But officials who want to use it are being blocked by the cellular phone industry’s lobbyists
Emiliano Aguas, an alleged leader of a notorious Bloods street gang in Baltimore, was quite explicit on the subject of imprisoned gang members’ most urgent need: cell phone minutes.
In conversations secretly recorded earlier this year by federal investigators, the 32-year-old arranged to have money sent to locked-up members of the PDL Bloods so they could keep their illegal cell phones stocked with minutes. Two weeks later, according to a recently-unsealed federal indictment, Aguas took on the job himself, pledging to replenish the minutes on those same prison cell phones.
A gang leader with a heart? No, Aguas was taking care of business, ensuring Bloods members could continue the gang’s beastly work while in prison: murders, beatings, drug deals, robberies and threatening witnesses, according to the 33-page indictment.
Can you hear me now? Inmates say, ‘sure!’
Cell phones may be illegal to possess in prison, but they have become increasingly essential to gang operations. Prison searches in Maryland last year yielded 934 cell phones, a 17 percent increase over the previous year, state corrections officials say. Cell phones are how gang leaders keep tabs on jailed members and put the word out on what’s expected of them.
Technology exists to jam cell phones, say corrections officials in Maryland and elsewhere, who want federal restrictions loosened so they can use the technique against gangs. But first, they must contend with another well-organized and powerful group: lobbyists for the wireless communications industry.
Drug kingpins and gang leaders have come up with this tech-savvy way to stay in business even after being incarcerated, corrections officials argue, and technology is the key to foiling them.
Fighting one kind of technology with another
Gov. Martin O’Malley is backing efforts to ease federal restrictions on cell phone jamming technology. South Carolina and Texas officials also want the 1934 law changed. But the wireless communications industry has criticized and tried to limit the jamming technology, as their members rack up millions in lucrative cell phone minutes.
Cell phone jamming is not only illegal, but a blunt, potentially ineffective instrument when not used by the federal government in rare instances,’’ according to a statement on the website of CTIA-The Wireless Association, the industry group.
By taking this stance the industry is essentially enabling other illegal activity, corrections officials argue, activity that can have deadly consequences.
Carl Lackl, a witness in a Baltimore murder case, was gunned down outside his Rosedale home in 2007 after the murder suspect ordered the hit via a cell phone from jail. The 24-year-old man most responsible for Lackl’s death was convicted and sentenced last month to four consecutive life terms.
In April, federal indictments against another gang, the Black Guerrillas, charged that its members were coordinating street drug sales from their cells in Maryland prisons through the use of cell phones smuggled in by correctional officers.
When Baltimore police interrupted a meeting of the Black Guerrillas in Druid Hill Park, imprisoned gang leader Eric Brown called his street lieutenants and chastised them for holding such a public gathering – one of many cell phone calls that was secretly taped by federal investigators, according to court papers.
The ease with which cell phones are smuggled into prisons makes the prospect of jamming their signals much more attractive to corrections chiefs than trying to locate the phones with special dogs.
Demo of jamming for the media
South Carolina Corrections Director Jon Ozmint was so concerned about contraband cell phones in his prisons – and determined to block their use – that he invited a Florida company to hold a demonstration of jamming equipment at a maximum-security prison outside Charleston last November. He did so, even though use of the devices is illegal without special approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
“I knew jamming technology was out there on the street and it worked,” said Ozmint. “Other countries were using it. ”
The prisons chief invited CellAntenna Corp. to the Lieber Correctional Institution along with another group of cell phone-junkies, the local media. It was a bold move.
It’s against federal law to block wireless communications. The FCC does have the power to grant exceptions to the law to federal agencies, but it has been less open to local law enforcement and halted a similar demonstration last year in Washington.
But Ozmint wanted Howard Melamed and his company to show not only what could be done to prevent inmate cell phone use from behind prison walls but to challenge his opponents’ main critique of jamming. The cell phone lobby contends that jammers would interfere with nearby legal cell phones or compromise emergency communications.
Melamed set up his targeted, jamming system in a prison auditorium with reporters watching, their cell phones at the ready. He turned on the briefcase-sized device and the reporters’ cell phones were signal-less.
The minute they walked outside the building, within a foot of the prison wall, their phones turned on,” said Melamed, CellAntenna’s chief executive.
If not jamming, what?
Everybody in that room knows this worked,” said Ozmint, the South Carolina prisons chief, in a telephone interview. “Just like France and Japan, we feel like eventually, the FCC or the Congress is going to do the right thing and we’re just hoping they do it before someone else gets hurt.”
Ozmint said he has explored other technology that locates cell phones, rather than blocks their signals, but it costs about $1 million, compared to approximately $100,000 to $150,000 for jamming capability.
If the FCC won’t budge on expanding the use of jamming equipment, Melamed says his firm has devised another device that can identify the serial numbers and carriers of cell phones operating inside a prison. Then it would be up to the wireless carriers to do the right thing – and turn off all the phones in the prison, he said.
“We think jamming is the best solution, but this would be next best.
- by ANN LOLORDO
