Spam Kings (16 page)

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.)
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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!"
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.