Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America [Hardcover]

Ken Dornstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 1996

Accidentally on Purpose is the first book to document the making of America's most peculiar criminal underworld. Not centered on the traditional activities of organized crime, this improbable underworld has been built from the raw material of faked personal injuries.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At half the length this would have been twice as interesting, for Dornstein gets buried under the avalanche of material he amassed and seems to have lacked editorial help in digging out. A first-time author, he's a writer of talent who knows how to build tension, but the reader's initial wonder at the ingenuity of the insurance scams presented ultimately gives way to tedium at their sameness, even at the self-mutilations that seem the common coin of insurance fraud. Dornstein, who became a private investigator of suspected staged accidents after graduating from Brown in 1991, presents a scholarly history of the subject, going back a century to detail the operations of ship scuttlers and arsonists, Workmen's Comp swindlers and the like, and then focuses on today's freeway "swoops-and-squats," i.e., staged crashes. Los Angeles is the capital of America's personal injury "underworld," according to the author, with an estimated 10,000 fraudulent claims filed annually. Not an underworld in the sense of being controlled by organized crime, scams are most often initiated by neighborhood hustlers or confederations of doctors and lawyers. The so-called accident victims are cheaply hired to sustain or fake injuries. And although individual claims are paltry, in the aggregate they amount to an estimated $1 billion annually. The lure of easy money, Dornstein concludes after pondering the self-evident, is probably the motivation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This book is a well-researched, fascinating review of the world of faked personal injuries. The author graduated from an Ivy League college in 1991 and then spent a short time working as an investigator of questionable injury cases in Los Angeles. He recounts his experiences and interviews some of the participants in a nationwide epidemic of greed and deception. Dornstein traces the historical origins of false personal injury claims to ship scuttlers in the early 1800s, who would overinsure their vessels and then wreck them to reap the insurance benefits. From ship scuttling to speculation on the lives of strangers to rigged car accidents, the world of faked injuries revolves around insurance claims. The author does suggest solutions but lays the blame on American culture, which encourages accident victims to cash in. For general collections.?Harry Charles, St. Louis, Mo.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (November 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312129920
• ISBN-13: 978-0312129927
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,846,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The History of Fake Injuries, On Purpose, November 30, 1999

By 

Gary McGregor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (Paperback)

If you ever want to know how the history of screwing insurance companies came about, this is the book for you. And for some reason I'm sure Dornstein left out about 10,000 more stories that he could have added in the book. Like a book with a lot of "stories," some stories are better than others and you tend to have to sift through the ho-hum parts but the book is very well written and composed. Get it for that uncle that's still waiting on his accident claim of "slipping in the supermarket aisle as he was trying to reach for some generic beer" to settle while he has to "do time in the barcalounger while detectives with video cameras have to monitor him."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Please Get a Job, April 16, 2002

By 

John G. Hilliard (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (Hardcover)

What a bunch of low life criminals. I bought this book as a lark, but came away mad. The energy some people put into getting your money is almost more then if they went out and got a job. This book is basically a history of all the most popular scams and con men in America over the last 200 years. The author must have spent a tremendous amount of time in researching the book because it is very detailed. If there is a scam out there and not in this book then I doubt it made money. The writing is good with an easy to read pace and sentence structure. My only complaint was the amount of detail, at times I got a little tired of hearing about the 5th best guy at the so and so scam. The book could have used a little more aggressive editing. With that said, if you are interested in scams you will get a lot of entertainment out of this book.

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough and interesting., July 14, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Toledo, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (Hardcover)

As a Property and Casualty Investigator for Nationwide SIU, I found the book to be very informative, and enlightening.