WRESTLING BABYLON News

[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling on August 4 under the headline, “Strange case of the Benoit Wikipedia hacker,” http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/08/04/6348491.html]

By Irvin Muchnick

I recently filed a complaint with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission to compel the Stamford Police Department to release the video of its interrogation last summer of Matthew T. Greenberg — a hapless University of Connecticut student whose Internet mischief has landed him the sobriquet of “the Benoit Wikipedia hacker.”

Pull up a chair while I explain.

One piece of the media frenzy in the wake of the June 2007 Chris Benoit double murder/suicide in Georgia concerned news that Benoit’s biography at Wikipedia, the online tag-team encyclopedia, had been edited at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, June 25 — more than 14 hours before the dead bodies of all three family members were found. According to Wiki, Benoit missed the pay-per-view show in Houston the night before “due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.”

When the Internet Protocol address of the computer making this unauthorized edit was traced to Stamford — where World Wrestling Entertainment is headquartered — a sidebar mystery kicked into another gear. On June 28 the hacker confessed at an anonymous post at Wikipedia, saying he had no special knowledge of what had gone down in Fayette County but simply was passing along rumors.

Echoing the consensus sentiment, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, “I wonder where those rumors came from. I guess the police will figure that out eventually.”

The Fayette County Sheriff’s Office did ask Stamford PD to interrogate young Greenberg, and the story quickly died. But not so fast. Fresh reporting strongly suggests that the media — both the mainstream variety and the wrestling fan press — blew it. There’s every reason to wonder if the cops asked Greenberg the important questions. And unless you’re neck-deep in sand, you can see how the answers to those questions might illuminate WWE’s bizarre timeline of the weekend of the Benoit tragedy.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 24, Benoit sent cryptic text messages, containing his physical address in unincorporated Fayetteville but little else, to fellow wrestler Chavo Guerrero and referee Scott Armstrong. According to WWE, company executives didn’t become aware of the messages until Monday afternoon. In between, Benoit missed the “Vengeance” pay-per-view in Houston on Sunday, on top of missing the house show in Beaumont on Saturday, as speculation about this heretofore compulsively reliable performer resonated throughout the wrestling world and cyberspace.

The backup record for the February 2008 report by the Fayette County sheriff, closing the Benoit investigation, is full of holes. Among other things, the report cooks the raw telephone company records to produce its own phone log, which nonsensically ends more than 24 hours before the bodies were discovered; in addition, the documentation of text messages to and from Chris and Nancy Benoit’s cell phones is incomplete, and no voicemail messages at all are retrieved.

Against that backdrop, I couldn’t accept at face value the Fayette County report’s bland assurance that Stamford PD forwarded a bland assurance that Matt Greenberg was “harmless.” This conclusory statement seemed especially inadequate when it became apparent that language in a supplemental report, claiming that a copy of the Stamford PD interview of Greenberg was “included in the case file,” was at best misleading. When pressed, Detective Ethon Harper conceded that he and other officers wrote their reports without ever viewing the complete Greenberg interrogation, which is on videotape. I requested a copy of what they had on hand, and it turned out to be only a snippet, cutting off after three minutes, as soon as it started getting interesting.

Stamford PD explained that they must have sent Fayette County a bad duplicate. (One can’t help being reminded of “Rose Mary’s Baby” — the 18½-minute gap in President Richard Nixon’s White House audiotapes caused by an accidentally-on-purpose erasure by his secretary, Rose Mary Woods.) Stamford has refused to send me the complete video, with a claim that “voluntary statements” to police are exempt under state public information law. After not finding a single expert who agreed with that baroque interpretation of the plain language of the open records statute, I appealed on July 28 to the Freedom of Information Commission. An arbitration hearing will be scheduled in Hartford if a commission ombudsman does not succeed in mediating a settlement.

Friends, you don’t have to harbor alternative theories about the Benoit crime in order to regard the Greenberg angle of the investigation as pertinent to what everyone knew and when everyone knew it. At Wikipedia, Greenberg professed no connection to WWE — but did the cops even probe that assertion? Online sleuths had fingered Greenberg as a serial Wiki vandal who (to cite just one example) also was responsible for puerile and sexist vulgarities on the page for Stacy Kiebler. Yet, in a single aberrantly nice edit, Greenberg removed ethnic slurs from the page for Chavo Guerrero, a Benoit text-message recipient. What’s that about?

Finally, bear in mind that Greenberg could have been an inadvertent conduit of important information without being an insider himself. In the 20 hours between Benoit’s final texts and the Wikipedia edit, the online rumor chain of discussion boards and chat rooms could have stumbled upon a whiff of the truth for a good reason. The cursory Connecticut police report says a search of Greenberg’s computer “revealed no information that was posted about the homicide prior to June 25, 2007,” but not in a way to make a careful reader confident that the cops drilled the computer’s Internet history with purpose or sophistication.

In a July 18 email to me, Fayette County sheriff’s attorney Richard P. Lindsey wrote, “I have not read anything which makes me question the integrity and thoroughness of the investigation and the quality of work done by the detectives. Their role was to determine who committed the crimes and to ensure that no third party was involved in the murders; their role was not to determine if WWE may have acted or not acted in a manner to control the publicity of the heinous crimes committed by one of its stars.”

Lindsey also wrote, “I am not being stubborn (maybe I am) …”

Sometimes the most revealing words are the ones in parentheses.#####

[originally published in Beyond Chron on August 5, http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5942]

by Irvin Muchnick

As only nervous Barack Obama supporters can do, Sam Stein of The Huffington Post worries out loud about the implications of John McCain’s appearance – replete with lowbrow images of underdressed females in a swarm of military veterans – at the annual motorcylists’ rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. Will McCain make a successful pitch for the voter bloc loosely defined as the NASCAR-cum-pro-wrestling crowd?

Relax. What Obama needs to do in response to McCain’s rather desperate effort to emulate George H.W. Bush’s professed fondness for pork rinds and aversion to broccoli can be summarized in one word: nothing.

In one of the most delicious ironies of this presidential season, it is the experienced but fatally recorded McCain who has the most work to do shoring up his base. The verbally gifted Obama, whose brief tenure on the national stage has left few policy footprints and hence made fewer enemies, can stay above the fray. A politician who wasn’t even in the Senate when President George W. Bush was authorized to use force in Iraq stands to be the bigger beneficiary of the Rashomon Effect in that area, or any other.

And the truth is that McCain has his own, deep, problem with the “wrestling vote.” During the primaries, the religious right voiced misgivings about McCain’s allegiance on litmus-test issues for good reason – he has an independent streak that he will be spending the entire general election campaign seeking to mute on every question except the war.

McCain also is weighed down like an anvil by his instinct to embrace the historically least attractive trait of Whig/Republicanism: a finger-wagging moralism that is utterly dissonant with the debauchery of a bikers’ convention.

Finally, there’s the little matter of rehabilitation. In the 1990s, just as the phenomenon of mixed martial arts (MMA) was starting to get legs, McCain was the highest-profile elected official in the U.S. seeking to ban the new sport, which he labeled “human cockfighting.” MMA, which is frighteningly real, has nothing to do with pro wrestling, which is frighteningly fake, but the crossover is obvious. Studies of pay-per-view ratings suggest that MMA siphons more viewers from wrestling than from boxing; as the young male demographic ages, it gets less sated by wrestling’s cartoonish side and hungrier for MMA’s undiluted violence.

One senses that Obama is smart enough to follow the path of least resistance. That is, ride the endless waves of American kitsch, and not strain to be something he isn’t. This spring, when World Wrestling Entertainment invited the candidates to do a shtick on the highly rated USA cable show “Monday Night Raw,” Obama read his lines dutifully. Go ahead and cringe – the man wants to run the country more than he seeks your feather in his cap. When he needs to admonish his base, whether it’s Jesse Jackson or Snoop Doggy Dog, Obama makes sure he picks on targets who have nowhere else to go. In 1992, Bill Clinton had his “Sister Souljah moment.” Obama, who is actually black, not just a wannabe black, has turned that rhetorical trope into an art form. Even the controversy over the New Yorker cover was a kind of highbrow Sister Souljah moment.

More and more, John McCain looks like the Bob Dole of 2008: a decorated and largely honorable dinosaur of the national scene who seems destined to get more discombobulated and shrill over why his Republican nomination, essentially a lifetime achievement award, gains no traction with general election voters.

Recently, McCain made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to exploit the fact that Obama both opposed the strategic step of war in Iraq and had some not entirely unkind things to say about the tactical step of the troop surge. Even Christopher Hitchens – no friend of Obama’s or of Beyond Chron readers – took note of Obama’s clear superiority over McCain at “jiu-jitsu, where the strength of your opponent is precisely what you use against him.”

Jiu-jitsu, by the way, is one of the core disciplines of mixed martial arts. Try explaining that one, Senator McCain, to the yahoos at the Sturgis Rally.
#####

Stamford Advocate

August 6, 2008

“Author files FOI complaint against police,” http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/localnews/ci_10110827

TODAY IN BEYOND CHRON
(just named “Best Local Website” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian)

Obama Need Not Worry as McCain Woos “Wrestling Demographic”

by Irvin Muchnick

As only nervous Barack Obama supporters can do, Sam Stein of The Huffington Post worries out loud about the implications of John McCain’s appearance – replete with lowbrow images of underdressed females in a swarm of military veterans – at the annual motorcylists’ rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. Will McCain make a successful pitch for the voter bloc loosely defined as the NASCAR-cum-pro-wrestling crowd?

Relax. What Obama needs to do in response to McCain’s rather desperate effort to emulate George H.W. Bush’s professed fondness for pork rinds and aversion to broccoli can be summarized in one word: nothing.

READ THE FULL COLUMN

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Obama_Need_Not_Worry_as_McCain_Woos_Wrestling_Demographic__5942.html

I recently filed a complaint with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission to compel the Stamford Police Department to release the video of its interrogation last summer of Matthew T. Greenberg — a hapless University of Connecticut student whose Internet mischief has landed him the sobriquet of “the Benoit Wikipedia hacker.” Pull up a chair while I explain.

For the complete column today at SLAM! Wrestling on canoe.ca, Canada’s leading interactive news site, go to

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/08/04/6348491.html 

WOC AM 1420
Davenport, Iowa
Morning Show with Sean Patrick
see the podcast page at http://www.woc1420.com

=====

Fox Sports Radio 1340
with David Taub

http://www.foxsportsradio1340.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=davidtaub.xml

The Senate Office of Public Records has posted 2008 second quarter filings by lobbyists, which are required under federal law. They show that April, May, and June were fairly slow months in Washington for World Wrestling Entertainment.

WWE’s main lobbyist, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP (lawyer Jerry McDevitt’s firm), reported spending on behalf of the company in the amount of $10,000 during the second quarter. (The number is a good-faith estimate, rounded to the nearest $10,000, of payments by the client to the lobbyist for lobbying activities.)

“Specific lobbying issues” are noted as “Representation relative to Congressional investigation of performance enhancing substances in professional wrestling.”

A second lobbyist, APCO Worldwide Inc., reported second-quarter income from WWE of less than $5,000.

On February 27, Congressman Bobby Rush, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, said, “The number of deaths in the professional wrestling ranks is startling to say the least. The tragedy of Chris Benoit has been well documented. I want to assure Mr. [Vince] McMahon that this committee fully intends to deal with the illegal steroid abuse in professional wrestling. And we hope he will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

Rush spoke at an omnibus hearing of the heads of major sports leagues and their players unions. McMahon, also invited to attend, was the only one to decline, citing a scheduling conflict for lawyer McDevitt. Rush said he was “exceptionally and extremely disappointed” by that.
But the subsequent decline of WWE lobbying expenditures, from an estimated $70,000 in the first quarter, suggests that there has been no follow-through on the House committee’s tough talk.

Irv Muchnick

Author Irvin Muchnick discusses the mystery of the “Benoit Wikipedia hacker” in an interview with Sean Patrick on WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa, Friday, August 1, at 6:35 a.m. Central time. WOC, 1420 AM, streams live at http://www.woc1420.com. After the Muchnick interview airs, it will be available on demand at the station’s online archive.

Patrick pegs the interview to the upcoming World Wrestling Entertainment “Smackdown” tapings in the Quad Cities.

Muchnick is involved in a dispute with the Stamford, Connecticut, Police Department over the release of a videotaped interrogation of a University of Connecticut student, Matthew T. Greenberg, who made an unauthorized edit of WWE star Chris Benoit’s biography at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on June 25, 2007 – some 14 hours before the bodies of Benoit and his wife and their son were discovered in a double murder/suicide. Greenberg’s edit said Benoit had missed the previous night’s wrestling show “due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.”

Muchnick’s appeal for access to the Stamford police video of Greenberg is now before the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.

Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon, co-author of Benoit: Wrestling With the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, and at work on the forthcoming Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. Website: http://wrestlingbabylon.com. Blog: http://muchnick.net/babylon. Investigative tips: tips@muchnick.net.

Media inquiries: media@muchnick.net.

#####

Yesterday I formally complained to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission in an effort to acquire the Stamford police video interrogation of Benoit Wikipedia hacker Matthew Greenberg. Read all about it in the last post.

What I hope to accomplish by this exercise was well explained by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, on June 29, 2007, the same day the cops were grilling Greenberg.

“The guy who’s admitted to [the unauthorized edit of Benoit’s Wiki page] said it was just a coincidence,” Wales said. “He said he was hearing rumors. I wonder where those rumors came from. I guess the police will figure that out eventually.”

But if the police did figure that out, the existing public record isn’t telling. And the reason the Fayette County and Stamford authorities are playing an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine with the release of the complete Greenberg video may be that what they’re hiding will show that they didn’t even try.

So far I have in hand a three-minute clip of the beginning of the Greenberg police interview. (Fayette County says that’s the only video on file there, and Stamford says it’s a faulty dupe.) I haven’t posted the partial video, but on July 16 I did publish a transcript.

“I was reading rumors and speculation online,” Greenberg told Stamford PD Detective Tim Dolan.

“Where online?” Dolan asked.

“Um, like on forums, I forget the exact, like, sites….”

Moments later the video cuts off. Only the complete video can show whether Dolan followed up effectively. The idea that Greenberg could not name any of the sites he visited just five days earlier wouldn’t be very credible.

The written summaries of the Connecticut police investigation of Greenberg are equally unrevealing. Dolan’s report is viewable at http://muchnick.net/StamfordGreenberg.pdf. For the search of Greenberg’s computer, Stamford PD turned to the Darien police, who have a computer forensics expert on staff; Darien Detective Chester Perkowski’s report on the search is at http://muchnick.net/DarienGreenberg.pdf.

From the main report, it seems clear that Dolan asked Greenberg no pressing questions about the most obvious curiosity of the Wikipedia affair: Greenberg’s residence in the same city where World Wrestling Entertainment is based. In his anonymous Wiki apology, Greenberg had professed no connection to WWE, but Stamford PD might not have probed that assertion at all.

Dolan also appears not to have talked to Greenberg about his pattern of unauthorized Wikipedia edits – including, on the most charitable end of the spectrum, his removing ethnic slurs from the page for Chavo Guerrero. And Guerrero was one of the wrestlers who received Chris Benoit’s final text messages Sunday morning the 24^th, close to a full day before Greenberg posted on Wikipedia that Benoit missed the Sunday night show in Houston because of circumstances “stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.” (In fairness to Detective Dolan, it’s possible he was not briefed well by Fayette County sheriff’s officers.)

Darien Detective Perkowski’s computer search report follows the same paradigm of asking only a single, and essentially useless, question. He wrote that an examination of the Greenberg computer hard drive “revealed no information that was posted about the homicide prior to June 25, 2007.”

Again, it’s not Perkowski’s fault if Fayette County didn’t ask Stamford PD – and Stamford PD in turn didn’t ask Darien PD – to search Greenberg’s Internet history to see the sites he visited and where he might have picked up on Benoit rumors on June 24.

But it’s somebody’s fault. Advertently or not, Matthew Greenberg’s sophomoric online vandalism opened a major window on the mystery of the timeline of the Benoit case. The video that the cops are suppressing could show that all they did was slam that window shut.

As they say in computer science, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Irv Muchnick

JULY 28, 2008 – The author of a forthcoming book on the double murder/suicide of pro wrestler Chris Benoit today asked the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission to reverse the refusal by the Stamford Police Department to release a videotaped interrogation that was part of the Benoit investigation.

On June 25, 2007, the corpses of Benoit and his wife and their son were found in their home in Fayette County, Georgia. In February 2008, a report by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office closed the official investigation as a double homicide/suicide. Muchnick’s book about the case, Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, will be published next year by ECW Press.

Muchnick’s dispute with Stamford PD concerns an interview the police conducted, at the request of Georgia authorities, with the Stamford man identified as the computer hacker who edited Chris Benoit’s biography at the online site Wikipedia at 12:01 a.m. on June 25, 2007 – more than 14 hours before the bodies were discovered. The edit said Benoit had missed a wrestling show the previous night “due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.” The Fayette County sheriff’s report would identify the computer hacker as Matthew Greenberg, a then-19-year-old University of Connecticut student.

On June 29, 2007, in the interview room of the Stamford PD Bureau of Criminal Investigations, a detective interrogated Greenberg in a session captured on videotape.

Stamford PD reported to the Fayette County sheriff that Greenberg was a wrestling fan, with no material connection to the Benoit case, whose unauthorized Wikipedia edit was simply an escalation of uncorroborated online rumors. The Fayette County sheriff’s report concluded that the Wikipedia angle of the investigation was a “coincidence” and that Greenberg was “harmless,” adding that a copy of the Greenberg interview by Stamford PD was “included in the case file.”

This month, however, Fayette County admitted to author Muchnick that it had in its possession only a short snippet of the police video, cutting off after three minutes. Stamford PD then explained that a faulty copy of the complete video had been sent to Fayette County. Georgia authorities have no explanation for why they published their conclusions about Greenberg’s role without first reviewing the entire interview, and they refuse to say whether they have requested a good copy of the video from Stamford. (The sheriff’s office agrees with Muchnick that the complete video would be a public record under Georgia law.).

On July 12, 2008, Muchnick asked Stamford PD for a copy of the complete interview under the 2007 Connecticut Freedom of Information Act. Stamford PD refused the request on the grounds that “voluntary statements to police” are exempted by the statute. State public information law experts told Muchnick that no such exemption exists, and advised him to appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission.

Muchnick said: “I look forward to a lawful resolution of this matter. I do not expect to uncover an alternative to the findings that Chris Benoit alone committed the crimes and that Matthew Greenberg was not seriously mixed up in any of the core events of the case. But the release of the Stamford police video is in the public interest for a number of reasons. For one thing, it will shed further light on overall timeline issues of the Benoit case.”

For more information on the State of Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission and the state Freedom of Information Act, visit http://www.state.ct.us/foi/. The text of Muchnick’s brief to the commission can be viewed at http://muchnick.net/ConnFreedom.pdf.

Muchnick’s website is http://wrestlingbabylon.com. His blog is http://muchnick.net/babylon. Investigative tips can be sent to tips@muchnick.net.

Media inquiries: media@muchnick.net.

#####