A lawyer at the head of the gang of fake accidents. Accomplices a Justice of the Peace and a clerk: 10 arrests and 14 suspects

 The Rome Traffic Police, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office and supported locally by the Naples Traffic Police, executed 10 precautionary detention orders for the crimes of criminal conspiracy to defraud insurance companies and related crimes against public trust and public administration. Furthermore, 14 other individuals were charged at large. The investigation, initially conducted by the Naples Public Prosecutor's Office and subsequently by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office, was based on complaints filed by insurance companies and the Guarantee Fund for Road Traffic Victims. The case was transferred to the Office of the Rome Public Prosecutor due to its jurisdiction, as it involved a Justice of the Peace from the Sant'Anastasia district. What emerged, after nearly two years of investigations by officers from the Lazio and Umbria Highway Police Department, the officers announced, was "a veritable 'system' aimed at reaping huge profits from road accidents that never occurred, artfully constructed by a veritable criminal organization specialized and branching out across the Campania region, operating on a serial basis." Over the course of the two years of investigation, it was determined that the procedures implemented by the organization generated over €1 million. The main protagonist is believed to be a lawyer from the Avellino Bar Association who, along with several colleagues, worked to compile the accident details and file the accident case. The road accidents, which never occurred, were presented as "runaway accidents," where the alleged perpetrator was always untraceable.

For a fee, people were hired to pretend to be victims of road accidents and others, instead, who had to play the role of witnesses, giving false testimony on the dynamics of the accident. The fake victim, after having given the mandate to the lawyer, was contacted by other members of the organization to be accompanied to public health facilities, where a compliant doctor drew up certificates attesting to the traumatic consequences of the accident that never occurred. Sometimes road accidents were planned on the basis of x-rays, already illegally possessed by the organization, from which the first aid diagnosis arose, obviously with injuries compatible with the circumstances of the accident. In such episodes, the diagnostic tests and health documentation of unaware patients were illegally acquired by the health facilities. The lawyer forwarded the compensation request to the Guarantee Fund for Road Victims, then awaiting receipt of the financial compensation proposal. In the second organizational level of the criminal system, the lawyer and his associates would have availed themselves of contacts with a Justice of the Peace and a Clerk. The latter, in the registration phase, would have steered the file of the fake accident by diverting its assignment to the compliant Justice of the Peace. According to the agents, all members of the organization were paid according to their functional level and the type of service performed; however, the value of the compensation was always proportional to the value of the compensation obtained.

The investigations, supported by interception activities, would have allowed to identify the various levels of responsibility, the organizational peculiarities of the associates and the level of penetration in the social fabric of the context in which they operated. The association, moreover, would have made use of the use of closed circuit cameras to monitor the environments and the availability of numerous telephone cards to manage contacts. The methods of organization of the criminal network and interactions between the associates were found to be rigid and constrained, with the aim of guaranteeing the anonymity of the leaders of the criminal group. For this reason, for the exchange of information or the negotiation of compensations, intermediaries would have been used, with the aim of avoiding direct contact between the leaders and occasional accomplices, making use of associates who carried out lower level tasks. Sometimes, in the conversations all possible precautions were adopted also using allusions and metaphors.