In the heart of Mobile, Alabama, a troubling web of public-private entanglement has unraveled, exposing how a local police officer and his business partner allegedly profited from a system meant to ensure public safety—while defendants paid the price and taxpayers footed hidden costs. At the center are Mobile Police Corporal Kevin Naman and Greg Wood, co-owners of Pegasus Services (also referred to as Pegasus Monitoring Services), a company that dominated pretrial electronic ankle monitoring in Mobile County until the sheriff’s office stepped in and dismantled the private operation.
What began as a seemingly straightforward side business providing court-ordered monitoring services devolved into an ethics scandal, operational failures that allegedly enabled serious crimes, and ultimately a complete takeover by the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office. This hard-hitting investigation reveals how conflicts of interest, potential misuse of public resources, and a flawed privatized model undermined justice in Mobile County—until authorities finally said enough.
The Ethics Complaint and Sustained Investigation Against Kevin Naman
Kevin Naman, a longtime Mobile Police Department officer who rose to Corporal and worked in narcotics, co-owned Pegasus Services while serving on the force. The arrangement drew sharp scrutiny. In 2023, the Alabama Ethics Commission investigated complaints against him, ultimately finding cause in a 4-0 vote that he committed at least one minor violation of the Alabama Ethics Act.
The core allegations centered on double-dipping and conflict of interest. Complainant Doug Roberts, who had been required to wear an ankle monitor after a burglary arrest, described Naman arriving at his home in a Mobile Police SUV to service equipment. Roberts alleged Naman used city time, uniform, and vehicle for private business gain—collecting payments (around $400 monthly per defendant, plus extra fees) and handling maintenance. Photos reportedly showed Naman servicing monitors from the official vehicle.
Roberts said it felt like a “scheme”: MPD arrests individuals, judges order monitoring through Pegasus, and defendants pay the arresting officer’s company. Naman’s dual role as narcotics officer and monitor provider blurred lines dangerously, raising questions about impartiality and whether public resources subsidized a private venture.
The Ethics Commission referred the matter to the Mobile County District Attorney’s office for review, which in turn involved the Alabama Attorney General. MPD launched an internal investigation. While resolved administratively as a “minor” violation, the episode highlighted systemic risks of officers moonlighting in court-related businesses. Naman reportedly requested administrative resolution, avoiding fuller public disclosure of specifics.
This was no abstract ethics breach. Alabama law prohibits public officials from using their positions for private financial gain or creating conflicts that undermine public trust. Naman’s involvement with Pegasus allegedly crossed those lines, especially if on-duty resources were diverted.
Greg Wood, Pegasus Services, and the Ankle Monitoring Business Model
Greg Wood, listed as agent and operations director (sometimes owner or co-owner), ran day-to-day operations for Pegasus alongside Naman. The company provided electronic monitoring for pretrial defendants and those on probation, charging significant monthly fees—reportedly around $276–$400 per person, plus hookup and add-on charges.
Pegasus filled a gap in Mobile County’s system, where judges ordered monitoring as a condition of bond for higher-risk defendants instead of full incarceration. Private firms like Pegasus, AccuPoint, and others handled installation, tracking, alerts for violations, and billing. Defendants paid directly, creating a profit-driven model.
Wood defended the private model vehemently, arguing it preserved neutrality and Fourth Amendment rights since data wasn’t shared with law enforcement. Pegasus operated in multiple counties but Mobile was its biggest market, monitoring over 160 defendants at peak.
Critics, however, pointed to perverse incentives: companies profited from keeping people on monitors longer, while skimping on robust oversight could lead to violations going unreported. Defendants complained of exorbitant fees and poor service. The privatized approach outsourced a core public safety function to for-profit entities with limited accountability.
Failures, Murders, and the Push for Sheriff Takeover
The system cracked under pressure from high-profile failures. In October 2024, murder defendant Haratio Donzell Stewart allegedly violated bond conditions—visiting a Mississippi casino and a Saraland shoe store—without timely reporting by his monitoring company (AccuPoint). Mobile County District Judge Jennifer Wright barred that firm from her courtroom.
Then, in November 2024, Nyyon Sanders faced charges in another murder while out on bond for a prior murder case. Prosecutors alleged he exploited a dead battery on his ankle monitor. These incidents, amid other companies folding, funneled cases to Pegasus—but exposed the fragility of relying on private operators for critical compliance monitoring.
Judges and District Attorney Keith Blackwood lost confidence. Private monitoring “just didn’t seem to be working,” according to Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s chief of staff. Sheriff Paul Burch agreed to bring the program in-house, creating a dedicated electronic monitoring unit with deputies, civilian staff, and new equipment from ShadowTrack Technologies.
The Mobile County Commission approved funding—up to $1.6 million startup, with ongoing costs around $340,000 annually, split with the city. By early 2025, the sheriff’s office began transitioning defendants. Presiding Circuit Judge Wesley Pipes ordered switches from Pegasus. As of late February 2025, dozens had transferred, though some lagged, prompting warnings of bond revocation.
The sheriff’s office now directly monitors, enabling faster response to violations with sworn deputies who can arrest immediately. Fees from defendants help offset costs, but the program prioritizes accountability over profit.
Wood’s Legal Pushback and Constitutional Claims
Greg Wood didn’t go quietly. Pegasus threatened legal action, arguing sheriff-run monitoring violates the Fourth Amendment as an unreasonable search without warrants. Wood cited Supreme Court precedents on GPS tracking and lifetime monitoring for sex offenders, claiming pretrial defendants can’t truly consent under duress and that law enforcement maintaining location data crosses a line.
County officials and DA Blackwood pushed back, noting defendants consent as a bond condition or remain jailed, and that sheriff monitoring is standard elsewhere in Alabama. They viewed Wood’s arguments as self-serving attempts to protect a lucrative business. Wood also complained Pegasus wasn’t allowed to bid on equipment or services.
As of early 2025, Pegasus lost its Mobile County dominance. The sheriff’s unit absorbed the program, removing private business intermediaries.
Broader Implications: Ethics, Public Safety, and Privatization
The Naman-Wood-Pegasus saga raises profound questions. How did a police officer’s private venture operate so long without stricter oversight? What does it say about conflicts when law enforcement-adjacent businesses profit from the justice system? The ethics finding, while “minor,” validated concerns about using public office for private gain.
Defendants bore costs—financially and in eroded trust. Public safety suffered when monitoring lapses allegedly enabled crimes. Taxpayers now fund a more accountable in-house system, but the transition exposed years of shortcomings.
This case exemplifies risks of outsourcing core governmental functions like pretrial supervision to profit-driven entities with ties to active officers. Alabama ethics laws exist to prevent exactly this kind of entanglement, yet enforcement often feels reactive.
Sheriff Burch’s team has switched over numerous defendants and aims for a professional, responsive unit. Whether it prevents future tragedies remains to be seen, but the shift from Pegasus represents a rejection of the old model.
Kevin Naman and Greg Wood built a business at the intersection of policing and profit. The sustained ethics case against Naman, combined with documented failures under private monitoring, painted a picture of a system ripe for abuse. Mobile County’s decision to dismantle it and go in-house sends a clear message: public safety isn’t a business opportunity—it’s a governmental duty.
The full scope of Pegasus’s operations, any unreported violations, and the precise financial benefits to its owners may never be fully public. But the outcome is undeniable: a privately run program, tainted by ethics issues and operational lapses, has been replaced by direct sheriff oversight. For Mobile residents demanding safer streets and ethical governance, that’s a long-overdue reckoning.
The Pegasus case sits at the intersection of several long-running debates about how local government should manage functions that are often left to private contractors. Pretrial electronic monitoring is one of those functions. In theory, it is straightforward: a defendant who would otherwise be held in jail pending trial is allowed to remain in the community, with an ankle monitor providing real-time location data that the court, the prosecutor, and law enforcement can use to make sure the defendant is complying with the conditions of release. In practice, the function touches on constitutional rights, public safety, professional ethics, and the cost of operating the local criminal justice system. The Pegasus case shows how those issues can compound when the entity providing the service has deep ties to the local law enforcement establishment.
The legal framework around pretrial electronic monitoring has been evolving for decades. The federal Bail Reform Act of 1984, which governs federal criminal cases, encourages the use of the “least restrictive” conditions of release that will reasonably assure a defendant’s appearance in court and the safety of the community. State systems, including Alabama’s, generally follow a similar approach, with judges empowered to impose conditions like electronic monitoring as alternatives to pretrial detention. The Supreme Court has addressed the constitutionality of electronic monitoring in a series of cases, most notably United States v. Jones, which held that prolonged GPS tracking of a vehicle constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, and Grady v. North Carolina, which applied that reasoning to lifetime satellite monitoring of sex offenders. The constitutional questions raised by Wood and Pegasus about sheriff-run monitoring are grounded in those precedents, but they have not yet been definitively resolved at the appellate level for the specific fact pattern of a county-run, pretrial-only program.
The Alabama Ethics Act, the state law at the center of the case against Naman, prohibits public officials from using their positions for personal financial gain and from engaging in activities that create a conflict between their public duties and their private interests. The act is enforced by the Alabama Ethics Commission, an independent state agency that investigates complaints and, when it finds cause, can refer matters to prosecutors or to the relevant public employer for administrative action. The 4-0 finding that Naman committed at least one minor violation was an unusual result, in part because the commission’s cases often end without a formal finding, and in part because the underlying conduct — a police officer running a side business that contracted with the same court system that his department supported — was exactly the kind of conflict the Ethics Act was written to address.
The practical problem with the private monitoring model in Mobile County was not just the conflict of interest involving Naman. It was also the structural incentives built into a for-profit monitoring operation. Pegasus, AccuPoint, and the other companies that operated in the county earned revenue by enrolling and retaining defendants in their programs. Each defendant paid a monthly fee, and additional charges accrued for equipment installation, damage, missed appointments, and a range of other fees. The companies had an incentive to keep defendants enrolled as long as possible, and they had a corresponding incentive to keep customer service complaints from reaching the courts. The result, in some cases, was a service that was expensive for defendants, frustrating for judges, and difficult for law enforcement to oversee.
The high-profile failures that led to the sheriff’s takeover — including the murder defendant who was able to visit a Mississippi casino and a Saraland shoe store while wearing a monitor, and the second murder defendant who was charged in a separate killing while out on bond on the first — were not just embarrassing for the monitoring companies. They had real consequences for public safety, and they put enormous political pressure on local officials to act. The decision by District Attorney Keith Blackwood, the mayor’s office, and Sheriff Paul Burch to bring the program in-house was, in effect, an acknowledgment that the privatized model had failed and that the county had to take direct responsibility for a function that is, at its core, a government responsibility.
The financial structure of the sheriff’s new program is also worth noting. The Mobile County Commission approved up to $1.6 million in startup funding, with ongoing costs around $340,000 per year split with the city of Mobile. The program is supported in part by fees paid by defendants, similar to the way the private companies were paid, but the program also benefits from the fact that the sheriff’s deputies who monitor the equipment can respond directly to violations, can make arrests when warranted, and can coordinate with other law enforcement agencies in real time. That kind of integrated response is one of the main arguments for sheriff-run monitoring programs, and it has been a feature of similar in-house programs in counties across the country.
The transition itself has not been entirely smooth. By late February 2025, dozens of defendants had been transferred to the sheriff’s program, but some remained with Pegasus, prompting warnings from judges that continued non-compliance would result in bond revocation. The slow pace of the transition reflects the logistical complexity of moving an entire population of monitored defendants from one system to another, including the need to install new equipment, transfer data, and ensure that defendants understand the new rules they are operating under. Presiding Circuit Judge Wesley Pipes’ order to switch defendants from Pegasus to the sheriff’s program was a key moment in the transition, because it gave the sheriff’s office the authority to make the change mandatory rather than voluntary.
The broader ethical question raised by the case is one that has surfaced in jurisdictions across the country. When local officials, including law enforcement officers, are allowed to run private businesses that contract with the same courts, the same prosecutors, and the same pretrial services systems that they are supposed to serve impartially, the result is a structural conflict that is difficult to manage even when the individual actors are acting in good faith. The Alabama Ethics Act, like the ethics laws in many other states, is designed to address those conflicts by requiring disclosure, by prohibiting certain categories of outside employment, and by giving the relevant ethics commission the authority to investigate and to refer matters for prosecution. The Pegasus case shows what can happen when those rules are not enforced until after the conflicts have been allowed to fester for years.
The lessons from the case are not limited to Mobile County. Other jurisdictions that have relied on private pretrial monitoring have faced similar issues, and several have moved to bring the function in-house for many of the same reasons that Mobile did. The shift toward sheriff-run programs reflects a broader recognition that pretrial supervision is a core government function, that it has direct implications for public safety and for the integrity of the criminal justice system, and that it cannot be left entirely to private contractors whose financial interests may not align with the public interest. The Pegasus case is a particularly clear example of what can go wrong when that lesson is not learned in time, and of what can be done to correct the problem once it becomes clear that the existing model is not working.