"amportal stop" using crontab

We periodically stop and restart our servers to do maintenance, backups etc.

To put our Asterisk system in that cycle, I was testing the following as root:

where /root/crontab_submit.data contains:

where /root/cron_job_1 contains:

date >> /root/cron.log /usr/sbin/amportal stop date >> /root/cron.log

But 1:52pm came and went and asterisk is still running.
Yet the 2 date and time stamps are there in the /root/cron.log file.

And if I do “/usr/sbin/amportal stop” on the command line then it stops immediately.

What am I doing wrong?
Why can’t I stop amportal via crontab?