Spam Kings (21 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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