An insurer became the plaintiff and pointed federal RICO, the racketeering statute built for the mob, at a plaintiffs' firm. Its Exhibit A: a celebration photo of a man the carrier says swore he could not dress himself.
A personal-injury claimant testified, the complaint says, that he was hurt badly enough he could not dress himself without help. Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company says it then produced a photo of the same man at a bar, and that when asked about it he confirmed he was out celebrating a soccer tournament his team had won. On January 27, 2026, the carrier dropped that photo into a federal racketeering complaint in Brooklyn. The image, Greater New York Mutual alleges, captures eleven people it says are responsible for twelve injury lawsuits, in a single frame.
That is the image at the center of Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company v. Liakas Law, P.C., docket 1:26-cv-00450 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. And the strange thing about it is who filed it. For decades, an insurer in a personal-injury fight is the defendant. It writes the check or it fights the demand. Here the carrier is the plaintiff. It is the one bringing the claim. It is the one accusing a plaintiffs' firm of running a crime.
The defendants include the firm, Liakas Law, P.C., two of its principals, Dean N. Liakas and Nicholas E. Liakas, and a litigation funder, Jumpstart Funding LLC. The complaint also points to the firm's special counsel, Ali Najmi. The cause of action is civil RICO. That is the federal racketeering statute built for the mob. Greater New York Mutual is pointing it at a law firm.
The theory is an enterprise. Not one bad case. A machine. The complaint describes a coordinated association of a plaintiffs' firm, medical clinics and doctors, and litigation funders, working together. The firm brings the lawsuits. The clinics supply the treatment and the paper. The funders supply the cash. Money moves through the loop and comes out the other side as settlement demands.
The predicate acts are the ordinary stuff of fraud. Mail fraud. Wire fraud. Travel Act violations. The pattern, the carrier alleges, is the manufacture of injuries that did not happen, or did not happen the way the file says they did.
The recruitment is where it turns ugly. The complaint alleges that runners found vulnerable people. Often undocumented. Often immigrants with no good reason to trust the courts and every reason to take the cash. The runners, the carrier says, steered them into staged or exaggerated trip-and-fall accidents at sites across New York State. Then, it alleges, the claimants were routed through medical procedures they did not need, the records were dressed up, and the demand letters went out inflated.
Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.
The man in the photo is one face of that. The complaint reportedly carries other exhibits in the same key. A woman whose injury claim sits next to social-media posts of her bowling and dancing. The point of each, the carrier says, is the same. The body in the medical file does not match the body in the photo. Greater New York Mutual is asking a federal judge to read the gap as fraud.
There is a real defense, and it is sharp. Liakas Law sent a spokesman, Hank Sheinkopf, who did not flinch. "Big insurance files a baseless claim, seeks to vilify plaintiff lawyers, and watches the case fall apart once judicial scrutiny is applied," he said. "Judges have consistently rejected these attempts because they are unsupported by facts or law." That is not noise. Greater New York Mutual filed two of these RICO suits at once, and an earlier carrier RICO suit of the same kind, against a different firm, was dismissed only months ago. Insurers have swung this bat before and missed. The firm knows it.
No dollar figure has surfaced. The complaint does not put a clean number on the loss in any record reachable without a PACER login. What the carrier asks for instead is treble damages. RICO triples whatever a jury finds. It also wants an injunction, which is the part that should keep a plaintiffs' firm up at night. A money judgment is a cost of business. An injunction is a court telling you how, and whether, you may keep practicing.
The fight has a name, and it did not come from the carrier. The insurance-defense bar coined it: the "fraudemic."
As appellate attorney Tim Capowski of Kahana Feld has documented, the industry now calls the wave of staged and inflated claims a "fraudemic," a campaign rather than an accident. Greater New York Mutual is filing under that banner. The word frames a single firm as one node in something the industry says is everywhere, and it tells you the carriers plan to keep filing.
What happens next runs through the docket. Watch the Eastern District of New York for a motion to dismiss, the stage where suits of this kind have failed before. This one may follow, or it may not. The complaint is built on images a jury could see with its own eyes: a claimant who, the carrier says, swore he could not dress himself, smiling in a bar photo from around the same stretch of weeks. Greater New York Mutual is betting that picture is worth more than a brief.
For once, the insurer is the one who gets to swing first.
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