SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of four members of the Titanic Crips Society gang in Weber County who claimed that Ogden police wiretaps used to gather evidence against them were illegal.

In three opinions issued Thursday, the court ruled that the Ogden Police Department wiretaps complied with requirements of the Utah Interception of Communications Act that say investigators must demonstrate the necessity of phone taps.

Police wrote in a 180-page warrant affidavit that phone taps were required to determine who the gang’s “shot callers” were and to gather evidence sufficient to break up or hamstring the gang. Defense attorneys argued that police failed to demonstrate they had exhausted other means, and one attorney contended that officers intentionally withheld or misstated some details in the wiretap requests.

Brothers Sadat and Tamer Hebeishy, Jaron Michael Sadler and Brock Adam Pickett were convicted in 2nd District Court of engaging in a pattern of illegal activity after Ogden police said they noticed an increase in criminal activity by the gang in 2015, including shootings, assaults and other violent crimes.

Police said they had used surveillance, controlled drug buys, electronic surveillance, searches and trash can contents sifting, but they concluded those methods were not sufficient for success against a gang with a management structure like TCS’s.

Ogden police were working on the investigation as part of the FBI’s Safe Streets Gang Unit Task Force.

Police said they believed the gang operated with a structure of “big homies and little homies,” with the Hebeishy brothers calling the shots, the “big homies,” and directing crimes to be committed by younger, often juvenile, gang members. The structure protected the Hebeishys from major prosecutions unless wiretap evidence gathering could be used, police said.

After several months of tapping the brothers’ phones, police and Weber County prosecutors had enough evidence to file the criminal-enterprise charges. Defense attorneys unsuccessfully fought to have the wiretap evidence suppressed before trial, but Judge Ernie Jones upheld the taps, saying police met the law’s requirements and explained adequately why other methods were insufficient to conclude the desired investigation.

The Court of Appeals said the warrant affidavit explained why wiretaps were warranted for various reasons, including that the relatively small size of the gang made it impossible to use confidential informants and because the Hebeishys were adroitly shielding themselves behind subordinate gang members.

The court also said Jones correctly ruled against the evidence suppression motions on the grounds that defense attorneys did not overcome the sufficiency of the affidavit and that they failed to provide evidence showing that police allegedly withheld or slanted key information in the affidavit.

The judges further referred to statutory intent language in which the Utah Legislature said that because “organized criminals make extensive use of wire and oral communications in their criminal activities, the interception of such communications to obtain evidence of the commission of crimes or to prevent their commission is an indispensable aid to law enforcement and the administration of justice.”

While there is no appeal precedent in the state regarding the wiretap challenges, the Court of Appeals said it was relying on well-established federal case law that provides backing for the Ogden wiretaps.

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