Slashdot Mirror
The Magic Box Hoax
Rasvar writes "Here is an interesting article from The Florida Times-Union about a high tech hoax that managed to pull in the likes of Blockbuster Video, US West, Ted Turner, Sen Orrin Hatch and numerous others. I actually attended one of the "demonstrations" of this device years back. I came away cynical becuase of the way he presented stuff. Sometimes it is good to be a cynic. This is a very good article on an impressive high tech scam."
Haha..
"Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology."
Madison Priest was a big con-artist, true, but if Ted Turner and the rest did their research, wouldn't they have realized that there are physical limitations to a POTS line's bandwidth?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
With all the stuff going on in the Catholic Church, and now this to top it off, how is ANYONE expected to ever trust a Priest again?
Say, doesn't that guy look kinda like CowboyNeal?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I find this fascinating.
e /s tories/1999/03/15/story1.html
http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonvill
He received a patent on his black box, so it must true and not a hoax, right?
Another reason why patents are worthless pieces of paper.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
It usually is. Suckers. I should've come up w/ this scam. I'm tired of being broke & having to work for a living...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology. Priest said the box could transmit data much faster than any existing system, and could do it through an ordinary household telephone line.
Uh.
If this guy has a patent certificate, can't any of us, you know, go down to the patent office and *read his patent*? I mean, that's the point of the patent office, you get a temporary monopoly on your innovation in exchange for which you have to tell EVERYONE exactly how it works.
I'm looking around the patent server trying to find anything with this guy's name on it, and i haven't found anything yet.. maybe i'm using this thing wrong? Don't you have to get the inventor name exactly right? What's this guy's middle initial?
It just goes to show how easy it is to scam people when they want to believe.
Think of all the things people are willing to buy into because they think it will make them tons of money. Now think of all the times this things turn out to be cons. You would think people would learn buy now to be a little more skeptical. I know I would never give my money to someone that "they overlooked Priest's demand -- his paranoia, even -- that no one so much as touch a keyboard."
Then again I did buy Ericsson stock. Oh well I guess I should practice what I preach.. Wait heres this company called Enron...
I am 31337 or something.
Is it just me, or is the "it got destroyed in a car accident / plane crash / flood / lightning bolt from Zeus" excuse the grown-up version of "my dog ate my homework"?
I'll never trust a guy over 300 pounds.
The physical limitations on bandwidth for a piece of copper (as with almost every other material used in telecom) are staggeringly huge. The practical limits on bandwidth are from what's hooked onto the ends of the piece of copper.
This is exactly like that Pixelon thing. Some guy claims to have an answer to an utterly unsolveable and technically infeasible problem. (Like getting fast speeds over dialup, and streaming full quality NTSC video over a 28.8 modem. Any competent techie would be skeptical of this.) Then they exploit a bunch of rich suckers who know nothing about said technology.
I can transmit video in realtime over a standard phone line -- it's called DSL. Additionally, I can even stream video over a modem, 512x512 @ 30 FPS as listed in the patent (even though TVs aren't square).
How about solid black? I'm thinking a 9600 baud modem can do that, depending on the compression.
With all of the tech-savvy people around, you'd figure that *someone* would have gotten suspicious and done some investigating of their own. I'm also surprised that when he failed to put out a physical prototype, the media companies didn't automatically pull out, figuring it was a hoax that he could put them out of business with this "magic box." If I were Priest, I'd be sure to watch my back as there are most likely some very disgruntled associates.
My other sig is an import.
I thought that the POTS line bandwidth was to some degree limited by other things like filtering.
Otherwise things like DSL wouldn't really work.
(off on a tangent) I recall many years (1970s?) ago how they did (and maybe still do) broadcasts in Boston of Boston Symphony concerts at TangleWood in the Berkshires, over 100 mile away. They had recordings of the original source, they had the signal at the end of the phone line, and they knew what the difference was. They merely amplified the signal at the source end to compensate for the losses, making sure to not clip the signals. Result at the end in Boston was a signal completely acceptable for FM Stereo broadcasts.
So I can see if you are not completely expert in the technology, being able to make up your own examples, and talking yourself into believing that Certain Limitations had been exceeded.
Heck, Look at the history of the dialup modem, going from teletype speeds to 56k, far exceeding original expectations.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I too have dumped many a dollar into entrepreneurs claiming to have a 'magic box'.
They usually delay on delivery of the goods... but I keep the faith alive. Sex is after all, the holy grail of geekdom.
If it is a scam, I concede it truly is a beautiful one.
"...and you ou will feel it, deep down in your pants." -Leon Phelps
If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !
This is a classic bit of snake oil - "I have this wonderful thing, and you can get a piece of it, but DON'T GO BACK THERE!"
That otherwise intelligent people fell for this just goes to show how most of us don't always act logically all the time.
Besides - pushing video over CAT-3 isn't hard: you just need enough OOMPH to deal with the attenuation, which over a few feet is not so bad. I've seen little boxes you can buy that allow you to send a VCR's output to another room over 100 feet of little thin zip-cord - all they are is a balun (balanced to unbalanced transformer) that matches the 75 ohm output of the VCR to the wire.
It's pushing that same signal over MILES of cable while somebody else is pushing a different signal over a different pair of wires in the same bundle without interfering with each other that's the tricky bit. Solve that with enough signal to noise ratio to allow multi-megabit transmission, and you will be rich. You also will be violating half a dozen laws of physics, but....
www.eFax.com are spammers
"Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier."
My respect for Intel just went down a notch for believing this guy who has a record like this.
-Vic
Blockbuster? Intel? Wouldn't these companies be rich enough to hire engineers and physicists who could tell you flat out that it's impossible?
So what's the real answer? Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maxiumum speed that data can be transfered at?
This guy isn't the only one running a venture capital scam promising high tech payoffs.
Check out Betavoltaic This guy that is the CEO has a long history of pseudoscience, and some of his officers worked on "perpetual motion machines", all of which needed a DC power source to run.
Posting anonymously to avoid the wrath of that asshole that runs the place. He likes to sue people to quiet them down about his scam.
it was either the aliens or the government, so that made it disapear and look like a hoax so that we wouldn't know about it.
yep thats definitly it.
Sometimes it is good to be a cynic.
No, but sometimes it is good to be a skeptic. In fact, in my own experience, it is always good to be a skeptic.
The cynics I've known were convinced that all human behavior was motivated wholly by self-interest, which, even if it is true in an ultimate sense, is an attitude guaranteed to close your mind. The skeptics, on the other hand, merely insist that all claims be testable and repeatable: they doubt, but their doubt is healthy and reasonable, and leave them with a mind-set that I think of as structured incredulity.
If more people were skeptics, charlatans like John Edwards and James Van Praagh wouldn't be able to make a living, and this "Magic Box Hoax" could have never occurred.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
"It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out"
I think a detailed explanation of some points that make the patent so clearly bogus would be appreciated by many here, and might help shame the U.S. Patent Office into action.
( Just saying that the bandwidth of copper is only X isn't enough, I feel ).
I think what they meant to say was that it would good to be skeptical, not cynical.
-Anonymous Howard
Madison Priest's Patent
Editorial: Bwa-hahahahahaha, Dumbasses. Maybe they should invest in Alex Chiu
-Sean
This sounds just like Larry, ex-CEO of a startup before the VCs forced him out of the CEO position, who took the VCs for $30M, which they later admitted was a mistake.
I find this story hilarious. Just a bunch of rich, stupid, assholes chasing each other with dollar signs in their eyes, only to be fooled by a fast-talking hillbilly. More power to him. He should move out of the country while he's still got their money.
From the article:
.
/.'ers
Priest's invention would make those old phone lines faster than anything on the market, decimating the communications speed limit.
What a terrible mixing of metaphors! Save for the obvious contextual cues in the first part of the sentence, I would read the phrase as "reducing the communications bandwidth by some fraction".
A better choice would be "obliterating" or some similar word without a numerical connotation
- one of the five English nit-picking
I was a spectator to a similiar case, where a guy calling himself Paul "Voss" Hinds was trying to get money to start a flight simulator game company. That story has a LOT of parallels.
He claims to be an Air Force Academy Graduate.
His AF records cannot be found by ANYONE, and he claims this is because of his involvement in secret projects.
He was out of sight for several months in 1997, and later claimed he was on death's door due to a scorpion sting under a fingernail.
He had a "fall guy" who he claimed ran off with the $10,000 he managed to get from investors.
He submitted as "proof" several SGI generated "screenshots", all of which used clearly typical demo features and openGL artifacts.
He claimed to own a P-51 Mustang and even submitted a doctored photo of a P-51 with his head cut-n-pasted into the cockpit and his name written under the canopy. The font for the canopy matched an Adobe Photoshop default.
He claimed to have shot down several Iraqi fighters in his F-16, yet no records of those shootdowns exist.
The list goes on and on, and this guy finally resurfaced using his handle "voss" in an online simulation, and he verbally attacks anyone who brings the scam up, challenging them to talk to his "astronaut general buddy". Strangely enough, this astronaut guy actually exists although I have not contacted him personally.
The parallels kept hitting me as I read the article, and I wonder if this was the same guy, or if (somehow) Paul Hinds had been set up by this same guy.
How often do busineeses ignore their own technical people? All the time at great expense I reckon. I am sure a lot of that happened here.
Wired mag ran a story last year about a guy with a similar scam. P.T. Barnum rules!
I always wondered what balun stood for. Thanks! We used to have them in the dorms at CMU (I hope they have removed 'em all by now and replaced then with a jack that doesn't look like it belongs in an evil scientist's lab). People said they could support 100mbit ethernet over those *ancient* cables, though I never saw it myself.
For those of you who think they can get really cheap ethernet cable with them, think again. The baluns and connectors (at least the IBM ones we used) weren't cheap.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
the investors "made their decisions unhindered by the thought process". Sums it up I think.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
You also will be violating half a dozen laws of physics, but....
...theres no jail time on that.
...And this kind of blind investing is what caused the dot.com fallout. "It works, really! Trust me!" At least somebody was smart enough to verify cold fusion and find it was a hoax withing a short persiod of time, but this is just plain stupidity on the companies part. Here's a good one: Require the inventor of Technology X to make the invention work at a site not of his choosing. If the inventor can't either do that, or let somebody at least look at the guts, somethings wrong... Jeez... A fool and their money...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"The day after a critical fund-raising trip to woo major telecommunications firms in Chicago, court records show Linda Priest called one of Zekko's founding fathers.
;P I wonder why she did it though.
It was all a hoax, she said. There was no invention. There was only The Revelation."
------
I guess this is just one great plan foiled by women
For all those who are outraged that the scam took in so many (i.e. "Why didn't they get some competent people to recview it before investing), the answer is that they did. The article talks about the way that many scientists reviewed the invention, but were never quite able to say that the invention was impossible. On this basis, the investor's said "it appears to work. I'll take the risk and assume it does actually work."
<p>
Why didn't the scientists say that this was completely absurd? A lot of reasons. First, they are being paid to review the invention. If they say that the invention doesn't work and it does, then they are liable for the massive losses incurred by the investor for a failed opportunity. If they say it doesn't work and it does, they get sued by the inventor. So, what do they do? They hedge their bets. They say that "more study" is needed, etc. To business types, this sounds like they are just being nerdy and cautious. Since they leave the question open, the investor (who wants to believe) goes ahead and goes for it, figuring that the 5 million dollars invested (or whatever) could well turn into billions.
<p>
In some respects, the scientiastws have failed them by not emphasizing their near-certainty that the idea was nonsense. And the businessmen failed themselves by not bothering to learn that, when a scientist says "quite improbable", he means "impossible."
<p>
sounds like everyday life to me, and should to most geeks.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Will the physics police arrest me?
Oh yeah. Anything that seems too good to be true, usually is.
Rich people don't get that way with brains,
they get that way with luck. Dumb luck.
Here's a story about a similar scam from the dot com era. This guy raised $20M, and spent $16M of that on a party in Las Vegas with entertainment provided by the Dixie Chicks and The Who.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
- The world sucks
- The world will always suck
- Any efforts to make the world better is naive and will only make things worse
In short, cynicism is a loser attitude disguising itself as enlightenment.Miko O'Sullivan
Anyone else remember pixelon? You'd think investers would learn from their past mistakes...
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
According to the article, it was Teddy Turner, Ted Turner's son.
From the bottom of the patent:
+--------------+
| |
Data | YHBT | Data
=====+ YHL +=====
In | HAND | Out
| |
+--------------+
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Is this like the linux box hoax
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !" should continue on to say "..run over and press every button imaginable and see waht happens!"
This article pisses me off, why? This scammer has an expensive home, a few cars such as a Jaguar (ok, Jaguar sucks but it is arguably better than his Eclipse), boats, and a couple of planes --- oh, and he still has a bundle of cash.
I, or any number of us, could pull an evil-scheme like this off. But, for some reason we don't. For some reason we have ethics and values. And, for some reason, a guy like that has more money than he needs to live on. Obviously, the world is not fair.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Priest finally got the thing working then Turner and Blockbuster paid him huge sums of money and told him to keep his trap shut. The hoax was made up to put an end to those meddling kids asking questions.
Rut Roh Raggy.
The investors were tricked using a VCR and lots of coax. I don't know about you, but investing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or even millions) without the chance to at least play quake over the super-fast "network" seems a little ignorant. Anyone who invested in this scam obviously let their greed get the better of them, and demonstrated that the rich are not always rich because they are extraordinarily smart.
I have just invented a magic black box in my basement. It is capible of sending and receiving an almost unlimited amount of data wirelessly. This new invention uses a spread spectrum chaos transmission to accomplish this. These chaos transmissions do not adversly effect current spectrum users, appearing as normal background noise on the spectrum. As this is based on chaos transmissions, it is inherently secure. Because of the nature of chaos transmissions, the range of this device is also virtually unlimited.
These devices must be produced in pairs, as that is the only way that one is able to talk to another.
Now, at present I only have 2 of these devices, and they are not yet stable enough that I will allow any one else to tinker with them. The configuration of these devices is so precise that I have difficulty maintaining it under the best of conditions.
I built the 2 prototypes for about $300, I just need $30 mil or so to complete my work.
Now, I know I don't have a background in electrical engeneering, but the thing works! Honest!
Whats that, you have an expert thats been researching this? You want me to talk to him? Gee, uh...
You won't give me the money without your expert reviewing it? Well, Ok. Hey, do you have Ted Turners phone number?
Than anything that happened during the .com phase? Its just easier to blame one ex-con guy instead of small bands of Ivy League graduates who have rich mommy and daddy or politician parents. Just a smaller scale Enron.
Same story different scale.
The outrage at the scandals (note the use of the plural) is partly that sexual abuses happened, but mostly that the church has gone to such lengths to cover them up and keep those same priests active, in some cases returning them to positions with unsupervised contact with children. If there weren't a pattern of covering up, the innocent priests wouldn't be tainted by the guilt of their colleagues. But, by suppressing the truth, the Church has allowed uncertainty to spread, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I was deeply convinced and profoundly amazed by the magic box demonstration they have on their site.
Now click here or cliquez ici for those who speak spanish in the audience, and, yes you must have flash...everybody must have flash!
So, note, if you press the "compatibility test" you will see how the blue flows through the magic box far better than it flows through your 56k...box. Yes I know compatibility means how compatible something is, not how it compares to something else, but ignore the words...just watch the test. Again...see how the blue flooooows through the magic box box...but still crawls along on the T3!
In fact, if you press the "test" button next to the magic box box, you will note that the blue comes through sharply, clearly, quickly every time! That's how reliable *your* customers will find the magic box every single time!
[sorry...i couldn't help it...my parents were in Amway...i've seen it all before]
Perhaps this is of interest. Hal Puthoff, the "Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using", is---I believe---also known as Harold Puthoff.
Together with Russel Targ, this infamous team produced, let us say, somewhat credulous studies of spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller's remote viewing abilities. They also have the dubious distinction of having provided some of the best evidence that positive feedback improves ESP ability. Tragically, no skeptic who uses reasonable experimental controls seems to be able to duplicate their results.
The fact that Priest's box has something to do with Puthoff's area of expertise is hilarious! I wonder if the author of the article was being *intentionally* ironic.
the speed test demo on that site is fuQ'd. it says that 56k speeds are based on 56kbps speeds and DSL/Cable/T1 speeds are based on 1.5mb avg. interestingly enough, the 56k test bar goes at nearly half the speed of the DSL/Cable/T1 bar.
What 56k modem are they using and where can I find one!?
We could have saved the investors millions.
or better yet....
If this lame scam netted the guy 6 million bucks, can't we come up with a better scam?
I remember reading some of the Anarchy text files from textfiles.com about 3-4 years back, and some of the stuff they came up with was ingenious. This was childs play. How could anyone just give money to someone without any proof or analysis of the equipement? There are litterally hundreds of communications companies out there developping technology. I am sure these investors were not techs themselves. Not one of them was skeptical enough to bring someone with a little insite to these presentations? I think perhaps these companies got what was comming to them. A wake up call to reality.
Though I do remember reading a story about Cisco on slashdot, not too long ago, about a similar technology. Something about 10mbps over barb wire? Here is the previous link to that. Perhaps his so called "vision" was not completely out of the range of possibility.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
...are stupid. I was a dotcom CTO and I saw my CEO lose his $20MM company in less than 9 months after he started dealing with investors and investment bankers.
I'm still not sure what the motivation was, but I think the fundamental problem is that investors scam themselves -- they latch onto an opportunity, convince themselves it's a golden opportunity, and that's how the bomb is set.
The investors who came in and merged with our company are essentially bankrupt a year later. The first CEO (founder) is gond and lost about $5MM of his personal stash. The new CEO has lost pretty much the same thing (he keeps floating money to the company so it can make payroll and rent -- he has enough to be driving that new uglyassed 7 series B). The company is still there, you probably recognize the name, and it's a vacuous shell of its former self.
There's a NYTs Business page article about what happened when analysts started becoming salespeople.
We used to have them in the dorms at CMU (I hope they have removed 'em all by now and replaced then with a jack that doesn't look like it belongs in an evil scientist's lab).
Nope. We still use them, and they still cost something like $25 brand new. Fortunately, since baluns are worthless outside CMU, there's a very healthy secondhand market for them.
For more information, click here.
That was one of the best articles I read in a while. It read like a book. It kept me reading to find out what happened. Someone could elaborate on this and make millions from a book inspired by this article...um...forget I said anything.
I used to work at Southeast Network Services in Jacksonville a few years ago, and heard of this guy. As a matter of fact, our sysAdmin went to work for hem.
I was just a tech support guy, and even I was too smart for this gimmick!
First of all, notice that there were actual experts that quoted that the invention was "implausable, but not impossible". At the same time, dsl, while not in widespread use, was definitely on the marketing tip of many a phone company. Broadband over regular phone lines was definitely possible, this guy just happened to be doing it faster. The experts weren't going to outright denounce it without at least LOOKING at the technology first.
Secondly, this was the heyday of the dotcom era. Everyone was getting rich, and there seemed to be no end in sight. However, there were a lot of investors with a sizeable amount of cash that simply hadn't gotten their piece of the preverbial dotcom pie yet. And seeing how the phone companies were developing competing technology, the sense of urgency was real.
As for criminal records, people are surprisingly lax about that sort of thing. Especially today, its so easy to run a criminal background check on someone, everyone assumes that someone has already done it, and doesn't bother. When other people are dumping multiple millions of $$$ into a company, and those people are well respected, intellegent people, it simply doesn't occur not to take the guy at his word. The only concern is getting in on it before its too late.
Scam artists, despite the vulgarity of their profession, are actually very talented and very good at what they do. They are literally experts in the art of social engineering. Anyone can scam a gullible nobody. Just send them a flyer in the mail and you'll have checks flying into your PO box. But to convince someone who's worth millions to give you a blank check with no verification that you can actually do what you say you can do. That's genius. Or it speaks very poorly for the competancy of the multimillionaires, which might just go to show that you don't need to necessarily be smart to be rich. And you don't have to be honest to get rich. And people might be too embarrased to get back at you once you're done fleecing them. Its a strange world indeed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
While taking circuits 2, my professor was an older electrical engineer who worked for GE in its earlier days. He described the countless black box items that passed by him each day. Each time, the case was the same. "This box will boost power nearly 20 times! You just cant disassemble it" So they would poke the box, and prod it, and test the information on it. Each time, it usually turned out to be something simple like a DC source hooked up to a simple OP-amp that would boost any signals that ir recieved X times. A clever little hoax, but it learns a lesson. Any good engineer should only trust what he can take apart and put back together wil similar results.
all my
I'm picturing a bunch of companies with copper networks led by King Arthur galloping with a bunch of coconuts up to a castle. The man (who somehow looks like John Cleese with a peculiar french accent) at the top of the castle says that this is a castle of people with fiber networks.
King Arthur: If you give us food and shelter, you can join us on our quest for the Holy Grail.
Frenchman: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. He's already got one, you see?
King Arthur: What? Are you sure you've got one?
Frenchman: Oh yes, it's very nice.
King Arthur: If you don't show us the grail, we shall take this castle by force!
Frenchman: You don't frighten us you copper-based pigdogs! Go and boil your buttons you sons of silly person. I blow my nose at you so cold, Arthur King. You and all your Silly English Kniggits! I fart in your general direction.... etc
At that point, the Fiber Optic French people catapult a gigantic light-based switch at them.
King Arthur and his Men: Run Away! Run Away!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Cynical == people who use profanity as a normal words and think about most "unthinkable" stuff like rape, coitus as of normal...
Sceptical == people who don't trust the demonstrations without great repeatability of them and solid theory under them.
"Extrodinary claims require extrodinary proof...."
Pop-skeptic dogma. Science requires of all claims adequate proof for provisional acceptance.
This assinine Carl Sagan quote really needs to die.
As far as good science goes, extraordinary claims are no different than mundane claims. Facts are facts, and claims are claims. No matter how insane my thesis may sound, if I have sound facts to back it up, then THAT IS HOW SCIENCE IS DONE. I do NOT require "extraordinary evidence".
Galileo claimed that the moons of Jupiter orbited Jupiter. What was his "extraordinary" proof? "Look through my damn telescope and see it for yourself." The priests of his day required extraordinary proof (a "miracle") before they would believe it.
Hey isnt that the same trick Bill Gates pulled with some technology - "windows" or something, anyway, this is just proof that most business people with money have no clue and need someone else to take their money for them.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Hey i've got a better idea: why not lay decent lines and comms networks for everyone and not flog your crap aged phone systems to people, considering data far outnumbers analog voice on all systems.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Craichy and a friend gave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention.
Not that I would accuse this article of being a hoax itself, but VisionTek is a company that makes [excellent] video cards....I use them in my boxes. Poking around Google yielded no companies with similiar names....what gives?
That's not the Ted Turner I know. And you're saying not one but two U.S. Senators fell for it too? No way!!
A very intersting story. So this guy invented coax and vcr huh. ;)
;)
I forgot the exact phrase from Barnum but its goes like: "One born every minute". Or the one from a WC Fields old move: "Never give a sucker an even break!"
----------
You can infinitly compress data down to nothing super easy.... It pulling it back out that hard.
Beeing an awfully rich investor i really didn't have the time to read through the whole article, but sending realtime video with an old modem sounds incredible! Damn, even some big companies are investing already into it and i didn't hear anything from him so far. I want to be part of the next big thing... how can i get this man to allow me to invest in his company?
An acquaintance of mine is particularly susceptable to these. He's a real dreamer type who made lots of money on one gamble (purchased cellular telephone bandwidth rights shortly before cellular telephones took off) and then lost it all on two others.
The scam that took most of it was a guy who was going to wire every stadium box in America with fiber and equip them with dual processor computers and 42" displays (in 1997 time frame). Basically, the idea was to let the rich simultaneously surf the Internet, see their email, get special game statistics, watch replays, etc while watching the game. Even if he did it, I never understood how he was going to make the millions of investment money back. This was an example of a scam that used plausible technology, but never had a sustainable business model. The investment capital was just being pocketed.
The other was actually a perpetual energy scam. Yes, people still fall for that one. This was some sort of device with multiple rings made of just the right metals and spinning in different directions or something. Somehow, it supposedly extracted energy from the Earth's magnetic field. I researched it a couple of years ago and found that the guy has been running the scam for over 40 years. This guy's big hook was religious based at the time. He claimed to have died in a traffic accident with a ruptured aorta and been miraculously brought back to life. When he awoke, the schematics were in his head for this device. They had been given to him directly by God. He was giving this story from the pulpit at really conservative Christian churches across the SouthEast and attracting all sorts of investors.
I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...
I'm crying, I'm really crying.
"There's nothing to explain. You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."
The use of cynic(al) here is inappropriate.
He wasn't asking to to believe in a higher ideal
or asking you to believe in some general goodness
of people; he was asking to believe HIM about some
specific device.
Your skepticism is entirely natural and
healthy!
Sounds like it does work, provided that its real purpose was to attract the interest of our society's pool of village idiots. While I'm at it, I'd like to start a completely offtopic debate: Assuming that 1) there is a God, creator of the universe 2) this God invented right and wrong and serves as the final judge of everything, including what happens to people after they die:
Will Bill Gates go to Hell? Why or why not?
...townsend didn't surpass it!
The "classic" limitation on analogue dialup modems was the quantization error introduced by the analogue to digital conversion on both ends.
However -- 56k depends on one end of the connection being DIGITAL . You're eliminating quant error on one side of the connection, thus you can get better downstream speeds. Upstream speeds, if you notice, are still limited to 33.6k due to quant error on the end user's modem.
There is no magic here. No laws are being surpassed or violated here. Shannon is still safe.
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !"
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
One keyframe, lots of delta frames :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Just a little while back there was a thread on ESP and the paranormal. Many people there were questioning as why that sort of stuff must be called pseudo science and why science demands such rigorus proofs. THIS is why. Rigged demonstrantions, people holding their own intrests over that of science and so on. For something amazing to be accepted as real it MUST be repeatable and independantly tested. Otherwsie you have things like this happen. Crooks show people something they WANT to be real, and they believe. It is important to have well defined methods for testing such claims.
The psychics of the world are no different, they demonstrate their powers only on their own terms. They won't submit to a real scientific test because they are frauds, and they know it will fail. Anytime someone tries to sell you on something that you have no way of independantly verifying, be careful. They might be well meaning but more often than not, they are a con man.
That's not true. Read Mark Twain's perspective on the issue.
Here's a snip:
And continuing later on...
I recommend reading the whole essay, "What is Man".
If more people were cynics, the world would not only remove charlatans (though incidentally, I'm quite happy with charlatans who rob robbers; It's much better than people who aid and assist robbers for a days wages), but the world would be full of wonderful friendly people.
What is a cynic? As far as I can tell, a cynic is a person who is a realist and an idealist.
To be a cynic, you have to be a realist. You've already helped demonstrate that, when you wote "even if it is true in an ultimate sense". A realist looking at human behavior will give that serious attention, and meditate deeply on its consequences, as has Mark Twain.
But to be a cynic, you also have to be an idealist. That seems contradictory; How's that? Because in order to complain about the way things are, you have to have some idea of how things should be. You have to be an idealist.
If you are a realist but not an idealist, you become someone who is content ripping people off, or just doing whatever you need to survive, the effects of whatever it is be damned. This describes 90% of people, I believe. Perhaps 10-20% of people are content ripping others off, the other 70-80% are quite happy just doing whatever they need to do in order to survive comfortably, effects on others be damned. Being a Realist while discarding ideals is what gives the Right a bad name.
If you are an idealist but not a realist, you run the danger of trying to do good things, but failing miserably, because you are out of touch with reality. At worst, such failure can be dangerous. Being an Idealist while discarding reality is what gives the Left a bad name.
When you have both Idealism and Realism, you are a Cynic.
Incidentally, there is a name for what effective Cynics are called- that name is "SAINT".
Did Mark Twain reach Sainthood? In my eyes, Yes, because he has had a very powerful positive influence on my life, and the lives of many others, even beyond death.
*WARNING* I have not checked or preview this, and am not exactly sure on how accurate it is (I wasn't really paying attention to it at the time) so contine at your own risk.
:) . I'm not sure how accurate this all is, but that's how I remember it.
I have some first hand experience with this particular scam. Localnet Communications (or something like that) was a subsidiary under this Zekko company, and they were promising the same technology. My dad became a "recruiter" in a sort of pyramid scheme (more on that later). He visited a few people and tried to get them to invest and attend a few demos they held. I went with him on one occasion to a demo, and I was very skeptical. They were promsing all this speed and technology, but never once in the demo I went to did they actually demonstrate anything. They did have a computer and tv set up in there, but I forget exactly what it is they showed. Anyway, they did come out with a WebTV like system. In addition to surfing the web, etc, they offered a service where you could use some office suite (Lotus?) over the phone line and save your files on their server. At least I think that's how it was. Also, the Localnet set-top box had a PCMCIA card on the front, for "technology upgrades" (super-high-speed over regular copper telephone wires, for example). All it was used for was to store your user info (account, dial up phone number, password, etc), like a smart card. It wasn't that bad for just web browsing (just vanilla html, anyway). I think it even had e-mail capabilities. Anyway, they also started providing long distance phone services. That's where the pyramid scheme was. You were to go out and recruit other people to go out and sell. You made a commision on every sale and a smaller commision on every sale your recruits made. My dad got a few recruits and made a couple hundred dollars the first 4 months or so, then got out of it when all this stuff about a hoax was spreading around. I told him so
Anyway, we actually still have the system, keyboard, remote, and "smart card." It still works and once I got it out and wanted to see if I could connect. I put in my local ISPs number and account information. It dialed out and connected, but it tries to go to the default homepage (localnet's now non-existant homepage) and times out and disconnects. Well, I'm assuming that's what's happening. If I could get a smart card reader/editor or something...
Anyway, here's a link to probably the only picture of this thing on the net. Nothing spectacular. It's on earthlink's support page. We're holding on to it in hopes it will be a collector's item and bring us some cash.
Also, don't visit Palatka. It's a shithole. I've lived here since 1987 or 88, so I know. If I sound like an idiot, that's why. Jackass.
And one more thing, unrelated. I cringe when Al Michaels yells out "A FACIAL!" when someone dunks in someone elses face. He either has no clue, or is an extreme pervert.
Someone claims they can do something like that? Fine, make them come to YOU and demo it, and have your engineers look at the device. A full look, not a hands-off, across the room kind of thing.
Cisco receantly had a new DSL technology they wanted to sell us on, they call it Long Range Eithernet. Allegedly, it gets 10mbps, both directions over regular phone lines at distances of around a mile. Now Cisco is a big, reputable company, not some small time con artist and we are friends with the engineer in this city. Doesn't matter, we STILL wanted to test it for ourselves. So they sent us an LRE switch and two remote units. We tested it, and indeed it does perform as advertised.
Now we know for a fact that it works. This wasn't a smoke and mirrorrs test, it was conducted in our lab, by our people. They weren't even around (the just loaned it to us for a month and said have fun). We got to run all the tests we chose on it. All this, for a product from a reputable company. But you know what? That's how you need to do it. Don't rely on what the people who make something tell you, demand to test it yourself. See if it works as advertised in YOUR environment.
This is doubly true for new technologies. Make the inventor bring his tech to your labs, demo it on your terms, and have your people run the tests. Then you know it isn't being rigged because you can check to make sure everything is on the level. I'm not talking looking at some poorly drawn semi-plausable circut diagrams, I'm talking about having the actual prototypes in your lab and under the gun.
is where they are bringing this guy up on fraud charges and suing his ass into the ground/ruining his life.
Am I missing something?
Anyone who's seen the Wizard of Oz should know this.
Wizard indeed.
The Keeley Motor, circa 1872, was a similar scam. That one also went on for a long time. J.P. Morgan considered investing, but brought along Edison to take a look. Edison noticed that the motor was vibrating in sync with the exhaust from a gas engine across the street, said a few words to Morgan, and Morgan declined to invest. But others did. The scam dragged on for years. After Keely's death, a team from Scientific American examined his lab, and discovered compressed-air plumbing hidden in the walls and floors, with a big tank in the basement.
How can someone be fooled by a VCR inside a computer case? Wouldn't the TELEVISION set on top of the 'computer' be a giveaway? Even if you use a video monitor, wouldn't the interlaced 60Hz picture tell you something???????????
And how come when a scam is in the software domain, like the whole late 90s Web crapfest, it's a revolution, but a hardware scam is just a scam?
Anyways, I might not like the guy, but he has serious balls and no matter what happens to him, no one can take away the years of high-life he has enjoyed!
It never ceases to amaze me how many nontechnical business people - people who are unable to actually produce a single useful thing from scratch - are under the delusion that they are the people that produce technology.
The real cons take place when investors steal the perpetual rights to powerful technology developed by financially unsophisticated geeks for a few paychecks.
It's nice to see someone putting something over on the real thieves for a change.
Sunday, May 5, 2002
Last modified at 12:09 a.m. on Sunday, May 5, 2002
-----
Madison Priest has said he first developed his magic box in this metal workshop outside his former home in Palatka. The Priests have since moved to a 6,000-square-foot waterfront home in a gated community in St. Augustine.
-- Special
-------
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?
Northeast Florida man attracted millions from investors who now say they were scammed
By Matthew I. Pinzur
Times-Union staff writer
Madison Priest's history is filled with people who call him a con artist, a geek who invented nothing more than a beautiful lie.
None of them, though, can prove it.
He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.
He choreographed elaborate demonstrations, quickening the pulses of engineers shocked by its innovation and capitalists stunned by its potential.
He asked for money and received it, sometimes more than a million dollars at a time, enough to move him from a cobblestone street in Palatka to a gated community in St. Augustine.
And then he stalled, stymied and stonewalled. Prototypes were destroyed by lightning, floods and plane crashes, he said. They were too unstable for independent tests. Just a little more money, he said, and it would be ready. Just a little bit more.
Every time, he wore out his partners -- rich partners like Blockbuster and Intel, prominent partners like former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins and the son of Atlanta media czar Ted Turner, partners who brought him to Silicon Valley and partners who brought him to Capitol Hill.
MULTIMEDIA
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players
Sometimes they sued him, sometimes they threatened him and sometimes they just threw up their arms in disgust, but they walked away and left their money with him. Priest -- who declined repeated interview requests -- never needed to mourn the loss of old partners; he just found new ones. He has had many since 1994, and they have paid him at least $6 million.
They could never quite prove that his stories -- not his magic box -- were the inventions.
-----------
Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology. Priest said the box could transmit data much faster than any existing system, and could do it through an ordinary household telephone line.
-- Special
------
If it is a scam, they concede, it is truly a beautiful one.
The Revelation
A fortune can become a failure with a single phone call, which four Jacksonville-area entrepreneurs learned as their deal with Priest unraveled in 1998.
The four, including Teddy Turner, formed a company called Zekko in 1997, and soon its only business plan was to turn Priest's invention into a product.
None of them really liked Priest, but none of them cared. He was their Bill Gates, and his invention was their Microsoft.
It was almost a sure thing.
Priest was ferociously protective of its secrets, though, and by mid-1998 he was missing deadlines to turn over working prototypes.
But the investors wanted so badly to believe, and they moved on their faith and on their greed. By September 1998, Zekko had raised almost $6 million, with as much as $1 million going directly to Priest and his wife, Linda. Another $36 million was on its way.
And then the phone call came, a pinpoint moment where hope and trust became betrayal and panic.
The day after a critical fund-raising trip to woo major telecommunications firms in Chicago, court records show Linda Priest called one of Zekko's founding fathers.
-
Linda Priest solders components to a circuit inside the Priests' Palatka workshop. In September 1998, Linda Priest told investors that her husband's magic box was a hoax.
-- Special
-------
It was all a hoax, she said. There was no invention. There was only The Revelation.
Selling the Holy Grail
Today the Priests live in a 6,000-square-foot waterfront home, where five motorcycles, two trucks, a Jaguar, a Lincoln Town Car and a Mitsubishi Eclipse are all registered in their names, as are two small propeller airplanes.
But in 1994, they were living in a far more modest home, a mile or two from sleepy downtown Palatka.
Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier. He had neither the connections nor the savvy to get rich off his magic box.
Hooking up with a former U.S. senator changed that. Paula Hawkins, a one-term Republican from the Reagan era, never invested any money with Priest. But she and her husband, Gene, had a golden Rolodex, and Priest gave them a 10 percent stake in his invention to mine it.
About this series
The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
Meetings the Hawkinses arranged with politicians such as Sen. Orrin Hatch were encouraging, but nothing compared to to the response from top executives at Blockbuster.
Blockbuster wanted Priest's invention badly, Gene Hawkins said, as if the entertainment giant's survival depended on it. And, in fact, it might have. Video stores could crumble if people could watch movies over their phone lines, and Priest promised exactly that ability.
Phone lines have long been considered far too slow to carry the huge amounts of data necessary for high-quality video. Those limits created the need for cable modems and other high-performance data lines, like the T-1 and T-3 lines running in many businesses. Priest's invention would make those old phone lines faster than anything on the market, decimating the communications speed limit.
"That was the enormous breakthrough," Gene Hawkins said. "It was just conventional, regular, plain old telephone lines."
Gene Hawkins said he worked steadily on the project for months. He led Priest to Wayne Huizenga, then the chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. He also connected Priest with US West CEO Richard McCormick and other six-figure investors.
Court records indicate the Priests netted at least $2.25 million in those early deals, primarily from Blockbuster. Blockbuster and US West declined to comment.
In what would become an unwavering pattern, Priest took the investment cash without turning over working prototypes. By the end of 1996, Blockbuster and US West appear to have walked away.
"The bigger the fish you go after, the less likely they are to come after you," said Bob Mons, an investment banker and one of Zekko's founding partners in Ponte Vedra Beach. "They don't want to admit to being taken by a flimflam man from Palatka."
By that time, Gene Hawkins said, he and his wife had discovered Priest's criminal record, including numerous arrests and at least one conviction for grand theft. The arrests were years earlier, but were enough for the Hawkinses to stop working with him.
"That was very hurtful and disappointing, so we turned very, very sour, my wife in particular," Hawkins said.
The Priests' history is vague, clouded by years of varying stories the Priests told their business partners.
Priest, now 46, sometimes spoke of being a graduate of the Air Force Academy, lawsuits and interviews show. There are no records of his attendance there, which he explained by telling people he was assigned to super-secret covert operations. Sometimes he told potential investors he had worked on a classified missile and weapons design team for aerospace defense contractor Martin Marietta, according to a lawsuit filed by Zekko. But according to that lawsuit, he was never more than a low-level assembly line worker, and was fired for stealing equipment.
"Depending on the audience, the story would take on different embellishments," said Mark Strong, a Naples investor who became the Priests' closest business partner and later their most determined opponent. "If he thought the audience was really clueless, he would really spread it on."
Before stepping back, Gene Hawkins said he introduced Priest to K.C. Craichy, a Tampa businessman who became close with the inventor. Craichy and a friendgave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention. Craichy also agreed to serve as its CEO.
At the same time, in mid-1996, Orange Park real estate broker Walter Williams and at least 10 other investors from Florida saw demonstrations and invested nearly $300,000. Citing confidentiality agreements from a lawsuit settlement, Williams refused to discuss the deal with the Times-Union.
As many as 25 or 30 others may have invested at the same time, Strong said.
"He literally sold it to anyone who walked through the door -- friends, relatives, whoever he could get money from," said a source familiar with Zekko, who requested anonymity because a confidentiality agreement bars him from discussing the matter.
That money, like all the rest invested in VisionTek, went directly to Priest and his wife, according to many of their former partners.
Potential investors were dumbfounded by the demonstrations, which seemed generations beyond state of the art. With a conventional modem, one computer can transmit a music video -- with a small, fuzzy picture -- in an hour or more. At Priest's demonstrations, though, investors saw that same computer send video instantly. The Eagles' performance of Tequila Sunrise showed up on the second computer in digitally perfect full-screen glory, the music as clear as a compact disc.
Even with top-grade fiber optic cables, that kind of quality was rare at the time. Amazingly, the computers at Priest's demonstrations appeared to be connected with ordinary telephone cord. The only other wires were the electric cords that plugged the computers into a power strip.
The results were so staggering that investors said they overlooked Priest's demand -- his paranoia, even -- that no one so much as touch a keyboard.
"He had a Holy Grail that was the telecommunications equivalent of cold fusion," Mons said.
Craichy had seen Priest's elaborate show for about a year, always at places carefully prepped by Priest with computers provided by Priest and videos selected by Priest. Now Craichy wanted independent tests in which he controlled those variables.
As soon as he suggested it, Craichy said, Priest vanished.
"He wouldn't take my calls, he wouldn't come see me," Craichy said. "He disappeared."
Tomorrow: As Priest's deals begin to unravel, his claims become even more daring.
Deception revealed
The day after Linda Priest's 1998 confession to Zekko technology chief Herb Presley, he and Mons drove to Palatka to investigate.
It was Sept. 11, 1998, and it was the beginning of The Revelation.
Mons, who had been the primary fund-raiser for the nearly $6 million Zekko collected that year, said he planned to confiscate whatever prototypes he and Presley could find. Linda Priest's phone call notwithstanding, he still believed they would find some components, which could be given to engineers and possibly still turned into a product.
But any hope of keeping Zekko alive dissolved in the next few hours, according to interviews and court records.
-------
Linda Priest stands next to testing equipment during an examination of Madison Priest's magic box at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando. Though some tests of the box appeared successful, investors now suspect the technology does not exist and the box was a hoax.
-- Special
---------
A computer at the Priests' home, which Strong said Linda Priest believed was a key part of her husband's network for that demonstration, turned out not to be a computer at all. Inside the steel computer case, Mons said, there were no circuit boards, no disk drives, no power source.
There was only a VCR.
The Revelation continued when Linda Priest took them to Kay Larkin Airport, a municipal airstrip in Palatka, where her husband rented a hangar for his planes. They found no prototypes, nothing that could have salvaged Zekko's investment. What they did find was plenty of evidence to suggest a massive fraud.
There were boxes of unused components. There were circuit boards configured with what the Zekko source called "obvious sneaks." And there was the power strip.
Hidden inside two power cords that plugged into the strip was a single piece of coaxial cable, which could secretly connect two computers. Sending video over coaxial cable is old technology, the basis of cable television. By hiding that cable in a power strip, Priest could make it appear that the video was traveling over phone lines.
"We found stuff that really scared the hell out of us," Mons said.
Arrogance, anxiety
As Priest's relationships with Craichy and the Hawkinses were crumbling around 1996, he found a new source of money and influence.
Strong had just sold a successful chain of medical imaging companies and was itching for a new business venture. He saw a demonstration in Tampa and was hooked.
"I thought I would be the guy that finally got this technology developed," Strong said. "That was my supreme arrogance."
He consulted Geoff Workman, a San Francisco merchant banker experienced with high-tech innovations, who advised him to move slowly.
"We've got an uneducated country bumpkin with a weird background in aerospace, who invented this in his workshop," Workman said. "I told Mark, 'This is going to require a lot of due diligence and vetting before we know if anything's even there.'"
Priest, though, was masterful at urging people to invest quickly, Strong said.
"If you didn't jump on this, some big company would get on it and you'd be aced out," Strong said.
Strong invested $100,000, and six months later he was ready to buy Priest's entire company. He had negotiated test-site agreements with three institutions, including the University of Florida and Columbia Hospital Corp. As soon as he had 40 working units for those clients, Strong said, he would sign the deal.
He never received them.
Strong's concern blossomed into heavy anxiety in April 1997, when Priest was nearly killed in a car wreck in his bright red Corvette.
"They said there was a chance he could die," Strong said. "If he died, the project was over."
During Priest's convalescence, Strong realized the risk of keeping the invention's secrets locked in its inventor's brain. He shifted his pressure on Priest from building the 40 units to documenting the technology.
Priest had always refused to draw complete schematics. Engineers who examined his diagrams were baffled when they showed components working beyond their capacity or being used in ways never intended. But like every story Priest told, there was always a nugget of truth, however obscure. The designs were implausible, the engineers said, but never quite impossible.
"His ideas are interesting and provocative, so he's got a good story," said Hal Puthoff, a Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using. "It might not be a true story, but it hangs together, at least in his own jargon."
After the wreck, Priest promised to explain everything in writing, calling Strong five or 10 times a day to update him.
"It was just all talk," Strong said. "He never filled in all the blanks."
While Strong waited, Priest began building the foundation for his next set of partners.
Presley and another high-tech industry entrepreneur, Michael Newman, were planning to invest $2 million in the project just after Priest's wreck. Within six months, Presley and Newman had joined Mons and Teddy Turner to form Zekko, and Strong had been almost completely cut out.
The deal with Zekko, detailed in an October 1997 letter, handed the Priests a lump payment of $500,000 and the potential to earn millions more.
The deal itself would not be signed for more than six months because the Priests, Linda especially, would call for endless revisions. Zekko officers now believe they were simply stalling for time.
"She was a first-time girl trying to be a lawyer," Mons said of Linda Priest, who did not respond to interview requests. "She was unbearably difficult to negotiate with."
But in late 1997, everything still looked stable. Presley and Newman found experts to examine the invention while Mons and Turner sought investors to fund it.
Priest, though, became their biggest obstacle on both fronts, Zekko officials said. Potential investors, most worth at least $1 million, were put off by his rural Florida twang, his T-shirts that said "rocket scientist," and breath so bad it could choke a man in close conversation.
Scientists and engineers were also frustrated in conversations with him: The self-taught inventor spoke a different scientific language than the Ph.D.s. They would praise the invention's potential, but refused to vouch for it until they could take the box apart and test it themselves.
None of it deterred Zekko. Priest claimed to be using theories called low-energy or zero-point physics, an obscure new scientific terrain.
"This is like the netherworld of physics," Mons said. "You cannot get anyone to come in and vet this and give it absolute verification."
While Presley struggled to arrange conclusive tests, Mons and Turner began raising more than $1.5 million from individual investors in late 1997. That Turner was attached to the project only made investors more confident.
"Obviously that was a good name, and there was some talk that CNN would be an end user," said Dave Wild, a South Florida investor who put $63,000 into the project.
Indeed, Turner arranged a demonstration for his father at CNN's Atlanta headquarters, according to Mons. Ted Turner did not return phone calls, and his son declined to discuss the matter, but Mons said CNN wanted to be the company's first client. Ted Turner provided Priest workspace at the CNN building, Mons said, and asked him to build a prototype. It never happened.
Looking back, Zekko's founders and investors see how Priest's endless stalling and laughable excuses should have made them more cautious.
At least 10 times, according to court records, Priest said working prototypes were hit by lightning. Other times he would claim they were damaged in floods, damaged in rains or otherwise became "unstable."
No one could force Priest to work faster or deliver the independent tests.
"Every time we told him to put up," Mons said, "he threatened to blow up and go away."
A half-mile lie
Even the phony computers and trick power strips did not prepare the Zekko bosses for the next day, when The Revelation continued and grew as they revisited buildings where Priest had hosted demonstrations.
At one site after another, Mons said, they found hidden lines of coaxial cable. In some places it was buried shallowly in the dirt. In others it was snaked along bushes.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
The ferryman at Fort Gates, Dale Jones, confirmed to the Times-Union that Priest had paid him to string the cable, but refused to discuss the matter.
The river is about a half-mile wide at the ferry, long enough that the cable would need special devices to amplify the signal. The Zekko source said the company had provided Priest with just such devices.
Rush to settlement
By the time Zekko's partners were getting queasy about Madison Priest, they were in too deep to retreat. In addition to more than $1.5 million Mons raised in late 1997, court records show prominent California computer chip maker Level One invested $3.5 million from October 1997 to January 1998.
The cash was flowing out of Zekko even faster than it was coming in. The contract with Priest had already paid him $500,000, and both Mons and another Zekko source said the inventor eventually got as much as $1 million of Zekko funds. In addition, the inventor's previous partners, including Craichy, Strong and the Hawkinses, began laying claim to the technology's rights. "We needed a clear title to this technology," Mons said, "and we were in a hurry."
So Zekko settled with everyone, according to company documents, paying out more than $1 million. Strong, who had signed non-circumvention agreements with Zekko bosses, received the juiciest deal: $525,000 cash, a $15,000 monthly consulting agreement and possible royalties. Craichy received $30,000 to $50,000, and the Hawkinses -- who invested only time, never money -- settled for a consulting agreement that was supposed to pay out $360,000. However, Gene Hawkins said they never received more than about $20,000.
"All those consultants; maybe only one worked for the company," the Zekko source said. "The rest were getting paid to settle."
No one from Level One, which has since been purchased by Intel, would comment on their investment in Zekko. Priest repeatedly postponed delivery of working prototypes during 1998, and by September, Zekko's officers could not imagine why Priest continued to miss delivery deadlines and stall on conclusive testing. Before flying with Priest to meet with eager investors from Ameritech and GTE in Chicago, one of Zekko's executives confronted Linda Priest, the Zekko source said.
If this was a hoax, she was warned, Zekko would pursue them like Captain Ahab followed his whale. Major corporations like Blockbuster might have been willing to write off their losses to avoid the negative publicity associated with lawsuits, but Zekko had no such compunctions.
Because Linda Priest had become the court-appointed liquidator for VisionTek, the Zekko executive assured her she would be easier to convict than her husband and serve more jail time. If she had anything to confess, he told her, now was the time.
She said nothing, and the trip to Chicago went on as planned, with Priest joined by Presley and another Zekko board member. The companies offered to write a check for more than $36 million on the spot. The Zekko executives held off, though. Both company sources and David Hodges, a Jacksonville private investigator hired by Strong, said Zekko wanted to be completely secure in the technology before putting major telecommunications companies on the hook for that much cash. Had the top executives accepted the check, some would have received bonuses as high as $875,000.
"The day before, you thought you were a billionaire," the Zekko source said. "Then you've got serious questions."
Profiting from belief
Ironically, it was fallout from Priest's Chicago demonstrations that destroyed Zekko.
Linda Priest's version of those events, according to Mons and other sources, went like this:
She believed her husband usually demonstrated the technology by connecting to a modem in their home computer, so she expected him to call from Chicago and tell her to turn it on. Unbeknownst to her, he was using the computer in his shop, which was already on. When he failed to call that day, she grew suspicious and opened the home computer. Inside the case she found nothing but a VCR.
When Priest returned to Palatka the next day, his wife was gone. She had emptied their house and filed separation papers in court. She initiated The Revelation when she called Presley, Zekko's technology chief, and told her story. She also called the FBI.
"She was in this up to her eyeballs," Mons said. "Now she was trying to extricate herself."
The accusations sent Zekko into a tailspin. The company's officers spent the next few days discovering staggering evidence of a massive scam. Many resigned in disgust, their investors' stock apparently worthless. Zekko stopped paying Priest and everyone else.
"This is a very well-orchestrated con, and there are a lot of people involved," Mons said.
It might have all ended here, with Priest dismissed as a scheming nerd who knew nothing special after all.
But Madison Priest knew one thing had not changed. People -- even smart, rich and powerful people -- want to believe in a magic box.
Within three months, Linda Priest would recant her accusations and reconcile with her husband. They would enigmatically explain the damning evidence as fallout from amnesia related to Priest's car accident -- amnesia they never mentioned at the time. They would accuse Zekko of breaking its contract, voiding the company's claim to the invention.
They wrapped the same old box with a ribbon of fresh, new stories. This time, the plan -- and the stakes -- would be even grander.
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
-------
Search Tips - Use + to require word, - to omit.
Enter words describing a concept or keywords.
-------
Story Archives
News | Marketplace | Learning Center | Entertainment
Jack's Cafe | Community | Home
Metro | Neighbors | Opinion | Obituaries | Business
Daily Special | Sports | Weather | Voices | Wire
About us | E-mail staff | How to advertise
This site, and all its content, © The Florida Times-Union
There's those computercompanies who tell us their "magic boxes" will make our lifes better, or their software. TV-broadcasters ensuring us we couldn't live without watching their Channels every day (makes one wonder what humankind did before the invention of TV), car companies convincing us that we need a car that can drive 150 MPH although there's only very few chances to do so, ...
Also there's all these "get rich quick" schemes and whatnot, but what they all have in common: there needs to be someone gullible enough to believe all those smooth lies and greedy enough to act before thinking for the scheme to work. How's this one different from any big corporation selling their product with even bigger lies? Just because it's a single guy instead of a whole corporation thats selling hot air on lies?
If that guy get's sued i'd like to sue all that corporations who told me i could get the hottest women in town just because i wear the right sneakers, drink the correct beverage or drive the right car. Then i have some serious issues with any companies selling XXX-light products because i didn't loose a single pound despite eating tons of the stuff. And then i want a free passage to my plot on the moon.
Where exactly is the difference between a scam and "good advertising"?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Check out www.etreppid.com to see a company making similar claims with software (basically, the old "unlimited yet perfect compression" scam). The company is ran by Warren Trepp, famous for being the number 2 man in Milken's famous junk bond scam.
Madison Priest on the Web or Usenet??? Is the story about a hoax, a hoax?
Almost nobody gets this stuff right.
if you didn't understand that the 'get fit before summer' scheme was a scam before now, no need to bitch us about it.
When the phone system was invented, there was no 'theoretical' limit to the quality, since it was all annolog (I mean, not counting the physical limitations of the wire, which is pretty high)
Once you start digitizing (at that rate) everything you're going to loose a lot of information.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No offense, but anybody who believes a charlatan like the one offering a mystery box deserves to have their money taken. Nobody should be stupid enough to believe in any miracle product without being able to check out it's guts.
you know, from the article, it sounds more like that the "investors" were more interested in keeping his invention out of production. Particularly Blockbuster and Qwest had tremendenous motivation to supress the idea, whether legitimate or not. I seriously doubt Blockbuster was interested in obsoleting their own business model. And Qwest owns of the more miles of wire than anyone in the world. Whether they knew it was a hoax or not is kind of irrelevant, since the principle investors never intended the product to be developed anyway.
So what's the real answer? Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maximum speed that data can be transferred at?
It depends on the length. But when you try to run it through all the existing telephone system you are limited to 64k without any A/D conversions.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's ironic that in making his fake high bandwidth phone line, he actually solved another networking problem - how to make high bandwidth power lines. Sure his solution (running a coax in the power line) isn't a technical revolution, but it is at least as good as every other scheme for doing networking over the power grid.
In the demo, however, they were just going to do a DS-1. I took a t-berd DS-1 test set, a Navtel protocol analyzer, and some cables, including a DS-1 loopback plug (RJ-48). We met them at some hospital in Jacksonville, present were Madison Priest and Mark Strong. Mark video taped the whole thing, which made me kind of nervous.
They took us down to the communications room in the basement of the hospital. There were two Packard Bell computers sitting on the floor. They were both plugged into the same powerstrip. The interesting part was there was not one power cable, but three for each computer. I think two of them ran into one of the ISA slot openings, and were "expoxied" in by what looked like latex caulking. It was a real mess.
Each computer also had an RJ-45 for the T-1, and an internal analog modem. I plugged the t-1 test set into one computer, and a loopback plug into the other. Madison then used hyperterm or procom (I forget which) to dial from one computer to the other thru the Hospital's PBX. When the modems synced up, the T1 came up. I verified I was seeing the loopback, sent some different bit patterns, and errors. When he pulled the pots line, the T1 went down (loss of signal).
Next, they wanted to show it ran over long distances. They used one computer to dial a number in my office in xxxx which was forwarded to the number of the other computer next to us. This worked just as expected. The T-1 came right up. We let the test set run awhile to make sure the line was error free. Mark Strong made it a point to videotape him asking me if it was working. About all I could say was that "It appears to be."
We went to a conference room nearby to talk while the test ran. Madison was pretty strange. He got, what I would term, angry several times during the meeting. I stayed out of it pretty much till at what point our VP asked me what else I needed to verify to make sure that it was capable of carry a T-1. I said I wanted to put the protocol analyzer on the circuit and make a call through xxxx. Then I wanted to send frames and measure the latency of the circuit. I said I know about how much latency I should see, given that signals travel about 100 miles per millisecond.
Then all hell broke loose. They refused to allow that test, or any others. They claimed I was trying to steal their technology. We ended up packing up and going home.
Over the next several months, we heard from them about doing more tests. We wanted to do a long distance video feed, but the week that was supposed to happen, weather was not good (I think it was too icy) for their general aviation plane to make it. They started calling themselves VisionTek, and they informed us, of all things, that we wouldn't see the latency we expected because this thing could transfer a signal faster than the speed of light.
I had suspected the power cords were the actual data path, and my latency test was going to test that theory, but they never allowed it to happen. I don't think they had come up with the "faster than light" story by that time, so I believe we caught them with their pants down.
I don't think we ever invested any money in them. I always believed it to be a hoax, but was just doing my job to investiagate it. I also knew that Madison Priest was an ex-con, and after witnessing his temper, I didn't want to become any more involved than I had to. I certainly wasn't going to challenge him or do anything that would lead him to believe that I *personally* was the reason he didn't get money from my company.
As a matter of fact, I think I should post this anonymously if you don't mind...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways?
Then again, it seems extremely probable that more people than ever are willing to throw money at unfounded concepts in the hope of reaping back even more for themselves. At the same time, people seem to be extremely unwilling to throw money at projects which have solid foundations in helping humanity, but which they will unlikely get no monetary gratification for.
...from this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also a product of a deranged imagination.
(Well, reiteration of the unfortunate state of much of the world has to be wrapped in friendly quotes)
Why is it that Florida seems to attract so many kooks? I mean, sure, nice weather and plenty of old ladies flush with cash, but there must be something in the water to make Florida the scam capital of the world, as well as the spam capital.
Neither the wx nor the abundance of local victims fully explain it.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I started work at a private company that publishes very popular audio software for the entertainment industry in the late 90's. My first task was to incorporate a new super high digital compression audio codec the company had just licensed.
:-) The fact that this "analog" algorithm would have to be implemented in a computer never seemed to cross anyone's mind. And according to the scam artist, the secret was that he would take the output on the digital side, and run it through "winzip", not just once like the other guys, but multiple times! You can't imagine how in the world I kept from laughing as the V.P. of Technology of this company told me this on my first day of work.
Upper level management was very impressed with the algorithm because it was an "analog" audio compression algorithm, and everyone in the music industry knows that analog sounds better than digital
The story is pretty much the same-- the guy never produced a working prototype, either analog or digital. He even sent me a visual basic program which of course never actually ran.
I wasn't there to meet the guy in person, but the demo that was described to me was incredibly easy to fake. He basically had a black box, and plugged the audio source into one side, and the output from the other side into an amp. Incredibly, the output sounded just as good as the input!!!
Unfortunately the story has a sad ending (for me at least) because in order to explain why I couldn't get the algorithm to work, I hinted that perhaps just maybe the guy was running a scam. (As if the lack of working prototype wouldn't explain it.) The president of the company actually yelled at me over the phone "do you think I'm an idiot!", "do you think I'd let myself by taken by a con artist", etc, etc. Needless to say I was fired a few months later...
True, but Harrison's clocks could be verified through simple black-box testing. If the clock kept time over the course of a sea voyage (as determined through astronomical observations, using the clock's time to determine position already known through other means, or just looking at another clock) then it was genuine. If it didn't, it wasn't. Such black-box testing wouldn't have been sufficient in this case, though.
Also, beware of people who claim over ten times that a working prototype has been struck by lightning
Try reading just a bit to inform yourself about the technology first. Betavoltaic technology was first developed by NASA. NASA file about betavoltaic technology Most recently it has been advanced by Sandia National Laboratories. Read DARPA-betavoltaic Learn your subject. Then you wont seem quite so ignorant. Betavoltaic will start to replace chemical batteries in the next few years.
In my opinion, it's always good to be a skeptic. It's rarely good (At least IMHO) to be a cynic.
Of course, being a skeptic might be what he was talking about
What this WHOLE STORY is just a curtain to hide the fact that somebody DID invent this thing!
Do you think that's possible?
we didn't even get to see a demo...some suit with a black belt in marketing tried to pitch application sharing instead of actually showing us the technology working. it was funny. our professor dr. nemo (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~nemo/) completely wrecked on it because let's face it. ..what modulation is gonna overcome the 3k filters that were on most phone lines at the time?
holy vaporware. this is completely hilarious to read about this a few years later.
m.
http://www.pataphysics-lab.com
Additionally, this pre-dated patent law, I think. It would've been possible (in principle) to reverse-engineer it and steal Harrison's ideas, although it's unlikely that the Astronomer-Royal of the day (Maskeyne?) would have been bright enough. (In fact, this is pretty much how some of the copies demanded by the Longitude Board were produced.)
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Actually, patents are anything but worthless. Patents (even if they're not completely accurate) can bring down huge right-to-practice issues on all sorts of companies. And even if you are granted a patent, your competitors can patent improvements around your patent and box you in.
It's kind of sad that patents have evolved into legal bargaining points. But that's how the game is played.
BTW, IANAL...
...I feel no pity for the greedy fools who got taken by Priest. As this Craichy character mentioned, all they had to do was request independent testing and he'd have been found out for a sham. It was their own stupidity to fork over millions without requesting such testing or even doing background checks on the "inventor".
Anyone remember the saying, "if it seems too good to be true... IT IS"?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
It has been years, but when I was a college student, we were working on a research project for PacBell on how to transmit more data over twisted pair transmission lines. My recollection is that getting data pushed through telco lines is complicated because of "loading" (I think it has something to do with inductors -- can't remember anymore) -- a technique that they used to extend the range of voice signals. Basically, once you got too far past 4khz, the signal would start to get seriously attentuated. In order to install ISDN lines, they had to actually send people out to remove the loading. I've never maintained enough interest in electrical/systems engineering to understand how DSL works, but I guess they must have figured something out.. So the point of all of this ramble, is pushing signal through POTS lines isn't the same as pushing signal over a pair of twisted pair lines in your house...
Evolution: love it or leave it
Michael McDonnough has demonstrated once again that we do indeed have the technological advancement to go into space with field dependent drive systems that are clean, efficient, and fast. By fast where talking about 29,900kps. with up to 1,440,000lbs. of thrust available using power systems and superconductors that exist right now.
All we have to do is exploit the systems described in his book and in the disclosed patents to be on par with other advanced space fairing worlds. The fact is you will not look at spacecraft development in the same way after reading his book. He leaves little doubt that our government has, and is developing these types of systems in secret, up till know at least.
After reading this book you may be wondering how we could have been so deceived so completely for so many years. After reading the patents and the authors investigative reasoning you will know more about how human engineered UFO's might operate than you may have ever expected possible without very high level security clearance.
You may, or may not believe in outer space alien craft but at least after reading this book you will understand the technology and the probable reasoning behind the cover-up of mankind's venture into the technical area of Field Drive Spacecraft Systems.
And, if you don't believe them ask Alex Ignatiev who is on the Technical Team.
We had the exact same scam running around in Sweden at the same years. Same box, same claims, same demo. Different people though. And since this is a small country you have to scale down all the dollar amounts passing hands a magnitude or two.
There must be a connection, but I don't know who franshised who on the idea.
I got a little involved in the swedish mirror case since the university I worked on was one of the victims of the scam.
It's funny to see how not only the scam is the same, but also the reactions. You have the pointy haired bosses who are the main target for the deception, you have the golden rolodexes who get the deceptors into contact with more money. And you have the techies who say "sounds nice but the demo is not proof".
I am curious to if there are more occurrences of this magic box scam? I would like for anyone who knows of this to contact me, If you don't publish on Slashdot.
To my knowledge the men behind the swedish mirror case never made it to court. The story abruptly ended when the telecom company Ericsson bought it all up and put a lid on everything, bringing it out of the media range.
1999 one of the guys appeared again in a similar scam, this time the technology was updated to wireless broadband. An LMDS lookalike this time. The magic box is DSL lookalike.
Damn, I wonder if he used the 'Magic Box Comparison Test' flash piece in his presentation. As soon as I saw that, I wanted one!
I love seeing the investors jump on any sort of technology matter, no matter if they know nothing about the field/company.
...Bubba's *still* from Citra. That's punishment enough, and reason enough to try any scam that'll get you out of there!
BTW, I lived a long time in Marion County (farther back in the boonies than Citra), so I *do* have a right to make wisecracks about it. And the ferry at the St. John's River is really cool, even if this yahoo abused it in putting over his scam---and even if it's so drought-stricken the river runs backwards half the time.
Great Ghu, there really *is* one born every minute!
He's a-pickin',
and I'm a-grinnin'
Thumper
...technology consultant to hollywood studios.
Am I right or am I right? Give it up for my post - Mod me up!
Mind you I'm in Oz
Actually I remember reading somewhere that Oz phone lines can Potentially do up to 64K, that maybe why I've even manage to do 56K sometimes
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?
... he's like Lex Luthor," Strong said. "He will really use anybody."
Northeast Florida man attracted millions from investors who now say they were scammed
By Matthew I. Pinzur
Times-Union staff writer
Madison Priest's history is filled with people who call him a con artist, a geek who invented nothing more than a beautiful lie.
None of them, though, can prove it.
He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.
He choreographed elaborate demonstrations, quickening the pulses of engineers shocked by its innovation and capitalists stunned by its potential.
He asked for money and received it, sometimes more than a million dollars at a time, enough to move him from a cobblestone street in Palatka to a gated community in St. Augustine.
And then he stalled, stymied and stonewalled. Prototypes were destroyed by lightning, floods and plane crashes, he said. They were too unstable for independent tests. Just a little more money, he said, and it would be ready. Just a little bit more.
Every time, he wore out his partners -- rich partners like Blockbuster and Intel, prominent partners like former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins and the son of Atlanta media czar Ted Turner, partners who brought him to Silicon Valley and partners who brought him to Capitol Hill.
MULTIMEDIA
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players
Sometimes they sued him, sometimes they threatened him and sometimes they just threw up their arms in disgust, but they walked away and left their money with him. Priest -- who declined repeated interview requests -- never needed to mourn the loss of old partners; he just found new ones. He has had many since 1994, and they have paid him at least $6 million.
They could never quite prove that his stories -- not his magic box -- were the inventions.
Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology. Priest said the box could transmit data much faster than any existing system, and could do it through an ordinary household telephone line.
-- Special
If it is a scam, they concede, it is truly a beautiful one.
The Revelation
A fortune can become a failure with a single phone call, which four Jacksonville-area entrepreneurs learned as their deal with Priest unraveled in 1998.
The four, including Teddy Turner, formed a company called Zekko in 1997, and soon its only business plan was to turn Priest's invention into a product.
None of them really liked Priest, but none of them cared. He was their Bill Gates, and his invention was their Microsoft.
It was almost a sure thing.
Priest was ferociously protective of its secrets, though, and by mid-1998 he was missing deadlines to turn over working prototypes.
But the investors wanted so badly to believe, and they moved on their faith and on their greed. By September 1998, Zekko had raised almost $6 million, with as much as $1 million going directly to Priest and his wife, Linda. Another $36 million was on its way.
And then the phone call came, a pinpoint moment where hope and trust became betrayal and panic.
The day after a critical fund-raising trip to woo major telecommunications firms in Chicago, court records show Linda Priest called one of Zekko's founding fathers.
Linda Priest solders components to a circuit inside the Priests' Palatka workshop. In September 1998, Linda Priest told investors that her husband's magic box was a hoax.
-- Special
It was all a hoax, she said. There was no invention. There was only The Revelation.
Selling the Holy Grail
Today the Priests live in a 6,000-square-foot waterfront home, where five motorcycles, two trucks, a Jaguar, a Lincoln Town Car and a Mitsubishi Eclipse are all registered in their names, as are two small propeller airplanes.
But in 1994, they were living in a far more modest home, a mile or two from sleepy downtown Palatka.
Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier. He had neither the connections nor the savvy to get rich off his magic box.
Hooking up with a former U.S. senator changed that. Paula Hawkins, a one-term Republican from the Reagan era, never invested any money with Priest. But she and her husband, Gene, had a golden Rolodex, and Priest gave them a 10 percent stake in his invention to mine it.
About this series
The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
Meetings the Hawkinses arranged with politicians such as Sen. Orrin Hatch were encouraging, but nothing compared to to the response from top executives at Blockbuster.
Blockbuster wanted Priest's invention badly, Gene Hawkins said, as if the entertainment giant's survival depended on it. And, in fact, it might have. Video stores could crumble if people could watch movies over their phone lines, and Priest promised exactly that ability.
Phone lines have long been considered far too slow to carry the huge amounts of data necessary for high-quality video. Those limits created the need for cable modems and other high-performance data lines, like the T-1 and T-3 lines running in many businesses. Priest's invention would make those old phone lines faster than anything on the market, decimating the communications speed limit.
"That was the enormous breakthrough," Gene Hawkins said. "It was just conventional, regular, plain old telephone lines."
Gene Hawkins said he worked steadily on the project for months. He led Priest to Wayne Huizenga, then the chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. He also connected Priest with US West CEO Richard McCormick and other six-figure investors.
Court records indicate the Priests netted at least $2.25 million in those early deals, primarily from Blockbuster. Blockbuster and US West declined to comment.
In what would become an unwavering pattern, Priest took the investment cash without turning over working prototypes. By the end of 1996, Blockbuster and US West appear to have walked away.
"The bigger the fish you go after, the less likely they are to come after you," said Bob Mons, an investment banker and one of Zekko's founding partners in Ponte Vedra Beach. "They don't want to admit to being taken by a flimflam man from Palatka."
By that time, Gene Hawkins said, he and his wife had discovered Priest's criminal record, including numerous arrests and at least one conviction for grand theft. The arrests were years earlier, but were enough for the Hawkinses to stop working with him.
"That was very hurtful and disappointing, so we turned very, very sour, my wife in particular," Hawkins said.
The Priests' history is vague, clouded by years of varying stories the Priests told their business partners.
Priest, now 46, sometimes spoke of being a graduate of the Air Force Academy, lawsuits and interviews show. There are no records of his attendance there, which he explained by telling people he was assigned to super-secret covert operations. Sometimes he told potential investors he had worked on a classified missile and weapons design team for aerospace defense contractor Martin Marietta, according to a lawsuit filed by Zekko. But according to that lawsuit, he was never more than a low-level assembly line worker, and was fired for stealing equipment.
"Depending on the audience, the story would take on different embellishments," said Mark Strong, a Naples investor who became the Priests' closest business partner and later their most determined opponent. "If he thought the audience was really clueless, he would really spread it on."
Before stepping back, Gene Hawkins said he introduced Priest to K.C. Craichy, a Tampa businessman who became close with the inventor. Craichy and a friendgave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention. Craichy also agreed to serve as its CEO.
At the same time, in mid-1996, Orange Park real estate broker Walter Williams and at least 10 other investors from Florida saw demonstrations and invested nearly $300,000. Citing confidentiality agreements from a lawsuit settlement, Williams refused to discuss the deal with the Times-Union.
As many as 25 or 30 others may have invested at the same time, Strong said.
"He literally sold it to anyone who walked through the door -- friends, relatives, whoever he could get money from," said a source familiar with Zekko, who requested anonymity because a confidentiality agreement bars him from discussing the matter.
That money, like all the rest invested in VisionTek, went directly to Priest and his wife, according to many of their former partners.
Potential investors were dumbfounded by the demonstrations, which seemed generations beyond state of the art. With a conventional modem, one computer can transmit a music video -- with a small, fuzzy picture -- in an hour or more. At Priest's demonstrations, though, investors saw that same computer send video instantly. The Eagles' performance of Tequila Sunrise showed up on the second computer in digitally perfect full-screen glory, the music as clear as a compact disc.
Even with top-grade fiber optic cables, that kind of quality was rare at the time. Amazingly, the computers at Priest's demonstrations appeared to be connected with ordinary telephone cord. The only other wires were the electric cords that plugged the computers into a power strip.
The results were so staggering that investors said they overlooked Priest's demand -- his paranoia, even -- that no one so much as touch a keyboard.
"He had a Holy Grail that was the telecommunications equivalent of cold fusion," Mons said.
Craichy had seen Priest's elaborate show for about a year, always at places carefully prepped by Priest with computers provided by Priest and videos selected by Priest. Now Craichy wanted independent tests in which he controlled those variables.
As soon as he suggested it, Craichy said, Priest vanished.
"He wouldn't take my calls, he wouldn't come see me," Craichy said. "He disappeared."
Tomorrow: As Priest's deals begin to unravel, his claims become even more daring.
Deception revealed
The day after Linda Priest's 1998 confession to Zekko technology chief Herb Presley, he and Mons drove to Palatka to investigate.
It was Sept. 11, 1998, and it was the beginning of The Revelation.
Mons, who had been the primary fund-raiser for the nearly $6 million Zekko collected that year, said he planned to confiscate whatever prototypes he and Presley could find. Linda Priest's phone call notwithstanding, he still believed they would find some components, which could be given to engineers and possibly still turned into a product.
But any hope of keeping Zekko alive dissolved in the next few hours, according to interviews and court records.
Linda Priest stands next to testing equipment during an examination of Madison Priest's magic box at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando. Though some tests of the box appeared successful, investors now suspect the technology does not exist and the box was a hoax.
-- Special
A computer at the Priests' home, which Strong said Linda Priest believed was a key part of her husband's network for that demonstration, turned out not to be a computer at all. Inside the steel computer case, Mons said, there were no circuit boards, no disk drives, no power source.
There was only a VCR.
The Revelation continued when Linda Priest took them to Kay Larkin Airport, a municipal airstrip in Palatka, where her husband rented a hangar for his planes. They found no prototypes, nothing that could have salvaged Zekko's investment. What they did find was plenty of evidence to suggest a massive fraud.
There were boxes of unused components. There were circuit boards configured with what the Zekko source called "obvious sneaks." And there was the power strip.
Hidden inside two power cords that plugged into the strip was a single piece of coaxial cable, which could secretly connect two computers. Sending video over coaxial cable is old technology, the basis of cable television. By hiding that cable in a power strip, Priest could make it appear that the video was traveling over phone lines.
"We found stuff that really scared the hell out of us," Mons said.
Arrogance, anxiety
As Priest's relationships with Craichy and the Hawkinses were crumbling around 1996, he found a new source of money and influence.
Strong had just sold a successful chain of medical imaging companies and was itching for a new business venture. He saw a demonstration in Tampa and was hooked.
"I thought I would be the guy that finally got this technology developed," Strong said. "That was my supreme arrogance."
He consulted Geoff Workman, a San Francisco merchant banker experienced with high-tech innovations, who advised him to move slowly.
"We've got an uneducated country bumpkin with a weird background in aerospace, who invented this in his workshop," Workman said. "I told Mark, 'This is going to require a lot of due diligence and vetting before we know if anything's even there.'"
Priest, though, was masterful at urging people to invest quickly, Strong said.
"If you didn't jump on this, some big company would get on it and you'd be aced out," Strong said.
Strong invested $100,000, and six months later he was ready to buy Priest's entire company. He had negotiated test-site agreements with three institutions, including the University of Florida and Columbia Hospital Corp. As soon as he had 40 working units for those clients, Strong said, he would sign the deal.
He never received them.
Strong's concern blossomed into heavy anxiety in April 1997, when Priest was nearly killed in a car wreck in his bright red Corvette.
"They said there was a chance he could die," Strong said. "If he died, the project was over."
During Priest's convalescence, Strong realized the risk of keeping the invention's secrets locked in its inventor's brain. He shifted his pressure on Priest from building the 40 units to documenting the technology.
Priest had always refused to draw complete schematics. Engineers who examined his diagrams were baffled when they showed components working beyond their capacity or being used in ways never intended. But like every story Priest told, there was always a nugget of truth, however obscure. The designs were implausible, the engineers said, but never quite impossible.
"His ideas are interesting and provocative, so he's got a good story," said Hal Puthoff, a Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using. "It might not be a true story, but it hangs together, at least in his own jargon."
After the wreck, Priest promised to explain everything in writing, calling Strong five or 10 times a day to update him.
"It was just all talk," Strong said. "He never filled in all the blanks."
While Strong waited, Priest began building the foundation for his next set of partners.
Presley and another high-tech industry entrepreneur, Michael Newman, were planning to invest $2 million in the project just after Priest's wreck. Within six months, Presley and Newman had joined Mons and Teddy Turner to form Zekko, and Strong had been almost completely cut out.
The deal with Zekko, detailed in an October 1997 letter, handed the Priests a lump payment of $500,000 and the potential to earn millions more.
The deal itself would not be signed for more than six months because the Priests, Linda especially, would call for endless revisions. Zekko officers now believe they were simply stalling for time.
"She was a first-time girl trying to be a lawyer," Mons said of Linda Priest, who did not respond to interview requests. "She was unbearably difficult to negotiate with."
But in late 1997, everything still looked stable. Presley and Newman found experts to examine the invention while Mons and Turner sought investors to fund it.
Priest, though, became their biggest obstacle on both fronts, Zekko officials said. Potential investors, most worth at least $1 million, were put off by his rural Florida twang, his T-shirts that said "rocket scientist," and breath so bad it could choke a man in close conversation.
Scientists and engineers were also frustrated in conversations with him: The self-taught inventor spoke a different scientific language than the Ph.D.s. They would praise the invention's potential, but refused to vouch for it until they could take the box apart and test it themselves.
None of it deterred Zekko. Priest claimed to be using theories called low-energy or zero-point physics, an obscure new scientific terrain.
"This is like the netherworld of physics," Mons said. "You cannot get anyone to come in and vet this and give it absolute verification."
While Presley struggled to arrange conclusive tests, Mons and Turner began raising more than $1.5 million from individual investors in late 1997. That Turner was attached to the project only made investors more confident.
"Obviously that was a good name, and there was some talk that CNN would be an end user," said Dave Wild, a South Florida investor who put $63,000 into the project.
Indeed, Turner arranged a demonstration for his father at CNN's Atlanta headquarters, according to Mons. Ted Turner did not return phone calls, and his son declined to discuss the matter, but Mons said CNN wanted to be the company's first client. Ted Turner provided Priest workspace at the CNN building, Mons said, and asked him to build a prototype. It never happened.
Looking back, Zekko's founders and investors see how Priest's endless stalling and laughable excuses should have made them more cautious.
At least 10 times, according to court records, Priest said working prototypes were hit by lightning. Other times he would claim they were damaged in floods, damaged in rains or otherwise became "unstable."
No one could force Priest to work faster or deliver the independent tests.
"Every time we told him to put up," Mons said, "he threatened to blow up and go away."
A half-mile lie
Even the phony computers and trick power strips did not prepare the Zekko bosses for the next day, when The Revelation continued and grew as they revisited buildings where Priest had hosted demonstrations.
At one site after another, Mons said, they found hidden lines of coaxial cable. In some places it was buried shallowly in the dirt. In others it was snaked along bushes.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
The ferryman at Fort Gates, Dale Jones, confirmed to the Times-Union that Priest had paid him to string the cable, but refused to discuss the matter.
The river is about a half-mile wide at the ferry, long enough that the cable would need special devices to amplify the signal. The Zekko source said the company had provided Priest with just such devices.
Rush to settlement
By the time Zekko's partners were getting queasy about Madison Priest, they were in too deep to retreat. In addition to more than $1.5 million Mons raised in late 1997, court records show prominent California computer chip maker Level One invested $3.5 million from October 1997 to January 1998.
The cash was flowing out of Zekko even faster than it was coming in. The contract with Priest had already paid him $500,000, and both Mons and another Zekko source said the inventor eventually got as much as $1 million of Zekko funds. In addition, the inventor's previous partners, including Craichy, Strong and the Hawkinses, began laying claim to the technology's rights. "We needed a clear title to this technology," Mons said, "and we were in a hurry."
So Zekko settled with everyone, according to company documents, paying out more than $1 million. Strong, who had signed non-circumvention agreements with Zekko bosses, received the juiciest deal: $525,000 cash, a $15,000 monthly consulting agreement and possible royalties. Craichy received $30,000 to $50,000, and the Hawkinses -- who invested only time, never money -- settled for a consulting agreement that was supposed to pay out $360,000. However, Gene Hawkins said they never received more than about $20,000.
"All those consultants; maybe only one worked for the company," the Zekko source said. "The rest were getting paid to settle."
No one from Level One, which has since been purchased by Intel, would comment on their investment in Zekko. Priest repeatedly postponed delivery of working prototypes during 1998, and by September, Zekko's officers could not imagine why Priest continued to miss delivery deadlines and stall on conclusive testing. Before flying with Priest to meet with eager investors from Ameritech and GTE in Chicago, one of Zekko's executives confronted Linda Priest, the Zekko source said.
If this was a hoax, she was warned, Zekko would pursue them like Captain Ahab followed his whale. Major corporations like Blockbuster might have been willing to write off their losses to avoid the negative publicity associated with lawsuits, but Zekko had no such compunctions.
Because Linda Priest had become the court-appointed liquidator for VisionTek, the Zekko executive assured her she would be easier to convict than her husband and serve more jail time. If she had anything to confess, he told her, now was the time.
She said nothing, and the trip to Chicago went on as planned, with Priest joined by Presley and another Zekko board member. The companies offered to write a check for more than $36 million on the spot. The Zekko executives held off, though. Both company sources and David Hodges, a Jacksonville private investigator hired by Strong, said Zekko wanted to be completely secure in the technology before putting major telecommunications companies on the hook for that much cash. Had the top executives accepted the check, some would have received bonuses as high as $875,000.
"The day before, you thought you were a billionaire," the Zekko source said. "Then you've got serious questions."
Profiting from belief
Ironically, it was fallout from Priest's Chicago demonstrations that destroyed Zekko.
Linda Priest's version of those events, according to Mons and other sources, went like this:
She believed her husband usually demonstrated the technology by connecting to a modem in their home computer, so she expected him to call from Chicago and tell her to turn it on. Unbeknownst to her, he was using the computer in his shop, which was already on. When he failed to call that day, she grew suspicious and opened the home computer. Inside the case she found nothing but a VCR.
When Priest returned to Palatka the next day, his wife was gone. She had emptied their house and filed separation papers in court. She initiated The Revelation when she called Presley, Zekko's technology chief, and told her story. She also called the FBI.
"She was in this up to her eyeballs," Mons said. "Now she was trying to extricate herself."
The accusations sent Zekko into a tailspin. The company's officers spent the next few days discovering staggering evidence of a massive scam. Many resigned in disgust, their investors' stock apparently worthless. Zekko stopped paying Priest and everyone else.
"This is a very well-orchestrated con, and there are a lot of people involved," Mons said.
It might have all ended here, with Priest dismissed as a scheming nerd who knew nothing special after all.
But Madison Priest knew one thing had not changed. People -- even smart, rich and powerful people -- want to believe in a magic box.
Within three months, Linda Priest would recant her accusations and reconcile with her husband. They would enigmatically explain the damning evidence as fallout from amnesia related to Priest's car accident -- amnesia they never mentioned at the time. They would accuse Zekko of breaking its contract, voiding the company's claim to the invention.
They wrapped the same old box with a ribbon of fresh, new stories. This time, the plan -- and the stakes -- would be even grander.
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
Investors shaken by amnesia, alien
Accused of faking his 'magic box,' Madison Priest makes new promises -- and looks for more money
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players
By Matthew I. Pinzur
Times-Union staff writer
He blamed amnesia.
When Madison Priest was confronted with evidence he had been faking demonstrations of his invention -- an invention that had already brought him at least $4 million -- he blamed amnesia from a Corvette wreck that happened 18 months earlier. He had never mentioned memory loss before, his investors said, but now he made it the keystone of his defense.
Priest, who declined repeated interview requests, said he had forgotten how to build the magic box that transformed regular home telephone wires into ultra-fast video and data lines. Until he could remember, or at least reverse-engineer his working units, Zekko bosses said he said he had to fake demonstrations to keep the investment cash flowing. And he begged them not to abandon him.
Desire and greed will give a man faith, but their faith was already worn down. They had run out of ways to convince themselves it was anything other than a hoax.
About this series
The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
There was a problem, though.
Even when his tales became absurd, even when he replaced deadlines with excuses, even when his wife of 22 years condemned the whole thing as a scam, no one could prove he was lying.
That was always the way with Madison Priest.
Teddy Turner, son of the Atlanta mogul, was finished believing. He had founded Zekko in 1997 with three other men, eager to take their place among the instant zillionaires of dot-com glory. His name -- his father's name, really -- conferred legitimacy on the unknown company and its unknown genius, giving many investors confidence.
Little more than a year later, after Priest's wife's catastrophic revelation, Zekko officials uncovered damning evidence suggesting a scam.
When they confronted Priest, he spun his story of amnesia. Then he disclosed, for the first time, how he developed his invention: The idea was brought to him by an alien being he called a "hopper," which traveled from planet to planet and revealed technological advances, recalled Bob Mons, one of Zekko's founders who attended the meeting.
"That's when we started to realize he was delusional and a total fraud," said Mons, who had raised nearly $6 million for Zekko.
By the end of the meeting, Turner had resigned in disgust. Others would follow in the next days and weeks. With no money left and no faith in their only asset, Zekko soon abandoned the project.
"Madison's endgame was a stalemate," said Mons, 41, a Ponte Vedra investment banker. "When it came time to put up, he just jumped on another horse."
Zekko was added to the list of Priest's jilted partners, joining Blockbuster, US West, First Coast real estate broker Walter Williams and others. More were on the horizon.
Priest connects computers to the magic box during one of five tests of the system conducted at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando.
-- Special
There were always more investors for Priest, because that magic box could be worth billions of dollars. Just as his earlier supporters had accepted stories about amnesia and aliens and dark forces hunting him for his secrets, new crops of partners would blithely embrace new tales: miraculous improvements that made the magic box wireless, prototypes that were ruined by incessant acts of God until the inventor himself destroyed the last working models, and then a strikingly similar technology he began to sell overseas.
They believed, at least for a time.
For a shot at getting in early on a technology like that -- to be the one who invested in Microsoft when Windows were still made of glass -- people will let themselves believe crazy stories.
Grasping at hope
Mark Strong had thought he was finished with Madison Priest. The two had briefly been business partners before Zekko was formed, but Strong felt betrayed by the deals between Zekko and Priest.
Zekko had paid Strong $675,000 to go away, but he still felt cheated out of the fantastic wealth he had expected to achieve with Priest. When the deal with Zekko collapsed in the fall of 1998 and Priest again came calling, Strong saw a second chance. Strong believed Priest and his wife, Linda, had possibly tricked Zekko into believing the technology was a fraud, hoping the company would walk away.
"I knew they were trying to get rid of Zekko," Strong said. "I knew he might give them false information, even if it was incriminating."
Over the next three years, Strong would become Priest's most enduring partner. He would settle lawsuits against Priest, locate millions of dollars in investment cash, broker deals with Intel and General Dynamics.
His commitment was so strong, in fact, that others who dealt with Priest over the years believe Strong must have been part of the con -- including David Hodges, the Jacksonville private eye Strong himself hired to investigate Priest.
"I look at Strong as a hustler," Hodges said.
Strong failed to tell at least some of his investors about Priest's criminal history or Linda Priest's accusations of fraud.
"Maybe in retrospect I was too naive and put too much trust in Mark," said Doug Motley, Strong's friend and fishing buddy from Naples, who invested $60,000. "I really hope that if he was aware of that he would have made me aware of that."
But Strong said he simply made the mistake of believing Priest's tales and set out to become the one person Priest could trust with his secrets. His company, Hyperlight, acquired all the rights to Priest's invention, even though Strong said he already saw Priest as a duplicitous liar.
Testing empty boxes
Strong's first priority was arranging independent tests of the device. He had been burned by Priest the first time they worked together, like the 1996 embarrassment with an Arizona physicist who was going to test the magic box.
"We open them up, and they're empty," said Jim Dilettoso, the scientist. "It was a power cord connected to a power supply connected to some red lights. Other than that was some stuff super-glued in there, pieces of junk, to give it weight and bulk."
Priest later said he just did not feel safe entrusting his secrets to anyone else.
Strong was prepared to not let the same thing happen again. He scheduled five sessions at Intertek Testing Services, a respected Orlando lab, beginning in November 1998. Priest still refused to let anyone take apart and analyze the units, but consented to setting up tests that were designed and witnessed by Intertek engineers.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka.
-- Special
Letters to Linda Priest from those engineers confirmed the first three tests were all successful. An Intertek engineer declined to comment, saying the test results were confidential.
Priest and Strong also enticed General Dynamics, the Virginia-based technology giant, which paid the Priests $70,000 in good-faith money and signed a deal in August 1999 to develop a marketable product.
That deal gave Hyperlight the cachet it needed to move forward. Strong amassed around $1.5 million from high-stakes investors, most from Naples.
The Priests received more than $1 million of that and bought the half-million-dollar house in a gated community in St. Augustine, as well as at least five motorcycles and three other cars and trucks.
The Priests also cashed in on a deal a month later with a telecommunications company called Telecom Wireless Corp. The company went bankrupt, but not before paying the Priests $400,000 and investing another $300,000 in Hyperlight.
The deal also connected Hyperlight with John Sununu, former White House chief of staff under the first President Bush. Sununu, an investor in Telecom Wireless, said he offered to bring in engineers to help perfect Priest's invention.
Sununu never invested in Hyperlight, though, as he became convinced Priest was hiding something.
"He [Priest] seemed very secretive," said Sununu, who has a Ph.D. in engineering. "I can understand when people are telling me something, and when they're avoiding telling me something."
Stalling for dollars
After the General Dynamics and Telecom Wireless deals were signed, Priest's stall tactics resurfaced. At least 10 times during his relationship with Strong, court records indicate, Priest claimed prototypes were fried by lightning strikes.
"That was a running joke," Strong said, "but nobody could laugh at it."
The next month, General Dynamics terminated its agreement with Hyperlight because Priest failed to deliver working prototypes. At a shareholders meeting that fall, Strong and Priest were visibly at odds.
"He [Priest] was stonewalling and Mark [Strong] was extremely frustrated," said Motley, Strong's friend who invested in Hyperlight. "Madison said he couldn't perform under all this pressure."
Still, though, Strong pushed forward, and Priest's claims about his invention grew even more audacious.
Forget the phone lines, he said in late 2000 -- he had made the system wireless. With just a regular mobile phone and his magic box, anyone could have a super-speed data connection anywhere, 1,000 times faster than a traditional dial-up. He even demonstrated a completely mobile version, powered through a car's cigarette lighter.
The implications were staggering. Some of the possible uses listed in a confidential memo that Hyperlight sent to potential investors in March 2001 included:
Wireless modems for laptop computers, with connections fast enough to not just surf the Internet but also watch live television.
Television set-top boxes that would allow viewers to instantly order any movie or music selection.
Global positioning satellite units with full-color, high-resolution aerial photos with animated map lines. Two more Intertek tests that winter showed the wireless units performing as promised. Video of the January test shows Priest -- using nothing more than a Nokia mobile phone and a Hyperlight unit -- receiving live satellite television, supposedly being sent over the mobile phone from Priest's home.
The wireless breakthrough launched Hyperlight into its most ambitious and potentially profitable deal, signing with Intel, one of the largest and most dominant technology firms in American history.
'Greed in overdrive'
It was the deal they had been waiting for, one that not even Priest could bypass in hopes of something better coming along. It would have paid Hyperlight $1 million on delivery and unimaginably more in royalties. There was only one hurdle: Priest had to turn over working prototypes by Sept. 25, 2001.
That day, Priest told Strong he had a serious accident while working on his son's car that injured his hand so severely that he could not bring the units to St. Petersburg, where a manufacturing lab associated with Intel was supposed to take possession of the technology.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka.
-- Special
"Madison
When Priest once again failed to deliver, Intel terminated the agreement, and Strong and Hyperlight finally turned against the inventor. Intel officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
Strong filed suit in Naples last October, accusing the Priests of fraud. If the technology does not exist, Strong wants to end the fraud. If it does exist, he wants to force Priest to turn it over to Hyperlight.
Priest, 46, was in jail last week -- the first time he has served related to his invention -- serving a 90-day sentence for contempt of court. After a three-hour hearing on April 24, a Pinellas County judge enforced an existing contempt order against the inventor, written in January when he failed to produce prototypes in court.
In videotape of a January meeting, Priest tells Strong that no working prototypes exist today. He destroyed them, he said, after Intel pulled out.
"I saw no need to maintain hardware that could be a security risk to Hyperlight," Priest said.
Strong was incredulous that Priest had destroyed his prized invention, leading his lawyers to press for Priest's incarceration.
Priest was immediately sent to jail at the hearing last month, but the brief victory celebrated by his embittered former partners disappeared even faster than the dream Priest once promised them.
The judge's order said Priest could be released early if he delivered the technology, but at an April 24 hearing the inventor testified he cannot build replacements because he has been unable to find acceptable parts.
Priest's lawyers argued to an appeals court he was being held improperly because he was jailed for failing to turn over something he said he could not possibly produce. A week after he was booked into the Pinellas jail, he was again a free man.
"There is no money left from this, and the prospect of litigation going on for God knows how long," Strong said. The same issue eventually forced Zekko to settle with Priest last summer for little more than stock in Hyperlight.
But while Priest fights Strong and Hyperlight, he appears to be starting the cycle again with new sets of investors.
"As a fresh tuna, you don't know anything about this, and, what's more, you don't care," Strong said. "Your greed is in overdrive."
New test casts doubt
Information about Priest's current deals is far more vague than his past, but some investors suspect the stakes exceed anything he has attempted before.
Burl Sheppard, a Tampa high-tech fund-raiser who saw a demonstration of the wireless technology last spring, was smitten. He and his partners spent three or four months -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars -- arranging more demonstrations and soliciting investments. They were planning on paying $10 million for exclusive rights to distribute the technology in the United States and China, Sheppard said.
Before any money began flowing in, though, Sheppard said he made a shocking discovery during a demonstration in Myrtle Beach, S.C. While displaying the wireless technology for a high-tech firm, Sheppard picked up the mobile phone that supposedly was being used to receive the data.
Priest, always rigid about anyone handling the equipment, shot out of his seat and yelled at Sheppard to put the phone down.
"The screen [of the phone] was black," Sheppard said. "There wasn't even a call taking place."
He now suspects that Priest was somehow broadcasting the signal with a briefcase DVD player. Sheppard pulled back almost immediately, he said, but not all his investors were convinced it was a scam.
On Sept. 26 -- the day after the accident Priest said kept him from traveling to St. Petersburg -- the inventor and at least one of Sheppard's contacts flew to Norway for a massive fund-raising trip, according to Sheppard and other sources familiar with the deal. They said that trip led to $5 million to $10 million in new investments. Priest has also recently been linked with an electric company in Philadelphia, and he testified in court that he has developed a separate technology that sends data over power lines.
Madison Priest holds up a mobile phone showing the Palatka phone number he used to demonstrate the wireless version of his magic box technology during a test in Orlando.
-- Special
Strong hopes that power-line technology will be Priest's undoing. He argued it is simply an evolution of Hyperlight's magic box, and is therefore owned by Hyperlight under an intellectual-property contract Priest signed in 1999. The judge in St. Petersburg has ordered Priest to produce a power-line unit in court by the end of June, after which experts for both sides will argue whether it is truly a different creation than the Hyperlight technology.
But Strong and others who have followed Priest's story said the inventor has faced deadlines before. They are skeptical that this one will be different, because Priest has always managed to elude a moment of truth.
"The cleverness is not in the invention, but the deception," said Strong, who said he is now 90 percent sure the entire affair was a hoax.
But does it work?
Engineers have tested the box -- engineers hired by Zekko, by Strong, by General Dynamics -- but they could never prove it really worked. Labs have tested the box -- reputable labs that run tests for Intel, Sony and Yamaha -- but never without Priest running the tests. Over eight years of deals and contracts, none of Priest's major investors has ever possessed a working unit.
But no one has been able to disprove the technology, which may be why Priest has collected at least $6 million and possibly many times that.
"He's a little country bumpkin with bib overalls, but he'll get the gold out of your teeth," said Al Keyser, CEO of a South Carolina technology company that hosted a demonstration last summer. "He's got some heavyweight people that he's put this with -- it's going to bite him."
The shadow of doubt, though, dwells in his mind, as it does with investors at every stop on Priest's timeline. For every obvious scam, hoax and con, there have been demonstrations so convincing that neither engineers nor scientists can fathom how they were staged. Unless Strong or another of Priest's jilted former partners succeeds in forcing his hand in court, investors and scientists say no one may ever really know the truth. Linda Priest said she reported Priest to the FBI while they were estranged in 1998, and Mons said he was interviewed by an agent. The FBI will not comment on whether a case exists, but a law enforcement source said there is no active investigation.
Even if the technology does work, many investors suspect they will never see profits without a lengthy court fight -- a fight most of them cannot afford.
"I put money in knowing it was a risk that the technology might not work, but I never thought the guy might be a fraud and a con man," said Dave Wild, a candle-shop owner from South Florida who invested $63,000 with Zekko and the Priests. "When you find out he's a fraud and a crook, it's no different than him walking into my house and stealing $63,000 worth of my stuff."
Strong has another theory, based on years of watching Priest's glee at forcing corporate multimillionaires to coddle him. As long as they needed the secrets locked in Priest's brain, they were forced to make him the center of their universe, flying him around the country on their private jets and hosting him at lavish meals. Turning over the technology would have made him rich, Strong said, but yanked him from the spotlight.
Priest, who originally agreed to be interviewed but changed his mind on his lawyer's advice, made only a single comment about his invention:
"I'm not sure that technology will ever see the light of day."
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/0506 02/met_9326453.html
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
When a desire to believe supersedes common sense, scientific analysis and verification people will get screwed. It's pretty scary how so many people, wielding so much money can be so fundamentally stupid.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
...if it can run Duke Nukem Forever?
The person to talk to on their technical team about stimulated decay theory is Dr. Ruggero Santilli Director of The Institute for Basic Research Dr. Alex Ignatiev has been brought in to develop the energy conversion technology. That is his specialty. He is named on a couple of dozen patents, mostly in energy conversion technologies and superconductivity.
The link above needs to be edited but that function is not in this message board. It is Institute for Basic Research Dr. Santilli is a pretty revolutionary scientist
Gee. I thought that was what patents were suppose to do. Protect the inventors of truely new ideas from being copied while the inventor was able to re-coup profits.
Even if someone did peek inside and say "Gee whiz I can build this easily enough," a real product would have no problem getting investors to fight any ensuing court battle.
The original poster was right. Somebody makes claims like this, cover your wallet.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets a Soprano type investor and then gets a demonstration of another type of black box.
Another reason why patents are worthless pieces of paper.
This is obviously incorrect. Priest's patent helped him make millions of dollars!! Just because it's total BS doesn't mean it's worthless, as long as some morons believe it means something.
What's funny to me is how he extracted all that money from large corporations. It'd be good if more people could swindle big greedy corporations like that. Imagine if someone could swindle MS out of part of that $40 billion they're sitting on...
Unless of course it is a prototype lightning rod.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
If I was going to try to pull a scam like this, and I wanted to take in as many of you as possible, I'd do it this way:
That is how a scam works.
(Oh, by the way, that demo was a real person on the other end of a hidden communication channel)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Anybody care to tell him or call him at (713)743-3621 (office)?
I like the name he had for his product: which he named advanced sub-carrier modulation (ASCM). The initials look like A SCaM.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
You are hardly anonymous. You will not avoid our legal right to protect our copyright which you have violated. You will not avoid legal action for posting Dr. Ignatiev's work phone and email address. This is harassment. The guy is trying to work. He has a full time job as a professor at UH. His work for Betavoltaic Industries Inc is by contract on the side. Why would you want the man harassed at this full time job? We will be contacting your ISP to determine who you are and that information will be given to our legal department. You had better get a lawyer.
IP Address: 64.130.70.93 Connection: dsl-64-130-70-93.telocity.com Browser: Mozilla/4.76 [en] Operating System: (X11; U; Linux 2.2.18pre15 i686) IP trace: Telocity (NETBLK-TELOCITY-3) 10355 N. De Anza Blvd Cupertino, CA 95014
There, is, though a healthy secondhand trade in them on cmu.misc.market. I trust with a little effort you could easily secure one for $5.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
It's been 9 days since this story hit. Today I got a package in the mail from my mother --- in it was a copy of the article and a note. Turns out that she actually taught Madison in high school.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet