‘I Can Do That’
Elizabeth Ainslie has never met a case she didn’t want to try
By Nick DIUlio PHo ToGRAPHy By lUiGi ciUffe Telli
The pattern couldn’t be a coincidence.
An employee of the United States Postal
Inspection Service in Pennsylvania had
begun noticing numerous auto insurance
claims with the same names and vehicle ID
numbers appearing again and again between
1976 and 1977. Since they were being filed
with a handful of different insurers—and
each claim was relatively modest—no one
had picked up on the repetition.
Eventually the inspector collected enough
evidence, and on Jan. 22, 1981, the U.S.
Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania indicted Orlando Hart and six
others in a scheme to defraud insurance
companies by submitting claims for
accidents that never happened. To lead the
prosecution, the U.S. attorney’s office tapped
a former Boston civil defense attorney who
had moved to Philadelphia only two years
earlier: Elizabeth Ainslie. It was her first time
prosecuting white-collar fraud.
“I didn’t have any cooperating witnesses,
and believe me, I really tried,” says Ainslie, now
a trial lawyer at Schnader Harrison Segal &
Lewis in Philadelphia. “The participants in this
scheme were extraordinarily reluctant. Some of
them backed out at the last minute or suddenly
changed their story during trial. I often had to
treat them as hostile witnesses and confront
them with their grand jury testimonies.”
To make her case before the jury, Ainslie
assembled a detailed chart displaying 20
fictitious accidents that served as the basis for
the fraudulent insurance claims.
“In one claim you had Rodney Williams as a
driver. Then another with Rodney Williams as
a passenger. Then another where his car was
in an accident but he wasn’t in the vehicle at
all. You even had the same VIN numbers being
used for different vehicles driven by the same
people over and over again,” recalls Ainslie. “I
said to the jury, ‘If you think this pattern occurs
in nature, I’m wasting my breath.’”
In the end, Hart was found guilty of two
counts of mail fraud and sentenced to two
consecutive five-year prison terms. Ainslie’s
doggedness earned her a reputation as one of
the office’s most tenacious litigators. Less than
two years later, she would become chief of the
Eastern District’s fraud section.
“Liz is utterly fearless and she has this
willingness to roll up her sleeves that brings
her extremely close to every case,” says Bob
Welsh, a criminal defense attorney at Welsh
& Recker who worked alongside Ainslie at the
U.S. attorney’s office. “She’s done that over
and over again.”
