"No problem...Walter," said Ruiz.
Ruiz invited Hawke to join him in the skittles room down the hall, where players hung out and challenged each other in informal matches. Hawke agreed to meet him there after he finished registering.
Hawke liked to think of himself as imperturbable, but bumping into Ruiz had knocked him a bit off balance. Hawke had known Ruiz since 1991, when they met at a chess tournament in Providence, Ruiz's hometown. Hawke was just thirteen at the time, and Ruiz was eleven. But the younger boy had already established a higher USCF rating, and earlier that year had won the national sixth-grade chess championship. Still, Hawke managed to finish the tournament in twelfth place, one place ahead of Ruiz. Over the next several years the two occasionally crossed paths at tournaments in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Mauricio's dad, like Hawke's parents, sometimes entered tournaments with his son. Rolando Ruiz played in the same division as Hy and Peggy Greenbaum, and the adults struck up a casual friendship.
Hawke didn't face Ruiz directly in tournament play until 1995. By then, Mauricio was clearly the stronger player, having established a USCF rating of around 2100, while Hawke, playing as Britt Greenbaum, had hit a plateau in the 1900s. Ruiz defeated Greenbaum in the first round and went on to place third overall, with Britt coming in tenth. They hadn't seen each other since that match.
When Hawke caught up with him in the skittles room, Ruiz was just about to sit down to a five-minute blitz match against a kid who couldn't have been older than fourteen. As Ruiz was setting up his pieces, he told Hawke he had been attending Bryant College, a business school in Rhode Island. It was boring and he wanted to drop out, said Ruiz.
Hawke replied that he had quit college after his junior year and had gone into business for himself. But before Hawke had a chance to provide the details, he was interrupted. Ruiz loudly hailed a high-school-age kid who had just walked into the room.
"Brad Bournival, meet my old buddy Walter."
Bournival, a pudgy, brown-haired 17-year-old from New Hampshire, shook hands with Hawke. Hawke asked him if he wanted to play a quick five-minute match for money.
"How much money?" asked Bournival.
"Five bucks a game," suggested Hawke.
"Nah, I think I'll pass," he said.
After someone offered to put up the money for Bournival, he relented. As Hawke and Bournival were arranging themselves at a table and setting their time clocks, Hawke scrutinized the younger player.
"What's your rating, by the way?"
Bournival hesitated. "Nineteen hundred."
"Good," said Hawke. "Me, too."
They ended up splitting two matches, with Hawke taking the first and Bournival beating him in the second game. Hawke's matches with Bournival in the skittles room would be the best he'd play in Philadelphia. After taking a draw in his first match, Hawke was beaten by his next two opponents and decided to withdraw. His play gave him a 215th-place finish out of 226 entrants in the open division. Ruiz fared better, coming in 123rd. As it turned out, Bournival had lied to Hawke about his rating, which was actually over 2100. But Bournival played above himself at the tournament. He upset several stronger players—including William Mark Paschall, who had a 2500 rating—and finished 90th overall.
Hawke and Bournival would cross paths again a few weeks later. In August of 2001, Hawke returned to the Northeast to play in the U.S. Open tournament in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It was the closest he had been to his parent's house in over two years. But he didn't even tell them he was in town. Instead, Hawke surprised his grandparents on his mother's side by calling them at the last minute and asking if he could crash there. They lived in Westwood and said he was welcome any time he was in the area. (Hawke's grandfather, a vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had always seemed more amused than upset about Hawke's neo-Nazi period.)
The Framingham event was held in a Sheraton decorated on the outside to look like a castle. Matches took place at long tables in large conference rooms lit by massive chandeliers. Hawke, playing as Walter Smith, drew a player rated 1400 in the first round and quickly dispatched him. Bournival similarly beat his first opponent, who had just a 1600 rating. The two met afterwards in the skittles room. This time, Hawke challenged Bournival to a rematch of their five-minute game at twenty dollars per game.
Bournival laughed nervously. "Are you rich or something?"
"As a matter of fact, I am."
With a flourish, Hawke pulled out his wallet and opened it wide so Bournival could see the contents. A thick collection of hundred-dollar bills was stuffed into it, easily totaling $5,000.
"Where did you get so much money?"
"I'm a spammer," Hawke said proudly.
Bournival just stared at him. "What the hell is a spammer?"
Hawke was amazed that anyone alive in the year 2001 hadn't heard of spam. He explained how he mailed out ads for diet pills and other products to email addresses all over the Internet, and a percentage of people placed orders. He told Bournival he worked only a couple days each week and spent the rest of the time playing chess or just hanging out. He even had a girlfriend who lived with him and looked after the business when he was away at chess tournaments.
Bournival listened intently as Hawke, whom he still knew as Walter Smith, described his business. The two couldn't have been more different. Hawke's long, dark hair was tied in a ponytail down his back, and his face was covered with a two-day-old beard. He wore a black T-shirt and a silver skull on a chain around his neck. In contrast, Bournival was dressed in a striped shirt with his hair neatly parted and gelled. He didn't regale Hawke with a description of his own life, besides saying he would be a senior at West High in Manchester and had been playing chess for just three years. Hawke assumed Bournival came from a boring, middle-class background, and Bournival had no desire to correct that impression. He figured Hawke wouldn't want to hear about how his parents divorced when he was ten. Or how he now lived with his half-brother and his mother, who was a crack cocaine user, along with her physically abusive black boyfriend, in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a three-story walk-up owned by Bournival's grandmother. Or how his mom kept several Pekinese dogs in the apartment, none of which was entirely housebroken.
Yet somehow amidst that mayhem in Manchester, Bournival had taught himself to play chess. He discovered chess as a freshman in high school during a 1999 visit to the games section of the Yahoo! site. He immediately liked the game, so he joined the school's chess team. A few months later, Bournival surprised many by winning the New Hampshire high school chess championship. Soon after that, people were paying Bournival ten dollars an hour for lessons. Chess was about the only thing that kept him from dropping out of school.
Time ran out before Hawke and Bournival got around to playing their skittles match. As they headed out for the next round, Bournival said he wanted to hear more about QuikSilver Enterprises. Hawke suggested a poker game that night with Mauricio Ruiz and anyone else willing to put up some cash. Bournival balked, never having played poker for money before. But he agreed anyway. When he left the skittles room, Bournival had the uncomfortable yet exhilarating feeling that Hawke could get him to do just about anything.[5]
As it turned out, Bournival somehow managed to win ten dollars at the poker table that evening. Even better, he convinced Hawke to tutor him about spamming in exchange for half of what he earned from spam. The two traded email addresses, and Hawke said he would be contacting Bournival with instructions on how to get started.
In all other respects, it had been a mediocre tournament for Bournival. He beat the players he should have but lost his rematch with Paschall, finishing 150th out of 480 players. Hawke, competing as Smith, played solidly as well, but pulled off no surprises en route to his 270th-place finish.
But with his new spam income, Bournival would have all the money he needed to attend tournaments anywhere in the country. Even though he had managed a 3.8 GPA his junior year, Bournival depart
ed Framingham knowing he would not return to West High that fall.
"You can call me Johnny," Hawke told him as they said goodbye.
* * *
[3] During a May 10, 2004, interview, Brad Bournival first described Hawke's method of hiding his money. Hawke confirmed the technique in an interview later that day.
[4] The following conversation was first described to me in the May 10, 2004, interview with Bournival. Ruiz confirmed the details in a May 28, 2004, interview over AOL Instant Messenger.
[5] Bournival recalled this feeling to me in the May 10, 2004, interview.
9/11
In the spam wars, the best defense is often a good offense. That's why Davis Hawke began spiking his spams with intimidating legalese in September 2000. At the bottom of the ads he placed a notice informing recipients that QuikSilver's spam was sent "in compliance with federal guidelines governing the transmission of unsolicited commercial email."
Hawke also added a link to a page at SpamLaws.com containing the text of the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 1999, also known as H.R. 3113. He closed the spams with his favorite excerpt from the Act: "Unsolicited commercial electronic mail can be an important mechanism through which businesses advertise and attract customers in the online environment."
Never mind that H.R. 3113 had died in the U.S. Senate in July of 2000. And Congress had so far failed to approve any other federal laws regulating junk email. Hawke's disclaimer did the trick: it kept would-be anti-spammers at bay. (Hawke wasn't the only junk emailer using the technique. In fact, at one point in 2001, the operator of SpamLaws.com, law professor David E. Sorkin, put up a notice explaining that he was not responsible for disclaimers included in spam emails that linked to his site.)
Before it languished in the Senate, H.R. 3113 had received support from two powerful opposing groups: the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and a grassroots organization known as the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. CAUCE was led by a number of respected anti-spam veterans and boasted over 20,000 members in 2000. Thanks to efforts by CAUCE on behalf of the bill's author, Heather Wilson, and cosponsors Gary Miller and Gene Green, H.R. 3113 breezed through the House by a vote of 427-1 on July 18.
But Senators were partial to S.R. 2542, a companion bill from their Senate colleagues, and they never took a vote on Wilson's legislation. But they also failed to summon much enthusiasm for S.R. 2542. Entitled the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2000 (CAN-SPAM), the Senate bill never made it out of the Senate's commerce committee. As a result, the 106th session of Congress concluded without a federal junk-email law.
Hawke continued citing H.R. 3113 in his disclaimer well into 2001. By then, Wilson had introduced a new version of her spam bill. Like its predecessor, H.R. 718 proposed that junk emailers be required to conspicuously label their messages as spam. The new bill similarly called for spammers to include their correct street and email addresses in their ads and prohibited them from falsifying the routing information in their messages' headers. H.R. 718 also made it a crime for spammers to continue sending ads to anyone who asked to be removed from their mailing lists.
But this time, Wilson's Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act faced a new hurdle getting through the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Lobbyists from the DMA as well as the banking industry cajoled committee members to remove a provision of H.R. 718 that would have enabled businesses, schools, or Internet service providers to post a "Spam Free Zone" sign on their mail servers. Under the original language, marketers who disregarded the notice and spammed anyway would be subject to stiff fines. But that language was gone from the version of the bill approved by the committee in March 2001. What's more, the updated version required that all mail server operators install spam-filtering software or else lose their right to sue violators of the law.
Many junk email fighters who had supported Wilson's original bill suddenly withdrew their backing. CAUCE condemned the revised legislation as a "costly, messy pro-spam bill," and predicted it would result in more spam rather than less. In a statement, CAUCE said it "remains hopeful that the unfortunate changes to the bill can yet be corrected, and we remain very appreciative of Rep. Heather Wilson's efforts on behalf of consumers."[6]
Despite CAUCE's objections, the revised legislation, which now had over one hundred cosponsors, moved forward and was scheduled for debate on the House floor in the second week of September. Wilson's goal of getting a federal spam law on the books, albeit a flawed one by some standards, once again seemed within reach.
Then a group of hijackers rammed two passenger jetliners into New York's World Trade Center. Terrorists commandeered a third jet and struck the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while another plane was crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
In an instant, controlling the junk email problem became a trivial pursuit, even for many anti-spammers. On September 11, operators of several spam block lists announced they were temporarily suspending operations in order to allow email to flow unimpeded during rescue efforts. Among them was Spamhaus operator Steve Linford, who decided that the Spamhaus Block List, which he had launched just weeks before, would go on a hiatus until further notice.
"From what we understand there are no telephone communications in or out of Manhattan but Internet communications are still working ... Therefore this is not an appropriate moment for any blacklist which may be blocking IPs of hosts in Manhattan to be operating," said Linford in a notice on Nanae.
But for some spammers and fraud artists, the 9/11 attacks on America presented a golden opportunity. In some cases, spammers sent phony condolences that were just tasteless ways to drive traffic to their shopping sites. In others, spammers looked to capitalize on the fear of additional terrorist attacks. Email ads for survival kits and anthrax treatments were all the rage in the weeks following September 11.
"The U.S. is under serious threats of Biological, Chemical and Nuclear attacks!" shouted one spam for fifty-dollar gas masks. "Don't wait until it is too late! Protect yourself and your family today!" advised the ad. A few months before, the company hawking the gas masks had been advertising credit card merchant accounts.
But more sinister ads appeared as well. On September 12, an email message bearing the subject line "Help for the Red Cross and the victims of our Nation's tragedy" began arriving in email in-boxes. The spam was sent through a computer in Belgium and solicited donations to the "Express Relief Fund" and the "Victims Survivor Fund." Recipients were directed to hand over their credit card numbers at a makeshift site. A week before, the same site had been selling what it called "Viagra for Women." Around mid-September, the site disappeared completely.
In some cases, the motives of opportunistic spammers were harder to judge. Using the Postmaster General system, a Denver, Colorado, company called SaveRealBig.com deluged the Internet with messages on the evening of September 11. The spams were identified as coming from the company's 29-year-old CEO, Scott Richter. They had the subject line "Help us support our nation" and invited recipients to purchase large nylon U.S. flags for twenty dollars at the SaveRealBig.com site. The messages said "all available proceeds" would be donated to "emergency and relief efforts."
Anti-spammers were immediately suspicious. Spamhaus's Steve Linford posted a copy of SaveRealBig.com's spam on Nanae and suggested it was a scam designed to put money in Richter's pockets. In recent weeks, Richter's company had been using Postmaster General to send ads for products ranging from diet pills to Ginsu knives to pagers. The company was also sending out spams for an adult entertainment site Richter owned called Ejackolate.com. Suddenly those offerings were no longer listed on the SaveRealBig.com home page. In their place appeared information on ordering U.S. flags.
To fend off skeptics, Richter updated the page a few days later with a photo of himself making a donation at the Denver chapter of the American Red Cross. A note from Richter claimed that he had given $20,000 dollars to the relief agency. On a message board he had set up to tak
e comments about the fund-raising effort, Richter posted this introduction:
We have nothing to hide. I feel that our efforts are very sincere and genuine. If any of you have anything negative to say about SaveRealBig.com and its present actions, then please show us what you have done to make a difference in this time of sadness.
Spews didn't wait around for proof that Richter was squeaky clean. Later that month, a large block of Internet addresses, including those used by SaveRealBig.com and several other Richter sites, showed up on the Spews blacklist. In response, Richter's ISP eventually cut off service to the sites, forcing him to line up new hosting.
After the hassles and the suspicion, Richter vowed he'd never again do online charity fundraising. But even if he didn't reap any big profits from selling over 10,000 flags, he did acquire a fresh list of "opt-in" email addresses. (The privacy policy at SaveRealBig.com made it clear that the company reserved the right to use information collected from customers "for the purpose of targeted marketing opportunities.")
Richter was on his way to building what would soon become a list of over forty-five million addresses, enabling him to send out tens of millions of spams every day. But by 2003, Richter's spamming would earn him a top-three spot on Spamhaus's Rokso and a lawsuit from Microsoft and the State of New York.
But in the wake of 9/11, it was a flurry of messages from Ohio-based spammer Tom Cowles that caused the biggest uproar from anti-spammers. On September 12, hundreds of thousands of the bizarre emails started hitting in-boxes. All bore Internet addresses registered to Cowles's Leverage Communications and carried the provocative subject line, "How you can help WTC victims. (BTW: Anti-spammers Support Bin Laden!)"
The top third of the message listed the addresses of web sites operated by the Red Cross and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the bottom third was a collection of already well-publicized phone numbers set up for relatives of potential victims by airlines and other entities involved in the attacks. Sandwiched between the two sections was a single-spaced, 250-word rant against spam opponents.
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