"I will take pleasure in suing you personally RANDY for all your remarks you made about us," said Richter in a newsgroup message. "I hope your company is ready to stand behind you. They will lose a lot more than your remarks will ever profit you," he added.
Meanwhile, Richter continued his public shenanigans aimed at getting under the skin of anti-spammers. In January, Shiksaa noticed that Richter had somehow managed to get himself listed at an online gallery of top spam fighters. Richter had apparently duped the site's operator into including his photograph among those of scores of anti-spammers.
"Paging Snotty Scotty Richter," wrote Shiksaa in a message to Nanae, "you're a spamming slime ball and not an anti-spammer."
By February 2002, Richter's SaveRealBig was in big trouble, thanks to smothering blacklists and a shortage of ISPs willing to carry his web sites. In a change of strategy, Richter decided to try a more conciliatory tone with anti-spammers in general and Shiksaa in particular. He announced in a message to Nanae that his company was going to "reconfirm" its list of thirteen million email addresses as part of an effort to clean up its practices.
Richter said the process would involve sending a message to the entire list asking recipients to confirm their interest in future mailings from his new company, OptinRealBig. To give the reconfirmation effort legitimacy, Richter said he wanted to retain the services of "a reputable person to oversee this process...so that there are no questions about us doing anything wrong."
A few days later, Richter followed up with a message specifically addressed to Shiksaa, pleading with her to put the past behind her.
"I hope that you will not chase around our new sites, as we are doing what you have wanted us to do for some time...life is much too short for games and I would much rather work with the Anti Spam groups than against them," he wrote.[3]
But Shiksaa wasn't buying. She pointed out that he had recently registered the domain Spam-Stopper.org under his father's name.
"Here's a novel way to stop spam, Snotty...stop spamming!" Shiksaa said.
Then she posted the Internet address of Goodman & Richter, the San Diego law firm where Richter's father was a partner. Shiksaa noted that, according to a profile at the site, Steven Richter had one son.
"Poor Mr. Richter only had one loser son. That must really rankle," she wrote.
"I am old enough to never make fun of your family, but I could stoop to your level if you want me to," was Richter's reply. "Let me know if you want to be professional or not. I can play with you either way."
Shiksaa backed off at that point. Then a few days later, she received an instant message from a stranger using the screen name EZBulkMail4U.[4]
"Leave Richter alone. He's trying to do the RIGHT THING."
"Go to hell, spammer," she replied.
"You people don't know who ur messin with."
"And who might you be?" asked Shiksaa.
"I won't tell you that, sorry. But I'd be careful if I was you. That's a warning."
"Careful of what, pray tell?" she asked.
"Someone will get in trouble over this thing," said EZBulkMail4U, and then he signed off.
Shiksaa wasn't intimidated by the warning from EZBulkMail4U and went right back to tangling with Richter on Nanae. One day in the middle of March, newsgroup regulars were treated to some especially heated banter between the two. At the time, spam fighters had been discussing the belated announcement by MindShare that it had hired Kelly Molloy Thompson as well as another former MAPS director named Peter Popovich to enforce its anti-spam policies. Some anti-spammers argued that the continuing flow of spam from MindShare's Postmaster General service proved that the former MAPS employees had been co-opted.
Suddenly, Richter piped up with an offer to hire Shiksaa as his company's email abuse officer.
"I would give you what ever you wanted to run our AUP [acceptable use policy] and would give you full control. I just think you're too scared to take the challenge," said Richter.[5]
Shiksaa suggested he save himself the money and download the AUP templates available for free from Spamhaus.org.
"I'm sure there are people who are willing to help you as long as you pay their price," Shiksaa said. "I don't like you, Snotty, and my life is far too busy to waste a second on someone whom I know firsthand is a liar and a vicious little worm."
Richter simply replied, " I love you, Shika Poo."
Shiksaa contemplated his comment for a moment.
"Sad thing is, Snotty, you're telling the truth. You want me, but I always promised my dad I'd never date outside my species."
* * *
[1] Shiksaa published a log file of this conversation with Richter at her site, Chickenboner.com.
[2] Richter published the email from Thompson on Nanae in a March 16, 2002, posting to Nanae.
[3] Richter posted this comment to Nanae on February 9, 2002.
[4] On February 10, 2002, Shiksaa published an excerpt from this exchange with EZBulkMail4U on Nanae.
[5] Richter's offer to Shiksaa appeared in a March 17, 2002, note on Nanae.
Hawke Goes Home to Rhode Island
Frigid air cascaded through the open windows of Davis Hawke's new apartment in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The temperature outside that night in January 2002 dipped into the low twenties. It was only marginally warmer inside the unheated bedroom on the top floor of the triple-decker at 40 Crescent Road. But Hawke slept soundly on a mattress on the floor, covered by just a thin blanket.
Since leaving the South that fall, Hawke had become obsessed with his health. He was a strict vegan, eating no animal products whatsoever and relying primarily on edamame soybeans for his protein. He consumed no refined sugar and completely abstained from alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs. Sleeping in a well-ventilated bedroom was part of that regimen. Unfortunately, Pawtucket, a mill town just outside Providence, had some of the worst air Hawke had breathed in years. Ozone levels in Rhode Island regularly exceeded limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state was vexed with one of the nation's highest rates of childhood asthma.
But the cold night air was good preparation for a goal Hawke had of spending a week without a tent or other equipment on Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, renowned for its brutal weather. To harden himself for the challenge, he had been reading about a boot camp run by the U.S. Air Force called SERE, which stood for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. SERE taught students how to survive in all types of weather conditions and captivity situations, and many went on to become members of elite forces such as the Army's Special Operations group.
Aside from the mattress and a table with his computer, there were few furnishings in Hawke's new apartment. He had unloaded most of his belongings the previous autumn in northern Vermont. When he and Patricia decided to get out of Tennessee, they had picked Vermont for its rugged terrain and its concealed-carry gun law. (The state allowed citizens to own and carry guns without a permit.) On a reconnaissance trip to Vermont, they had found a nice cabin to rent in the hills outside Lyndonville. The woods and hiking trails were perfect for raising their wolves, and yet the town was right on I-91.
But after a few months, Hawke became restless. He had been living with Patricia for nearly three years. When they first met he had liked that she was a loner and wasn't preoccupied with her appearance. But lately she had become too antisocial for him and was putting on weight. The whole thing just started to feel way too much like marriage. So, Hawke left Patricia behind when he moved to Rhode Island. He intended to continue supporting her and to visit her regularly in Vermont, but he needed his freedom.
Hawke chose Pawtucket because of Mauricio Ruiz. He lived with his parents just ten minutes away in North Providence and was commuting to classes at nearby Bryant College in North Smithfield. The clincher was when Hawke made a few calls about rentals the following winter and found the apartment on Crescent Road, which was not only cheap but didn't require a credit check.
&nb
sp; Moving to Pawtucket was a homecoming in many ways. Hawke was now just thirty miles from his birthplace in Newport and equidistant from Lakeville, Massachusetts, where he spent his early childhood, and Westwood, Massachusetts, the home of his 80-year-old grandparents. Unbeknownst to them, he had used his laptop computer and their phone line to mail several batches of spam for diet pills and Banned CDs. On Christmas Eve 2001, he even spammed some ads for Ginsu knives from their house. (Hawke also kept one of his money stashes in a hollowed out book he hid on a bookshelf in their house.)[6]
The bonus in Pawtucket was Paola Castaneda, his old high school girlfriend. They had lost contact during college, but in Tennessee he found out she was still single and living in Pawtucket. He looked her up during a visit to the area in the summer of 2001, and they hit it off again.
And Hawke's apprentice, Brad Bournival, was now just a couple hours away in southern New Hampshire. Since their initial tutoring session, Hawke and Bournival had been in frequent contact by email and telephone. Then, in early February 2002 they decided to hang out together at a chess tournament in Lowell, Massachusetts.
With his 2200 USCF rating, Bournival played in the tournament's open division, while Hawke swallowed his pride and entered the Under-2100 group using his pseudonym Walter Smith. Bournival managed a draw with Paschall in the first round and then drew again in his next pairing. After Hawke split his two matches, both he and Bournival decided to withdraw from the tournament. It would have been a relatively unmemorable competition, except for something Hawke did the first night.
From his room in a Lowell hotel, Hawke sent off a batch of spam, forging the routing headers on the messages so they appeared to come from the operators of the Internet Chess Club site. (He listed [email protected] in the From and Return-Path headers of the spams.) Earlier that week, Hawke had been kicked off the ICC after the club received several complaints that he had developed a tendency to cheat and verbally abuse other players, especially when losing. When Hawke didn't heed warnings, the club's webmaster permanently banned him from the service. As a result, the club would have to deal with the thousands of error messages and complaints generated by Hawke's spam.[7]
It was Hawke's maiden run for an herbal Viagra alternative called V-Force. He wasn't convinced V-Force would sell well, but he decided it was the perfect product to embarrass the prudish operators of the ICC. His ads said that the thirty-dollar bottle of pills would "turbo-boost" a man's sex drive. The yohimbe, zinc, and other ingredients in V-Force were guaranteed to counter impotency, dramatically increase the user's "staying power," magnify his orgasms, "and even add some extra length and girth" to his penis.
Hawke didn't hide the fact that QuikSilver was responsible for the Joe-job. At the bottom of each spam was listed the Manchester, New Hampshire post office box he and Bournival had opened the previous October. But the ICC simply shrugged off the Joe-job and was content just to have Hawke off its membership roll.
Hawke's experiment with V-Force produced some sales, but he never followed up with repeat mailings. He was distracted at the time by some infrastructure work he was doing for QuikSilver. By the spring of 2002, Hawke's Pawtucket apartment remained austere, but he had furnished it with a T1 line from AT&T. The high-speed connection enabled him to set up several computers in his parlor, each with its own zippy link to the Internet. That way, he could split his mailing list into several chunks and let different computers simultaneously churn away at it. Meanwhile, there would still be plenty of network bandwidth to carry out other tasks such as uploading files to his web sites or just surfing the Internet. (To prevent anti-spammers from discovering his T1 and the twenty-five IP addresses that AT&T had allocated to him, Hawke always used Send-Safe, which concealed the true origin of his spams.)
But Hawke's Crescent Road apartment wasn't all business. It also became the site of numerous poker games involving Ruiz and Michael Clark, a high school kid from Pawtucket who was one of the top scholastic chess players in the state. After Hawke discovered the tennis courts in Slater Park, he befriended several tennis players, including a Lebanese immigrant named Loay Samhoun. Ruiz's girlfriend Liliana also often hung out with them and became pals with Paola. And Ruiz's cousin, Mike Torres, was a regular member of Hawke's poker posse as well.
After six lonely years living in the South, Hawke suddenly found himself at the center of an active social circle. It didn't strike him as especially ironic that so many of his new cadre were nonwhite or that he had picked up their rap-music-inspired slang.
Hawke had always taken a philosophical view of race. To him, the races were not equal; each had its strengths and weaknesses, with whites ending up with the balance in their favor. But that didn't mean Hawke couldn't allow that, for example, a black might be brilliant—or a poor athlete for that matter.
Bottom line: Hawke no longer cared about which race would survive. All that mattered was how he would survive.[8]
Hawke's views on race had been tempered by 2002, but they still hadn't caught up with those held by his great, great grandfather one hundred years before. Both Hawke (Andrew Britt Greenbaum) and his father (Hyman Andrew Greenbaum) had been named after ancestor Andrew Sledd, who was a civil-rights advocate at the turn of the century.
As a professor of Latin at Emory University in Georgia, Sledd published a controversial 1902 magazine article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Negro: Another View."[9] The 32-year-old Sledd had written the piece after a train on which he was traveling stopped en route so that passengers could observe a lynching that was taking place beside the tracks.
Sledd's article described how the crowd, "mad with the terrible blood lust that wild beasts know," strung up a black man named Sam Hose and delighted in "the indescribable and sickening torture and writhing of a fellow human being." Sledd's article denounced lynching and said that while blacks may not be equal, that was merely the result of segregation and slavery and could be undone "by process of development."
After the article appeared, Sledd was branded a race traitor. An effigy of him was burned in the streets of Covington, the Georgia town where the lynching took place. The board of Emory soon demanded his resignation and for decades did its best to hush up what came to be known as the "Sledd Affair."[10]
Sledd was eventually celebrated in the North as a courageous prophet against prejudice, and he triumphantly returned to Emory a dozen years later as a professor of theology. But budget problems at the University led to severe faculty salary cuts, forcing him to live his final years close to poverty. Sledd died destitute at the age of sixty-nine, with his family forced to sell his furniture and books to pay off his debts.
For Davis Hawke, the ending of Sledd's story would have pained him the most. But for some reason, Hawke's parents never told him of his namesake ancestor's civil-rights activism.
* * *
[6] Recipients of the spams posted copies to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup. In a May 2004 interview Hawke confirmed to me that he sent them. Bournival revealed to me in a June 2004 interview that Hawke kept money hidden in a book at his grandparents' house.
[7] Recipients of the spam posted copies to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup. During a June 2004 interview over AOL Instant Messenger, Hawke confirmed sending them as a Joe-job against the Internet Chess Club. In a May 2004 interview, Martin Grund, one of the operators of the ICC, recounted the site's problems with Hawke and the Joe-job.
[8] Hawke made this statement to me in a March 29, 2004, conversation over AOL Instant Messenger.
[9] Sledd, Andrew. "The Negro: Another View," The Atlantic Monthly 90 (July 1902): 65-73.
[10] Matthews, Terry. "The Emergence of a Prophet: Andrew Sledd and the 'Sledd Affair' of 1902." Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1990.
Hoffman Catches Tom Cowles
After a brief stakeout, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations finally decided to make its move. In the late morning of Thursday, March 7, 2002, five unmarked cars pulled up outside 1
133 Corporate Drive, a low-slung white building in an upscale corporate park in suburban Toledo. A dozen agents from the BCI and Federal Bureau of Investigation piled out, some with guns drawn. They were looking for Thomas Carlton Cowles, president of Empire Towers Corporation.
Karen Hoffmann watched it all go down from her car across the street. She couldn't clearly make out what was happening, but she snapped a few photographs anyway as the BCI agents swarmed the building's front entrance. Earlier that morning the officer in charge had called to give her a heads-up that the raid was scheduled for eleven. It was her reward for assisting law enforcement in investigating and locating Cowles.
Hoffmann was the one who first discovered that Cowles had moved into the 1133 Corporate Drive location. A few months back she had spotted the address in some Internet domains registered to Cowles. She visited the building several times to take photographs, which she posted at "As the Spamhaus Turns," her web site dedicated to Cowles and his spam operation. One of the photos showed the front door of the office, which had a paper sign taped to it that read "Leverage Communications," the name of one of Cowles's companies. In subsequent reconnaissance trips, she had also spotted a dark green convertible parked out front. Hoffmann had been on the lookout for the vehicle after a former Empire Towers employee described Cowles's car to her.
Hoffman first got involved in the case in December, on an invitation from the Wood County (Ohio) sheriff's department. A deputy there had been assigned the task of serving Cowles with the court order from authorities in Broward County, Florida, where Cowles was charged for the August 2001 third-degree grand theft of approximately $16,000 worth of computer equipment allegedly owned by his former business partner, Eddy Marin.
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