‘Slammer’ tells jury how he plotted mentor’s murder in New Orleans staged wrecks coverup

NOLA.com, By James Finn, August 19, 2026

As the federal government’s star witness, Ryan “Red” Harris’ testimony could decide a trial underway on Poydras Street.

Ryan “Red” Harris heard it first from injury attorney Vanessa Motta, then from his own mother, who’d heard it from a friend.

Cornelius Garrison III, the driver behind the wheel in a bevy of staged wrecks involving Harris’ family members, was cooperating in a federal investigation.

“She was mad,” Harris said Tuesday of his mother, Selita Harris, as he testified on the witness stand in a federal courtroom. “She was pissed off about it because he brung up our name.”

A month later, Harris said Motta called him to say Garrison had just been indicted by a federal grand jury, confirming their fears. They arranged a meeting for the next day at Motta’s office with her fiancé, a tall former attorney named Sean Alfortish accused in the indictment, though not by name, of working with Motta to file scores of claims from bogus 18-wheeler accidents.

Alfortish was pacing the room. He seemed angry, too.

“They was pretty much saying they want to kill him, they want him dead,” Harris told a Justice Department trial attorney, J. Ryan McLaren. “He was pissed off. He was like he had had enough and was ready to do something about it ASAP.”

Harris took the stand Tuesday as the Justice Department’s star witness in the second blockbuster trial this year over what prosecutors say was a yearslong scheme by Alfortish, Motta and various “slammers” — mainly Garrison and Harris — to defraud insurers and trucking companies. A separate jury convicted Motta in March for her role in the scheme.

But it’s what happened after the feds caught onto the plot that will shape the fates of Harris, Alfortish and Leon “Chunky” Parker, Alfortish’s codefendant in a murder-conspiracy trial at New Orleans’ federal courthouse now in its second week.

Four days after Garrison’s indictment in September of 2020, and three days after that meeting on Canal Street, he was shot to death in his mother’s Gentilly entryway. His indictment carried details only Garrison could have provided to federal officials, leading prosecutors to suspect a retaliatory hit by someone who feared his cooperation.

Harris was arrested and charged four years later with the execution-style killing. He agreed the following year to take a plea, saying Alfortish paid for the hit and that Harris recruited Parker, his mother’s former boyfriend who he called "family,” to carry it out.

“(Alfortish) said, ‘Do you know anybody who could kill him?’” Harris, wearing shackles and a tight-fitting white shirt under prison orange, said on the stand. “I said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

Since entering his plea last year, Harris’ word has guided prosecutors’ explanation as to how the yearslong fraud probe transformed overnight into a murder-conspiracy investigation.

Yet his credibility has also emerged as the crux of Alfortish and Parker’s defenses and could become a liability for the prosecution when the 12 jurors decide on their guilt when the trial ends.

Attorneys for both men have seized on shifting statements Harris made to federal authorities to call him a serial liar. They argue he had the most to lose from Garrison’s cooperation — his family members are scattered across Motta’s roster of clients — and say he fabricated his story to save himself from a lifetime in prison.

“It’s hard to keep the lies straight, isn’t it?” Parker’s lawyer, Stephen Haedicke, asked when Harris appeared to falter in answering under cross examination.

Harris replied that he had come to tell the “whole truth.”

Early days
A decade Harris’ senior, Garrison was known around New Orleans as a hustler. By the late 2010s his hustle of choice was staging accidents with big-rig trucks. The driver known as “Slim” would fill cars with recruits, crash them into moving 18-wheelers on Interstate 10 and tote the riders to injury lawyers who promised them big settlements.

Selita Harris rode as a passenger in one wreck. To her son, the six-figure settlement she’d been promised sounded sweet.

“I told her, ‘I want to get involved with Cornelius,’” Harris said. “I thought I’d come up big on an 18-wheeler.”

Harris would soon be working for the older man as a “spotter,” watching wrecks from a separate car before scooping Garrison from the scene so a passenger could slide into the driver’s seat. Harris later graduated to staging collisions himself, getting paid by Motta and Alfortish, who knew it was all a scam, he testified.

Harris wasn’t entirely inexperienced in vehicle insurance fraud. He testified Tuesday that he used to make money buying cars at auction and crashing them to make insurance claims.

Under questioning from McLaren, Harris recounted how Garrison coached him to not use repeat passengers.

“Once the insurance company starts seeing people over and over again, that puts a red flag on ‘em,” Harris testified.

They would meet passengers at a Burger King in New Orleans East. After the wrecks, Harris said they ferried riders to Motta’s law office in Kenner, where he said Alfortish would pay $1,000 per rider. They made more money after convincing Alfortish to cut out a middleman known as “Big Irv.”

The mentorship was not to last. Harris preferred to be patient, thinking it best to await the perfect moment to strike a big rig. Garrison would sometimes rush to cause collisions within moments of getting on the freeway, Harris said.

“He got kind of sloppy with it, kind of crazy,” Harris said.

It wasn’t long before Alfortish began to worry the FBI had caught on to the scheme, he said, and Harris went back to staging wrecks between passenger vehicles.

“The 18-wheelers got kind of hot,” Harris said. “Sean had kind of shut us down. I had to go back to my old ways of making money.”

‘Me, Leon and Sean did it’
Harris testified that Motta FaceTimed him with the news that Garrison had joined “Team USA” sometime in 2020.

He met with his mother and Parker on Orleans Avenue soon after. Harris recalled Parker saying in that meeting that Garrison should die. So, when Alfortish asked if he knew anyone to carry out a hit, Harris testified, he had an answer.

“I said I knew Leon Parker,” he said, “because he was pretty much saying the same thing Sean was saying — that he wanted him dead.”

Through Motta, Harris said he planned another meeting with Parker and Alfortish at Harris’ auto shop to plan the hit. Alfortish offered Parker $20,000 for the job, he said. Harris testified that he and Parker bought burner phones — one of them for Jovanna Gardner, his then-girlfriend. The plan was to ask Gardner to text Garrison on the night of the hit to lure him outside, Harris testified.

He lied to Gardner about the purpose of the ruse, saying he and Parker only wished to offer Garrison money.

“I figured she wouldn’t want anything to do with it,” he said of the murder plot.

Harris said he initially considered using his mother, who introduced him to Garrison all those years before, to play Gardner’s role.

‘Lying to keep yourself out of jail’
The day of the hit, Harris said he “cased” Garrison’s neighborhood for surveillance cameras. Gardner texted Garrison about 8:30 p.m. pretending to be a woman named “Kim.”

Garrison’s mother and other neighbors called 911 a few minutes later. “Mama, fall on the floor,” Garrison yelled as he died, warning his mother about the spray of gunfire.

Afterward, Harris told the jury he and Parker went to the Industrial Canal to dump the 9 millimeter handgun used in the killing.

FBI dive teams never found the weapon, Alfortish’s attorney, Shaun Clarke, said while cross-examining Harris. Haedicke showed the jury multiple firearms found in FBI searches of Harris’ home and work, as well as an extended 9 mm magazine. Police said Garrison was shot 10 times.

After she and Harris were arrested in 2024, Gardner quickly pleaded, saying Harris confessed to the killing on the night it happened and threatened to kill her, too, if she spoke out.

Harris denied that account on Tuesday, saying he meant to convey to Gardner that Parker had killed Garrison and that she could “get killed,” too. Gardner is expected to testify in the trial.

Calling Garrison’s murder the work of a much younger man, Haedicke has argued that Parker at the time of Garrison’s death was obese and ailing from unneeded surgeries from his staged wreck. He recited a list of Harris’ relatives who participated in staged accidents, emphasizing a potential motive for silencing Garrison.

“You participated in killing someone to keep yourself out of jail,” Clarke said while cross-examining Harris. “And so lying to keep yourself out of jail is nothing to you, right?”

“I’m telling the truth and nothing but the truth,” Harris replied.

Link.