S34 EP4: Spam King | Dirtbag Climber

When you fly SJC, you can zip from curb to gate in minutes, faster than fast.

So much faster, you'll wonder where the time didn't go.

Fly simple, fly SJC.

Visit flysjc.com.

This is a CBC podcast.

Hello?

Hi.

Hello, yes.

I'm Friarish Dave Bridger.

Uh, Dave Bridger is speaking.

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

Oh, okay.

Hey, what's up?

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

Oh, uh, what story is that?

Uh, a story looking at uh amazing internet products and I guess the whole spam operation you got going.

Uh spam?

Well, you know, internet-based advertising.

Um, not sure what that is.

What do you mean?

A spam.

I'm not sure what that is.

I think you know what spam is.

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

Well, I don't know really what you're talking about.

I mean, I work at McDonald's.

I'm I'm a manager.

So I'm not not sure what you mean by emails.

I mean, we do have some specials.

I mean,

burgers for $3 today.

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

What is a website?

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

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

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

it'd be cool to hear from you directly.

Yeah, well, you're talking to me.

Yeah, but you're just, you know, you're giving me a bunch of BS, so

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

Yeah.

Well, good talking to you.

Well, I hope we can talk again.

Okay, bye.

McWilliams and Bridger would talk again.

They'd end up talking a a lot.

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

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.

I don't like people to know my name.

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

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

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 lead him up to Canada, where he would meet his end.

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

Computer people call it getting spammed, unwanted email.

Since the internet revolution began, marketers have discovered email as a way to target consumers.

It can be infuriating and embarrassing.

Spam.

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.

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

And the subject of spam was a specialty of his.

Here he is explaining how it worked.

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

It wasn't target marketing.

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.

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.

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

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

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

message boards and basically stealing people's email addresses.

Or you would just randomly generate email addresses.

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.

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

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

Mortgage rates, penis enlargements, pornography, greeting cards.

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

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.

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

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.

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

But then one day, he got an email.

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.

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?

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.

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 millions of annoying emails every day and cashing in on it.

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.

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

In the summer of 1999, Hawk's life prospects were slim.

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

Just so I make sure I have the thing down right about the march on Washington.

So you booked it out of there before

the day of the march itself?

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

in the middle of the night.

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

His parents had stopped supporting him.

He was out of work and out of money.

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

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

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

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

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

And on eBay,

you're basically selling off

the Nazi trinkets?

Yeah.

I mean, was it knives and jewelry and stuff?

Yeah, basically.

But this was not exactly spamming.

This was just selling stuff on eBay.

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

You want to know the reason I started doing it?

I'll tell you why.

It's because I was selling stuff on eBay.

I was making like

maybe two, 300, maybe even 500 bucks a week, okay?

But eBay banned me.

They shut me down.

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

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.

That's what got me started.

Otherwise, I never would have started had they not shut me down.

But I was fucking pissed.

I basically started spamming just to piss them off.

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.

Yeah, no, it was disastrous the first couple months of spamming.

I couldn't get any orders.

I had sent out thousands, I couldn't tens, hundreds of thousands.

I couldn't get shit.

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

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

He lived in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Rhode Island, with occasional dips in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where he held P.O.

boxes.

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.

It was a funny existence.

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.

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

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.

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

He also tinkered with what he was selling.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

And I think Hawk

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?

He wasn't.

Not really.

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

I can't be jailed for spamming.

Read the federal laws.

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

It is a civil offense whereby you can sue me for $500 per message.

I make $25,000 each weekend doing this.

It will cost you more than $500 just to hire a good civil attorney.

Go for it, pal.

I can afford it.

This seems to be the way Hawk ruled.

When he made people angry, he doubled down.

It was also at this time that he started protecting himself with shell companies, registering them in the name of more and more aliases.

Names like George Baldwin, Clell Miller, Thomas P.

Barnum.

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.

So he went to a chess tournament.

During his Nazi days, Hawk gave up chess.

About a year into his spamming phase, he decided to get back into it.

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

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

Somebody calls out to him, Hey, Britt!

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

And

he just is

just kind of like, don't call me Brett, kind of thing.

He says,

my name now is Walter.

And

so Ruiz like, okay, Walter,

how are you?

How are you, man?

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.

But more importantly, at this tournament, Mauricio introduces Hawk to a fellow chess player named Braden Borneval.

But people call him Brad.

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

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

And,

you know, a pretty kind of innocent kid,

smart, really good chess player.

Brian McWilliams interviewed Brad in 2004.

The audio quality is poor.

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

You know, that's crazy.

Are you rich or something?

He's like, yeah, and he pulls out this big wad of money.

I've never, never seen money like that.

Like, wow.

You know, he says, you know, I'm a spammer.

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

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.

But I think he really hit it big financially

with these pills.

These pills would absolutely revolutionize Hawk's spamming business.

For $25 a bottle, Hawk sold herbal penis enlargement pills.

It really didn't enlarge penises.

It was like a

herbal Viagra, basically.

It was a product called Yohimbi, which I guess just basically increases the circulation of extremities.

Whether they worked or not didn't matter.

The spam was going out, and people were responding to them in droves.

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.

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

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

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 you know, people's vulnerabilities and what they wanted to hear.

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

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.

Dr.

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

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

He was encroaching on the turf of other grifters.

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,

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

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

His business was going to the moon.

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

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.

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.

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

There were days when Dave was getting in like

25, 30 million a day.

It was really ridiculous.

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

January 2003, I made a lot of money.

I probably

did 150, 200,000 rows.

150 grand a month bought Brad a nice big yellow Hummer.

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

At some point, he develops the odd habit of taking out his profit as cash and then burying it, like actually burying it in the ground.

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

He does all this so that on paper, he has barely any assets, should anyone come after him someday.

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

They briefly kind of took this little detour from spamming and they had they created this company called Cream Pie Productions.

Cream Pie Productions.

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.

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

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

America Online now offers more benefits than ever before.

And we've spent over a half a billion dollars to triple capacity.

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.

And AOL had something very valuable to spammers.

They had email addresses.

Lots of them.

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

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.

They're kind of new to the internet.

They probably have some money.

They would be an easy mark, you know, for your spam.

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.

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

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

Look, there's a lawsuit in court.

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.

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

Absolutely nothing.

A 20-year-old soldier goes missing from a U.S.

Army base.

How can she go missing on a military base?

That's ridiculous.

What would come to light is horrifying and ignites a movement that sparks a reckoning in the U.S.

military.

Listen to Vanished, What Happened to Vanessa, A new series from ABC Audio in 2020.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certapro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certa Pro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Unknown Caller.

That literally says my phone goes spam risk.

Hello, Davis.

It's your legacy for me.

This is Washington, D.C.

lawyer Jennifer Archie.

In 2004, she and her colleagues filed a lawsuit as outside counsel for America Online, Inc.

against Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

But in 2003, something happened that changed the game.

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.

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.

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.

The AOL employee was caught and charged.

He spent 15 months in jail.

But AOL didn't stop there.

They went after Hawk.

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

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

Today, though, our inboxes are clogged with unwanted, objectionable, and fraudulent messages.

Spam is threatening to destroy the benefits of email.

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

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

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.

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

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.

And we were on a hunt for targets.

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

We

ended up proving to the court that they had sent billions and billions of messages, billions.

And so by 2003, there was a lot of political willpower here in Washington to do something about it.

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

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

AOL was asking for millions in damages.

So, and what your plan is to do what

regarding the lawsuit?

Absolutely nothing.

So you're not going to try to come to some settlement with them or nothing?

That's funny.

No, I don't think so.

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.

Hawk may have been cool-headed about this.

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

Brad, on the other hand...

What Brad Bourneville ended up doing was settling it.

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

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

you know.

And you can't talk about

what the terms are?

No, of course not.

I'd love to, but you know.

You still have a hummer?

I'm not driving a hammer.

No.

You can take your a wild guess at what happened to it decades later jennifer archie filled us in ao gave away brad's hummer in a contest uh i was a utility worker in connecticut won the uh yellow hummer and came down it was just the happiest day you know aoel 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 it was a it was a very happy day

things did not go down quite as smoothly when it came to Hawk.

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

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

They staked out his apartment in Pawtucket.

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

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

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

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

This is an actress reading from her deposition.

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.

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.

Brad Bourneville saw Hawk's mental state change too.

And you told me the story about how he shaved his head and yeah, no, last time I saw him he had shaved his head.

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

He was fixated on the FBI.

Brian McWilliams heard this from Hawk as well.

And I was followed twice by the FBI.

Both times I made the tail.

Both times...

Well, the first time

I followed him.

And the second time, he followed me.

And and then I cut my life off reverse, and I tailed him.

We were in almost like a high-speed chase.

Twice I was tailed by those fucking guys.

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

He did, and so did we.

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

I think

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.

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.

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

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.

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

So he decided to run.

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

He was definitely planning to do something.

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

from the IRS.

And

he wasn't going to pay them ever.

So

eventually he would have been charged

with tax evasion.

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

And then I got a voicemail.

Received Monday, August 9th at 10:03 p.m.

Yo, Brian, this is Dave Hawk.

Hey,

tomorrow 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.

Okay, see you later.

There are some interesting developments.

Later.

He didn't leave a phone number.

You never left a phone number.

He said, I'll try reaching you again and click.

And

that was it.

I had no other contact with him.

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

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

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.

Here's Hyman Greenbaum.

He said he's going to disappear.

He left a book here, I think, called Hide Your Assets and Disappear.

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

AOL looked for him for months.

brian mcwilliams spoke with brad bourneval about it in the middle of the manhunt i doubt they're ever gonna find him

he you know he might eventually but i don't know he he's pretty he's pretty smart when it comes to you know hiding so

and he doesn't care you know if someone doesn't care about you know their family and you know ever seeing their friends again then it's tough to catch them

But AOL was undeterred.

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

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.

He had put it into gold bars.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

Gold bars.

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, you know, deed converted his spam earnings into 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 and he said i went to home depot to buy the shovel with him

brian mcwilliams asked brad bourneville about the gold too

all the money he has he buries in the white mountains literally digs a hole he literally digs a hole and buries the money in the white mountains he literally goes up there digs a hole he has a gps or something market spider and how does he know where he's putting putting it?

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.

We need the GPS.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Ultimately, AOL decided against the dig.

Because the property owners went went to the media and 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.

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

But AOL still didn't give up.

They wanted Hawk.

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

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.

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

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

Brian McWilliams also remembers Hawk telling him that he would one day move

You know, I asked him in one of our last times we talked, I said something like, where do you see yourself in 10 years?

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

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.

But eventually.

The trail went cold.

And I have to believe he took the gold.

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

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.

He had emails or anything like that.

He didn't get anything from him.

Yeah, that must have been tough.

He was your son.

Right.

Yeah.

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

It was a handwritten note that said,

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

It's hard to get a visa to come to the United States.

I'm sick of this fishing trawler.

Love Britt.

Peggy told the lawyers she didn't know where her son was, although with the reference to the fish trawler, Belize seems like a good guess.

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

Great.

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

So it was very emotional.

2006 is the last anyone heard from Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

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

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

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

We don't know where he is.

So I'm answering the phone now

in hopes that it's Britt.

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

But then, in August of 2009,

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

Climbing partner wanted.

Anytime, any day of the week.

I'm in Squamish until October 1st and looking for a climbing partner, ASAP.

Call or text me if you'd like to get out and do some climbing.

Ciao, Jesse.

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

I should have known better because he hated hot weather.

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

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.

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

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

Spam was weaponized in a lot of different ways.

It was viewed as

really an engine of crime.

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

He made quite a few enemies while he was spamming.

What kind of enemies?

Enemies who threatened him with physical harm.

He made a lot of enemies.

It was a bad time.

It was scary.

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.

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.

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

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

probably using money you got from the gold.

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.

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.

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

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

Can't wait for more?

Binge all episodes early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at CBC Podcasts.

For early and ad-free listening, subscribe to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts at apple.co slash CBC TrueCrime.

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

The show is hosted by me, Stephen Chua.

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

The showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar.

Producers are Karen Bracken and Tina Apostolopoulos-Moniz.

Associate producer, Hadil Abdel-Nabi.

Sound design by Paul Tedeschini and Chris Kelly.

Tamara Black is our coordinating producer.

Original music by Chris Kelly.

Our senior producer is Jeff Turner.

Our digital producer is Rosh Nihinaier.

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

Additional reporting by Yvette Brand.

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

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

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

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Norani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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