Klaus Haas's prison cell phones

Klaus Haas's prison cell phones are contraband devices that give him a practical role in the prison’s economy and an unexpected channel to the outside. Requested after Haas accepts life in a shared cell, the phones become merchandise he sells to inmates who need to manage business from behind bars; one also enables his direct call to reporter Sergio Gonzalez, through which the question of Haas’s innocence acquires a voice beyond the prison walls.

From private cell to shared life

After Haas is moved from the private cell to a block with other prisoners, the narco comes to say goodbye and offers help if a serious problem arises. Haas says he is trying not to interfere. During a lawyer’s visit the following day, she asks whether he wants to begin proceedings to return to a private cell. Haas refuses: he expects to leave the cell eventually and considers it better to accept that reality sooner rather than later. Instead, he asks his lawyer to bring him a cell phone. She warns that getting prison authorities to allow one will not be easy, but Haas insists that she bring it.

The request marks a shift in how Haas handles confinement. He does not ask for a way back to the privacy he has lost; he asks for a device he can put to use within the new conditions. A week later he requests another phone, and shortly afterward a third. The narrative thus presents the phones not as incidental possessions but as the beginning of an improvised business and communications system.

A prison economy of phones

Haas sells the first phone to an inmate serving time for killing three people. The buyer receives money from outside, and Haas judges that a phone is a useful way to conduct business. The man pays three times what the device originally cost. The transaction shows Haas turning a scarce, prohibited object into a commodity whose value depends on what it can make possible inside prison.

The next phone goes to a butcher who wants to continue running two shops while incarcerated and suspects that his sister, who is managing them, is stealing from him. Haas does more than supply the device: he shows the buyer how to use its address book and send messages. For this phone he charges five times its original price. The difference between the two markups, and the practical instruction accompanying the second sale, establish that Haas is dealing in access and know-how as well as hardware.

This activity takes place amid Haas’s other exchanges with prisoners. Before the transfer, he had kept three younger friends content by buying canned food and drugs; they ran errands for him or acted as bodyguards. In conversation, he spoke to them about self-control, hard work, and the possibility of shaping one’s fate, though they did not understand his references. The cell-phone trade extends his dealings with inmates into a more concrete sphere: an object and its uses connect imprisonment to money, outside contacts, and business that continues beyond the cell.

The phone as a line to the reporter

After a press conference by Haas causes a minor scandal, Sergio Gonzalez calls the number Haas’s lawyer has supplied. Gonzalez expects the lawyer might answer; Haas picks up instead. The phone makes the exchange direct and immediate, bypassing the assumptions that prison communication would remain in the hands of legal representatives. Haas recognizes Gonzalez as the reporter from Mexico City who attended the press conference.

Haas tells Gonzalez that he was afraid during his first days in prison. He had imagined that other inmates would attack him in revenge for the murdered women, but says he soon understood that he was not going to be torn apart for the crime of which he was accused. He recounts asking a prisoner what he thought about the dead women and being told that they were considered sexually available but did not deserve to die. Asked whether he believed Haas had killed them, the inmate said he did not. Haas takes this response as evidence that prisoners know he is innocent, even if he cannot yet explain how that knowledge has spread.

To describe the unexplained awareness, Haas compares it to a real noise that enters a dream shared by people in enclosed spaces: the dream passes among prisoners, but the noise belongs to the world outside it. He says he has some ideas about the person who knows he could not have committed the murders, but needs more time to identify that person. Gonzalez tries to ask about Haas’s confession, trial date, and treatment by police; Haas postpones those subjects for another conversation. The phone therefore carries a consequential but incomplete account: it opens a channel for Haas’s interpretation of prison life while leaving other questions unresolved.

A device against imposed isolation

The phones link the prison’s internal hierarchy to the world beyond it. They allow inmates to coordinate outside affairs, while Haas’s call lets a reporter hear his account without relying on a scheduled press conference or an intermediary’s presence. Their value is practical, but their narrative function is also structural: a prohibited object unsettles the boundary between confinement and public communication.

The call does not establish the truth of Haas’s claim or identify the person he suspects. Instead, it makes his uncertainty audible. He has time in prison, yet insists that he needs more time still; the phone offers contact without delivering a solution. Its importance lies in that tension: Haas can communicate from inside, conduct business through the devices, and speak to the press, but the mystery surrounding the murders and his own alleged involvement remains open.