Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
5people
2014–2020years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- By far the most intriguing was Davis Wolfgang Hawke, the "spam Nazi", subject of the 2004 book Spam Kings.
- Read Spam Kings. It covers a lot of the history.
- It says in the article:
> A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum.
so yeah, that's got to be a very messed up psyche, to take on the identity of your enemy.
- It says it right in the article... "A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra."
- I've actually met this guy in the past, after he moved to BC and reinvented himself. His provided name of "Jesse James" was obviously fake and he was clearly sketchy (he claimed to have a PhD in physics, was the CEO of some AI-related startup, and various other outlandish things, and all that within the first ten minutes of speaking with him) but he seemed friendly enough.
The news of his murder was a pretty big shock locally. Everyone is talking about his youthful neo-Nazi fling but to me the most amazing part of this story is his past as a spammer. I read the book Spam Kings way back when and I clearly remember everyone hating these guys. Then fifteen years later or something, I'm chatting with one of those same guys at some local crag without knowing it. I know it's a cliche, but life is strange.
