Filing Details Jail Chicken Smuggle Scheme

OCTOBER 17--A court filing has put some meat on the bones of the case against the corrections officer just arrested for allegedly smuggling chicken wings into a Texas lockup.

According to court papers filed yesterday, a Travis County jail official was monitoring an inmate’s phone calls “on an unrelated incident,” when the man told a relative that “a corrections officer had provided him with chicken wings after he sent the officer money on Cash App.”

Specifically, the inmate said that the officer had “agreed to supply him with habanero mango chicken wings from Wingstop” in return for $50.

A subsequent review of jail surveillance video showed a food delivery arriving at the Travis County Correctional Complex, a 2300-inmate campus in suburban Austin. After the paper bag was run through an X-ray scanner, Amos Nyanway, 25, “picks up the bag and eats some of the wings himself.”

Nyanway, who was hired last year, then “takes several chicken wings” from the bag, places them on paper towels, and “hands them to an inmate, and the inmate walks away with the chicken wings and eats them.”

Court filings do not identify the inmate or why an officer with the jail’s “Security Threat Intelligence Unit” was monitoring his calls.

Investigators have obtained a search warrant for Cash App data to determine “the extent of Nyanway’s involvement in bringing in contraband" and to "assist in identifying other incidents.”

Pictured at left, Nyanway was busted Tuesday on a misdemeanor contraband charge. Citing Texas Penal Code 38.114, an arrest affidavit notes that, “chicken wings are not provided or authorized to be provided to inmates.”

Nyanway has been fired. (2 pages)