CBS's '60 Minutes' Scrutinizes Shysters' Fraudulent Claims Made on BP Oil Spill Fund

Scott Pelley‘s report on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last evening served to further expose the inbred fraud of Gulf Coast shysters as they parasitically seek to suck free money out of BP in the wake of the 2010 oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.

Kenneth Feinberg, an attorney renowned for evenhandedness after administering compensation funds following both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, served initially as the top administrator of the multibillion-dollar compensation fund BP established in the immediate aftermath of the oil spill.

Feinberg told Pelley that, before being forced out of the job overseeing BP payouts by ethically challenged locals who didn’t like his scrupulous approach, only about a third of the million or so claims filed at that point were justifiable.  And he says the shameless feeding frenzy that has resulted from courts’ interpretations of a subsequent settlement agreement between BP and plaintiffs’ lawyers will discourage companies responsible for future environmental disasters from being as forthcoming and as generous as BP has tried to be.

Of course, Pelley’s report also allows local shysters like Jim Roy and current fund administrator Patrick Juneau to rationalize their participation in massive fraud.  But their best argument seems to be that BP’s attorneys signed on to a bad deal and now want to complain about it — as though BP should have known that Gulf Coast personal injury lawyers have no apparent control over the incestuous criminality that has long characterized their ilk.

But for the sake of discussion, let’s say BP’s lawyers were just plain stupid for obligating their client to a settlement that lets the practitioners of backwoods bayou justice lie without consequence in pursuit of free money.  Even if that were the case, where are the consciences of these plaintiffs’ lawyers, to say nothing of their respective bar associations’ disciplinary committees?  Would these shysters argue that’s it’s okay to steal money out of a blind beggar’s cup simply because the blind beggar knows some may steal?

In any case, the truly astounding thing is that personal injury lawyers can’t understand why opinion polls consistently show them to be even less popular than used car salesmen (no offense intended to used car salesmen).