Judging which mugshots appear on the cover of Cellmates is not a meticulous process, insists Dwayne Mayo.
Visibly inebriated? Probably. Huge scars? Yep. Face tattoos? Oh, yeah, that's in. Beautiful ladies? Definitely.
"When you get the [charge of] public nudity in a bar, yeah, that goes on the cover," says Mayo over beers at a WingHouse restaurant in St. Petersburg. "The crazier, the better."
Mayo, 47, is the publisher of Cellmates, a weekly tabloid featuring the mugshots of hundreds of Tampa Bay residents every week. Though the premise is not original — Mayo copped the idea from an Orlando entrepreneur who prints a similar paper in Orange County — the St. Pete resident has turned a fledgling rag with a mere 2,500 copies into West Central Florida's premier mugshot tabloid, blanketing Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties with 15,000 papers every week. Last month, he added 4,000 more copies for Palm Beach County. All of this in just eight months.
"I'm still amazed on how this took off," the former security guard says. "I'd like to see one in every state in a few years."
Mayo's success comes from a combination of a risk-adverse business plan, in which independent contractors pay to distribute the $1 papers, and the public's insatiable appetite for shame and scandal.
"It's local and it's personal to the people here," Mayo says. "I know everyone buys it to see who they know in it. It would take you five hours to look for the same amount of people online. You can look at my paper and do it in five minutes."
But Mayo insists Cellmates is more than just scuttlebutt on jailbirds, although he admits that's the selling point. Mayo thinks public shame can prevent crime.
"I hope it has a redeeming quality," he says. "I don't really want to humiliate people. I hope it makes people make different choices."
And there's no one untouchable in this business. When police arrested one of his sales employees for DUI a few months back, Mayo printed her mugshot. A vendor's daughter and a drinking buddy weren't given special treatment either.
"If I get arrested, I'm on the cover," promises Mayo, who has a short criminal history of his own. He was arrested for domestic violence in 1999, though the case was dismissed.
Although there's no way to determine Cellmates' impact on crime, concerned citizens have led police to two runaway kids featured in the paper. And between those who scream at him or threaten his life, Mayo says readers have admitted they won't drive drunk for fear of ending up on the front page. Even Mayo is more careful; he won't drink more than two beers without taking a cab home (a personal rule he adhered to on the evening we met).
"[Preventing crime] may put me out of business," he says. But until that happens, Mayo's got a piece of advice: "Don't do it. Don't be in my paper."
Read about Sarasota's mugshot mogul here.
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2008.