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Sender Unknown in Portsmouth E-Mail Campaign

Posted on: Thursday, 22 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Meghan Hoyer, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Jun. 22--PORTSMOUTH -- Elizabeth Psimas had reached her breaking point. From her downtown office, she fired off an e-mail to her colleagues begging for help.

This person "is really twanging my last nerve," she wrote.

"He's obviously got it in for me personally. I really don't get it."

Earlier that morning in January 2005, Psimas had received an e-mail criticizing her work on the City Council. It was one of nearly a half dozen she had received from a man she never had met.

Those e-mails were only the beginning.

As months passed, Psimas and other city officials would become targets of increasingly personal attacks. One e-mail called City Manager Jim Oliver a dictator. Another questioned Councilman Steve Heretick's parenting skills. A few even lit into residents, calling an Olde Towne woman a dog and berating another person for being gay.

At face value, the e-mails appeared to be correspondence from ordinary citizens -- people named Bill Russell and Rick Williams and Ann Thomas and Suzana Seleznev and Mr. West.

It seemed the critics watched council members' every move and were present at every city event.

Yet these critics didn't exist.

In 250-year-old Portsmouth, relationships date back not just years but generations -- a complex web of allegiances, family connections, past romances and neighborhood ties.

The mayor calls residents of the small city members of the "Portsmouth family," and like any family, they fight and holler, love and make up.

A hundred years ago, Portsmouth residents transmitted news in person while sitting on the front porch. Today, there's e-mail. Technology has made it easier to attack without the fear of retribution -- or the disclosure of your real name.

Civic leagues, the Chamber of Commerce and council members have their own e-mail lists, giving them the ability to broadcast a single message to hundreds of people in seconds.

The flow of e-mail among these groups can be heavy. Residents say it's the easiest way to keep in touch, to share the latest news.

Most don't question whether the people sending the e-mails are who they say they are.

For two years, Portsmouth officials and residents have received e-mail from a phantom -- someone, or several people -- hiding behind at least seven fake names and e-mail aliases, using the protection of anonymity to criticize decisions and make personal attacks.

The tactic has been successful. In the past year, two e-mails from writers using aliases were published in The Virginian-Pilot as letters to the editor. Others were posted -- and remain -- on a Web site run by a group of citizens interested in city news. E-mail s from the alias accounts rebuked both challengers in this year's City Council race. Documents obtained from the city show that since 2004, all seven council members and the city manager repeatedly received the questionable messages.

The tone of the more than three dozen e-mails since the middle of 2004 is almost always the same:

"Perhaps a recall effort needs to be started so the house can really get the cleaning it so desperately needs."

"You put political and council duties above the interests of your son."

"That was the ugliest outfit I've seen in quite some time. Someone should have called the fashion cop and had him arrested."

The e-mails, all from AOL or Yahoo addresses, share common traits. The spelling is usually correct, but words are missing frequently. Possessives are regularly incorrect. The writers have access to internal city memos and documents.

The senders are seemingly everywhere the council is, yet no one has actually met any of them.

"When you start looking at the e-mails together, you realize that Rick Williams and Ann Thomas and Bill Russell -- they write very much alike," Heretick said. "When you put them side by side and take the name off, by all appearance they come from exactly the same source.

"And whoever the source is, they're very closely tied to the affairs at City Hall. It certainly narrows the field to a very few people."

City officials such as Psimas and Heretick receive thousands of e-mails a year. It's the way modern business -- and democracy -- happens.

Residents take to the keyboard rather than seek out their representatives in person. E-mail is the barometer of public sentiment. If residents don't like something, officials' inboxes are full. Problems or questions get voiced through the Internet.

The e-mails sent from alias accounts can disrupt the system, creating the appearance of a public outcry that doesn't exist or giving weight to a minor problem.

"It lends nothing to public debate for people to be hiding behind false names," Heretick said. "I think it's intended simply to cause annoyance. It's meant to irritate. It's meant to divert the limited time we have to give to legitimate issues."

In December 2005, Oliver invited Ann Thomas to meet in person so he could explain an issue; she didn't take him up on the offer.

Psimas and Councilman Ray Smith have had exchanges with the e-mailers that lasted for days. One of Psimas' ongoing battles with Bill Russell was over the etiquette of a woman wearing a hat to the city's Memorial Day parade.

"It's frustrating," said Psimas, a downtown businesswoman serving her first term on council. "You think you're doing the right thing, you're trying to do a good job, and you're getting criticized for just bizarre things. They tend to single out a particular council member for something they've done wrong, so that individual fights their own battle."

Still, Psimas said, any city administrator who ignores e-mail does so at his or her own peril.

"You have to take each one seriously," she said. "You can't just push it aside as nonsense, because you assume it must be a real issue to somebody."

One morning in February 2005, Rick Williams, the sheriff's internal affairs investigator, stopped in the lobby of his office to check his mail. A commander complimented him.

Nice letter about Vice Mayor Bill Moody, he said.

Williams, a law enforcement officer in Portsmouth for nearly 40 years, didn't know about any letter.

The commander showed him a Web site run by a local gadfly. There, staring from the screen, was a letter supporting Moody on a recent political issue. It was signed Rick Williams.

Williams didn't take the situation lightly. If his colleagues thought he wrote it, he figured, he needed to clear things up. He called Moody and told him he hadn't written the letter. Moody laughed it off, Williams said.

He didn't think anything more of it until more e-mails came.

Psimas received angry messages from someone using the address PoliceLB@aol.com who claimed to be Rick Williams. So did Ed Forlines, then Portsmouth's Chamber of Commerce president.

Then, in mid-October, Heretick acted as the host of a campaign fundraiser at his house. A few days before, a group of civic leaders and residents received an e-mail from PoliceLB@aol.com complaining about the event.

"I know it's short notice but I would like to see if we could organize some pickets outside Mr. Heretick's Octoberfest Bash," the letter read.

Heretick called Williams at the sheriff's department the next day.

"What did I do to you?" Heretick demanded.

Williams was dumbfounded.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he replied.

In a letter to the council Nov. 1, Williams tried to clear up the mess.

"Any negative e-mails have NOT COME FROM ME," he wrote. "Sorry someone is using my name ... in a negative way."

It was signed "Rick Williams (the good one)."

Computer technicians in the sheriff's department tried to prod AOL into disclosing who was using the PoliceLB@aol.com account. Without a legal order forcing the company to provide the information, that was out of the question.

Williams never found out who was using his name.

"This is probably somebody who I know," he said in June. "Obviously, I have somebody who I think is a friend who isn't.

"People should stand up and take responsibility for this."

After that, city officials never heard from PoliceLB@aol.com again. However, they already had begun receiving messages from others.

Carl Haywood criticized the city's new amphitheater manager in several letters. Ann Thomas berated Heretick for bringing his 7-year-old son to a formal city museums fundraiser. She also attacked this year's City Council challengers, Forlines and Doug Smith.

When William E. Russell opened The Pilot in late June 2005, he panicked when he saw a letter to the editor signed "Bill Russell, Portsmouth." He is the only William or Bill Russell in Portsmouth listed in the phone book. He had never seen the letter before.

When Russell learned in May that dozens of negative e-mails have been sent to city officials and others bearing his name, he simply groaned. "Not again," he said.

The letter to the editor -- and several other e-mails -- criticized U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, whose territory encompasses Portsmouth and Chesapeake. In fact, the real Russell, the deputy superintendent for Chesapeake Public Schools , is close with Forbes. In his role as a minister, he gave the invocation at Forbes' swearing-in ceremony. Russell says he believes whoever wrote the letter to the editor was aware of that and intentionally used his name.

"Fortunately, he knew I wouldn't do something like that," Russell said. "But it makes me very uncomfortable. It really is like identity theft. This guy is starting to make me look bad."

According to voter registration records and several research databases, there are no other Bill Russells in Portsmouth. There is no Carl Haywood or a Suzana Seleznev. The only Ann Thomas listed in public records said she has never sent city officials e-mail, and other men in Portsmouth named Rick Williams said they weren't involved. In the instances in which the suspect e-mails provided addresses or neighborhoods, no person by any of the given names lived there.

Earlier this year, council members began to suspect an e-mail problem bigger than just someone pretending to be Rick Williams. Heretick and Ray Smith exchanged e-mails this January after yet another blast from Ann Thomas.

Heretick : Do you have any idea who this woman is? I can't find out anything about her, and so far no one I ask seems to know her.

Smith : I am not sure. You are correct, she has the habit of pouncing on us regularly.

Heretick : I'm wondering if this person really exists ...

Like many old cities, Portsmouth has seen this and worse political chicanery before.

In 1986, letters started appearing in the mailboxes of city leaders who opposed the closing of the old I.C. Norcom High School. The anonymous writings, most crudely scrawled across newspaper clippings, were often obscene and sometimes racist.

Through fingerprinting, handwriting analysis and testimony, the letters were traced to the office of the city's mayor, James Holley.

Holley, who is black, was the only suspect. He never was charged with a crime, but in 1987 he became the first Virginia officeholder to be recalled by voters, cutting short his tenure as mayor to three years.

In 1996, Holley returned in an overwhelming victory and remains mayor .

Now, through technology, an old trick is revived. Even the Internet companies call it an alias, the screen name a person adopts when they create a new e-mail address.

Creating an address with Yahoo or AOL doesn't require a real name or an identity check. Users can make up any screen name they'd like, and AOL subscribers can have multiple e-mail addresses linked to a single account.

In the last few years, the addresses MWR567@aol.com, PoliceLB@aol.com, portsmouthwatch@yahoo.com, cobnetski@yahoo.com and portssail@aol.com all have been used to send out critical e-mails.

The sender has been sloppy. Writers purporting to be Bill Russell, Mr. West and Will Thomas have all sent messages from the MWR567@aol.com account in the last 12 months . Street addresses ranging from Shea Terrace to Green Lakes, at the opposite end of the city, have been linked to that account.

There, too, is something slightly off in Ann Thomas' interest in city spending on consultant contracts. Something odd in Suzana Seleznev's knowing the acronym of a Portsmouth industrial committee. Regular citizens often don't know or care about these details.

Then there are the rare positive messages from the alias accounts.

Several -- and the second of the two letters to the editor -- praise the actions of just two councilmen, Moody, the vice mayor, and Charles Whitehurst . The letter to the editor, sent by the MWR567@aol.com address and published in April, asked voters to select just Moody and Whitehurst in the upcoming election.

In two years, the senders have never criticized Moody and Whitehurst, although they've attacked all five of the other council members and the city manager.

One January e-mail from Ann Thomas, in response to an invitation Heretick mailed for a political fundraiser after the governor's inauguration, states:

"From what I hear about Mr. Heretick, I would not walk across the street to share a refreshment with him, much less Richmond."

Underneath is one line of tiny type, something Heretick never noticed.

"You are subscribed as bil moody@aol.com." That address is Moody's personal e-mail account.

Moody said he forwarded the invitation to a number of people, but he did not know who Ann Thomas is or how his address ended up at the bottom of her message.

Both he and Whitehurst said they had no idea who was behind the e-mails.

In May, The Pilot asked to see all the e-mails that city officials had received from the suspicious addresses.

Since then, each of the accounts has been abandoned and turned off. The final account shut down last week , days after The Pilot sent a message asking the sender to identify himself or herself.

Messages sent to the questionable addresses now bounce back -- "Undeliverable: User Unknown."

* Reach Meghan Hoyer at(757) 446-2293 or meghan.hoyer@pilotonline.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Virginian-Pilot

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