Crazy Villainous Schemes Involving Insurance Fraud: Diablo Edition

Amazing Spider-Man #607 by Joe Kelly, Mike McKone & Adriana Melo

Yesterday, we posted a short profile of the former construction tycoon and current owner of The DB, Dexter Bennett. We had mentioned that 20 years ago or so, Bennett had a falling out with his business partner, Bernie Mayer, which had caused him to resign from his position with the company. The falling out had to do with some mysterious backdoor deal that Mayer had made with an unknown party in order to acquire cheap materials.

It turns out that this shady dealing involved one of the most convoluted and ineffective villainous plans I have ever witnessed throughout my history of reading comics. Now, comics are no strangers to intricate and sometimes nonsensical plots, especially by weaker villains. But this one has to make a list somewhere. There should be a Guinness Award in the Marvel Universe for such things--and this would certainly win one.

The charmer you are looking at in the panel depicted above is Diablo. Diablo is typically a Fantastic Four villain but has decided to make his way over to the Spideyverse in this instance. He is equipped with the ability to transmute elements, which allows him to create various materials and potions in order to perform actions largely outside the realm of modern science. He can create sleeping potions, hypnotic powders, and things like that. Basically, he is one part alchemist, two parts crazy evil scientist. The catch? Most of his creations only last for a temporary amount of time before they explode, disintegrate, or just fade from existence.

In this plan, Diablo had used his talents to create a whole bunch of steel, which he then sold to the Bernie Mayer at extremely cheap rates. Suspecting that something was amiss, Dexter Bennett did not support the deal. And this was incredibly astute of him for it turns out that this steel was geared to explode in exactly 20 years from the time of its creation. That's right, this plan would take 20 years to live out...

Indeed, Spidey. Why did that psycho go through all this trouble of making and selling 20,000 tons of steel and sitting around for 20 years until it was rendered useless? And then attempting to murder the owners of the construction firm he sold that steel too? (By the way, this is what led Spider-Man to his tail in the first place).

The answer is a major insurance ploy. Diablo had concocted a scheme to sell faulty steel to Bennett and Mayer, knowing that they would then use that steel to construct a major office building...you know what, let me outsource this to Spidey and the Black Cat:

OK, so here is where the insurance comes into play. Go on...

Wow. Were you guys as blown away by that as I was? Let's recap what we have just learned about the bulk of Diablo's diabolical insurance scheme in terms of what I imagine to be his to-do-list:

Diablo's Evil To-Do List:
1) Create 20,000 tons of faulty steel set to expire in 20 years.
2) Sell 20,000 tons of faulty steel to famous construction company
3) Somehow get involved with / start forty different, unconnected small businesses and secure permit for a seemingly innocuous NYC office building
3) Persuade this construction company to use this steel for construction of seemingly innocuous NYC office building
4) Take out massive property insurance policy for all forty businesses.
5) Wait 20 years.
6) Find and kill owners of famous construction company from 20 years ago and hide their bodies so as to make them appear suspicious for the impending destruction of seemingly innocuous office building.
7) Watch building get destroyed.
8) Somehow collect on over $9 billion of insurance money, without bearing any of the suspicion since it would all be placed with those greedy, corrupt construction folks.

If I'm reading this plan right (and admittedly the details are a bit vague, so I'm making several assumptions here), then there are so many things that are so exaggerated and elaborate that it's hard to believe Diablo is any sort of scientist (even if it is an evil alchemist). Even Doctor Octopus's ludicrous schemes have some semblance of logic. This is just plain silly.

First, let's talk about this insurance policy. Spidey and Black Cat throw around the term "catastrophic," but this is not to be confused with catastrophic health insurance, or high-deductible health plans, designed to cover, well, catastrophes in health. No, this seems like Diablo or these companies or whoever merely took out a whole bunch of property insurance policies that cover things like magic steel explosions.

One thing that confuses me about this is the payoff of $9 billion. That seems like an awful lot of money to me. As a comparison, following the attacks of 9/11, the insurance companies paid out up to $4.6 billion for the World Trade Center's destruction. And this was after a trial in which the insurance companies, in an effort to pay less, argued that the collapse was caused by one incident, whereas leaseholder Larry Silverstein claimed it was two, distinct attacks. Note that this was only about $5 billion AND it was for two different events AND it was for the WTC, two of the tallest buildings in the entire world. The fact that Diablo stands to collect $9 billion seems highly suspicious to me and it's a wonder that it did not seem so to anyone else.

Second, how is it exactly that Diablo got himself in a position to collect all of this money? The building in question, according to Black Cat, contains "forty separate small insignificant operations carrying wicked huge insurance policies." She also mentions that the companies are "seemingly unconnected." To me, this suggests that there is, in fact, a connection and that this connection is clearly Diablo. So then is the implication that Diablo created forty different small businesses for the purposes of later destroying them and collecting insurance checks? If he did not physically create them, then he must be somehow involved with their management and finances such that he serves as the insurance policyholder. Either way, there seem to be forty semi-phony companies that exist to pay Diablo off. And what's more is that these businesses have had to operate consistently and earn profit for over 20 years. That's quite a lot of work for one supervillain and frankly I didn't realize that Diablo had the business sense to keep it going. AND we're in a recession. Jeez!

There is no doubt that Diablo's plan focused entirely on making money. There is no Joker-like sensation of foiling the superhero and there is no seeking of power and fame here. This is strictly about stealing dough and being rich. I realize that many villains are not too effective in this area, but there are much more obvious ways that Diablo could have pulled this off that would not have involved waiting 20 years and the operation of 40 small businesses as a prerequisite.

Here's an idea: Make and sell more steel! This is a guy with the power to make things that nobody else can make. And he's demonstrated that he is capable of selling these things. So, um, why not just keep doing that?

How about this one: Make money from your businesses! Again, Diablo has some sort of financial connection to these 40 operations, whether he physically owns them or has somehow persuaded them to pay him lots of money. He is clearly at the very least a shrewd operator, since these businesses have been profiting for over 20 years and the collective insurance payout between them has amassed to $9 billion dollars. The guy can just make money legitimately, but instead he decided to spend two decades trying to see the fruition of a plan that is as faulty as the steel with which it was based on.

As Spidey mentioned, it turns out that behind all this convoluted foolishness, Diablo is nothing more than a simple crook. And the real tragedy is, he's not even a good one.

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Why is Fraud so Easily Committed in Comics?

Spoilers Ahead

Batman R.I.P. by Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel (2008)

Comic books are known for the often convoluted and extreme nature of their villainous machinations. Since the early days when Batman would primarily bring ordinary street thugs to justice, criminals have become increasingly more imaginative in their schemes to either steal money or foil their respective superheroes. Often times, these plots involve years of careful scheming, a collusion with like-minded villains, and a significant amount of expenditures in terms of time, money and physical effort.

The Black Glove recently attempted a psychological attack on Batman which involved luring Bruce Wayne into a nefarious sensory deprivation experiment years in advance, introducing a covert love interest into his life, and fabricating the return of Thomas Wayne. Norman Osborn, through years of work, is now a prominent political figure in the United States. The Red Skull recently attempted infiltrating Captain America's mind through a combination of fake assassination attempts and time travel (which Mark discusses here).

Despite all this meticulous planning and ingenuity, what continually surprises me in comic books is the ease with which villains seem to commit fraud. In fact, I don't know whether the banking system or personal identification infrastructure is just regulated much less than on real-Earth, but villains always seem to get away with crimes such as identity theft and insurance fraud.

Consider the following examples from recent literature.

Exhibit A: The Hunter

Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke (2009)

In Darwyn Cooke's latest adaptation of Richard Stark's novel, the protagonist, Parker, secures a fake driver's license and uses it to score a checkbook associated with a real bank account. He does this by going to the Department of Motor Vehicles and filling out a State of New York driver's license form with the arbitrary name, "Edward Johnson." He then steals a ballpoint pen, coincidentally being of the same color as the DMV's in-house approval stamps, and literally sketches the words "Paid, Nov. 6, 1962" in the space reserved for the state stamp. Finally, he treads from bank to bank, claiming to the teller that he had misplaced his checkbook and forgot his account number, displaying his fake driver's license as certification of his identity.

Granted I'm not an expert in the 1960s regulatory structure, but this seems entirely too easy. He did not actually steal a legitimate personal identification document from someone else, but rather created a false one on his own. This means that he also fabricated a driver's license number. Shouldn't the bank have had this information and have crossed-checked it with the account before handing out a checkbook?

Furthermore, I never knew that in the 1960s, the form that one fills out in the DMV actually also served as the license. Though, again, I am not an expert in the history of personal identification.

Parker's plan seems to have required a bit too much luck. He had to have used a pen, the color of which had to be nearly identical with the state stamp. He had to have been such a meticulous artist that his quick sketch of the stamp had to fool a bank teller, who likely sees driver's licenses many times a day. He had to find a bank that had an existing account for the name "Edward Johnson" and hope that the teller did not recognize the individual. And finally, he had to rely on the gross negligence of the bank to merely accept a name, overlook the stamp and phony driver's license number, and quickly dispense a new checkbook and disseminate the account number.

Exhibit B: Streets of Gotham

Streets of Gotham #2 by Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen (2009)

We've detailed Hush's latest plans of attacking the Wayne family here and here. To reiterate, his nefarious plan is to be charitable: he intends to invest $1 billion of Wayne funds a month towards rebuilding the Gotham City infrastructure and to shocking a lethargic economy brought down by the recession. Although devious enough, his plan suffers from a critical flaw: how, exactly, does he have access to Bruce's money?

Thomas Elliot (Hush) presupposes that just by holding a press conference under the guise of Bruce Wayne and announcing his intentions that he would be able to commit these funds. Yet, don't regulations exist against these very abuses? There are conspicuously no documents that Hush needs to sign in order to secure this transfer. There are no PIN numbers, credit card numbers or bank account numbers he needs to divulge in order to gain access to these accounts. There is no proof of identity involved. No nothing! Just by being a skilled plastic surgeon, Hush is able to skirt all individual protection laws and commit identity theft on a massive scale.

Does this imply that anybody could gain access to another individual's life savings just by looking like them? Could identical twins steal each other's money? Could Superboy Prime access Superboy's bank account? Could Zooey Deschanel book a trip to Paris on Katy Perry's tab?

Exhibit C: Incognito
See our post on Zack Overkill's attempt to commit credit card fraud here.

It seems as though the individual protections that exist on real-Earth to guard against the aforementioned infractions are negligible or absent in comic books. Perhaps it would save cities some money, individuals some lives, and superheroes some work if the United States government were to consider implementing such regulations. This is particularly true in a world where shapeshifting supervillainy is rampant. It is irresponsible for the government not to have done so already.

On the other hand, I don't recall Clayface or Mystique committing identity theft before.

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