STRANGER THAN FICTION:
Odd Details From Operation Cable Trap
Timing
is everything. One criminal made more than $1 million a year building
cable
descramblers
in his basement. The day our agents
showed up at his house with a search warrant, he and his pregnant
wife were on their way to the hospital to deliver a baby. The agents
seized
one of the criminal's cars, but let him keep the other for a
week so he could drive back and forth to the hospital.
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Crime
doesn’t pay.
One cable crook placed an ad in an electronics
magazine (see below) selling surveillance
videos and transcripts of wiretaps from the case—information
his lawyers had gathered before his trial was
to begin. His discounted asking price? $199.95. "See:
The successful prosecution develop from start
to finish!," the
ad read. Oddly enough, the prosecution
was so successful that
the
crook himself pled guilty and
landed in jail!
Caught
on film. Years earlier, this same criminal took an unusual
tack to get his suppliers in China to provide more cable boxes. He sent
them a photo of himself and two employees at his company in California.
They were holding cable boxes and frowning. Their message: "We
desperately need more cable boxes! Send them now!"
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“I need them like blood.” A few days before Smith
was arrested by our undercover agents, he told the agents over the phone
how desperate he was for the cable boxes, saying, "I need
them like blood."
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Lights … camera
... crime! Once,
thieves came up with a bold plan to get 3,500 more
cable boxes—steal them from
a Los Angeles Police Department evidence locker. The
locker was located in an old jail
site that was often rented out to movie companies.
The thieves, who were in cahoots with a crooked security
guard at the site,
drove up to the facility
in an empty truck under the guise that they were
there to film a music video. Instead, they cleaned
out the locker and drove
off.
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Even
the crooks got conned. The corrupt lawyer (who later shot himself
in the
neck) guaranteed
several defendants in the case that they
wouldn't go to jail if they paid him tens of thousands of dollars.
One criminal landed in the slammer, got mad, and spilled the beans
on the lawyer's
actions to our agents.
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