GPS Device Plays Key Role in Theft Arrests

Gadget Helps FBI Track Stolen Phones

GPS gadgets can guide you to virtually any place on the globe these days, but one hidden in a truckload of stolen cellphones might have put Walter Lee Green on the road to prison.

Green, 49, of Annapolis pleaded guilty to possession of stolen goods in federal court in Baltimore last week and could face 10 years behind bars.

The story of his crime, as described in the plea agreement, is at the juncture where one of the older crimes on Earth -- larceny -- meets the 21st-century technology that taps into satellites whizzing around above the ozone.

The plea agreement describes a caper that began a week before Labor Day in 2007, when someone pulled a white tractor truck into a Glen Burnie freight yard, hooked it to a white trailer filled with $585,000 worth of Cingular Wireless cellphones and drove off. This was not a new trick, and Cingular had hidden a Global Positioning System device in with the phones.

The FBI was called. Following the device's signal, agents found the trailer sitting in Annapolis. They popped a second, magnetic GPS unit onto the trailer as a precaution against battery failure and peaked inside, taking note that the shrink-wrap was unbroken on 19 of the pallets of cellphone cases. Another had been opened, and several cellphone boxes had been removed.

The next day, a blue tractor rolled up, hooked onto the white trailer and towed it away, first to a warehouse in Baltimore, where some of the cellphones were unloaded, then south toward Jessup, with both GPS units silently advising the FBI agents of their travels.

In Jessup, the units parted company. The white trailer with the magnetic GPS had been dumped, but the other GPS went along as the remaining cellphones headed back to Annapolis.

The next day, Anne Arundel County police stopped Green as he drove the white tractor. He admitted to involvement in the heist and showed investigators that he had five of the stolen phones in his truck. He named a couple of people he said had unloaded some of the cellphones in the Baltimore warehouse.

One of those people, Lawrence M. Branch Jr., is scheduled for trial in December on the same charges Green faced, said a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.