Between 2004 and 2017, sideswipe accidents involving 18-wheelers on a 14-mile stretch of I-10 in New Orleans East tripled from 69 to nearly 200 per year. The cars always had multiple occupants — the average jumped from 1.4 to more than 3 people per vehicle. An LSU statistician calculated the odds of this pattern occurring naturally at 1 in 750 trillion, according to The New Yorker.
At the center was Cornelius Garrison III, known as "Slim," a professional "slammer" — someone who deliberately crashes into trucks to generate insurance claims. Garrison would stalk semis like, as one investigator described it, a lion trailing a wildebeest, waiting for a lane-change signal before accelerating into the truck's blind spot. After impact, he'd swap out of the driver's seat, walk away, and get picked up by a spotter car. He staged scores of crashes and never killed a passenger.
The legal side was run by attorney Vanessa Motta — a former Hollywood stuntwoman whose billboard showed her karate-kicking a truck — and her fiancé Sean Alfortish, a disbarred lawyer who'd previously served time for fraud. Passengers were recruited from poor neighborhoods, paid to risk their bodies. Some underwent unnecessary spinal surgery to inflate claims. Motta's income jumped into the millions; she spent $836,401 on slot machines at the Beau Rivage casino.
The FBI launched Operation Sideswipe in 2019. Garrison became an informant but was shot dead at his mother's door in September 2020 — allegedly at the direction of Motta and Alfortish. Motta was convicted in March 2026 of fraud, obstruction, and witness tampering. Sixty-three people were indicted total, most of them the poor Black passengers who'd been recruited to ride in the cars. Alfortish faces murder conspiracy charges in August.
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