Fast Focus
	Former insurance agent spins the dark side of insurance into a trilogy of novels.
	Offsite sales meeting is the setting for intramural intrigue involving greedy management and naive agents.
	Fearful of becoming the main character in a legal thriller, the author hides behind a pseudonym.

Titanic Trail of Intrigue

Murder, fraud, theft, sex, alcohol and mayhem—this is not your father’s insurance company.

By  Louise Lague

It’s a good thing that John Patrick Lamont lives on an island in the Mississippi River, for security purposes. It’s a good thing that only one of those three names is real. It’s a good thing he’s no longer in the insurance business.

“Using my real name, I’d be too easy to target,” he says, furtively glancing around the lobby of Chicago’s Sheraton Towers. He knows a passel of black-tied insurance folk are about to turn up for a charity event. And they are the enemy, ever since the publication of The Worst Kind of Lies, the first of Lamont’s trilogy of tell-all novels about the insurance industry.

Lamont is a former fine arts major who spent 14 years as an agent for both a fraternal organization and a local, Midwest branch of a “very large full-service insurance carrier,” which absolutely has to remain nameless, as its most dreadful secrets are spilled all over the first novel’s 508 pages. “Mostly, I try to avoid issues that the insurance companies would find a convenient reason for suing me,” he says. “Naming companies is one of them.”

Nearly all the stories are real, or engineered out of a real story, and so are the many characters, drawn from the people Lamont once worked with, he says. “There are people who’ve bought this book because they inspired some of the characters,” he says. “They don’t recognize themselves, but other people do.”

The fictional Titanic Insurance Company is based in Iowa, as he finds that “the epitome of the Midwest mentality.” TIC is headed by a greedy geezer with a nasty cigar habit, whose imminent death from lung disease is cheered by his personal assistant, an ambitious African-American albino who is rumored to be a voodoo witch. The hero, a well-meaning middle manager named Ted, is mentored by his old boss, the deceased but not yet gone ghost of Jack Farley. Ted is squeezed between his ruthless manager, Mary Garrotte, and his team of somewhat dim, sometimes crass, and often naively eager agents.

The characters collide at the company offsite meeting in Caracas, where intramural intrigue sizzles in a stew of fluorescent cocktails, new product introductions, and a flurry of cheesy promotional items. Hotel employees are bribed to spy on the staff, and the state insurance director has an operative onsite, as well.

In spite of the dirty deeds discussed, Lamont’s novel also celebrates the agents who really do care about their customers. Bitterness aside, the author says he loved his job as an insurance agent, “because I knew I was doing good in the world by helping people protect their assets and save for the future.”

Unfortunately, all that was counterbalanced by a world of “abuse from management, fellow brokers, customers, and the state insurance commissioner’s office,” he says. “Leads were taken off my desk, customers were stolen, clients accused agents of forging signatures.” But, he warns, “The corruption and mismanagement I address in my book apply to everyone in our society. Everyone is vulnerable and suffers equally.”

Lamont eventually “had to leave the business because I could see big layoffs coming.”

Before he left, Lamont worked long hours, struggling to keep up with management’s goals and demands. He had a recurring nightmare that his wife and daughter would meet a tragic end when he was not home. The nightmare made it into the book as reality.