Slashdot Mirror
Jailed Spam King Caught Conspiring to Kill Witness
An anonymous reader writes "Spam king Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, is facing up to life in prison for conspiracy to tamper with a witness and up to 20 years for endeavoring to obstruct justice. The charges are based on an alleged phone call in which he threatened to have a witness or the witness' family killed to prevent them from testifying against him in an upcoming trial on drug and related charges.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
From the article:
"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."
And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.
The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.
yes, i constantly get death threats for closing port 25... ;-)
Antother one bites the dust, hey hey!
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
We can only hope his ass is now the recepticle for junk male...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Having opt-out's slain is frowned upon by the legal system.
I always knew that spamming was a gateway crime. It only leads to something bigger!
There's some underlying psychological trait to a guy who would be a spammer, threaten to kill witnesses, run shady online drug sites. They're all things that worsen society to the benefit of the individual. Somebody who went beyond Psych 101 can probably enlighten us here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
[Fooz] In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
Looks like we are one step closer to this "perfect world" Fooz speaks of!
Remember, when you're going to call someone from jail to discuss killing a witness have them steal your attorney's cell phone first...
WTF is this world coming to? Our children turn evil this quick now?
p g
http://www.spamdailynews.com/uploads/rizler_003.j
I mean good lord. He amassed that kind of wealth that quickly, is now in jail and was threatening to kill another human being.
So sad...I don't feel bad for him, per se...but it makes me sick...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
...he received an unsolicited add for a hitman and decided to try it out.
One thing I was thinking though, will we get more spam as spammers get more and more time for their crime. Instead of just your grandmas spamming from their computer part time we gonna get sophisticated criminal/spam organizations who will get into this as the chance jail time vs profit increases. Just like drug trafficing. The more time you get for it the more money you can make from it.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
William Smith
Murcielago - $230,000.00
Houses in Prior Lake and Burnsville - 1 Million dollars
Being a high school dropout spammer stupid enough to use a jail phone to arrange a hit - Priceless!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Spammers are sociopaths. It seems for a lot of them that their disregard for basic decency also includes a disregard for basic adherence to the law. I bet a lot of them are guilty of actual definite crimes. It's just a matter of finding what they are. But we can find out who a lot of them are.
I think that should be the message here. No matter how annoying spam is, it's seldom seen as the type of crime that anybody should really worry about. A lot of people probably don't even see it as a "crime" -- and by people, read legislators. The message from this story is that the kind of people who put together large-scale, organized spam operations are not only a financial burden on society but they are also, sometimes, serious scumbags. Think Al Capone and tax evasion; spam operations should be seen as a red flag for a gray-market mentality, at minimum. Dig a little further and you could find other, more serious criminal operations.
Breakfast served all day!
Oh, how nice. "Not recently". How moral and upstanding!
... torture, really, for moral men to hear. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's propaganda.
... it's TORTURE. And the only thing that's not stopping it is that there isn't a higher military power to invade the US to enact the necessary regime change.
The backpedaling and endless justifications for American torture practice and methods are just
What the US is doing is not just "humiliation"
Do not confuse the US "humilation of prisoners" with civil treatment by a moral society. Even the rules of war (to which the US professes to be a subscriber) prohibit the things that America now routinely does to prisoners taken in the Middle East. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.
I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.
...and this sort of thing isn't nearly as commonplace as you seem to imply. Though I was an infantryman in Iraq, my best friend was an interrogator for our battalions S-2 (intelligence) section. Whenever we took prisoners in to S-2, I'd stand in with him during the interrogation; the implied threat of physical violence from me (one of the guys who'd taken the prisoner in the first place, which means he'd already been manhandled, and none too gently, by us) usually enhanced the subjects willingness to talk. The implied threat. I only saw one instance of a prisoner being struck by an American, and that was a piece of shit who had killed three of our men in an IED attack. I'll admit I punched the fucker, too.
If you want to see prisoner abuse, take a look at the Iraqi governments prisoners. They routinely have prisoners who "commit suicide" or were killed "trying to escape". The Iraqi police are particularly bad - I have some pictures of a group of prisoners that were tortured by the IPs. Not interrogated, just tortured. No question asking, just rubber hoses and AK-47s. Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the world isn't a black-and-white moral landscape. It's all shades of gray, and sometimes being the lesser of two evils is what makes you the good guy. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's the plain truth. I envy the apparent strength of your moral convictions, but I pity you for the way you've allowed them to blind you.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
We exchange the spammer for Abdul Rahman.
Bomb them into the stone-age, I'm fine with that. But for fuck's sake... sending them a spammer? That's just pure sadism.
The twenty year sentence, or any kind of punishment, sort of assumes someone actually reports the rape. It also assumes that the report is taken seriously by the guards rather than ignored. Most victims will not even report it in the first place, especially in prison, where informing on another inmate can get you killed. And many prison administrators routinely ignore and even encourage rape in prisons. The rapist is usually not likely deterred by a theoretical 20-year sentence that he will never have to serve.
The correct answer is an emphatic, "YES!" When the courts martial refused to examine the possibility that Lynndie England was merely following orders, when the Bush administration's highest-ranking lawyer drafts legal briefs on instructions directly from from the President as to why their abuse of prisoners is perfectly legal despite warnings from the Navy's general counsel that the "legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse in spite of the Geneva Conventions were unlawful, dangerous and erroneous" -- how the hell could you NOT conclude that
- the Bush administration knew perfectly well what it was doing
- knew that it was illegal
- wanted a legal smokescreen for the time when such activities leaked out
The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were all carried out under color of authority -- the administration's authority -- which has violated all manner of treaties to which the United States is signatory, not to mention its own Constitution and laws.The question isn't whether Bush and his greasy pals -- Cheney foremost among them -- should be impeached. The question is, how far down does the moral rot go?
Dog is my co-pilot.
You're half right: Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny. Jokes about them can be funny IF (and this is a very big IF) the joke is a means to relieve tension in an absurd and/or awful situation. People need to joke about terrible things to make sense of the world. Gallows humor. Black comedy. I get that. I even like that.
However: jokes about killing Jews are not funny if the point is to take the actual killing of Jews less seriously. Or to turn killing Jews into entertainment.
Likewise, in this case, if the joke was intended to relieve tension on the agreed horor of prison rape, I'd laugh. That wasn't the point. It never is. People really think prison rape is funny. In and of itself. But it's not. Real torment never is. It's also bad for society. It's bad for you.
Clueless people my ass.
Cheers.
Taken from: http://www.lyricsdomain.com/4/donovan/universal_so ldier.html
Universal Soldier
by Donovan
He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.
He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.
And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.
And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.
But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.
--
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
I totally get that humor can be based on suffering, depending on the context and intent. I laughed in Pulp Fiction when the kid gets his head blown off by accident. But I didn't laugh during Shindler's List. I have a hard time believing you did. There is a difference.
And to be clear: sympathy is not my motivation to dislike prison rape. There are at least three reasons why everyone should be against prison rape:
1. Nearly all criminals are released from prison eventually. If they have been raped they are more dangerous to society.
2. The rapist is experiencing power. Why is anyone in prison allowed the pleasure of feeding their abusive tendancies? See point #1.
3. A society that sanctions human rights violations is fundamentally a less healthy society. Violence anywhere begets violence everywhere. This has been shown over and over again throughout history.
On your tangent: people are not all sadists. How many consciously sadistic acts does the average person undertake per day? Assuming you're living in something that passes for a functioning society, I'd say virtually zero. And you believe this is all simply repression? Even the jerks I know don't seem to take pleasure in hurting, it's just a side effect of their being inconsiderate. In fact, nearly everyone I know takes efforts to avoid causing suffering of others.
Yet we can still laugh at a good Nazi joke. Get used to the complexity of people. Don't get hung up on one point and then paint everything black and white.
Cheers.