United States v. Perez

Kenneth DeMary, Larry DeMary, and Mayo Perez (defendants) were the central participants in a complex and wide-ranging fraud scheme. The scheme revolved around staging car accidents and then recouping insurance payments for nonexistent injuries supposedly arising from the accidents. The participants in the scheme included drivers who would crash into another car, drivers and riders in the car that would be hit, physicians who would falsify medical records for treatment of the invented injuries, and attorneys who would advance payment to the drivers and riders and pursue the fraudulent insurance claims. The success of the scheme depended upon the repeated action of all the participants in their various roles across a wide geographic area. The various participants in each particular fraudulent accident varied, and no one specific incident of fraud included every participant in the scheme, but the fraud operated in a concerted, overlapping, and organized process. The conspirators used the United States mail to submit the fraudulent insurance claims. The scheme was eventually exposed. Ten individuals were charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and some were also charged with the crime of mail fraud itself. The defendants who were convicted of the conspiracy charges appealed, alleging that the prosecution had failed to establish that one single overall conspiracy existed between the various participants.