By Arik Hesseldahl



Am I wrong? Are you right? Tell me why in

Synthesis 		Cybergangs: A bad joke

Over the summer a few newspapers around the country published stories about so-called cyber-gangs, online spinoffs of inner city gangs, who had attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies.

But it seems that what had been characterized as a menacing cyberspace trend appears to be more like a hoax, according to an online journalist who tried to track down the story behind the Glock 3 Web site.

Glock 3 is an impressive site that glorifies of the gangster lifestyle. But Brock Meeks, who writes Cyberwire Dispatch, a column distributed through an Internet mailing list, claims that Glock 3 is nothing more than a bad joke carried on too far.

Meeks reported that the site began as the idea of Nick Woomer, a white 16-year old high school student from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who went by the online gangster name of N-Doggg.

Woomer told Meeks that he and two friends created the site as the online home of a fictional Detroit-based gang. They said they were fed up with authorities referring to his school as being gang-infested every time graffiti showed up on a schoolhouse wall.

The name Glock 3 comes from a kind of handgun, mentioned in several gangster rap songs. Woomer and his friends even went so far as to recruit members and give them gangster handles.

Before long, Glock 3 had a reputation as "the best known gang site in the country," and fooled at least one Arizona police officer and so-called gang expert, who mentioned it in a story about the site in The Arizona Republic and elsewhere.

Glock 3's widening reputation made Woomer's Michigan-based Internet service provider nervous, and the site was shut down. But soon, Woomer received an e-mail from someone in Auckland, New Zealand calling himself Sinista, who offered to revive the site using space on his own service provider's server.

Using HTML skills he said he learned at a "troubled youth" camp he was forced to attend after being busted in East L.A., Sinister turned Glock 3 into an impressive collection of gangster images and information.

Sinista claims to be a 19-year old Hispanic who moved to New Zealand with his family. In e-mail both to Meeks to myself, he has made references to a criminal background he can't discuss.

In an e-mail message I asked him about his background and Glock 3's newfound fame. "I can't go into detailz of my criminal history coz then I'll probably be identified. I never really wanted all this publicity anywayz! I hope you understand. Before I emigrated, I waz livin' in Whittier, EastLos. I used to hang on 13th St.," he wrote.

I asked him if he thinks his site glorifies the gangster lifestyle.

"We don't care if it ain't positive. We jus' lettin' people know about a lifestyle that a lot of people readin' may NEVER experience. BUT in some wayz IT IZ positive coz I've noticed that thugz are gettin' more into computaz an' less into killin'."

He also claimed to have some associates here in New York City, and I offered to meet with any of them.

"I don't think they'd be down wit' talkin' to no media (for obvious reasonz!). ...I can't go in-depth wit' any reportaz about tha click coz I don't want my familia identified an' then harmed coz of tha stuff that I've said or done. If I go around shootin' my mouth off too much then I'm likely to end up in tha casket," he wrote.

But the fact is, Sinista has shot his mouth of quite a bit on the Internet, and in ways that I think expose him to be not what he claims he is.

I entered his e-mail address (sinister@voyager.co.nz) into the DejaNews archive and got an interesting profile of his Usenet reading and writing habits.

Sinista apparently answers to the very un-Hispanic name of Eric Wheelock, according to two cancel messages he posted to the alt.hackers and alt.rock-N-roll.metal.death newsgroups on Oct. 17. He claims the name belongs to a racist rival using that name who forged the messages. (Editorial note: I have since contacted the REAL Eric Wheelock for his version of the story behind these cancel messages. Sinista is NOT, repeat NOT Eric Wheelock.)

Sinista, or Sinister as he is also known, also founded an organization called Flamenet, a gang of sorts designed to intimidate other people posting to newsgroups. He is responsible for several so-called flame messages posted to several newsgroups, including 161 such messages to alt.teens.

It is the wording of one of these messages that I think exposes him as nothing more than a gang-banger wanna be.

On Feb. 10, Sinister wrote a flame message in reply to someone on alt.teens as part of an ongoing thread called "Pot" concerning the use of marijuana: "I used to be like you when I first started to post here. I soon learnt my lesson."

The word "learnt," while technically correct English is generally used only by people who learned to read and write in schools in England, Australia, New Zealand, but not the U.S. Another message on alt.teens uses the word "prioritised" which Americans usually spell with a 'z' not an 's'. This also is peculair to Anglophiles.

Compare these statements with the overdone and transparently phony gangster-ese of his messages to me and the statements on his Web site, and you may wonder, as I do, how many reformed Hispanic gang bangers from East L.A. use Anglicisms.

I agree with Meeks. The Cybergangs scare, at least as far as Glock 3 is concerned, appears to be nothing more than a hoax, and not a clever one at that.