawyers to stage wrecks with 18-wheelers, as he had been telling FBI agents in dozens of meetings over 11 months.
The killing turbocharged the case into a murder-conspiracy investigation…