The Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 hit Louisiana hard as seafood, tourism and oil and gas industries were ravaged. Residents found themselves both unemployed and unable to qualify for loans. Vietnamese shrimpers who made up nearly half of the Gulf Coast workforce were hit hard too, according to The Atlantic.
But Mikal Watts, a personal injury lawyer from San Antonio, came to help.
Watts wanted to represent the Vietnamese fishermen in a lawsuit against British Petroleum. He teamed up with Eloy Guerra, who pitched potential mass torts to lawyers, ;and recruiting plaintiffs for lawsuits.
The two had worked together before. Watts told The Atlantic that it was Guerra’s idea to seek out seafood workers, claiming he could find Watts up to 7,000 clients. That number jumped to 20,000. Then 40,000.
Watts recruited other investors to help pay legal costs after investing $10 million with Guerra to retain those 40,000 plaintiffs. Other investors kicked in millions.
Watts’ list of claimants provided to BP in 2011 equaled 76 percent of the BP Seafood Fund, or $2.3 billion set aside by the oil company. Watts claimed he had represented 44,500 coastal residents.
That’s how he received a spot on the plaintiff’s steering Committee.
There’s a major problem with those plaintiffs though, according to The Atlantic: they didn’t exist.
The scheme began to unravel after the BP-funded Gulf Coast claims facility began issuing payments.
Dung Nguyen, a 39-year-old Vietnamese fisherman living in Dickinson, Texas, decided to join the mass tort, after receiving a check for $5,000 and another for almost $10,000. He was eligible for a third and final payment if he promised to never sue BP. At that point he would have received up to two years of lost wages. Or, he could join the mass tort.
He did not
He hired attorney Tammy Tran, who filed for the third BP payment, but was told that he wasn’t eligible for because he’d joined the mass tort — as a client of Mykal Watts.
Tran would represent hundreds of individuals who had been added to the mass tort against BP without their knowledge.
Watts was indicted in October 2015 for fraud for his role in the Deepwater Horizon tort scheme. The Express News noted that seven people were charged, including Watts, his brother David, their office manager, and Hector Eloy Guerra, of Harlingen, who had been pitching potential plaintiffs, as well as several others.
All were charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, identity theft, and aggravated Identity theft.
However, according to the Sun Herald, Watts, his brother David, the office manager and Guerra were acquitted in 2016.
The courts instead found Gregory Warren of Lafayette, Louisiana and Thi Houng “Kristy” Le of Grand Bay, Alabama guilty of 66 different charges. No evidence surfaced during trial that Watts and his associates knew of the scheme.
The jury concluded that Warren and Le submitted names and information for people who had not been effected the spill, who were dead or simply didn’t exist.