Full story in NOLA.com

By John Simerman and James Finn

Personal injury attorneys Jason Giles and Vanessa Motta were found guilty Friday on all counts and ordered jailed ahead of sentencing in a brazen fraud scheme involving hundreds of pre-planned collisions with 18-wheelers and filing lawsuits for scores of bogus injury claims.

Giles and Motta were both convicted on eight charges, which included conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, multiple counts of mail fraud, witness tampering and more. Each of their law firms were found guilty as well.

A jury returned the verdict Friday afternoon in a packed federal courtroom in New Orleans after deliberating for more than five hours. As Chief U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter read the verdict, Motta sobbed silently in the courtroom, then hugged her teenage daughter. Giles also hugged family members in the courtroom.

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When Vitter returned, she said both Giles and Motta should be jailed.

“To be clear, this is anything but a typical fraud case,” Vitter said. “Look at this courtroom: There is nothing in this case that makes it a typical fraud case. The jury has found a wide-ranging conspiracy involving professionals that are supposed to be looked up to, attorneys, who are part of this conspiracy.”

Motta’s sentencing is scheduled for July 7, and Giles’ is scheduled for July 14.

The guilty verdict came after more than two weeks of testimony in a case that has gripped New Orleans’ legal community. It was the first case to go to trial from a sprawling investigation dubbed “Operation Sideswipe” that has led to about 50 guilty verdicts to date.

Federal prosecutors said Giles and Motta each worked hand-in-hand with “slammers,” who they paid to fill cars with passengers and steer them into tractor trailers on highways in New Orleans. Civil juries in those cases tended to return higher settlements, according to testimony from insurance defense lawyers and others.

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Prosecutors painted a sordid picture of a group of lawyers — Motta, Giles and other attorneys who were not charged and were not called to testify — conniving with street-level “slammers” to create a constant flow of lucrative injury claims by manufacturing them.

At issue for the jury during the trial was not whether those slammers staged hundreds of sideswipes and other wrecks in cars full of passengers as they crashed into tractor trailers on New Orleans roadways.

Motta and Giles acknowledged the scheme, but their attorneys denied they knew it was going on around them. Their attorneys presented no witnesses in defense of Miles and Giles after more than 11 days of government testimony.

From the witness stand, slammer Damian Labeaud spelled out a scheme working with Giles and other lawyers at The King Firm, in which they paid him $1,000 for each adult passenger in a staged collision with a big rig. Labeaud told the jury he delivered hundreds of bogus crash victims to Giles and another lawyer, Danny Patrick Keating Jr. Labeaud also implicated others at The King Firm.

Keating has already pleaded guilty and testified at the trial, spelling out his knowledge of Labeaud’s work and the code words involving food and fish that the slammer would use while offering crashes for sale.

Another slammer, Ryan Harris, testified about his involvement in a similar setup with Motta, a former Hollywood stuntwoman, and her former fiance, disbarred attorney Sean Alfortish, a former Kenner magistrate who served federal prison time over a scheme to defraud a Louisiana horsemen’s group as its president.

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