by Adam Tanner
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 a
dded 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.
Over time, Prall expanded his reach to other high schools and even Illinois State University. A good friend helped out and encouraged him to present a tougher façade. When classmates’ parents went out of town, Prall and his fellow dealers offered to sponsor parties at their homes. They would foot the bill for kegs and then take up residence in a corner, taking in hundreds or even thousands of dollars in a night in entrance fees. By promising to make the host kid popular overnight, they uncovered a steady stream of houses for their events.
The fact that Prall was up to something did not escape his parents’ notice. His mother occasionally found large wads of cash in his room. She and Prall’s father suspected he was running with a dubious crowd. At one point his father, who in his courtroom had seen what happened to kids who ran afoul of the law, confronted Prall. “I think you’re up to something,” the elder Prall told his son. “If you keep it up, you’re going to get in trouble.”
Prall ignored the warnings. He kept dealing all through high school, raking in tens of thousands of dollars. Still, when his friend branched out into cocaine, Prall stuck to weed. He feared trouble from the kind of people who bought cocaine. Good grades and a solid middle-class background helped keep Prall below the radar. Even with all the extracurricular dealing, Prall graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign accepted him, and he planned to matriculate in the fall and major in finance.
That summer, Prall moved out of his parents’ house and into a cheap summer sublet he shared with some high school friends. It was a rite of passage for newly minted high school graduates in Bloomington, who got their first taste of living on their own by taking up residence in houses vacated by the city’s college kids. One July day he was relaxing with a friend on the porch when plainclothes detectives arrived: “We’re looking for Kyle Prall.”
The cops told Prall they had to take him downtown because he had an outstanding traffic ticket. It wasn’t the first time Prall had been hauled to the station. The previous arrests had all been for relatively minor violations too, like underage drinking. He always seemed to have a beer in his hand when police raided parties. But this time it was different.
He knew things were bad when officers took him through the back door. They took his mug shot and led him down a long hallway lined by holding cells. Prall recognized many of the shoes lined up outside the cell doors. The authorities had nabbed almost all his drug-dealing friends. But as Prall looked around the room, he noticed that one pair of shoes was missing. His good friend who had helped show him the ropes in the business had escaped arrest.
As he sat in his jail cell, Prall thought back to an episode that he now realized had led to his downfall. One cold winter day the previous winter, his pal had telephoned and said he had run out of marijuana and had to buy in bulk. Prall headed to his house, albeit a bit grumpily, as wholesale distribution meant far less profit than dealing to individual customers. A few blocks from the house, Prall noticed a Ford Crown Victoria parked on the side of the road. A man was sitting inside, reading a newspaper. “There is no way that guy is just sitting in his car reading his newspaper,” Prall thought.
Prall called his friend and told him what he had seen. Perhaps he should not come over, he suggested. By that point in his dealing career, Prall had developed an instinct for signs of trouble. Yet he remained gullible enough to trust his savvy partner, who had already served time in juvenile detention. “It’s okay, come on over,” the friend assured him.
When Prall arrived, he found his friend acting a bit stiffly. Something was not right about the way he was talking when Prall handed him the marijuana he wanted to buy. “It’s a quarter-pound, right?” he asked a few times. Prall didn’t know it, but that was the day the other teen had become a police informant. That winter visit was one of four during which the friend gathered evidence against Prall using a wire taped to his chest.
The friend-turned-informant had grown up on the poorer side of town, and he had not received the same breaks in life. His father worked as a manual laborer, a world away from the courts of Prall’s father. Prall knew his friend got along poorly with his father and stepmother, and he was always looking for a way to make a fast buck. At the Catholic school he attended, he stole lunch tickets and sold them to other kids for half price. He also pinched the answers to tests and made a tidy sum selling them. In fifth grade, his Catholic school kicked him out.6
Most of the students avoided the kid. But there was something about him that appealed to Prall, who had an innate rebellious streak. As he hit puberty Prall chafed at the well-off middle-class life he had enjoyed. His new friend, on the other hand, seemed to be the ballsy, live-for-the-day kind of kid Prall wished he was. Additionally, he used his outside earnings to dress flashily, and that appealed to Prall.
The two started out in business together in the seventh grade, when both took on newspaper delivery routes. On busy days they would lend each other a hand. They also got together after school to get into mischief. The friend seemed to bring out Prall’s wild side. The two would go out and steal other kids’ candy on Halloween or shoot water balloons, vegetables, and other objects at people with a powerful long-distance slingshot.
The friend typically led the way. In the summer before high school he started dealing small amounts of marijuana, charging $5 a joint. Over time Prall grew curious, and late in his freshman year he started smoking weed. The amount his friend earned from dealing began to impress him. It looked like easy money. Hardened by a tougher upbringing, he schooled Prall in street savvy. Prall impressed his friend with how quickly he picked up the business. But the tougher kid couldn’t figure out why someone with so much going for him would risk it all to sell dope.
“Your family’s well-off,” he said to Prall one day. “You’re guaranteed to go to college. You’re smart as fuck. Why in the world do you want to sell drugs and hang out with these scumbags?”
Prall had a ready reply: “Because it’s fucking boring, dude. It’s fucking boring hanging out with fucking dorks.”
In December 1996, their son’s senior year, the friend’s father and stepmother discovered a stash of marijuana in their basement. It was the last straw after a series of troubling incidents. They had been trying to get him to shape up for years and worried about what would happen if he had to go to jail as an adult. They knew a detective and decided that their best hope was to try to work out some kind of a deal. Prall’s friend was trapped. He had turned eighteen earlier that year. If he was arrested, there was no more juvenile hall. To avoid jail, he agreed to entrap other dealers by wearing a wire.
The friend-turned-informant recorded a series of conversations with Prall, and the evidence was irrefutable. Prall pleaded guilty to one felony count out of four original charges. The legal process dragged on for months, giving him enough time to finish his first term of freshman year at college before serving his time. That term Prall earned an A plus in a philosophy course on logic and reasoning.7 In 1998, as his
classmates headed off to their summer jobs, Prall turned himself in to the DeWitt County jail. After sixty days, he was set free. He also paid $1,550 in fines.
At the University of Illinois, Prall majored in finance and held part-time jobs delivering pizzas, working as a waiter, and helping at construction sites. Although he also got into several minor scrapes with the law, Prall graduated from college with an overall B-plus average. After studying with flash cards at the gym, in classes, and at coffee shops, he passed the Certified Public Accountant exam in 2002. With his criminal record, Prall did not find it easy to get hired, but a friend of his father’s granted him an interview to work at his accounting firm. He started the job in the late summer after college, but quickly grew disillusioned with conventional work. “Absolutely hated it. It was mind-numbingly boring,” he says.
In the years that followed, Prall drifted through a series of jobs. He analyzed credit reports for a Chicago-area bank, moved to Cleveland and then New York, where he landed a job at a small investment bank specializing in bankruptcy restructuring. He was earning $100,000 a year, enough to afford a fifth-floor walkup apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He met many clients and began to think big. “You know what? I could do what these guys do. Why am I not sitting on that side of the table?” he wondered. He decided to call it quits and moved in with a friend in Austin, Texas, looking for new opportunities.
Kyle Prall’s mug shots from his younger days. Source: McLean County Sheriff‘s Office.
Mug Shot Empire
Prall’s personal-data empire lies in an office park overlooking downtown Austin, the Texas capital. The company does not list its address on its website or in local directories, and workers treat their location as a corporate secret. The sign on the door offers no indication of the company’s business and could easily belong to a lawyer’s or insurance office.8 The desire for anonymity is explained by Ryan Russell, Prall’s chief investor: “I’m tired of death threats. I’ve never dealt with something this controversial. I’ve never dealt with something that made me fear for my personal safety.”
