How do gang bosses run things from prison?

Factual Questions
1

I read about this all the time, but it seems like the contacts to the outside are few and far between. Even if you can give anything at all to your lawyer uncensored, what lawyer is going to come often enough to be a liaison?
Seems like a boss would lose control of the gang in about a week, as they are always fighting for control when not locked up.

2

What, have you never read Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

3

well cell phones usually. They are of course not allowed, but I guess that kind of defines whether you are a crime boss or not. If you can obtain a cell phone, you must be powerful enough to be a boss, if not, you’re not.

The US Bureau of Prisons has an active research program underway to develop detection and recording equipment. One of their major contractors usually does work for the likes of the CIA (all this is from a National Public Radio story-accuracy of the source is fair to good. Better than most news sources). The obvious solution-commercial jammers-doesn’t work well because a) the guards like their cell phones, and b) they tend to jam the guard radios and equipment. They had a nice story about a prison warden in Texas who got an irate phone call from the wife of an inmate who called the warden to complain that her husband didn’t have enough bars on his cell :slight_smile: [reception on his cell phone of course].

4

The last time I was in Brazil, folks were talking about an unsettling trend going on there: cell phone extortion.

Many Brazilians use prepaid cell phones, charging them up from time to time using cards that can be bought in any convenience store.

Folks are saying that ne’er-do-wells in prison are calling total strangers in their homes, threatening to send a bunch of nasty dudes to their house to do unspeakable horrors unless the poor housewife scurries down to the corner market, buys a bunch of cell phone cards, and then reads off the secret numbers to the prisoner (they are scratch-off, like lottery tickets). That’s how they keep their minutes topped off.

I can only assume that these guys are mere pawns in the prison machinery, carrying out the bidding of the drug kingpin, who couldn’t be bothered to extort folks himself.