Inmates Do More Than Phone Home

Anne Marie Reed prided herself on being an efficient communicator--skills she put to use for Mexican Mafia leaders behind bars at the Los Angeles County Jail.

Working out of her home in a quiet La Mirada neighborhood, the 22-year-old single mother helped gang members orchestrate stabbings, beatings and drug smuggling from the lockup, authorities say. She relayed messages by phone between inmates and the streets--all under the noses of jail officials.

“Everybody in L.A. County Jail calls me,” Reed once boasted to an inmate during a phone conversation. “You know the Big Homie that runs everything? He calls me.”

Authorities eventually caught on to the activities of Reed, “Big Homie” (a gang member named Luis Maciel) and others. They wiretapped the calls, and Reed was sentenced in February to five life terms in what is considered one of the biggest operations of its kind.

The Reed case underscores a problem facing the nation’s jails and prisons, where easy access to phone lines allows some inmates to continue their criminal enterprises.

“This is happening every day in the jails,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary F. Hearnsberger, who prosecuted Reed. “They can use the phone to threaten witnesses, to arrange alibis, they can get people to destroy evidence. . . . They can arrange murder.”

Regular access to a phone is one of the most basic rights behind bars--one enjoyed by practically all inmates, even those on death row and in segregated confinement.

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calls, state and federal prisons monitor only a small percentage of them. (Guards, however, do open all mail sent to prisoners). Many municipal lockups, such as the Orange County Jail and Los Angeles County Jail, do not monitor inmates’ calls at all.

Preventing crimes by restricting phone access might seem like a simple fix. But federal courts have long held that inmates have a 1st Amendment right to use telephones--to communicate with attorneys and with others in the outside world. Moreover, many prison officials fear that limiting phone privileges would increase tensions and unrest.

Officials said the new wave of specialty features offered by phone companies--such as call waiting, three-way calling and call forwarding--make it easier than ever for prisoners to keep their schemes going from behind bars. Indeed, a recent study of federal prisons found the problem to be widespread.

But perhaps no case documents jail telephone abuse as well as that of Reed, the woman whom authorities described as a switchboard operator for the Mexican Mafia.

Officials Suspect Melees Were Incited

The investigation that led police to Reed began in late 1995 after a rash of riots at Los Angeles County’s Pitchess Detention Center. Officials suspected that Mexican Mafia members were inciting the melees to disguise targeted stabbings of their rivals inside the jails.

The probe quickly focused on 28-year-old Maciel, a reputed Mexican Mafia chief awaiting trial for ordering the murder of five members of an El Monte family. Maciel, known as “Big Homie,” was being held at the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail in a ward that houses the county’s most dangerous inmates.

Maciel and the other residents of the “high power” ward spent most of their day inside cramped cells connected by a long white hallway set far away from the rest of the inmate population. But at the end of the hall stood their link to the outside world: a pay phone.

For 30 minutes a day, Maciel dialed away during what inmates refer to as their “freeway time.”

Believing that the crimes were being orchestrated out of the “high power” ward, detectives obtained a court order to wiretap the pay phone.

The recordings stunned investigators--even those expecting to uncover criminal activity. The tapes allegedly showed Maciel and other inmates conspiring to smuggle drugs, ordering the stabbings and beatings of other inmates and plotting with gang members on the outside to destroy evidence and intimidate witnesses.

Maciel’s orders were conveyed via a network of telephones inside and outside the jail. The lines were connected using features such as call forwarding, call waiting and conference calling.

At the center of this web was Reed.

She was recruited into the role gradually, court papers show. She began accepting collect calls from her jailed boyfriend and relaying simple messages to his gang associates on the streets.

However, it quickly evolved into a full-time job, with Reed eventually handling dozens of calls a day.

With the efficiency of a corporate secretary, she started logs of booking numbers and hit lists. She juggled multiple calls at the same time.

Mexican Mafia members called Reed daily to receive the latest marching orders, including a list of those marked for beatings and stabbings. The orders were blunt.

Talking to one inmate, Reed said: “Those ones you put in the . . . hospital. Six feet under if you can.”

On the audiotapes, she can sometimes be heard handling gang business while also cooing her young daughter to sleep.

“No, you gotta sit up girl, sit up,” she tells her 3-year-old in the midst of rattling off the day’s hit list to an inmate named Danny. “Hee-hee-hee-hee, li’l brat. . . . Oh, she’ll call you a brat back too.”

“She has a smart mouth, huh?” the inmate asks.

To avoid runaway phone bills from collect calls, Reed set up “burn-up phones.”

An accomplice would open a telephone account at an address, usually a vacant house, apartment or business, using a fake or stolen identity. Using call forwarding, the telephone was programmed to automatically transfer all incoming calls to Reed’s home number. Reed accepted the collect calls, but the billing went to the burn-up phone. By the time the telephone company disconnected the line for lack of payment, the operation had moved to another location, forwarding calls to Reed.

Her La Mirada home became a virtual command and control center.

“Everybody . . . calls me,” Reed told an uninitiated inmate.

“Why?”

“To find out all information,” she said. “Who’s got the light [on the hit list], who doesn’t, they got any messages to get to the Big Homie. . . . I thought you knew that already.”

One inmate didn’t, and it almost cost him his life.

The man, a small-time thief and drug addict, began boasting to his cellmates at Pitchess that he was a made member of the Mexican Mafia. Such a status qualifies one to get “taxes” on drug transactions and other benefits, authorities said.

Reed informed Maciel that the inmate was claiming to be a Mexican Mafia leader and that he wanted the tobacco and money such high-ranking gang members are supposed to receive.

After getting Reed’s message, Maciel made his own rounds of calls to verify the stranger’s status, including calls to another reputed Mexican Mafia chief on the streets.

“He’s a nobody,” one of Maciel’s associates eventually told Reed.

She dispensed the orders.

“He needs to be blasted severely,” she told Mexican Mafia lieutenants at Pitchess. The same day, the offender was beaten and stabbed 12 times, barely escaping with his life.

At times, Reed expressed remorse about her role in the violence.

“Oh, I don’t want to hear no more details,” she said at one point on the audiotapes, after hearing that another inmate was stabbed in the neck. “No, because then you are gonna make me feel guilty. . . . Did you know every night before I go to bed I pray to God, asking him to forgive my sins?”

Authorities closed the wiretaps in November 1996, but it took three years to sift through the thousands of pages of transcripts and build a case against Reed.

“We were amazed how widespread it was,” said Hearnsberger, a 19-year veteran prosecutor.

Reed was arrested early last year and charged with five counts of conspiracy to commit murder for her role in four jail stabbings and another planned attack that wasn’t carried out. She pleaded no contest in November and received five life sentences. She declined to comment, as did her attorney.

Because Maciel had already received a death sentence after being convicted of multiple murders, authorities decided not to charge him.

Many Crimes Likely Go Undetected

For every operation like the Reed case that authorities discover, some officials believe, many others go undetected.

A 1999 study by the U.S. inspector general’s office concluded that federal prisoners used their phone privileges to commit scores of serious crimes, including murder for hire, credit card fraud and drug smuggling. Of the roughly 200,000 calls made daily from federal prison, the study found that guards listened to only about 5,000 of them.

“Inmates are having a field day committing crimes from behind bars,” said former U.S. Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich, who oversaw the federal study.

Prison officials do not keep record of inmate crimes committed using phones. But prosecutors and investigators whose jurisdictions include large prisons and jails estimate that hundreds of such crimes occur annually in California alone.

“It is not just the Mexican Mafia,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Richard Valdemar, a veteran investigator who specializes in prison gang activities.

Officials believe that the most common criminal enterprise involves drugs.

In Orange County, for example, a federal felon named Cruz Iniguez will be sentenced in May after being convicted of using jail phones to operate a Santa Ana drug house. Making daily calls to his brother on the outside, Iniguez was able to deal more than 13 kilos of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine without raising the suspicion of the guards.

“He ran the whole drug organization from jail,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Linda Aouate, whose office eventually prosecuted Iniguez in connection with the drug scheme.

One of the most involved jail phone scams involved a group of Los Angeles inmates who scanned newspaper classifieds in search of lost pet notices. They called the unsuspecting victims with phony information.

Eager to retrieve the beloved animal, the victims accepted the collect calls and then agreed to be billed for a third-party long distance call under the mistaken notion that it would help find the pet. The inmate would then run up a large telephone bill at the victim’s expense.

Reports of the scam prompted the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1999 to pass an ordinance requiring all calls from jail pay phones to include a message warning that the call was coming from an inmate.

Phones are used for more than just financial gain.

Notorious serial killer Charles Ng nearly unraveled his marathon murder trial by using an Orange County Jail pay phone to call a juror. “This is Charles. . . . I just wanted to tell you you are very nice,” he allegedly told her.

The juror immediately reported the call to the judge, who eventually decided that the case could go forward. Deputies later found the juror’s phone number in Ng’s jail cell.

Jail officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties said they have considered installing systems that would monitor calls, but are wary of the expense of buying the equipment and paying employees to listen to all the calls. Inmates in the Los Angeles County jails make close to 12 million calls a year.

“The bottom line is there are way too many hours of phone calls to monitor routinely,” added California Department of Corrections spokeswoman Margot Bach, whose system handles about 150,000 prisoners at any one time. “If it is a high-profile case like the Menendez brothers or Heidi Fleiss, they would be monitored. Otherwise, if it is Joe Blow inmate, they would not be routinely monitored unless we suspect some criminal activity.”

Moreover, the officials added, the telephone is one of the few privileges that incarcerated men and women have. Restricting phone use could lower inmates’ morale and maybe cause more problems inside the jails.

“We are continually taking away the rights of people who are incarcerated, and they didn’t have a lot of rights to begin with,” said Natman Schaye, chairman of an Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers committee. “To cut them away further . . . from their families, it is going to lead to a minimal gain in crime fighting and a major loss in rehabilitation.”

But some believe that current phone policy needs to be reevaluated in the wake of networks such as Reed’s.

“The phone really should be treated differently,” said Hearnsberger, the Los Angeles prosecutor. “It is a weapon.”

Reed and her inmate callers marveled at how easy it was to carry out their dealings.

“They are dumb,” one inmate told her during a recorded call, referring to the jailers and the phone company. “You know, it takes them time to figure [it] out.”

But for Reed, outsmarting authorities was only part of the equation. She was also proud of running an efficient operation.

At one point, she discussed with one inmate the possibility of another woman taking over the assignment.

“But if they find another [operator], she has to be home all day, huh?” the inmate asked.

“No, it has nothing to do with being home all day,” Reed said. “It has to with being able to take care of business.”