If you read The New York Times on July 1, you probably walked away thinking the federal government had just busted an operation dedicated to keeping a convicted sex trafficker connected to the outside world. The headline practically screamed it: “Federal Inmate Charged With Lending Contraband Phone to Sex Trafficker.” The story that followed described how David Motovich, a Brooklyn businessman, had procured a cellphone inside the Metropolitan Detention Center and handed it to Oren Alexander, the disgraced luxury real estate broker whose sex trafficking conviction had riveted the real estate world and the Jewish community.
Great copy. The problem is, it completely misses the actual story.
Read the criminal complaint (included in full below) and you realize the Times didn’t just bury the lede. They distorted the charge to fit a sexier narrative. Motovich wasn’t charged with “lending a phone to a sex trafficker.” He was charged with possessing a prohibited object as an inmate and conspiring to obtain another one after being transferred to a different facility. The core of the federal case is about the terrifying ease with which inmates are getting their hands on cellphones inside federal lockups.
The affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Cory O’Donohue is straightforward. Motovich allegedly activated a phone at the MDC with the help of someone on the outside, racking up over 500 contacts with his family and associates. After he was moved to FCI Otisville, he allegedly conspired to get another phone smuggled in, purchased at a Brooklyn store just blocks from his family’s business. O’Donohue explicitly notes that inmates at the MDC “commonly share contraband phones with other inmates.” The FBI knows the phone was passed around. But the federal charge isn’t about who borrowed it. It’s about the fact that the phone was there at all.
The Times zeroed in on a single detail: a photograph showing Motovich grinning next to an inmate whose face was redacted in the court filing. Relying on an unnamed source, the paper identified the redacted man as Oren Alexander and spent the bulk of the article rehashing his trial and the fall of his real estate empire. By framing the story around Alexander, the Times obscured a systemic failure within the Bureau of Prisons that federal judges have been sounding the alarm about for years.
The real scandal isn’t that a disgraced real estate broker made a phone call. The scandal is that the MDC is awash in contraband and the people running the place seem incapable of stopping it. The judges forced to send defendants there have been putting it in writing. In the very complaint against Motovich, the FBI cites a 2024 ruling by Judge Jesse Furman in United States v. Chavez, where he noted that “for years, the conditions in the federal jails that serve this District have been a major, growing, and widely understood problem” and that “contraband from drugs to cell phones is widespread.”
Judge Gary Brown’s memorandum in United States v. Colucci was even more pointed. Brown was so appalled by what he called the “dangerous, barbaric conditions” at the MDC that he threatened to vacate a tax fraud defendant’s prison sentence and replace it with home confinement if the BOP sent him there. He noted that gang members were posting photos to Instagram from their cells, “apparently created using smuggled contraband cellphones,” on the very same accounts they used to sell stolen opioids before their arrest. His conclusion: “The results of such anarchy are predictable.”
Even the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York has publicly stated that “contraband cell phones enable federal inmates to continue committing crimes even while they are in custody at the MDC, which endangers both the jail population and the community at large.”
Inmates are fishing packages of cellphones through windows with ropes. Correctional officers are being indicted for taking bribes to smuggle in chargers and devices. Gang members are running their social media from their cells. That is a breakdown of the federal correctional system, and it is the story the Motovich complaint is actually telling.
When the media turns a story about institutional rot into a gossip item about a boldface name, they aren’t just misrepresenting a court document. They are giving cover to a broken system that needs a spotlight, not a celebrity angle. The feds charged Motovich because the MDC is out of control. The paper of record had a chance to say so.
