Pay Phone

Don't worry about competition from cell phones, a phone executive told Mason Harris, calming him and his fellow pay phone operators at their annual gathering in Las Vegas years ago. TV didn't kill radio as predicted, he said. Wireless and pay phones would complement each other, too. "It was a great explanation," says Harris, president of Robin Technologies Inc., a Rockville pay phone company. "Unfortunately, it wasn't correct." Wireless phones turned out to be the rare punishment that pay phones weren't built to withstand.

The president and chief executive of Wings to Go, a fast food franchise headquartered in Severna Park, pleaded guilty to wire fraud Monday for embezzling $885,000 from the company to pay for telephone sex and prostitutes over a six-year period, the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office announced. From 2006 through this year, Mark Chandler Goodnow, 55, claimed to have spent nearly $832,000 on business advertising, but the money really went to three phone sex operators in Texas to pay their fees and personal expenses, according to his plea agreement.

THE GLORIES of telephone deregulation are embracing America like the warm, enfolding arms of a grizzly bear.It all began when the courts ordered the dismemberment of the Bell System in the mid-1980s. It intensified with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.Last week, it flowered with news that the 35-cent local pay phone call, that unimaginable benefit to all Americans, might soon become universal. The blessings of the 50-cent call could come next year. The quarter call is surely dead.Now let us ask ourselves: Who are the people most likely to patronize a pay phone?

The former CEO of Severna Park-based Wings to Go pleaded guilty Monday to wire fraud for embezzling more than $885,000 from the franchise company to pay for prostitutes and phone sex, the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore announced. Mark Chandler Goodnow, 55, of Pasadena, former president and CEO of the Buffalo wings franchise company, spent about $885,071 of the company's money to hire prostitutes in Maryland and to pay three women in Texas for phone sex and personal expenses, according to his plea agreement.

A pay phone was stolen from in front of a McDonald's restaurant in Gambrills over the weekend, county police said yesterday.The assistant manager of the McDonald's, Daniel P. Hill, 31, told police the theft occurred between 3 p.m. Sunday and 6 a.m. Monday. Police said it appeared that the thieves cut the chain that held the phone to the wall.McDonald's rents the phone from Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. of Maryland.Mr. Hill could not say how much the phone was worth.POLICE LOG* Odenton: Vandals broke windows on five construction vehicles at the Winmark II office building being built in the 1100 block of Annapolis Road and stole four shrubs worth $25 each.

A 17-year-old Crownsville youth was robbed at gunpoint Tuesday night as he used a pay phone at an Exxon station near Jumpers Hole Road and Ritchie Highway, county police said.A man walked up to the youth shortly after 10 p.m. and pulled out a handgun. He took the victim's coat and an undisclosed amount of money before running off along Jumpers Hole Road, police said.

It's last call for AT&T Inc.'s pay telephones after the company said yesterday that it plans to get out of the business by the end of next year. But the company's exit doesn't necessarily mean that Superman will have to find a new phone booth to change clothes. The nation's largest carrier, which operates 65,000 pay phones, will try to sell the business to independent operators that would continue to run them. The first pay phone, installed in 1878, had an attendant who took callers' money, said AT&T spokesman Michael Coe. Inventor William Gray set up the first coin-operated phone in 1889 at a bank in Hartford, Conn.

A Gaithersburg woman who had stopped at a pay phone in Mount Airy about 8 p.m. Saturday was abducted, robbed and later dumped outside a lumberyard there.Diana C. Dunn, 34, was attacked from behind, said state police with the Westminster Barracks. Her assailant covered her eyes with a bandanna and forced her into a tan, full-sized car where he knocked her unconscious. Her brown leather purse, wallet and identification were stolen.Police, who were called about 8:24 a.m. yesterday, found her at Calvary United Methodist Church on Main Street.

Two men with a sawed-off shotgun robbed a Severn man while he talked on a pay phone outside a Columbia ice rink Tuesday night, police said.Christopher P. Murphy, 28, a construction worker, said he stopped at the telephone in the 5800 block of Thunderhill Road about 11:45 p.m."I was on my way home after hanging out in Columbia and I stopped to call a friend," Mr. Murphy said. "I was on the phone for two or three minutes when I saw the men coming around the side of the building."Mr. Murphy said one of the robbers held the shotgun to the right side of his ribs while the other rummaged through his 1992 blue Chevrolet Camaro.

The Federal Communications Commission cracked down yesterday on Oncor Communications Inc., a Bethesda-based pay telephone operator that it cited for charging unwitting consumers three or four times market rates for long-distance calls charged to credit cards.The FCC ordered Oncor's parent company, Operator Communications Inc., to reduce Oncor's interstate rates to no more than 15 percent more than AT&T's rates for a comparable interstate phone call. It also gave the company seven days to add an audible message telling callers that its rates are available by dialing a specified number.

Apparently pay-phone owners make money when certain toll-free numbers are called. So this guy programmed his phones to repeatedly call the numbers. Similar to robo-clicking on blog sites, only a little more direct. And more lucrative. Pay phones are a dying business, but Mr. Kantartzis seems to have found a way to revive them. Temporarily. From the Associated Press, via the Daily Record :  Nicolaos Kantartzis pleaded guilty in September to using more than 100 pay phones to make phantom calls to toll-free numbers, some 8 million calls in all. Because the calls are free to legitimate users, the party getting the call must pay costs that include a cut for the pay phone operator.

We're taking care of General Motors. The blob known as Citigroup will soon be slimmer and less dangerous. Another 20th-century business must now check in to 21st-century fat camp. The U.S. mail is losing billions. It's at "high risk" of failing financially, say government auditors. It may raise stamp prices again even though it just did. It's talking about closing post offices, including five in metro Baltimore. You've heard before about Postal Service budget crises. This is the big one. To deal with a plunge in mail volume that began in 2007, the U.S. Postal Service is about to become a very different part of the economy and a different part of our lives from the one we have known.

WASHINGTON -- One of the worst parts of being homeless is the loneliness, said David Pirtle, who slept many nights on Baltimore's waterfront and Washington's streets. Homeless for more than two years, Pirtle combated the isolation by taking quarters people threw into a fountain at the National Museum of African Art in Washington and dropping them into a pay phone to call family in Ohio. Pirtle, 33, now has a home and a cell phone. But the pay phones he once relied on to connect with the world are becoming harder to find for those still on the street.

Good news for Marylanders on the go who don't have cell phones. (Are there any left besides me?) Verizon, the last major telecom company in the stationary pay-phone business, says it has no intention of exiting. In the wake of news that AT&T is trying to sell its pay-phone business, I asked Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell if Verizon would be next. Although the company has only about 225,000 pay phones in 28 states and D.C. these days - half what it had in 2000 - it apparently still likes the business.

It's last call for AT&T Inc.'s pay telephones after the company said yesterday that it plans to get out of the business by the end of next year. But the company's exit doesn't necessarily mean that Superman will have to find a new phone booth to change clothes. The nation's largest carrier, which operates 65,000 pay phones, will try to sell the business to independent operators that would continue to run them. The first pay phone, installed in 1878, had an attendant who took callers' money, said AT&T spokesman Michael Coe. Inventor William Gray set up the first coin-operated phone in 1889 at a bank in Hartford, Conn.

Maryland State Police are looking for a person who made a phone call threatening to "shoot up" a Carroll County high school yesterday, prompting a countywide school lockdown for nearly three hours. State troopers, with help from the county sheriff's office, were dispatched throughout the county in response to the threat, searching and securing campuses, state police said. Police were to remain at all schools until 4 p.m., said Sgt. Arthur Betts of the state police. An increased police presence is also expected at schools in South Carroll today.

Got a quarter for a phone call?Thanks. Now how about a dime?Bell Atlantic, the dominant operator of pay phones in Maryland, announced yesterday that it is increasing the price of a local pay phone call in the state from 25 cents to 35 cents. The process of coverting Bell Atlantic phones to the new rate began immediately, but will not be completed for several months. Rates for long-distance calls will not be affected, the company said.There are no plans to equip phones to make change for two quarters.

A Glen Burnie man was robbed at knifepoint Monday morning at a pay phone at Hospital Drive and Elvaton Road, county police said.Thomas Harold Smith, 23, of the 1300 block of Howard Road, was not injured in the incident. He told police he was using the phone about 11 a.m. when a man walked up to him, put a knife to his throat and said, "Give me everything."Mr. Smith surrendered his waist pack, which contained an undisclosed amount of cash, credit cards and a checkbook. The man then ran off, cutting through the woods toward the Mountain Ridge Apartments, police said.

NEW YORK -- For pay phones in New York and pretty much everywhere, time is expiring. Once planted like lifelines on city sidewalks and in small businesses, pay phones are rapidly disappearing from an ever-expanding wireless landscape. The proliferation in recent years of cellular phones, not to mention BlackBerrys and Sidekicks, is doing nothing to get the pay phone off the endangered species list. Like the phonograph and the typewriter, the pay phone could one day become an anachronism, the kind of prop seen in period films.

TBILISI, Georgia - As director of Georgia's National Library, Levan Berdzenishvili is expected to serve as guardian of his nation's culture, keeper of its collective memory and conscience for its political leaders. But each winter, the 50-year-old classics scholar faces an additional challenge: staying warm. He sat in his office recently wrapped in a thick sweater, cradling a hot cup of instant coffee. "It's very difficult to stay here," he admitted. "Sometimes it's impossible to work here."