If anything characterizes American popular culture, it’s its imposters. From Charles Ponzi to Anna Sorokin, American history (and its streaming platforms, always ready to tell the same story again with enhanced aesthetics) is full of tricksters. However, not all go as far as William Mize IV – protagonist of a report published in New York magazine this month and signed by Lauren Smiley – mastermind of a scheme he and his family have used to swindle insurance companies out of millions.
Between 2006 and 2017, Mize orchestrated more than thirty fake car accidents with his wife, children, nephew and a small clan of relatives, swapping the roles of victim and perpetrator to later make an agreement with the insurance companies. Far from faking the victims’ injuries by spraying a jet of red paint on the bodywork, Mize cut his associates with a blade or cutter and spattered the vehicle with blood so the pantomime would be believable. He even made them empty a bottle of their own urine to make it look like they’d passed out. They got $6 million for it.
The Injury Artist
According to Smiley’s research, Mize was an “injury artist”. Also known as William Talento, Chad Harris or Phillip Gonzalez, he always believed that acting within the bounds of the law was for the poor. Born in El Paso, Texas in 1961, Mize was raised by his single mother Eve on the outskirts of San Francisco until, in a fit of youthful rebellion, he left the family home and started as a waiter as The New York publication. Traveling through Idaho, famous for its 19th-century gold mines and adventurers, he met Teresa Mastin, a 15-year-old teenager who became his first wife shortly after becoming pregnant.
The family grew with the arrival of William Mize II. His birth father, absent until then, burst into his life. And far from holding a grudge against him, Mize also named his son Will in his honor (it would be William Mize V; for some reason our protagonist wanted to be named William Mize IV, skipping a generation). In a possible burst of California nostalgia, the family relocated to Sacramento, the state capital, where their daughter Angela was born in 1984, per People,” he wrote. Joan Didion, a native of the California capital, in Where Am I From. “They didn’t come in the west for a home and security, but for adventure and money.”
Following Didi’s maxim, luck soon granted Mize the money. It was his father’s inheritance when he died in the late 1980s: $700,000 and a home in Arizona. With a wife, home, and two children, Mize could have dedicated himself to embodying the ideal of the American suburban family, but he didn’t want to conform to any standard. He already had money, he just wanted more. His character became authoritarian and his personal style became increasingly artful, perhaps inspired by the rise of one of his greatest idols of the time: Donald Trump.
Panoramic view of the city of El Paso, Texas, where William Mize IV was born Sandy Huffaker (Getty Images)
This erratic behavior eventually ended his marriage, and in 1993 Mize gave up everything to move to Acapulco with his two children, where he began his first business outside of the law: marijuana trafficking to the United States. It was during this period that he met Sandra Sandi Talento, his future partner and an indispensable member of the family’s scam business. After spending several months in a prison in Guadalajara, Mexico after being arrested at his airport with drugs on him, Mize returned to the United States and settled in a palatial house in a residential neighborhood of Spokane, Washington. low. To give it a baroque facade, Mize spared no expense, scattering gargoyles around the garden and placing a chandelier on a rug in the garage next to his Bentley.
The cheater is born
In 2006, Mize began his career as a professional insurance fraudster. According to the OECD, the United States is their organization’s first country in healthcare spending, and the high medical costs that a car accident entails (up to $250,000) open the door for people like Mize trying to cash in on the system the crisis.
How exactly did it work? The alleged victims claimed at the hospital that they had insurance but did not have their policies to hand. Later, already recovered, they came back to ask for an invoice for their treatments and pay them in cash, which meant a discount. Mize then acted under an assumed name as the alleged victims’ insurance agent for those allegedly responsible for the accident (actually all part of his clan) and agreed to a supposedly lucrative insurance deal that would save her from a claim. All this accompanied by fake bills to claim treatments and other claims such as loss of income or damage to property. The result? A rain of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the first to jump into the business was Ryan Park, Mize’s nephew. To lure him, his uncle offered to pay the entire mortgage on the home he shared with his girlfriend Kimberly Boito in exchange for his contribution to the scams. Coming from someone Ryan considered a father, it seemed like a seamless plan.
“I never thought [Mize] I would shag someone I love,” the boy told New York magazine. Things soon changed. Mize was increasingly in control of his life. “If the phone rang and I didn’t answer, I’d be in trouble,” he laments in the American publication.In 2015, Mize had him pull out a piece of his tooth with pliers and spit it out in front of paramedics treating him after a staged accident.It was Mize’s final request to get his name off the mortgage and him free from his bonds.
The plan had failed: the insurance company would not pay for it, the patriarch said. One of the many lies he told about whom he affectionately called him “Uncle Bill” as a child. Mize’s influence was omnipresent. Angela, her daughter, was trying to make a living outside of the family business, but the precariousness of her job at a Las Vegas casino made her feel like a failure. After attempting suicide, Mize helped him financially on condition that he participate in his scams. Dressed in yoga pants, Angela began her criminal career in 2014 when she pretended to be the driver of a mid-size Chrysler Sebring convertible that her father had stuffed into a luxury Mercedes E500. “This is the family I was born into,” laments the young woman in the report. “This is my destiny”. Angela received $100,000 in compensation. Finally the entire Mize clan was connected to the business.
The search file for William Mize IV, who is still on the run from justice.
Once again luck seemed to smile on the Mize clan. In 2015, Angela met the man she would eventually marry. Ryan and Kimmy celebrated their wedding in 2016. The family business gained new members and ran smoothly. Mize dedicated herself to distributing cuts, bumps, and bruises to make accidents more believable and to attract insurance company payments. The more blood, the bloodier, the more shocking the condition of the car, the better. “That was the most important thing for him,” Ryan told New York magazine. “Blood, blood, blood.”
A helicopter ride to the airport or surgery was a money maker that could net them close to $30,000. One of his most memorable accidents was a cameo appearance by a local celebrity: Ron Wells, a Spokane architect and real estate developer. The North Carolina millionaire met Mize in 2015 and they soon bonded thanks to their shared interest in luxury cars. Little did Wells know that he would soon be smashing his massive Dodge Ram 3500 pickup truck into the back of a speedboat that belonged to Mize. The reason? A $20,000 loan payment he couldn’t afford due to an expensive divorce.
“I wanted to do?” Wells told Lauren Smiley. “It was an easy fix.” Mize would be so pleased with the gray mass of iron created in that crash that he would refer to it as his Mona Lisa.
In May 2018, an FBI search warrant arrived. A few months later, a federal jury indicted Mize and his 22 accomplices on charges including money laundering and conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud. According to The Spokesman Review, Spokane’s local newspaper, “Mize is allegedly to blame for car crashes, falls and other accidents in several states.” The Mize clan’s millionaire empire went bankrupt in 2019, with all of its members convicted. Sandi was the worst station. The judge imposed a sentence of 70 months in prison and three years of judicial supervision and a fine of more than $2 million. After 12 years of building a company for which Ryan said she is chief financial officer, the “Orange County brown beauty” was found guilty on 26 counts.
“Scams like this cause America’s hard-working taxpayers to pay higher insurance premiums,” said Special Agent Justin Campbell. As a good counterfeiter, Mize had one last ace up his sleeve. Cornered by justice, he followed one of America’s greatest literary traditions: he fled to live anonymously across the country. “Please understand that all of my options are very poor,” he wrote to his daughter Angela from San Diego. “I don’t want to die in prison.”
Far from becoming a nomadic Beat Generation figure or escaping to Alaska like the protagonist of Into the Wild, Mize was last seen in a Nevada liquor store in early 2020 wearing a blue Nike polo shirt and combed brown hair. According to the search and seizure cartel disseminated by the United States Marshals Corps, Mize likes “warm climates, marinas, and a luxurious lifestyle.” If he’s not caught sooner, he might move to Miami or Los Angeles. Even to Benidorm. All before you serve 20+ years in federal prison.
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