Pubdate: Fri, 17 Feb 2006
Source: Muskogee Daily Phoenix (OK)
Copyright: 2006 Muskogee Daily Phoenix
Contact: http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/customerservice/contactus.html
Website: http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3319
Author: Leif M. Wright, Phoenix Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)

POTHEADS SHOW YOU'RE NOT ANONYMOUS ONLINE

GreenThum43215: Hey, are you the Phoenix guy?

LeifMWright: Yes. Who's this?

GreenThum43215: You interested in an internet story?

LeifMWright: I'm all ears.

GreenThum43215: Have you ever heard of overgrow.com?

That Internet chat began the weirdest column I've ever undertaken, 
one full of international intrigue, secret marijuana gardens, the 
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, a 
shady character with an Armenian name, a former movie actor turned 
marijuana seed dealer and tens of thousands of freaked-out potheads 
who started what I call the Marijuana Bean Field Wars.

Overgrow.com was the world's largest marijuana cultivation Web site, 
and possibly the largest single marketplace of illegal ideas in the 
history of the world. The site taught growers the ins and outs of the 
plant and how to increase their yields and ostensibly increase the 
THC content. THC is the chemical believed to cause the "high" of marijuana.

At its peak before Jan. 31, Overgrow.com had more than 100,000 active 
members -- a massive amount for all but the largest web sites, and 
certainly for one that exchanged information that is illegal in most places.

Jan. 31, the site disappeared. Poof. Up in smoke, you might say. It 
had warned users a couple of days earlier that it would be undergoing 
server upgrades, so expect some outages. So no one panicked.

A day later, the site was still gone. Potheads, who are notoriously 
paranoid already, began to wig out.

What if the site had been busted? Would members be subject to 
prosecution based on the information they had shared on the site? Had 
authorities been watching the whole time, building up information so 
they could attack?

The War Begins

GreenThum43215: A lot of people around here are freaking out.

Probably an understatement.

I started searching the Internet for information about Overgrow.com. 
I found a slew of forums and dozens of sites repeating the same news: 
Overgrow.com and its parent site, Heaven's Stairway, had been shut 
down, their Canadian owner arrested, his house raided and his family jailed.

Heaven's Stairway was a seed distribution company. Marijuana growers 
call the seeds "beans." Heaven's Stairway, according to Canadian pot 
activist Marc Emery, had to be the largest seed merchant in North 
America, selling cannabis seeds all across Canada and the United 
States, and probably to other countries, too.

The stories on the Internet didn't answer some key questions. Were 
the Web sites shut down by Canadian authorities, or were they, as 
Emery's own bust nine months earlier, done in cooperation with the DEA?

Who was the mysterious owner of the sites, and what happened to him? 
Was he in jail? Was he out? Was he even alive?

What happened to the records of his seed business and the logs on his 
site that could possibly lead police to those who frequented the site?

Internet forums were atwitter with the details -- or lack of them.

It seems the sites were owned by a Richard Calrisian in Montreal. But 
later, it seemed "Calrisian" had been an alias. His real name was 
Richard Baghdadlian. And later, it seemed "Richard" was an alias, 
too. His real name, they asserted, was Hratch Baghdadlian.

No one seemed to be able to find any official records of his arrest, 
or even of an investigation.

That, the growers seemed unified in believing, was even more ominous. 
If the cops had busted Baghdadlian but hadn't arrested him, it could 
be that they were still investigating -- or worse, Baghdadlian was 
cooperating with them, singing like a canary, selling out seed 
customers, seed merchants and growers all over the continent.

I called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa.

"We don't confirm or deny if there is an ongoing investigation," said 
Sgt. Nathalie Dechenes, spokesman for the RCMP. "So we wouldn't tell 
you either way. I don't know if we even have authority to shut down Web sites."

So I called Emery, who was busted nine months ago and is facing 
extradition to the United States on charges of selling marijuana 
seeds in the U.S.

"I'm facing 31 years in a maximum security federal prison," Emery 
said. "It seems to me if Baghdadlian was facing the same thing, he 
might have started cooperating if they offered to drop the 
investigation in the U.S. and keep him in Canada."

Emery had run a seed company in competition with Heaven's Stairway. 
When he was busted, his computers were seized ("Nothing was on them," 
he said), and his clients in the United States started receiving blue 
sheets of paper asking them to confirm orders they had placed with his company.

"It was essentially an effort to try to get them to incriminate 
themselves," he said. "But most were smart enough to hit my Web site 
and find out it was the DEA and not us sending those notices out."

Meanwhile, several cannabis-related sites were breaking out into full 
civil war over the Overgrow debacle.

On one side was a fomer movie actor who had had a bit part in a 
Jean-Claude VanDamme flick and now was calling himself "Gypsy 
Nirvana." He claimed to have spoken with "RC," which was a pseudonym 
for Baghdadlian (growers seem to be big on initials and acronyms).

RC, Nirvana assured everyone, had been arrested, but he was out on 
bail and he had shut down the servers when he learned of the 
impending raid -- everyone's information was safe.

Dissenters began to surface, however, saying Nirvana had a profit 
motive in mind; he wanted Heaven's Stairway's seed business.

On the other side was someone calling himself "Plural of Mongoose," 
who apparently commanded great respect in the growing community. He 
also claimed to have spoken with RC, who had told him several lies, 
some of which, combined with a friend being busted, led him to 
believe RC was cooperating with the authorities.

Caught in the middle was Emery, whose own case had generated a lot of 
publicity, and who is loved by about half the growing community and 
violently hated by the other half. Emery's initial statement on the 
matter had been that Baghdadlian, tired of the seed business, had 
decided it was time to bail, so he shut up shop and took off to 
greener pastures, no pun intended.

The battle raged on in Internet boards with Nirvana accusing Emery of 
being a jerk for revealing Baghdadlian's name and phone number on his own site.

Others said Baghdadlian was the jerk for leaving his business 
partners high and dry, wondering if they could be busted at any time 
based on information from his servers.

No Bust, No Investigation, Mom Says

I called a number given on one site for Baghdadlian. A woman answered 
and gave her name as "Mrs. Baghdadlian."

She confirmed that Hratch is her son and that he was the proprietor 
of Heaven's Stairway and Overgrow.com.

"Nothing has happened, there is nothing right now," she said in an 
Armenian accent. "He has not been arrested. There is no investigation."

I asked her if Baghdadlian had shut the servers down himself. She 
started stuttering.

"Um," she said. "I don't think I can say anything more than this."

I asked if she knew where I could reach him to talk to him. She said 
she did not.

"Wow," Emery said when I told him about the conversation. "That sure 
lends credence to the idea that he took the money and ran."

It's possible that Baghdadlian had noticed an increased amount of 
government servers hitting his sites, saw the writing on the wall and 
bailed. Emery agreed it was possible.

"Before I was raided, about six weeks before, there was a huge 
Department of Justice focus on our Web site," he said. "Our server 
logs revealed their IP addresses and we were able to do a whois on 
them and find out where the hits were coming from."

Taking the money and running would explain Baghdadlian's silence -- 
and the silence of law enforcement, which had thrown a big media 
party when they busted Emery, patting themselves very publicly on the 
back for such a large takedown.

What Does It Mean to You?

The bottom line is those who were doing business with Baghdadlian and 
Emery were breaking the law if they were doing it in the United 
States -- they took a tremendous risk to break the law, and they are 
likely wise to be worried.

Doing that business over the Internet may have given people a false 
sense of security, since the Internet allows people to feel "anonymous."

In the marijuana growing community, the disappearance of Overgrow has 
made them rudely aware that Internet anonymity is an illusion.

For law enforcement, if there was no bust, they may still benefit 
from Baghdadlian's disappearance. Growers all over the Internet were 
proclaiming that they were done -- they were shutting their 
operations down for fear "LEO" would come get them based on 
information obtained from Baghdadlian's debacle.

The net gain for law enforcement is a new paranoia in the 
cannabis-growing world -- and fewer people growing, which means 
shorter supply and less headache for "LEO."

The average, law-abiding citizen can take a good message away from 
the mess, too, though. The message:

"You're never anonymous," Emery said. "It's impossible. Governments 
are investing huge amounts of money to monitor what's going on on the 
Internet. If they're interested in knowing something, they'll get it."

Protecting yourself over the Internet -- even in legitimate business 
- -- should take top priority. You may never have thought about 
breaking a law yourself, but your information is scattered all over 
the Internet, and those with less scruples than you can easily gain 
access to it and use it to defraud you.

Be careful. The Internet is still a rough new frontier, much like 
Oklahoma was in the Land Run years. You may not be facing droughts 
and maurading bandits, but you face less-than-honest people who will 
take your information and use it to hurt you.

"Never do business with anyone who won't give you a real name," Emery said.

More importantly, never do online business with a company you haven't 
thoroughly seen to be trustworthy. Even big companies suffer from 
"phishing," where people will pretend to be the big companies and 
request personal information from you, which is later used to defraud you.

For those doing illegal business over the Internet, my advice is 
this: Just don't.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake