Shiksaa was a big believer in spammus interruptus. When new junk emailers appeared on her radar screen—by sending her spam or getting mentioned in anti-spam newsgroups—she made a point of paying them a preemptive online visit. If the spammer had an America Online account, she would add the screen name to her buddy list and wait to be notified that he or she was online. Then Shiksaa would gently let the newbie know that anti-spammers like her would be hounding them every step of the way. She wanted to divest them of any illusions that junk emailing was an easy way to make a buck. Better to nip a chickenboner in the bud than to try to reform a full-blown, Rokso-grade spam operation.

But it didn’t work out quite that way with Scott Richter, president of Colorado-based SaveRealBig, Inc. In July 2001, months before Richter gained the attention of other anti-spammers for his post-9/11 U.S.A. flag ads, Shiksaa added his AOL screen name to her buddy list. When Richter signed on one Saturday evening, she was all over him.

“Hey Scott. I hear you’re spamming. Why?”^[1]

Richter responded that she must have confused him with Chris Smith, a Minnesota spammer who used the nickname Rizler. But Shiksaa refused to back down.

“Help me out here Scott. One of my friends said you spammed him. I was simply asking if that was true.”

“Not that I know of,” said Richter.

To help jog his memory, Shiksaa sent Richter the Internet address of several newsgroup postings where copies of his spams had appeared. The messages advertised pagers from a company controlled by Richter. At least one of the spam runs had apparently been relayed through a mail server in Russia.

A couple of minutes went by, and Richter still hadn’t responded. Shiksaa assumed he was reading the newsgroup link she had sent. While she was waiting, the AOL “You’ve Got Mail” voice sounded, so she checked her in-box. Waiting for her there was a message from one of America Online’s administrators; it was a notice that the company had just received a report that she was violating AOL’s terms of service. The message cited an excerpt from her conversation with Richter.

Before Shiksaa had a chance to explain, AOL’s Member Services department suspended her account for spamming.

Shiksaa managed to straighten out AOL over the phone and convinced the company to reinstate her account. But the incident taught her an important lesson about Richter: he knew how to work the system.

Shiksaa would later learn that Richter was the son of a certified public accountant and tax lawyer in San Diego, California. Richter saw less of his dad, Steven S. Richter, after age eleven, when his parents divorced and his dad moved out. But Richter had acquired his father’s interest in making and holding onto money.

Unlike his father, Scott didn’t go to college and get a business degree. Instead, he spent his time after high school running RAM Amusement Investments, Inc., a vending-machine business he incorporated in 1991 with his mother as corporate secretary. That business frequently took him into bars and restaurants, and he eventually opened his own chain of 50s-style restaurants around Denver known as Great Scott’s Eatery, as well as a nightspot called the Colorado Sports Café.

Spending so much time around good food did a number on Richter’s weight. At one point the six-foot-one Richter pushed the scales at nearly 300 pounds. So when the Internet beckoned Richter to try his hand at online entrepreneurship in late 2000, spamming diet pills seemed a natural choice. He even featured himself in a before-and-after photo at a web site for Inferno, the ephedra-based supplement he was selling.

Deep in debt at the time as the result of stock market losses, Richter initially could afford to hire only small-time spammers to deliver his Inferno ads, which listed the Colorado Sports Café’s street address as SaveRealBig’s corporate headquarters. But as the cash flow picked up, Richter turned to MindShare’s Postmaster General system for most of his mailing.

Shiksaa had noticed complaints on Nanae about SaveRealBig spams emanating from MindShare’s service. In late August, she posted a note on the newsgroup observing that Richter apparently was using “dirty” mailing lists—containing addresses of people who hadn’t opted in to receive them—and that Postmaster General didn’t seem to be aware of the problem.

In early November 2001, more glaring proof appeared that Richter’s lists weren’t of the highest quality. Using the Postmaster General system, SaveRealBig had emailed ads for six-dollar cell-phone booster antennas to an Internet discussion list dedicated to the Debian computer operating system. The ads carried the subject line “Vital Emergency Strategy” and played on fears that new terrorist attacks would bring the sorts of communications breakdowns that plagued World Trade Center rescue efforts: “Worried that you or your loved ones won’t be able to summon help in a crisis? The Amazing ezBooster is the solution!”

By the end of the month, Richter’s ads had caught the attention of America Online. The big online service warned MindShare that, due to member complaints, it intended to remove SaveRealBig from the “white list” of bulk emailers allowed to send messages to AOL members. In response, MindShare’s abuse manager (and former MAPS employee) Kelly Molloy Thompson contacted Richter by email with an ultimatum: “You, as a list owner, will need to submit documentation that the AOL addresses on your list were in fact collected through an opt-in process.”^[2]

According to Thompson, Richter’s documentation minimally needed to include the date and time the user opted in, as well as his or her Internet protocol address. Failure to produce such evidence within three days, she said, would result in SaveRealBig’s messages “being silently discarded” by AOL’s spam filters.

Richter was unable to produce the proof by AOL’s deadline. Like many email marketers, he had built his mailing lists, which had grown to over ten million addresses at the time, largely through what are known as coregistration deals. Under such arrangements, operators of web services sell or trade their customer lists to other marketers. In some cases, customers haven’t actually given permission for their information to be shared, yet unscrupulous marketers nonetheless pass off their lists as “opt in.” In other instances, sites hungry for sales leads essentially trick visitors into granting permission through confusing fine print and numerous checkboxes. Then there are the lists sold as “co-reg” leads which actually contain a blend of data, some of it harvested from the Internet. Not surprisingly, spam complaints from coregistration lists can be common.

(Under pressure from ISPs such as AOL for complete documentation of coregistration data, some fraudulent bulk emailers turned to software programs that could dummy up “proof” that their addresses were not harvested from the Internet or otherwise obtained without the permission of customers.)

Cut off from mailing to AOL through Postmaster General, Richter began focusing his ads on general Internet addresses. But even then, his mailing lists continued to get him—and MindShare—into trouble. In early December, spam from Richter arrived in the email in-box of anti-spammer Morely Dotes. The message was sent through the PostMaster General service and carried the subject line, “Why should men have all the fun?” It promoted a product called Vigel, which it claimed was “a topical gel that increases feminine sexual pleasure and excitement.” According to the SaveRealBig web page advertised in the spam, Vigel contained menthol and the amino acid L-arganine and was “guaranteed to improve your sex-life or your money back!”

Morely Dotes forwarded a copy of the spam to MindShare’s Internet service provider with a recommendation that it block all traffic from the company, which he called “a spam-for-hire outfit, with no legitimate users.”

At the time, Richter publicly relished the bad-boy image he was gaining among anti-spammers. When several of Richter’s SaveRealBig sites were kicked off San Francisco ISP Hurricane Electric in December 2001, Richter posted a note to Nanae that celebrated the action.

“The more attention we get the more money we make. We are going to be big. REALBIG, the name we use says it all ... we are legit and getting stronger by the day. The more people talk about us the more companies find us. COMPLAINERS=$$$$$$,” wrote Richter.

A few days later, as spam fighters were discussing Richter’s listing on the Spews.org blacklist, he jumped into the fray: “I love the public’s eye and the attention. Keep chatting; I LOVE EVERY MINUTE OF IT. MAKE ME FAMOUS.”

But contrary to his public posturing, Richter was privately seething over the attention his spams had generated. In early January 2002, he phoned management at Peer 1 Network, an ISP based in British Columbia. Rob Mitzel, the ISP’s abuse coordinator, had posted what Richter considered defamatory comments on Nanae about SaveRealBig. When Richter threatened to sue the company, Mitzel published a public apology on Nanae.

“On behalf of Peer 1 Network and myself, I would like to apologize to Scott Richter, Richter Enterprises, and his various SaveRealBig.com domains, for any slight I may have caused him,” began Mitzel’s mea culpa. (He concluded with a postscript that stated, “I am not doing this on my own volition. This is being required of me by my company.”)

The incident followed a similar lawsuit threat from Richter against Communitech, a Missouri ISP that found itself on the Spews blacklist in September 2001 for hosting Richter’s sites. In December 2001, Richter targeted Communitech employee Randy Rostie after he announced the ISP had kicked Richter off its service.

“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.”

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.

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.

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 1133 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.

During a search for clues on Tom Cowles’s whereabouts, the sheriff’s deputy ran across Hoffmann’s site dedicated to the man and his spamming operation. At the time, Hoffmann had recently updated the site with a series of photos she had taken of Cowles’s residence in the woods beside a river in rural Bowling Green. She had also created separate sections dedicated to his relatives, including 24-year-old sister Shannon; his father, Thomas Herman Cowles; and his brother, Alfred, who was serving time in an Ohio prison for rape.

Even with the detailed dossier Hoffmann had compiled, the Wood County sheriff’s office couldn’t get its hands on Cowles to serve him with the court papers. So it bumped the matter up to the fugitive task force run by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations. In reviewing the case, BCI investigators suspected Cowles might also be involved in something bigger, perhaps an international crime syndicate that trafficked in stolen computers. Undercover agents watched the building at 1133 Corporate Drive for signs of shipments coming or going, but nothing suspicious had happened. Even Cowles’s convertible seldom left the lot.

Cowles blamed Hoffmann and her web site for galvanizing anti-spammers into attacking him. Besides the usual hate mail and annoying phone calls, he was subject to particularly bizarre telephone messages from a kook who phoned nearly every day, threatening to kill him. Cowles’s 20-year-old wife Dasha was so freaked out by the calls that she refused to be in the house alone when he worked late, which was most nights. So Dasha had begun spending evenings with him in the office, and Cowles had put in a futon so they could crash there if necessary.

That Thursday morning, Cowles was awakened by knocking on the interior door to his personal office. His sister Shannon, who was Empire Towers’s secretary, stuck her head in the doorway.

“Tom, the FBI is here!”^[11]

“O.K., hold on,” he groaned.

Cowles clambered out of bed and grabbed his pants off a nearby file cabinet. Dasha sat up in bed, pulling the covers up to her neck.

“Tom, what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Don’t worry. I’ll deal with them.”

Cowles put on his shirt and then sat down on the floor to pull on his socks and shoes. Suddenly, the door opened again, and a team of BCI agents barged in. Dasha screamed as three officers shoved Cowles to the floor and handcuffed him while others stood by, guns drawn.

Outside, Karen Hoffmann was waiting impatiently in her car for the culmination of more than a year of researching Empire Towers: the sight of Cowles being led out of his office in handcuffs. Instead, she saw a lone BCI agent leave the building and head toward her. After she rolled down her vehicle’s window, the agent in charge asked whether she had a list of the computer equipment allegedly stolen by Cowles from Marin.

“There’s a couple truck loads of computer gear in there,” the agent said.

Amazingly, the BCI had neglected to obtain an inventory from prosecutors in Broward County prior to the raid; such a tally would be necessary in procuring a search warrant. The agent asked Hoffmann, whom the BCI considered the expert on Thomas Cowles, if she could contact Marin and get him to fax over a list of the stolen gear pronto.

“Right now?” asked Hoffmann.

“Right now,” he replied.

Hoffmann reluctantly left the scene and raced home. From her office computer, she fired off emails to Kim and Eddy Marin. (Eddy had been released from prison in January 2002.) To her relief, moments later she received a fax from the Marins with a list of their missing equipment. Hoffmann sped back to Corporate Drive, only to find that Cowles had already been transported to the Wood County jail. A few BCI agents were still milling about, waiting to execute the search warrant when it arrived. When one of them invited Hoffmann to BCI’s downtown Toledo headquarters to help write up the warrant, Hoffmann was happy to oblige.

After she got the news from Hoffmann, Kim Marin sent an instant message to Shiksaa.

“Guess who just got arrested,” she asked.

Shiksaa was away from her computer at the time and didn’t respond, so Marin left her a note.

“They nailed the piece of shit and they are waiting for a search warrant for the pig’s warehouse to try and recover my property. Talk to you later. Karen can give you more scoop since she is there,” said Marin.

That evening, Hoffmann wrote up an account of the day’s events and posted it to her web site. She reported that authorities said they found Cowles “crouched behind a file cabinet,” and that the “mattress” in the room suggested Cowles had been “camping out in the office” in order to elude arrest.^[12]

At the top of her web page about the arrest, Hoffmann posted a copy of the booking photo taken of Cowles that afternoon by the Wood County Sheriff. Cowles was wearing prison garb; he was unshaved and his shoulder-length hair was unkempt. Cowles’s eyes looked red and swollen, prompting Hoffmann to compose this description of her feelings about the events of the day:

Cowles was hashing out an entirely different set of questions in his cell at the Wood County Justice Center. He was astounded that state attorneys in Florida had decided to file criminal charges against him. As he saw it, the case was a simple civil dispute between former business partners over the ownership of five computers. Why were prosecutors in both Florida and Ohio dedicating thousands of dollars to such a silly case? And why were they doing it all on behalf of a convicted money launderer and cocaine dealer?

Cowles partly blamed Hoffmann for his situation. He believed she had cajoled authorities into pursuing the charges against him, probably under the pretense that it was a great way to incapacitate one of the Internet’s biggest spammers. But most of all, he blamed Marin.

Cowles ended up spending four nights in the pokey, thanks to a bureaucratic screw up that delayed his arraignment until Monday morning. So as not to miss the event, Hoffmann and a friend arrived at the Bowling Green Municipal Courthouse twenty minutes early. Hoffmann had learned that prisoners didn’t appear in person and instead were arraigned over closed-circuit television, so she took a seat in the courtroom’s third row near the TV.

While they waited for the start of the hearing, Hoffmann and her friend noticed a young woman walk into the courtroom and head right toward them. Hoffmann hadn’t seen the woman before, but she immediately knew it was Cowles’s Russian wife, Dasha.

Dasha strode to the front row, turned around to face Hoffmann, and pulled something out of her purse. There was a flash of light as she snapped Hoffmann’s photo with a disposable camera.

“You have to leave,” ordered Dasha.^[13]

Hoffmann was stunned. “No, we don’t. We have a right to be here,” she replied, looking around for the bailiff or anyone else in authority who could back her up. But the courtroom was empty.

Her pretty face contorted with anger, Dasha pointed at Hoffmann. “We are filing a stalking complaint against you. And trespassing. You can’t harass us like this.”

In researching Cowles, Hoffmann had learned that Dasha kept a tank of eight piranhas in her house. Seeing Dasha in person for the first time, Hoffmann understood the younger woman’s taste in pets.

“I’m not stalking anybody, and I’m staying right here,” Hoffmann replied.

Dasha scowled at Hoffmann before turning away and walking briskly out of the courtroom. Moments later, she returned with a half-dozen people, including Cowles’s attorney, father, and sister. Without making eye contact with Hoffmann, they filed into the row ahead of her on the other side of the aisle and took their seats.

The hearing lasted only a few minutes. Cowles appeared on the TV monitor, wearing his prison uniform and looking nearly as disheveled as he had in his arrest photo.

After brief statements by Cowles’s attorney and the county prosecutor, the judge set the bond at $5,000 and ordered Cowles to deal with the grand theft charges in Florida before March 29, when the judge would conduct Cowles’s extradition hearing.

As Cowles’s entourage left the courtroom and gathered in a conference room outside, Hoffmann and her friend remained behind for a few minutes, hoping to avoid another confrontation. Once safely back home, she wrote up an account of the hearing and published it on her web site, along with a photograph she had taken outside the Wood County jail. (Cowles posted bond and was released from the jail later that day.)

Hoffmann heard nothing more regarding the threatened stalking complaint. The only hint she had that Cowles was back in action came a few days later, when Shiksaa announced on Nanae an unusual discovery. According to Shiksaa, Cowles had recently assigned some very familiar names to two of his computer servers. The machines now bore the names Shiksaa.leveragecomm.com and Karen.leveragecomm.com.

Despite this virtual nod to her, Cowles didn’t even glance at Hoffmann during his next court appearance. At the March 29 extradition hearing, Hoffmann and her friend decided to keep a lower profile and sat in the back of the courtroom. Cowles entered with Dasha and his attorney, and they all took seats a few rows up. Cowles, dressed in a suit, looked frighteningly thin to Hoffmann. His skin had an unhealthy pallor, and his long hair desperately needed washing.

When Cowles’s case was called, he and his lawyer rose and stood before the judge, who demanded to know why Cowles hadn’t been to Florida to face the charges there. Cowles’s attorney assured the judge that his client fully intended to resolve the matter but had run into obstacles lining up legal representation in Florida. The attorney asked the court to grant a continuance to allow Cowles to continue working to resolve the Broward County charges.

The judge was visibly annoyed by the request. He turned directly to Cowles.

“You knew what the ground rules were. If you had been to Florida, this would have gone away,” said the judge. Then he summarily announced that he was denying the request for a continuance and revoking Cowles’s bond.^[14]

“Bailiff, please take Mr. Cowles into custody,” he ordered.

Astounded by the sudden turn of events, Hoffmann watched as Cowles emptied his pockets at the bailiff’s desk. She was caught further off guard when Dasha stood up and started snapping photos of Hoffmann and her friend. Dasha’s camera flashed repeatedly, causing Hoffmann’s friend to call out, “Lady, stop taking my picture!”

The commotion caught the attention of everyone in the packed courtroom. Embarrassed at the spectacle Dasha was creating, Hoffmann and her friend rose and quickly made their way out of the building, with Dasha snapping a few final shots in the hallway for good measure. Hoffmann contemplated getting her own camera from her car and returning to exchange fire with Dasha, but she abstained. To date, Hoffman had restricted herself to taking photographs of Cowles’s property but not of him or his relatives. She considered it rude to photograph someone without permission. But Dasha, evidencing what Hoffmann considered a typical spammer’s mentality, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

In an update to her web site that evening, Hoffmann described the bizarre hearing. She reported that Cowles was probably facing an extended stay in the Wood County jail unless Broward County authorities expedited his case.

“Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, when Florida’s plans for Tommy are revealed,” she wrote in concluding her account of the events.

As it turned out, Cowles spent four more nights in jail before being released April 2. His attorney arranged a hearing for him the next morning in Florida’s Broward County Courthouse. He pled not guilty, posted a one-thousand-dollar cash bond, and took the red-eye back to Ohio. Then he began what would eventually become a two-year wait for trial.

With Cowles finally in the grip of the long arm of the law, Hoffmann lost some of her inspiration. She continued to be Nanae’s expert on Empire Towers and kept a watchful eye on the company and its leader, but Hoffmann didn’t provide the promised updates to her site. In fact, she didn’t touch it again until early August of 2002, when an Associated Press story about spam appeared in newspapers and on Internet news sites all over the world.

The article, the second in a three-part series on spam, discussed how “relentless anti-spam vigilantes” were hounding Cowles and other bulk emailers. According to the AP, Cowles admitted to counter measures such as obfuscating the addresses of his web sites. For years, Hoffmann had been trying to get the media interested in exposing Cowles, and finally it seemed that her little web site had paid off. But then the article abruptly shifted gears:

The article didn’t mention Hoffmann by name, but anyone who plugged “Tom Cowles” into a search engine could easily figure it out. (Her site appeared near the top of search results.)

Hoffmann was enraged. The article made her look like a nutcase. She had never followed Dasha or Cowles or threatened them in any way, with the exception of exposing their spam operation. Nor had anyone in law enforcement ever contacted her about any stalking complaints. In fact, state and local authorities had turned to her for assistance in tracking down and arresting Cowles. Why, she wondered, hadn’t the AP mentioned that crucial fact?

Hoffmann emailed a detailed critique to the AP reporter and posted a copy on her site and on Nanae. She noted that he hadn’t given her a chance to defend herself. (The reporter had attempted to contact her by email prior to publishing the article. But when she replied three days later with her phone number, the reporter emailed her back to say he was “pretty much done with the story,” and he never phoned her for an interview.)

Anti-spammers on Nanae sympathized with Hoffmann, but the consensus was that she had no legal recourse. Hoffmann contented herself with knowing that the article had indirectly caused Cowles’s true nature to be revealed. In a note to Nanae, she reported that traffic to her site had suddenly gone through the roof, the result of web surfers searching for more information about Cowles.

Hoffmann’s note also drew a reply from Scott Richter, who had been following the Nanae discussion. In June, Richter’s spamming had earned him a place on the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations. But he wasn’t mentioned in the AP story.

“I was wondering if you sell banner space for advertising on your site?” Richter joked with Hoffmann.

“LOL. Yes,” she replied. “Send cheesecake.”