Paul Michaels walked up to the Wilton Manors townhouse of his 68-year-old buddy Larry Ellison, pulled a key from his pocket, turned the lock, and walked in. Amid broken dishes in the small kitchen, he found his genial, gray-haired friend dead on the floor, his face blue and his neck streaked with obscene red strangulation marks.
Kyle Alcott/Newscom
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About a week later, on March 16, 2009, Broward Sheriff's Office deputies charged 27-year-old drifter Gabriel Nock with the murder. Hours before Ellison's death, witnesses had seen the pair leaving the beach together, and other evidence seemed to seal the deal. Cops found Nock by tracing his cell phone.
But now the murder charges are at risk.
The reason: Officers didn't get a warrant to track the phone. And in a similar case last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled authorities were wrong to track a Washington, D.C. suspect via GPS without a judge's permission. That ruling has put in doubt many arrests like that of Nock. Indeed, Florida is a national mecca for this sort of tracking. Not only are South Florida police forces among the national leaders in using this technology, but also a recent WikiLeaks data dump turned up that a company in Melbourne, Florida, is one of the largest U.S. producers of the tracking technology.
"The case should be over in months, not years," Michaels says. "These challenges just delay justice. It's frustrating."
Authorities often use satellite-based GPS devices pinned to a bumper or under a hood to track a suspect within inches. They rarely ask judges for search warrants because the devices are attached in public places and they don't need to enter cars or suspects' personal space.
That practice has been challenged by civil rights lawyers several times in the past decade, most prominently in the case of Antoine Jones, a Washington, D.C. club owner suspected of cocaine trafficking whom local cops had tracked for more than a month to build a case.
Jones was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to life in prison. He later challenged his conviction — arguing that probable cause is needed to follow suspects remotely — and this past January 23, the Supreme Court tossed his conviction by a unanimous vote, declaring that "the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle... [is] a 'search.'"
Though the U.S. v. Jones decision didn't explicitly say cops need warrants for GPS tracking, most agencies now urge their officers to seek a judge's approval before planting the devices.
A key question remains unanswered: What about cell phones? They require a fundamentally different kind of tracking technology that police rarely discuss, in part because they fear giving criminals an edge. "We don't want [suspects] to know the who, how, and what so they don't have the upper hand on us," Miami-Dade Police Department spokesman Det. Alvaro Zabaleta says. In court, cops often evoke the Fifth Amendment in declining to talk about the issue.
But it's clear MDPD tracks suspects through their phones almost as frequently as any department in the nation. A recent report by the Wall Street Journal shows that Miami-Dade cops tracked 320 phones in the past three years, which tied the department for number two with Phoenix among the 20 major forces the paper investigated. (Los Angeles is number one. BSO did not respond to New Times' request for similar numbers.)
How exactly can Miami-Dade cops find your phone? They won't say, but WikiLeaks blew open the secret technology in a little-read report six weeks ago. Documents show a Melbourne-based company called the Harris Corp. sells tracking equipment to forces worldwide. Between 2006 and 2008, the MDPD paid at least $300,000 for two machines called the StingRay and the KingFish. The expense was discreetly hidden in the Law Enforcement Trust Fund — a kitty of cash mostly seized from criminal operations that has little oversight.
Zabaleta declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of WikiLeaks' documents.
Harris, the largest private employer in Brevard County, has nearly 6,500 employees and a boatload of federal contracts, mostly for space-based technology used in shuttle flights out of nearby Cape Canaveral. A Harris spokeswoman declined to comment about the company's lesser-known cell-spying products.
Privacy advocates say that such machines — which intercept cell signals and then use towers to find the phone's location — are ripe for abuse without court oversight. In 2008, for instance, Minnesota police used similar equipment to track and arrest eight protesters at the Republican National Convention.
"It's still not clear where the law draws the line involving tracking cell phones and other mobile devices," says Alan Butler, a fellow at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. "But the majority of the Supreme Court clearly has strong views about the privacy concerns that come with this kind of tracking."
In the meantime, defense attorneys in Miami and Broward are already scrambling to use U.S. v. Jones to their advantage. One of them is Dohn Williams, a public defender in Fort Lauderdale who represents several accused murderers apprehended using cell-phone technology, including Gabriel Nock, the accused killer of Wilton Manors' Larry Ellison.
According to friends and public records, Ellison had lived in Wilton Manors since the late '90s and loved the tight-knit, small-town atmosphere of the gay community there. Michaels, a 53-year-old hotel employee, met Ellison, who sported a dapper gray mustache, shortly after he arrived. The pair liked going to dinner at Tropics, a local gay piano bar and buffet joint.
