*It's fantastic. Magic-realist, even. Rivals the Franco-Prussian seige of Paris, which combined pigeons with hot-air balloons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/01/pigeons-mobile-phones-brazil-prison
Inmates have devised an innovative way to smuggle in mobile phones into a prison farm in Brazil – carrier pigeons.
Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the south-eastern city of Sorocaba noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a small cloth bag tied to one of its legs last week.
"The guards nabbed the bird after luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cellphone inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said. (((Gotta like it that they are COMPONENTS.)))
A day later, another pigeon was spotted dragging a similar bag inside the prison's exercise yard. Inside the bag was the mobile phone's charger, Soramiglio said.
The birds were apparently bred and raised inside the prison, smuggled out, outfitted with the mobile phone parts and then released to fly back....
(((The unamusing, Not an April Fool's joke part:)))
In 2006, Sao Paulo's notorious First Capital Command used mobile phones to co-ordinate a wave of assaults on police, banks and buses that left more than 200 people dead in South America's largest city.
The gang's leaders are based in prisons and use smuggled mobile phones to plan and execute drug deals, kidnappings and bank robberies.
