DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [122]
Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson
DS Chris Dawson had worked on Freddybb’s case with exceptional diligence, putting in many of his own hours to ensure that the jumble of figures, dates and technological detail was comprehensible to any lay person when it reached court. In a break for consultations during Taiwo’s Proceeds of Crime hearing, Dawson thought he heard Taiwo say, ‘Fuck it, I’m not paying.’ When the judge left the courtroom, the detective stormed out in a fury caused by the incompetence of the English judicial system.
He continues to work as a senior homicide officer in Hull.
Dimitry Golubov
Following his arrest in Odessa, the hacker Dimitry Golubov spent five and a half months in prison, during which time he was interrogated by American law-enforcement officials, including Greg Crabb of the US Postal Inspection Service. However, on the intervention of two Ukrainian MPs, he was released and finally exonerated of any wrongdoing by a court in Kiev in 2009.
Six foot two, with a charismatic blue-eyed gaze, Golubov denies any relationship with Script although there are inconsistencies in his version of events, and the digital evidence in the hands of American law enforcement tells a very different story (this included data uncovered on Roman Vega’s computer that Script was Golubov).
Script faded away after his release from custody, but Golubov returned with a renewed commitment to social change and enterprise by forming The Internet Party of Ukraine. Still based in Odessa, Golubov has developed a political programme that aims at fighting corruption, pornography and drug-dealing on the Internet. He is confident that within a decade he will be elected either Prime Minister or President of the Ukraine, and although at the moment that looks like an outside bet, his drive and ambition should be taken seriously. The Internet Party has fielded dozens of candidates at local council elections in Odessa, and although, so far, it has only won a single seat, there is no question that the movement is growing throughout the country.
Strangely, though, despite his organisation’s fierce moral stands on some criminal issues, such as child pornography, Golubov has launched a campaign to secure the release of the notorious carder Maksik from his thirty-year jail sentence in Turkey.
Roman Vega
Roman Vega has been incarcerated since his arrest in Nicosia in February 2003. Transferred to California in June 2004 at the request of the United States, he has been in custody ever since, but has never been tried. At the time of writing he is a prisoner in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, a dour facility near Gowanus Bay. During this entire period Vega has had no visitors except for his legal representatives.
In August 2007 a hearing was scheduled in front of Judge Charles R. Breyer in the Northern District of California. Prosecution and defence were ready to sign off on a plea bargain, which would have seen Vega released, having already served the forty-six months’ sentence that the lawyers had agreed. On the afternoon before his release a prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York filed a whole new set of charges, requesting Vega’s transfer to Brooklyn. The charges were in substance identical to the Californian ones. The prosecuting counsel in New York, however, chose a different statute under which to file the charges, to avoid a double-jeopardy ruling.
The transcript of the court hearing makes it clear that Judge Breyer, a brother