Caller ID Is Hanging Up Cheats, Crooks, Cops Alike

A scientist named Terry Spontarelli met a girl on America Online, set a time for a tryst in a Tulsa, Okla., motel, then engaged in three hours of sex acts that violated eight kinds of laws.

She was 13, he was 35, and she had skipped school by pretending to be sick. Sometime during her encounter with the PhD, who’d brought along his camcorder, she made a preemptive phone call to her mother at work. She pretended she was still at home, ready for a nap.

Like a lot of people who pick up a phone these days, the girl underestimated the endlessly mutating power of the technology she was using. She didn’t know that her mother’s company, a collection agency, had installed caller ID, and that police would soon be banging on a door at the Microtel Inn.

Spontarelli, an explosives analyst at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with a wife and a daughter back in New Mexico, pleaded guilty to various state and federal crimes against having sex with a minor. He was sentenced in June to 10 years in a federal penitentiary and another 10 in Oklahoma state prison. “If the mom hadn’t had caller ID at her work, we wouldn’t have known where this girl was meeting this adult, this child molester,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Susan Morgan in Tulsa.

The caller ID box--and the even more widely available keystroke services that copy what it does--is only one part of a brutally competitive communications industry that is moving faster and marketing harder than lawmakers, lawmen, lobbyists and civil libertarians can control.

As it has exploded across the country, caller ID is having an almost daily effect on police work, in some cases putting sleuthing powers once held by police in the hands of the victims, sometimes even entangling cops when they go carelessly undercover.

The fluid ease of caller ID has, likewise, opened up a new set of moral debates in some communities about hotlines--for suicide, rape, domestic abuse, drug and other crimes--that depend on the promise of anonymity.

“How many people think about that when they call somebody--that the person on the other end instantly has their phone number and possibly their name and address?” said Peter Crabb, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist who studies the effect of technology on human behavior.

Here, from the last month alone, is a sampling of true crime stories from the world of caller ID:

* A New Jersey high school teacher who claimed she took a phone call from somebody who threatened to blow up the school was arrested after caller ID showed there was no such call. Schools nationwide have scrambled to install caller ID because of the rash of copycat threats after the April massacre at a Colorado high school.

* A 15-year-old boy with a long juvenile record of crime told his father he was spending the night at his older brother’s house. Caller ID indicated otherwise, and the man tracked his son to a hotel in downtown Cleveland, where the boy had spent the night having sex with his state-assigned social worker. Suzanne Smithers, a 47-year-old married mother of three, was sentenced to two years in prison for corrupting a minor.

* A federal judge in New Mexico ordered the Hobbs City Police Department to stop investigating whether a civil rights activist had harassed the police chief, Tony Knott, who cited calls to his home that had come from the activist’s phone. The judge said police had continued to investigate Carl Mackey, who happened to be involved in a class action discrimination lawsuit against the department, even after it was clear Mackey’s apartment-hunting sons called the chief, who had an ad in the classifieds for a place, along with his number.

* In Galveston, Texas, Mark Dixon went on trial for helping his girlfriend kill her husband. Barbara Holder was convicted of capital murder in March. Police say the pair conspired to make the nearly 90-stroke stabbing of Curtis Holder, 47, look like a robbery, but their story unraveled three days later when Holder told a neighbor watching one of her children that she was calling from the police station, when caller ID showed she was really at a local motel.

* An Ohio man was sentenced to six months in jail for repeatedly phoning in sick to his job as a Hamilton County janitor. Michael Leedy, 45, took a month of paid sick leave last year, which the county’s caller ID system indicated had been regularly called in from his other job across town.

* In California, a pair of purported neo-Nazi skinheads, 19-year-old James Ronald Romo and a juvenile, were arrested in connection with the abduction, robbery and savage beating of an Orange County man who believed he was targeted because he was gay. The suspects had returned a call that came in on the beeper that had been stolen from the victim. The caller’s ID log led police to the motel where the suspects were staying.

Criminals Usually on the Cutting Edge

The signs that many people are oblivious to a world in transition are legion. “We got a window of a year or two until everyone figures it out,” said Sgt. Mike Tully, a detective in Colonie, N.Y., outside Albany.

Last month, Colonie police arrested four people in the beating and kidnapping of a 17-year-old acquaintance they had suspected of stealing a suspect’s pit bull puppy. Tully said kidnappers had made numerous ransom demands from the apartment where the youth was being held to the home of his parents, who had caller ID.

When it comes to somewhat more organized crime, the private sector has often been a lap or two ahead of police agencies. Though many are reluctant to talk about it, different police agencies have devised different ways of outfoxing the increasing cleverness of caller IDs.

“We have drug cases we work all the time, and we have to be careful with who we call,” said Mickey Hawkins, head of the FBI office in Tulsa. “We use a device that gives a different number.”

Even false numbers can be figured out by state-of-the-art caller ID systems if the address it digs up is the local precinct house. While budget-bound police departments clamor for upgrades, or are even unaware that they need them, some law officers insist that drug rings snap up the latest in telephony being offered by the welter of firms competing to destroy each other with nifty new products.

“That’s the flip side of it,” said Lt. Steve Heider, a Colonie detective. “Especially in drug enforcement, they [the villains] get more technical than we do years ahead of time.”

Though many Americans may not realize it, virtually every call to a 911 system instantly identifies the caller’s location. Now, many telephone users have the same power. Even people who don’t own caller ID in most places can punch the “star” button and two digits to purchase the number of the heavy breather who just hung up, or even initiate a trace that alerts police. Most users can dial “star” 67 to avoid being identified by caller ID, but they are increasingly finding systems set up to refuse those calls, and in some instances, even trace them. All these services cost money, and it’s one of the most lucrative parts of the business.

About 15% of telephone users have the box, and virtually all users have the ability to block or trace calls. Hoping to make caller ID, which is used by 16% of Pacific Bell customers, as ubiquitous as call waiting, used by 50%, phone companies have just begun offering a combo package that lets people see the name of whom they want to keep waiting.

There are movements afoot in some states to give documented victims of stalking or domestic abuse the ability to create false caller identities. Several states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee, recently passed laws prohibiting telemarketers from blocking their IDs, and most others are considering it. Unlisted numbers supposedly are protected from caller ID, though Kansas state lawmakers earlier this year held hearings on why some supposedly unlisted numbers, including a legislator’s, showed up on caller ID boxes.

Even the old standby, the phone booth, is no longer a secure place to make a clandestine call.

In a study of the effect of caller ID, U.S. Customs surveillance expert David P. Williams described a case in which an undercover investigator made a call from a phone booth to a suspect, who shortly afterward drove by the phone booth. He had caller ID and was able to pinpoint the number’s location through search engines on the Internet that provide the location and number of a city’s pay phones.

Even cops who use phone cards or credit cards should be wary, because such cards increasingly carry identifying information. One carrier’s caller ID service actually flashed “U.S. Government” when a federal credit card was used to book a call.

Williams recommended that police departments consider numerous cloaking devices, particularly those that divert calls made to one number to yet another.

Though the most lame-brained lawbreakers remain clueless, the savvier ones know not to answer a call from an anonymous caller, or even an unrecognized number. While law enforcement agencies grumbled when caller ID became available to the general public, Williams said it can be more a benefit than a hindrance--though he said most agencies haven’t realized it.

“There are so many different phone companies out there, and they each operate a little different,” he said. “Telephone technology is moving so fast that it’s scary. In Pennsylvania alone, there are hundreds of companies.”

Battle Over Privacy Continues

Caller ID is only part of a broad national debate on the protection of privacy in the Information Age. Law enforcement agencies such as the FBI say they need broader powers to tap wireless transmissions and the fiber-optic cable lines that soon will be bearing the bulk of communication traffic, while civil libertarians say both private and public sectors already have amassed too much power to poke into people’s lives.

That was largely why California was the last state to allow caller ID, in 1996, and its growth since has been as inexorable as ivy’s. Anonymous hotlines of every degree are struggling to see if caller ID will separate the cranks from the crucial cases and decide which tipster deserves the reward or whether it will simply scare off people who will settle for nothing less than absolute anonymity before reporting a rape, spouse assault or other crime.

Crime Stoppers, the nationwide network of anonymous hotlines run by local police and private donations, has resisted the lure of caller ID. Even the simple functions that would allow the hotlines to recall the number just dialed are blocked, said Lt. Dave Shock, the police coordinator for the South Bend, Ind., area Crime Stoppers.

“We’ve had homicides that go unsolved and the investigator wants to speak to [the tipster] and we can’t get back to them,” he said. “But we can’t sacrifice the anonymity of our clients just because we can’t get enough information. The fact that we don’t have caller ID is kind of cool.”

*

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.