Cold-Case Playing Card Maker Came About After the Cards, Jeremy Maready & Suzie Schottelkotte, The Ledger, 29 April 2011
Effective Playing Cards in Plant City and law enforcement's cold-case playing cards both came of age in 2006.
A successor to Effective Signs in Plant City, the company was registered with the state in March 2006, three weeks after Heartland Crimestoppers paid Mainely Graphics in Lakeland $7,000 for 5,000 decks of cold-case playing cards.
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How those cards have been purchased is now among the main elements in an investigation by The Ledger that spawned an inquiry by the Florida Attorney General's Office and spurred Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd to halt funding for Heartland until questions about financial practices are answered.
Since 2006, records show an estimated $170,044, or about 38 percent of Heartland's $453,563 in promotional expenses, has flowed to Effective, according to the agency's records. Heartland has produced no records to show sole-source documentation or that proper bidding processes were followed for any of those purchases, including playing cards, yard signs and fugitive magazines.
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After producing the initial deck, Heartland printed a second deck in early 2006 bearing more unsolved cases in Polk, Highlands and Hardee counties, which are served by the group.
The $7,000 contract went to Mainely Graphics in Lakeland, whose owner, Tricia Blouin, was a consultant in graphic design for Effective Signs, the predecessor to Effective Playing Cards. Blouin said Heartland Crimestoppers' initial orders for playing cards were processed through her company until the new Effective Playing Cards was formed.
Dan Turner, a friend and former brother-in-law of [Heartland Executive Director Wayne] Cross, has managed Effective Playing Cards since its inception. The company is owned by Turner's sister, Barbara Hedgepeth, according to state records.
Blouin said she still consults for Effective under contract, primarily designing the cold-case playing cards the company produces.
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The success of the local cards led the state Attorney General's Office to pull $75,000 from the state's Crimestoppers Trust Fund in 2007 to create the first statewide cold-case deck for distribution in prisons across the state. Effective Playing Cards was paid $68,000 to print the cards, but the Attorney General's Office said records couldn't be located detailing whether there were bids for the project. The remaining $7,000 was set aside for rewards.
By July 2007, officials had begun distributing the decks to an estimated 93,000 inmates across the state. Two arrests followed within six months, one in Fort Myers and one in Sarasota, and both cases resulted in convictions, FDLE's Ray said.
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He said his job involves coordinating the design work and contracting with companies overseas, primarily in China and India, to get the cards printed. Crimestoppers programs across the state have ordered cold-case decks through Effective, he said, including Jacksonville, Miami, Fort Myers, Palm Beach, Panama City and other areas of the Panhandle, along with California and South Carolina.
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When the Florida Department of Law Enforcement decided to have similar cards printed in 2008, it received bids from several vendors. The bid went to Priority Marketing of Fort Myers, which bid 39 cents a deck. Effective bid 79 cents, according to documents from FDLE.
But it appears the state is pulling out of the playing-card business. The state has turned that function over to St. Louis-based Keefe Commissary Network, which operates the canteens in Florida's prisons.
Instead of giving cards to inmates upon their arrival at prison, Keefe is selling the statewide decks for $1.90 in the prison canteens. Keefe has contracted to purchase those decks from Effective, and since public funds aren't involved in that transaction, the terms of that contract are private.
These decks seem to actually work, you can look up news articles and people have reported tips after seeing a card!
(No it does not handle well, not one bit 
