Family members held in major insurance scam

The L.A. Times reports:

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.