The Slammers of New Orleans, or On the Ancient Art of the Deliberate Collision

There is a road that runs along the Mississippi, near the place where, in 1863, Union soldiers dug a canal through the bayou — the Duckport Canal, a passage that was meant to circumvent a fortress and ended up circumventing nothing but its own purpose. The canal silted up, the water refused to obey the engineers, and the river kept its secrets. One hundred and sixty-three years later, on the same stretches of asphalt that wind through New Orleans East, a different kind of engineering was taking place: men called "slammers" were steering their cars into the flanks of eighteen-wheelers, not by accident, but by design.
The word itself — slammer — carries the weight of ancient ritual. In the trial that opened this March in a federal courthouse in New Orleans, prosecutors described an operation they named "Sideswipe," a scheme in which drivers were paid to recruit passengers, fill their vehicles with warm bodies, and hurl themselves against the great beasts of commerce that lumber down the interstates. The attorneys — Vanessa Motta, once a Hollywood stuntwoman, and Jason Giles of the King Firm — would then file the lawsuits, and the insurance settlements would flow like the Mississippi itself: muddy, relentless, indifferent to justice.
One thinks of the φαρμακός (pharmakós), the ancient Greek scapegoat, the human vessel chosen to absorb the pollution of the city. But here the equation is inverted. The slammers were not sacrificed to purify; they sacrificed themselves to corrupt. Damian Labeaud testified that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks. Ryan Harris, now serving thirty-five years for his role in a murder connected to the conspiracy, told the court he began crashing cars around 2017, introduced to the craft by a man named Cornelius Garrison — a figure who stands at the center of this story like a colossus, six feet and six inches tall, who staged approximately fifty collisions before becoming that most dangerous of creatures: a witness.
Garrison turned informant. He gave the FBI documentation showing $192,000 in checks from Sean Alfortish's company — Alfortish, the disbarred attorney, the former Kenner magistrate, Motta's fiancé. And then, four days after Garrison's name appeared on an indictment built largely from his own testimony, he was gunned down at his mother's doorstep in Gentilly. He was fifty-four years old.
There is a passage in Dante — Inferno, Canto XXVIII — where the poet encounters the sowers of discord, their bodies split open and walking in an endless circle, their wounds healing only to be split again by a demon's sword: «un diavolo è qua dietro che n'accisma / sì crudelmente, al taglio de la spada / rimettendo ciascun di questa risma» (a devil is here behind who hacks us thus cruelly, putting again to the sword's edge each of this throng). Garrison, the informant, the man who knew too much and spoke too freely, was not merely silenced — he was made into an example, a warning written in the only language the conspiracy understood.
Alfortish, prosecutors allege, offered Garrison $500,000 to "take the fall." He offered to move him to the Bahamas. When persuasion failed, he allegedly instructed others that it would be "better" if Garrison were dead. Motta's defense now claims she was manipulated by Alfortish — a Clytemnestra blaming Aegisthus, a Lady Macbeth discovering, too late, that the blood will not wash from her hands.
Rafael Goyeneche of the Metropolitan Crime Commission called it potentially the largest fraud case in Louisiana's history, noting that auto insurance premiums across the state were inflated by this corruption — "billions of dollars," he said, touching "every licensed driver that owns a vehicle in this state." The former U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser observed that similar schemes existed in Connecticut but that New Orleans "expanded it out 100-fold," partly because local juries were predisposed to side against the truckers and the insurance companies. There is something almost Homeric in this — the city's own sympathies weaponized against it, like the Trojans welcoming the horse through their gates.
And Motta — the stuntwoman. She who once threw her body through breakaway glass and tumbled from moving vehicles for the camera. What is a staged crash if not a stunt performed for a different audience? The line between spectacle and fraud is thinner than we like to believe. In the Satyricon of Petronius, Eumolpus devises an elaborate fraud involving a fake inheritance: «nemo verum sanguinem novit» (no one knows the true blood). The blood in the New Orleans crashes was sometimes real — Harris testified that "there's going to be bad ones... anything could happen. It was all fraud." The passengers, recruited from the neighborhoods of New Orleans East, did not always emerge unharmed. Some underwent unnecessary surgeries. The body, as always, pays the price for the mind's deceptions.
The Duckport Canal failed because the Mississippi refused to be redirected. The slammers of New Orleans failed because a man named Garrison refused to stay silent — and then, because others refused to let him live. The canal silted up; the conspiracy silted up with bodies, with testimony, with the slow accretion of evidence. In both cases, the river — that ancient, indifferent witness — kept flowing south, toward the Gulf, carrying everything with it.
On this Saint Patrick's Day, as the city prepares its parades and its green beer, the federal courthouse on Poydras Street continues its own procession: witnesses, prosecutors, defendants, the ritual of American justice unfolding in a city that has always understood ritual better than law. The trial is expected to last another week and a half. The murder trial — Alfortish and Leon "Chunky" Parker — is scheduled for late summer.
The river does not care. The river has seen it all before.
Claudius, the Helmsman