For further insight into the character and tactics of Gary Weiss, consider the story of how Gary plotted to destroy a fellow journalist named Ian Williams, a reporter for The Nation who was president of the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA). Apparently, Gary’s wife wanted a position in the UNCA that was held by Williams’ wife, a BBC World Service journalist and a native of Uzbekistan. So Gary tried to drive Mrs. Williams out of the country by accusing her of lying in order to get a U.S. visa.
Gary’s allegations proved absolutely false. Instead, it emerged that Gary’s wife, a citizen of India, had herself forged a bunch of documents to secure UN press credentials. For example, as part of her application, Mrs. Weiss submitted multiple stories that she had purportedly written for The Pioneer, an Indian newspaper, and a letter confirming her appointment to that newspaper, signed by the Pioneer’s editor. The stories were fakes –later proven to have been photo-shopped on a computer — and the Pioneer’s editor, Chandan Mitra, stated that Gary’s wife had “never been engaged by The Pioneer for any purpose.” He added that the signature on the letter was “an outright forgery”. The UN revoked Mrs. Weiss’s credentials and escorted her from UN premises under armed guard.
Days later, Gary was on Amazon, anonymously trashing Ian Williams’ books. Then he founded “Mediacrity,” a blog supposedly devoted to media criticism, but actually focused, at least initially, on heckling Ian Williams and circulating unfounded rumors about Williams’ wife.
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It would be possible to dismiss Gary as a marginal creep. But his strange views on phantom stock are widely cited. Herb Greenberg and other journalists regularly promote his blog. Meanwhile, Gary and his crook friends do more than post lies on blogs and internet message boards. They have also seized control of Wikipedia - one of the most important (though certainly not accurate) sources of information on the internet.
That’s right, Gary Weiss was until recently the sole (anonymous) author of multiple Wikipedia pages, including the blatantly distorted entries on naked short selling (phantom stock), Overstock, and Patrick Byrne. (Gary Weiss is, of course, also the author of the glowing Wikipedia page on Gary Weiss.) And though Wikipedia claims that it can be edited by anyone, the truth is that until this scandal broke, the pages authored by Gary Weiss were given special protection. Nobody other than Gary Weiss could touch them.
Judd put together proof of what Gary was doing, and submitted it for review to a high-ranking Wikipedia administrator known only by the screen name, “SlimVirgin.” Rather than examine this evidence, SlimVirgin immediately forwarded it to Gary Weiss. One of Judd’s “methods” allowed him to determine this immediately.
Judd also quickly learned that Gary’s privileged status on Wikipedia was, in fact, the result of SlimVirgin’s interventions. For months, anytime a user attempted to edit a page controlled by Gary, SlimVirgin would step in and restore Gary’s preferred version.
Wikipedia allows its administrators to remain anonymous, and they would if it weren’t for clever internet sleuth Daniel Brandt. Brandt unmasked the man who edited the Wikipedia entry of one-time government official John Seigenthaler to suggest that Seigenthaler had a role in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. Brandt also revealed that a Wikipedia administrator who had claimed to be a professor of theology with two doctorates was, in fact, a 24-year-old college drop-out. These two incidents became the basis for critiques of Wikipedia in the New Yorker and other mainstream media.
For his third act, Brandt discovered that SlimVirgin’s true identity is one Linda Mack, a woman who was suspected of working as a British intelligence agent. It turns out that Linda Mack also studied philosophy with Patrick Byrne at Cambridge University, where, for a time, they had a close if somewhat odd relationship. Patrick wrote a public letter describing this relationship. The letter has literary merit. Check it out here.
Meanwhile, John Cooley, a former correspondent for ABC News, wrote a public letter
describing how Mack had once worked as a research assistant for ABC. His former boss, Pierre Salinger, fired SlimVirgin when he began to suspect that she was spying on ABC for MI5, the British intelligence agency.Soon after Cooley sent this letter, I interviewed a man named Edwin Bollier, who was once accused of supplying the suitcase bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. SlimVirgin’s boyfriend was on that plane, so that could explain her interest. But Boiller says that SlimVirgin once showed up in his office and identified herself as an agent for MI5.
When Judd reveals that Gary Weiss is the anonymous editor who has conspired with the supposed one-time MI5 agent called SlimVirgin to hijack the Wikipedia pages on phantom stock, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales and SlimVirgin dismiss it all as “conspiracy theory.” Wales announces that Gary Weiss has nothing to do with those pages. Gary himself flat out denies that he has ever edited a Wikipedia page.
When Judd continues to present his evidence, and persists in making this an issue, Wikipedia administrators begin to debate an Orwellian “Bad Sites” policy which would prohibit a certain website from being mentioned on Wikipedia. This online debate generates more words than are contained in the New Testament (literally, Judd has done a comparison) and is focused entirely on Judd’s blog, Antisocialmedia.net, as the one “Bad Site.” Things get really strange when Wikipedia’s administrators decide that their discussion about this “Bad Site” must continue without mention of the site itself.
So now, websites advertising child pornography and other evils are regularly mentioned on Wikipedia, but a single utterance of “Antisocialmedia.net”, a blog devoted largely to describing the strange attempts of Gary Weiss and SlimVirgin to whitewash the problem of phantom stock, is enough to have an administrator removed from his position and banned forever from Wikipedia.
Then Wikipedia takes the unprecedented step of blocking the IP addresses of Overstock and 1,000 homes in Judd’s neighborhood in Traverse Mountain, Utah. One should not underestimate the significance of this: Judd and his neighbors, and the employees of Patrick Byrne’s Overstock.com, become the only people on the planet who cannot access the Wikipedia edit function. The Register, an internet publication (something like a British version of Wired Magazine), does a story about this, titled, “Wikipedia Black Helicopters Circle Utah’s Traverse Mountain.”
Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales and SlimVirgin continue to vehemently deny that Gary Weiss has anything to do with the “Naked short selling” Wikipedia entry.
But then several of Wales’s contributions to a very small and private email list are leaked to Judd. One of these - a September, 2007 email from Wales — alluding to Mantanmoreland, the on-line alias of the author of the Wikipedia “Naked short selling” entry - reads as follows:
From: jwales@wikia.com (Jimbo Wales)
I just want to go on record as saying that I believe the reason for this is that Mantanmoreland is in fact Gary Weiss.
When Wikipedia administrators see this, they rise up against Wales. For months, Wales and SlimVirgin have been assuring them that Gary is not the editor of the entries on naked short selling - that Judd isn’t credible, that he’s a conspiracy nut and author of the world’s only “Bad Site.” Now, here is clear evidence that Wales and SlimVirgin had duped the other administrators.
Meanwhile, dozens of Wikipedia users submit amazingly detailed and academic studies (one employs phraseology to demonstrate language-use similarities between Gary and his on-line aliases) that help prove that Gary Weiss is indeed the anonymous, conflict-laden editor who controls, with the support of SlimVirgin, every Wikipedia entry having to do with naked short selling, phantom stock, Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com, and Gary Weiss himself.
Wales dissembles, saying that “believing” that Gary Weiss is Mantanmoreland is “not the same as knowing for sure.” But as the scandal spins out of control, more evidence emerges of coordinated distortion of Wikipedia pages. It appears, for example, that Wales wangled changes to the entry on a Canadian newscaster in exchange for sex. And The Register reveals that a cabal of Wikipedia administrators have hijacked the entry for a religious cult leader, Prem Rawat, who refers to himself as the “Lord of the Universe.”
Then Jeff Merkey, a former top scientist at software development company Novell, writes Wales an email that says, “I just sent ***ALL*** of your emails to the associated press, exposing your lies and deceit.” The Associated Press, in turn, reports that Wales gave special protection to the Wikipedia article on Jeff Merkey in exchange for a substantial donation to the Wikimedia Foundation.
As of April, 2008, a veritable revolution is underway at Wikipedia. Its administrators are demanding explanations-especially about Wales’ relationship with Gary Weiss and SlimVirgin. The Wikipedia founder, backed into a corner, has become ever more defensive, though he is agreeing to look into the Gary Weiss allegations.
“I support that this investigation continue,” Wales writes on a message board, “and request that it be done in a kind, thoughtful, loving way.”
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The importance of Wikipedia entries should not be underestimated. If you do a Google search for “naked short selling,” the all-important number-one result is the Wikipedia entry that says in no uncertain terms that phantom stock does not exist.
Did Jimbo Wales give special protection to Gary Weiss and SlimVirgin, allowing them to hijack this and other Wikipedia pages? It is perhaps too early to say for sure, but it is worth understanding a little bit about Jimbo Wales’ prior career.
To summarize: Before founding Wikipedia, Wales owned a soft core porn site. Before founding a soft core porn site, Wales was a key player in the precise area of the Chicago options market where naked short sales are often negotiated.
For a good explanation of how phantom stock is created in league with options market makers in Chicago, read this paper.
* * * * * * * *
It is also important to recognize the role of The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), an organization headquartered in New York City. DTCC is where stock trades are processed — more than $1.5 quadrillion worth of them every year. That’s 30 times larger than the entire gross product of the entire planet. According to the Wikipedia entry on the DTCC, authored largely by Gary Weiss, the DTCC “streamlines processes that are critical to the safety and soundness of the world’s capital markets.”
Indeed, the DTCC is one of the world’s most important financial institutions. But what the Wikipedia entry does not mention is that the DTCC is also among the least transparent organizations on earth. No joke: America’s founding fathers would take up arms if they knew that anything like the DTCC could exist in this country. There are funds exceeding 30 times global output flowing through a sealed black box that is not understood even by the SEC officials who are supposed to regulate it.
One former SEC official describes his colleagues visiting the DTCC and asking, “So, what is it you guys do here, again?” A former DTCC employee confirms that the SEC would occasionally send junior people, and summarizes their oversight as follows: “The SEC staffers would say, ‘What do you do?’ and ‘How do you do it?’ After we would explain to the SEC folks what the DTCC did, the SEC people would say, ‘OK, are you doing it?’” These meetings would occur about once per year, and take no more than two or three hours. That was the oversight provided by regulators to the sealed black box corporation through which 30 times the economic output of the entire world flows.
Because the DTCC processes every short sale, it knows which brokers have hedge fund clients that are selling stock and not delivering it. The organization also knows precisely how much phantom stock is circulating in at least one part of the system (additional phantom stock is created outside the DTCC, or “ex-clearing”). Yet, perhaps because it is “user owned” - that is, it is owned and operated by the very Wall Street brokerages that sell the phantom stock - the DTCC refuses to release any information.
Meanwhile, the organization leads an energetic public relations campaign denying that phantom stock is a problem. It sics lawyers and a pit bull flack named Stuart Z. Goldstein on journalists who attempt to report on the subject. The few journalists who have managed to secure an interview with a DTCC official describe having to pass through a security cordon of machine-gun wielding guards, X-ray machines, and written questionnaires.
Yet, oddly, one journalist might have been given open access not only to the DTCC’s premises, but also to its computer system. Judd Bagley says this journalist is none other than…Gary Weiss.That is correct: Judd Bagley’s “methods” show that Gary Weiss-liar, message board maniac, Wikipedia hijacker, forger, fraud, and friend of crooks - has used a computer inside the DTCC’s offices to post on the internet.
If so, this would suggest that Gary is a cog in the DTCC’s public relations machine. Which, along with his close allegiance to Manuel Asensio, Kingsford Capital, and an array of convicted felons, might explain his intransigent and equivocating blog-rants identifying all critics of naked short selling as wackos and worse.
When I asked Gary about this, he had a nervous breakdown. Really, I’ve never heard anybody (except, perhaps, Herb) blow their top in quite this manner. Not only did Gary deny working for the DTCC, but he launched, totally unprompted, into a lengthy tirade, saying nobody has evidence, and he’s never talked to the DTCC’s public relations chief-or he has talked to him, but only about that nut Patrick Byrne-and he’s never set foot in the DTCC, nobody has seen him in there, or maybe somebody has seen him, but if they saw him, it was only because he was going in there to use an ATM machine-yeah, an ATM machine, maybe he went into the DTCC building to use an ATM machine or something.
Yeah, an ATM machine….or something.
Russian Mafia Conspiracy on Wall Street in Media and Government - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12- 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17
