Prisoners Con the Lonely With Huge Pen Pal Scams

David Paul Hammer was a prisoner at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester a few years ago when he bragged to a reporter for an alternative magazine that he had received at least $176,000 from 1,500 to 2,000 people he had duped into sending him money.

“The trick is making them fall in love with you through letters and on the phone,” Hammer told the Los Angeles-based magazine, the Advocate. “And I mean people who are lonely are so willing and vulnerable because they’re reaching out and they’re wanting something.”

Across the country, prisoners’ ploys to acquire and psychologically manipulate pen pals--frequently homosexual men--have resulted in the loss of millions of dollars and countless broken dreams over the past 15 years, authorities say.

But now, the stakes have risen as pen pal scams have figured in the murders of four gay men, three in Mississippi and one in New York, who had been writing to the murder suspects when they were behind bars.

On Sunday in San Clemente, former Indiana inmate Keith Eugene Goodman and two associates were arrested in separate SWAT team raids on suspicion of stalking Goodman’s prison pen pals and killing them after committing robberies.

Goodman, 30, walked out of state prison with thousands of dollars from pen pals whom he had apparently persuaded to send money, said New York State Police investigator Richard J. Kadien.

One of Goodman’s suspected victims, Harold Williams, 60, found shot to death Dec. 17 in his Upstate New York home, had apparently paid a $500 phone bill accumulated answering collect calls from Goodman. He had also sent Goodman a total of $300 while they wrote each other.

For long-term, maximum security inmates with time on their hands and nothing to lose, “scamming” outsiders is probably the most popular and lucrative of all prison “businesses,” including the sale of illegal drugs, said Annette Viator, chief legal counsel for the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

Investigators have conservatively estimated that 10% of the 5,500 inmates at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, with or without outside contacts, have taken in more than $1 million in a recent three-year period.

Homosexuals, sometimes vulnerable to blackmail and unlikely to file complaints, are the primary target of such scams, she said, followed by religious people who want to help the less fortunate, and lonely subscribers to singles magazines carrying personal ads.

Some inmates also subscribe to metropolitan newspapers to contact people listed in divorce or real estate transactions. “Inmates who are truly looking to scam a large number of people leave no stone unturned for a source,” Viator said.

Typical victims include a 67-year-old Orange County widow who spent $3,000 and sold her home to bankroll a prisoner who said he needed to pay off legal fees, according to Viator. In Canada, a homosexual high-ranking aide to a Canadian Parliament official lost $30,000 to pen pals who blackmailed him, then informed his boss about his homosexuality anyway.

Viator said that many people are surprised to learn that the dupes are often intelligent professionals. “They’re not stupid. They’re just very trusting.”

The cons are “chameleons,” she said. “It’s amazing how they know how to fit their identify to a person who needs them. If you’re a homosexual, they’ll say, ‘So am I.’ If you’re a lonely old man, they’ll say, ‘I’m a young girl who never had a family.’ ”

For example, an ad reading “Be My Summer Lover,” placed last year in the Advocate, was signed only “Eddie.” An established Santa Cruz professional, just jilted by his gay lover, picked up the magazine and replied. It resulted, he said, in an emotional and financial nightmare.

As the man found out later, after voluntarily sending “Eddie” $17,200, his pen pal was not the “cuddly, shy” 23-year-old Texan he claimed to be. Instead he was a 43-year-old convicted murderer, spending his time in a Louisiana prison bilking money from emotionally vulnerable people.

“Often minorities feel we’re all in this together,” said the 55-year-old Santa Cruz man who asked not to be identified. “Here was this gay young man. I’m gay. When (one feels) the majority is out to get you, minorities protect one another. I adopted a father or protector role.

“I started out sending him money to get out of trouble, to get him out here to California, then to post bonds as he kept getting in ‘trouble.’

“By the time I realized I had no more money, I had borrowed up to the hilt.”

A lawyer he had contacted to help “Eddie” instead made him realize that he had been duped. After the initial embarrassment, he said, he was relieved. “What I could not handle was thinking that this kid is going to go to prison and get raped because I couldn’t help him anymore.”

The man now has a civil suit pending against “Eddie.”

Viator says the scams are difficult to stop, partly because overburdened and under-funded prosecutors are unwilling to spend time and money to charge and try prisoners already serving life sentences.

In addition, authorities cited the relative ease of raising bogus money orders--the nation’s single-largest prison scam.

One scheme known to investigators as the Parchman Money Order Scam has waxed and waned at the Mississippi Penitentiary in Parchman for 15 years, said Mike Hesse, Memphis, Tenn., postal inspector whose jurisdiction includes the prison.

In 1987, about 60 prisoners there were involved in a bogus money order scheme soliciting pen pals through personal ads in magazines.

Typically, authorities said, an inmate writes to his victim saying he is in prison because he made a mistake, is serving a short jail sentence and is financially secure. Then the letters become more intimate with the inmate asking for the pen-pal’s phone number and starting to call collect.

Usually, the prisoner will talk about relocating near the victim to begin a sincere relationship and then send his pen pal a $1 or $5 money order, altered in the prison press shop to read $100 or $500. Believing the prisoner to be an innocent victim, needing money for attorney fees or other reasons, the pen pals will help smuggle the cash in.

Once the inmate feels he has bilked the victims as long as he can, the relationship is ended.

In 1985, postal investigators found more than 3,500 money orders at the Mississippi prison with an altered value of $1.6 million. In 1989, the value was $1.4 million, of which $400,000 was recovered--from the victims themselves.

Brian Kennedy, Los Angeles area director of Prison Fellowship Ministries, a Christian organization founded by Watergate figure Charles Colson, said he warns many well-meaning pen pal volunteers against giving their addresses to prisoners.

A recent episode of the comedy television show “Golden Girls” dealt with a surprise visit from a prison pen pal with whom one of the women characters had carried on a torrid correspondence, figuring that he was safely guarded. Such episodes can occur in real life and are far from funny, authorities say.

Kennedy said that some prisoners “prey on well-meaning volunteers to do a number of things--to get them money, to do special favors, make contacts in the community for them, send in special items for them. Sometimes they intimidate the volunteer. ‘If you don’t do what I ask you, I’ll do this or that, hurt your family.’ It’s rare, but it happens.”

Kennedy said he trains pen pals to communicate clearly that they want nothing more than a friendly relationship by mail and not to respond to sexual propositions.

The most vulnerable are gullible people who think they understand an inmate’s mentality, he said. “I’m real scared for people like that,” he said.

The Advocate accepts personal ads from prisoners but also prints periodic warnings against bogus ads and scams.

On the other hand, some prisoners complain about pen pals writing them, then cutting off contact abruptly, said Mike Riegle, office manager for the Gay Community News, an 8,000-circulation publication that goes to 600 prisoners and carries a Prisoners Seeking Friends column.

Despite negative experiences, he encourages prison correspondence. “Any kind of contact they can maintain to make them feel like a human being is crucial,” said Riegle.

In some cases, authorities have transferred scammers to other prisons in an attempt to break up gangs, but attempts to stop scams have had spotty results.

At Parchman, prison officials agreed to take away conjugal visits of scammers and place them in a special lockup, Hesse said. “The money order problem went down to zero.” But inmates petitioned a federal court in Jackson, Miss., claiming that they were receiving punishment without being charged with a crime.

When officials could not prove their claims, they were forced to release them and the problem “skyrocketed,” Hesse said.

Viator said the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office have also investigated the scams, but no charges have resulted.

In an attempt to crush the scams, Angola last year initiated a so-called Scam Tier--a special row for inmates convicted by an in-house review board of scamming. On the row, the only communications they are allowed are monitored by prison officials.

Nearly all the 20 inmates on Scam Tier have joined a class-action suit, now pending before a federal judge, claiming that the privacy of their attorney-client relationships has been violated.

Though a lower court magistrate has already ruled in favor of the inmates, Viator said she is not fighting a losing battle.

“If we lose, I’ll take it to the court of appeals. Even though the right to attorney-client privilege is important, other things can outweigh it.”

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