"He thought he could pull a fast one...in flagrant disregard of the court order," Kleinberg told the jury.
Vale had, in fact, stopped spamming for apricot seeds and other Laetrile-related products. He stuck primarily to mass-emailing ads for other herbal products, such as willow flower for urination and prostate problems, coral calcium for stronger bones, and noni seed juice for "cellular rejuvenating enzymes." And the ordering page at Vale's ChristianBrothers.com web site no longer listed Laetrile products as of May 2000.
But according to Kleinberg, the top of Vale's web page advised visitors to call a toll-free number "for questions about apricot seeds." When Food and Drug Administration (FDA) undercover investigators phoned the number to inquire about purchasing Laetrile, they were informed that Christian Brothers no longer handled such products. Potential customers were referred instead to a firm named Praise Distributing based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Kleinberg told the courtroom that records on file with the Arizona Secretary of State showed that Jason Vale was behind Praise Distributing. In December 1999, he had registered the corporate name Christian Nutriments, listing himself as president. A few months later, he had changed the company's name to Praise Distributing and listed his grandmother as president. Digging further, investigators discovered that the address on file for Praise was simply a mailbox service that forwarded to Vale's home in New York. Records showed that Vale had paid for the mailbox with his credit card.
In October 2000, Kleinberg revealed, investigators from the FDA and the U.S. Postal Service decided to crack Vale's shell corporation. Armed with a search warrant, they conducted a surprise inspection of Vale's Queens, New York, home.
"The agents literally caught the defendant with his hand in the apricot seed jar," Kleinberg said to the jury.
In the basement of the house, inspectors found 15,000 Laetrile tablets, enough to treat one person for 200 years. Plastic tubs in the basement also stored over 100,000 apricot seeds, a quantity that would last a single person forty-two years. Investigators also found more than 2,000 vials of injectable B17. Other damning evidence included outgoing packages, all bearing Praise's Arizona return address, as well as invoices from suppliers addressed to Praise. While searching the basement, FDA agents used a cell phone to dial Praise's toll-free number. To no one's surprise, a telephone on the desk in the basement rang when they called.
Armed with the evidence, prosecutors had no trouble convincing Judge Gleeson to make his preliminary injunction against Christian Brothers permanent. In November 2000, he permanently banned Vale from directly or indirectly promoting or selling Laetrile.
Kleinberg took a step toward the jury box. "But did the defendant keep his word this second time around?" he asked, gesturing toward Vale. After a pause, Kleinberg answered his own question. "Not a chance," he said.
Then Kleinberg explained how Vale, with the help of his family, quickly made plans to resume selling Laetrile under a new front, Cyto International. In January 2001, one of Vale's employees phoned Woodland Nut, the California wholesaler that had supplied Christian Brothers with apricot seeds. Vale's employee ordered 500 pounds of the seeds on behalf of Cyto, with instructions for Woodland to ship them to a tire and auto center in Queens. A few days later, once the order was en route, the employee phoned the trucking company and changed the delivery address to the camera shop run by Vale's father in Corona, New York.
"As any fan of dime store novels will tell you," said Kleinberg, "you don't change taxicabs in the middle of a trip unless you want to make sure that you are not being followed."
According to Kleinberg, Vale used the same trick to order even larger shipments of apricot seeds in February and March 2001—all in an effort to throw investigators off his path.
"That, ladies and gentlemen, is a crime. It's called contempt of court," said Kleinberg as he concluded his opening statement.
When it was Vale's turn, Judge Gleeson provided him with plenty of gentle coaching. But Vale still had trouble mounting much of a defense. He seemed lost while cross-examining government witnesses and had no real witnesses of his own. Vale had hoped to get testimony from a friend who had purchased seeds from him in the past. But the friend failed to show up at the court to testify, forcing Vale to rest his defense. The one witness he did call to the stand was a friend from church whom he had spotted in the courtroom. After the surprised acquaintance was sworn in, Vale struggled to come up with questions and soon abandoned his intended character witness.
In his closing argument, Vale was clearly unprepared for the verbal challenge. Using an overhead projector, he attempted to persuade jurors that the language of the court's injunction was ambiguous. But Vale's own bizarre syntax often stood in his way, such as when he tried to criticize the government's inspection of his home and its failure to send him a letter warning that he was in possible violation of the injunction:
If anyone is in contempt of this agreement, it is not me. I am supposed to follow this impossible-to-understand part, and yet, the plain stuff that is alleged to them is, you know, send a letter, or say you have to stop or do it—an inspection. They don't have to call up. They don't have to give a call and say they are coming; they can just come and show up. All this is...another thing that they never did; they never came over and destroyed the product. I believe...I don't know. They never came over and did this but they never did any of the parts of their injunction.
Vale wound up his summation with a plea to jurors to "decide justice" and to understand that he did not "knowingly and willfully" disobey the law.
"I pray you find me innocent so that I can go back and do the things the right way and continue with my life and not go to jail for fifteen...whatever. Thank you," Vale concluded.
On the morning of July 21, 2003, as the jury was sequestered to begin the second day of its deliberations, Kleinberg informed Judge Gleeson and the other counsel of a startling development. Someone outside the courthouse had been handing out pamphlets claiming that jurors had a Constitutional right to ignore the government's evidence under a process known as jury nullification. The pamphlets implored jurors instead to "vote their conscience."
Judge Gleeson was livid. "Does anybody know anything about this?" he demanded.
Vale immediately piped up. "I didn't do it."
"Do you know who did it?" asked the judge.
"Someone I know did it," Vale admitted. "They handed out First Amendment literature, your honor. It doesn't say my name on it."
Judge Gleeson glared at Vale. "There's nothing First Amendment about it. It's an inappropriate attempt to influence a verdict in a criminal case ... if anybody in the courtroom does that, I'm going to direct the marshals to arrest you on the spot. It's an outrage," he said.
At a loss about how to handle the unusual situation, the judge decided to query jury members about whether they had seen the handout. Three jurors admitted they had been given what appeared to be slightly different copies of the pamphlet. The judge reminded them individually of their duty to heed the instructions he gave at the start of the trial, and to decide the facts in accordance with the law.
"It's a bunch of baloney," Judge Gleeson said of the pamphlet to one of the jurors who had a copy in her handbag. "Can you continue to perform your function as a juror?" he asked.
"I suppose I can," she replied.
Apparently satisfied with her answer, the judge sent the juror back to the jury room. Then he turned to Vale's standby counsel.
"Why shouldn't I remand Mr. Vale?" the judge asked.
The attorney replied that he hadn't had an opportunity to gather information about the incident, and he requested more time before the judge made a decision to take Vale into custody. Judge Gleeson agreed to give Vale's standby counsel until 5 p.m. that day to prepare an explanation for what the judge said was "a naked effort to improperly influence a jury."
But the court never got a chance to hear more about Vale's involvement in the leafleting effort. At 4 p.m., the foreperson sen
t the judge a note saying the jury had reached a verdict. Vale was found guilty on all three counts of criminal contempt.
After the judge dismissed the jury, Vale's attorney requested that Vale be allowed to remain free pending his sentencing, perhaps under some form of house arrest. In response, Kleinberg forcefully argued that Vale should be detained.
According to Kleinberg, "the events of today sort of stand alone. They are in a category beyond anything I've seen. And maybe my experience is limited, but the defendant is responsible for just total and complete disregard for this court's orders...it makes him both a flight risk and a danger to the community."
At that point, Vale's attorney tried a new line of argument: his client was beset by mental problems that affected his conduct during the trial.
"I would be able to come forward with certain psychiatric evidence to show that, in fact, there may have been some aspects of this that were affected by diminished capacity," said the attorney. "There's medical conditions going on here...there's a variety of conditions that would soften what's going on."
"I can't trust you," said the judge to Vale. "This very case is about contempt. It's about a refusal, knowingly and willingly, to abide by a court order." With that, the judge set Vale's sentencing for the third week of October 2003. Then he ordered marshals to take Vale into custody.
Vale was booked into the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, the same facility that held tickling-fetish spammer David D'Amato in 2001. While awaiting his sentencing, Vale was informed that the court had determined he defrauded the U.S. government by claiming he qualified for Legal Aid. In September 2003, Vale was ordered to reimburse the government $31,590 for the costs of his appointed defense attorney.
Vale's October 2003 sentencing date would come and go. As the result of numerous postponements, Vale would remain behind bars awaiting sentencing for nearly twelve months. It wasn't until June 2004 that he would learn his fate.
* * *
[11] Based on a trial transcript obtained from the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York.
[12] On the first day of the trial, as jurors were about to be brought into the courtroom, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kleinberg spotted a Bible on the table in front of Vale. Kleinberg quickly brought it to the judge's attention.
"I would ask that the jury not be allowed to see it," said Kleinberg, the government's lead prosecutor on the case.
Judge Gleeson asked Vale if he had any response.
"I heard what he said. I'm completely against that," said Vale.
"You need the Bible, sir?" asked the judge.
"I need the Bible," answered Vale.
"You can have it, but I would like to strip the proceedings of any overt trappings of religion, and I'd like you to place it in a spot that is not visible to the jury," instructed the judge.
Vale put his bible on a chair beside him, and the government began a nearly weeklong task of laying out its case against Vale.
The Time-Travel Spammer
In May 2003, millions of Internet users got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invaded their email in-boxes. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills, or weight-loss products, an email arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.[13]
The message offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel, including an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor."
Dave Hill, a software programmer in Iowa, normally deleted a couple dozen junk emails every day with hardly a glance. But when he received the time-travel solicitation, he hit the reply button instead. Hill sent the spammer a message saying he could get him what he wanted. With a little deft photo-editing, Hill created a fake online store with all the sci-fi items sought by the would-be time-traveler. In July, Hill even shipped an old hard-drive motor disguised as a "warp generator" to a Massachusetts address provided by the spammer, who said his name was Bob White.
When White gratefully acknowledged receipt of the parts a few days later and earnestly asked for help obtaining others, Hill decided to end the stunt. He had expected White to tell him that it was all a joke. But instead White seemed totally serious about his quest for time travel and in need of psychological help.
Hill was not the first Internet user to be drawn into the strange world of the mysterious man some refer to as the time-travel spammer. Since 2001, people have posed as aliens, time-travel equipment vendors, and intergalactic policemen—anything to feed the imagination of the strange spam's sender. The odd interplay began in November 2001, when someone calling himself Robby sent millions of emails with the subject line, "Time Travelers PLEASE HELP."
The three-page, single-spaced message began, "Here is a brief description of my life," and went on to describe how the author had been drugged and poisoned as a child by Denise, a woman his divorced father had dated.
"I and also my Mom made my dad break up with her...My dad never believed me about her or what she did, or the side effects I had from her poisonings. I am 21 now, and since then my life has been obviously completely tampered with. I believe she is the link," he wrote. Robby's message then described how, one morning after taking a shower, he noticed UFOs in the sky and suddenly saw a flash of white light.
"It seemed as if I rotated slightly with this tremendous force on my body and everything went blank for a second. The air was warm and dry for that quick second. I heard this click which sounded like a camera. And then it was over," he wrote. When Robby went to wake up his mother and tell her what had happened, she pointed out that it was 12:30 in the morning, and he should go back to bed.
"This was all real, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that time travel is possible for me. I believe it happened as a sign that I am meant for time travel as an only option to correct what has been done to my life," wrote Robby. He concluded his message with an appeal to readers.
"I believe that God is leading me to a time traveler who can help me with the type of time travel needed. Please I am dying! The sooner we can get started the better," he wrote.
Some Internet users speculated on discussion lists that Robby was actually a sci-fi author in search of material. Others suggested the time-travel messages were just a cunning way for spammers to harvest working email addresses. The more common assumption was that the unidentified author of the emails was just out for fun. To play along, a few pranksters even created fake eBay auctions in response to the messages.
But one person who received Robby's message found something haunting about the strange cry for help. Brendan Milburn, a member of the New York jazz-rock trio GrooveLily, penned a tune about it. "Rewind" was released on the band's 2003 album, Are We There Yet. It goes like this:
Calling all aliens
And time-traveling superfriends
Secretive scientists with secretive client lists
Calling all aliens
I know you've got this practical invention
To move a human through the fourth dimension
I need to get my hands on the remote control of my life
And press rewind...
It wasn't until August of 2003 that fans of the time-travel spams learned they were actually the work of a 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, man named James R. Todino.
"Robby," it turned out, was dead serious about his desire to rewind time. He lived at home with his mother, who was divorced from his father, an electrician living in nearby Billerica. Robby's psychological problems—he had been diagnosed with dissociative disorder and mild schizophrenia—prevented him from holding down most jobs, unless they involved working at home on the computer.
His parents had long ago given up trying to argue with Robby about time travel. But they worried that he wasn't very street-smart and was easily manipulated. Some people had tried to take advantage of his gu
llibility and had sold him phony equipment. Others strung him along with long telephone calls and emails that only exacerbated his torment.
But although Todino's time-travel messages made him appear fragile and unstable, he was a remarkably competent and hardheaded spammer. Years before his first time-travel emails, Todino had been sending out garden-variety spams for everything from "free" government grants to "detective" software. Todino had discovered the junk email business just prior to graduating from Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in 1999, where he studied welding and culinary arts. In March 1999, he mass-emailed a "chain mail" scam that attempted to trick naïve recipients into sending him five dollars. Later that year, Todino registered a handful of web sites under the company name RT Marketing and began spamming for a variety of products.
By November 2000, Todino was on Shiksaa's radar. After his web sites were repeatedly shut down for spamming, he broadcast some emails searching for someone to sell him a "bulk friendly" T1 line. Posing as a potential supplier, Shiksaa contacted him over AOL Instant Messenger.
"You need a T1?" she asked.
"Yes."
"OK, how much can you pay? What is your company? I know a guy, but he'll want to know what you want it for," she said.
"My company is RT Marketing...I am willing to pay triple as much as a regular T1 connection if you can keep me up," said Todino.
"I don't understand. What do you mean?"
"Well, basically, I will not be mailing through my T1 connection. I just need the T1 to make my website accessible to the Internet. It will generate complaints, but they will not violate your terms of service," he explained.
Todino gave Shiksaa his real name and phone number, after which she said her friend "Ronnie" would be in touch.
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