I should also note that I found this experience to be a very positive one, and would welcome similar opportunities in the future. Please contact me via email at: antisocialmedia@gmail.com

Likewise, arguments crafted without a foundation amount to something ranging from worthless to dangerous.

In both cases, the motives of those responsible must be questioned.

Observers of one Yahoo stock message board were recently treated to the equivalent of a foundation-free high-rise project. It started with a post by New York attorney Howard Sirota, who demanded:

No More Anti-Semitism on this Board!
I just did a search for “Jew” on this Message Board.
There are 428 posts containing the word “Jew.”
That means that this board is infested with anti-semites, which is intolerable.

Sirota went on to claim that some admittedly inappropriate comments made to this blog (which were immediately removed once brought to my attention) were symptomatic of a further anti-Semitic infestation.

In his blog, Gary Weiss reflected on Sirota’s assessment saying:

The subject is a disturbing one — the tendency of the Baloney Brigade anti-short-selling lunatics to use anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery.

And with that, a set of flimsy and transparent walls were hastily erected.

Sam Antar also chimed in, insisting that the unnoticed words of one commenter somehow equate to the endorsement of the board of directors of my employer.

“The Audit Committee…has a simple choice: wheather (sic) they choose to be associated with such vile ugliness from their inaction in fully enforcing the company’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics or to take swift action to prevent further vile acts…”

And with that, a particularly leaky and incompetent roof was put in dropped in place and the mass was dubbed a house.

Looking at their work, Gary Weiss and Sam Antar would have the world believe that they’re responsible for creating something great.

But one thing is absent: a foundation, which Howard Sirota neglected to build, rendering the contributions of both Weiss and Antar worthless.

Let’s start with Weiss, who built his claim of anti-Semitism on the part of opponents of illegal market manipulation entirely upon Sirota’s assertion that one company’s stock message board was infested with anti-Semites. This claim, in turn, was based upon Sirota’s observation that the word “Jew” appeared in 428 of the tens of thousands of messages posted there over more than five years.

For the sake of argument, and in deference to Mr. Sirota, who is Jewish and undoubtedly better at recognizing anti-Semitism than a non-Jew, let us assume that this is a reliable metric of a message board’s level of bigotry.

Weiss takes the argument one step further and announces that in addition to being quantitative, this metric is also qualitative, in that from it, blameworthiness can also be assigned. Specifically, Weiss feels the blame for 428 tainted message board posts fall squarely at the feet of all opponents of illegal naked short selling.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers to gauge the integrity of this line of reasoning.

A search for posts including the word “Jew,” conducted two days after Sirota’s, returned 442 such messages. The authors of these posts were then divided up based on their attitude toward illegal naked shorting (with a third category comprised of those who, like Mr. Sirota, have made no statements on the topic).

The result is very instructive.

• Those in favor of illegal naked short selling authored 323 messages, or 73% of the total.
• Those most likely to be opposed to illegal naked short selling authored 96 messages, or 22% of the total.
• Those without a discernible position on the issue of illegal naked short selling authored 23, or 5% of the total.

But wait, there’s more!

Among those authors in favor of illegal naked short selling, one stands out far above the rest: Lamborghini751, who personally authored 131 messages deemed anti-Semitic by Howard Sirota.

That’s one-third of all of them.

The best part: Lamborghini751 is Gary Weiss (as demonstrated here).

In other words, if Sirota’s method of assessing message board bigotry is accurate, the biggest culprit is Gary Weiss himself, thereby invalidating everything Weiss has written on the topic, whether as himself, as Lamborghini751, or as the blogger Mediacrity.

On the other hand, if Sirota’s method is not accurate, then the entire basis for Weiss’s claim of anti-Semitism being endemic to opponents of naked shorting is flawed, again invalidating everything Weiss has written on the topic.

Now let’s look at Sam Antar.

What Sammy apparently forgot to tell Sirota (a longtime Antar family friend) is that thanks to the Dissembler Sorting Algorithm, it’s possible to determine when multiple Yahoo message board aliases are tied to the same account. In the case of Mr. Sirota, it was quickly discovered that he is behind not only the username hsirota, but also StanleySargoy.

Sirota created StanleySargoy in 1999 and used the account very occasionally to either promote or demote companies primarily in the pharma and biotech space, until 2005.

Then in April of this year, StanleySargoy was called out of retirement and into active combat duty. The target: Usana, a company under heavy short seller attack by convicted felon Barry Minkow and his so-called Fraud Discovery Institute, which just days before had issued an internally authored study accusing Usana of serious fraud.

Oh yeah…Minkow is shorting Usana.

StanleySargoy (who says he hails from San Francisco) has since become one of the more active and negative posters to Yahoo’s Usana message board.

What interest would Sirota have in Usana?

You may recall a March column by Herb Greenberg entitled What Two Crooks Told me Over Lunch, in which Greenberg details his no-reason-given meal with Sam Antar and Barry Minkow.

We can surmise that Antar and Minkow do business together.

Thanks to the actions of StanleySargoy, it appears Sirota and Minkow are doing business together.

By the transitive property, a little common sense, and some educated observation, it now appears Sirota and Antar are also doing business together.

Finally, let’s take a quick look at Howard Sirota.

Sirota’s first demand that certain comments be removed from this site was sent early Friday, June 8. The offending comments were posted June 7. Server logs confirm that, prior to their removal, only Sam Antar (whose IP address is very well known) saw all three.

In that time, no other visitor managed to see more than any one of the offending comments. Thus, assuming he’s even been to AntiSocialMedia.net, Howard Sirota’s complaint — which he likely didn’t write — dealt mostly, if not entirely, with content he likely never saw.

You might want to stand clear, Howard…with no foundation, this flimsy house that Gary and Sam built is in the process of coming down just like all the others.

Preface and editor’s note: As stated previously, AntiSocialMedia.net has issues with Gary Weiss, not his wife.

As is happens, one of the more startling examples of abuse of social media we’ve discovered anywhere – and the central theme of this, the fourth and final part of this series on the history of Gary Weiss’s pathology – cannot be told without making reference to that relationship.

However, because her identity is ultimately not material to this situation, we shall only refer to her as “Mrs. Weiss” (though Weiss is not her real last name), and have set this site’s comment filter to immediately reject any comments that contain either her first or last name.

Also, all references to her are redacted from the document included in this post. The only circumstance under which that will change is if Gary Weiss (or his known surrogates) choose to call into question the document’s validity, or claim the redacted name is that of someone else.

Finally, Gary Weiss was invited to comment on the claims that follow, but ignored multiple requests to do so.

Background
Through parts one, two and three of this series, we established that in April of 2005, Gary Weiss created the Mediacrity blog, which from the beginning dedicated a substantial amount of space to attacking writer and former president of the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA), Ian Williams.We also established that in March of 2005, Mrs. Weiss, who for three years held UN media accreditation as a correspondent for The Pioneer of India newspaper, suddenly lost her media credentials.

Two months before the launch of Gary Weiss’s Mediacrity blog, in February of 2005, a media criticism website ran suspiciously-timed stories attacking both Ian Williams and his wife, a BBC World Service reporter and native of Uzbekistan; the former for accepting media training assignments from UN agencies, and the latter over what were ultimately shown to be unfounded questions relating to her visa status in the US. At the time, Williams’s wife also held a paid position within UNCA, one to which those familiar with the situation confirm Mrs. Weiss aspired.

But as mentioned, not only did Mrs. Weiss not get that job, one month later she was permanently barred from the UN.

One month after that, Gary Weiss created Mediacrity, which, among other things, he used as a platform for casting further aspersions upon Williams’s wife, calling her an “obscure hack” and continuing the fruitless challenges to her immigration status.

When securing her own permanence in this country, Mrs. Weiss, an Indian national, requested then-UNCA President Tony Jenkins write a letter to the State Department verifying her employment as UN correspondent for the Pioneer of India newspaper, which Jenkins did.

Keep that in mind as you read this document (click to enlarge) in which it is revealed that Mrs. Weiss had no connection to the Pioneer of India whatsoever, and that the three years she spent acting like a reporter at the UN were all a sham.

These circumstances invoke myriad questions, but for now we’ll focus on those involving Gary Weiss; specifically, how could Gary justify attacking another on baseless immigration issues when his own wife’s residence had been founded at least in part on a shockingly brazen and possibly illegal misrepresentation?

Also, it’s generally understood by those I spoke with that Mrs. Weiss is not exactly “computer savvy.” If that’s true, what role did Gary Weiss have in the annual creation of forged documents that the Pioneer’s Chandan Mitra termed “computer generated?”

Gary will likely try to divert the issue, claiming this is an attack on his wife. Indeed great lengths have been taken to ensure that such is not the case. Instead, this is the culmination of a four-part series demonstrating the foundations of Gary’s unfortunate pattern of deception and abuse of social media for personal gain, which his come to permeate his professional and personal lives.

————————-

postscript:
Expecting that claims of unfair attacks against Mrs. Weiss are inevitable, we wish to pre-emptively add some context to that discussion.

In November of 2005, former soc.culture.jewish Usenet newsgroup regular Ted Dichtler (shown here to be Gary Weiss) escalated his ongoing flame war with a particularly repulsive neo-Nazi by posting the man’s home and business addresses, in addition to his wife’s full name.

Weiss then went on to add these personal details to Ted Dichtler’s Usenet posting signature, meaning it was reproduced scores of times across the web.

Gary, for future reference, that’s what it means to unfairly attack your target’s spouse.

Preface and editor’s note: AntiSocialMedia.net has issues with Gary Weiss, not his wife.

As is happens, one of the more startling examples of abuse of social media we’ve discovered anywhere – and the central theme of this, the third part of this series on Gary Weiss – cannot be told without making reference to that relationship.

However, because her identity is ultimately not material to this situation, we shall only refer to her as “Mrs. Weiss” (though Weiss is not her real last name) and have set this site’s comment filter to immediately reject any comments that contain either her first or last name. Comments containing any other personally identifying information belonging to Mrs. Weiss will be immediately deleted and the commenter barred from further use of this site.

Background: In parts one and two of this four part series, we established that Gary Weiss is the would-be anonymous writer of the blog dubbed Mediacrity, which considers itself “A media insider’s occasional rants on goofs, bias and hypocrisy in the media.”

Also, a prior post on this blog demonstrated Gary Weiss’s proclivity for creating fake Amazon.com book reviews for the purpose of boosting of his own books’ ratings while deflating the ratings of those authors with whom Gary has tangled in the past.

You’ll need to keep both of those facts in mind as you read the following.

CORRECTION: Someone familiar with the circumstances outlined in this post has contacted us to clarify some minor points that we’re unhappy to report we got wrong. They appear corrected below.

While researching links between Gary Weiss and the targets of his abusive Amazon.com book reviews, we hit a dead end when it came to understanding exactly what Gary had against author Ian Williams, whose two books were trashed by reviewers Ted Dichtler (reviews since deleted) and Raymond Stella in the spring of 2005. What made this instance so curious was the fact that soon after we announced the forthcoming investigation on the topic of Weiss’s fabricated Amazon.com reviews, Gary Weiss (as Ted Dichtler) quietly deleted his one-star thrashing of Williams’ book, United Nations for Beginners, replacing it with a tepid review of another author’s book about the UN.

The Williams book review, which we captured prior to Gary’s replacement of it, read as follows:

Trash. A superficial book that offers a la-la land version of the UN, failing to mention entire areas in which the UN has failed miserably.
Also, since it was recently disclosed that Ian Williams has actually worked for the UN as a media trainer and pamphlet writer, it seems to me that the validity of this book is entirely questionable. He boasts about his UN work on his website. That only adds to the tastelessness of this rubbish. (Ted Dichtler)

Most would probably consider those sentiments a little harsh for an illustrated book aimed at school-aged kids.

While we did finally discover the reason for Gary’s acrimony toward Ian Williams, that knowledge arrived too late to be included in the Amazon.com review fabrication story.

Which is why we’re telling you about it now.

Two independent sources confirm that Gary Weiss’s wife was at one time credentialed as a reporter for the Pioneer of India newspaper, covering the United Nations. As a credentialed UN correspondent, Mrs. Weiss was eligible to join the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA), which she did. Subsequently she sought a paid position with UNCA, held at the time by Ian Williams’s wife. Mrs. Weiss had apparently sought other paid positions within the UN proper as well. Williams, UN correspondent for The Nation, was former UNCA president.

For reasons that don’t matter now (but will explored in part four), in March of 2005, Mrs. Weiss lost her media credentials and was ordered never to set foot on UN property again. Obviously, she was also taken out of consideration for any position within the UN and UNCA that she had sought.

Those familiar with the situation feel Mrs. Weiss blamed Williams for the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate turn of fate.

A few days after this incident, Gary Weiss – through Amazon.com reviewer Ted Dichtler, called Ian Williams’ book “trash.”

Exactly 30 days after that, Weiss launched the Mediacrity blog, and with it, an attempt at a recurring series called, “Hypocrites on Parade,” focusing on Ian Williams.

Weiss’s first examination of Williams in Mediacrity reads in part as follows:

…Williams is a fourth-rate hack. But fourth-rate hackdom has not prevented other ethics-deprived journos from being publicly pilloried. What is keeping Williams from the gallows?
… If you go on his website, http://www.ianwilliams.info/, you see what I’m talking about–if you can read it. This guy is such a dummy that he’s got black print on a dark blue background.

We feel secure in classifying the above as “mean-spirited.”

“Hypocrites on Parade” would go on to be replaced by “Creeps on Parade” and dozens of drive-by attacks on Williams, in which he is named, among other things: “The Payola Pundit,” “Fourth-rate Hack” (later promoted to “Fifth-rate Hack”), and “Bloated UN Minister of Propaganda.”

The final part of this series, coming very soon, examines the strange circumstances surrounding Mrs. Weiss’s gaining and losing her media credentials, the role Gary Weiss played in that process, and a new wrinkle that even we find difficult to believe.

Let’s start by re-stating three key facts as established in Part One.

1. In June of 1995, Gary Weiss told the world that his personal email address was garywbw@aol.com.
2. Gary would go on to use that account to identify himself when posting on Usenet newsgroups for the next 10 years.
3. Primary among those newsgroups were soc.culture.jewish (scj) and its moderated (scjm) subgroup.

During garywbw’s decade long tenure on that newsgroup, several regular and semi-regular posters emerged, including:

• Yitz pascalamb@aol.com / pascalamb@verizon.net
• Daveumansky daveumansky@aol.com / daveumansky@verizon.net
• Ted tdichtler@hotmail.com
• Teddydichtler teddydichtler@hotmail.com
• Tdicktler tdicktler@hotmail.com
• Annieschwartz annieschwartz@hotmail.com
• Brenda catallergest@aol.com

These eight accounts often posted in close temporal proximity to one another, usually in support of each other’s increasingly venomous flame-wars with an uncommonly obnoxious contingent of anti-Semitic trolls.

Then, exactly two years ago on December 20, 2004, Gary found himself in a fix, which you can read unfold in its entirety here, or summarized below.

Basically, fellow scjm newsgroup user cindys confronted garywbw as follows:

cindys: Hey, Gary! I’m really curious to know why you didn’t share with us that you and Dave Umansky are the same person?

garywbw: If this is a joke…you’ll have to tell me the punch line.

cindys: It’s not a joke. A poster on another group, someone who never posted to that particular group before yesterday, told me that I seemed like a “pretty bright person” and gave me weblink to a certain yahoo group and suggested that I might like to read that particular yahoo group for a while. When I clicked over there, I found that “Daveumansky” was a sometime poster to that group and guess what his email address was? garywbw@yahoo.com How do you explain that?

Garywbw: Well, I can’t explain it and I have no idea how that can be, since I don’t have a yahoo address and have never heard of a “daveumansky” or even heard of the existence of same until you mentioned it. So I think someone is pulling your leg. I don’t see the humor, frankly.

Despite his protestations and ten year posting history, within a few days of this exchange garywbw would disappear from Usenet forever.

In December of 2004, cindys referred to an undisclosed Yahoo group whose membership included a user named daveumansky with email garywbw@yahoo.com.

A year earlier, the Yahoo Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) group counted among its active members a user named garywbw, whose email address was daveumansky@aol.com.

By June of 2005, garywbw was replaced by username stopthewarrrrr, though the email address remained daveumansky@aol.com.

By exploiting Yahoo’s dissembler sorting algorithm bug, we learn that indeed, garywbw@yahoo.com = stopthewarrrrr@yahoo.com = daveumanskyfromny@yahoo.com.

On another Yahoo group, this one dedicated to Gary Weiss’s high school alma mater Bronx High School of Science, we observe garywbw using the email address pascalamb@aol.com, and this time, conveniently, Gary signs off using his real name and high school graduation year: 1971.

Usenet posts carry with them header data that’s hidden by default, but which includes important information identifying the origin of a post.

Look at this post by Yitz with its header data included (limited to the most relevant data below):

From: "Yitz"
Date: 18 Nov 2005 17:51:21 -0800
NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.23.102.179

 Compare that with this post by Ted (truncated below):

From: "Ted"
Date: 27 Nov 2005 09:25:49 -0800
NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.23.102.179

Note that between the two posts, one element is identical: Posting-Host. This means both of these posts, while nine days apart, were made from the same computer.

In fact, identical Posting-Host data are also shared by daveumansky, teddydichtler, tdicktler, Ted, annieschwartz and Brenda, suggesting they’re all the same person.

The IP address used in the above example (70.23.102.179) is owned by Verizon and assigned to dsl customers in the pool designated as NY325. Most subscribers in that pool see their IP address (and thus Posting-Host) address change randomly, on roughly a monthly basis.

Some time in the first half of December, 2005, the Posting-Host of garywbw, daveumansky, teddydichtler, tdicktler, Ted, annieschwartz and Brenda all changed to 70.23.42.100 in unison: consistent with a single user scenario posited here.

The point of this exercise is conclusively demonstrate that Gary Weiss = garywbw = daveumansky = pascalamb = Yitz = Ted Dichtler

And here’s why that’s really important…

In April of 2005, a blog called Mediacrity appeared, calling itself a “media insider’s occasional rant on goofs, bias and hypocrisy in the media.”

Mediacrity’s inaugural post is dated April 24, 2005. The first reference to Mediacrity on Usenet occurs the next day, thanks to Ted Dichtler, who read that first post and comments “this guy nailed it on the head.”

Within two hours of Mediacrity’s second post, Dichtler is back on Usenet spreading the word.

This time two interesting things happen.

First, a real person, Susan Cohen, asks Ted to clarify the identity of Alison Weir, the post’s subject. Soon thereafter, Mediacrity appends the post with:

A reader informs me that the Jew-baiting pinhead who met with Okrent is not to be confused with a distinguished historian also named Alison Weir.

Second, a couple of days later a new poster arrives on the thread started by Dichtler. His name is Rick Ruby, and his email address is: mediacrity@hotmail.com (the original email used by the writer of Mediacrity, recently replaced by a gmail account).

To be certain, let’s compare the header data of Ted Dichtler and Rick Ruby’s respective posts.

Ted Dichtler (full version here):

From: "Ted"
Date: 26 Apr 2005 12:10:24 -0700
NNTP-Posting-Host: 64.12.116.66

Rick Ruby (full version here)

From: "Rick Ruby"
Date: 29 Apr 2005 07:03:57 -0700
NNTP-Posting-Host: 64.12.116.66

The IP data (corresponding to AOL at that point) are identical, confirming Ted Dichtler and Rick Ruby posted from the same location, and are most likely the same person.

At this point, it seems we can confidently add two elements to the growing list of identities that begins with Gary Weiss:

Gary Weiss = garywbw = daveumansky = pascalamb = Yitz = Ted Dichtler = Rick Ruby = Mediacrity blogger.

If each of those relationships is accurate, this chain of equalities may also be correctly expressed as Gary Weiss = Mediacrity blogger.

Knowing Gary is the blogger behind Mediacrity opens up a whole universe of conflicts and complications to examine, as we shall do in Part Three of this series, set for publication on Saturday, December 23, 2006.

————————————————

Bonus material: a little running up of the score

“Ted Dichtler” as the name of one of the five fake amazon.com book reviewers we demonstrated were created and abused by Gary Weiss to artificially boost his own books’ ratings while artificially depressing the ratings of those authors who’ve tangled with him in the past.

“Catallergest” (see the email address of Brenda above) is the nickname used by Marty Ross, another of Weiss’s false Amazon.com book reviewer sockpuppets whose reviews have since been deleted.

“Chuck T” is among the remaining five amazon.com reviewers we claim Gary Weiss created and used abusively, but whose reviews have yet to be deleted. According to Technorati.com, Mediacrity belongs to chucktatum, presumably named for the character of the same name starring in the 50s flick “Ace in the Hole” and seen in this image, which is also used on the Mediacrity About Me page.

A reader tells me that originally, Technorati.com listed “Ted Dichtler” as the owner of Mediacrity. We’ve yet to find independent verification of this claim, but are inclined to believe it.

Except for a brief note on Nov. 1, 2006, Mediacrity went dark from Sept.10 – Nov.21: a period encompassing the unprecedented break in Gary Weiss’s blogging and Wikipedia editing seen while Gary was in India.

This is the first of a four part series on the origins of the pathology apparently afflicting our subject, Gary Weiss. This pathology is manifest as a compulsion to invent false identities online for personal gain, and, when discovered, to lie, deny, and attack his accusers.

Gary himself provides a beautiful launching point in the form of a story written for Business Week in June of 1995, entitled Online Investing. Around halfway, Gary offers this lynchpin piece of information:

My AOL address is Garywbw@aol.com. I also have a Prodigy address (NNEL28A@prodigy.com) and an address at an Internet provider known as NETCOM On-Line Communication Services Inc.: garyrw@ix.netcom.com. But initially, I was only at AOL.

It seems safe to assume that garywbw stands for “Gary Weiss Business Week.”

It also seems safe to assume that in 1995, Gary Weiss was among the many oblivious to the future implications of printing one’s personal email address in Business Week.

That future is here.

Exactly six months prior to Gary’s publication of his email address in Business Week, he made what appears to be his first newsgroup posting, to the misc.writing group.

The next post made as garywbw wouldn’t come until September of 1996, simply reading:

Looking for people who have had any dealings with [Monitor Investments, Global Equities Grp., State Street, Norfolk, Biltmore], as well as Sovereign Equity Management and First Hanover. Kindly email me at garywbw@aol.com.

Three months later, part one of Gary Weiss’s BusinessWeek story The Mob on Wall Street would make extensive reference to four of the firms inquired about in the above post.

Point being, garywbw@aol.com is our Gary Weiss.

Garywbw spends the first part of 1997 as a surprisingly constructive participant in a few support-related groups. Then, in March of that year, we see Gary’s first, fateful post to the newsgroup soc.culture.jewish:

This newsgroup sucks
Is there a better one somewhere — a moderated one, preferably to keep out the kooks, flames and so on? One where “Jewish culture” is actually discussed? Pls advise.

We consider that post “fateful,” because it represents Gary’s first apparent contribution to the newsgroup where the seeds of his habitual deception were sown.

Part two of this series (to be published on Wednesday, December 20, 2006) examines a few of those seeds; and, if we may be so bold, will likely freak you out.