The Sunday Post’s report on how a vile cast of villains — Russian and MS-13 gangsters, plus slimy surgeons, lawyers and lenders — pressure migrants, the homeless and other vulnerable New Yorkers to undergo unnecessary surgeries to bolster bogus lawsuits is a tale right out of a twisted horror film.
It’s only possible thanks to a perfect storm of government incompetence and progressive policies.
The scam goes like this: MS-13 members recruit “victims,” then coach them on how to fake an accident on a street or worksite.
Post-“accident,” the pawns get whisked to a seedy lawyer, who walks them through the process of filing a lawsuit.
They’re then passed along to a doctor who performs risky and life-altering surgeries, like spinal fusion, that injure the soon-to-be plaintiff further and increase the possible payout for everyone up the line.
Meanwhile, third-party “litigation lenders” (a skeevy cottage industry New York lawmakers refuse to regulate), some of them suspected Russian gangsters, cover medical costs and more during lawsuits, while charging plaintiffs sky-high interest rates.
The scheme expoits New York’s Scaffold Law, which makes owners and contractors automatically liable for any accidents on their worksite, regardless of whether the worker was at fault — resulting in an easy payday for attorneys and plaintiffs and higher insurance premiums for everyone else.
If the plot works, plaintiffs, who took on all of the physical risk, often get the smallest slice of the pie, especially if they have to pay back predatory loans.
So the sick scammers get richer and the stooges they lured into taking part in the plan face a lifetime of complications, pain and potential future medical costs.
“Nauseating” barely begins to cover it.
It doesn’t help that the state Office of the Medicaid Inspector General enables fraud by not only failing to aggressively investigate shady claims, but announcing ahead of time which types of fraud it will focus on in any given year, letting criminals know which areas are soft targets.
Sometimes, the victims in these cases are homeless people pulled off the street; sometimes, migrants shipped to New York specifically for the slip-and-fall scam.
So President Biden’s open border (and NYC’s sanctuary status) is delivering a steady supply of easy prey straight into these sociopaths’ hands (as well as letting in the MS-13 gangbangers running the show).
There are whispers of a federal probe into these scams, but no sign so far of any crackdown on these professional mutilators.
Outrageous: The resource-rich US Attorney’s Offices in New York should be working with local District Attorney’s Offices to bring the hammer down hard on these nightmarish criminal conspiracies — while Albany finally gets serious about fixing the laws and practices that enable and encourage these monsters.