Three generations of family accused in insurance scam

They say nothing makes a man prouder than watching his children follow in his footsteps.

But one has to wonder how Curtis H. Connor is feeling, now that his alleged career path has led two generations of his brood into handcuffs.

Before dawn Thursday, 200 Los Angeles police officers raided homes throughout the city and across the Southland with arrest warrants for more than 40 people, who, investigators say, were involved in one of California's largest, longest-running auto insurance fraud scams.

At the center of the ring, police say, is Connor, who already has served several years in prison for a previous auto insurance fraud conviction, and several of his sons, daughters and grandchildren.

For the last two years, Juan Camacho and Ronald Vega, detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department's Commercial Crimes Division, have been meticulously tracing paper trails of accident claims and payouts through the murky auto insurance world in an effort to build a case against the Connor clan and their accomplices. The documents the detectives compiled tell of dozens of allegedly fabricated accidents since 2000 that amounted to more than $512,000 being bilked from 10 insurance companies. In one claim alone, the ring milked State Farm Insurance for nearly $137,000 for faked injuries and car damage, according to police documents.

And that, insurance industry investigators say, is only a slice of the several millions of dollars the ring is suspected of pocketing over more than two decades of scamming.

The case offers a unique glimpse into automobile insurance fraud, an increasingly sophisticated racket that costs insurers billions of dollars a year.

In California alone, phony auto insurance claims total more than $500 million every year, industry experts say. It is a cost passed directly on to consumers, who have an estimated $300 to $400 tacked on to premiums each year. Nationwide, fraud associated with all property and casualty coverage, which includes auto insurance, amounts to about $30 billion a year, according to the Insurance Information Institute, which is run by the insurance industry.

"To be honest, this case is just a drop in the bucket," said LAPD Capt. Bill Williams, the head of the Commercial Crimes Division. "But we're hoping to send a message to the others out there that 'we're looking at you and we're going to do everything we can to get you.' "