S34 EP4: Spam King | Dirtbag Climber

Summary

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Dirtbag Climber from Uncover — S34 EP4: “Spam King”

Date: September 29, 2025
Host: Stephen Chua (CBC)

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Overview

This episode—Chapter 4 of “Dirtbag Climber”—dives into the dramatic, stranger-than-fiction transformation of Davis Wolfgang Hawk, a.k.a. Dave Bridger, a/k/a Jesse James, from failed neo-Nazi leader to one of early Internet’s most notorious email spammers. Through investigative reporting, interviews, and archival audio, host Stephen Chua and guest voices explore how Hawk’s digital exploits revolutionized spam, made millions in illicit gains, and set him on a relentless run from corporations and authorities—before his trail vanished in mystery and homicide. The episode exposes the wild, lucrative, and dark underbelly of early-2000s Internet crime and the warped journey of a man caught in its center.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening: Confronting the “Spam King” (00:25–02:18)

• Brian McWilliams (tech journalist) records early phone calls with “Dave Bridger,” suspecting him of running major spam operations.
  • Hawk/Bridger deflects: “I work at McDonald's. ... I don't even know anything about computers. What is a website?” (01:23)
• Narrator notes: Bridger absolutely knew what a website was, cementing the elaborate nature of his lies.

2. The Birth and Mechanics of Mass Email Spam (03:40–06:48)

• Explains what 'spam' is and why it was unpoliced.
  • Millions of emails blasted with the hope of a tiny percent responding.
  • Addresses gathered via scraping or random generation.
  • Quotes: “You could just send out a bunch of emails even to addresses that didn’t exist ... that’s what it was all about.” (04:53, Expert/Analyst)
  • Example: An Ohio soccer mom gets 100,000 unsolicited emails in 48 hours.

3. Hawk's Twisted Origins: From Extremism to Spamming (07:15–08:55)

• Background: After a failed neo-Nazi march and loss of parental support, Hawk transitions skills from spreading hate to selling online.
  • Sold Nazi memorabilia—then banned from eBay for poor shipping.
  • Out of spite, he begins harvesting emails and spamming.
  • Hawk: “I basically started spamming just to piss them off.” (08:55)

4. Scaling Up: Spite as Fuel & Business Evolution (09:39–11:24)

• Early difficulties and paranoia; constant moving for evasion.
• Hawk realizes digital products (PDFs, “how-to” guides) are easiest to spam and sell.
  • Quote: “He realized the easiest thing to spam was digital products ... how to be a spammer, how to hide your identity …” (10:52)

5. Legal Threats and Shell Games (11:37–13:20)

• First legal threats arise; Hawk boasts: “I make 25,000 each weekend doing this. ... I can afford it.” (12:15, Actor reading Hawk’s email)
• Starts using aliases and shell companies to cover tracks.

6. The “Chess Prodigy Spammers” and Big Payoff (13:20–17:27)

• Key recruits: Hawk meets chess friends from his youth—Mauricio and Brad “Brayden” Bourneville—at a tournament, inviting them into spam ops.
• Turning point: Herbal penis enlargement pills (“Yohimbi”, branded Pinnacle) become their cash cow.
  • Hawke as awe-inspiring pitchman: “[You’ll] radiate confidence and success. ... When you reveal yourself ... she will not be able to keep her hands off you.” (15:42, Actor reading Hawk’s pitch)
• Spam operation scales up: millions in revenue, a mill for operations, and lavish perks—like a yellow Hummer.

7. AOL: The Prime Target and Eventual Showdown (19:30–20:44)

• AOL was the top prize for spammers due to its vast, naive userbase. Hawk buys a 90-million address list for $52,000, reigniting spam wars.
  • Expert: “AOL is like a deer, a 12-point stag ... the target that we all are shooting for.” (19:56)
• This triggers decisive legal and corporate countermeasures.

8. The Legal Hammer Drops (22:12–27:31)

• Jennifer Archie (AOL legal counsel) describes lawsuits against Hawk and Bourneville.
• The CAN-SPAM Act (2003) makes spamming a felony.
  • “We ended up proving ... they had sent billions and billions of messages. Billions.” (25:26, Brian McWilliams)
• Hawk’s refusal to cooperate: “Absolutely nothing.” (21:00)
• Bourneville settles (his Hummer given away in a contest); Hawk refuses and becomes increasingly paranoid and evasive.

9. Paranoia, Disappearance, and the Gold Legacy (27:35–35:55)

• Hawk’s behavior grows erratic: “He would grab whatever he brought ... yell ‘the feds!’ ... run towards the door.” (28:10, Peggy Greenbaum, Hawk’s mother)
• Hawk claims to be trailed by FBI, insists he’s being hunted.
  • Quote: “Twice I was tailed by those fucking guys.” (28:49, Hawk)
• Moves assets into gold bars, buries in the White Mountains and elsewhere.
  • “All the money he has, he buries in the White Mountains.” (33:18, Bourneville)
• AOL seeks court order to use ground-penetrating radar at Hawk’s grandparents’ home; family mocks the effort.

10. International Flight & Trail Grows Cold (35:22–37:44)

• 2005: Hawk’s new alias, “Andrew Britt Greenbaum”, surfaces in Belize.
  • “I see myself under a palm tree in Belize with a pretty girl by my side ...” (35:32, Hawk)
• Reports he also went to Vanuatu, laundering money as “Julio Santiago.”
• Final contacts: last letter to mother from a fishing trawler (probably Belize); last heard from in 2006.

11. Re-Emergence as “Dirtbag Climber” (38:05–39:47)

• August 2009: Hawk resurfaces online in Squamish, BC, seeking climbing partners as “Jesse James.”
  • “Climbing partner wanted. ... I’m in Squamish until October 1st ... Call or text me ... Ciao, Jesse.” (38:19, Actor as Hawk)
• Suggests he fled south due to enemies made in previous criminal life.

12. The Dark Side of the Spam World (39:08–40:29)

• Spamming’s criminality escalates; spam becomes “an engine of crime.” (39:08, McWilliams)
• Hawk was deeply aware of his growing enemies and the danger he was in, per his mother: “He made quite a few enemies while he was spamming.” (39:22, Peggy Greenbaum)
• Possible connection to later criminal enterprises like Bitcoin laundering.

13. Cliffhanger: The Final Chapter Begins (40:20–40:55)

• Next episode will examine Hawk's last days, and how his past caught up with him: “He was worried about people coming for him ... and it’s obvious why.” (40:29, Hawk/Bourneville)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On motivation for spamming:
  “I basically started spamming just to piss them off.”
  — Davis Wolfgang Hawk (08:55)

• On spamming’s easy riches:
  “I make 25,000 each weekend doing this. ... I can afford it.”
  — Actor as Hawk, quoting Hawk’s email (12:15)

• On AOL as spam’s ‘holy grail’:
  “AOL is like a deer, a 12-point stag ... the target that we all are shooting for.”
  — Expert/Analyst (19:56)

• On evading the law:
  “Absolutely nothing.” (on plan for lawsuit)
  — Davis Wolfgang Hawk (21:00, 26:06)

• On paranoia and hiding:
  “He would grab whatever he brought ... yell ‘the feds!’ ... run towards the door.”
  — Peggy Greenbaum (28:10)

• On gold-burying:
  “All the money he has, he buries in the White Mountains.”
  — Brad Bourneville (33:18)

• On disappearance and family loss:
  “It was the first time in his whole life he ever used the word love to address me.”
  — Peggy Greenbaum, reading last letter from Hawk (36:39)

• On Jesse James’s final ad:
  “Climbing partner wanted ... I’m in Squamish until October 1st ... Call or text me ... Ciao, Jesse.”
  — Actor as Hawk (38:19)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:25 — McWilliams' first phone call with "Dave Bridger”
• 03:40 — Early mechanics of spam explained
• 09:30 — Hawk's spite-driven entrance into spamming
• 13:20 — Chess tournament, team-building
• 15:08 — Herbal enhancement pills become the big seller
• 19:30 — AOL targeted, purchase of 90 million addresses
• 22:12 — Lawsuit: AOL vs. Hawk
• 25:26 — Proving billions of spam messages
• 28:10 — Hawk’s paranoia (from mother’s deposition)
• 33:18 — Gold burial in White Mountains
• 35:22 — Belize alias surfaces
• 38:19 — “Jesse James” climbing ad in Squamish
• 39:22 — Hawk’s mother discusses fears for his safety
• 40:20 — Tease for next episode: Hawk’s end

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Tone & Language

• The episode balances investigative detail with dark, occasionally humorous asides, giving a sense of both the era’s cyber-wild-west and the pathos of Hawk’s increasingly desperate existence.
• Speakers like Brian McWilliams and Jennifer Archie are direct and professional, while Hawk’s own words shift from brash bravado to paranoid defiance.
• Frequent use of first-person testimony, candid phone calls, and archival remarks keep the episode engaging and immediate.

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Summary Takeaways

“Spam King” recounts a digital outlaw’s creative and criminal journey, showing how internet anonymity, greed, and relentless ingenuity fueled one of the 21st-century’s first great online crime waves. Hawk—a shape-shifter, fugitive, and master manipulator—exploits every loophole until the law and his mounting enemies force him into hiding, changing identities until his story’s dark final turn.

The episode ends as Hawk, now “Jesse James” in Squamish, Canada, tries—perhaps for the last time—to run from the mess he’s made, setting up the next chapter’s focus on his mysterious demise.

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Transcript

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Only Boost Mobile.

[Brian McWilliams]

Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Free year when you buy a new 5G phone. New 5G phone? Enough. But I'm your hype man. When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months with credits totaling one year of free service. Taxes extra for the device and service plan. Online only. This is a CBC podcast.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Hello? Hi.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Hello, yes, I'm trying to reach Dave Bridger.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Dave Bridger speaking.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Hey, Dave, it's Brian McWilliams from New Hampshire Public Radio.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Oh, okay. Hey, what's up?

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Well, I wanted to talk with you for a story I'm working on.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Oh, what story is that?

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

A story looking at amazing Internet products and I guess the whole spam operation you got going.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Spam?

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Well, you know, Internet based advertising.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Not sure what that is. What do you mean a spam? I'm not sure what that is.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

I think you know what spam is.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Technology journalist Brian McWilliams is trying to keep his cool while on the phone with this guy, Dave Bridger.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

I don't know really what you're talking about. I work at McDonald's. I'm a manager, so I'm not sure what you mean by emails. I mean, we do have some specials. I mean, burgers. $3 today. Yeah, I don't even know anything about computers. What is a website?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

It's 2003 and most everyone in the world knew what a website was. And there's no doubt that Dave Bridger did, too.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

I guess I'm just reaching out and it sounds like you don't, you know, you'd rather just sort of hide behind this veil of the McDonald's thing, but it'd be cool to hear from you directly.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah, well, you're talking to me.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Yeah, but you're just, you know, you're giving me a bunch of bs, so, you know, it's sort of funny. But there's nothing, you know, nothing real here, so.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah. Well, good talking to you.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Well, I hope we can talk again.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Okay, bye.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

McWilliams and Bridger would talk again. They'd end up talking a lot. And McWilliams would find out that Bridger loved being in the mountains and playing chess. He'd find out that he grew up in the suburbs of Boston. And most importantly, he'd find out that Dave Bridger was not his real name.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

I don't like people to know my name.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

McWilliams would learn that Dave Bridger's legal name was Davis Wolfgang Hawke. After failing to rally White supremacists in Washington, D.C. hawke embraced the next chapter of his life online. And understanding this period might be key to tracing the patterns of his final undoing. Because it's his actions in this era that would make Hawk fabulously rich and lead him up to Canada, where he would meet his end. I'm Steven Chua and this is dirtbag climber from CBC's Uncover Chapter 4. Spam King.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Computer people call it getting spammed unwanted email. Since the Internet revolution began, marketers have discovered email as a way to target consumers. It can be infuriating and embarrassing.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Spam, we all know it, we all hate it. But I think it's important to take a moment to break down how it worked in the early 2000s because it was relatively new and very hard to police. Brian McWilliams was a technology journalist at the turn of the millennium, writing for outlets like Wired. And the subject of spam was a specialty of his. Here he is explaining how it worked.

[Expert / Analyst]

The system sort of depended on the fact that it was mass marketing. It wasn't target marketing. You know, it wasn't find an audience that has, you know, is interested in your product and get your ads in front of them. It was blast out millions of emails to everybody on the Internet and hope that you would get like a half of 1% response because that would be enough, you know, to make some good money.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

And so that's what spammers like Davis Hawk would do every day, send out millions of emails hoping to get a bite.

[Expert / Analyst]

Basically, you would just either buy a mailing list with hundreds of millions of email addresses on it that somebody had somehow put together by going around the Internet and scraping, you know, message boards and basically stealing people's email addresses. Or you would just randomly generate email addresses. You could just send out a bunch of emails even to addresses that didn't exist. And you might hit some addresses that did exist. And that's what it was all about.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Here's how it was reported on CBC at the time. Every day, shooting through electronic networks, 7 billion email messages speed around the world, covering just about every topic.

[Brian McWilliams]

Mortgage rates, penis enlargements, pornography, greeting cards.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But it wasn't just annoying messages pushing bogus or embarrassing products. Criminals were also using spam as a way to illegally distribute prescription pills or run stock market schemes. In 2003, the spam economy was booming, junk emails were running rampant, and McWilliams was writing a book all about it entitled Spam Kings. In it, he reported on all sorts of email horror stories, including one soccer mom in Ohio who received over 100,000 unsolicited emails in 48 hours. The only problem with his book was that it didn't have a main character yet. But then one day, he got an email.

[Expert / Analyst]

One day In May of 2003, I got just a series of spams from this company called Amazing Internet products, which were advertising a bunch of junk. And because I had some chops as a sort of an Internet sleuth, I tried to track down where are these spams coming from, who sent them to me. And I was able to figure out that it actually came from a company that was located about 20 miles from where I was living.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Dave Bridger, aka Davis Hock, was the perfect subject for his book because his company, Amazing Internet products, was indicative of how spam senders at the time operated. Sending out millions of annoying emails every day and cashing in on it.

[Expert / Analyst]

They had made $300,000 in the course of that month, just based on the order logs that I saw. That was one website, you know, and they would be managing multiple websites at any given time.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But to get to this pinnacle of spamdom, Davis Hawke had to start from the bottom. In the summer of 1999, Hawke's life prospects were slim. His time as a neo Nazi leader ended when his planned march on Washington failed spectacularly.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

Just so I make sure I have the thing down right about the march on Washington. So you booked it out of there before the day of the march itself, literally.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Well, technically it was the day of March because it was about 3am in the middle of the night.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Membership fees to his knights of freedom website were drying up. His parents had stopped supporting him. He was out of work and out of money. So with his life in shambles, Hawk headed back down to South Carolina and held a fire sale online. In the life of Jesse James, no experience is wasted as neo Nazi Davis Wolfgang Hawk. He learned a lot about Internet marketing while flooding forums and chat rooms with his hateful views.

[Expert / Analyst]

Because he had dropped out of college at the time, to support himself, he was selling Nazi paraphernalia on the Internet on ebay.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Hawk took everything he learned from being an online Nazi and brought it over to the spam game.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

And on ebay, you were. You were basically selling off, like, the Nazi trinkets.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

I mean, was it knives and jewelry and stuff?

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah, basically.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But this was not exactly spamming. This was just selling stuff on ebay. Actually, he may have never gotten into spamming had he not been a little lazy and a lot spiteful.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

You want to know the reason I started doing it. I'll tell you why. It's because I was selling stuff on ebay. I was making like maybe 2, 300, maybe, maybe even 500 bucks a week, okay? Then ebay banned me. They shut me down. They said I was too slow to ship the product, that people were complaining, etc. Etc. So then I got really pissed at ebay. I started harvesting ebay addresses from the ebay site, mostly manually, by hand, and spamming their users. That's what got me started. Otherwise I never would have started had they not shut me down. But I'm fucking pissed. I basically started spamming just to piss them off.

[Expert / Analyst]

He realized you could effortlessly market and sell products online from your own little trailer in South Carolina.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

It did take a while for Hawk to work out the kinks, though.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah, no, it was disastrous. The first couple months of spamming, I couldn't get any orders. I sent out thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands, and I couldn't get shit.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

While Hawk was trying to get this off the ground, he moved around a lot. It's harder for people to come after you when you don't stay in one place for too long. He lived in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Rhode island, with occasional dips in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where he held P.O. boxes. By his side for most of this was his girlfriend from the Nazi days, Patricia, and their two dogs, Nemesis and Drayton, that Hawk claimed were half wolf. It was a funny existence. She would make some side cash teaching karate in whatever town they'd landed, while Hawk would keep refining his spam abilities, constantly making adjustments and adapting. For one, he started to spam only.

[Expert / Analyst]

On the weekend, and his theory was that that's when the system administrators, you know, these anti spammer types, might be away from their computers, might be distracted, and they might not be at work. And so then his spams could land in all the inboxes of all these people across the world.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He also tinkered with what he was selling.

[Expert / Analyst]

He realized that the easiest thing to sell was not like a product where you had to put it in a package and put, you know, and mail it to somebody, which was like really labor intensive. He realized the easiest thing to spam was digital products like how to books, you know, how to be a spammer, how to hide your identity, you know, how to seduce women, you know, he came up with all these concepts that he could just create a PDF file and email it to people who responded to his, to his spams.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

So the average Joe would open his Email, which, remember in those days, might have taken a while because it was mostly dial up. And slowly they'd start to see spam after spam clog up their inbox.

[Expert / Analyst]

Early in his career, when he was still spamming from South Carolina, somebody who received one of his spams contacted him and threatened to sue him. And I think Hawk was like a little jarred by this and apparently went to an attorney and said, you know, what's going on here? Am I really at risk?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He wasn't, not really. Besides, in the early days of spamming, there was very little anyone could do to stop him.

[Actor (reading Hawk's statements)]

I can't be jailed for spamming. Read the federal laws.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

This is an actor reading Hawke's response to a complaint he got in March 2000.

[Actor (reading Hawk's statements)]

It is a civil offense whereby you can sue me for $500 per message. I make 25,000 each weekend doing this. It will cost you more than 500 just to hire a good civil attorney. Go for it, pal. I can afford it.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

This seems to be the way Hawk ruled. When he made people angry, he doubled down. It was also at this time that he started protecting himself with shell companies, registering them in the name of more and more aliases and names like George Baldwin, Clell Miller, Thomas P. Barnum. But threats of a lawsuit would not slow Haak down. Business was picking up. So much so that he needed to hire a full time staff, people he could trust. So he went to a chess tournament. During his Nazi days, Hock gave up chess. About a year into his spamming phase, he decided to get back into it. Given the turmoil of the past few years, he wanted to keep a low profile. So Hawk registered to play at a chess tournament under the alias Walter Smith.

[Expert / Analyst]

Somebody calls out to him, hey, Brit. And he turns and it's this old, you know, high school buddy of his, Mauricio Ruiz. And he just, he's just kind of like, don't call me Brett kind of thing, Says, you know, my name now is Walter. And so Ruiz like, okay, Walter, how are you? How have you been?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

The two old friends reconnect and Hawk, or Walter Smith as he's known at the tournament conscripts Mauricio to join his little spamming group. But more importantly, at this tournament, Mauricio introduces Hawk to a fellow chess player named Brad Brayden Bourneville, but people call.

[Expert / Analyst]

Him Brad, who at the time I think was maybe 17, he was still in high school in Manchester, New Hampshire, and, you know, a pretty kind of innocent kid, smart, really good chess player.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brian McWilliams interviewed Brad in 2004. The audio quality is poor. It's been cleaned up, but some of the words may be difficult to catch.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

You know, that's crazy. Are you rich or something?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He's like, yeah.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

He pulls out this big wad of money, you know, like, I've never, never.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Seen money like that. Like, wow, you know, he says, you.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Know, I'm a spammer.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brad would eventually become Hawk's business partner, and they would form amazing Internet products together. So with Brad Mauricio and a few others, Haack had his team of young, influential chess prodigy spammers, and they started selling what turned out to be the perfect product.

[Expert / Analyst]

But I think he really hit it big financially with these pills.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

These pills would absolutely revolutionize Haack's spamming business. For $25 a bottle, Haack sold herbal penis enlargement pills.

[Expert / Analyst]

Really didn't enlarged penises. It was like a. It was an herbal Viagra. Basically. It was a product called Yohimbi, which I guess just basically increases the circulation of extremities.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Whether they worked or not didn't matter. The spam was going out and people were responding to them in droves.

[Actor (reading Hawk's statements)]

Imagine for a moment how you will feel. You'll radiate confidence and success whenever you enter a locker room, and other men will look at you with real envy. But the best part is when you reveal yourself in all your glory to the woman in your life. I promise you, she will not be able to keep her hands off you when you give her everything she needs from a man.

[Expert / Analyst]

My impression of Davis Hawk was he really was a pretty talented writer and would have been a really good, like, ad copywriter. He seemed to be really good at tapping into, you know, people's vulnerabilities and what they wanted to hear.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

The problem was, like, with everything that Hawk did, he often took from others without asking. Much of his ad copy was actually ripped off from others. In fact, he really pissed off a very powerful spammer who, who went by the name Dr. Fatburn. Dr. Byrne had sewed up a nice size of the market for herbal diet pills and was making good money. So Hawk wasn't just pissing off the victims of his scams. He was encroaching on the turf of other grifters.

[Expert / Analyst]

I know he was upset with Hawk at some point for stepping on his toes, basically, but I don't think it would ever rise to the level of anything that would, you know, require, you know, putting a gun to his head kind of thing.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But Hawk didn't have time to think about Jilted spammers. His business was going to the moon in the beginning. He and his staff spammed out of their respective apartments. Hawk and Pawtuck at Rhode Island, Brad and the Chess boys in Manchester, New Hampshire. But then they upped production, moving into a 20, 2700 square foot refurbished mill in downtown Manchester. This gave them space to house dozens of computers, work areas for packing and shipping, and row upon row of boxes of penis pills which went by the brand name Pinnacle. Every day, amazing Internet products would just hammer email inboxes across America with spam.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

There were days when Dave was getting in like, you know, 25, 30 million a day. It was really ridiculous.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

And sending 30 million emails a day resulted in a lot of profit.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

January 2003, I made a lot of money.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

I Probably, I probably did 150, 200,000 rows. 150 grand a month. Bought Brad a nice big yellow Hummer. Hawk, meanwhile, is also raking in the money, but is just squirreling it away. At some point he develops the odd habit of taking out his profit as cash and then burying it, like actually burying it in the ground. He's not living flashy. He rents his apartments and only buys used vehicles with a special love for old cop cars. He does all this so that on paper he has barely any assets should anyone come after him someday. At this time, the boys and their pill money saw a chance to expand into another industry.

[Expert / Analyst]

They briefly kind of took this little detour from spamming and they had, they created this company called Cream Pie Productions.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Cream Pie Productions.

[Expert / Analyst]

So I asked Brad one time, I said, what, what was Cream Pie Productions? And he said, oh, it was a porno film company. They actually filmed some pornos.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

We haven't been able to find any porn they made. But we do know that spamming remained their main source of income. And one day in 2003, amazing Internet products was offered something that would change everything.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

America Online now offers more benefits than ever before. And we've spent over a half a billion dollars to triple capacity.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

America Online was the Google of its day at one point because becoming the most recognizable brand on the Internet. At its Height, more than 30 million people were AOL users. And AOL had something very valuable to spammers. They had email addresses, lots of them.

[Expert / Analyst]

If you're a hunter, AOL is like a deer, a 12 point stag with a red bow in its horns, as though this is like the target that we all are shooting for. Because these are, you know, these are Internet users who are naive. They're, they're kind of new to the Internet. They probably have some money. They would be an easy mark, you know, for your spam. So the goal was always to get into aol. And these guys figured out a way to do it and just become really annoying in the process.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

For $52,000, Haack and Bourneville bought a list of over 90 million AOL email addresses. These addresses would make them more money than ever before. But it would also be the beginning of the end.

[Brian McWilliams]

Look, there's a lawsuit in court. You've been served with it, so you're accountable. Like they handed you the papers. So you have to come to court and address the situation.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

So, and what your plan is to do what regarding the lawsuit?

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Absolutely nothing.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Only Boost Mobile.

[Brian McWilliams]

Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Free year when you buy a new 5G phone. New 5G phone, enough. But I'm your hype man. When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months with credits totaling one year of free service. Taxes extra for the device and service plan online only.

[Brian McWilliams]

What kind of person takes on the law? Can they ever really know what they're getting into?

[Expert / Analyst]

A really tough looking guy came up to us and said, are you part of this gay case?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

My family started death threats. I wasn't able to go outside alone anymore.

[Brian McWilliams]

I'm Phelan Johnson, host of See youe in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who made history.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

This is David and Goliath.

[Brian McWilliams]

We have here, find and follow See you in court wherever you get your podcasts. Unknown caller that literally said my phone goes spam risk. Hello, Davis, it's your legacy for me.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

This is Washington D.C. lawyer Jennifer Archie. In 2004, she and her colleagues filed.

[Brian McWilliams]

A lawsuit as outside counsel for America Online Inc. Against Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Jennifer is sitting in a gorgeous boardroom on the 10th floor of her firm's office building. A giant banker's box in front of her on a long wooden conference table. It's filled with case files that all pertain to Davis Wolfgang Hawk. She first knew Hawk as a pain in the ass spammer.

[Brian McWilliams]

Spammer we came to know as Davis Wolfgang Hawk was sending herbal penis enlargement spam in significant volume that he got on our radar that way.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Initially, awell spent a lot of time and money trying to outsmart spammers like Haack.

[Brian McWilliams]

As lawyers, we worked really closely with the in house technical team at America Online and they had a way in which members could report unwanted messages to A database they called Toss spam.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But in 2003, something happened that changed the game.

[Brian McWilliams]

One of the problems was that if you want to make up and invent email addresses, if you want to scrape them from the Internet, if you want to just find a list and buy them, you were going to get a lot of bounce backs because the addresses wouldn't be good. So there was a holy grail search in the spammer community of, like, how could you get your deliverability up so that everything wasn't getting blocked? So someone reached into inside AOL and found an employee named Jason Smathers. And he sold screen names, names and addresses to a middleman, a broker. And that broker sold it five times, and. And he sold it once to Davis Hawk.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

The AOL employee was caught and charged. He spent 15 months in jail. But AOL didn't stop there. They went after haack. Because in 2003, for the first time, companies like AOL had been given the power to go after spammers.

[Brian McWilliams]

Congress kind of heard the call and passed the Can SPAM act of 2003.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Today, though, our inboxes are clogged with.

[Expert / Analyst]

Unwanted, objectionable, and fraudulent messages.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Spam is threatening to destroy the benefits of email.

[Brian McWilliams]

And for the first time, it specially defined a variety of felonies that would involve sending unsolicited bulk messages.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

In other words, Congress began taking spam seriously. And spam was a big problem for America Online.

[Brian McWilliams]

By 2003, I think, AOL's Mail Servers was the largest email system in the world. It was blocking about 1.5 billion spam messages daily.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Spam not only made their users unhappy, but it cost AOL a lot of money to filter and police it. So with this new law in their arsenal, Archie and her team were tapped to go out and find the most egregious spammers and make an example of them.

[Brian McWilliams]

And we were on a hunt for targets.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

And right in their crosshairs, a former neo Nazi.

[Brian McWilliams]

We ended up proving to the court that they had sent billions and billions of messages. Billions. And so by 2003, there was a lot of political willpower here in Washington to do something about it.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

So Archie and her team hit the two owners of amazing Internet products. Brad Bourneville and Davis Wolfgang Hawk were the full force of the new law to calculate damages. Jennifer and her team asked for a percentage of each message sent. AOL was asking for millions in damages.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

So, and what your plan is to do what regarding the lawsuit?

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Absolutely nothing.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

So you're not going to try to come to Some settlement with them.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

That's funny. No, I don't think so. What exactly do they hope to gain from suing me? I mean, when I saw the lawsuit in the paper, I just laughed. I thought this was comic.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Hawk may have been cool headed about this. He was practiced at running, hiding, and changing his name when he was in trouble. Brad, on the other hand, what Brad.

[Expert / Analyst]

Bourneville ended up doing was settling it.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

McWilliams spoke to Brad Bourneville as his lawsuit with AOL was being finalized.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

When we finally came to agreement, I mean, I think we did do it through the court and the judge had to approve it and everything. So it's over now. And, you know, and you can't talk.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

About what the terms are.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

No, of course not. I'd love to, but, you know, do.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

You still have a Hummer?

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

I'm not driving a Hummer, no. You can take a wild guess at what happened to it decades later.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Jennifer Archie filled us in. AOL gave away Brad's Hummer in a contest.

[Brian McWilliams]

I was a utility worker in Connecticut, won the yellow Hummer and came down. It was just the happiest day. You know, AOL and Time Warner were one company and so they filled it with, you know, every dvd, you know, of all the, you know, like a whole bunch of Time Warner stuff. It was a very happy day.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Things did not go down quite as smoothly when it came to haack.

[Expert / Analyst]

But Hawk, I think, just said, you know, I'm not settling this thing.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

AOL hired a team of private investigators to track him down and serve him papers. They staked out his apartment in Pawtucket. A PI handed out Hawk's photo at local restaurants. They even staked out tennis courts, hoping he might show his face to play a game. Those around Haack during that time described someone who had become paranoid. In her AOL deposition, his mother told lawyers that she was so worried about him that she almost considered having him committed. This is an actress reading from her deposition.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

He would grab whatever he brought with him and yell the feds. And he would jump up and run towards the door, our door, to go and leave. And I would say, brit, Brit, stop it. It's not the feds. He was just crazy. And also, I mean, I saw it coming. I saw it way, way back when he was involved in the Knights of Freedom organization. Kof.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brad Bourneville saw Hawk's mental state change too.

[Brian McWilliams (phone interviewer)]

And didn't you tell me the story about how he shaved his head and.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah, no, last time I saw him, he had shaved his head. He said he Found out from a source that the FBI was after him.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He was fixated on the FBI. Brian McWilliams heard this from Hawk as well.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

And I was followed twice by the FBI. Both times I made the tail. Both times, for the first time I, I followed him. And the second time he followed me. And then I cut my lights off, reverse, and I killed him like we were in almost like a high speed chase. Twice I was tailed by those fucking guys.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Hawk was desperate for McWilliams to file a freedom of Information request to get his FBI file. He did, and so did we. While the FBI does have a lot in it about his Nazi activities, they were not terribly interested in spamming.

[Brian McWilliams]

I think. I'm no psychologist and I think his psychology was pretty complicated. But I think there was a healthy dose of fear that the government was looking for him and that it wasn't just America Online. We had heard that from some of his friends and compatriots that he would get very paranoid. And so my own contacts with him were just very clinical and businesslike. Like, look, there's a lawsuit in court. You've been served with it, so you're accountable. Like they handed you the papers, so you have to come to court and address the situation.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But there was no way Hawk was going to do that. So he decided to run. Brad says that last time he talked to him, Hawk says he was going to leave the country.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

He was definitely planning to do something.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brad told McWilliams that Hawk wasn't just being hounded by AOL, but that the IRS was after him too.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

He was telling me he was getting notices like every week from the irs, and he wasn't, he wasn't going to pay them ever. So eventually he would have been charged. Yeah, with tax evasion.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

The last time he heard From Hawk, Brian McWilliams was just finishing his book.

[Expert / Analyst]

And then I got a voicemail.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Received Monday, August 9th at 10:03pm Yo, Brian, this is Dave Hawk. Hey, tomorrow may be the last chance for you to interview me before this book gets published. So I'll give you a call back just in case you want to ask me any final questions. Okay, see you later. There are some interesting developments later.

[Expert / Analyst]

He didn't leave a phone, you know, never left a phone number. He said, I'll try reaching you again, and click, you know, and that was. That was it, you know, I had no other contact with him, Hawk or no Hawk.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

AOL kept going with the lawsuit.

[Brian McWilliams]

And so ultimately court entered a judgment of $13 million against Hawk.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

With A multimillion dollar judgment on his head, the authorities on his tail, and a personality that liked to thumb his nose at the man. Davis Hawk made sure no one could find him. Here's Hyman Greenbaum.

[Expert / Analyst]

He said he was gonna disappear. He left a book here, I think called Hide youe Assets and Disappear.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

It was a giant game of hide and seek. And he was successful. AOL looked for him for months. Brian McWilliams spoke with Brad Bourneville about it in the middle of the manhunt.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

I doubt they're ever gonna find him. You know, they might eventually, but I don't know. He's pretty smart when it comes to hiding and he doesn't care. You know, if someone doesn't care about their family and ever seeing their friends again, then it's tough to catch them.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But AOL was undeterred. They wanted to recoup some of those ill gotten gains here.

[Brian McWilliams]

We decided if you weren't going to play nice, we were going to go find your assets. And he was a harder case than some because he didn't use bank accounts. He had put it into gold bars.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Yes, you heard that correctly. Gold bars.

[Brian McWilliams]

We learned from his business partners and things that he had this habit of converting things to gold. We found the receipts that he had indeed converted his Spam earnings into gold bars. And there was pretty good evidence that he was burying the gold. His business partner, we said, how do you know he buried it? And he said, I went to Home Depot to buy the shovel with him.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brian McWilliams asked Brad Bourneville about the gold too.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

All the money he has, he buries in the White Mountains.

[Expert / Analyst]

Literally digs a hole.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He literally digs a hole that buries.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

The money in the White Mountains. He literally goes up there, digs a hole.

[Expert / Analyst]

Does he use a GPS or something and mark a spot? I mean, how does he know where he's putting it?

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

He won't reveal how he knows, but he says sometimes he goes and checks.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

To make sure it's still there every once in a while he says sometimes he has trouble finding it.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Another place where Hawk was rumored to have stashed the gold was in his grandparents backyard in Massachusetts. And AOL was determined to dig it up.

[Brian McWilliams]

So we went to a court in Massachusetts and presented all the evidence. And the court said that we could use ground penetrating radar.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Hawk's mother Peggy went to the media when it was reported that AOL was considering the dig. She's quoted as saying, I don't care.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

If they dig up the entire yard, they are just going to make fools of themselves.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

They're going to.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

There is absolutely no reason for them to think that Davis Hawk would be stupid enough to bury gold on our property. My son is long gone.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Ultimately, AOL decided against the dig because.

[Brian McWilliams]

The property owners went to the media and, you know, said that this was going on, and there was really no interest in having a. This was something we wanted to do quietly to see if literally that was where the gold was. And it wasn't a publicity stunt at all. So ultimately, AOL did not go, you know, looking for any gold in. In the backyard.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

But AOL still didn't give up. They wanted Hawk. They deposed all of his associates, his parents, his past girlfriends, and their private investigators looked high and low. And then in 2005, one of AOL's private investigators gets a ping from a passport entering the country of Belize and using the name Andrew Britt Greenbaum. Belize is one of those countries where it's easy to open a bank account and hard for others to track it down.

[Brian McWilliams]

He went to Belize and was looking to buy property there.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Brian McWilliams also remembers Hawk telling him that he would one day move there.

[Expert / Analyst]

You know, I asked him in one of our last times we talked, I said, we're where do you see yourself in 10 years? And he said, I see myself under a palm tree in Belize with a pretty girl by my side or something like that.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

There are other reports that he bounced over to Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific where he was money laundering under the name Julio Santiago.

[Brian McWilliams]

But eventually, the trail went cold, and I have to believe he took the gold.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Haack would send emails to his parents, occasionally a phone call. But around this time, he all but disappeared from their lives, too.

[Expert / Analyst]

I mean, we both thought he would find a way to communicate with us, you know, or drop us a postcard or something. But he had not heard anything, even.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

Emails or anything like that.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

He didn't get anything from you? No. No, no.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

Yeah, that must have been tough. He was your son, right?

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Yeah.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

During her deposition with aol, Peggy spoke about one of the last letters she ever got from her son. It was a handwritten note that said.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

Dear Mom, I don't know when I will be able to see you again. It's hard to get a visa to come to the United States. I'm sick of this fishing trawler.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

Love British.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Peggy told the lawyers she didn't know where her son was. Although with a reference to the fish trawler, Belize seems like a good guess. But she told Them that the letter was very special to her because he signed off with love, right? She said, quote, it was the first time in his whole life he ever used the word love to address me. So it was very emotional. 2006 is the last anyone heard from Davis Wolfgang Hawk. It was the last time he would see or talk to his parents. Peggy Greenbaum died in 2019, wondering what happened to her son.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

We haven't seen Brett in months, months and months and months. We don't know where he is. So I'm answering the phone now in hopes that it's Brit.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

For years, it seems he was even hiding from the Internet. But then In August of 2009, he re emerges in his final form and posts to a rock climbing group.

[Actor (reading Hawk's statements)]

Climbing partner wanted. Anytime, any day of the week. I'm in Squamish until October 1st and looking for a climbing partner asap. Call or text me if you'd like to get out and do some climbing. Ciao, Jesse.

[Expert / Analyst]

There were rumors he'd gone to Colombia and South America, but. But I should have known better because he hated hot weather, and I should have known he'd more likely go to Canada.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

We don't know what he was doing during those lost years between 2006 and 2009, but it's not a stretch to imagine that he'd pissed someone off in Belize or wherever else he landed and needed another escape. What's clear is Haack was working in a dangerous profession. Basement hackers were using spam, but so were dangerous criminals.

[Brian McWilliams]

Spam was weaponized in a lot of different ways. It was viewed as really an engine of crime.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Even his mother, during her deposition, admits that her son was worried about his safety.

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

He made quite a few enemies while he was spamming.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

What kind of enemies?

[Peggy Greenbaum (Hawk's mother)]

Enemies who threatened him with physical harm. He made a lot of enemies.

[Brian McWilliams]

It was a bad time. It was scary. And the people that were attracted to this sort of pseudo criminal activity that, you know, they could easily tumble into criminal, you know, conduct in this in the same way, because they were, you know, playing with the feds.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

And there is no way someone like Hawk, someone so attracted to the dark side of the web, could have stayed away from what was coming next. And this time, it wouldn't take much to imagine someone wanting to kill him.

[Expert / Analyst]

Bitcoin was invented in 2009, and I'm pretty sure he, at some point within a year or two after that, bought quite a bit of bitcoin, probably using money he got from the gold.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Next to this time on dirtbag Climber, we explore the final chapter of Jesse James's life and how all of his past lives contributed to his ultimate demise.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

He was worried about people, he expressed to me coming for him, and it's obvious why. He's living in a truck, you know, in the woods, away from people.

[Brian McWilliams]

Was he worried about people coming for.

[Dave Bridger / Davis Wolfgang Hawk]

His money or was there something else going on? Well, I think that he was worried about, you know, he's basically coming to kill him. Foreign.

[Narrator (Stephen Chua)]

Can'T wait for more. Binge all episodes early on the CBC True Crime YouTube [e-mail] C Podcasts for early and ad free listening, subscribe to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts at Apple truecrime Dirtbag Climber is a production of Lark Productions and Kelly and Kelly for CBC Podcasts. The show is hosted by me, Stephen Chua. It's written and produced by Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly. The showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar. Producers are Karen Bracken and Tina Apostolopoulos Moniz Associate Producer Hadil Abdel Nabi Sound design by Paul Tedeschini and Chris Kelly. Tamara Black is our coordinating producer. Original music by Chris Kelly. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Our digital producer is Roshni Nair. The series was developed by Ainslie Vogel, Gene Parsons and Kristen Boichuk. Additional reporting by Yvette Brand for Kelly and Kelly Executive Producer Chris Kelly Executive Producer Pat Kelly Business Affairs Producer Lauren Berkovich for Lark Productions Executive Producer Aaron Haskett VP Business Affairs Tex Antonucci for cbc. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager and Arif Narrani is the Director of CBC Podcast.

[Actor (reading Hawk's statements)]

For more CBC Podcasts go to CBC CA Podcasts.