Spam Kings (5 page)
At the time, Davis Hawke didn't know the term LART, but he knew firsthand its
potentially awesome power. Within days of Karl Gray filing complaints about receiving eight
Web Manual spams, InnovaNet had shut down Hawke's dial-up account, and Interspeed had pulled
the plug on hosting the WebManual2000.com domainâall before Hawke had a chance to make more
than a handful of sales. He paced the floor between his office in the trailer and the
kitchen. He was ready to move ahead with his life. He had shaved off his push-broom
moustache. He'd taken the swastika flags off the walls and the Nazi death's head off his
dresser. He'd tossed the remnants of a box of American Nationalist Party business cards into
the garbage. He was keen to print up a fresh set bearing the name of his new online
enterprise: Venture Alpha Corporation
. It frustrated Hawke to know that people were still determined to get in the
way of his plans.
Hawke was having a hard time clinging to the belief that greatness was his historical
destiny. It had been drilled into him as a boy, when his mother would quiz him at mealtimes
on the Ambler family treeâher side of the family. Who did great, great, great Grandmother
Polly from Virginia marry? Why, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, of course! And who signed
their marriage certificate? Then-Governor Thomas Jefferson! And who turned down a marriage
proposal from soon-to-be-President Jefferson? Great, great, great, great grandmother
Rebecca!
During these dinner-table genealogy lessons, Hawke's father just smiled and listened.
They never devoted much conversation to the Greenbaum side of the family. So when Britt's
fourth-grade teacher assigned students the project of drawing up a family tree, the young
boy focused exclusively on the Ambler clan. When it was Britt's turn to present his project
to the class, he unfurled his drawing, which he had labored over for hours with his mother,
and began talking about his family's patrician roots.
The teacher took one look at the neatly drawn chart and ordered him back to his seat.
"Shame on you, Britt Greenbaum," she scolded, certain he had fabricated it all.
Looking back now on his aborted show-and-tell, Hawke realized that one of the greatest
skills chess had taught him was not to allow small setbacks to thwart his grand strategy.
Although his mother was furious to learn of the teacher's reaction to his genealogy report,
Hawke let the incident slide by. But eight years later, he quietly made the trip down to the
Dedham courthouse to change his name. And neither parent opposed the move.
Hawke thumbed through the Greenville/Spartanburg Yellow Pages. He was looking for the
section on Internet services. After a few phone calls, he arranged for a new dial-up account
with a company in Anderson called Carolina Online. He signed onto Carol.net and began
piecing together his next Venture Alpha offering.
This time, he would market something called Million Dollar Publishing Company in a
Box
. He had got the idea a few weeks back from a piece of junk email that arrived
in his Yahoo! in-box. The message, apparently sent by a company in western Massachusetts,
advertised a CD-ROM with advice on how to start a home-based business selling "information
through the mail." For ninety-nine dollars, the author was willing to part with full reprint
rights to hundreds of reports on topics ranging from how to win a sweepstakes contest to how
to become a TV or movie star.
Hawke recognized the offer for the scam it was. Like the Web Manual, the only people
likely to buy the Publishing Company in a Box were other spammers. It wasn't quite a pyramid
scheme, but it relied on some of the same twisted logic. Hawke chuckled at one especially
clever part of the ad:
I am sending this ad to 10,000 other people...and I will only allow 50 kits to
be sold. It wouldn't make much sense if I sold this kit to 1,000 or 2,000 people...The
market would be saturated with these same manuals...and I don't want to do that. To make
sure that the people in this offer get the same results I have...ONLY 50 people can have
it for $99.00!
The author even promised to return, uncashed, any checks he received after selling his
quota of fifty kits. Hawke realized he would be ecstatic if he made $5,000 from his
hundred-dollar investment. Then again, if hundreds of orders rolled in, who would know
besides him? Hawke purchased the CD-ROM, determined this time to make some serious money
before spam haters got in his way.
When the CD arrived in the mail, Hawke took it to a computer store in Spartanburg that
charged five dollars per CD to burn two dozen copies for him. Since Interspeed had shut down
his WebManual2000.com site for violating its terms of service, Hawke had to come up with a
temporary work-around until he could find a new host for the domain. He uploaded a copy of
the old site's files, slightly modified for his new venture, from his PC to a home page he
had created at Angelfire.com.
A free, ad-supported home page provider catering to consumers, Boston-based Angelfire
had two big drawbacks. It didn't allow members to advertise their home pages using spam or
to run programs for processing online orders. To fill the latter gap, Hawke signed up at
CartManager.net for a fourteen-day demonstration. The Utah-based electronic shopping cart
service would enable him to seamlessly submit orders from his Angelfire site to his account
at CartManager.
After creating a new email account for the project,
[email protected]
, Hawke worked on his ad copy. He used the original
message almost verbatim, with necessary changes to the ordering information. Hawke also
modified a section at the bottom of the ad that instructed recipients on how they could opt
out of future mailings. In hopes of mollifying spam haters, Hawke whipped up this version
instead:
We are STRICTLY OPPOSED to spam! You are receiving this email because you
have either signed up for one of our services or you have authorized your email address
to be given out by filling out an "opt-in" form when signing up for any type of free
service. If you wish to be removed from this email list, please send a message to
"
[email protected]
" with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject
field. We apologize if you have received this email in error
.
As a further countermeasure against complaint-related interruptions, Hawke decided to
switch mailing programs. He'd received a spam advertising a package called Extractor
Pro
, which, according to its web site, was designed to send ads onto the Internet
through third-party mail servers known as open relays. These machines, usually operated by
businesses, universities, and other organizations, had been configured (either out of
courtesy or neglect) to allow unauthorized users to bounce their messages off the servers en
route to their final destinations. As a result, recipients of the messages who examined the
headers could trace their origin back to the open relays but usually not to the sender's
ISP. Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy of Extractor Pro from the company's web
site.
On October 20, 1999, Hawke was ready to broadcast his new ad for Publishing Company in a
Box. He signed on to Carol.net and configured Extractor Pro to use the half-million fresh
email addresses that came with the program.
Meanwhile, nearly five hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., Heather Wilson, a
republican from New Mexico, was introducing the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of
1999
to the U.S. House of Representatives. If enacted into law, the bill would
require email marketers to use real return addresses on their messages, provide opt-out
features, and abstain from forging their messages' headers. A failure to comply could open
them up to private lawsuits from individuals or ISPs to the tune of five hundred dollars per
infringing message.
But Hawke wasn't paying attention to national news, much less to pending federal
legislation. After double-checking to make sure Extractor Pro had successfully connected to
a set of relay servers, he took a deep breath and pushed the program's start button.
Tomorrow, the 21
st
, he would turn twenty-oneâhis golden birthday.
Who knew what it might bring?
Jason Vale was in big trouble. For nearly two hours he'd been trapped in a windowless
conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. A government lawyer was grilling
Vale, 29, about his Internet-based apricot seed business, which he operated from his home in
Queens, New York. It was April 2000, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
had been after Vale's company, Christian Brothers Contracting Corporation,
since 1997, when they sent inspectors to his home.
It was just a deposition, but Vale felt like he was already on trial. He really needed
to use the bathroom, but his interrogatorâa woman in her mid-twentiesâwouldn't let
up.
"How would you characterize your feeling, your religious beliefs in relation to the work
that you do?" asked Allison Harnisch, a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's Office
of Consumer Litigation.
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Vale wasn't certain where she was going with the question, but he lurched into his
standard answer about how Genesis 1:29 contained a prescription for life without
cancer:
Then God said, "I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the
entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for
food."
There are way too many lawyers in this room
, Vale thought. Besides
Assistant U.S. Attorney Harnisch, there was Vale's lawyer, another attorney from the
Department of Justice, and one from the FDA. Vale was just an online entrepreneur, filling
orders in his basement for bags of apricot seeds; tablets of the extract from the seeds
called Laetrile, or vitamin B
17
; as well as an injected form of the
compound. He used several computers to send out email advertisements for his web sites,
which included apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com. In its 1998 suit against him, AOL
claimed that Vale sent an estimated 23.5 million junk emails to AOL members.
Vale didn't have much respect for AOL or the FDA. On his sites' home pages he explained
how the pharmaceutical industry pushed the FDA to ban B
17
, even
though many people believed the compound worked as a cancer preventative.
(B
17
couldn't be patented, so, as Vale saw it, drug companies
considered it a threat to their profit model.) Sure enough, the FDA had sent him several
warning letters stating that Laetrile was not approved as a drug and that he was violating
the law by promoting it as a cancer cure. Now it looked like their goal was to get a court
order forcing him to stop selling the B
17
.
"Do you want to stay in business,
this
business?" Harnisch asked
him.
Vale stiffened. "Is that a threat?"
"It's just a question," she said.
"I would love to stay supplying seeds," he replied.
Who wouldn't? Before Vale launched the company, he was working construction and running
a billiard parlor. Now, he was grossing easily $300,000 a year from his low-overhead spam
business, shipping out nearly a ton of apricot pits and over 100 boxes of tablets a
month.
Harnisch asked what Vale would do if the court said he could no longer sell apricot
seeds or B
17
.
"I would listen to the court if the court said that I can't sell
B
17
," he replied. But then he added, "If it said I can't sell
seeds, that's a different story."
"Why would the seeds be a different story?"
Vale explained how the state of Arizona allowed the sale of apricot seeds as a
nutritional supplement and how companies all over the place were selling them. He told her
about how he called the FDA once and even it said he could do it.
"Mr. Vale," his lawyer butted in. "Just answer her questions. Just keep it to answering
her questions."
"Can I go to the bathroom?" Vale asked.
Out in the hallway, Vale let out a deep breath and headed for the men's room. He'd told
customers that he was in a David-versus-Goliath battle, but he'd actually faced much bigger
opponents than the U.S. government. The summer after his high school graduation, Vale
developed a persistent cough and a pain deep in his left side. When the symptoms didn't
respond to antibiotics, doctors finally figured out there was a tumor the size of a
grapefruit between his spine and his ribs. Surgeons removed the growth, diagnosed as an
Askin's tumor, and left a nearly two-foot-long curved scar below his left shoulder blade.
They said most people with the rare form of cancer lived only about eight months. But when
Vale came home from the hospital, he did a handstand in the drivewayâthe staples in his back
be damnedâjust to show everyone he was fine.
That was eleven years ago, and Vale didn't look like a cancer victim now. He was a
strapping 180 pounds and had gone on to become a world-champion arm wrestler in the
middleweight class. He survived a second bout with Askin's and another surgery. He
attributed his success in beating the disease to eating a dozen or more bitter apricot pits
every day (in addition to praying even more than usual).
When Vale returned to the conference room, Harnisch said she wanted to talk about his
spam email operation.
"My forte," he smiled.
"To your knowledge, do you have a reputation in the Internet community?"
She was leafing through several pages of web page printouts. They were Nanae postings,
he assumed correctly.
"I see myself in the newsgroups," he said.
"Would you say you're notorious for your spams?"
Vale's lawyer jumped in, saying he objected to the question. But he instructed Vale to
answer.
"They'll do anything they can, they'll do
anything
to stop a bulk
email," Vale told Harnisch.
Vale hated the meddlesome anti-spammers in Nanae who whined about his spam to the FDA
and the Federal Trade Commission, and he blamed them for getting his sites disconnected by
ISPs. Vale also held anti-spammers partly responsible for the lawsuit filed against him in
late 1998 by America Online. The online service calculated that it had received over 47,000
complaints about Vale's spam since December 1997. Many of the junk emails bore phony AOL
return addresses.
But Vale was defiant. When AOL dispatched someone to his house to serve him with the
lawsuitâthe Sunday before Christmas no lessâVale just threw the papers back in the man's
face. After that, Vale completely ignored all of the legal proceedings and went right on
spamming AOL members.
Exasperated, AOL's legal counsel assumed Vale thought he was above the law. A year
later, in December 1999, they convinced a magistrate to award AOL $600,000 in damages and a
permanent injunction that barred Vale and Christian Brothers from using AOL's network in the
future. So far, AOL's attorneys hadn't tried to force him to pay the money. They seemed
content just to keep him away from their service.
It was not at all like Jason Vale to walk away from a fight. As a teenager, he had been
a master of the preemptive punch. Although it cost him a knocked-out tooth and a
twice-broken nose, fighting was so much more effective than trying to reason with someone.
But against the anti-spammers, Vale's pile-driver right wasn't of much use. He couldn't get
to them. Antis hid behind their computers, using words to jab at him and other bulk
emailers. They had taken to calling him the Cyanide Idiot in their Nanae postings, referring
to one of the active ingredients in Laetrile. Some even left messages on his answering
machine complaining about his spam. Their voices sounded effeminate to him. "Most
anti-spammers are gay," Vale wrote to Frederick, an anti-spammer, in a May 1999
exchange.
A few months before the AOL lawsuit, Vale had annoyed spam-tracking antis with a new
technique for driving customers to his sites. Instead of directly revealing the site
addresses, such as apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com, in his email adsâwhich would
have made him an easy target for complaintsâVale's spams encouraged recipients to visit the
AltaVista search engine and type the words "apricot seeds" and "cancer." Because Vale had
hidden in his pages' source code terms like Laetrile, B
17
, apricot
seeds, cancer, holistic, and other keywords, his sites would come out at the top of the
search rankings.
Vale's technique was even cited in an October 1999 article in the
Industry
Standard
, which Shiksaa saw when someone posted excerpts from the article
to Nanae. After reading about it, Shiksaa decided to pay Vale a little visit online. She dug
up his Cianide70 screen name and contacted him over AOL Instant Messenger.
"Why do you spam, and why are you vindictive against people who complain when you spam
them?" she asked.
"You should just hit delete," replied Vale, not sure who she was.
"I refuse to click delete," she said. "I will complain about every single spam I
get."
Vale didn't understand why antis got so worked up about spam, which he considered to be
no different than paper-based junk mail.
"There are other more important things in life that one should spend their time
concerned with," he said.
"You didn't answer my question...why do you spam?"
Vale tried to dodge the question with a rare gesture of peacemaking. "If you want to
give me your address," he said, "I'll send you a free video and a pound of apricot seeds
just cause you were nice."
"What would I do with apricot seeds?" Shiksaa asked, after thanking him.
"When you see the video your life will be changed."
But Shiksaa signed off without giving him her address.
By the time Harnisch finally wrapped up the deposition, it was quarter to two. Vale
agreed to provide the government with a list of all of his web sites, their traffic stats,
and documents showing his income from the Christian Brothers
business dating back to 1996.
But on Easter Sunday 2000, before he'd even had a chance to pull the information
together, and just as he was getting ready for church, Vale got a call from a
Wall
Street Journal
reporter. She told him the government had convinced a judge to
shut him down with an injunction. District Judge John Gleeson had issued an order that
prohibited Vale from selling Laetrile, even in the form of apricot seeds.
"What do you think about that?" the reporter asked.
"I respect the court. I respect Judge Gleeson," he said.
Vale told her he still thought B
17
and apricots seeds were not
illegal, but he said he would abide by the court's decision. The next day, he removed the
banned products from the ordering sections of his web sites. But he kept the rest of the
pages online and added one soliciting donations to his legal fund.
Jason Vale wasn't planning to give up without a fight.
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From a transcript of the April 14, 2000, deposition on file with the U.S. District
Court for New York's eastern district.