The Great Insurance Scam

There was this time, and there was this Chevrolet, and there was this need for money.

And there were these brothers. Let’s call the older one Barry and the younger one Ralph. Let’s say they’re in their twenties. Barry has a wife, kids, cars, debts; the kit and the caboodle. The Chevy is a good car – with a bad transmission. Well insured. Barry has big bills to pay, but no plan; he says “Ralphie -- come over and we’ll drink beer and make a plan.”

“Ralphie, what will I do? The transmission’s going out of the Chev; it sounds so bad nobody’s gonna buy it and I sure as hell can’t pay to get it fixed.”

“The body is very good, Barry. The insurance company doesn’t know the transmission’s bad . . . what if something terrible were to happen?”

“It could be kinda dangerous.”

“We’ll wear motorcycle helmets.”

“Good idea.”

They decided that a rollover was the most likely sort of accident to produce the desired result without involving too much expensive hospitalization. “How about that steep bank at Karl Johnson’s farm, just down the road from Pa’s? Where the deer are always in the road. We might have been avoiding a deer.”

“Good idea.”

Now, you may think it’s very easy to roll a car over; it happens all the time, doesn’t it? That’s just what these brothers thought. Well, you are wrong. Try it. Some evening, in a light rain, try driving your pre-power-steering car off the edge of the old gravel road and careening it sideways off the precipice and into the jaws of certain doom. You only get one chance. Review the laws of physics. Take your brother. You may find that at the exact moment of impending disaster, the car will point itself straight down the embankment (which is not quite so steep as you remembered) and it will come to rest in the soft, moist loam of Karl Johnson’s cornfield.

You may find that you are stuck.

You may remember that Karl Johnson never really liked you so much.

You may find yourself one of two grown men in motorcycle helmets, walking down a country road at midnight, a gentle rain falling.

The words “crime does not pay” may occur to you.