How Convicts Dial M for Murder

July 19, 2009— -- Last week 24-year-old Patrick Byers was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the 2007 murder of a single father named Carl Lackl, who was supposed to testify against Byers at a murder trial.

What is more disturbing is that Byers called in the hit from behind bars, using a contraband cell phone. The Byers case is one of dozens Maryland authorities are dealing with in which prison inmates smuggle in cell phones and use them to keep their criminal syndicates up and running. The crimes range from credit card fraud, to drug deals, to murder.

"We think that when people go to prison, if they were involved in gangs on the streets, that stops," says Gary Maynard, the head of corrections for the state of Maryland. "But it doesn't if you have cell phones."

Maynard is one of several state leaders pushing for federal legislation that would permit jamming technology that could block cell phone signals inside prisons. It's a matter of life and death, he says. "Just one call that we weren't aware of could result in somebody getting killed."

Cell phones are smuggled into prisons the same way other contraband gets in -- either with the help of a corruptable prison guard or someone on the outside. Sometimes the outside contact simply throws the phone over the prison wall in a lower security prison or more elaborate schemes that involve planting a phone at a location where a particular inmate is expected to be out in the community on a work detail team. The inmate can pick up the phone and smuggle back in with him into prison. From there it's up to prison officials to track them down using different techniques.

Maryland was the first state in the country to train its own cell phone-sniffing dogs. "Everything, including electronics, has a scent signature," says Major Peter Anderson, the head of Maryland's K-9 unit. The dogs are used in random sweeps through the prison to check for contraband phones that could be hidden in drains or cut into bed mattresses. Inmates are also known to hide cell phones in body orfices. At Maryland's medium-security Jessup prison, any inmate with contact to the outside world is supposed to be scanned using a new high-tech metal detector.