Eight charged with auto insurance fraud

Published: 2009-03-26 10:38:04
Author: Mark E. Vogler, Eagle Tribune, November 3, 2008

Investigators from an auto insurance fraud task force in Lawrence, Mass., say participants in phony crashes allegedly set up by Leo Lopez usually felt safe.

But a two-car "paper crash" at the intersection of Route 125 and Interstate 495 south near the Haverhill, Mass., and Plaistow line on July 15, 2002, is the latest case against Lopez.

He faces auto insurance fraud charges along with seven other people who received treatment for phony injuries.

"With Leo Lopez, it was probably easier to persuade passengers and drivers to get involved because there was seldom a threat of injury," Lawrence police Detective Sgt. Michael Simard said.

"Most of the accidents he orchestrated were all on paper. So, there wasn't any staged collision where somebody might get hurt," said Simard, the department's lead investigator on the task force.

Lopez, 28, of 69 Abbott St., Lawrence, was already facing three separate grand jury indictments when arrested again.

The seven people charged along with Lopez were treated at Kaplan or Haverhill Family Chiropractic.

The operators of those clinics — Michael Kaplan, of Hampstead and Troy L. Wheelwright, 40, of Amesbury, Mass. — were indicted along with Lopez earlier this year as part of a grand jury investigation initiated by the state attorney general's office.

This case brings to 341 the number of individuals charged with auto insurance fraud in Lawrence's five-year-old crackdown.

Lopez is scheduled to be retried later this month on a case being prosecuted by the state attorney general's office after a Superior Court jury couldn't reach a verdict several weeks ago.

"Leo Lopez is the most notorious, the most brazen and the most prolific of the runners we've investigated," Simard said of the former Haverhill man. Investigators have identified him as "a major player" who got paid by area lawyers and chiropractors to recruit victims of phony crashes in a cottage industry that once cost insurers millions of dollars a year in Lawrence.

Full story