What Stays in Vegas (23 page)

Tourists line up for mug shots at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

Source: Author photo.

How did it come to this?

Dispute Over $3.68 on a Restaurant Bill

One summer Saturday afternoon in 2007, Paola Roy and a friend joined a third woman for a late lunch at the House of India restaurant in Coral Gables, Florida. Roy had already eaten but wanted to keep her friend company, so she ordered a small $5.95 portion of spicy black lentils and naan bread. At the end of the meal she asked for a doggie bag. When the bill came the restaurant had charged her $9.95 for the
larger portion of lentils. She refused to pay the higher amount and left $22 in cash on the table—$3.68 short of what the owner thought she should pay. He called the police.

The women left the restaurant and headed toward their cars in a garage. As she arrived, Roy saw a police officer on a bicycle dressed in spandex shorts. He signaled that she should approach him. Her heart pounded and she froze, prompting the officer to rush up a parking ramp toward her.

“I hear you skipped out on a check,” he said.

“Well, someone lied to you,” she replied.

She held a Styrofoam container with the extra lentils in her left hand as she explained the dispute. Several police cars arrived on the scene. One officer went over to interview the restaurant owner. Eventually the officer who had arrived by bike asked, “Are you going to pay the bill in full?”

“No.”

“You are going to have to pay the $3.68 difference or I am going to arrest you.”

“It was the restaurant owner's mistake. I don't feel I owe him the money, and I am not going to pay him. There is no reason for me to pay this bill.”

He took out his handcuffs and grabbed her left wrist. Roy's friend yelled out that she would pay the difference. But Roy, angry about the way she was being treated, looked over at the officer's identification tag and read aloud his name.

“I want to see who is arresting me for three dollars and sixty-eight cents.”

“Oh yeah? That's it, I'm taking you in.”

He cuffed Roy's right hand and led her down the parking ramp, then into the backseat of a patrol car. She had never gotten in trouble with the law other than a few traffic tickets. As they drove to the station, Roy felt a moment of regret, then anger and defiance, as she replayed what had just happened to her. Police booked her and announced they would take her mug shot. She had come to the restaurant from the beach, so she had pulled back her hair and did not wear
any lipstick or jewelry. The officer told her to remove her glasses and snapped the photo. She felt grateful that she might look a bit better in the image without glasses.

Some time later, officers removed her from the cell and drove her to a jail downtown, charged with “defrauding innkeeper.” She arrived at 6:45 p.m., hours after her lunch, but the sun had yet to set. In the arrival area she saw a van of inmates arriving, many of the men unshaven and dirty, some with tattoos and holes in their clothes as though they had been fighting. She spent hours in a holding cell with other women who expressed amazement upon hearing how she came to be arrested. She was released from jail on bail at 5 a.m. the following morning. Prosecutors ended up dropping the charges soon afterward, and the matter seemed forgotten.

Starting a Mug Shot Business

The following year in Austin, Texas, Kyle Prall started a job as a financial analyst at Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the electric grid for much of the state. He had gone through a lot of trouble as a teenager and young man, but those days were behind him now. He landed the position just before the financial crisis hit, costing millions of American workers their jobs. Las Vegas casinos were hit particularly hard; thousands of workers were fired as gamblers stayed home and saved their pennies.

Despite his relative good fortune in tough times, however, Prall remained restless. He found his finance work mind-numbing and meaningless. Around that time a friend told him about a Florida newspaper that published pictures of sex offenders. “That makes a lot of sense,” he thought. “This is something I can do in my spare time.” Prall's true calling was coming into focus.

Prall decided to publish a local newspaper that would display mug shots of ordinary citizens arrested for crimes both serious and not. For that he would need lots of images, so he turned to the local police department. Prall emailed the Austin police. He did not mention why he wanted the images.

“Hello Don, my name is Kyle Prall and I would like to inquire about an open records request for booking photos and booking information for every individual arrested for an entire previous week,” he said in an email.
¹
“I realize this is a rather large request, so I thought it would be a good idea to work out a couple details to make this request as easy for you as possible and as efficient as possible for myself as well.

“I would likely need to set this up on a weekly recurring basis.”

Six days later Austin Police Department official Don Field wrote back. He offered a price tag of $1 an image—reasonable for a single image, prohibitive for a large archive of photos. Prall, after long hours researching the state's open records laws, filed a complaint. The police lowered the charge to 10 cents and then even lower, to about $90 a week for all the records he wanted. Neighboring Williamson County asked for $60 a week. He had obtained the first of what would eventually become millions of mug shots for his personal-data business.

Even as he gained access to the mug shots, Prall faced the uphill task of creating a traditional print newspaper at a disastrous time for the industry. Amid an anemic economy in 2008 and 2009, dozens of regional papers had folded. But more locals were committing crimes, giving the paper a steady supply of new faces. Initially, Prall hoped to do original reporting for the paper, which he called
Busted! In Austin
.
²
Eventually he settled on just publishing mug shots alongside descriptions of a few top crimes of the week. In May 2009, he printed two thousand copies of the first issue, and managed to get about seven hundred of them into stores. He had invested roughly $5,000 in the venture, and wondered if he was crazy to have done so.

Lured by the newspaper's subject and offbeat motto (“Getting arrested isn't funny . . . but the mug shots are”), people bought the paper—for $1 a copy. All the issues distributed to stores sold out. The next week stores took the full
Busted! In Austin
print run of two thousand copies. The new paper attracted a lot of attention. Local television featured it. Prall carefully remained out of the public eye, unmentioned in his own newspaper.

Within a year or two the paper hit a peak of about ten thousand sales of a single issue. In 2011 Prall bought the website domain
bustedinaustin.com
, the start of a migration online. In April, with the backing of new investor Ryan Russell (and after parting ways with his old partner), Prall launched another website—
bustedmugshots.com
—which posted mug shots from across the country. With the newspaper, a reader might randomly come across a friend, neighbor, or acquaintance whose mug shot appeared that week. Yet with about eight hundred thousand people living in Austin, most residents would never see the image, even if thousands read the paper every week. The Internet changed everything, because now anyone looking someone up would easily stumble upon his or her mug shot.

The wallop came from a few lines of code on each mug shot that ensured that the images would appear prominently in Internet searches for the names of those involved. Anyone clicking would be directed to
bustedmugshots.com
. The site declared it sought to improve public awareness of crime and perhaps generate tips to solve open cases.
³
But it stirred up great controversy because Prall decided to charge people to remove their images: $68 to erase an image within ten business days, or $108 to remove it within twenty-four hours. The idea of accepting payment to remove the booking photos, Prall says, was almost an accident—lawyers working for some of the people pictured in the mug shots started making demands and threats to get the images taken down, but one lawyer offered to pay $50 to have an image removed.

Ryan Russell reacted uneasily to the suggestion at first. “I don't know, guys, it doesn't seem right,” he said. Yet the company was forking out thousands of dollars a month in legal bills to fight threats against the site, so Russell relented and embraced the plan. Prall saw the payments as a way to get the lawyers off their back. His site advertised the removal payments as “a reasonable fee that will cover our costs.”

Anyone found not guilty of the charges could remove the images without charge. Officially, the company only allowed those arrested on nonviolent charges to remove their photos.
⁴
However, the company did not always follow this policy. When I called in 2012 to ask a call center attendant if I could remove the images of a man charged with murdering his father and brother and wounding his mother in Georgia, the
attendant said yes. Prall says he has since retrained his staff to follow the firm's written guidelines on serious crimes.

A Bad Breakup

In late 2012, a friend called Paola Roy with an unusual question: “Have you Googled yourself recently?” She told Roy that her 2007 mug shot had all of a sudden started appearing prominently in search results. Roy worried that the image would complicate her efforts to find a new job. She seethed with anger toward Busted! and Kyle Prall. “It's not a public service to have others believe that I am some kind of a criminal,” she said. “I should not have been arrested. I was not prosecuted or convicted of anything, so why is he ruining my life?”

Another whose images appeared on the site was Janet LaBarba, whose drunk-driving arrest came on a night of personal trouble. Over dinner and two glasses of wine in a fancy Dallas restaurant, the divorced wedding planner's boyfriend announced he was breaking up with her. They went home. She left her home and drove a short distance to visit a friend.

A driver who can make passengers uneasy even when sober in the light of day, LaBarba did not notice blinking traffic lights or the stop sign across the street from Whole Foods as she returned home around midnight.
⁵
A police officer whose flashing lights had not grabbed her attention as she drove followed her into her driveway. After she got out of the car he conducted a sobriety test.

She watched as the officer waved a pen back and forth. She then heard him declare that she exhibited slow eye movement. The officer hauled her down to the station, took her photo, and charged her with drunk driving. LaBarba already knew the drill: police had arrested her six months before for drunk driving, on another night when she had argued with her boyfriend.

The DUI arrests landed LaBarba in jail for a few days each time, and she had to wear an ankle monitor transmitting her whereabouts for five months. She also forked out $20,000 in legal fees. LaBarba's image appeared on
bustedmugshots.com
four times, even though she had
only two arrests. By coding LaBarba's photographs, the site got them to surface at the top of online searches for her name. “It completely screwed with my life,” she says. “People Googled me and it was very embarrassing.”

For LaBarba, appearing on Prall's website has stung more than her punishment. She would rather have learned her lesson privately without the world knowing about her mistakes. She paid to make the photos go away.

The charges against Roy were quickly dropped, but Busted! twice refused her request to remove the image. Roy insisted she should not have to pay. “I can pay and have it removed and then it will pop up next year and I'll have to pay to have it removed and it will pop up another year, so I feel I could be doing this ad infinitum,” she said. “As you can see I'm willing to go to jail for $3. I'm not going to let these people get away with this.” She sent in her documentation a third time, and finally the site removed the image.

Whether they paid to remove their images or not, many who appeared on the site became angry when they learned that Prall himself had a long arrest record and troubled past yet seemed to show so little sympathy for their plights.

Restless Youth

A native of Bloomington, Illinois, the home of State Farm Insurance, Prall has held many jobs in his more than thirty years. As a boy he would occasionally help out on his grandparents' farm. In junior high school in the early 1990s, he woke before dawn to deliver the local newspaper, and later he added a second job serving food in a nursing home. With good grades at school and a father who worked as a local district court judge, Prall projected the image of an all-American boy.

He lived in middle-class comfort, yet he felt restless. In high school, Prall used his paperboy earnings to buy alcohol and marijuana. His clean-cut appearance impressed his dealer, who eventually suggested that he should try selling weed himself at his high school. The money was very good for a high school kid. He had earned about $100 a
week delivering newspapers, yet he could make five times as much, sometimes even more, dealing marijuana. With a sharp mind for both schoolwork and entrepreneurship, Prall learned the new trade quickly. “After a while it became second nature,” he said.

Prall impressed his peers and teachers as bright, and he maintained his good grades. He wasn't an athlete or a member of the popular crowd, but dealing made him a big man on campus. Everyone knew his name. The job brought the added advantage that he could smoke as much weed as he liked.