Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America

At half the length this would have been twice as interesting, for Dornstein gets buried under the avalanche of material he amassed and seems to have lacked editorial help in digging out. A first-time author, he's a writer of talent who knows how to build tension, but the reader's initial wonder at the ingenuity of the insurance scams presented ultimately gives way to tedium at their sameness, even at the self-mutilations that seem the common coin of insurance fraud. Dornstein, who became a private investigator of suspected staged accidents after graduating from Brown in 1991, presents a scholarly history of the subject, going back a century to detail the operations of ship scuttlers and arsonists, Workmen's Comp swindlers and the like, and then focuses on today's freeway ""swoops-and-squats,"" i.e., staged crashes. Los Angeles is the capital of America's personal injury ""underworld,"" according to the author, with an estimated 10,000 fraudulent claims filed annually. Not an underworld in the sense of being controlled by organized crime, scams are most often initiated by neighborhood hustlers or confederations of doctors and lawyers. The so-called accident victims are cheaply hired to sustain or fake injuries. And although individual claims are paltry, in the aggregate they amount to an estimated $1 billion annually. The lure of easy money, Dornstein concludes after pondering the self-evident, is probably the motivation. (Jan.)