S34 EP4: Spam King | Dirtbag Climber

Speaker 1 This isn't just a game, it's a once-in-a-generation event. The Harlem Globetrotters 100-year tour.

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Speaker 5 This is a CBC podcast.

Speaker 5 Hello? Hi.

Speaker 6 Hello, yes. I'm trying to reach Dave Bridger.

Speaker 7 Uh, Dave Bridger is speaking.

Speaker 6 Hey, Dave, it's Brian McWilliams from New Ha New Hampshire Public Radio.

Speaker 9 Oh, okay. Hey, what's up?

Speaker 8 Um, well, I I wanted to talk with you for a story I'm working on.

Speaker 7 Oh, uh, what story is that?

Speaker 6 A story looking at amazing internet products and I guess the whole spam operation you got going.

Speaker 6 Spam?

Speaker 6 Well, you know, internet-based advertising.

Speaker 7 I'm not sure what that is.

Speaker 6 What do you mean? A spam.

Speaker 7 I'm not sure what that is.

Speaker 7 I think you know what spam is.

Speaker 12 Technology journalist Brian McWilliams is trying to keep his cool while on the phone with this guy, Dave Bridger.

Speaker 7 Well, I don't know really what you're talking about. I mean, I work at McDonald's.
I'm a manager.

Speaker 7 So I'm not sure

Speaker 7 what you mean by emails. I mean, we do have some specials.
I mean,

Speaker 7 burgers for $3 today.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I don't even know anything about computers.

Speaker 17 Well, what is a website?

Speaker 20 It's 2003, and most everyone in the world knew what a website was.

Speaker 14 And there's no doubt that Dave Bridger did, too.

Speaker 8 I guess I'm just reaching out, and it sounds like you don't, you know, you'd rather just sort of hide behind this veil of the McDonald's thing, but

Speaker 8 it'd be cool to hear from you directly.

Speaker 7 Yeah, well, you're talking to me.

Speaker 8 Yeah, but you're just, you know, you give me a bunch of BS, so

Speaker 8 it's sort of funny, but there's nothing, you know, nothing real here.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Well, good talking to you.

Speaker 22 Well, I hope we can talk again.

Speaker 7 Okay, bye.

Speaker 13 McWilliams and Bridger would talk again.

Speaker 23 They'd end up talking a lot.

Speaker 13 And McWilliams would find out that Bridger loved being in the mountains and playing chess.

Speaker 18 He'd find out that he grew up in the suburbs of Boston. And most importantly, he'd find out that Dave Bridger was not his real name.

Speaker 26 I don't like people to know know my name.

Speaker 13 McWilliams would learn that Dave Bridger's legal name was Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

Speaker 14 After failing to rally white supremacists in Washington, D.C., Hawk embraced the next chapter of his life, online.

Speaker 11 And understanding this period might be key to tracing the patterns of his final undoing, because it's his actions in this era that would make Hawk fabulously rich and and lead him up to Canada, where he would meet his end.

Speaker 13 I'm Stephen Chua, and this is Dirtbag Climber from CBC's Uncover, Chapter 4, Spam King.

Speaker 34 Computer people call it getting spammed, unwanted email. Since the internet revolution began, marketers have discovered email as a way to target consumers.

Speaker 39 It can be infuriating and embarrassing.

Speaker 16 Spam.

Speaker 13 We all know it, we all hate it, but I think it's important to take a moment to break down how it worked in the early 2000s, because it was relatively new and very hard to police.

Speaker 10 Brian McWilliams was a technology journalist at the turn of the millennium writing for outlets like Wired.

Speaker 21 And the subject of spam was a specialty of his.

Speaker 20 Here he is explaining how it worked.

Speaker 22 The system sort of depended on the fact that it was mass marketing.

Speaker 33 It wasn't target marketing.

Speaker 22 You know, it wasn't find an audience that has, you know, is interested in your product and get your ads in front of them.

Speaker 22 It was blast out millions of emails to everybody on the internet and hope that you would get like a half of 1% response because that would be enough, you know, to make some good money.

Speaker 25 And so that's what spammers like Davis Hawk would do every day.

Speaker 23 Send out millions of emails, hoping to get a bite.

Speaker 22 Basically, you would just either buy a mailing list with hundreds of millions of email addresses on it that somebody had somehow put together by going around the internet and scraping

Speaker 22 message boards and basically stealing people's email addresses, or you would just randomly generate email addresses.

Speaker 22 You could just send out a bunch of emails even to addresses that didn't exist, and you might hit some addresses that did exist. And that's what it was all about.

Speaker 14 Here's how it was reported on CBC at the time.

Speaker 40 Every day, shooting through electronic networks, 7 billion email messages speed around the world, covering just about every topic.

Speaker 36 Mortgage rates, penis enlargements, pornography. Greeting cards.

Speaker 4 But it wasn't just annoying messages pushing bogus or embarrassing products.

Speaker 21 Criminals were also using spam as a way to illegally distribute prescription pills or run stock market schemes. In 2003, the spam economy was booming.

Speaker 20 Junk emails were running rampant, and McWilliams was writing a book all about it entitled Spam Kings.

Speaker 13 In it, he reported on all sorts of email horror stories, including one soccer mom in Ohio who received over 100,000 unsolicited emails in 48 hours.

Speaker 19 The only problem with this book was that it didn't have a main character yet.

Speaker 14 But then one day, he got an email.

Speaker 22 One day in May of 2003, I got just a series of spams from this company called Amazing Internet Products, which were advertising a bunch of junk.

Speaker 22 And because I had some chops as a sort of an internet sleuth, I tried to track down, you know, where are these spams coming from? Who sent them to me?

Speaker 22 And I was able to figure out that it actually came from a company that was located about 20 miles from where I was living.

Speaker 14 Dave Bridger, aka Davis Hawk, was the perfect subject for his book because his company, Amazing Internet Products, was indicative of how spam senders at the time operated, sending out millions of annoying emails every day and cashing in on it.

Speaker 22 They had made $300,000 in the course of that month just based on the order logs that I saw. And that was one website.
You know, and they would be managing multiple websites at any given time.

Speaker 43 But to get to this pinnacle of spamdom, Davis Hawk had to start from the bottom.

Speaker 13 In the summer of 1999, Hawke's life prospects were slim.

Speaker 33 His time as a neo-Nazi leader ended when his planned March on Washington failed spectacularly.

Speaker 8 Just so I make sure I have the thing down right about the march on Washington. So you booked it out of there before

Speaker 8 the day of the march itself?

Speaker 7 Literally, well, technically, it was the day of the march because it was about 3 a.m.

Speaker 7 The middle of the night.

Speaker 14 Membership fees to his Knights of Freedom website were drying up.

Speaker 43 His parents had stopped supporting him.

Speaker 33 He was out of work and out of money.

Speaker 44 So with his life in shambles, Hawk headed back down to South Carolina and held a fire sale online.

Speaker 38 In the life of Jesse James, no experience is wasted.

Speaker 18 As neo-Nazi Davis Wolfgang Hawk, he learned a lot about internet internet marketing while flooding forums and chat rooms with his hateful views.

Speaker 22 Because he had dropped out of college at the time to support himself, he was selling Nazi paraphernalia on the internet on eBay.

Speaker 33 Hawk took everything he learned from being an online Nazi and brought it over to the spam game.

Speaker 6 And on eBay, you were

Speaker 8 basically selling off like the Nazi trinkets?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 8 I mean, was it knives and jewelry and stuff?

Speaker 7 Yeah, basically.

Speaker 18 But But this was not exactly spamming. This was just selling stuff on eBay.

Speaker 13 Actually, he may have never gotten into spamming had he not been a little lazy and a lot spiteful.

Speaker 7 They said I was too slow to ship the product, that people were complaining, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 7 So then I got really pissed at ebay i started harvesting ebay addresses from the ebay site mostly manually by hand and spamming their users

Speaker 7 that's what got me started otherwise i never would have started had they not shut me down but i've been pissed i basically started spamming just to piss them off

Speaker 22 you realized you could effortlessly market and sell products online from your own little trailer in south carolina It did take a while for Hawk to work out the kinks, though.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, it was disastrous the first couple couple months of spamming. I couldn't get any orders.
I had sent out thousands, but tens, hundreds of thousands. I couldn't get shit.

Speaker 13 While Hawk was trying to get this off the ground, he moved around a lot.

Speaker 32 It's harder for people to come after you when you don't stay in one place for too long.

Speaker 44 He lived in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Rhode Island.

Speaker 13 with occasional dips in New Hampshire and Massachusetts where he held P.O.

Speaker 27 boxes.

Speaker 21 By his side for most of this was his girlfriend from the Nazi days, Patricia, and their two dogs, Nemesis and Drayton, that Hawk claimed were half-wolf.

Speaker 28 It was a funny existence.

Speaker 13 She would make some side cash teaching karate in whatever town they'd landed, while Hawk would keep refining his spam abilities, constantly making adjustments and adapting.

Speaker 23 For one, he started to spam only on the weekend.

Speaker 22 And his theory was that that's when the system administrators, you know, these anti-spammer types, might be away from their computers, might be distracted, and they might not be at work.

Speaker 22 And so then his spams could land in all the inboxes of all these people across the world.

Speaker 14 He also tinkered with what he was selling.

Speaker 22 He realized that the easiest thing to sell was not like a product where you had to put it in a package and put,

Speaker 22 you know, and mail it to somebody, which was like really labor intensive.

Speaker 22 He realized that the easiest thing to spam was digital products like how-to books, you know, how to be a spammer, how to hide your identity, you know, how to seduce women.

Speaker 22 You know, he came up with all these concepts that he could just create a PDF file and email it to people who responded to his spams.

Speaker 21 So the average Joe would open his email, which remember in those days might have taken a while because it was mostly dial-up.

Speaker 18 And slowly they'd start to see spam after spam clog up their inbox.

Speaker 22 Early in his career, when he was still spamming from South Carolina, somebody who received one of his spams contacted him and threatened to to sue him. And I think Hawk

Speaker 22 was like a little jarred by this and apparently went to an attorney and said, you know, what's going on here? Am I really at risk?

Speaker 42 He wasn't.

Speaker 16 Not really.

Speaker 33 Besides, in the early days of spamming, there was very little anyone could do to stop him.

Speaker 46 I can't be jailed for spamming.

Speaker 4 Read the federal laws.

Speaker 12 This is an actor reading Hawk's response to a complaint he got in March 2000.

Speaker 20 registering them in the name of more and more aliases.

Speaker 33 Names like George Baldwin, Clell Miller, Thomas P.

Speaker 13 Barnum.

Speaker 38 But threats of a lawsuit would not slow Hawk down. Business was picking up, so much so that he needed to hire a full-time staff, people he could trust.

Speaker 21 So, he went to a chess tournament.

Speaker 13 During his Nazi days, Hawk gave up chess. About a year into his spamming phase, he decided to get back into it.

Speaker 25 Given the turmoil of the past few years, he wanted to keep a low profile.

Speaker 33 So Hawk registered to play at a chess tournament under the alias Walter Smith.

Speaker 22 Somebody calls out to him, Hey, Britt!

Speaker 22 And he turns and it's this old, you know, high school buddy of his, Mauricio Ruiz.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 22 he just is

Speaker 22 just kind of like, don't call me Britt, kind of thing. He says, you know, my name now is Walter.

Speaker 22 And so Ruiz, like, okay, Walter, how are you? How have you been?

Speaker 33 The two old friends reconnect, and Hawk, or Walter Smith, as he's known at the tournament, conscripts Mauricio to join his little spamming group.

Speaker 33 But more importantly, at this tournament, Mauricio introduces Hawk to a fellow chess player named Braden Borneval. But people call him Brad.

Speaker 22 Who at the time, I think, was maybe 17.

Speaker 22 He was still in high school in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Speaker 23 And,

Speaker 22 you know, a pretty, kind of innocent kid,

Speaker 22 smart, really good chess player.

Speaker 13 Brian McWilliams interviewed Brad in 2004.

Speaker 42 The audio quality is poor.

Speaker 13 It's been cleaned up, but some of the words may be difficult to catch.

Speaker 35 You know, that's crazy. Are you rich or something? He's like, you know, he pulls out this big wad of money.
You know,

Speaker 35 like, I've never, never seen money like that. Like, wow, you know, he says, you know, I'm a stammer.

Speaker 13 Brad would eventually become Hawk's business partner and they would form amazing internet products together.

Speaker 4 So, with Brad, Mauricio, and a few others, Hawk had his team of young, influential chess prodigy spammers, and they started selling what turned out to be the perfect product.

Speaker 22 But I think he really hit it big financially

Speaker 22 with these pills.

Speaker 19 These pills would absolutely revolutionize Hawk's spamming business.

Speaker 4 For $25 a bottle, Hawk sold

Speaker 32 herbal penis enlargement pills.

Speaker 22 It really didn't enlarge penises. It was like a, it was an herbal Viagra, basically.
It was a product called Yohimbi, which I guess just basically increases the circulation of extremities.

Speaker 18 Whether they worked or not didn't matter.

Speaker 33 The spam was going out.

Speaker 13 and people were responding to them in droves.

Speaker 46 Imagine for a moment how you will feel. You'll radiate confidence and success whenever you enter a locker room and other men will look at you with real envy.

Speaker 46 But the best part is when you reveal yourself in all your glory to the woman in your life.

Speaker 46 I promise you she will not be able to keep her hands off you when you give her everything she needs from a man.

Speaker 22 My impression of Davis Hawk was he really was a pretty talented writer and would have been a really good like ad copywriter. He seemed to be really good at tapping into

Speaker 22 people's vulnerabilities and what they wanted to hear.

Speaker 13 The problem was, like with everything that Hawk did, he often took from others without asking.

Speaker 25 Much of his ad copy was actually ripped off from others. In fact, he really pissed off a very powerful spammer who went by the name Dr.
Fatburn.

Speaker 16 Dr.

Speaker 13 Byrne Byrne had sewed up a nice size of the market for herbal diet pills and was making good money.

Speaker 21 So Hawk wasn't just pissing off the victims of his scams.

Speaker 30 He was encroaching on the turf of other grifters.

Speaker 22 I know he was upset with Hawk at some point for stepping on his toes, basically, but I don't think it would ever rise to the level of anything that would, you know,

Speaker 22 require, you know, putting a gun to his head kind of thing.

Speaker 10 But Hawk didn't have time to think about jilted spammers.

Speaker 28 His business was going to the moon.

Speaker 21 In the beginning, he and his staff spammed out of their respective apartments.

Speaker 31 Hawk and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Brad and the Chess Boys in Manchester, New Hampshire. But then they upped production, moving into a 2,700 square foot refurbished mill in downtown Manchester.

Speaker 15 This gave them space to house dozens of computers, work areas for packing and shipping, and row upon row of boxes of penis pills, which went by the brand name Pinnacle.

Speaker 3 Every day, amazing internet products would just hammer email inboxes across America with spam.

Speaker 9 There were days when Dave was getting in like

Speaker 26 25-30 million a day.

Speaker 26 It was really ridiculous.

Speaker 20 And sending 30 million emails a day resulted in a lot of profit.

Speaker 35 January 2003, I made a lot of money. I probably

Speaker 44 did 150 to a thousand rows.

Speaker 12 150 grand a month bought Brad a nice big yellow hummer.

Speaker 10 Hawk meanwhile is also raking in the money but is just squirreling it away.

Speaker 12 At some point he develops the odd habit of taking out his profit as cash and then burying it.

Speaker 20 Like actually burying it in the ground.

Speaker 32 He's not living flashy, he rents his apartments and only buys used vehicles with a special love for old cop cars.

Speaker 21 He does all this so that on paper, he has barely any assets.

Speaker 23 Should anyone come after him someday?

Speaker 10 At this time, the boys and their pill money saw a chance to expand into another industry.

Speaker 22 They briefly kind of took this little detour from spamming. They created this company called Cream Pie Productions.

Speaker 18 Cream Pie Productions.

Speaker 22 So I asked Brad one time, I said, what was Cream Pie Productions? And he said, oh, it was a porno film company. They actually filmed some pornos.

Speaker 32 We haven't been able to find any porn they made, but we do know that spamming remained their main source of income.

Speaker 13 And one day, in 2003, Amazing Internet Products was offered something that would change everything.

Speaker 49 America Online now offers more benefits than ever before. And we've spent over a half a billion dollars to triple capacity.

Speaker 23 It's incredibly easy. America Online was the Google of its day, at one point becoming the most recognizable brand on the internet.
At its height, more than 30 million people were AOL users.

Speaker 25 And AOL had something very valuable to spammers.

Speaker 13 They had email addresses.

Speaker 18 Lots of them.

Speaker 22 If you're a hunter, AOL is like a deer, a 12-point stag with a red bow in its horns.

Speaker 22 I mean, as though this is like the target that we all are shooting for because these are, you know, these are internet users who are naive.

Speaker 22 They're kind of new to the internet. They probably have some money.
They would be an easy mark, you know, for your spam.

Speaker 22 So the goal was always to get into AOL, and these guys figured out a way to do it and just become really annoying in the process.

Speaker 23 For $52,000, Hawk and Bourneville bought a list of over 90 million AOL email addresses.

Speaker 16 These addresses would make them more money than ever before, but it would also be the beginning of the end.

Speaker 50 Look, there's a a lawsuit in court.

Speaker 36 You've been served with it, so you're accountable. Like they handed you the papers, so you have to come to court and address the situation.

Speaker 8 So, and what your plan is to do what regarding the lawsuit?

Speaker 26 Absolutely nothing.

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Speaker 16 Unknown caller.

Speaker 36 That literally said my phone goes spam risk.

Speaker 36 Hello, Davis.

Speaker 36 It's your legacy for me.

Speaker 13 This is Washington, D.C.

Speaker 33 lawyer Jennifer Archie.

Speaker 36 In 2004, she and her colleagues filed a lawsuit as outside counsel for America Online, Inc. against Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

Speaker 13 Jennifer is sitting in a gorgeous boardroom on the 10th floor of her firm's office building.

Speaker 38 A giant banker's box is is in front of her on a long wooden conference table.

Speaker 13 It's filled with case files that all pertain to Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

Speaker 33 She first knew Hawk as a pain-in-the-ass spammer.

Speaker 36 Spammer we came to know as Davis Wolfgang Hawk was sending herbal penis enlargement spam and significant volume that he got on our radar that way.

Speaker 38 Initially, AOL spent a lot of time and money trying to outsmart spammers like Hawk.

Speaker 36 As lawyers, we worked really closely with the in-house technical team at America Online, and they had a way in which members could report unwanted messages to a database they called TOS Spam.

Speaker 3 But in 2003, something happened that changed the game.

Speaker 36 One of the problems was that if you want to make up and invent email addresses, if you want to scrape them from the internet, if you want to just find a list and buy them, you were going to get a lot of bounce backs because the addresses wouldn't be good.

Speaker 36 So there was a holy grail search in the spammer community of like, how could you get your deliverability up so that everything wasn't getting blocked?

Speaker 36 So, someone reached into Inside AOL and found an employee named Jason Smathers, and he sold screen names, names, and addresses to a middleman, a broker, and that broker sold it five times, and he sold it once to Davis Hawk.

Speaker 4 The AOL employee was caught and charged.

Speaker 20 He spent 15 months in jail.

Speaker 25 But AOL didn't stop there.

Speaker 23 They went after Hawk.

Speaker 25 Because in 2003, for the first time, companies like AOL had been given the power to go after spammers.

Speaker 36 Congress kind of heard the call and passed the Can Spam Act of 2003.

Speaker 39 Today, though, our inboxes are clogged with unwanted, objectionable, and fraudulent messages. Spam is threatening to destroy the benefits of email.

Speaker 36 And for the first time, it's specially defined a variety of felonies that would involve sending unsolicited bulk messages.

Speaker 21 In other words, Congress began taking spam seriously, and spam was a big problem for America Online.

Speaker 36 By 2003, I think AOL's mail servers was the largest email system in the world. It was blocking about 1.5 billion spam messages daily.

Speaker 32 Spam not only made their users unhappy, but it cost AOL a lot of money to filter and police it.

Speaker 32 So with this new law in their arsenal, Archie and her team were tapped to go out and find the most egregious spammers and make an example of them.

Speaker 36 And we were on a hunt for targets.

Speaker 37 And right in their crosshairs, a former neo-Nazi.

Speaker 16 We

Speaker 36 ended up proving to the court that they had sent billions and billions of of messages, billions. And so by 2003, there was a lot of political willpower here in Washington to do something about it.

Speaker 32 So Archie and her team hit the two owners of amazing internet products, Brad Borneval and Davis Wolfgang Hawk, with the full force of the new law.

Speaker 13 To calculate damages, Jennifer and her team asked for a percentage of each message sent.

Speaker 42 AOL was asking for millions in damages.

Speaker 8 So, and what your plan is to do what

Speaker 8 regarding the lawsuit?

Speaker 7 Absolutely nothing.

Speaker 8 So, you're not going to try to come to some settlement with them?

Speaker 7 That's funny. No, I don't think so.

Speaker 7 What exactly do they hope to gain from suing me? I mean, when I saw the lawsuit in the paper, I just laughed. I thought this was, you know, comic.

Speaker 25 Hawk may have been cool-headed about this.

Speaker 13 He was practiced at running, hiding, and changing his name when he was in trouble.

Speaker 23 Brad, on the other hand.

Speaker 22 what Brad Bourneville ended up doing was settling it.

Speaker 13 McWilliams spoke to Brad Bourneville as his lawsuit with AOL was being finalized.

Speaker 26 When we finally came to agreement, I mean, the court, I think we did do it through the court, and the judge had to approve it and everything. So it's over now, and

Speaker 9 you know.

Speaker 6 And you can't talk about

Speaker 8 what the terms are?

Speaker 26 No, of course not.

Speaker 26 I'd love to, but you know.

Speaker 9 You still have a hummer?

Speaker 26 I'm not driving a hummer.

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 26 You can

Speaker 26 You can take your wild guess at what happened to it.

Speaker 48 Decades later, Jennifer Archie filled us in.

Speaker 33 AOL gave away Brad's Hummer in a contest.

Speaker 36 I was a utility worker in Connecticut, won the Yellow Hummer and came down. It was just the happiest day.

Speaker 36 You know, AOL and Time Warner were one company, and so they filled it with, you know, every DVD, you know, of all the, you know, like a whole bunch of Time Warner stuff.

Speaker 36 It was a, it was a very happy day.

Speaker 13 Things did not go down quite as smoothly when it came to Hawk.

Speaker 22 But Hawk, I think, just said, you know, I'm not settling this thing.

Speaker 25 AOL hired a team of private investigators to track him down and serve him papers.

Speaker 14 They staked out his apartment in Pawtucket.

Speaker 25 A PI handed out Hawk's photo at local restaurants.

Speaker 21 They even staked out tennis courts, hoping he might show his face to play a game.

Speaker 13 Those around Hawk during that time described someone who had become paranoid.

Speaker 33 In her AOL deposition, his mother told lawyers that she was so worried about him that she almost considered having him committed.

Speaker 14 This is an actress reading from her deposition.

Speaker 51 He would grab whatever he brought with him and yell, the feds. And he would jump up and run towards the door, our door, to go and leave.
And I would say, Britt, Britt, stop it. It's not the feds.

Speaker 51 He was just crazy. And also, I mean, I saw it coming.
I saw it way, way back when he was involved in the Knights of Freedom organization, KOF.

Speaker 13 Brad Borneval saw Hawk's mental state change too.

Speaker 6 And you told me the story about how he shaved his head.

Speaker 26 Yeah, no, last time I saw him, he had shaved his head.

Speaker 26 He said he found out from the source that the FBI was after him.

Speaker 28 He was fixated on the FBI.

Speaker 32 Brian McWilliams heard this from Hawk as well.

Speaker 7 And I was followed twice by the FBI.

Speaker 7 Both times I made the tail. Both times, well, the first time I followed him.
And the second time, he followed me. And then I cut my life off reverse, and I tailed him.

Speaker 7 We were in almost like a high-speed chase.

Speaker 7 Twice I was tailed by those fucking guys.

Speaker 25 Hawk was desperate for McWilliams to file a Freedom of Information request to get his FBI file.

Speaker 32 He did, and so did we.

Speaker 25 While the FBI does have a lot in it about his Nazi activities, they were not terribly interested in spam.

Speaker 36 I think...

Speaker 36 I'm no psychologist and I think his psychology was pretty complicated, but I think there was a healthy dose of fear that the government was looking for him and that it wasn't just America Online.

Speaker 36 We had heard that from some of his friends and compatriots that he would get very paranoid. And so my own contacts with him were just very clinical and business-like.

Speaker 50 Like, look, there's a lawsuit in court.

Speaker 36 You've been served with it. So you're accountable.
Like, they handed you the papers. So you have to come to court and address the situation.

Speaker 13 But there was no way Hawk was going to do that.

Speaker 21 So he decided to run.

Speaker 44 Brad says that last time he talked to him, Hawk says he was going to leave the country.

Speaker 9 He was definitely planning to do something.

Speaker 13 Brad told McWilliams that Hawk wasn't just being hounded by AOL, but that the IRS was after him too. He was telling me he was getting noticed like every week

Speaker 26 from the IRS. And

Speaker 26 he wasn't going to pay them ever. So

Speaker 6 eventually he would have been charged

Speaker 6 with tax evasion.

Speaker 43 The last time he heard from Hawk, Brian McWilliams was just finishing his book.

Speaker 22 And then I got a voicemail.

Speaker 7 Received Monday, August 9th at 10.03 p.m.

Speaker 7 Yo, Brian, this is Dave Hawk.

Speaker 26 Hey,

Speaker 6 tomorrow

Speaker 6 may be the last chance for you to interview me before this book gets published. So I'll give you a call back just in case you want to ask me any final questions.

Speaker 6 Okay, see you later. There are some interesting developments later.

Speaker 22 He didn't leave a phone number, you know, never left a phone number. He said, I'll try reaching you again and click.
You know, and that was

Speaker 22 it. You know, I had no other contact with him.

Speaker 13 Hawk or no Hawk, AOL kept going with a lawsuit.

Speaker 36 And so, ultimately, court entered a judgment of $13 million against Hawk.

Speaker 28 With a multi-million dollar judgment on his head, the authorities on his tail, and a personality that liked to thumb his nose at the man, Davis Hawk made sure no one could find him.

Speaker 10 Here's Hyman Greenbaum.

Speaker 47 He said he's going to disappear. He left a book here, I think, called Hide Your Assets and Disappear.

Speaker 28 It was a giant game of hide and seek, and he was successful.

Speaker 23 AOL looked for him for months.

Speaker 13 Brian McWilliams spoke with Brad Bourneville about it in the middle of the manhunt.

Speaker 9 I doubt they're ever going to find him.

Speaker 26 You know, they might eventually, but I don't know.

Speaker 9 He's pretty smart when it comes to hiding.

Speaker 26 And he doesn't care.

Speaker 26 If someone doesn't care about

Speaker 26 their family and ever seeing their friends again, then it's tough to catch them.

Speaker 32 But AOL was undeterred.

Speaker 12 They wanted to recoup some of those ill-gotten gains.

Speaker 36 Here we decided to, you know, if you weren't going to play nice, we were going to go find your assets. And he was a harder case than some because he didn't use bank accounts.

Speaker 36 He had put it into gold bars.

Speaker 42 Yes, you heard that correctly.

Speaker 30 Gold bars.

Speaker 36 We learned from his business partners and things that he had this habit of converting things to gold. We found the receipts that he had

Speaker 36 deed converted his spam earnings into gold gold bars. And there was pretty good evidence that he was burying the gold.
He had his business partner. We said, How do you know he buried it?

Speaker 36 And he said, I went to Home Depot to buy the shovel with him.

Speaker 18 Brian McWilliams asked Brad Bourneville about the gold, too.

Speaker 29 All the money he has, he buries in the White Mountains.

Speaker 22 Literally digs a hole. He literally digs a hole and buries the money in the White Mountains.

Speaker 35 He literally goes up there, digs a hole.

Speaker 22 He supposes he has a GPS or something? Market Spider-Man, how how does he know where he's putting it?

Speaker 35 He won't reveal how he knows, but he says sometimes he goes and checks to make sure it's still there every once in a while. He says sometimes he has trouble finding it.

Speaker 16 Neither GPS.

Speaker 13 Another place where Hawk was rumored to have stashed the gold was in his grandparents' backyard in Massachusetts, and AOL was determined to dig it up.

Speaker 36 So we went to a court in Massachusetts and presented all the evidence, and the court said that we could use ground-penetrating radar.

Speaker 32 Hawke's mother, Peggy, went to the media when it was reported that AOL was considering the dig.

Speaker 51 She's quoted as saying, I don't care if they dig up the entire yard. They are just going to make fools of themselves.

Speaker 51 There is absolutely no reason for them to think that Davis Hawk would be stupid enough to bury gold on our property. My son is long gone.

Speaker 25 Ultimately, AOL decided against the dig.

Speaker 36 Because the property owners went to the media and, you know, said that this was going on and there was really no interest in having a, this was something we wanted to do quietly to see if literally that was where the gold was and it wasn't a publicity stunt.

Speaker 36 It also, ultimately, AOL did not go, you know, looking for any gold in the backyard.

Speaker 18 But AOL still didn't give up.

Speaker 13 They wanted Hawk.

Speaker 13 They deposed all of his associates, his parents, his past girlfriends, and their private investigators looked high and low.

Speaker 13 And then, in 2005, one of AOL's private investigators gets a ping from a passport entering the country of Belize using the name Andrew Britt Greenbaum.

Speaker 13 Belize is one of those countries where it's easy to open a bank account and hard for others to track it down.

Speaker 36 He went to Belize and was looking to buy property there.

Speaker 13 Brian McWilliams also remembers Hawk telling him that he would one day move there.

Speaker 22 You know, I asked him in one of our last times we talked, I said, Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Speaker 22 And he says, I see myself under a palm tree in Belize with a pretty girl by my side, or something like that.

Speaker 13 There are other reports that he bounced over to Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific, where he was money laundering under the name Julio Santiago.

Speaker 36 But eventually, the trail went cold.

Speaker 36 And I have to believe he took the gold.

Speaker 13 Hawk would send emails to his parents, occasionally a phone call, but around this time, he all but disappeared from their lives, too.

Speaker 47 I mean, we both thought he would find a way to communicate with us, you know, or drop us a postcard or something, but it had not heard anything.

Speaker 51 He had emails or anything like that.

Speaker 16 He didn't get anything from him.

Speaker 51 Yeah, that must have been tough.

Speaker 47 He was your son.

Speaker 16 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 25 During her deposition with AOL, Peggy spoke about one of the last letters she ever got from her son.

Speaker 42 It was a handwritten note that said,

Speaker 51 Dear mom, I don't know when I will be able to see you again.

Speaker 51 It's hard to get a visa to come to the United States. I'm sick of this fishing trawler.
Love Britt.

Speaker 30 Peggy told the lawyers she didn't know where her son was.

Speaker 42 Although, with the reference to the fish trawler, Belize seems like a good guess.

Speaker 48 But she told them that the letter was very special to her because he signed off with love.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 28 She said, quote, it was the first time in his whole life he ever used the word love to address me.

Speaker 32 So it was very emotional.

Speaker 13 2006 is the last anyone heard from Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

Speaker 30 It was the last time he would see or talk to his parents.

Speaker 18 Peggy Greenbaum died in 2019 wondering what happened to her son.

Speaker 18 We haven't seen Britt in months, months and months and months.

Speaker 36 We don't know where he is, so I'm answering the phone now

Speaker 7 in hopes that it's Britt.

Speaker 28 For years, it seems he was even hiding from the internet.

Speaker 18 But then, in August of 2009,

Speaker 4 he re-emerges in his final form and posts to a rock climbing group.

Speaker 46 Climbing partner wanted. Anytime, any day of the week.
I'm in Squamish until October 1st and looking for a climbing partner, ASAP.

Speaker 46 Call or text me if you'd like to get out and do some climbing. Chow, Jesse.

Speaker 47 There were rumors he'd gone to Columbia and South America, but

Speaker 47 I should have known better because he hated hot weather.

Speaker 47 And I should have known he'd more likely go to Canada.

Speaker 32 We don't know what he was doing during those lost years between 2006 and 2009, but it's not a stretch to imagine that he'd pissed someone off in Belize or wherever else he landed and needed another escape.

Speaker 33 What's clear is Hawk was working in a dangerous profession.

Speaker 32 Basement hackers were using spam, but so were dangerous criminals.

Speaker 36 Spam was weaponized in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 36 It was viewed as

Speaker 36 really an engine of crime.

Speaker 10 Even his mother, during her deposition, admits that her son was worried about his safety.

Speaker 51 He made quite a few enemies while he was spamming.

Speaker 37 What kind of enemies?

Speaker 51 Enemies who threatened him with physical harm. He made a lot of enemies.

Speaker 36 It was a bad time. It was scary.

Speaker 36 And the people that were attracted to this sort of pseudo-criminal activity that, you know, they could easily tumble into criminal, you know, conduct in the same way because they were, you know, playing with the feds.

Speaker 13 And there is no way someone like Hawk, someone so attracted to the dark side of the web, could have stayed away from what was coming next.

Speaker 13 And this time, it wouldn't take much to imagine someone wanting to kill him.

Speaker 47 Bitcoin was invented in 2009, and I'm pretty sure he at some point within a year or two after that bought quite a bit of Bitcoin

Speaker 47 probably using money you got from the gold.

Speaker 4 Next time on Dirt Bad Climber, we explore the final chapter of Jesse James's life and how all of his past lives contributed to his ultimate demise.

Speaker 17 He was worried about people, he expressed to me coming for him, and it's obviously why he's living in a truck, you know, in the woods, away from people.

Speaker 36 Was he worried about people coming for his money, or was there something else going on?

Speaker 17 Well, I think that he was worried about, you know, he's basically coming to kill them.

Speaker 23 Can't wait for more?

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Speaker 13 Dirtbag Climber is a production of Lark Productions and Kelly and Kelly for CBC Podcasts.

Speaker 3 The show is hosted by me, Stephen Chua.

Speaker 12 It's written and produced by Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly.

Speaker 13 The showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar. Producers are Karen Bracken and Tina Apostolopoulos Moniz.

Speaker 10 Associate producer, Hadil Abdel-Nabi.

Speaker 12 Sound design by Paul Tedeschini and Chris Kelly.

Speaker 13 Tamara Black is our coordinating producer.

Speaker 32 Original music by Chris Kelly.

Speaker 21 Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Our digital producer is Rosh Nihinaier.

Speaker 38 The series was developed by Ainslie Vogel, Gene Parsons, and Kristen Boychuk.

Speaker 13 Additional reporting by Yvette Brand.

Speaker 45 For Kelly and Kelly, executive producer Chris Kelly, executive producer Pat Kelly, business affairs producer Lauren Berkovich.

Speaker 19 For Lark Productions, executive producer Aaron Haskett, VP Business Affairs, Tex Antonucci.

Speaker 43 For CBC, executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Speaker 10 Tanya Springer is the senior manager and R.

Speaker 13 F.

Speaker 21 Norani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Speaker 5 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.