Why Was Deep Capture Shut Down?
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http://mindbodypolitic.com/2011/10/22/patrick-byrnes-deep-capture-site-shut-down/#comment-110717
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http://mindbodypolitic.com/2011/10/23/why-was-deep-capture-shut-down/
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October 22, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized
Patrick Byrne’s Deep Capture was an important expose of the subversion of the major financial media; it also documented corrupt ties between the big banks and the speculators.
Now it has been shut down temporarily, reports EconomicPolicyJournal.com. The URL returns a blank page.
I will be adding links  as I find more.
[Sorry. I won't be adding links to any of its pages. I read the court order and some of the current defamation law in Canada. It seems that even hyperlinks by a third-party, sans commentary, can be construed as defamatory.  There you go. You can yell the vilest invective all day long at ordinary people. But serious financial or political stories? Then watch for libel litigation, court injunctions, gag orders, and legal threats.
So copy or link to any scraped or republished pages at your own peril. You might have to defend yourself in Vancouver at your own expense.]
My own sense is that there is more involved here than simply Mr. Nazerali’s wounded reputation.
Two other sites shut down recently, The new Sanity Check by Bob O’Brian (aka The Easter Bunny) and Christoph Amberger’s Green Laser Reviews.
Note: The old Sanity Check (upto 2006) is still up.
They are all connected to the financial crisis, but I won’t be saying more about them to avoid any problems. If you want more information, I suggest you do your own research, bearing in mind that most of the links relevant to understanding what happened have been removed.
All three helped me a great deal in figuring out parts of the financial crisis, but it would be wise to understand that doing google searches alone isn’t going to help you do that. They had compiled a number of fascinating and suggestive facts, but putting them together in a way that can stand up in court or hold off libel suits is a different cup of tea altogether.
The investigative journalist is always on the losing end of the deal, fighting the ticking clock tracking down footnotes strong enough to hold up in court, and, if the footnotes do hold up, running risks to himself and his family.
Not a good deal. Which is why I don’t dabble in investigative stuff as such, but prefer analyzing the broader picture.
I notice by the way that Judd Bagley hasn’t been named.  I’m guessing it’s because his research was meticulous to the point of over-kill. He analyzed wikipedia manipulation and  captured IP addresses from there and from message boards.  But even that kind of research also has its legal (and ethical) gray areas that targets will be quick to exploit….
Here is Stockwatch’s Mike Caswell:

“Vancouver promoter Altaf Nazerali has won a court order that has at least temporarily shut down the deepcapture.com website. He complained that the site, which purports to expose stock market wrongdoing, posted material portraying him as a criminal and a fraud artist. The order, handed down in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, Oct. 19, instructs the site’s host to block access to any material referring to Mr. Nazerali and prohibits the domain’s registrar from allowing a transfer of the domain.
While it is not clear how much of deepcapture.com directly referred to Mr. Nazerali, attempts to access any part of the site only returned a blank screen on Friday. The order was granted without any prior notice to deepcapture.com. Unless extended, it remains in effect until Dec. 2, 2011.
Nazerali’s claim
The order came the same day that Mr. Nazerali filed a notice of claim against the site and its operators. He claimed that deepcapture.com linked him with Mafia figures and an associate of Osama bin Laden, among others. The defendants included naked short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who is the publisher of the site. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant was Illinois resident Mark Mitchell, who the suit identified as the author of much of the material that Mr. Nazerali complained of.
According to the suit, deepcapture.com posted the defamatory material in a series of chapters. One, dated July, 2011, stated that Mr. Nazerali was an important figure at Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “the massive criminal enterprise that did business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia to Colombian drug cartels.” His business partners, as listed in the passage, included Mufti al Abbar, “chief market manipulator for Muammar Qadaffi,” and “an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali’s mobster friend Egor Chernov).”
Another chapter claimed that Mr. Nazerali’s associates included Yasin al Qadi, “Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier.” It also linked with other Middle Eastern figures. “Nazerali, recall, has working relationships with … members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan’s ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network.”
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Why Was Deep Capture Shut Down?
October 23, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized
The timing and manner of the temporary court order (see my earlier blog post) that prevents access to theDeep Capture website interests me.
The order, reported at Stockwatch, was handed down on October 19, the same day by the Supreme Court of British Columbia (Canada), the home state of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, long recognized as a center of stock-market schemes of all kinds.
The order was the result of a complaint by a Vancouver stock promoter, that he is named in a libelous manner in all but five of the chapters of a book on Wall Street crime that Deep Capture was serializing. The book, “The Miscreants’ Global Bust Out” (a spin on the famous book about Michael Milken,  called “The Predators’ Ball”)  was by one of the three writers on Deep Capture, Mark Mitchell, a former Columbia Journalism Review editor.
1. My first point is that the allegedly defamatory material had been up at Deep Capture from much earlier this year. The first chapter, “Was The United States Attacked By Financial Terrorists?” was serialized at the site on April 29, 2011. And the promoter is only one of dozens of people placed in at least equally damaging light, many of them much higher up the food chain:
Patrick Byrne:
“Jim Chanos was Eliot Spitzer’s biggest donor. That’s all been publicly reported and acknowledged and Chanos said he didn’t know who she was, he didn’t know she was servicing Eliot Spitzer… Well that may all be.
“But if it isn’t, put it this way: if any hedge fund was involved in the procuring of hookers for Eliot Spitzer, that hedge fund owned himself the Attorney General of the state of New York. Right? If you bring him hookers, you own him. And if you look at the list of the companies shorted by [Steve] Cohen and Chanos and guys in that little circle, and then you compare it to the list of companies Eliot Spitzer went after, you’ll see a remarkable coincidence.”
However, the only response so far to these assertions, even on the web, has been  silence.
Even more interesting, there have been no claims of libel or defamation, until Nazerali’s claim.
Most interesting of all, just a month before this order, Deep Capture did suddenly begin to get “Nasty-Grams,” according to Byrne, September  20, 2011.
2. Point two. The only other person who did try to remove Deep Capture material is also directly linked to the target of a lawsuit by Patrick Byrne.
A video of well-known hedge-fund manager turned publisher, author, and TV personality Jim Cramer, in which he admitted to intentionally manipulating stocks, was taken down in 2010 from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, as well as from other websites, by Cramer’s lawyers. It was Deep Capture that had supplied Stewart with the video.
Cramer is a former stock-broker for Goldman Sachs (the target, with Merrill Lynch, of Byrne’s current suit) who went on to run his own firm from the offices of Michael Steinhardt, well-known hedge-fund manager. Over the course of a lucrative career, Cramer invested money for such New York luminaries as Martin Peretz (who owns the New Republic), as well as for his old class mate Eliot Spitzer, son of a billionaire New York real estate developer, NY Attorney General, and Governor of New York.  Spitzer was brought down by a hooker scandal, subsequent to which the hooker, allegedly, stayed in the house of Jim Chanos, a short-seller accused of market-manipulation and manipulation of the financial media.
Other people, including libertarian financial adviser Barry Dyke, author of a 2007 book on Wall Street corruption (Pirates of Manhattan),  have also accused Cramer (ex of Goldman) of promoting  Goldman Sachs stock picks and  of defending the firm’s practices.  Eliot Spitzer (then Attorney General of New York) Byrne implies, went after a list of companies that strangely parallels the list targeted by short-seller Chanos.
Cramer made his admission of stock manipulation on the video in 2006. It’s since been removed from several sites, see here, according to this article (here). His video admission also made the rounds of the web in 2007, which you can see  here .
3. The third interesting point is that the injunction against Deep Capture came down on the same day that the promoter filed a claim of notice against the site and its owners, and it came without any notice to them.
The date until which the temporary order remains is December 2, 2011. Oddly, or not oddly, depending on how you are disposed to think about Byrne’s naked-short-selling conspiracy theory, that is just before the December 5, 2011 trial date originally set for the suit by Mr. Byrne. The suit is filed against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch,  but was first  filed in February 2007  against GS, Morgan Stanley and other prime brokers; then settled with all but two defendants in December 2010 for $4.4 million; and refiled in November 2010 against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, this time invoking RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).
I’ve since learned that the trial date has been postponed to next year (March 5, 2012) and the petition to use RICO has been denied, so perhaps the closeness of the original date to the ending date of the BC court’s temporary order is nothing but coincidence.
In any case, for a view from his foes and targets, here is a suitably grim blog post from financial journalist Gary Weiss, summing up the complaint against Byrne. Byrne and Weiss have sparred for several years in one of the financial blogosphere’s most acrimonious and bizarre wrestling matches:

“I know a fellow who was the defendant in a libel suit who was subjected to two weeks of grueling cross-examination in a pre-trial deposition. The other side’s lawyers probed his private life in grim detail. And in that case he was dealing with an American court, the plaintiff was guilty as hell, and he was telling the truth!
The same is true for any other person or entity associated with the site, including Byrne’s loyal hatchet person Judd Bagley,a former company spokesman who was moved back to Overstock in late 2010, and former message board stalker Evan Karpak [sic], who remains a principal of Deep Capture LLC and was, inexplicably, not named in the lawsuit. An oversight, I’m sure, that can be rectified in due course.
In Canadian courts, the usual burden is reversed and the defendant has to prove the truth of the libelous statements. Good luck, Mark.”

Weiss was apparently responding to a recent post by Byrne at Investor’s Hub, where he responds to the British Columbia SC order and cites a July 25 2011 executive order by Obama blocking the property of transnational criminal organizations, as well as a 2002 article about Vancouver stock scams that mentions  the promoter tangentially in connection to the halting of a penny stock operation called 800America.com.
Weiss contends that this response itself may violate the BC Supreme Court’s injunction against Byrne et. al. and the site.