A ringing telephone roused Shiksaa from her sleep one night in late December 2002. According to her bedside clock, it was four in the morning. But she fumbled for the phone and answered, worried that it might wake her 80-year-old father who lived with her and was quite frail.

“Hello?” she mumbled into the phone.^[1]

“Is this Susan?” asked the unfamiliar male voice on the other end.

“Yes, it is,” she replied, at once relieved and annoyed.

“Hey, it’s Bill Waggoner.”

Shiksaa’s grogginess instantly disappeared. “How the hell did you get this number?” she demanded. It was an unlisted number that she gave out to very few people, none of whom were spammers.

“Someone just IM’ed it to me. I wanted to see if it really was your number,” replied Waggoner, a Las Vegas-based junk emailer who had been on the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (Rokso) since it began in 2000.

Shiksaa sat up in bed. “You idiot. Do you realize it’s four in the morning? Don’t ever call this number again, or I’ll call the police,” she snarled. Then she hung up. She tried to get back to sleep, but she was struggling to understand how the unlisted number had gotten into circulation. Only one explanation made sense. She had recently phoned Scott Richter, head of OptInRealBig LLC, using the line. He must have captured the number with caller ID.

The next day, Shiksaa contacted SBC and got a new unlisted phone number. A customer service representative recommended that she file a police report about the call. Later, she tracked down Waggoner over AIM and confronted him.

“I know who gave you my phone number. Scott Richter himself,” she said.

“Yeah, so what’s that have to do with anything?” replied Waggoner. “So I called your ass at four a.m. So?”^[2]

Shiksaa had been double-crossed. Since early 2002, she and Richter had conversed frequently over AIM. At one point, Richter became her underground informant, passing along dirt he had discovered about other spammers. In May 2002, he even gave her the login information to his account at the Bulk Barn spammers club. (“Merry Christmas” he said in handing her his username and password.) In exchange, Shiksaa invited him to hang out in the #Spews Internet relay chat (IRC) channel, where she and other anti-spammers conversed about their battles with junk email.

Despite her new rapport with Richter, Shiksaa remained cautious. While he seemed truly interested in going legit, Richter still had one foot on the dark side of spamming. In July 2002, Shiksaa discovered that Richter was in cahoots with Florida junk emailer Eddy Marin, whom she considered one of the most egregious spammers on Rokso. Richter hadn’t disclosed the deal to Shiksaa. Instead, it came out after anti-spammers stumbled upon an open directory on a web server operated by Marin’s company, OptIn Services. The server exposed several megabytes of confidential business information, including invoices and correspondence.

In quickly shuffling through some of Marin’s files, Shiksaa found email from Dustin Parker, the 16-year-old head of technology for Richter’s Colorado-based OptInRealBig.com. In the message, Parker was making arrangements with Marin’s brother, Denny, to host Bodyimprover.com, one of Richter’s diet pill sites.

When she confronted him about it, Richter had explained to Shiksaa that he was forced to make deals with the likes of Eddy Marin because no other Internet service providers would do business with him. Richter blamed Spews and Spamhaus blacklists for his inability to line up other providers.

A month later, in August of 2002, Richter posted the latest in a series of requests to be delisted from Spews. In a conciliatory message to anti-spammers on Nanae, Richter said that his history as a junk emailer might make it hard for him to get off spam blacklists.

“I consider using the Internet a privilege and do not take it for granted,” wrote Richter. He added a tip of the hat to Shiksaa for helping him clean up his act.

“Susan has been very generous in giving me her time and assistance. Even though she doesn’t have to, she does all of this as a volunteer to me,” he said.

Shiksaa acknowledged Richter’s comment by saying she was always happy to try to help someone who was trying to help himself.

“Good luck, Scott,” she concluded.

Later that August, Richter had tipped off Shiksaa that Bill Waggoner was trying to figure out her true identity. After getting a promise from Shiksaa that she wouldn’t divulge the information, Richter cut and pasted portions of an AIM conversation he was having at the same time with Waggoner.

“I found out something about Shiksaa. Really interesting,” Waggoner told Richter. According to Waggoner, he had discovered that Shiksaa worked as a reporter for CNN.

“Got her social security number,” Waggoner boasted.

“Want me to ask him any thing else, before I pass out laughing?” Richter asked Shiksaa.

“Yes,” she replied. “Ask him if he has a thing for me like you do,” she said, inserting a smiley-face emoticon to show she was only kidding.

“I’m trying to be serious about this,” said Richter. Then he pasted another snippet of the log of his simultaneous conversation with Waggoner.

“If I sue, they are going to come here. Even Linford. I can sue him even if he’s in Finland,” Waggoner had told Richter, referring to Spamhaus’s London-based director Steve Linford, whom Waggoner appeared to believe was living in Finland.

Like a lot of the spammer intel Richter relayed to Shiksaa, the information about Waggoner was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Earlier that summer, Waggoner had contacted her over AIM and threatened to sue her if she didn’t remove his record from Rokso.

“I am researching you and all of the guys who run that right now, and I am close to finding out the goods on everyone. Before I take you guys down hard, I am trying to be polite,” Waggoner had said.

“Don’t threaten me, ass-wipe,” replied Shiksaa.

“It’s not a threat. I’ve already got investigators on your scene, finding your assets, etc.”

“You couldn’t find your ass if you had a search warrant, flashlight, and a road map,” said Shiksaa.

“You really think you’re dealing with a moron here, eh?” he asked. “Lady, this can be easy or hard.”

“Go away, Billy Bob,” was her response.

But Waggoner continued to press the issue.

“I am going to be driving your car, owning your house,” he said. “Shiksaa, take my record down and everything will be fine for you.”

Although she disliked having to cut off the lines of communication with spammers, Shiksaa had used AIM’s “block” feature to prevent Waggoner from contacting her further. Weeks went by, and he still didn’t deliver on his threat to sue her.

Meanwhile, Richter had some legal problems of his own. Unknown to anti-spammers, in August 2002 Richter had been charged by the Colorado attorney general with eight counts of theft. The charges resulted after Richter bought large supplies of stolen cigarettes and other hot items from a Denver undercover policeman between December 1999 and July 2001. Detectives believed that Richter and a business associate were involved in a fencing operation. Richter, who was still running the Colorado Sports Café at the time, claimed he intended to use the cigarettes in his vending machines. He made several trips into one of Denver’s grittiest neighborhoods in his Lexus sport-utility vehicle to make the buys.

On January 2, 2003, Richter pled guilty in Adam County District Court to a single count of conspiring to commit theft. He was sentenced to pay nearly $40,000 in restitution and was placed on probation for two years. The court also ordered Richter to perform forty hours of community service. The settlement went unpublicized at the time, but in an article that appeared in Denver’s Westword newspaper a year later, a detective with the city’s antifencing unit called Richter “one of the best crooks I know.” Richter claimed the episode was a clear case of entrapment.

Despite his legal problems, by the early spring of 2003, Richter appeared close to clawing his way out of spammer purgatory. It had been nearly six months since Richter’s email ads landed in spam traps set up by Spamhaus and many other junk email opponents. Under the guidelines for Rosko, Richter and OptInRealBig had almost been spam-free long enough to qualify for removal from the blacklist.

“We have seen nothing implicating your outfit directly in many months,” conceded spam fighter Adam Brower in a late-February 2003 posting to Nanae in response to Richter’s request that a block of his company’s Internet addresses be removed from the Spews blacklist.

“You’ve done a great job of restructuring your entire business model,” chimed Karen Hoffmann, referring to Richter’s efforts to send ads only to people who agreed to receive them. “Hang in there, Scott. Keep up the good work,” she added.

But Richter’s public plea on Nanae failed to convince the mysterious operators of Spews to take him off their blacklist. So Richter turned his attention to pressuring Shiksaa privately to change or expunge his Spamhaus Rokso record. Richter was especially incensed that his mother’s contact information had been added to his Rokso listing.

Shiksaa explained that Spamhaus avoided listing relatives unless they were involved in the spammer’s business. Shiksaa pointed out that the name and address of Richter’s mother had appeared in a couple of Richter’s corporate registrations, making her fair game. Junk emailers often listed relatives in their corporate documents and domain registrations to avoid detection when signing up for web hosting and other services.

Richter had all along denied that he was responsible for Waggoner getting her unlisted phone number. But in early March 2003, Richter proved he was willing to use her personal information as leverage. One evening he sent Shiksaa a teaser of an email. It arrived with the subject line “Quick Question” and appeared to be seeking her advice as an Internet sleuth:

Half an hour later, a follow-up message arrived from Richter. This one simply said, “All I have to go on is this,” and then listed the street address of her condominium in Stanton, California. Richter signed the message, “Thanks for assisting.”

In the nearly four years that Shiksaa had been a spam fighter, she had always tried to protect her address from all but the most trusted spam fighters. She had made arrangements to list Adam Brower’s contact information, not her own, in the registration record for her Chickenboner.com site. (She had originally used bogus contact information when she registered the site in 2000 but was forced to list valid information after spammers complained to the company hosting the site.) Similarly, in her Nanae postings, Shiksaa had never revealed so much as the town she lived in, although she made no secret of the fact that she was in southern California and even sometimes mentioned that she resided in Orange County.

The thought that Richter and other potentially vindictive spammers now had her home address was chilling. Fending off kooks by email, IM, and even telephone was something she had become quite adept at. But having them physically stalking her was not something she was prepared to face. Southern California was home to several notorious junk emailers, including some known for making threats of physical harm against anti-spammers. One of them, Rokso denizen Saied “Sam Al” Alzalzalah, lived about an hour north in Beverly Hills. Sam Al had repeatedly emailed violent threats to Spamhaus director Steve Linford. Once, Linford’s girlfriend had answered the phone when Sam Al called, and the spammer told her to get out of the house because he was coming to shoot her. Linford shrugged off the threats, but he was a guy living in England, thousands of miles away from Sam Al.

Adding to Shiksaa’s worries was her father, who was hospitalized in late January after fainting on a golf course. He was taken to a hospital emergency room, where doctors discovered he had an infection that required immediate treatment. He was home again after his hospital stay, but Shiksaa did not want him worrying about her safety. And yet she knew she should warn him to be extra vigilant now that their address was potentially in the hands of her enemies.

Shiksaa saw only one way out. On the morning of March 6, 2003, she contacted Richter over AIM.^[3]

“Scotty, you up?” she asked.

“Yes,” came his immediate response.

“My dad is still ill and he does not need to worry about me. I am composing a letter to Steve [Linford] and resigning. Not just Spamhaus, but spam fighting in general,” said Shiksaa.

At that moment, she was ready to hang up her LART if it would protect her father from harassment. But even as she typed the words to Richter, she knew he probably saw it as a bluff. Could she really walk away so suddenly from Nanae, Spamhaus, and the last four years of her life?

“If you believe in what you do, you should continue your fight,” said Richter. But, he added, if she truly intended to resign, she should first remove his mother’s personal information from Rokso.

“You can take that up with Steve,” she replied. Then she continued, “It’s ironic, since I really wanted to help you and Bill [Waggoner]. So, you won.”

Richter advised her to “only do what is right” in deciding whether to quit spam fighting and whether to leave his family information posted on Rokso.

Shiksaa repeated that she was not responsible for his Rokso record.

“Anyway,” she said, “I never wished you any ill will. But my dad is sick and I can’t have him upset.”

Richter became philosophical. “Susan, when you are on your death bed, you have two choices...” he began. Then Richter switched gears somewhat. “I believe in karma. You can fix a lot of the damage you have been associated with. I would hope your dad wants you to do that and make him proud,” he said.

“You may not believe this, but I really was on your side,” Shiksaa admitted. “I wanted to help you go the right way. I never hated you or anything like that.”

Richter ignored her olive branch. “Then you have the power [to remove] what I asked on my record,” he insisted.

Shiksaa fired right back. “You have the power to tell me where my info came from. I gave you my word that I would not tell a soul,” she said.

Richter bristled. “I haven’t posted your family info all over Nanae. That says a lot for me having class,” he said. “[But] it doesn’t stop you from blasting the world with my info...my damn mom’s info for Christ’s sake. You’re worried about your info—imagine your dad’s info all over Nanae for the trolls to use.”

Shiksaa read that as a veiled threat, but she tried to remain calm.

“I’m sorry it came to this, Scott,” she said.

Then Richter said something that puzzled her. “Leave it there,” he said, suddenly feigning nonchalance about his Rokso record. “I’d rather make a site of antis’ info and run it, maybe like a hobby for me. I need some thing to do,” he added.

Shiksaa was startled by Richter’s reply. She broke off the conversation at that point, after criticizing him for his decision to “cop an attitude.”

The next morning, Richter sought her out over AIM. He revealed that he had gotten her street address from Steve Hardigree, head of Boca Raton-based Internet Media Group, Inc. Hardigree had been in the bulk email business since around 1996 and had been listed on Rokso from day one. Shiksaa knew Hardigree frequently did deals with Eddy Marin and other south Florida spam kings.^[4]

“They’re serving you for some crap...I’m sure that soon enough you will know what their suit is for,” said Richter.

“Serving me for what?” asked Shiksaa. “Calling them spammers? They are spammers.”

Richter said Hardigree had revealed his lawsuit plans on a secret Internet mailing list for an elite group of spammers. For years, spammers everywhere had been driven crazy with desire to unmask the mysterious operators of the Spews blacklist. Hardigree and his Boca Raton spamming buddies seemed to believe that she, Shiksaa, was behind Spews. Richter said he was planning to travel to south Florida later that month to meet with some of the men, and he’d try to get the details of their lawsuit plans.

“Can I see the letter? Please send me a copy,” she asked.

“I would be killed for that in this industry,” Richter replied. He added that he would continue to feed her information gleaned from the list.

“Why are you associating with a secret spammer cabal if you’re cleaning up?” she asked.

“Because, thanks to Spamhaus and Spews, I’m forced to host with them and pay high rates not to get shut down.”

Shiksaa paused before replying. “I have nothing to do with Spews, Scott, and anyone who thinks so is insane,” she said.

“I know you’re not Spews,” said Richter. “I’m also confident that who is Spews and associated with it will be well known shortly.”

The idea of being sued by spammers seemed ludicrous to Shiksaa. But while the threat of a lawsuit in and of itself didn’t bother her, she did worry about the attention it would bring.

“I have had threats made against me, Scott,” she told Richter.

“Yes, in Nanae maybe,” he replied. “You cannot call someone every name in the book and not expect them to call it back.”

“I have never advocated anyone doing anything abusive to a spammer,” said Shiksaa.

“Ruining someone’s life could be taken to heart I guess,” he replied.

“Ruining? How the hell did I ruin anything? I posted information that is publicly available,” said Shiksaa.

Richter contemplated her question a moment. “Let me ask you this,” he said. “If someone hid and posted bad things about your dad’s realty company, would you be pissed if he lost his license over it and had no business left?”

“That’s apples and oranges, Scott. If he was violating a law or something, then he would deserve it,” she replied.

Rather than continuing to debate the point, Richter returned to the subject of his Rokso record. He asked Shiksaa who was responsible for compiling it.

“I need to know. Whoever does it is obsessed with me. I’m worried that they’re watching me like Karen [Hoffmann] used to do to [Thomas] Cowles. I mean, whoever is in charge of me has gone overboard,” said Richter.

“Yeah, I feel the same way about me,” she replied.

When their conversation was through, Shiksaa contacted the other members of the Spamhaus team. After explaining the situation, she was able to persuade them to remove references to Richter’s mother from his Rokso listing. It would have been the perfect opportunity to announce to the group her plans to retire from spam fighting. But Shiksaa held back.

Instead, a few days later, Shiksaa announced on Nanae that rumor had it she would be the target of a lawsuit aimed at revealing her role in Spews. Shiksaa said she was flattered that Steve Hardigree thought she possessed the knowledge to run the blacklist. “Alas, I am not Spews,” she wrote. Then Shiksaa added a comment directed at the Boca spammers.

“Gentlemen, wrap the tinfoil more tightly, please, because you are all becoming far too paranoid.” (In Internet culture, those who act paranoid are often derided as believing that a tinfoil hat can ward off mind-control rays.)

Two weeks passed, and no news on the legal front for Shiksaa. But then a strange note appeared partway into a Nanae discussion about Spamhaus. The “From” line said the posting was from “Susan Gunn” at email address [email protected]. To the few anti-spammers who recognized her legal name, the message’s content clearly wasn’t from Shiksaa.

“The fun has started,” said the note. “The fallout will be long and hard. Iraq may not be the main stage any longer. Antispews.org will dominate soon!”

The anonymous “Spambusta1” appeared again later, posting another message on Nanae using an AOL account. Again, the “From” line listed Shiksaa’s real name, Susan Gunn. The post’s subject line read “Shiksaa Tells All about Spamhaus to BB.” The acronym at the end apparently referred to Bulk Barn, the spammer site.

In the message body, the author wrote, “To all the ones who have suffered damage from Spamhaus and Spews, this is your information that you paid for by joining BB.” Then Spambusta1 listed Shiksaa’s real name, along with the street address of her condo in Stanton. The message also included information copied from the State of California Department of Real Estate site. It was her father’s broker license, listing their condominium complex’s street address as his main office, along with other data about his realty companies. Below that, Spambusta1 offered this explanation:

Shiksaa was mortified to see her father’s name on Nanae. He didn’t even own a computer, let alone work as an anti-spammer. She wasn’t sure what Spambusta1 hoped to accomplish by posting her dad’s real estate broker information. There was nothing embarrassing about the record, contrary to what Richter had implied in their recent chat.

Spambusta1 may have hoped the posting would finally drive Shiksaa out of the ranks of anti-spammers. But it had the opposite effect. After reading and rereading the message, she was more determined than ever to fight back. She hadn’t wanted to dignify Spambusta1’s posting with a response, but she couldn’t resist. Around noon on March 30, she posted a reply:

Spambusta1’s original message drew more than 400 replies over the course of several days. Most were from anti-spammers ridiculing the author’s investigative skills. (Spamhaus’s Steve Linford said—incorrectly—that the home address posted for Shiksaa was actually an office building.) But a couple responses also appeared from people cheering Spambusta1’s work. “It’s about time someone outed this cunt,” wrote an anonymous person who used a Yahoo! return address. The message, from someone listing his name as “Give Us An Out,” continued:

Spambusta1 was back the next day, ready to rebut Linford with threats to publish photographs of Shiksaa’s condominium. “It is a very nice Condo. Nice dead end street. Did any one notice the brown van? We moved it today per direct orders as we are staking out a member of Spews currently and will begin with the posting of information on who is behind them next,” he wrote.

Shiksaa and her supporters tried to determine who was behind the postings. Short of getting a subpoena for AOL, there was no way to unmask Spambusta1 directly from the Internet protocol address listed in his messages. Studying the language of the messages for telltale characteristics was unproductive as well. Shiksaa knew it probably was the work of Hardigree, Marin, or the group of south Florida spammers she began to refer to as The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight. But it could just as well have been any of the dozens of spammers she had tangled with over the years.

Richter tried to distance himself from the postings. In a note on Nanae, he admitted that at times he “might not see eye-to-eye with Susan, but I try and have some class.” Richter claimed that people close to him knew he wasn’t a violent person. Then he added a note addressed to what he called “high-deployment mailers,” chiding them not to resort to the same tactics anti-spammers used to harm them. Richter concluded his posting by saying he hoped Spambusta1 wasn’t somebody he knew.

That Friday evening, Spambusta1 was back on Nanae with news that he had created a site at the Tripod home page service. The site was entitled “Shiksaa Shakedown” and included three photographs of the outside of her condominium. One showed the gray gatehouse, with its locked, eight-foot fence, at the entrance to the complex. Another was taken a few steps from her garage door. The third was shot from the ground just below the deck outside her second-story bedroom window. Someone had doctored each of the photos with digital image-editing software. The picture of the condominium complex entrance included the words, “The Gates of Hell?” The shot of her garage was altered so the white door appeared to be covered with graffiti, above which were the words “Does this say Shiksa?” On the photograph of her deck, someone had circled some drink cans on the railing and a table, and added the word, “Beer?”

But what bothered Shiksaa the most about the Shakedown site weren’t the photos. It was the publication of her latest unlisted phone number. Since Bill Waggoner had called her in December on her old unpublished number, she had been extremely circumspect about the new one. She knew someone must have tricked or paid off an employee at the phone company to get the number. She downloaded a copy of the Shakedown site to her computer for use in the police report she would file Monday.

But the online attacks on Shiksaa continued that weekend. An unidentified person began pumping out emails to people all over the Internet in an effort to Joe-job her. The messages were spoofed to appear as though she had forwarded them from her AOL account. They carried the subject line, “How to Boycott America, the Global Bully” and encouraged support for a boycott organized by activists running a site called AdBusters.org. The boycott was aimed at undercutting America’s role in the world by weakening its major corporations.

The bottom of the note included instructions on how to be removed from the boycott’s mailing list. “Please contact Susan Wilson, Islamic Peace Activist” it stated, followed by Shiksaa’s street address, with her country of residence listed as “United States of Aggression.” (The use of Shiksaa’s married name, which she had accidentally published in the alt.test newsgroup in 1999, suggested the Joe-jobbers were not affiliated with Spambusta1.)

As Shiksaa mulled over the events of the past few weeks, she realized this was not the time to quit spam fighting. It didn’t matter how tired she was of battling vindictive spammers. If they thought they could drive her out, they had very badly underestimated her. If anything, they made her more determined than ever to get in their faces.^[5]

Shiksaa increasingly came to place the ultimate blame for her troubles at the feet of Scott Richter. He had painted himself as her confidant and defender against The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight. Yet he had also taunted her with her confidential information weeks ago, and he did nothing to stop its dissemination by others. Shiksaa decided it was time to abandon her naïve allegiance to Richter and her other spammer sources.

On April 8, Shiksaa assembled a small collection of AIM log files from her conversations with Richter, Waggoner, and a handful of other junk emailers. She sanitized the logs somewhat by replacing the spammers’ true screen names with generics such as “CO Spammer” for Richter and “702 AC Spammer” for Waggoner. Shiksaa then published the log files at Chickenboner.com and announced the project, which she called “The Bulk Barn Diaries,” on Nanae.

“I’ve decided to post my memoirs relating to the spam wars, including instant messages from a number of spammers. Kind of a spammer-undercover type thing,” she wrote.

The move agitated the junk emailers involved, and they immediately sent Shiksaa frothing complaints. But she ignored them. She really didn’t care if she burned any bridges. Not after what they had done to her.

It was almost an anticlimax when, a week later, the long-threatened lawsuit from Florida arrived.

Mark Felstein, the personal lawyer for Florida spam king Eddy Marin, filed the lawsuit against Shiksaa and eight other anti-spammers in a Federal court for Florida’s southern district. In his complaint, Felstein listed as his client and plaintiff EmarketersAmerica.org, a Florida nonprofit. Besides Shiksaa, the individual defendants named in the complaint were Steve Linford and his brother Julian, Alan Murphy, Steven Sobol, Clifton Sharp, Richard Tietjens (a.k.a. Morely Dotes), Adam Brower, and Joe Jared. Also named as defendants were Spews.org and Spamhaus.org, along with their domain registration service, Joker.com.

According to the complaint, members of EmarketersAmerica.org included unnamed “email marketers, Internet service providers, and other related businesses.” The complaint alleged that the eight defendants were all officers of both Spews and Spamhaus and accused them of libel, invasion of privacy, business interference, and other charges. The complaint requested punitive and compensatory damages from the defendants.

State of Florida records showed that Felstein had incorporated EmarketersAmerica.org just over a month before, naming himself as a director. In an interview with a Florida business magazine, Felstein claimed that EmarketersAmerica.org had approximately fifty members, forty of which had paid $3,000 in annual dues. He refused to name the members, citing fear of reprisals from anti-spammers.^[6]

But Shiksaa and the other codefendants (who came to be known as “The Nanae Nine“) were fairly certain that Marin and his gang were behind the lawsuit. It wasn’t clear to the anti-spammers why they had been chosen as targets for the suit. They saw it as a thinly veiled attempt to make them roll over and disclose the true operators of the Spews blacklist. They were determined to make Felstein regret the lawsuit. They made arrangements to enlist the services of Pete Wellborn, the Georgia attorney who had earned the nickname “The Spammer Hammer” from successful litigations against high-profile spammers, including Sanford Wallace.

Meanwhile, Scott Richter was watching the legal proceedings from a safe distance. As U.S. troops took control of Baghdad that week, he began to mail millions of email ads with the subject line “Get the Iraq Most Wanted Deck of Cards.” The spams promoted “the one true collector’s item from Operation Iraqi Freedom”—replicas of the playing cards given by the Pentagon to coalition soldiers. The cards featured photos and brief descriptions of the fifty-five most-wanted leaders of Saddam Hussein’s regime, with Saddam himself depicted on the ace of diamonds.

The spam campaign turned out to be even more successful than Richter’s post-9/11 U.S. flags project. Although he hadn’t even received his stock yet from the supplier, within a week of sending out the first spams, he had already taken 40,000 orders for the playing cards.

This time, Richter wasn’t giving the money to charity.

Just outside St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the tire on Davis Hawke’s Ford Crown Victoria blew. It was barely six o’clock on a chilly morning in late April 2003. Brad Bournival had been dozing in the passenger seat, when Hawke cursed loudly and pulled over to the shoulder on I-93. They had been on the road for about four hours, after spending the evening at Foxwoods Casino in southeastern Connecticut. In recent weeks, Hawke and Bournival had regularly taken some of their profits from penis pills to the casino’s seventy-six-table poker room. And tonight, like most nights, the spammers came away a bit richer.

But Hawke had seemed distracted when they cashed out around two a.m. As soon as they got outside, he was on his cell phone, trying to reach Patricia. Since moving to Rhode Island that winter, Hawke had been back to Vermont only a couple of times. That left Patricia mostly alone, except for their wolves. She had been taking classes at Lyndonville College, and Hawke usually phoned her every few days. But he’d been unable to reach her for a week, and she wasn’t responding to the messages he left on the answering machine.^[7]

When they got to Hawke’s car in the casino parking lot, Hawke said he had decided to head up to Vermont and check on Patricia. Bournival had never been to Lyndonville, so he agreed to go along. He would regret it later when, by the side of the freeway that morning, Hawke revealed that the car had no spare tire. (Although Hawke had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away, he insisted on driving beat-up used cars. He was particularly fond of old Crown Vics, especially if they had been police cars in a former life.)

Hawke tried phoning Patricia again, in hopes that she would drive down to pick them up. No answer. Fortunately, Bournival had a AAA card and arranged a tow into St. Johnsbury. As they waited for the tire shop to open at eight, the young men grabbed breakfast at a bagel shop and were back on the road by 9:30.

Such temporary diversions were nothing extraordinary for the co-owners of Amazing Internet Products. They had encountered several problems at the start, most notably when AOL suddenly cranked up the effectiveness of its spam filters. But after switching to a new proxy-based mailing program, Super Mailer, they were able to get their messages through. Soon, business was humming along again nicely. With their new no-limit merchant account, both Hawke and Bournival often pulled down over a thousand dollars per day. Pinacle penis-enhancement pills remained their cash cow, but the partners also experimented with spamming for products such as human growth hormone and CD-ROMs containing information about government grants. They also mailed the occasional run of ads for Power Diet Plus pills and the Banned CD.

As Hawke eased the Crown Vic into the cabin’s empty driveway, Bournival noticed the building’s front door was wide open. Hawke cut the engine, jumped out of the car, and ran to the cabin. Bournival trailed right behind, half expecting to find Patricia’s lifeless body on the floor.

Inside, the cabin appeared to have been ransacked. Books had been knocked off the shelves onto the floor of the living room. Couch cushions were flung about the room. Dishes, some of them with dried-on food, had apparently been hurled onto the floor. Hawke yelled Patricia’s name as he moved quickly through the small house. Her clothes were gone from the bedroom closet. So was a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills he had stashed behind the wall paneling.

“Fuck,” was all Hawke said as he circled back to the open front door. On the front step, Hawke cupped his hands to his mouth and howled loudly. Then he began walking around the back of the cabin, howling. He was hoping to call in Dreighton from the woods somewhere. At the edge of the clearing, Hawke suddenly dropped to his hands and knees on the ground. “Fuck!” he shouted again, as he realized a large stash of cash he had buried there was gone.

Bournival watched Hawke get up and walk slowly back toward the cabin. He stopped just outside the front door and stared down at the ground, as if unwilling to face the scene inside again.

Bournival took a step toward him. “What do you think happened?” he asked.

Hawke didn’t answer. He just shrugged, his eyes glassy with tears. He seemed afraid to speak, in case his voice might crack. Hawke pushed past Bournival and headed back inside.

Bournival remained outside. He’d never seen much emotion from Hawke, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with this unusual display. Bournival’s instincts told him Patricia had grown tired of being Hawke’s squaw and had run out. Bournival surmised that she had probably taken what she considered her half of Hawke’s money. He wondered whether she would also try to plunder the Swiss bank account Hawke had sometimes mentioned.

When Hawke came back outside a few minutes later, Bournival suggested they visit the college and ask around about Patricia.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Hawke said. It was the first time Bournival could recall being the one to set their agenda.

After persuading college officials to track down one of Patricia’s professors, Hawke learned that she had missed several meetings of her biology class. But he was unable to find anyone who could provide information about her current whereabouts. After a brief stop back at the cabin, during which Hawke gathered up some of his belongings, the two young men hit the road heading south. Hawke dropped Bournival at his place in Manchester and returned to Pawtucket alone.

At that point, Hawke tried the only lifeline he had left. He sent Patricia an email.

To his surprise, she wrote back a couple of days later. She revealed that she was somewhere in Michigan and had both wolves with her. She also admitted that she had used some of the cash she took to buy a new pickup truck. Hawke persuaded her to email him her phone number. When they finally spoke, he pleaded with her to come home. She refused, saying she was starting over. She had cut her hair short and dyed it blonde as part of an identity change. Taking a page from Hawke’s old PrivacyBuff.com site, she used a technique called the “graveyard gambit” to sign up for a social security number in the name of a girl who had died in infancy.

Hawke offered her a deal. If she came back with all his money, he’d find a nice, big house where they could live. He promised he’d spend more time with her. He’d pay for her to take classes at a college in Rhode Island. He’d even buy her a fur coat.

Patricia told him she’d think about it.

The next day, she was on her way to Pawtucket. A few weeks later, they moved into a new three-bedroom house together in North Smithfield, a few miles outside Pawtucket. The place had a two-car garage and a large, sunny yard with an in-ground swimming pool, flowerbeds, and ornamental trees. It was the sort of tidy suburban home where young, professional couples might start a family.

But once Patricia returned all of Hawke’s money—aside from the cash she’d spent on her truck—he was done dabbling in domesticity. Patricia had been his lodestone for the past five years. But he didn’t want a wife, and he sure as hell didn’t want children. He didn’t want to wake up one day attached to a ball and chain, no longer free to bang young women or hang out in casinos or hike up mountains in the middle of the night. His ten-year plan was to be living on a tropical island somewhere, ideally with a little tropical girl by his side.^[8]

By June 2003, America Online boasted around thirty-seven million customer accounts, making it by far the biggest Internet service provider in the world. Since each of these subscribers was entitled to register up to seven different screen names, AOL actually maintained some ninety-two million email addresses on its system.

Davis Hawke and Brad Bournival owned a list of all of them.

They had bought the list for $52,000 in late May 2003 from a fellow spammer. The man, who said his name was Sean, told them he had a copy of the complete AOL member database, including customer names, street addresses, and telephone numbers. Sean said he bought the list from an AOL software engineer who had stolen it from the big ISP’s customer-data warehouse.

Neither Hawke nor Bournival gave much thought to the fact that buying the stolen list from Sean might make them coconspirators in a crime, namely a violation of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. To them, the AOL screen names would be a gold mine. (Hawke and Bournival had no immediate use for the AOL subscribers’ physical addresses and telephone numbers.) Amazing Internet previously used a list of around twenty million AOL addresses that Hawke had assembled from a variety of sources, including web page harvesting. But the old list contained a large percentage of undeliverable addresses. That often caused AOL’s mail servers to automatically drop connections from Amazing’s spamware programs in the middle of a run, since AOL had tuned its servers to recognize potential spam attacks.

Earlier that spring, Bournival had tried to solve this problem by signing up for Massive F/X, a web-driven bulk-email system marketed by Tom Cowles of Empire Towers. The company charged around $3,000 per month for a package that allowed spammers to send emails using a proprietary system Cowles had developed.

When Bournival talked to Cowles by phone, the Ohio spammer boasted that Massive F/X, if used properly, was capable of getting through any spam filter, including those deployed by AOL. But after Bournival wired Empire Towers the first month’s fee, Cowles never sent him his account login information. Bournival bugged Cowles by phone nearly every day for a week, and Cowles kept promising to set him up the next day. But in the end, Cowles never delivered and stopped taking Bournival’s calls.

Although it was pricey, AOL’s stolen customer database gave Amazing Internet a huge surge in sales in June. The list contained only real, deliverable email addresses, so the response rate was much better than other lists. Plus, Hawke knew he could easily turn around and sell the addresses to other spammers to recoup his investment. He had already made some quick money that spring selling his lists of eBay and AOL addresses for hundreds of dollars.^[9]

As customer orders for Pinacle pills flowed in that June, Hawke began to rethink his past reluctance to spamming for pornography. Amazing Internet had accumulated a verified list of well over 100,000 people who wanted bigger penises. It would be a no-brainer to cross-market porn to that list.

One night, Hawke and Mauricio brainstormed a possible plan. They could produce their own amateur videos, a popular segment of the Internet porn business. To save money, they could film the whole thing in Colombia, where Mauricio and his girlfriend Liliana had family. They’d develop a new niche, XXX-rated videos with amateur young women from all over South America.^[10]

Neither Hawke nor Ruiz knew anything about videography, but they knew Bournival had played around with video editing on his computer. Hawke brought Bournival in on his plan, and Creampie Productions, their new company, was born.

Soon, Liliana was helping Hawke make arrangements with a firm in Bogotá that could do the filming. Then, with Hawke and Bournival fronting their expenses, Liliana and Mauricio flew to Colombia. They had no script to work with or even any specific directions for the video. They simply rounded up a handful of girls and a couple dozen guys and paid them to perform sex in front of the camera. A week later, Mauricio returned home with DVD-ROMs containing ten hours of raw video and a huge grin on his face.

Bournival took on the job of editing the video down to marketable segments. But after previewing parts of the film, his excitement about Creampie Productions waned. The young women weren’t especially attractive, and the quality of both the audio and video was mediocre. At the time, Bournival was swamped with running Amazing Internet Products, so the DVDs remained on a shelf in his apartment. (Bournival nonetheless changed his profile at chessclub.com to include the line, “I am a video producer of amateur pornos.”)

Hawke, however, was fascinated by Mauricio’s tales of his adventures with women in Colombia. The stories revived Hawke’s dissatisfaction with monogamy. He’d seen Internet sites that offered to match up American men with young Latinas from South America. But Hawke had a more direct plan in mind. He bought Ruiz another plane ticket, this time to Bolivia, and gave him instructions to bring home for Hawke an attractive teenaged woman willing to prostitute herself.

But even though Hawke authorized Mauricio to offer up to $2,000 per week for the woman’s services, he returned empty-handed. A determined Hawke then sent Liliana down to Colombia with the same mission. Always more reliable than Mauricio, she quickly lined up a few prospects and emailed photos of the girls to Hawke. After he made his selection, Liliana ran into troubles getting a green card for the young woman. But soon she brought home to Hawke a pretty 19-year-old named Margie.

Hawke took no pleasure from food—his regimen of tofu, vegetables, and rice was simply a way to sustain his body. Even money was no longer a powerful driving force. All Hawke really cared about that summer was getting laid.^[11] And now, he had his very own live-in prostitute.

Hawke had recently convinced Patricia it was a good time to find her new digs closer to Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where she would begin graduate-level coursework in microbiology at the University of Massachusetts campus there. Hawke paid Patricia’s rent at the new place, which was thirty miles from Pawtucket.

At first, Hawke didn’t tell Patricia about his plans for the prostitute. But when he finally revealed the arrangement, she tried to shrug it off. He’s just a guy, Patricia told herself. She knew he didn’t love the whore.^[12]