(This content was created with the help of AI.) Something exceedingly strange began happening on a stretch of I-10 outside New Orleans about a decade ago—the 14-mile run of highway saw an improbable surge of crashes between cars and 18-wheelers.
So many, in fact, that one LSU professor put the odds of the pattern being random at 1 in 750 trillion, writes Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker.
As the story explains, it was anything but random. Instead, many of the crashes were part of a bizarre and disturbing insurance fraud scheme. Investigators eventually spotted the common threads: “slammers” who deliberately sideswiped big rigs for big insurance policies, “spotter” cars to play witnesses, and an informal network of personal-injury lawyers, runners, and doctors ready to turn faked soft-tissue injuries into high-dollar settlements—often padded by unnecessary surgeries…