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With nothing but time on their hands, two Florida inmates devised a seemingly foolproof system for smuggling contraband into their Pinellas County jail. But, unthinkably, their feat of engineering was foiled when corrections staff spotted their plastic grocery bag full of weed dangling from fishing line outside a fourth floor window.
Inmates Phillip William Henderson, 38, and Mark Matthew “Red” Keating, 45, attempted the scheme with the help of their then-unincarcerated pal Eric Scott Snook, 41. Snook waited in the jail parking lot with a plastic bag containing marijuana, cigarettes and lighters while Henderson and Keating lowered the fishing line from the rooftop recreation area.
They would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling corrections officers gazing out the window. Identifying the floating treasure trove as suspicious, the officers quickly intervened and seized the stash.
Snook was arrested and all three were charged with introducing contraband to a jail. A six-foot fence was soon erected around Snook’s ground-level crime scene to discourage copycat attempts.
“We’ve never had this problem before,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told WFLA-TV. “We never had anything like this before. The system seems to work, so we need to look at it, we’ll consider it, but I really think this is an anomaly situation.”
It seems the authorities maintained their sense of humor despite the security breach, valuing the 29 grams of marijuana they seized at $1,500.
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