Ordinary Perople Versus Corporate Bullies

The Overstock.com slo-mo train wreck continued last night, with its resident stalker, the so-called "director of social media" Judd Bagley, reiterating a threat he had made a week ago to contact the employers of people criticizing this disgusting company. 

It's interesting how Bagley and his boss Patrick Byrne have focused their venom on ordinary Internet users, as well as gutsy reporters who have taken them on (such as Susan Antilla of Bloomberg and Joe Nocera of the New York Times). This is a new and disturbing element of Overstock's "campaign of menace," as it was so accurately described by Nocera.

While it is unclear whether Bagley can actually do any damage by his tactics -- replaying his smear campaign against a Florida reporter when he was a flack in the Jeb Bush administration -- there's no doubt that this slimeball would love to destroy his boss's critics. 

 After all, that is what Bagley is paid to do. His cover story, a joke called "Omuse, was revealed last week to have been outsourced, and another fairy tale, that Bagley was put in charge of a "cars" project, disintegrated today with a routine announcement referring to a "vice president for cars." It ain't Bagley.

It's clear that he and Byrne are hell-bent on diverting attention from Overstock's miserable financial condition, as in Byrne's moronic "hold up the sign" stunt on CNBC last March (right). Overstock's finances have become so awful that it has begun liquidating assets. See Jeff Matthews's analysis of Byrne's sale of a once-hyped travel subsidiary, and a Seth Jayson article in Motley Fool describing the O-Meltdown. 

The number one target on Overstock's enemies list is a software engineer who runs the excellent O-Smear blog, who was instrumental in revealing that the antisocialmedia.net smear site was run by Overstock. 

 O-Smear recently deconstructed Bagley's smear campaign against Antilla, commenced after she wrote a column excoriating Bagley and Byrne. Bagley, typically, centered an entire item around a fiction -- Antilla's "marriage to a hedge fund magnate," constructing a brand new conspiracy theory. A few minutes of checking records on the Internet-- or, God forbid, a phone call to Antilla -- could have ascertained that they are divorced. 

Bagley and Byrne are also terrified of Sam E. Antar, former CFO of Crazy Eddie's, who devotes his life to exposing the Overstocks of this world. They worked hard to get him kicked off the Investor Village Overstock message board, where he was removed for "clogging" the board with smart questions. 

Sam's analysis of Overstock's accounting, through sharp questions such as this, provides a road map for regulators in the months ahead. 

David Carr talked about "citizen journalists" in the New York Times today. But these aren't journalists. They are just citizens. 

What I don't understand is why regulators and law enforcement (who are fully aware of Overstock's actions, believe me), haven't stepped in by now, particularly since Overstock's strange share price behavior is sucking in still more "dumb money." 

 All regulators need to do is follow the trail of bread crumbs -- left for them by citizen sleuths who have already done much of the spadework. 

Meanwhile I wonder what's next on Bagley's agenda. Drowning puppies? 

UPDATE: Nope, looks like the next item on his agenda was covering his tracks. All of Bagley's posts on the Yahoo Overstock message board, where he is "antsaresocialinsects," abruptly vanished on March 20. The puppies will come later. 

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved. 

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  Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6. Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Going Postal in Baloney-land

As I have noted in several posts, the paranoia of the anti-naked shorting loons sometimes froths over the top into obscenity and violence.

The threats against Universal Express receiver Jane Moscowitz by deranged anti-shorting cultists, and the creepy threats against a Wikipedia administrator by Judd Bagley of Overstock.com, are examples of that.

The rhetoric from these lowlifes seems to have ratcheted up a notch.

I'm grateful to a reader for bringing to my attention some really troubling, violent rhetoric from a character named C. Austin "Bud" Burrell, who runs a pink sheet company and is one of a cluster of penny stock types to bang away at stock market conspiracy theories in "thesanitycheck" website.

Burrell is justifiably obscure, but he recently garnered some attention when it was revealed that his constant hyping of naked shorting poster child Universal Express (in rants like this and this) came at a price -- he was on the payroll of Universal Express as a "consultant."

The strain of railing against a nonexistent crisis seems to be extracting a toll on the poor dear, as today we get a violence-tinged rant.


Burrell begins by likening "the typical serial financial criminals" (translation: people who disagree with him) to serial killers, and then spits on the experiences of real combat veterans by likening his silly posturing to serving under fire in the military: "I am 7 years in, and bluntly, I am well past hoping to completely repair myself psychologically." He'll get no argument from me on that.

Burrell continues,

I warn everyone here and now that if one or more of you wants to try and drag me back into this morass, don't expect to survive in whole form. I have had enough of this corrupt insanity. If I am threatened again by anyone for any reason, I will retaliate on the spot without limits. I won't wait to find out if you really meant it, or for you to try and choke out an apology. (emphasis added)

You can hope that I can call the FBI first, but that will depend entirely on how serious I think you are. You should not interpret this as a warning, but much more as a promise from someone who keeps his as a part of his personal identity.

No. My hope is that someone else calls the FBI first, and the sooner the better.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Does Overstock.com Have a Board of Directors?

Warning: This item is not recommended for pregnant or nursing women, children under 18, persons with high blood pressure or heart disease, or anyone with a weak stomach:

Reading the latest atrocity by the nauseating (and I do mean nauseating) Judd Bagley, Overstock.com's Director of Communications, official spokesman and resident stalker, has gotten me wondering: does Overstock.com have a board of directors?

Not "does it have a competent board of directors?" or "does it have independent board members who care about their jobs?" -- the answer to those two questions obviously being no -- but whether there is such a thing as "corporate governance" at this chamber pot of a company.

What got me wondering about this was an act of blackmail, signed proudly by Bagley, directed at the proprietor of the O-Smear website, which has exposed this SEC-investigated company's unethical conduct.

You can read about the blackmail here, but I think the letter is worth replicating below:

From: Judd Bagley
To: scipioafricanus_iv@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 11:51:26 PM
Subject: just thought I'd ask...

I thought I should tell you that I've have known your real identity for a while now.

Up until last week, it appeared that you'd grown tired of o-smear and all the games (which would make "outting" you unnecessary) but lately it appears that's not the case.

I don't want to cause anybody unnecessary harm, but I'm beyond tired of the lies.

If you choose to continue as you have been, I will write about you on AntiSocialMedia.net. In doing so, my goal is not to intimidate, but to let you own your words; under those circumstances, I think the lies will take care of themselves.

Having said that, I'm also very much aware of the impact this could have on your reputation, especially where you live, and I feel obligated to offer you a way out. So, if you're ready to set things right, I'll keep your name to myself and figure we'll both be karmically better off for it.

I look forward to your response (and will be PMing this to your IV account, as well).

--
Judd Bagley

Note the dictionary definition of blackmail: "to force or coerce into a particular action, statement, etc."

This may go down in history as the first blackmail letter written in smug corporate P.R. doublespeak. ("I'm beyond tired of the lies"="I'm beyond tired of the truth." "My goal is not to intimidate"= "My goal is to intimidate you and every other critic of Overstock.com") I say that because Bagley was, of course, aware that his letter would be made public. He's proud of it, you see.

Note the similarity in wording to the threat that he made against a Wikipedia administrator in late August, shortly after going on the Overstock.com payroll in his initial title of "director of social media."

No other company in the U.S. would sanction such disgusting, unethical, and legally questionable conduct by a corporate official, made doubly odious by the fact that Bagley was hired to do the bidding of CEO Byrne, and his actions have a long history of being supported and promoted by Byrne.

Any other corporate board would discharge both Byrne and Bagley -- something obviously inconceivable for the laughingstock, lapdog, functionally nonexistent Overstock.com board.

Reading this email from a corporate thug to a private citizen also makes me wonder: Is there is such a concept as "SEC enforcement" when it comes to the misdeeds of Overstock and its CEO Patrick Byrne? Or has Byrne's ancestral wealth and political influence makes that concept moot as well?

This latest episode in the Bagley-Byrne saga is a test of Overstock.com's board of directors as well as the Enforcement Division of the SEC.

The board's independent members, I understand, have been advised of Bagley's latest actions. Ditto for the SEC.


If they do nothing in a reasonably brief period of time, then the answer to the question that I posed above will be answered. It will mean that Overstock.com, for all intents and purposes, does not have a board of directors.

As for SEC enforcement -- well, just read my book and you can understand why nothing has been done. If anything is done, I would surmise, it would only happen long after Ovestock is a wretched memory.

Also today, Sam Antar has a revealing, detailed post on how Bagley and Byrne have used anti-Semitism as a tool of corporate intimidation. It makes for fascinating reading.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: O-Smear did not respond and Bagley carried out his threat on Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. By so doing, Bagley showed that he is as much a schmuck as he is a blackmailer.

Bagley's "revelation" is that O-Smear is run not by the Sith Lord but by some guy in Indiana -- a private citizen who is disgusted with corporate creeps like Judd Bagley.

To make the slimy picture complete, and thumb his nose at Joseph J. Tabacco Jr. and other independent directors, Bagley put a spyware bug in his ASM post, so as to track people distributing the item via email.

The onus is now on Tabacco and the other independent board members. By serving on the board of this company, they have a moral and, I suspect, legal obligation to register strong and public disapproval of the activities of Bagley and Byrne. If they don't, their silence would be tacit approval of Bagley's and Byrne's disgraceful behavior, and they will bear full responsibility for their neglect of duty.

Quite frankly, I wonder how reputable people like Tabacco could allow their reputations to be sullied by associating with a company such as Overstock.com.

Some reaction:

The Motley Fool's Daniel Rubin calls Bagley's blackmail adventures "the most incredible thing I've seen in my seven years of following the market. "

Says Rubin:

Is there ANY oversight of all this filth? Any at all? To see this mockery go on right out in the open, and involving an American public company is starting to genuinely challenge my faith in the integrity of the system. As I've said, this is the cruelest irony of this debacle. This pitiful, puke-inducing chapter of American business never ceases to turn the stomach - cyberstalking, anti-Semitism, Sith Lords, international mobsters, conspiracies, and enough message board animosity to fuel a space shuttle.

Rubin added in another Motley Fool post: "The question is when will all [Byrne's] railing and false accusations and seemingly blatant illegal activity result in his removal and legal action? This man has left a trail of animosity and denigration of the human spirit that is awe inspiring in it's scope."

That's the question. The answer is with Joe Tabacco and his colleagues.

More reaction:

• Sleazy McSleaze Now Even Sleazier (Dealbreaker)

• Is Overstock threatening its detractors? (AOL Finance BloggingStocks Blog)

• Judd Bagley is threatening people who speak out against the management and deception at Overstock.com? (Tracy Coenen's FraudFiles blog)

Digg this!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Overstock.com to Regulation FD: Drop Dead

(Updated 6/6/07 with quote from Patrick Byrne on Reg. FD)

Something new and wondrous always seems to emerge over the weekends in the always fascinating Overstock.com slo-mo train wreck. So it was this weekend.

Seems that "Omuse," the worthless Wikipedia wanna-be that was created to provide a cover story for its nauseating stalker in residence, newly re-titled Director of Communications Judd Bagley, is finally emerging from months of "beta testing" and will be officially inaugurated within the next two weeks.

How did I become aware of this material nonpublic information?

Simple, my dear Watson. It was officially announced not in a press release or some other legitimate vehicle of corporate disclosure, but was the subject of an anonymous posting by the hard-working Director of Communications in Wikipedia Review, a limited-readership message board dedicated to attacking Wikipedia. Word then crept out to the Investor Village message board.

Here's the Wikipedia Review post. Scroll down for the entry at 10:31 p.m. June 3.

This unsigned post is signed only "WordBomb," which is one of the anonymous handles that Bagley uses when vandalizing Wikipedia and threatening Wikipedia administrators. See this earlier post and others tagged "Wikipedia," and the thorough dissection of Bagley's activities on Wikipedia on O-Smear.



Posting this significant information on Wikipedia Review is revolting even by Bagley standards because it flies in the face of the rules against selective disclosure of material nonpublic information in Regulation FD.

As Seth Jayson of the Motley Fool points out, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne himself acknowledged the Reg. FD hazards of posting on message boards in a Motley Fool post in October 2005:

1) You can safely assume that every security lawyer I know is wringing his hands and saying, "Holy Toledo, Byrne, you cannot engage with people on a public message board. It'll be Exhibit A in a lawsuit against you!" But as a smart fellow once told me, lawyers say that about everything.

2) That said, there is a Reg FD issue with me being here. That is, if I disclose things that are material, then because this is not open to the whole public, the SEC would come kick my butt. And they would be right to do so. [emphasis added]

I think it's fairly clear that the official inauguration of Omuse is material information, given the fact that Omuse is one of the five tabs that can be seen from the Overstock.com main page, right up there with Cars, Auctions, Travel and Shopping. (The fact that Omuse is a joke that can't possibly add a nickel of revenues is beside the point.)

It also seems particularly malodorous because Wikipedia Review is dedicated to undermining Wikipedia, against which Omuse is laughably claiming to compete. Indeed, Wikipedia Review hates Wikipedia so much that it doesn't mind, apparently, that Bagley posted spyware-infested messages to grab IP addresses from Wikipedia Review readers.

But hey, they don't call him Sleazey McSleaze for nothing.

Omuse has been widely ridiculed as a flop from the outset. It has been such an abysmal failure that Bagley has taken to spamming Usenet newsgroups to push Omuse -- and, when not ignored, getting a hostile reaction. See this link and this one. Kudos to Seth Jayson at the Motley Fool for first noticing (subscription required).

In contrast to the hype surrounding its launch, it has aroused almost zero interest, as can be seen by examining a list of new pages, and the fact that most pages (such as this one) are advertising spams by Overstock vendors. A link to recent changes, which highlighted the lack of activity on Omuse, was deleted by Bagley in February.

Gee, I don't see why it is such a failure. Wouldn't you be thrilled to give your credit card information to Judd Bagley for the privilege of adding content to someone else's website?

As I pointed out previously, Overstock.com had previously given the finger to Regulation FD by announcing this hot new Wikipedia wanna-be on the Investor Village message board.

When you've finished gagging over this sliminess -- and if your appetite for Overstock.com sleaze is unsated -- be sure to read two illuminating posts in Sam Antar's blog (here and here).

The first focuses on Patrick Byrne's lying in a message board post that he never hired a public investigator (turns out he did, for $50,000, though it turned out to be a crooked P.I.).

The second hones in on a crude death threat against me by a piece of muck posting on Bagley's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. The post is signed "alpineanalytics" and I'm persuaded that is this indeed from someone affiliated with New York entities named "Alpine Analytics" (not to be confused with the Colorado-based management training firm at this website).

This same moron has pumped Overstock on message boards, and purports to manage money for "clients." Makes me wonder: would you give your money to people who post a death threat on a website, and are dumb enough to sign it?

UPDATE: A faithful reader brings to my attention that Overstock.com no longer posts links to the nutty "Sanitycheck" stock market conspiracy theory website, run by a former used medical equipment salesman named Phil Saunders ("Bob O'Brien"). A link to "sanitycheck" used to be found on every Overstock product page. A diligent search found a grand total of one link, as compared to thousands previously.

Removal of the links won't do sanitycheck's dwindling readership any good. Like all nutso sites, it initially benefited from a kind of ghoulish curiosity, but has dwindled over the past year, according to Alexa.

Below is what every product page on the Overstock site used contain until recently:



The "market reform" link took one to a site devoted not to market reform, but to loony conspiracy theories and personal attacks on critics of Byrne -- a function now replaced by Bagley and Overstock.com's in-house smear site, antisocialmedia.

It's interesting to speculate why the links were removed. It's even more interesting to speculate how the nature of the support sanitycheck received from Overstock and Byrne. This is something the SEC needs to explore in its investigation of the company and its CEO.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Nut Season Has Begun

It's that time of year, I guess

The Full Moon was on April 13, so that can't be it. Sunspots, perhaps? Anyway, for whatever reason I've been getting a larger than usual number of nutty/threatening emails/attempts to comment on this blog, with every single one from the anti-shorting crackpots.

This is, apparently, nut season!

The most egregious of these nutty/threatening etc. emails etc. I have cheerfully forwarded to law enforcement agencies.

That brings me to something the public doesn't understand about journalists. There seems to be a feeling out there that if you communicate with a reporter you are instantly afforded some kind of "First Amendment" protection. Hell no! Everything is on the record unless stated otherwise, and if threatened (in the criminal sense of the word) most journalists will prosecute.

I made that point back in February, when the "sanitycheck" website's bravely pseudonymous proprietor, "Bob O'Brien," who the NewYork Post has identified as a former used medical equipment peddler named Phil Saunders. Saunders reported a cock-and-bull story about a "journalist friend" being "threatened" by supposed thugs in a bar. (He posted the story to explain why he cowers behind a phony name.) See Feb. 15 entry here. As I said at the time, a real journalist would not hesitate to report a threat.

I should point out that threats have never (well, almost never) been an issue in the past. Years of writing about the Mob produced not a single threat of any kind.

That's because Mob people are (with some exceptions) fairly rational. Naked-shorting nuts are not. Maybe that's because their entire movement is based on a screwy conspiracy theory that makes the Mossad-dynamited-World Trade Center kooks seem sane by comparison.

Take, for example, the communication that I received last night, which attempted "blackmail" over "dirt" that exists only in this slimeball's imagination. This person concluded his missive as follows:

"Tell your friends to stay away from our computers, or we will release the information to NCANS [National Coalition Against Naked Shorting]. They've been waiting for months for something this juicy."

I presume the "our" is this creep and his pet hamster. The "friends" refer to the massive conspiracy in which I am involved (no doubt along with hedge funds that I excoriate in five chapters of my book) and I suppose the "computers" are ... Lord knows.

Lunatic or not, a threat is a threat -- and I repeat: I report all threats to law enforcement, even from obvious nuts. In fact, especially from obvious nuts who are dumb enough to use the Internet to communicate threats.

This particular jerk didn't sign his name. Another one did. We're talking dumb.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Baloney Brigade anti-shorting movement is an army of wackos -- small, vocal, and dismayingly effective in its campaign to divert regulatory attention from real problems.

Time for regulators to wake up and smell the nuts.

UPDATE: A response to this item came quickly on an Internet message board from "Bob O'Brien," the bravely pseudonymous phony name used by Phil Saunders, the creep who is the Propaganda Minister of the anti-shorting crazies. ApparentlySaunders was dissatisfied with my reaction to the threat from one of his followers, and he wondered aloud as follows:

Wonder what the bad guys have on 'lilGW, or whether it is a straightforward financial matter?

First of all I appreciate the compliment. I am trying to get little, with no success.

I think the rest of this typical O'Brienism -- the same line pushed by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne -- merits some analysis and should not be instantly dismissed as "trash talk" or somesuch.

Byrne and his anonymous friend both take the position that it is impossible for any journalist to believe that Overstock.com is a stinker, or that the naked shorting campaign is a lot of hooey. We must be corrupt!

This attitude can be easily explained. The anti-shorting movement is not a legitimate movement, but a cult. Only cults demonize their critics in this fashion. This rhetoric, which can be found throughout the anti-shorting movement, is not evidence that the anti-shorters are a cult. It is proof.

FURTHER UPDATE: The errant individual has come forward. (See comments.) He pleads the "baloney defense" -- he consumed too much baloney, and that apparently resulted in a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Apparently this person didn't realize that IP addresses are captured by the Haloscan system. Even if they weren't, they're easy enough to track down.

Hey, baloney cultists are not known for their mental acumen. If they had half a brain, after all, they wouldn't be pushing a nonexistent cause, would they?


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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.