VLADIMIR F. KOSTYUSHKO
WESTFIELD – A city man has been charged with filing a fraudulent motor vehicle insurance claim after reporting that a car fell from the second tier of a car carrier he was responsible for.
The same car was reported to have smashed into a utility pole on North Road on the same day.
Matthew Markiewicz, an investigator for the Western Massachusetts Task Force of the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts, detailed the charge in a document filed in Westfield District Court to support a criminal complaint against Vladimir Kostyusho, 30, of 33 Russellville Road.
The bureau, according to its website, “was created by the insurance industry and authorized by state statute in 1990 to conduct criminal investigations of all lines of insurance fraud” and refers cases for criminal prosecution when it discovers “fraud, deceit of intentional misrepresentation.”
The alleged fraud came to light because both the owner of a 2008 Audi A6 sedan and a West Springfield woman filed insurance claims for damages incurred with the same vehicle on the same date.
Police records show that on Nov. 6, 2010, a caller reported at 4:50 a.m. that she had encountered a vehicle at the intersection of North and Root roads which had crashed into a utility pole. She said that two Russian men, who said that they were uninjured, were trying to remove the 2008 Audi A6 sedan.
Markiewicz reports that he learned that city police officer Harry Sienkiewicz, then assigned to the department’s Traffic and Safety Bureau, had done a follow-up investigation which revealed discrepancies in the accounts provided by the car’s occupants at the time of the crash.
Markiewicz also found that the owner of the car, a Rhode Island resident, had been told that the damages to the car had occurred when it fell from a car carrier.
His investigation showed that the car owner had contracted with a West Springfield company to transport the vehicle from Rhode Island to Florida and the car had been in the custody of an employee, Vladimir Kostyushko.
Markiewicz said the manager of the company told him that Kostyushko had been a driver for the company since 2009 and said that, shortly after hiring him, the company began to receive complaints from owners of vehicles which had been transported by Kostyushko.
He said that, in one reported incident, he believed that Kostyusko’s brother, Oleg Kostyushko, had “taken a customer’s vehicle without permission.”
The manager told Markiewicz that he warned Vladimir Kostyushko not to allow his brother to use any of the customers’ vehicles, on pain of dismissal.
Markiewicz reports that he learned from Sienkiewicz that the Nov. 6 accident report showed that Eduard Kostyushko, another of Vladimir’s brothers, had reported that he was driving the car at the time of the crash and it was also occupied by Andrey Lukomski of 126 Union St., and Marina Dipon of 96 King’s Highway, West Springfield.
Markiewicz also found that, on the morning of Nov. 6, Vladimir Kostyushko had called his boss and told him that he had been in the customer’s Audi on the second tier of his car carrier when it fell from the trailer and was damaged, beyond repair.
Kostyushko then called the owner who subsequently filed a claim with his insurance company. Kostyushko repeated his account of the incident to the owner’s insurance company in a recorded telephone interview in May, 2011.
The owner’s claim was settled in June, 2011.
The insurance company received a personal injury protection claim from Dipon in January, 2012, for $9,883 and a bodily injury claim of $16,000 for injuries sustained while she was in the car which crashed on North Road.
Sienkiewicz had interviewed the owner of the car, 4-6 weeks after the crash, and told Markiewicz that the owner said that he had not authorized anyone to use the car.
Sienkiewicz also told Markiewicz that he interviewed Dipon who said that the men at the crash site had given police false information so Markiewicz, and a colleague, interviewed Dipon in May, 2013.
Markiewicz reports that Dipon said that in the early morning hours of Nov. 6 she had been locked out of her house by her mother and called her boyfriend, Yuriy Tikonchuk, who came to get her in a 2008 Audi driven by Oleg Kostyushko.
She said that she had been with the two men when the car crashed into a tree on North Road later that morning.
Dipon told Markiewicz that Oleg Kostyushko called his brother, Eduard Kostyushko, who came to the crash site with his father, Fedor Kostyushko, and a truck and trailer where they attempted to remove the smashed car but “the Westfield police arrived and stopped them.”
She said that Oleg, who was intoxicated, fled into nearby woods before police arrived and Eduard claimed to have been operating the vehicle and identified Lukomski as Tikonchuk.
The company denied Dipon’s claim because use of the vehicle had not been authorized.
Markiewicz reports he again spoke with the manager of the car hauling company, in late May, 2013, and learned that the man had confronted Kostyushko after he became aware of Dipon’s injury in the vehicle which Kostyushko had said fell from the truck.
The manager told Markiewicz that Kostyushko lied initially but later told him that his brother Eduard had been driving the car. He subsequently said that was also a lie and eventually admitted that his brother Oleg was responsible.
Kostyushko told him, he said, that Oleg Kostyushko had “somehow” gotten into the company’s truck where he took the keys to the Audi without Vladimir Kostyushko’s knowledge “to drive the girls around.”
The manager said that he subsequently discharged Kostyushko.
Markiewicz said that his efforts to speak with Vladimir Kostyushko were unsuccessful and he applied for a criminal complaint against him for making a fraudulent motor vehicle insurance claim.
Kostyushko, who had been in custody on other charges, was arraigned in Westfield District Court on Tuesday, July 9, on charges relating to larcenies from a Clifton Street business, as detailed in The Westfield News on June 12, 2013, as well as the insurance fraud charge.
He was held in lieu of $1,000 cash bail pending an Aug. 8 hearing.
