David Paul Hammer was a prisoner at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester a few years ago when he bragged to a reporter for an alternative magazine that he had received at least $176,000 from 1,500 to 2,000 people he had duped into sending him money.
"The trick is making them fall in love with you through letters and on the phone," Hammer told the Los Angeles-based magazine, the Advocate. "And I mean people who are lonely are so willing and vulnerable because they're reaching out and they're wanting something."
Across the country, prisoners' ploys to acquire and psychologically manipulate pen pals--frequently homosexual men--have resulted in the loss of millions of dollars and countless broken dreams over the past 15 years, authorities say.
But now, the stakes have risen as pen pal scams have figured in the murders of four gay men, three in Mississippi and one in New York, who had been writing to the murder suspects when they were behind bars.
On Sunday in San Clemente, former Indiana inmate Keith Eugene Goodman and two associates were arrested in separate SWAT team raids on suspicion of stalking Goodman's prison pen pals and killing them after committing robberies.
Goodman, 30, walked out of state prison with thousands of dollars from pen pals whom he had apparently persuaded to send money, said New York State Police investigator Richard J. Kadien.
One of Goodman's suspected victims, Harold Williams, 60, found shot to death Dec. 17 in his Upstate New York home, had apparently paid a $500 phone bill accumulated answering collect calls from Goodman. He had also sent Goodman a total of $300 while they wrote each other.
For long-term, maximum security inmates with time on their hands and nothing to lose, "scamming" outsiders is probably the most popular and lucrative of all prison "businesses," including the sale of illegal drugs, said Annette Viator, chief legal counsel for the Louisiana Department of Corrections.
Investigators have conservatively estimated that 10% of the 5,500 inmates at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, with or without outside contacts, have taken in more than $1 million in a recent three-year period.
Homosexuals, sometimes vulnerable to blackmail and unlikely to file complaints, are the primary target of such scams, she said, followed by religious people who want to help the less fortunate, and lonely subscribers to singles magazines carrying personal ads.
