The yacht is moored at the mouth of the Miami River, in the long shadows of the city’s luxury hotels and high-rises. It is of Italian design: sleek, imposing, with a flybridge and sundeck and five cabins, and a price point of about $10 million. On the hull, bold silver lettering declares its name: Convict.
The Convict is the crown jewel of prison technology company Smart Communications, whose CEO, Jonathan Logan, has a reputation for flaunting the millions he has made in the business of prisons and jails. There is also Logan’s $300,000 Lamborghini, with a license plate that reads “INMATE.” There are the photos he posts dressed in garish suits, posed in the driver’s seat of his Rolls-Royce.
The yachts, the cars — they all form part of Smart Communications’ “empire,” as insiders refer to it. The company rakes in tens of millions in revenue each year from its prison communications tech, a business model that mostly involves charging people incarcerated in the US prison system to send emails (50 cents a pop) or make phone calls (7 cents a minute) or leave thirty-second voicemails ($1 each).
It is an empire over which Logan is now battling for control.
Logan once owned the company together with his father, James Logan, who died in 2022, leaving his shares in Smart Communications to his wife. Ever since, Jon Logan has been waging a vicious fight to wrest control of the company from the rest of his family, a succession battle that has played out in several courts across multiple states, drawing yachts and mansions and a dozen exotic cars into its crosshairs.
Inadvertently, the bitter feud has also pried open the internal workings of Smart Communications. The result is an unparalleled look into the immense fortunes and…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
