Cops freeze phones in new tactic against dealers
Heroin dealing has grown into a booming business in Milwaukee, sending police in the city and beyond scrambling to disrupt the deadly trade.
But even as officers make busts and haul suspects to jail, the dealer’s key source of cash — the cellphone number where orders roll in — often is quickly back up and running, sometimes in just an hour.
Police say many dealers, knowing they could get arrested, have set up contingency plans to transfer the prized 10-digit number to a new phone, preserving its value and keeping the drugs — and cash — flowing.
In the heroin business, the cellphone number is the lifeline of the trade. Well-established numbers can generate more than $11,000 a day — potentially millions a year.
To combat the quick switch, Milwaukee law enforcement officials are trying a new tactic, dubbed a “seize and freeze” order.
Prosecutors ask a judge to allow them to freeze the phone number for
a period of time, rendering the line unable to send or receive calls or text messages. Once addicts realize the number is dead, it loses its value and dealers lose the stream of income.
The first such case in Wisconsin — possibly in the nation — was filed earlier this year and shut down a number being used by a heroin-dealing crew known as Big Money Addicts, or BMA, according to court records obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The group is one of several in Milwaukee that has turned to a new mobile model designed to quickly deliver narcotics — in the city or suburbs — and thwart police efforts to arrest them, the records show.
In July 2015, the Journal Sentinel examined how the heroin trade has evolved toward rolling drug houses, a tactic that takes advantage of the Milwaukee Police Department’s pursuit policy, which limits when officers can chase vehicles.
The quick switch of cellphone numbers is the latest twist.
It starts with prepaid cellphones and easy-to-remember numbers. The groups acquire phone numbers typically used by businesses — such as those ending in numbers like “1212” — and even put the numbers on business cards with phony company names, such as tow truck operations.
When the dealer is arrested and the phone is seized, someone else transfers the number to a new phone.
Keeping the money flowing through a particular phone helps a dealer finance a legal fight from behind bars, paying for bail money and lawyers.
Chasing individual numbers can feel hopeless to law enforcement. A warrant filed earlier this year says officers sometimes have seized up to 20 phones from a single dealer.
“The BMA relied heavily on the cellular phone as the core means of communications of their business,” says the warrant. “Due to the high profits from selling narcotics, dealers will retain these phone numbers at all costs.”
Keeping and protecting numbers have led to deadly disputes in Milwaukee.
A fight over a phone was behind the December 2014 shooting death of 13month-old Bill Thao. He was killed as he played with toys at a relative’s home, which drug dealers shot up by mistake.
Meanwhile, there has been a surge in overdose deaths in Milwaukee County, with nearly 170 confirmed cases as of July 11, according to the medical examiner’s office. There were nearly 300 such deaths last year. Officials are concerned this year could top 400.
Sprawling racketeering case
For years, law enforcement has targeted the Big Money Addicts. The key figures — Rashawn Smith, Errion GreenBrown, Kyawn Lewis and David Harris — have all been charged with racketeering along with drug dealing and other criminal counts in Milwaukee County court.
Smith, 26, and Lewis, 25, have pleaded guilty and promised to testify against Green-Brown, 25, and Harris, 23. That case is set to go to trial later this year.
The 53-page racketeering complaint and other recently filed court documents lay out how the criminal enterprise was born and how it is centered around drug phones.
According to the documents:
Each member of the group was required to contribute at least one “established” cell number to the organization. Such numbers would receive hundreds of calls and text messages a day. BMA members were making up to80 drug deals a day on the phones.
The four leaders of the outfit even worked out a shift schedule: They would work in pairs and alternate days off.
For instance, one pair would get Monday and on that day one person would make all the deals and keep all the profits. His partner would drive, maintain the car and roll marijuana joints for them to smoke while they worked.
The next day, the other pair worked. Then the first pair was back on, but their roles would be reversed, and the other dealer would reap the profits.
By alternating days and roles, the model ensured there was an incentive to support each other, since a big payday came every four days, the warrant affidavit said.
In 2015, the group got a foothold in Milwaukee’s lucrative heroin marketplace and soon was selling huge amounts of heroin.
Lewis told authorities he and Smith personally sold more than 1 million grams of heroin, charging $150 to $300 a gram. He said Green-Brown and Harris sold less, about 5,000 grams each.
Founders of the BMA group agreed to provide the “fundamentals to a successful and lucrative business. These fundamentals include customer satisfaction, accessibility, mobility, comparable heroin prices and recruitment of new customers,” an affidavit seeking the warrant said.
Fleeing police was part of the plan: Lewis said the outfit used a car-stealing crew out of Illinois to get vehicles. He said he was involved in eight to 10 high-speed chases with Milwaukee police.
Phones in ‘ready status’
Law enforcement officials often target cellphones through wiretaps and other means to track suspected drug dealers. To thwart this, dealers will frequently switch out phones.
But with lucrative street-level drug dealing phones, the opposite is true: Dealers are doing whatever they can to keep the numbers up and running.
“It was essential for the BMA to keep and maintain their cellphone number in an active and ready status,” the warrant said. “This ensured repeat orders from their customers, knowing that the heroin user has a physical addiction to satisfy multiple times a day.”
The group used U.S. Cellular, buying prepaid phones that could be activated over the phone but which did not require providing any identifying information, the warrant said.
Police found GreenBrown through one of the drug phones. They tried to arrest him in January, but he crashed a car into a police squad and fled. He was arrested a month later in Mississippi.
After Green-Brown was arrested, the drug phone number, ending in 9500, was soon back up and running for drug sales, the warrant said. Police later learned he leased the drug phone to another dealer for $2,000 but Green-Brown was monitoring the sales to the number from behind bars, it said.
The search warrant, prepared by Assistant District Attorney Laura Crivello, argued the phone number was being used for criminal acts and therefore could be “seized” at least temporarily under state law. Crivello declined to comment, noting it is an open case. Milwaukee police also declined to comment.
The warrant was granted by Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz and the phone number was “dead” until June 16 of this year.
The phones were set up through U.S. Cellular, which the dealers said was their preferred provider, because of the ease of setting up a business number under an anonymous name and the protections the company provides for porting the phone number, according to the warrant.
The warrant says the number, and others like it, are “business line numbers.” A spokeswoman for U.S. Cellular said the number frozen by law enforcement was not a business line, but rather a prepaid phone line.
The representative did not say if the number was randomly assigned or if the dealers obtained the “9500” ending by paying a premium.
The warrant did note that U.S. Cellular lawyers reviewed the request from prosecutors and approved it.
Legal concerns
Robert Bell, assistant special agent in charge at the Milwaukee office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said the agency and other law enforcement will use “any and all effective and legal approaches to disrupt and dismantle violent drug trafficking organizations and their activities.”
“Identifying and exploiting command-and control phones, as well as interrupting the availability of street level ‘distribution’ phones are a couple techniques that make selling dangerous substances more difficult,” Bell said in a statement.
Privacy advocates applauded the fact law enforcement used a formal search warrant process to freeze the suspected drug-dealing number.
They worried, though, that police may go to a cellphone company without documentation or a judge’s approval to cut off a phone number.
Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group advocating electronic privacy rights, said she was not aware of another order like the one issued in Milwaukee.
“This is the kind of legal framework that we would expect law enforcement to go through,” she said. “It is the responsibility of cellphone providers to protect their users’ information.”