Re: 4/30/05 - Barrons: A Family Threatened on the 'Net
TECHNOLOGY TRADER
On Yahoo! message boards, writers threaten a hedge-fund manager's family.
A Family Threatened on the 'Net
by Bill Alpert
WE FINANCIAL WRITERS spend our time looking for dollar bills lying on the sidewalks of Wall Street, and hundred-dollar bills offered at suspicious discounts. But sometimes we take the more redeeming role of a Neighborhood Watch, shouting out when we see someone threatening a kid in a wheelchair.
I'm shouting.
The online debate over some stocks has become dangerous enough that the cops should take notice. In recent weeks, a pseudonymous message writer on Yahoo! chat boards has posted thinly-veiled threats against the the wife and disabled kid of a hedge-fund manager. The writer of the threatening messages keeps changing his Yahoo! screen names, but under the pseudonym "Bob O'Brien" he operates one Website that condemns shortselling and another that promotes the sub-prime mortgage-lender Novastar Financial (ticker: NFI), a company with which he claims no affiliation. I can't contribute to the world's knowledge of Novastar and I haven't the slightest idea who "Bob O'Brien" really is.
But in e-mails to me, and on one of his Websites, "O'Brien" acknowledges that he wrote the Yahoo! messages publicizing the location and identities of the family of Marc Cohodes, a money manager with the hedge fund Rocker Partners, that "O'Brien" blames for selling Novastar short. The Yahoo! messages read like lines from a gangster movie or an anti-abortion Website that targets doctors.
On April 19, "O'Brien" used a screen name "dirtydirtydeeds" to post on the Yahoo! chat board devoted to Novastar Financial. The subject line of one message consisted simply of Cohodes' home address. The message said:
"How is the weather up in [Cohodes' town]?
Sunny days? Todo Bien? Is [Cohodes' son] well? [Cohodes' wife] good? Everything working out
OK?
Wanna talk about [another address] as well?
Still feel like playing?
This is coming up on game overtime. Figure it out. Your playbook is known."
A few days later, using the same screen name, "O'Brien" wrote:
"[Cohodes address]
[Cohodes son] doing well today, I trust?"
There were other, similar messages, and not all of them under the same screen name. As it happens, Cohodes' son was born with cerebral palsy and gets around in a wheelchair. The message board carried links to a picture of Cohodes' house and his son.
In other messages, "O'Brien" asked readers for the home address of Herb Greenberg, the columnist at our sister organization MarketWatch.Com.
Yahoo! eventually pulled the messages from the Novastar board, but you can still find messages from August 2002 that attacked Cohodes on the Yahoo! message board for ESS Technology. That's when Barron's quoted the hedge-fund investor on the business problems facing ESS, a manufacterer of chips for DVD players. Cohodes was right, and the stock has since dropped from 13 to 3. At the time, Cohodes asked a judge to order Yahoo! to identify the writers of the anonymous threat, but the judge declined-saying the threats were harmless rhetoric.
Cohodes and his family feel endangered by the latest Yahoo! board threats, and only a callous person could disagree. "Are you threatening to kidnap them, are you threatening to kill them...what's the deal?" Cohodes says about his anonymous stalker. "A guy threatening a severely disabled kid is pretty low."
I asked "O'Brien" how his messages could be read as anything but threats. At first, "O'Brien" denied that Cohodes had been threatened. When I forwarded copies of the threats, O'Brien didn't give a responsive answer. Instead, he offered "context," saying his friends had been abused in anonymous messages that he blames on Cohodes.
Why he blames Cohodes is the scary part, because in his volumes of Internet postings, "O'Brien" shows no evidence that Cohodes and Cohodes' family are anything but the victims of a dangerous-sounding man. I hope that public-safety officials figure out who "O'Brien" is.
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