Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio Zara Elizabeth.
You know you know I'm just char dance and waiting for you as I do these days.
I love it. I love a good shared dance. Listen. Yeah, you know it's ridiculous.
I do. I've been Christmas shopping for you and it's not easy to So I was looking up the James Gardner's daughter was mentioning a cookbook almost got for you. Then I was like, nah, she won't want this. It's
called the Cop Cookbook, The Cop. Yeah, and so it's like it was about because you know, he played uh, obviously Rockford files Garner, and then before that he was also Philip Marlowe, so he'd played some detectives and then they're like, yeah, so James Garner, you know, other than taking on Raymond Chandler's memorable character and then playing uh, the my favorite Jim Rockford. So they have this cake recipe and I was like, oh. It was like I was looking through it. I was like, what are they
got in there? And so I wanted to tell him about this cake recipe. It's called Marlowe's Low Cholesterol Lemon Cake. Right, So in the description, this is not like this is older recipe books, so it's not like you get an essay before.
You get the time a low cholesterol.
Yeah yeah, late seventies case. So they have just like one sentence or two sentences to describe the cake before you get to the recipe, which is like old recipe so wonderful. So the sentences are these. This is our family's favorite cake, which was given to us by our friend Seanna Treebert. It's made for every birthday and holiday and it's always gone by morning, eaten by thieves in the night. So my favorite part though, this is where you get the low cholesterol. The first ingredient is non
stick cooking spray. The second ingredient is all purpose flour. The third ingredient is one package of white cake mix. Wait, and then it's like you get some vegetable oil, some waters, mag whites, and vanilla extract, and then three ounce package of sugar free lemon gelatin.
Stop. It is so Southern to use. I used to try and collect all these like church cookbooks, because there would have they would have stuff like this like Grandma's something cake. Get one box of chocolate cake. No no, no, no, But my all time favorite is. There was one recipe in a church cookbook that I got when I lived down in the South that was for Snicker biscuits.
Okay, that sounds good and ingredients.
You get one can of Pillsbury biscuits, like the kind where you have to like pop it over violently pop open, so you get those biscuits and then you get little bite sized Snickers. The individually wrapped is the other ingredient, and you shove it into the biscuit. Yeah, and then wrap like the biscuit around it and bacon.
That's the recipe.
That's the recipes I came up with a Snicker biscuits.
Those are my favorite stoner Snickers biscuits.
What you need to doms you can't even forget it. It was the crat Snicker biscuits.
So Grandma, oh yeah.
But any of these like family recipes that call for box cake, Thick's amazing. And you know what, they are ridiculous?
You know it.
Do you want to know what else is ridiculous?
Please?
Stealing for stealing's sake? Oh oh, this is Ridiculous Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers. Hie cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Damn.
Yes, I am.
Books, Elizabeth Books. I love books, books, books, McGee.
How many books do you think you own?
Hundreds and bordering into the low thousands.
Yeah, i'd say so. I don't have that many physical copy books in my possession right now, Like I'd say I probably have maybe around one hundred or so. Really, Yeah, most of my are stored at my mom's house.
How many do you have there?
Well, her collection is like in the thousands. Yeah, i'd probably go up to like fifteen hundred or something like that. Yeah, she has a full library in the house. She means business. I think it's safe to say that she reads like four books a month.
That's good.
Yeah. Anyway, I have a ton of books on my kindle. Oh okay, I checked earlier today. I can't read off nine hundred and seventy three damn my library. But I've recently moved over to audible.
Okay.
So, because I have to wear glasses now both distance and reading, and I'm miserable, so I like to visually raw dog the world old. So I don't usually wear my glasses at all, and the only time I always wear them is when I'm driving.
Huh, well that's least responsible of you.
Yeah. Or it's like I have to read more than like a paragraph. You put them on, I snap on the specs because I'm so old anyway, I don't like to do that. So I started listening to books.
Wait a minute, that's why.
Yeah, I only have eighty four books on my audible library right now.
I can't read books off of kindles, and I cannot listen to books on Audible because I won't remember what I hear. I have to like read them so I can create. It is a problem. It is I can't read where I'm not flipping pages. For some reason, I really need the tactile feel.
Okay, I like the did I resisted the Kindle went to it actually really liked it. And then I'm trying to get into audible.
But how's it working for you?
I love it, but I do miss reading like actually looking at I should probably put my glasses.
Do you remember the stories with the same vivid No, that was quick.
But then, and I also don't remember the stories that I read on hard.
I don't remember anything anymore.
No, I remember who are you? So what's my point? My point? Is that we love books. We both love we've both written books. It's true, yep books. I told you stories about book.
Criminals before you have I have a book.
I'm gonna do it again today. Son. Yeah, so I have a book thief. But he's unusual, so I usually I actually don't think there's a typical book thief.
I was wondering about that.
They're a weird lot, but this guy is even outside of that to some extent. He's kind of like our man John Gilkey, who was pursued by biblio Dick Ken Sanders. This guy he wasn't into the thefts as a means of enriching his bank account.
Okay, so he wasn't going for high dollar.
Books, and he didn't do it for the money.
Looking for delicious books. Is he like eating them?
No, he did it for the love of books.
No, m giving the game.
But he didn't do it in the way that Guilkey did it because remember, like Guilkey wanted rarities, first editions, and he wanted to build like this impressive library, so something that someone important would have, like someone accomplished. The guy I'm going to tell you about today. He also stole books, but He didn't do it to sell them and make money. It was for the love of the books, but also for what they meant, And in his case, it wasn't the glamour or the power of a fine library.
It was the symbol of access. Oh so I'm curious, zaren close your eyes. No, I'm not messing. You really are close them. I want you to picture it.
Don't yell it.
It's January fifth, twenty twenty two. You are a customs agent at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Before you is a long line of travelers eager to get their passport stamped, passed through your kiosk, and head out into the US of A. Some chat with each other, All of them seemed exhausted from their travels and flummixed by the long line ahead of them. Some looked longingly over at the global entry area. No line, just the
occasional traveler breezing through with no asshole. The airport speaker's broadcast announcements in a calm tone, calm yet unintelligible. A baby cries at the far end of the line, and in a silence, with gentle whispers from his mother. You look at the line in front of you, a woman with a messy updo, a chic yet casual outfit and a roller suitcases up next. You raise your hand to waver forward, and she approaches your counter. You run through
your usual questions. What is the purpose of your visit tourism? I'm actually here to go shopping. How long will you be staying? Ten days, she tells you. Where will you be staying at the Ace hotel? You look down at a British passport. Do you have anything to declare? Not a thing?
Love?
She says? What do you do for a living? I'm an interior designa, she says, with a smile. Have you been to the US before? Many times? She says, I love it here. You stay up for passport and wave her through. She thanks you and heads out to the waiting city. You look up and see the next man in line. You look down at the portion of your desk that runs under the counter out of you with the travelers, there are a few photos of people for
whom you are to be on the lookout. You compare one of the photos to the man standing in line. That's him. You press a button on the corner of your desk and then wave the man forward. He approaches your desk and slides his passport to you europe Republic Passaporto. You flip it open, Filippo Bernardini. You look him in the eye. He seems calm. You clear your throat, and you're about to ask him the purpose of his visit when he is suddenly flanked by FBI agents. They quietly
tell him to take his passport come with them. So wait, zaren, that's the climax of the story.
I gave it away, yes, wondering, I let you know.
The story before everyone else got a chance. Actually, I was using a literary tech.
What is that?
I have a degree in this? There and mess with me. I know what I'm doing. Let's go back to the beginning. Oh, I'm already gripped, so Filippo Bernardini.
Yes, Philip Phil, Hey, phil phil Phil.
He grew up in Italy, m surprise. He was a lonely child. He was shy with drawn. Books were a refuge for him, so they gave him companionships, structure, meaning and reading friends. Friends. Reading wasn't just a hobby, it was how he learned to feel connected to something larger than himself.
Aimes be like, you know, the cigar rollers in Cuba. He gets paid to read stories, like maybe he had like a grandfather who's like, I give him a couple of quarters, he reads me a book. Yeah, for his job as a child.
For them, I mean, I get it. I was a child bookworm because books were often far more interesting than my peers.
Oh you know I read yeah a kid. I used to a lot of pizza in the reading context.
Exactly Slade. So this attachment to books shaped his ambitions. So he pursued education and work that would like put him near literature, not as a writer or creator, just someone like in proximity to it all in the reflected glory. He wanted access. He wanted to be part of the world that books came from before they reached the public.
So on LinkedIn, he said he had a quote obsession for the written word in languages, and according to his profile on there, he got his bachelor's in Chinese language from the University in Milan. He said he also served as the Italian translator for the Chinese comic book author
Rau Pingrew's memoir Our Story. He then got a master's in publishing from University College London and on the site he said his passion was ensuring quote books can be read and enjoyed all over the world and in multiple languages. This is so true, they really can't.
It's a great thing about books.
The thing about books read can be read all over the world. So by the early to mid like twenty tens of twenty teens, he had he got a job in the publishing industry in the UK. He worked as a rights coordinator for the British branch of Simon and Schuster. It's a big, big publisher. His role put him inside like a legitimate corporate structure, gave him daily exposure to the mechanics of global publishing.
He's looking at all those arcs and manuscripts at the published.
Yes, so a rights coordinator is not like a junior assistant, but it's also not central to editorial decision making. So it means like managing foreign rights communications. He would track licensing agreements, coordinate with all like international partners, had to have like a really good attention to detail, discretion, and like constant email correspondence with agents, editors and rights professionals.
So it provided visibility into the movement of manuscripts without granting authority or access to them.
Yeah, he's not changing any words, right.
So basically he was positioned at the edge of the manuscript pipeline. He's talking about manuscripts, but he's not actually seeing them. He could see when books were being discussed, shopped, prepared for foreign sales. He can see the names of editors, agents, scouts who were like exchanging early drafts, but he wasn't in those exchanges. So over time he starts to feel really excluded, and he's like, this is even more than just like professional hierarchy. This is a personal slight soelt
he felt invisible, he felt undervalued. Zerum he believed that access to manuscripts represented belonging itself. So without it, he's like, you know what, I'm not really a part of publishing. I'm just on the And so he's like, you know what, I want to check that right now. If you're in this position, how would you change that?
Get a new job, could work in a bookstore, I don't know what would you do?
Well, a lot of publishing is who you know.
Definitely, and also how many followers.
Do you have on Well, there's that, like there's some some people are able to make their way in the in the industry through like sheer displays of talent and acumen.
Yeah, it's getting refer and uer for most of its network.
Yeah, and it's like that's honestly so much it's how people get ahead. I mean, I know that's true of a lot of industries, but I am blown away by how outsized that is when it comes to publishing.
Well, so it's much like Hollywood. They're more and more risk averse, more and more being counters have gotten involved, and now they want to have a book that's going to sell really well the first month, and you don't get like what's come girl with her book Conto that's sold like nineteen hundred copies after they pushed out of it.
So whoever, it's such a cancer.
Right, whoever signed Olivia Notzi her contract for that book, their whole career he's got foreshortened because some people don't want that. They don't want to be the one who brought Tanto to the.
Market exactly exactly. So like here you've got Bernadini right, like he he's a guy who loves books, but he doesn't come from like a literary family with connections. He doesn't have school connections, because that's what I found is another thing like that makes a big difference in the publishing induto. And he's not like a hustler in terms of schmoozing and getting to know all the right people and positioning himself to move up the ladder.
And then he doesn't have like the Italian equivalent of the University of Iowa's like workshops.
It's like exactly, oh my gosh, exactly. But he wants more, and so he came up with a plan. He was gonna be sneaky. He was going to fool people.
I'm listening, He's going to.
Get what he wanted. Go for access. Let's take a break, we come back access Zaren, Elizabeth Saren, Philippe Berndi great name. But Phil Bernandi, Phil Barry, Phil Bernie, Bernie, Phil burn Burns unlikely criminal very much. So here he is here, he is Phil working and publishing, which had been his dream. But once he's in it, he looks around, He's like, wait, I'm still an outsider. How did this happen? He didn't get to have his finger on the pulse of the industry.
He didn't get to see the books as they were ushered through the process from hand to hardback.
Yeah, he's a cog far from the action.
Yes, everyone around him knew about the big hits way before they went to the stores. They'd already read them. They were miles ahead. He wanted that. So instead of using his crafty brain to maneuver himself into the area of publishing where he.
Could be that guy, Yeah it would be possible.
No, he tried something else. Around August of twenty sixteen, he started constructing this like multi year scheme. He was going to steal manuscripts, and not like in a cool Nicholas cageway. No, he was stealing the books before they became real books. He didn't want to steal the stories or like shop him as his own. He wasn't going to sell them. He just wanted to get his hands on the currency of his dream industry. He just wanted to feel the books, not even feel the digitals.
Not even getting like he's got the scent of new paper.
So basically he came up with like a multi layered cyber impersonation campaign.
Phil.
He built it to exploit weaknesses in the publishing world's very informal practices. So the publishing industry relies really heavily on email. Communication is real between authors, agents, editors, and scouts, and so pre publication manuscripts are typically circulated by like trusted individuals, but they are not elaborate security protocols.
No, they're attachments and emails exactly.
Hopefully a PDF, sometimes a word doc. So Bernardini built his own infrastructure that mimicked this trust network. So first we're spoofed domains. He registered domains that were nearly identical to actual publishers and literary agencies. His techniques fell into three major categories. First was character substitution. So let's say the actual website is, you know, realdomain dot com, right,
so heat registered real door nain dot com. So making instead of having M use RN so it looks with bad Kurning or whatever, quick reading or r EAI domains, so instead of an L, put a lowercase I. The most common substitutions were M became RN, RN became M was his zero AE, that kind of stuff, so really subtle changes that bypassed casual visual scrutiny, and we're like really effective because most people don't look at email headers.
You just skim it or you see their name and then like it's you know, peripherally.
Oh and also if you're doing like typos, you wouldn't notice if he had one that's just one letter away on the on the.
Keyboard, right exactly. So so that's where the emails are coming from. These these websites that have you know, these these domain names. Then there was top level domain variations. So let's say that the legitimate website is publishername dot com. The spoof is publisher name dot co or org or US. Sometimes he would add or remove a country code to like mimic multinational imprints. And then the third thing was hyphenation. So let's say that you had a literary agency, the
Burnett Agency, okay, and your website is Burnett Agency dot com. Right, Bernardini would register Burnette hyphenagency dot com or agency hyphen Burnett dot com or like the Burnet Agency, right and like but putting these hyphens in, and so it would like mimic these naming styles used across international publishing. He made fake sites that looked plausible even to industry insiders.
Oh wow.
Yeah. So with the fake sites came fake email accounts. He configured email accounts under real employee names. So a lot of the spoofed emails contained copied signatures and formatting that he took from legitimate correspondence. Okay, and then he timed requests to coincide with like natural publishing workflows, so
like right before the Frankfurt or London book fairs. So manuscript exchanges are increasing, Totally, a lot of authors and agents expect manuscripts to be sent around constantly, and so these emails they don't raise suspicions.
Not at all.
So who's the targeting's errant.
And also who's really good? Who in the criminals sense of things. Yeah, you would not think criminals would be doing this, So it just so beneath the page.
Your everyday work, you don't think twice about these things. Yeah, so the targets, right, He's focusing on individuals who control unpublished content. In that literary pipeline, authors were the main one, well, especially those with like upcoming high profile releases, so debut authors also they're more likely to quickly cooperate with requests from industry professionals.
Yeah, they don't know it's a standard or totally.
I guess I got to send it again to this guy so like they fell for it. He'd usually contact authors directly with like this urgent or super friendly tone, like hey, can you send me the latest draft for evaluation purposes, like just really quickly. So then we got
the agents. Okay, agents are always sharing manuscripts with scouts and editors, so he exploited it by impersonating scouts or editors requesting material from agents, and they would love to comply, Oh totally, And they've got such a high volume of email that they get, so they're just like, yeah, yeah,
let me just clear this send it off. Plus as you're saying like, oh yeah, I want to sell this thing, and a lot of agents work with international scouts, like on a daily basis, and so they're constantly forwarding stuff to maintain deal momentum. So then you know they were Obviously we'd have the editors coming in there. They're exchanging manuscripts with colleagues and with translators, and he impersonated both.
So editors were targets because they have access to the earliest version of major works, and they share drafts widely for acquisitions or foreign rights, and they're really used to getting like dozens of manuscript requests during peak publication periods they get overwhelmed. And then lastly, we have the literary scouts. So these are people they work between agents and publishers to identify promising books, and they maintain these databases of
pre publication intelligence. So Bernardini's most sophisticated attacks involved Scouts because the scouts held confidential project lists. That's what he wanted an access to. So they're the keepers of the coolness,
like as far as he's concerned, literal gatekeepers exactly. They track international deals, translation rights, and he found that their staff tend to reuse similar passwords across company systems and like that's all offices really, but like he noticed in particular, so this is the group whose credentials he successfully phished using a fake site, Like he unlocked access to internal communication archives. So from twenty seventeen to twenty nineteen he
expanded his operation. He was really methodical about it. He registered dozens of spoofed domains and it just kept growing and growing until he had more than one hundred and sixty websites. Each one was impersonating a legitimate organization, that's incredible, and each email impersonated a real person and like manuscripts are just flowing in draft novels, non fiction proposals, early versions of books that would later become major releases.
Can you imagine his like organizational stuff on his computer. He has all this wrapped out, like the files.
He would download all of it and store them privately, like on his home computer. Didn't steal them, but there's no evidence he never shared them with anyone else. He did nothing with them beyond possession. He didn't try and sell them, He didn't upload them anywhere, did not try and like exploit the market value. He wasn't trying to pirate them. Yeah, he just wanted to have this, stole them to steal them. So who did he target?
Who are the writers he liked, not like you know, what do you call grocery store authors like Scott Trow.
Okay, so they're like the government hasn't released like a full list of victims, but there are some that we do know that he got. So Margaret Atwood really she publicly confirmed that a manuscript of hers had been stolen by him. It was the draft for The Testaments, which is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. Okay, and at
the time it's you know, obviously unpublished. She later wrote about the experience, and she described it as deeply unsettling, and she emphasized, well, she said the theft wasn't just like technical, but personal, and she said early drafts are private and vulnerable. Oh yeah, And so knowing that like an unknown individual out there and unsubbed had obtained one really distressed her, even though like the manuscript was never leaked beyond him. There's this writer, James Hannahem. He told
The New York Times, quote, you feel violated. I don't want anyone to know how bad the early drafts of things are.
Oh wow, writers pride you think about it.
Think about early draft when you're like I just barfed this out here and I haven't tinkered with it.
I want someone to kind of tell me how the flow is.
And you look back at it. Oh my god, I get published totally, totally. So other titles scammed such a fun Age by Kylie Read, the Sign for Home by Fell, A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke, Wow, and Hush by Dylan Farrow.
Wow.
Yeah. So there were unsuccessful attempts.
There were a lot of them.
In fact, he was swinging for the fences with one in twenty seventeen. So March first, twenty seventeen, this book publisher in Sweden gets a weird email A colleague in Venice vints. Yeah, wanted access to a top secret document. It was the unpublished manuscript of the fifth book in Steve Larsen's Millennium series.
I was a gun, a guest said Sweden.
I figured, so, you know, those are the ones about Elizabeth Salander, the Girl with the Dragon tattoo. Those books have sold more than one hundred million copies.
World where they were huge. But then that was when he was still like, people were going, is there going to be another book?
Well, no, this is because it's the fifth, right, So Steve Larson he passed away after the first three. Yeah, at this point, yeah, and then there's this other Swedish author, David lagger Crowns. He continued the series if.
He had notes in it, everything for it.
Right, the fifth book, The Man who Chased His Shadow, was going to like expected to be a blockbuster. It's gonna be huge, and everyone was trying to keep a lid on it. The author lager Kronz. He wrote his first extension of the series, the book four, on a computer that wasn't even hooked up to the Internet. Because remember there was so much secrecy around the whole series. He printed every well, there were all these conspiracy theories after Larsen died.
And behind how much is this going to be actually his book?
Yeah, so this lager Crowns he printed everything out and delivered it by hand to the publisher and it felt a little excessive for the fifth book. They're like, you know what I think, Like, you know, we can probably figure something out, like for the love of God, dude, right, So the publisher was like, there has to be a secure digital way to do this, so they asked around. They found out about hush mail, which is an encrypted email service and it has like two factor authentication.
A disappearing email.
No everyone involved has to sign an NDA. So this weird email from the lady in Venice, Francesca Varoto. She's an Italian edition editor, so she supposedly wrote to the publisher Darre, Linda and Catherine. I hope you're well. Could you please resend me the link to the manuscript of the Man who Chased His Shadow. Thank you best, Francesca. So then like the literary agent for this got basically the same message, which is, this is crazy. How could
someone lose the link for something so important? It be so flippant about it. It sounds like a Valley Girl when she's in Venice, Italy. So like, while everyone's thinking like that's kind of weird, she emails again and was like, I need new log in credentials. It's not that I don't even have the link, Like I think my mind has expired. So can you just give me a new log in?
I've lost everything.
So another employee at the publisher sent an email asking if everything's okay, just like a fresh email, not responding to the chain. Phone immediately rings. It's yeah, She's like, what are you talking about? I have not sent you anything and I did not lose my login. So everyone goes back to the original weird emails, and Varoto noticed that the signature on the fake email had her old job title on it.
I was wondering also if she had like an old signature where it's like I don't even use that quote anymore.
The quotes and the signatures goupless, Why I feel so inspired? No, it was like she had gotten a promotion like two months prior, and so they you know, it was like the subject line also misspelled the name of her company, a little problem there, and the domain on the email address was wrong Instead of dot it at the end
for Italy, it was dot com. So they all got nervous that maybe the emails had like a trojan horse in them or something, so they deleted them, and then Veroto's IT guys they found that the fake dot com domain had been created the day before, and it was registered to an address in Amsterdam and had this Dutch phone number. One of the IT guys calls it and it goes straight to voicemail. Thank you for calling IBM. Really yeah, which I would just be like, okay, this
is some girl with the dragon tattoo stuff. Yeah, like I'd be, you know, freaking out.
I'm dealing with packers. Yeah.
Everyone involved in the book felt like they were suddenly under attack, Like how else would this person try and infiltrate their systems to get their hands on the manuscript?
North Korea?
Yeah, like they're does like red siren lights or you know, they're running and like close the doors, close the blinds. This is going to ruin the whole book, release, the world tour. But nothing else what tour the world tour, but nothing else happened. Manuscript wasn't leaked, the book came out as planned. So in July of TWI though, like Bernardini, he's like, I gotta up my game. He escalates his methods. He created a fake website that replicated the log in
portal of a real literary scouting firm. The design was like identical.
You think he can take these skills and get a new job, one.
Would think, one would think. So he sent emails like directing employees to log in, and he captured their credentials in the process, and then about like twenty users entered their usernames and passwords.
So he did like a phishing campaign.
Yeah, like please log into the website and they're like okay, you go. So now he's got the credentials, he gets unauthorized access to all these internal databases that had confidential industry information, so like manuscript tracking grids, all the acquisition notes, internal correspondence, and then all the attachments and so this let him see which manuscripts were circulating, who had access,
where they were heading next. So he uses all this information and he starts sending emails that referenced specific projects or submission stages or like the editorial conversations. So he's impersonating colleagues with like incredible accuracy, and he's referencing information that only insiders would know. He's no longer guessing it stuff, and so he's navigating this ecosystem from within. Still, no manuscripts are leaked, and so this phase like accounts for
a large portion of the stolen manuscripts. This is when he's just like he's like threw the net out into the fish ridge water.
Very specific one too, and prosecutors later.
Estimated the number that he pinched at more than a thousand. Damn, Sean, it's a lot of books, myan, dude, let's stop and think about that. I want you to think about it, Zaren. And when we return, we're going to go to the airport, Zaren. Elizabeth Zavin, are you reading a book right now?
Yes, so good. That's what I was. I was flipping through a book. You can see here in my hands.
The book I'm reading is that Daniel Steele. So we've got Philippo Bernetti really putting you know, the heat on that one.
That was good. He's putting a lot English on that Italian name.
Phil Burnos. He's a book nerd extraordinaire.
Have you on the extraordinary?
This is a guy who wants to know all the spoilers parents right, like he's doing so.
Much, so much worse, such a little payoff. Yes, yes, I hope he was giving him the feeling he wanted to think.
So by twenty twenty, there were like subtle signs of the fraud that's surfacing, Like some authors and agents started to notice the unusual email variations and like messages that you know came from familiar people but like slightly altered addresses, and like sometimes they get the same request twice from like nearly identical senders.
So or like maybe they're dealing with that editor and some other recent exchange.
Yeah, and then all of a sudden, it's like, wait, we just talked. So in late twenty twenty, Publisher's Marketplace announced that Little Brown would be publishing a novel called re Entry, and it was written by James Hannaham, who I quoted earlier. It was about a transgender woman paroled from a men's prison, and the editor for the book was announced as Ben George So. Two days after this announcement comes out in publisher's marketplace. Hannaham gets an email
from the editor Ben George. The editor is asking for the latest draft of the manuscript, so hannahem. He has a website and on it is an email contact link, and that's where the email went, not to his usual account, so he didn't think anything of it. He just opened his regular email account and sent off the docum. Then his phone rings, it's the editor. He's like, I didn't send you any email asking for this. So like everyone's starting to get like they're whispering about this. It's because
weird things are happening. Penguin, Random House and Simon and Schuster his own employer, two of the biggest publishers. They sent out warnings about the scam to staff, so he had to have gotten that email.
Yeah, so they can.
See that there's like this fraud store at work, but they can't figure out exactly who they are, like what they want why.
Yeah, And also nothing's ever coming out. There's no damage being done to the authors or the companies.
That's so according to Reeves Wideman.
And this is also before like AI stuff, so you wouldn't be like saying they're worried that they're using this to train their large language.
Yeah. No, exactly this New York Magazine article quote. Some in publishing were beginning to question whether manuscripts were even the end goal. How else to explain why the thief would want sample pages of Bong June Ho's Parasite Storyboards and a ten page book proposal for Michael J. Fox Memoir. After a rights manager in Germany got hit, she speculated that a security company was stress testing publishers in the hopes of later selling them protective software.
That's an interesting theory.
Yeah, several friends I spoke to who considered themselves the good kind of hackers, so this sounded like a Cybergang's training program. The stakes were low, the targets weren't especially tech savvy, and there was a deliverable target, the manuscript that a new recruit could bring home before moving on to stealing login credentials from employees at a nuclear reactor. In the wake of North Korea's alleged leaking of emails from Sony Pictures, could this be another attempt to destabilize
Western culture? Dramatic perhaps, but then again, I had found nearly two hundred companies in more than thirty countries that the thief had impersonated, and none of them was Russian. Damn. So it's just it's so widespread.
That's a really big nets two hundred companies, yes countries.
So then the story hits the New York Times in December of twenty twenty. They wrote, quote, whoever the thief is, he or she knows how publishing works and has mapped out the connections between authors and the constellation of agents, publishers and editors who would have access to their material. This person understands the path a manuscript takes to go from submission to publication, and it is at ease with insider LINGO like MS instead of manuscript like. Okay, that's
not the hardest thing to dot. That's gotta be an inside jo. So no one understood the scope or the source of the activity. There's no obvious pattern that points to a single purp. It just seemed weird. Behind the scenes, cybersecurity teams started tracing suspicious domains and like patterns emerged.
Domain registrations were clustered together, the hosting details overlapped and phishing incidences were linked to the same infrastructure, so the Feds come in, they start investigating, and by late twenty twenty one they had a suspect. So Bernardini. He lands at JFK Airport January of twenty twenty two. Federal agents arrest him. Immediately. You were there, you were getting ready
to remember the passport. The Department of Justice charged him with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, and then they laid out this like six year campaign of impersonation and unauthorized access. The publishing industry was just stunned, in part because like everyone had their own pet theory, and Bernardini fit none of them.
Nobody was even closed, no one.
Was even remotely close. A lot of folks thoughts, since they knew detective novels and thrillers, that they would for sure be able to crack the case. They would say it in interviews like we know, we know detective stories.
I was going to say, well, he's breaking the classic like the rule, which is who benefits, he's not benefiting, no, yeah, and.
You can't follow the money like yeah, exactly. So the majority of those who were tracking the whole thing were positive that the purp was a literary scout and they were sure that whoever this person was, they were in New York, so because he tried to like mimic Eastern time zone apparently, so like a good chunk of those folks actually thought it was like one particular guy who's
kind of like a horse's ass insult. Oh yeah, it would have been great to be able to finally pin him on him and everyone's like, man, yeah, he was just like this super jerk and then was like, it's gotta be him, dude. The other thing was that the scale of the operation was unprecedented. It's like hundreds of people had been impersonated, and like, as we said, more than a thousand manuscripts are taken. But we don't have motive.
It doesn't make any sense. There's no financial gain, like you said, no, So during the investigation, authorities found zero evidence that he ever intended to profit from the manuscripts. He admitted to him, I just like to read them private.
Seriously, where did you do with them?
And he said he said he felt compelled to get his hands on him because like the access itself was the reward, the idea that he has access to all this stuff that he kind.
Of like you know, kept out. He wasn't an outsider, he was the insiders insider.
Yeah. January twenty twenty three, he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.
Wondering what they're going to charge him with.
Yeah, he was also charged with identity theft, but they dropped that as part of the plea agreement. He was sentenced in March of twenty three and the judge was like, you know, this is this is a really unique situation. So he gets sentenced to time served, ordered to pay eighty eight thousand dollars in restitution, placed on supervised release, and then deported.
They take away his internet access be guess not.
And he so he has this like written statement where he expressed from Morris. He said that books which were once his refuge had become reminders of his wrongdoing. His career in publishing is over, Like books are ruined for him. He has nothing. So the judge like noted the seriousness of the crime and like the harm that he caused that you know here these authors had like this fear and this sense of violations that publishing professionals who'd been falsely suspected of wrongdoing.
Who's the j is like, you know, come on, guys, and so like a great way to find out.
No one likes the FBI keeps coming to your office, like are you sure you didn't do it? No, I didn't.
We'd like you to submit for yet another test.
We have so many people have accused you, and so like trust is damaged all across the industry that you know, people are now they don't believe emails that are coming in everyone's double triple checking. In the months after the case, all these publishing houses they started revising their security practices.
Don't a bunch of new it guys are showing up that he created, So.
Like email verification improved, manuscript sharing became way more controlled, and then there was training and fishing and impersonation like that that all these employees had to go through. But the case, it like left behind this deeper unease. Because he's not an outsider exploiting publishing from afar calls coming
from inside the house. He understood the culture of the rhythms, the vulnerabilities, and so the crime like exposes how dependent the industry had become upon you know, trust without.
Verification, Yeah, completely.
And it forced really uncomfortable questions about access and exclusion, and like obsession in creative industries.
Also, what about the publishing houses that he didn't imitate? Did they feel like we're on the outs, we didn't books anything worthwhile? That's how you find out you're like not a hot agent.
Oh that's so painful. Yeah, and that hurt their feelings. I'm guessing a lot of Bruce digos so like his actions, they're criminal, they're deliberate.
You're hit brunch lying about it like, oh my god.
Yeah, he tried to hack us like fifteen times.
Totally imitated me, like at least six times, like just in one year.
You like that you start spreading these rumors that your book was one of the ones. Yeah, you know, it's crazy. I kept telling people how did this get?
I called Margaret that one. I was like me too, girl.
So you have like he has his desire to belong right and he winds up destroying every connection.
That he saw, completely connection to the thing he loves.
And there aren't precedents for the cases like this.
Yeah, no, I don't know how they.
Intellectual property theft revolves around profit for the most part, and like so his is just about possession and it's like emotionally driven. So like even among non monetary frauds. It's unusual because the scale was so massive. It's more comparable to like massive financial cybercrime. So you can't find any analogs in anything. The sophistication was approaching like state level.
In person, I was going to say, yeah, really, it's much more like the North Korean hackers and the Russian hackers that type of move.
Yeah, And then he's targeting creative labor rather than the institutions directly.
There's not a lot of laws to protect the feelings of vulnerability of authors.
Which you're very sensitive. And then we have this like total apps. There's no spectacle, there's no profit, there's no coersion. So in the end, he didn't steal the books to sell them, like I said, he just wanted to feel close. He wanted to feel chosen, Yeah, part of that world. And he crosses this like legal and ethical line, he
can't come back. And so publishing figures out, like you know, the quietest crimes can be the most devastating, truly, Zaren, I wonder what's your ridiculous takeaways question?
I wonder if anyone this happens to be my ridiculous take perfect. So it works out. Well, Yeah, I wonder if anyone like felt bad for him and like would flip him a bone and like send him a manuscript like before it goes out. Anyway, just includes him on the like email list. Let's see if anyone noticed this is this from Bernadini what the guy?
The guy like at Gmail?
I will totally do that. If I was an agency right now, I was an author who had a new book, I would send it to.
Him on like A I would create a fake Bernadinie email.
Address or your new pen spelled two l's like, and then.
Just copy it on everything, and people like, what is wrong with you?
I'm sick of.
Your detective is filled, Berdine.
You want to feel included, you want access? Here you go, you know what we need?
Wait, wait, wait a minute, you didn't tell me your ridiculous What was it that is?
This is so weird? There are no analogs, there's nothing like that, George. Yeah, sure, okay, say it was? Who was my musings and my takeaway? You know what I really need is a talk bag? Oh? I love Hi, Elizabeth and Zarren.
My name is Eric, and I am calling to you from my home in Watertown, Wisconsin, home of Ryan Bogwart. There's such a thrill to hear you guys talk about my little town of my home of forty four years. I just wanted to let you know about the culture, Elizabeth. You called it lovely. I would call it drunk. We were probably the drinking oft town in the drinking estate in the Union, and at one point we had a downtown intersection where three of the four buildings were bars.
Have a good day.
That sounds pretty lovely to meet, dude.
Yeah, I mean, what is lovely?
It's another person's what is.
It about the latte? It's like we always think about like tropical places it being like drunk because like of advertising, right, it's like, oh yeah, live moths come down and get drunk here, and like we oh, like we have like you know, the Christmas lights in our palm tree of your corona, like we associated. But really the more northern latitudes, the drunker and the real whole fashional drinking.
And the winter days are so short.
Is that what it is? It just gets dark.
I lived it.
It's bizarre like Iceland, Wisconsin, doesn't matter, Glasgow, Russia, all of Mongolia. I mean, it's just.
Yeah, what else she gonna do. It's cold, it's dark.
They ferment horses, milking monk. Like, we can drink off that you drunk off.
There's a was it seagull wine or whatever?
Oh, that's right.
The last day.
There's some stuff like when I hear some of the drinks people drinking northern latitudes and you're talking to somebody who will pretty much try any drink. What you got liquorund it, I'll try it. They have stuff there. Then I'm like, dude, what now, like seagull wine or whatever. I'm like that, you know, Oh, that's like you we we've lost God's light here.
That was awesome, Well lovely. That's it for today. You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also at Ridiculous Crime on Blue Sky and on Instagram. We're on YouTube at ridiculous Crime Pod. You can email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com, and most importantly, leave us a talk back on the free iHeart app reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton and Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Literary Scout for the
Baltimore Orioles Dave Coustin starring Analyse, Rucker is Judith. Research is by QR Code, Restaurant menu Thief Marissa Brown and student group Project PowerPoint Thief to Barie Davis. The theme song is by Phillible Pdf Thief Thomas Lee and heavily formatted Excel Spreadsheets EF Travis Dutton. Host wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred. Guest hair and makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive producers are LG. Dishwasher Manual author
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