“All of a sudden, smuggling contraband became very lucrative for folks smuggling it from the outside, and also for prisoners and prison gangs to distribute drugs and contraband inside.” “Frankly, prisoners for the longest time were inward looking,” says Stirling. Internet-connected cell phones and electronic money transfers through Green Dot prepaid cards, or mobile payment services like Cash App-often with an advance cut to outside conspirators who receive the balance on delivery–make them much easier to coordinate. It’s people running jobs on the inside and the outside. It’s not children who are committing these heists, of course. This is sort of a new threat vector for the same issues that people have had … Only now you’ve got a $1,500 drone that a 10-year-old can pull out of the box and fly.” “We built fences, we built moats, we put guards around the outside. “Since the time of castles and moats we’ve had to deal with two-dimensional perimeter protection,” says Mary-Lou Smulders, chief marketing officer at the counterdrone company Dedrone. Prisons, generally speaking, weren’t designed to defend against such threats. It just shows how interconnected, though ideologically opposed, a lot of these gangs are, acting in concert to further the distribution of methamphetamines.” “I mean, you’re talking Bloods, Gangster Disciples, which are African American gangs, Ghostface Gangsters, and the Sinaloa Cartel, which is, obviously, an international Mexican cartel. “What’s interesting about the gang affiliation is just the breadth of them,” says Smith, who represented one of the midlevel conspirators, a man named Oronde Pender, in the case. Drones delivered the cell phones, but the meth never entered the prison: It was being sold outside, the indictment charges, by an unlikely confederation of gangs and drug cartels. Daniel Roger Alo, who goes by the street aliases “Marco Polo,” “Boss Man,” “Lo,” and “Uh No,” allegedly led a drug ring that smuggled cell phones into a Georgia prison and used them, along with PayPal accounts, Green Dot prepaid cards, and Western Union money transfers, to coordinate methamphetamine distribution across Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. And in one of the more astounding examples, UK law enforcement prosecuted a drone gang for a two-year plot coordinated across at least five prisons and involving 49 illegal drone flights and contraband worth up to $1.34 million-a plot that only came to light because field cameras set up to record wildlife tipped off police, the BBC reported.Īrguably, one of the biggest threats posed by drones is the cell phones they’re delivering, devices that can be worth several thousand dollars inside prisons, where they allow inmates to maintain vast criminal enterprises on the internet, says Cain Smith, a city attorney for Statesboro, Georgia, who represented Nicolas Lo in the case.Ī 2016 grand jury indictment in the Southern District of Georgia suggests just how elaborate these schemes can be. They’ve sparked prison riots, crash landed on an elementary school roof, and supplied weapons like ceramic knives, scissors, and guns (perhaps even to the Italian Mafia) that put inmates and correctional officers at heightened risk.įrance’s justice minister speculates they were used before the helicopter escape of murder convict Redoine Faid to run reconnaissance on the grounds of Reau Prison, in the south of Paris. They’ve dropped wire cutters used in bold prison escapes involving body doubles and leading to manhunts. They’re brazenly dangling contraband from fishing lines in front of smashed prison windows or crashing into recreational areas, sometimes midday. They were sentenced to 12 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to their roles in the scheme.ĭrones are dropping drugs and cell phones in prison yards. Later identified as Nicolas Lo and Cheikh Hassane Toure, the men, who had fled to the woods, were taken into custody, and later indicted in the US District Court on grand jury charges for a plot to smuggle contraband into the prison. One of the deputies approached the vehicle to question the driver, who told him he was with two other men. But when they switched off the car lights, they caught the attention of deputies from the Telfair County Sheriff’s office stationed nearby. Their plan, plotted out for over a month, was simple: To fly the drone over the prison’s walls, where it would drop the payload and soar off, undetected, into the night. Inside a duffel bag, the men had a 1.9-pound Storm Drone 4, a Radio Link UAS controller, a Spektrum video monitor with DVR headset, 75 grams of loose tobacco, four rounds of loose ammunition, and 14 cell phones. On August 26, 2019, at 1:30 am in rural Georgia, two men stopped a car 100 yards away from Telfair State Prison, a closed-custody facility that backs into a forest of cypresses and oaks.
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