Did Bugatti swim for cash? Jury to decide

Andy House, the driver who swerved a million-dollar super-car into a Texas swamp, will have to convince a jury that he didn’t purposely end up in the lagoon to collect insurance money. He will go to trial later this month.

Three years ago, House, an auto dealer, told authorities he dropped his phone while driving down a Galveston, Texas, highway. When he looked up, he claims he saw an errant pelican on the road, which caused him to swerve into the water.

Nearby motorists excited to catch a glimpse of the Bugatti – one of only 300 ever manufactured – filmed the sighting and, to their surprise, the car’s trip to the pond. The video surfaced on YouTube and has generated nearly 3.7 million views, according to the site.

Now, the insurance company is pointing to what it sees as a suspicious sequence of events leading up to the accident. According to ABC News, three weeks before the accident, Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Co. said, it issued a $2.2 million policy on the Bugatti Veyron. The insurance company is using the video as evidence to say House committed fraud because there was no pelican in the video, according to the company.

According to news reports, the insurance company believes that House drove into the swamp to collect the multi-million dollar claim to pay back a friend who lent him money for the car. Lloyd Gillespie, the man who gave House the money, is also a defendant in the suit.

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