The Hacker Chronicles - A…the Computer Underground/The Hacker Chronicles - A Tour of the Computer Underground (P-80 Systems).iso/misc/ge7.txt

Text File | 1992-09-27 | 34KB | 617 lines

=============
NEIGHBORHOODS
=============

     Be the first in your mark's neighborhood to become a blockbuster.  It's
time to fuss up the mark's neighbors again.  Find a real estate agency that
deals mostly with blacks or Chicanos.  Posing as the mark, call the agency and
invite a salesperson out to talk about the sale of the mark's neighbor's house.
Don't hoke up your role with a lot of brotherhood stuff -- play it straight.
Now, if the mark is a good, solid white citizen living in a neighborhood of
same-minded bigots, you have a wonderful deal going for you.  The kicker is,
you give the salesman the mark's name and the neighbor's address.  Obviously,
you must pick the most rednecked, bigoted neighbor to be the fall guy for the
black or Chicano salesperson.  By the time the "mistake" gets straightened out
who's going to believe the mark?  Not only have you alienated his neighbor, but
you have taken a big chunk out of his credibility and popularity.  Black is
beautiful, especially when it's the color of the mark's reputation among his
peers.

     This stunt works -- a person I know used it.  He's a professional ball
player who went into a furniture store with his wife to buy living-room-and-den
suite of furniture.  The clerk was bigoted and exceptionally nasty.  My friend
calmly asked to see the manager, who turned out to be worse than the clerk.
The black customer suddenly flashed his wallet full of green money, and both
white guys blanched.  No further words were exchanged as the married couple
left the store.  Two days later my friend called a black real estate agency.
You just read about what happened next.

===========
NOTARY SEAL
===========

     Possession of or access to a notary seal is vital to a trickster.  To the
average layperson and common lawyer, the mere fact of a notary seal on a
document is like God's own rubber stamp.  Many times you will need to have a
document notarized as part of the scams explained in this book.  Having your
own seal kit is the obvious answer.  Some firms sell real ones -- "official" --
on the black market.  Some sell replica kits, which are not official.  Avoid
these -- some are so crude that they wouldn't even fool a politician.  I know
one trickster who had a seal kit custom made -- by a con in a California prison
print shop.  The con had been an engraver in civilian life and really knew his
work.

     You can buy a blank die kit openly from any shop stocking seals.
Corporations use them all the time, which may give you a tip right there about
the value of seals.  You can have a custom seal made by many of these
companies.

     However you obtain it, get a notary-seal kit.  The uses of it pay off the
first few times you scam someone.  In addition to the notary seal, you should
also get a couple of other official-looking dies.  Commercially and openly, you
can obtain blank dies with state logos, or you can get one that looks like a
U.S. eagle.  All sorts of possibilities exist.

=============
OIL COMPANIES
=============

     The soaring oil prices and lack of leadership got so bad late in 1979 that
all the dedicated and honest congresspersons got together to protest big oil.
But who is afraid of seven people!

     You remember the Great Gasoline Ripoff of 1979, when the oil companies
raped the driving public both coming and going?  Petroleum magnate Jimmy
Slushslinger related this story:  A regular customer pulled up to a service
station and said, "Fill 'er up."  As he was paying the bill, he said, "Oh
gosh, all I have is a fifty-dollar bill.  Sorry."

     The gas jockey replied, "No problem -- you can pay me the rest next week."

     Starting rumors at the inappropriate time is the something else to do.
For example, if your mark happens to be a gasoline station owned by a major
company, and a lot of citizens are in a gas line waiting for their semi-annual
pittance of overpriced petroleum, you could walk onto the scene wearing
oil-smeared coveralls and stroll down the line -- just out of sight of the real
station personnel.  Tell parked motorists that all fuel is gone.  If anyone
gets belligerent, use the "I'm a minimum-wage employee, but the boss said if
anyone got angry to send the bastard to him, because he'll sure cool him off in
a hurry."  Don't wait around for the cooling-off period.

     Cut out a stencil that has the word ARAMCO on it, then spray it with white
paint under the word STOP on all the stop signs in your town or near a large
oil-company office building or refinery.  Aramco, in case you didn't know, is
the major oil cartel that works with OPEC to rob American citizens.

     During the 1979 oil-company blitzkrieg against the American public, a
guerrilla fighter hit back.  He cut a sliding door in the floor of his van.  He
had a three-hundred-gallon tank installed in the van, along with a small
electrically operated pump and a twenty-foot hose.  He drove in only to
company-owned gasoline stations, parked over the main tank caps, then used a
wrench to open one.  He dipped in his hose, turned on the quiet pump, and
filled his tank with three-hundred gallons of free tigers.

     Bruno Tannetto dislikes oil companies.  For years he played credit-card
bingo with them, pirated cards, counterfeited cards, and ran up huge debts and
skipped them -- all in the name of guerrilla warfare against the oil giants.
He also saved all the postage-paid return envelopes they used to include with
his bills.  Since he rarely paid, he had quite a collection of envelopes,
which is when he really got his rocks off.

     Bruno collected a bunch of heavy rocks and boxed them up in a sturdy
carton, which he marked, "Caution -- Geological-Core Samples" and addressed to
whatever oil company he had the envelopes for.  Using the envelope as the
"postage," he mailed this heavy box first class to the oil company, which had
to spring for the huge postal charges.  He did this many times to several of
the giants.

     Giggi Hilliard tells about a chap who played nasty to get an oil-company
operation into some difficulty.  The agent provocateur's mode was forgery, and
here's what he did.  While on a routine visit to the oil company's corporate
offices, he swiped an internal memo from a desk while the secretary was out of
the room.  He had his printer create some blank memo sheets using the company
logo.  Then, using a safe IBM typewriter and following the style of the company
original, the trickster wrote a very sensitive memo from one oil-company
manager to another.  The memo discussed the need for deep cover to prevent
leakage of sensitive financial contributions to state and national political
officials.  He then leaked the memo to the press.

     "The idea behind this," Hilliard explains, "is to cause the oil company,
or whatever mark you choose, to have to explain and deny.  Nobody believes them
anyhow, so you give that big business another credibility black eye.  Great,
huh?  You can use this same tactic with any corporation, utility, or business.
The list of sensitive topics is limitless.  But always use real officials'
names on the forgeries."

     Consult OVERTHROW (see section on Ma Bell) to obtain the telephone-credit-
card numbers for the major oil companies.  Use this information to you best
advantage.  Beware:  Oil companies hire experienced FBI, CIA, and
drug-enforcement people for their security staffs.  The security and
intelligence operations of the oil industry are as nasty and effective as
anything the feds could put together, and they are not hindered with what few
laws do restrict the federal law-enforcement people.   You have no civil or
human rights when the oil-company security and intelligence people go after
you.  When dirty tricking the oil companies it is crucial that you practice
WYA, which means Watch Your Ass!

     Recently, a lady trickster called the wife of an oil-company robber baron
and pretended to be a lowly cleaning lady at corporate headquarters.  Telling
Mrs. Oil Executive that she, the cleaning lady, was a good Christian lady who
believed in the God-given sanctity of family and marriage, our "cleaning lady"
revealed that she often had to clean fresh semen stains from the couch in Mr.
Executive's office after "private, after-hours conferences" between the boss
and his young secretary.  That's all, just a simple telephone call from a
simple, honest, God-fearing lady to a stay-at-home wife who's probably already
paranoid about her executive-husband's extracurricular sex life.  If more
right-minded citizens cared about the moral decline among executives in the oil
industry...

     By now you surely owe that friendly and cooperative printer a few glasses
of lemonade for being your co-cospirator in a number of scams.  Here's one
more.  Many of your area's prominent citizens should recieve a fancy invitation
to attend a special local social function hosted by your favorite oil
corporation.  The invitation should read something like this:  "Admit bearer
and guest for the special Hollywood entertainment and buffet on [day and date].
Informal dress from [time] to [time] at [location]."

     Try to pick a Saturday or Sunday and mail the invitation only a day or so
prior to the nonevent.  This won't give the doubters, cynics, press, or anyone
else much time to ascertain the veracity of the invitation.

     In the summer of 1979, after reading newspaper stories about how the major
oil companies were raking in untaxed windfall profits ranging from 35 to 130
percent, Melvin Lierd decided enough was enough.

     "I had no mere dirty tricks in mind; my whole idea was to rip those
bastards as much as I could, the greedy, lying thieves," Melvin muttered
mildly.

     His plan was simple.  He obtained credit cards from as many companies as
possible and charged as many products and services as possible only from
company-owned stations.

     "I ran up bills as high and as fast as possible.  I had absolutely no
intention of paying," Melvin explained.

     Asked if he got the cards in his own name.  Melvin responded, "Nah, I got
them in a fake company name.  I run up as much as I can, then pay them each $5
or so, claiming it is only a token payment because we're a new company, but I
will make the rest soon, blah, blah, blah.

     "The greedy bastards are so anxious to make money they'll just add on
those outrageous interest charges -- usury rates, they are -- and drool at how
much they're screwing me on financing.

     "I'll string them along for a couple of months; then, if they get serious,
I'll simply dissolve my company and let them eat their bills."

     Do lawsuits bother Melvin?  He rates lawyers and judges slightly below
clam feces on his scale of respect, and he says, "Let them sue the company.  It
has no assets.  Plus, they gotta find me.  Let me tell you something, old son
-- you have to use the law.  There is no justice, so you use the law to suit
yourself.  How do you suppose the big oil companies and the big lawyers and the
big judges and all the other crooked snakes got so powerful -- by using the
law!"

     At last report, Melvin Lierd was draining the oil giants at a rate far in
excess of his own expectations.  He has invited many of you to join him.

     Not content to live by the rule of "steal from them before they steal from
you," Carl Bepp likes to add things to the oil-company stations' bulk tanks.
He says that many of the additives described earlier in this book and elsewhere
will work.  But, he does have a sentimental favorite.

     "Once, some land rapists were drilling a noisy, sloppy gas well near the
home of a friend of mine," he relates.  "Since they were stealing from the
land, I decided to steal some land from them.

     "One evening, when they were finished drilling for the day, I got some of
that slimy, mucky gunk that the drillers had bailed out of the well.  I took it
to my most-hated oil company's very own station and dumped three two-gallon
buckets of that gunk down into their bulk tanks."

     He said he has also used several gallons of refurbished solid wastes,
known as sludge, as another additive for the oil-company products.

==========
PARTY TIME
==========

     It's always fun to drop into a number of what I call olde phart bars --
the seedy downtown places where drunken men hang around from morning to
evening, pouring down oceans of booze but never seeming to get falling-down
drunk.  The place stinks, and they stink.  It's a great place to make up a
guest list for your mark's party.

     Have a couple of beers and talk with the old duffers, unless everyone's
uptight about a stranger being there.  Usually, though, old pharts in bars are
friendly.  After a bit of social ice has been clinked, tell them about a keg
party "you're" having.  Obviously, you use the mark's name and give his
address.  Early Sunday afternoon is a good time to schedule the party.

     If you hit enough bars on Saturday and talk to enough old drunks, your
mark should have a helluva wingding show up at his house Sunday afternoon, all
hung over and roaring to get started again.  Salud!

     Remember Donald Segretti, Richard Nixon's unofficial classless clown?
Apparently, he could have easily written this book from memory.  In any case,
Segretti came up with a party "on behalf of" the late Hubert Humphrey, thought
to be a threat to Nixon back in 1972.  Segretti printed up thousands of
invitations to a luncheon with Humphrey, set for 1 April in Milwaukee.  He had
the invitations distributed all over the black ghettos of that city.

     They read, "FREE! -- All you can eat -- lunch with beer, wine or soda.
With Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Lorne Greene, Mrs. Martin Luther King."  He
gave a time and place, too.  Of course, there was no lunch, no drinks, and no
people there other than hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and highly irritated
people.  Should we say they were non-Humphrey voters?

     The next stunt demands that you or your personal agent arrive at a party
thrown by the mark.  Among your mark's other munchie dishes you should include
a selection of candied laxatives.  You can serve a commercial product, which is
already adequately disguised as candy, or you can make your own by coating
and/or coloring stronger constipation-relief medicines.  Be creative with the
disguise.  The result of having people eat mittfuls of these bowel busters is
breathtaking.

     Woolsey Newcomer and Enos Pomerene remember a party a number of years back
in which a barrel of beer washed down the thirst of the folks gobbling bogus
candy, which was really a powerful laxative.

     "The digestive hell began the morning after the party and lasted up to
four days for some people," Woolsey recalled.  "The guys had been stuffing
those laxatives in their mouths and washing it all down with some draft beer.
What a combination!  We had some sick folks."

     Woolsey always wondered who had infiltrated the candy dish.

     A more subtle relation to the dish full of laxatives is to get a candy
mold from a confectionery-supply house.  These are usually in the form of
little animals, Santas, etc.  Molds for chocolate Easter bunnies are probably
the most common example.  You simply melt a little bit of real chocolate and a
good bit of chocolate laxative together, fill the mold, and turn out some
homemade candy with an explosive punch to it.

     Finally, if you know your mark is having a party any given day or night,
that would be a splendid time to cause the utilities to be shut off or
otherwise disrupted.  Contemporary civilized socializers just can't handle
disruption of modern conveniences like power and water, and they tend to
remember the host/hostess (your mark) and identify him/her with the failure.
It's a good, subtle, nasty trick.

========
PEN PALS
========

     Men are fools when it comes to being conned by the game that proceded even
prostitution.  For example, if you could create a fictional lady, she could be
as seductive as you wanted her to be.  After all, to the mark she is an image
brought on by the words you put down on paper or maybe use on the telephone.
You want him to become her pen pal.

     As this scam progresses, you hope the emphasis will turn to personal
matters.  It's even more fun if the mark is married, because then he'll make a
bigger ass of himself.  Your fictional pen-pal lady must build a desire in the
mark, by doing just what comes so naturally.

     The climax is an assignation setup in an exotic city as far away as
reality will allow.  Setting up this sting calls for teasing creativity and all
sorts of facades like flowers, hints of gifts, Fredrick's of Hollywood apparel,
bogus sexy Polaroids, etc.

     The next to last thing you will do in this stunt is discontinue your
post-office box or whatever mail-drop address you were using for his return
messages.  The last thing you will do is mail, call, or telegraph this final
message, "Meet you at the Sin City Hotel, suite 625, tonight at 10 P.M.  I'll
have the tub and me all warm and wet."

     Naturally, only one of you will arrive, and he'll hardly be in the mood to
start without "you."

========
PERSONAL
========

     You can easily turn your mark into a fabled thief, according to former
private detective Trowridge Bannister.  You need a full-face photo of your
mark, plus a furtive longer shot of the type usually taken by surveillance
cameras.  Take these pictures and your WARNING copy to a trusted printer to get
some posters made.

     Bannister explains:  "You make up posters warning mechants and customers
to be on the lookout for the mark.  Display his name and picture on the poster
in a prominent location, along with the big headlines about this person's being
a thief, shoplifter, or pickpocket.  A small amount of copy could explain some
brief history of your mark's criminal career.  Make it sound realistic -- don't
get cute.  Sign the thing by the local community's merchants association or
something like that."

     Bannister says the final step is for you to take these posters to various
stores and carefully post them around the stores.  Avoid being seen.  Doing
this in a large shopping mall or in a busy downtown area ensures tha thousands
of local citizens will get your message about the mark.

     You could use the same tactic and mark your mark as a sex offender, child
molestor, or worse...a pornographer.

     You can write horrible "news" stories about your mark and have your
printer set them in newspaper style, complete with column-length lines and,
perhaps, border rules and datelines.  You should make the dateline a town in
which your mark fomerly lived.  In these bogus news stories, she/he could be
the subject of almost any sort of exercrable activity, such as child molesting,
sexual perversion, child abuse, killing kittens, starving and beating puppies,
poaching fawns, self abuse in public, and on and on.

     Naturally, the more authentic you make the story, the better the scam will
go when you send Xerox copies to the mark's employer, family, and friends.
Have your mail postmarked from the mark's former city and include a short note
from "a friend who thinks you ought to know the truth."

     During World War II, the British SOE made use of a harassing substance
that became known as "Who, Me?"  It was later adopted by the American OSS.
Essentially, it was a tube of obnoxious-smelling liquid that would be squirted
onto an enemy's clothing or body during some time that would not cause alarm,
such as while she or he was sleeping or bathing, or during the jostling of a
crowd.  Exposed to the air, the liquid immediately gave off the pungent odor of
strong, fresh human feces.

     The product was manufactured by Federal Laboratories near Pittsburgh under
an OSS contract.  It proved to be quite satisfactory and, as it was packaged, a
user could eject one cubic centimeter of Who, Me? as a thin liquid stream at
distances of up to ten feet.  There was little danger of self contamination if
it was handled properly.

     According to OSS records, two different formulas were used -- a fecal odor
for the European theater and a "skunky/body" odor for the Pacific theater.  The
research-backed reasoning is that because the Japanese often used human wastes
as agricultural fertilizers, they would not be as sensitive to the odor as the
Germans.  Both forms were found to be "noticeably lasting for well over a day,
despite frequent washings."

     You probably want to know if you can buy surplus Who, Me? from your local
army-navy outlet.  No, but you can produce it yourself using the following
formula:

     919 g. mineral white oil
      20 g. skatol
      20 g. n-butyric acid
      20 g. n-valeric acid
      20 g. n-caproic acid
       1 g. amyl mercaptan

     That will produce a kilogram of the fecal-smelling liquid.  You could
alter the amounts to produce as much or as little as you think you'll need.  If
you prefer the skunky odor, here's the formula on a relative-percentage basis:

     65 percent mineral white oil
     10 percent butyric acid
     10 percent mercaptan
     15 percent alpha ionone

     Another great pretender to aroma of woodpussy is 3-methyl-1-butane-thiol.
It is easily obtainable in chemical-supply stores and smells almost as terrible
as the real thing.

     If you are assertive enough to get the chemicals and mix up of a batch of
composition, you probably already have the applicator selected and don't need
further help.  If not, use this as a lesson in becoming more self-sufficient.
Happy squirting.

     If you're too insecure to become a home chemist, you could obtain some
formaldehyde, which is popularly known as embalming fluid.  This stuff is bad
news.  It stinks and cna burn your skin.  According to some folks, if enough of
it gets into the air it will vaporize.  If this takes place in a room, that
room will be cleared of all breathing objects for several hours.

     Being a liquid, formaldehyde may be squirted from any appropriate
applicator.  It is fairly devastating stuff, but you can get it in small
amounts if you are involved in biological or chemical experiments.  Sometimes,
a white lab coat makes a good cover when you go shopping in a drugstore or
medical-supply house outside your neighborhood or town.

     A bit more personal, but nowhere near as dangerous, is to dip your fingers
in warm water, come up behind you mark, and as you deliver an ear-shattering
sneeze, fling the water on the mark's neck or back.  This works well with
backless dresses, at the pool, or almost anywhere, for that matter.  Escape may
be a vital concern here, depending on your mark's sense of humor.

     If your mark is one or both members of a young couple, Dana Bearpaw had a
policy of calling the parents of one or both.  Playing the role of an older,
irate neighbor, he would shout, "Look, I don't care how much [description of
carnal activity to be left up to the discretion of the caller] your
son/daughter engages in with every male/female/whatever every damn night.  Just
keep them out of our backyard when they're doing it.  If you're any kind of a
parent you'll talk to them about all this."

     Parents usually take this sort of thing to heart...which causes all sorts
of communications and credibility problems with their youngsters.

     If you want to endear your mark to his/her neighbors, go to the local
library and consult the street-address or cross-reference city directory to
learn who your mark's neighbors are and their phone numbers.  If you can't find
such a directory in a more rural area, just drive and list names from
mailboxes.

     Later, call some selected neighbors using your mark's name and be sure you
identify yourself as a close neighbor.  Then, launch into something like, "I
want to come over and talk to you about [Communism, homosexuality, child
pornography, drug legalization, busing, whatever].  I want you to sign a
petition demanding fair treatment under the law for [whatever topic you've
chosen]."

     Be pushy and really work to make your mark's reputation a deserved one.

     Many times women are certain their men are out somewhere adding
significantly to the statistical rate for sexual infidelity.  When one lady had
absolute proof of her man's bombastic bedding habits with other ladies, she
devised a scheme that would guarantee his sticking around.  On one rare night
when he was in their bed, his mate waited until he had fallen into his usual
deep sleep, then gently applied one of the new superglue products to both his
penis and his leg and held the two together for the short bonding time so well
advertised on television.

     No elephant, tractor, or pro footballer could break that bond.  It took
the delicate skill of the family physician to make the separation, a move
matched that afternoon by the vendicted lady, who also cut out on her very sore
ex-man.

===========
PHOTOGRAPHY
===========

     Ask any competent photographer who also has some sense of humor, about
composite photographs.  They're easy to make -- the tabloids used them for
years.  It's a photo where someone has been added to a group, someone's face
has been used on the body of another person, or an entirely new photograph is
created simply by using composite parts.

     This is a very useful dirty trick and one that bears the stamp of approval
of the CIA and the FBI.

     Unless you're competent in photography, including copying, darkroom
technique, and minor retouching and airbrushing, or unless you have a very
trusted friend who will help you, you'd best forget this one.  However, done
well, the uses of composites are limited only by your imagination.  Here are
some examples passed along by some of the sources of this book:

o     A "photo" showing the mark leaving a motel room with a person of the
      opposite sex.

o     A "photo" sent anonymously to the police showing the mark or the mark's
      vehicle engaged in some illegal activity -- like poaching, dealing drugs,
      or corrupting the morals of minors.  Be sure the license number of the
      vehicle of visible.

o     A "photo" showing the mark's spouse nude and in a compromising pose with
      a companion -- human, animal, or whatever.

o     A "photo" showing the mark in a compromising situation with a person of
      the same sex could be sent to the mark's employer.  This will surely mark
      your mark a gay who will live in infamy.

     Like other topical areas in this book, this one is strictly a technical
suggestion.  You will have to furnish the motive, rationale, and application
for your own photographic nastiness.

========
POLITICS
========

     As public jesters from Jerry Rubin to Jerry Ford to Hunter Thompson to
Frank Rizzo to Nobody have discovered, any fool with twenty-five dollars and
twenty-five signatures can run for public office.  As Rubin asks, "What better
way to make fun of the political system than to run for public office?"

     He's right.  It gives you a legal platform to attack and ridicule the
institutions and people who deserve such attention.  If you have either
sophisticated or totally rustic local media, and know how to manage and
manipulate media people, you will get oodles of free publicity.  That isn't
very difficult, as many people demonstrate daily.

     Neil Mothra, who understands politicians, came up with this stunt.  If
your mark is a candidate or political VIP, if his coterie doesn't know you, and
if it's a very hot, shirtsleeve day, you're all set.  Slip into the meeting or
reception area, walk briskly up to the mark, and offer politely, "May I take
your coat, sir?"  The impression is that you are going to hang it up for him.
It will be best if you are dressed up or in some form of institutional-looking
uniform.  You simply take the coat away with you.  If you also have the
person's wallet, you must do what you think is best and most honest to all
concerned.

     One of the grandest tricks of all time happened in 1960, when a beaming
crook named Richard Nixon was posing in San Francisco's Chinatown with a group
of Chinese youngsters holding a large banner spelling out a slogan in native
characters.  The photo ran locally and was picked up by both wire services and
network television and disseminated to the entire nation.

     The very next day, a worried staffer told canidate Nixon the Chinese
banner had said, "What about the Hughes Loan?"  It was a reference to the
Howard Hughes cash payoff to Nixon's brother Donald, in the form of a "loan."
At the same time, Nixon found out that thousands of fortune cookies had been
passed out at the same rally, each containing the same message, this time in
English:  "Ask him about the Hughes Loan."

     The antics of Donald Segretti, court jester to the Committee to ReElect
the President (CREEP) in 1972, should fill your imagination with enough
fertilizer to devise tactics of your own, should you wish to advise a political
candidate.

     For example, during the Florida primary, one of Segretti's raiders paid a
young lady twenty dollars to streak naked outside Ed Muskie's hotel room,
shouting, "I love Ed Muskie!" and "Father my child, Ed!"  During a Muskie
picnic, a Segretti trooper had a chemist mix up a batch of butyl percaptan,
which is, as you know, a grossly foul, stinking mess.  The after-action report
to Segretti noted that among the guests, "everybody thought the food was bad."

     If the bigshot candidate is having one of those hundred-dollar-a-plate
fundraisers, your candidate should hold a ninety-nine-cent, blue-collar special
-- chipped-ham or bologna-and-cheese sandwiches.  Blue paper plates and cups
would contrast nicely with the power establishment's fancy eatery.  The theme
could be "Why pay a hundred dollars for bologna from [other candidate]?"

     Here's some further nastiness at the expense of three marks -- a
politician, the Postal Service, and the citizen you've chosen.  You secure a
franked postal envelope from your political mark.  Carefully steam and remove
the original mailing-address label.  Using a rented or public IBM electric
typewriter, carefully type in the name of your citizen mark on an IBM address
label.  Stick this label on the envelope.

     The rest of this stunt depends on how nasty you are and how much revenge
you feel you must squeeze from the mark(s).  Some general suggestions for the
contents of this envelope include:  Heavily anti-Semitic propaganda for a
Jewish mark; fanatical antireligious material for a religious sort; very
explicit pornography for a very straight person; homemade Polaroid photos
featuring closeups of dead pet animals -- roadkills and mutilations -- for
sensitive animal lovers; Polaroid closeups of genitalia, both human and animal,
for very proper people; and on and on.

     Most marks will blame all this on the person whose return address is on
the envelope -- the political candidate.

     Congressmen (there are rarely Congresswomen) have postal franking
privileges that allow them a lot of free mail.  A longtime politician baiter,
Ted Shoemaker, decided to help a least-favored Congressman.  Obtaining a
franked envelope from his own mailbox, Shoemaker had a printer duplicate the
postage-free envelope.  By the way, this is a serious federal crime.  He also
prepared a mailing in which the ultraconservative congressman announced his
backing for abortion and legalized marijuana, saying, "Times have changed, and
we old farts have to change with them."  Further, the letter had the politician
saying, "You get drunk on booze -- why not let the kids get high on pot?  You
cheat on your spouse -- why not let the kids get a little free fun too?"

     As you might imagine, the constituency was terminal Bible Belt.  Shoemaker
addressed, stuffed, and mailed a thousand of these messages, including copies
to many media outlets.  It only took two days for the old pol to claim fraud,
but by that time the bogus letter had received lots of media attention, and
more than a few old voters had made up their minds their good old boy was
actually guilty of the whole thing anyway.

     Shoemaker says, "He may have gotten some sympathetic backlash, though.
This kind of thing can backfire, so be careful."

     Barclay Skinner, the activist who championed women for membership in the
National Jaycees, developed a frothing dislike for an especially weasel-like
political candidate.  This man's major credentials were that he'd served as a
legal advisor for the Warren Commission, which tells you a lot about his lack
of honor, intelligence, and integrity.

     Skinner hired an actor who was a real lookalike for this politician and
had the ringer travel the state giving speeches and press conferences in the
real politician's name.  The actor made all sorts of oddball, controversial,
and asinine statements.  He insulted local leaders, heroes, and institutions.
He came off as a real sphincter.

     Because the real politician was not really well-known either personally or
visually, the impersonation worked well for the planned week.  The real
candidate found out about this and tried to stop it, but he was a week too
late.  He did not do well on election day.  By that time, Skinner and his actor
friend had faded back into the shrouded mists of heroic anonymity.

     "Ah, politicians, God's unchosen people!" Skinner beamed.

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