So belly up to the bar–jail bars, that is–and learn how the No-Class of 2010 earned their dishonorable mentions.

Enter the Malice Palace

Jeffrey Alnutt

A tenant died when cash-poor landlord Jeffrey Alnutt burned down his apartment building to steal more than $300,000 in insurance money. The Johnstown, N.Y. man's second-floor tenant Debra Morris died when she dashed back into the flaming building to rescue her cat.

Investigators identified four spots where gasoline was found in the ruins: a staircase, an enclosed porch, the living room and kitchen. A red gasoline can was found melted to the floor.

Alnutt had plenty of motives. His finances plummeted when several of his businesses declined because he spent too much time with his girlfriend, his ex-wife testified during the trial. Hard-up for money, he couldn't cover the mortgages on several buildings he owned.

The court sentenced Alnutt to 25 years to life for murder. He's already serving 15 years for burning down his house for nearly $200,00 in fraudulent insurance claims.

Francis Fredette

The Rutland, Vt. man broke his back when he tumbled off the roof of a gas station he was burglarizing. Still scheming despite his painful injury, Fredette had his crony drive him to Fredette's apartment building and dump him on the front steps.

Fredette then shook down his innocent landlords and insurer, lying that he had slipped on the landlords' supposedly unsafe steps. Fredette made $700,000 on the deal.

The landlords' insurer paid him $550,000, and the landlords gave up their life savings of $150,000 to pay Fredette the balance. The landlords had counted on that money for retirement. Things got sticky when Fredette's crony had a fit of conscience and turned him in. Fredette received 46 months in jail. But he'd already spent the stolen money and was broke, thus forcing his hapless crony to repay the landlords and the insurer.

Joel Zellmer

The Seattle, Wash.-area man drowned his three-year-old stepdaughter for $200,000 in life-insurance money. Young Ashley McLellan suspiciously died in Zellmer's pool only months after he and Ashley's mother married. He bought the life policy on Ashley just three months before killing her.

Zellmer had a dubious history of whirlwind romances with women who had toddlers. Ashley's mother was the third single mother to whom he'd proposed in a year.

Zellmer was engaged to yet another woman with a two-year-old child, and strangely wanted to buy life insurance on her and her daughter. The child later was pulled from the pool, and his then-wife found a handprint-shaped bruise on the girl.

His first wife's four-month-old infant also had at least one leg suspiciously broken in Zellmer's care. He claimed the child was hurt in a hit-and-run crash. Zellmer made a $25,000 uninsured-motorist claim afterward. But he dropped the claim when his wife provided the insurer with a sworn affidavit saying that no crash happened. She said she saw Zellmer damaging the back of his Honda to create the appearance of a rear-end collision.

The court sentenced Zellmer to 50 years in prison for Ashley's murder.

James Kalfsbeek and Donna Jean Rowe

A self-styled “Christian” auto insurer launched an unholy con. The Puget's Sound Agricultural Society claimed it was a Christian outfit. The Calif.-based group inhaled millions of dollars by charging drivers $500 for a lifetime membership, plus $250 per vehicle.

But Puget's Sound wasn't licensed in California, didn't have proper reserves, and paid only small claims while ignoring larger ones. Nor did the so-called “policies” pay for pain and suffering, which the group considered part of “God's plan.”

Consumers who were involved in car wrecks had their driver licenses suspended because their auto insurance wasn't real.

A Mich. court handed down a $20-million civil judgment involving a single-car crash that killed Fred Coty and left Jill Glover severely disabled for life. A Puget's Sound member was driving. But Puget's Sound “paid” the grieving families by trying to pawn off on them a “Bill of Exchange.” The document fraudulently authorized the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to pay out the money.

At their criminal trial, the scheme's head honchos James Kalfsbeek and Donna Jean Rowe defiantly called themselves “sovereign citizens” not subject to government oversight. That didn't sit well with the court, nor did anything else. Kalfsbeek received 10 years in federal prison, and Rowe four years.

Bart Posey

One of America's largest and most-notorious fake health plans bilked vulnerable consumers around the U.S. Bart Posey controlled the unlicensed American Trade Association. The outfit was a major player in a national wave of bogus health plans exploiting consumers in a downturned economy. Many consumers had no health insurance or were simply looking for an affordable deal, and fell prey to sales pitches such as ATAs.

The Springfield, Tenn. outfit sold fake coverage to at least 12,000 people, and stole as much as $12 million in premiums. Some victims were stuck with large hospital bills when ATA refused to pay their claims.

An Okla. man was in desperate condition when his heart started failing. He urgently needed a pacemaker, but ATA wouldn't pay for his surgery. He was having trouble finding coverage from legitimate insurers afterward because of his preexisting condition.

S.C. resident Beth Wicker suffered a stroke and went to the hospital, only to discover her ATA coverage was bogus. She owes $17,000 in medical bills, lost her premiums, and has no health insurance.

ATA spread its tentacles so far that insurance departments around the U.S. were forced to issue cease-and-desist orders and consumer alerts. The Tennessee insurance department liquidated ATA this year.

Dr. Steven Schneider

Dozens of patients died from overdoses linked to illegal insurer-paid prescriptions for powerful addictive painkillers and other drugs provided by a clinic run by Dr. Stephen Schneider.

Many of the Wichita, Kans.-area doctor's patients were addicts. He prescribed drugs to some patients even after they'd overdosed on the same kinds of drugs. Schneider also left blank pads of signed prescriptions so his clinic staff could illegally dispense drugs. His nurse wife also forged his signature to other prescriptions.

He stole more than $20 million worth of insurance money, prosecutors contended. Some 68 people were linked to overdose deaths from addictive prescription drugs Schneider's clinic prescribed. His prescriptions also were linked to 107 overdoses at local emergency rooms.

An amputee's decomposing body was discovered at home. The man had taken oxycodone and a muscle relaxant together in an accidental death after Schneider had prescribed him drugs. Another patient died of an overdose after going to a clinic for severe migraines. She was prescribed Actiq–a potent, addictive painkiller approved for cancer patients.

Schneider's clinic accounted for 18 percent of overdose deaths in the Sedgwick County area from 2002 through 2007. Diversion of addictive prescription drugs has reached epidemic levels in many areas of the U.S. Insurers pay much of the tab through illicit prescription claims.

Schneider received 30 years in prison.

Kelly Klein

The Seattle, Wash.-area woman may have the unluckiest family in the U.S. They kept getting badly hurt–or so Klein claimed. Klein filed more than $200,000 in fake injury claims. The money involved 96 claims involving family members in less than three years–covering a long list of improbable and phantom accidents.

Klein's husband, for instance, supposedly lost his foot after it was crushed by a tractor and required a medical helicopter evacuation to the hospital for amputation. To enhance the seeming realism, Klein even filed a claim for a prosthetic foot.

In addition, her teenage son was seriously burned in a fireworks explosion, needing days of treatment at a burn center, Klein insisted. Her teenage daughter broke her femur in a car wreck that also forced her husband into a wheelchair. The maladies went on.

Klein submitted forged receipts, medical records, and police accident reports to support her fraudulent claims. However, insurer background checks with doctor offices and hospitals showed that Klein's family members had never been patients there, or at least not for the claimed treatments. Despite it all, Klein received only a year in jail, with most of the sentence suspended. She also was forced to repay most of the stolen insurance money.

Pierre Lamont Taylor

Going to body-mangling extremes, swindlers sometimes mutilate themselves for insurance money. Figuring he could make a living without actually working, Pierre Lamont Taylor had his cousin shoot him in the leg to fake a robbery and steal workers' compensation money.

Taylor worked for UPS and lied that he was wounded during a job-related robbery in the Washington, D.C. area. Sporting a fresh bullet hole in his right leg, Taylor made a workers' comp claim with Liberty Mutual, which paid out a lump sum of $250,000 as UPS' insurer.

Taylor shared some of his insurance windfall with his crony as payment for the shooting. The dishonest duo got the idea for the shooting after watching a television show involving a similar plot. A former friend of Taylor told authorities about the scheme, and Taylor ultimately confessed.

Taylor and his cousin each received five years in prison (suspended) in a scheme that the cousin's sentencing judge called “one of the dumbest things” he's ever seen.

James Quiggle is the director of communications for the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. He may be reached at [email protected], www.insurancefraud.org.