Closing the File on a Criminal and Junkie Named Judd Bagley
Monday, March 30, 2015
 | | Bagley, charged with eight felonies, cut a plea deal to avoid prison |
I've written about a veritable rogues gallery of criminals over the years, ranging from Mafia capos to penny stock hustlers to Bernie Madoff, but by far the creepiest was a corporate hatchet man from Utah named Judd Bagley.
Bagley called himself a practitioner of "P.R. 2.0" or something like that, but there was nothing novel about his job, which was to be sure that if you were a reporter or analyst, you didn't dare criticize Overstock.com and its CEO, Patrick Byrne. That was no easy job, because Overstock has been beset by a series of grave allegations since it went public in 2005. Its long history of serious issues runs the gamut from cheating customers, as successfully charged by California prosecutors, to gross mismanagement, to misleading investors about its financial condition.
 | | Byrne after his arrest | Bagley did his job with a kind of maniacal zeal. From 2006 to 2011, when he abruptly ceased his activities in the wake of a libel suit, he frantically stalked and harassed journalists and critics of this third-rate retailer and Byrne, going on and off the company payroll. (At last look he was on.) Byrne is noted for misogyny and paranoid delusions, so preventing the media from writing negatively about him, such as keeping his arrest on gun charges out of the occasional puff pieces, was a full-time job in itself.
To accomplish his mission, Bagley spun elaborate conspiracy theories and engaged in smear campaigns like this one targeting Bloomberg's Susan Antilla. Bagley stalked the wives and children of critics, once creating a fake Facebook identity for that purpose.
It was a dirty job, but there's little question that his tactics deterred negative coverage. In 2010, after a relentless series of posts by Sam Antar, the blogger and reformed felon, Overstock restated its earnings to throw out years of phony profits. Sam wrote about it here. See if you can find a reference to it in the media.
Bagley always seemed a bit strange, a bit "off"—obsessed, maniacal, prone to public tantrums that seemed odd for a p.r. guy. He gave the impression of being a ticking time bomb. Financial commentator Barry Ritholz once described Bagley as "a career douche bag" and, due to his stalking the children of Overstock critics, a "possible pederast." Still, no one ever quite got a handle on why Bagley was quite so weird. I certainly couldn't figure him out.
Well now we know the answer: It turns out that Bagley was and is a raging drug addict.
Sam Antar's blog revealed today that Bagley was arrested in 2013 on eight felony counts of altering prescriptions so he could illegally acquire the addictive prescription drugs Lortab and Adderall during 2012 and 2013. He pleaded guilty to reduced charges, was fined and sentenced to probation and a lengthy period of community service, monitored by an ankle bracelet. The court filings can be found here.
Sam also reveals that Bagley, who liked to project a "family man" image as he stalked the families of Overstock critics, preys on lonely housewives when he isn't shooting up.
 | | Preyed on a school volunteer | In lawsuit filings, Bagley confessed to cheating on his wife with a married woman, the mother of a student at a school where he as a sponsor, the Karl G. Maeser Preparatory Academy in Lindon, Utah. This took place at about the same time he was forging drug prescriptions, and continued even after he was arrested and "rehabilitated." The husband of the woman he preyed upon sued Bagley, who first lied about the affair and blamed his victim, finally admitting to it as the evidence mounted up. The suit's filings are online here.
As Sam points out today, "It was not the sad excess of a man in midlife crisis, but the vicious act of an out-of-control drug addict, a tawdry affair that smacks of sexual harassment--in addition to exposing Bagley as an absolute hypocrite."
Forging a prescription is low-life addict behavior, really desperate and high-risk, and Bagley was caught doing it repeatedly. He obviously needed a fix badly. Lortab, "when used illicitly, it is often crushed into a powder and either snorted or an mixed with water and injected. Both of these routes of administration result in a faster and stronger high, often compared to the high of heroin." Adderall has been dubbed " America's Favorite Amphetamine."
I knew that one day Bagley would be disgraced and discredited, and that his victims would be vindicated by his own self-destruction. It was inevitable: he was just too out-of-control. But I assumed the coup de grâce would come from the libel suit now pending against him or from stock-fraud charges. I never expected that his downfall would be quite so grimy and pathetic.
© 2015 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.
------------------------------
My latest book is AYN RAND NATION: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, published by St. Martin's Press. Click here to order the book from Amazon.com, and here to order it from Barnes & Noble. Follow me on Twitter: @gary_weiss
Labels: Deep Capture, Deepcapture.com, drug addiction, forgery, Judd Bagley, Judson Montgomery Bagley, Karl G. Maeser Preparatory Academy, Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, street crime
posted by Gary Weiss @ 9:41 AM | <!-- Trackback autodiscovery code --> links to this post  
| <!-- Trackback autodiscovery code --> Links to this post:
<$BlogBacklinkTitle$> <$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>
Create a Link
<< Home |
