Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America.

Ken Dornstein St. Martin's Press 257 Park Ave. South New York, NY 10010 452 pp., $26.95

A week rarely goes by without a major U.S. newspaper reporting that yet another phony accident ring was broken up by the authorities. These rings are actually loosely organized gangs that stage auto accidents, fake injuries, make phony claims, and collect damages. Author Ken Dornstein worked a few years after college for a major insurance company investigating these gangs.

At first blush, one might think the book is a diatribe against personal injury lawyers. It is not. Most of the book is a history of false claims-making. Dornstein traces this practice as far back as the early 1800s and discusses in some detail a variety of false claims, including ship jacking and phony railroad injuries. He also mentions slip and fall artists, such as Banana Anna. The book then moves quickly into the automobile age and concentrates largely on phony personal injury claims and ambulance chasing in New York in the 1920s.

Dornstein presents a balanced view of how the trial bar's elite--motivated largely by ethnic and racial prejudice--pursued the unethical lawyers of the 1920s. He does a good job of exposing how the "best men " of the New York Bar denounced the ambulance chasers, who were referred to as "unlearned, unlettered, and utterly untrained." Legal historian Jerold Auerbach later explained that this meant they were immigrant attorneys and, in particular, Jews.

Perhaps the most refreshing disclosure in the book occurs in a chapter called "Whiplash Culture." Dornstein briefly touches on the creation of the National Association of Claimants' Compensation Attorneys (NACCA), the predecessor to ATLA. He describes with candor and respect the efforts that organized plaintiff trial lawyers have made since the late 1940s to improve personal injury practice.

Dornstein exposes efforts by the insurance industry as early as the 1950s to hire public relations people to "educate judges, lawyers, and the public about the social harms of unchecked damage awards" and to place ads in magazines to try to pollute the minds of prospective jurors. The parallels to how big business and the insurance industry continue to corrupt the public on victims' rights in the tort area are striking.

What is the current status of the personal injury underworld in America? Dornstein focuses almost exclusively on the Los Angeles basin, where largely Hispanic accident gangs stage collisions on freeways. This is not a book that can be described as controversial or of great public import. Rather, it simply surveys a backwater of the American tort system.

Edward M. Ricci practices law with Ricci, Hubbard, Leopold & Frankel in West Palm Beach, Florida.