Dodgy insurance claims for thousands of injured drivers and passengers flooded auto insurers during a reign of error by a Russian-American crime ring working the New York City area. Mikhail Zemlyansky masterminded the largest no-fault auto scheme ever charged and New York's streets must have seemed like a giant bumper-car ring.

His crooked assembly line churned out $279 million worth of false injury claims from real and phantom car wrecks until his ring was destroyed. He was federally convicted in March 2015, and is scheduled for sentencing in December.

Zemlyansky is a Ukrainian native with his ring mainly comprising people of Russian-American descent. They included 10 doctors and three lawyers who sold out their professions for lucrative bribes to rubber-stamp bogus crash treatments and claims. His gang is a hyper-steroidal icon of organized crime's growing infiltration of insurance fraud — staged crashes, Workers' Compensation, private health and Medicare-Medicaid.

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