We asked Joe.

Joe doesn’t know.

It all started on January 10, 2006, when Business Week writer Tim Mullaney clumsily fell into the very trap he had set for Overstock.com CEO (and Deep Capture reporter) Patrick Byrne. You can read all the gruesome details here and then here.

One week later, Gary Weiss launched his blog. We know from emails between Weiss and Floyd Schneider (read this to learn how I came to posses them) that at about that same time, Weiss began trying to convince journalists and editorial columnists to pen attacks on opponents of illegal naked short selling, particularly Patrick Byrne and Bob O’Brien (whom Weiss calls “Bob O’Baloney”), the pseudonymous author of the highly influential Sanity Check blog.

Weiss did this with little success, until February 22 of 2006, according to the following two emails Weiss sent to Floyd Schneider:

From: garyrweiss@verizon.net
To: Floyd3491@aol.com
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:34:19 -0500
Received: from unknown (HELO maincomputer) (garyrweiss@verizon.net@70.23.60.180 with login) by smtp101.vzn.mail.dcn.yahoo.com with SMTP; 22 Feb 2006 23:34:15 -0000
—–
Incidentally, don’t tell nobody! — but was preoccupied today. Interview with Joe Nocera of the Times for his Saturday column. Seems he is focussing on the naked-Mullaney situation. Mullaney tells me Nocera is sympathetic. We shall see……
Mullaney obviously is extremely nervous but me, I am fairly pleased I must say. I was… oh… shall we say unfavorable toward our Mr. O’Baloney.
The above is confidential!

Followed shortly by…

From: garyrweiss@verizon.net
To: Floyd3491@aol.com
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:56:25 -0500
Received: from unknown (HELO maincomputer) (garyrweiss@verizon.net@70.23.60.180 with login) by smtp102.vzn.mail.dcn.yahoo.com with SMTP; 22 Feb 2006 23:56:21 -0000
—–
Yeah, well I want to shift on to be a little quiet and modest between now and Friday. Yes, O’Baloney seems to have run up the white flag it would seem, at least for the time being. I think the SABEW blog seems to have brought him to reality. That is what was picked up by Nocera, by the way. This is totally my doing! Yuk yuk yuk.
The Mullaney thing really touches a raw nerve, you know.

Based on the above, we can conclude that at least three days ahead its publication date, Gary Weiss knew all about Nocera’s February 25, 2006 column Overstock’s Campaign of Menace.

Note, in the first of the two emails, Weiss insisted that “The above is confidential!”

This is with good reason, as it’s considered a serious breach of ethics for a business writer to reveal the nature of his or her coverage of public companies to outsiders ahead of time, lest the information be used to the advantage of an unscrupulous investor (ie, “trading ahead” of the story).

And yet, Weiss knew. And boasted about knowing.

Recently, Patrick Byrne asked Joe Nocera to comment on this apparent ethical misstep.

Here is Nocera’s response:

From: Joe Nocera
To: Patrick Byrne
Subject: Re: that gary weiss email
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 11:31 AM
—–
I have no idea why Mr. Weiss would make those claims, nor has he ever had any “inside information” about any of my columns. I don’t give out such information. all best, Joe Nocera

I welcome Joe to explain how reality, and his apparent interpretation of it, can possibly co-exist.

For better or worse, I was born with an extremely well-developed sense of fairness, coupled with an even better-developed sense of obligation. Put those qualities together, and you get a person who, like me, tends to take up the fights of those being mistreated, even (or especially) when the outcome doesn’t affect me directly.

Antisocialmedia.net is a team effort, albeit conceived of and launched by me, which has taken part in the fight against the perpetrators of a form of financial fraud known as strategic failure to deliver, or, more commonly, illegal naked short selling.

What makes this situation different from others in which I’ve involved myself in the past is that the injustice taking place here does affect me. And you. And those you care about.

And it needs to stop.

You should click here to watch a presentation on illegal naked shorting already viewed by 300,000 others.

What does Antisocialmedia.net have to do with the fight against illegal naked shorting?

As was explained here, this site exists to do exactly one thing: help increase awareness of, and opposition to, illegal naked shorting by exposing the existence of organized and well-financed proponents of the practice, many of which ply their trade full-time on the web.

Living online as they do, we’ve collected an enormous amount of information about them, down to many of their identities, some of which have been exposed here. These people are abetting fraud against our capital markets and need to be held accountable for their actions. That’s why the data and research we’ve amassed is being turned over to law enforcement so that true accountability may follow.

Ends and Means

Given how many individuals have contributed information and research, I can’t speak to all the methods used, because I don’t know them all; however I can say that I’m confident no laws have been broken.

Those who stand to lose the most by what we’ve done will certainly cry hypocrisy because some of our means have resembled their own (particularly in our use of multiple identities), but that’s just a smokescreen to obscure the fact that our motive has been to foil the same crime their actions endeavor to facilitate…sort of like a police decoy dressing like a prostitute as a means of curtailing true prostitution. (Now there’s an analogy – naked short shills as whores – that could be milked all day long.)

As for me, I happen to work for Overstock.com, one of the many companies targeted by these criminals. Yet this effort has nothing to do with Overstock.com, other than make the offense of illegal naked shorting all the more offensive to me. In fact, given the insistence of my boss, CEO Patrick Byrne, that any continuation of my nearly one year old research be strictly and unambiguously limited to my own time, there’s no question but that my current employment has hampered my progress.

Prior to starting at Overstock.com, I established a relationship with a business writer covering the naked shorting issue, and we had frequent conversations about the results of my investigations.

A few days after starting at Overstock.com, she called me asking for an update, and I found myself in the awkward position of having to tell her that those calls would likely have to wait for the weekend (a time journalists would rather spend not working). The solution, I decided, was to regularly and anonymously post my progress in a way that the objective data could stand on its own, and keep me and my employer appropriately separate from it.

And that’s how Antisocialmedia.net was conceived.

Message bored

I find that active finance message board participants fall into one of two categories: those who are paid to post smears against others, and those who know the first group is paid to post smears against others. That the first group is apparently now being paid to smear me is both an honor and the best possible vindication of everything published on Antisocialmedia.net.

Today Roddy Boyd of the New York Post, who to his credit told me he agrees Gary Weiss faked many of his own books’ Amazon.com reviews, emailed asking for comment on how I’m being portrayed on various message boards. I replied that it had been a while since I’d had time to spend more than five minutes there, especially since concluding I had already gleaned all the useful data they’re likely to yield.

But to answer Roddy’s question, I really don’t care what the message board attack crew is saying about me in their little echo chambers, and am secure in the knowledge that that those whose opinions matter will consider the source of the attacks: Gary Weiss and his pseudonymously loyal toady ScipioAfricanus, the only two people left on earth who still insist Gary never faked a single Amazon.com review(!).

I care even less about the attacks originating from Gary Weiss’s push-button blog, which has, according to Alexa, a statistical readership of approximately zero.

So, I say: Smear on, Gary! Smear on Scipio! Otherwise, I’ll start to worry that I’m not on the right track. Thanks to you, I couldn’t be more confident that I am.

Final note

On those rare occasions in which defenders of illegal naked shorting allow themselves to be pinned down long enough to offer a philosophical defense of their indefensible actions, the best they can come up with is a perversion of the anarchocapitalist ideal, which tends to sound like this:

“The job of regulating our financial markets is too big for government to handle alone, so it’s the responsibility of investors to use tactics like naked shorting to find and punish bad companies.”

What a load of bullshit. Yet that, if you’re curious, is how they manage to sleep at night.

But just for kicks, I’ll accept that premise and counter with my own:

The job of tracking down and exposing miscreants* like Gary Weiss, Darl J. Dumont, Floyd D. Schneider and their ilk is too big for government to handle alone, so it’s up to concerned citizens to employ tactics, such as those we have, to find them.

We’ll defer the punishment to those with the authority.

—————————-

*While I consider someone to be a “criminal” upon committing a crime, such as not disclosing compensation received in exchange for promoting or demoting stock; for the purposes of this blog, I’ve decided to adopt the legal standard, which demands a conviction before the term should be applied. Hence I have made a word substitution here to reflect that. (1/14/07)