The Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix (FCI Fort Dix) is a low-security United States federal prison for male offenders in New Jersey. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A satellite prison camp houses minimum-security male inmates.
FCI Fort Dix is located in Burlington County on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. It is approximately 40 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[1] Fort Dix is the largest single federal prison in the United States by number of inmates.[2]
Notable incidents
Identity theft ring
In early 2010, a joint FBI and Federal Bureau of Prisons investigation found that Dimorio McDowell, an inmate at FCI Fort Dix, was operating a major identity theft ring from the prison. Eight co-conspirators, with whom McDowell communicated by telephone, were also arrested. The ring targeted credit cards issued by major chain stores such as Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Staples, Home Depot, Lowes and others. McDowell and his co-conspirators obtained the personal information of credit card holders through customer service departments and added themselves as authorized users. When McDowell's co-conspirators went to make purchases, they showed false identification or provided the last four digits of the cardholder's Social Security number and charged high-end items such as a John Deere tractor, big-screen televisions, snow blowers and stoves. The companies that issued the cards, including Citigroup Financial, HSBC and GE Capital, lost between $500,000 to $1 million.[3]
McDowell subsequently pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud and was sentenced to 14 additional years in prison on January 18, 2011.[4] McDowell is currently incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution, Terre Haute in Indiana, which has a Communication Management Unit, where inmate contact with the outside world is severely restricted and tightly monitored. He is scheduled for release in 2028.[5]
Released from custody in 2014; served 19 years.[8]
Drug trafficker and former partner of drug kingpin Carlos Lehder; directed the shipment of thousands of tons of narcotics into the US in the 1970s and 1980s; pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in 1995; portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2001 film Blow.[9][10]
Released from custody in 2007; served 4 years.[13]
Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island from 1975 to 1984 and 1991 to 2002; convicted in 2002 of racketeering for accepting bribes in exchange for city jobs from 1991 to 1999.[14][15]
Released on 27th October of 2016; served 17 years.
Pleaded guilty in 2002 to racketeering and fraud for siphoning over $200 million from insurance premiums paid to companies he controlled in the 1990s; Frankel's story was featured on the CNBC television program American Greed.[16][17][18]
Serving a 17-year sentence; scheduled for release in 2027.
Former worker at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine; pleaded guilty to arson for setting fire to the nuclear submarine USS Miami in 2012, injuring five firefighters and two sailors and causing $400 million in damage.[19]
Was a regular guest on the Howard Stern Show. During the November 9, 2004 live broadcast he admitted that he had not filed or paid taxes for several years, an Internal Revenue Service employee happened to be listening to the show and reported Mroszak to their superiors at the IRS. He was sentenced to serve one year in FCI Fort Dix and pay his outstanding back taxes. On June 29, 2005 Mroszak was moved from FCI Fort Dix to the Federal Medical Center Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts.