46 prison guards face drug charges

ATLANTA — Investigators arrested 46 current and former Georgia correctional officers, as well as two civilians and one inmate, Thursday in the latest phase of an undercover federal investigation targeting contraband and criminal activity in the state’s prisons.

Dozens of prison guards had agreed to protect drug-smuggling operations for a high-level trafficker, believing their status as correctional officers would protect them from a vehicle search if they were stopped by police, authorities said Thursday. In exchange, the guards received thousands of dollars in bribes.

But there was no big drug trafficker, and the drugs weren’t real; it was all part of the FBI’s sting operation.

Since September, about 130 people — including prison employees, inmates, former inmates and others accused of helping them — have been indicted in the effort called Operation Ghost Guard.

The investigation began when the FBI traced a scam — in which people around the country received phone calls saying they had missed jury duty and that they could either pay a fine or be arrested — to Georgia prison inmates using contraband cellphones. That led them to look at how the phones were getting in, and they zeroed in on guards who were smuggling in phones and other contraband in exchange for bribes, said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dan Odom.

It snowballed from there. Corrupt guards saw an opportunity to get more money, and the scheme was hatched to protect the purported drug trafficker, who was supposedly moving kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine from one part of the state to another, Odom said.

The officers charged worked at nine different prisons.