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by Val Ellicott
Staff Writer
When Nicole
Marks stopped in at a crowded restaurant, she usually found a seat
right away ... on the floor.
For years, Marks made a comfortable living in Boca
Raton and other cities across the country as a slip-and-fall con
artist adept at faking a variety of injuries for insurance money.
Her technique, a sliding tumble that looks
deceptively bone-jarring, often earned a few thousand dollars for a
single performance - even more if Marks topped off the fall by
"banging" her head on the floor.
Marks, a self-described Gypsy, said she saved the
head-whacking move for "a real good audience."
`You're just tapping it; you're not really hurting
it," she explained to investigators in a videotaped statement in January.
In 1994 and 1995, Marks and similarly accident-prone
members of her family scammed insurers for Palm Beach County
businesses out of thousands of dollars.
"They're not very educated, but they're real street-smart,"
Glen Hughes, an investigator with the state's Division of Insurance
Fraud, said last week. "They were good at building a buffer
between themselves and their insurance claims."
Hughes spent nine months chasing the family through
a maze of bogus names, mail drops and beeper numbers. With the help
of Federal Express records - the one faulty weld in the family's
armor of false fronts - he eventually tracked them down.
Three family members have pleaded guilty to
racketeering and other charges, marking an unexpectedly successful
end to the prosecution of the operation, which bilked insurance
companies in Florida, New York, Massachusetts and California over a
period of at least six years, law enforcement officials say.
"To my knowledge this is the first time
anyone's been able to put together a case against them of this
magnitude," Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Cindy Imperato said.
"There have been hit-and-miss cases across the country, but
there's never been a whole organization taken down like this."
Marks, 20, is serving two years' house arrest after
pleading guilty in February to racketeering, organized fraud,
insurance fraud and grand theft. She must serve five years' probation
after her house arrest ends and must pay $5,000 in restitution to the
Kemper insurance company.
Marks is working toward her GED and says she is
determined to earn a legitimate living.
"It's actually very nice," she said
Thursday of her new life. "I don' t have to wake up anymore and
pull out a briefcase to start figuring out which claim is which."
Marks' husband, Jason Cook - the two were married
in a Gypsy ceremony but not in a church - pleaded guilty to similar
charges. Cook, 23, is serving a two-year prison term followed by five
years' probation.
Cook's father, Robert Cook, 41, pleaded guilty in
March and was sentenced to a year in jail followed by five years'
probation. His wife, Ann Evans, 43, is set to stand trial in June but
is discussing a plea deal with prosecutors.
Two of Evans' sons by a previous marriage,
Christopher Evans, 22, and Russell Ely Evans, 32, as well as
Christopher Evans' wife, Raquel Miller, 20, are fugitives in the case.
Marks says she is eager to break ties with the
Gypsy culture that trained her from childhood in the art of the con.
"It's strange to say about getting locked up,
but I'm kind of glad it happened," she said. "I have no
bonds with them anymore. I've always wanted to separate myself from
them, but it never worked out."
Marks and her husband and in-laws earned more than
$23,000 over a period of just three months in 1994 and 1995 by
collecting on claims for slip-and-fall incidents at businesses across
Florida, including Red Lobster, Bennigan's, Pete Rose's Ballpark
Cafe, Toys "R" Us and Discovery Zone, all in Boca Raton.
Typically, the family earned between $8,000 and
$20,000 a month on the scams, Marks said. About one of every three
claims resulted in a settlement.
The rip-offs succeeded largely because the family
settled for relatively small amounts - usually a few thousand dollars
- that insurance companies would happily pay to make a claim go away.
"If an insurance company started questioning
them too much, they just dropped it," Imperato said.
In a typical scenario, Marks would fake a fall at a
business and complain to the manager, who would notify his company's
insurer. In many cases, she would be taken to a hospital where she
would fake symptoms that seemed to justify an overnight stay and
expensive diagnostic tests.
Marks knew ways to increase the bill even more.
"With the intravenous, they would put it on
slow drip and I would put it on fast drip," she said in her
videotaped statement. "If they put an oxygen mask on me, I would
suck in as much oxygen as I could. Everything they give you costs
more money."
Marks later sent the hospital bills to the
insurance company, saying she had paid the bill and asking for reimbursement.
"The perpetrators would then keep any money
received from the insurance companies, leaving the hospitals with
unpaid bills," according to a state Division of Insurance Fraud summary.
In other cases, Marks and her family created false
medical bills from nonexistent doctors and phony letters from
fictitious employers to back up claims of lost wages.
Family members avoided meeting insurance adjustors
in person and never provided a real home address. The addresses they
used were actually mail drops. The phone numbers the family listed
always rang at answering or voice-mail services.
With Marks and her family faking 10 to 15 falls a
month under a variety of aliases, there was a real danger one of them
would mix up claims while talking to an insurance adjustor on the
phone. To avoid that, the family kept meticulous files on each claim.
The work seldom slowed down, Marks said. As soon as
the intravenous needle marks healed on her hands, she was back at a
restaurant, bookstore or nightclub having another "accident."
The insurance fraud case against Marks and her
family began early in 1995 when an investigator working for Travelers
Group insurance company noticed that a woman named Stacy Huntington
had filed slip- and-fall claims at two different locations in Boca
Raton on the same day. The investigator contacted Hughes.
"We made a couple of checks and found that
Stacy Huntington didn't exist," Hughes said.
At that time, Hughes didn't know the fraud involved
more than the two bogus claims. He tried to lure Marks, alias
Huntington, into meeting with him so he could arrest her.
"We offered her an $18,000 settlement check if
she would just come in and sign a release," Hughes recalled.
"She wouldn't come in. She wanted everything handled through
Federal Express."
So Hughes sent Marks a release via Federal Express,
which yielded the FedEx account number Marks was using.
"That was the huge break," Hughes said.
"It just started growing from there."
Federal Express records contained the names of
businesses the family had targeted in slip-and-fall incidents.
Eventually, Hughes was able to link each incident to a specific
family member.
Marks said she enjoyed the money she earned duping
store managers, paramedics, doctors and a long list of other people.
But she has no desire to return to her old life.
Falling down, she says, was easy. Everything after
that was hard work.
*top
The Family
Law enforcement officials say seven members of a
family -- a husband and wife, their sons from previous marriages and
the sons' wives -- traveled around the country for years defrauding
insurance companies by faking injuries in a slip-and-fall scheme. A
number of the scams victimized businesses in Boca Raton before four
family members were arrested and pleaded guilty to racketeering.
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