William R. Cowden is the man some supporters of AdSurfDaily Inc. love to hate.
Cowden’s middle name is “Rakestraw.” Such a name posed an altogether too enticing opportunity for one ASD apologist. The apologist opined that Cowden, a federal prosecutor acting on behalf of victims of an alleged $100 million Ponzi scheme, should be placed in a medieval torture “rack” and that ASD members should draw “straws” to determine who got the honor of turning the screw.
It was only a hint of the deeply troubling excess that would follow.
After an evidentiary hearing last fall requested by ASD to to explain its business model and to ask for emergency release of funds seized by the U.S. Secret Service in August 2008, Cowden was derided by ASD’s apologists as a hapless, clueless “Gomer Pyle.”
It didn’t matter that ASD President Andy Bowdoin had entered guilty pleas to felony charges of securities fraud in Alabama a decade previously, the apologists explained. Nor did it matter that Bowdoin’s business partner had been implicated in a securities scheme of his very own in the 1990s.
What mattered, the apologists explained, was that Bowdoin was a fine “Christian” man who’d invented a miraculous business system for people of faith.
Cowden, they insisted, didn’t understand technology or the business model. When Andy Bowdoin took the 5th Amendment at the evidentiary hearing, one of his apologists explained that he was “too honest” to testify.
Another Christian apologist — in a hail of fire and brimstone — called for God to strike the prosecutors dead. Yet another described Cowden as a “Nazi.”
During the time ASD’s apologists were deriding Cowden as “Gomer Pyle,” they described Bowdoin’s attorneys as the “Perry Mason” team.
Perry had reduced Gomer’s case to rubble, the apologists claimed. For good measure, one of them later added that U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer would have to be “brain dead†or “taking a payoff†if she ruled against ASD.
Earlier, Collyer had been made the subject of a prayer chain that admonished God to intervene so she would do the right thing — namely, rule in ASD’s favor.
Here is how a Mod who related one-sided reports to members of the Pro-ASD Surf’s Up forum assessed the performance of ASD’s witnesses and attorneys from both sides at the conclusion of the evidentiary hearing:
[ASD] Witnesses:
Bob Grayson – Excellent
Gerald Nehra – Excellent
Chuck Osmin -Excellent
ASD Legal Team – Excellent
US Attorney – Cowden – Not so much.
Witnesses for the Prosecution: … … … Zero –
Victims prior to 8/01/08:… … … Zero
Collyer ruled Nov. 19 that ASD had not demonstrated at the hearing that it was a legal business and not a Ponzi scheme. She chastised ASD’s expert witness — an MLM attorney who had been paid a retainer of $24,000 and opined that ASD was not a Ponzi scheme — for relying on one-sided information from ASD and not performing a thorough analysis of ASD’s business operations before arriving at his opinion.
ASD did not produce an audited balance sheet at the hearing, thus failing to dent the prosecution’s claim the company was insolvent and using money from new members to pay old ones in a shell game.
No release of funds would be forthcoming, Collyer said. Her ruling can be summarized in two words:
Gomer won.
After ASD suffered the stinging blow, Bowdoin apologists who once gleefully described his attorneys as the “Perry Mason” team and their performance as “Excellent” apparently decided they’d been too generous in their praise.
The apologists ignored the fact that Andy Bowdoin had more than two months to produce an audited balance sheet and failed to do so. They also ignored the fact that Bowdoin had failed to provide documentation to his own lawyers when requested to do so and that testimony at the hearing was contradicted by information on ASD’s own website.
Under a theory that emerged later, both Bowdoin’s attorneys and the prosecution were worthy of condemnation. The only people who could be trusted were among a “group” of ASD members with whom Bowdoin consulted in private. Members of the “group” advised Bowdoin to become his own lawyer.
“The group said that my attorneys had taken the wrong approach,” Bowdoin said. “The group was very confident that they could help because the government had broken so many laws and had violated our rights as citizens of the United States.”
This year and last, dozens of advocates for ASD wrote letters to the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice to have Cowden and his then-boss — former U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor — investigated and perhaps even fired. One Bowdoin apologist said Cowden would be lucky to find work in a fast-food restaurant after ASD members were done destroying his legal career.
Some ASD apologists also wrote letters to Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Thirteen U.S. banks failed during the period in which ASD’s apologists were composing those letters and Leahy’s staff was fielding them in the opening days of the year. That number now has increased to 98, with weeks remaining in 2009. There were three bank failures in all of 2007.
The ASD case, of course, is about keeping banks clean and safe from those who would pollute them with dirty money gathered in domestic and international fraud schemes.
To describe the smear campaign by some ASD members against Cowden as unjustified does not do it justice. It was insidious, plain and simple. Later, Cowden was attacked by Curtis Richmond , a man hailed a “hero” on the Surf’s Up forum, the site from which the torture rack was proposed.
Richmond, who once declared that he was immune from U.S. law because he was a “sovereign” being, accused Cowden, Taylor and Collyer of a money grab.
“The U.S. Atty. and/or U.S. Judge Had No Authority or Jurisdiction to Steal Most of the $93 million of ASD Member Ownership Interest,†Richmond said, using his trademark mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. “All of the ASD Members had a Constitutional Right to Make A Contract With ASD and None of the ASD Members had a Contract With the U.S. Government.â€
Richmond, who has a contempt conviction for threatening federal judges in a separate case and holds the distinction of having been banned from the practice of law in Colorado even though he is not an attorney, advanced his theory of the ASD case:
“Since the U.S. Atty. could not present any court order giving him Authority to Seize the $40 million of Cashier Checks and deposit them in an Account Of His Choosing, he is Guilty of Misappropriation of Funds [at] a minimum and very possibly Embezzlement,†Richmond claimed.
Richmond also claimed he had “irrefutable†evidence against the prosecutors and suggested Collyer was conspiring with another federal judge and the government to deny justice to ASD members.
“This was accomplished by sending by Return Receipt with a ‘Demand For Legal Evidence Affidavit’ to William Cowden, Assist. U.S. Atty., Jeffrey Taylor, U.S. Atty., and Roy Dotson, Special Agent, U.S. Secret Service[,] giving them 7 Days to present Legal Evidence that the Statements Made in the Demand For Legal Evidence[,] including the Listed Constitutional Rights, WERE FALSE,†Richmond claimed.
“The Demand for Legal Evidence [was] part of Notarized Affidavits and clearly stated “Your Silence will be an Admission that you do not have the Legal Evidence,†he said.
Cowden, Taylor and Dotson knowingly and willingly defaulted on his demands “because they had no Legal Evidence or believed they were above the law,†Richmond said. “Attorneys & Judges Are Not Above The Law. A Lawful Default Is a Lawful Default.â€
In short, Richmond’s theory of the ASD case is that you can demand a litigation result from federal judges and federal prosecutors by stating what you’d like to see occur, putting a letter containing the demand in the mail, giving the recipients a few days to submit to the demand — and then claim they’ve broken the law by not playing the game you brought to their doors.
It was not the first time he had played the game. Richmond was among a group of litigants from a sham Utah “Indian” tribe sued for racketeering and ordered last year to pay damages for their conduct, which targeted judges, prosecutors, police officers — and even a family-services worker — in a scheme to place enormous financial judgments against them.
Acting as an “arbitrator” for a sham company, Richmond signed a fraudulent award against the family-services worker for more than $300,000. The “tribe” placed a sham judgment for $250 million against a county prosecutor. Richmond claimed the federal judge hearing the case owed him $30 million, and the tribe drew up fraudulent arrest warrants against two other judges and Richmond’s litigation opponents in a banking case.
The tribe fabricated a “Supreme Court,” which used the address of a Utah doughnut shop, and tried unsuccessfully to force the U.S. Marshals Service to serve fraudulent court documents that called for the imprisonment of judges and Richmond’s opponents.
After Richmond began to file pro se pleadings in the ASD case in February, others followed, including ASD President Andy Bowdoin, who had fired his attorneys after consulting with the “group” of members. Bowdoin’s pro se pleadings were not as far out as Richmond’s, which is not to say they were grounded on terra firma.
Bowdoin rewrote the facts of a civil case against money and property seized from him, declaring himself a “defendant” in a quasi-criminal case and saying his paid attorneys had been incompetent. Bowdoin later publicly smeared one of his attorneys.
Prosecutors now say Bowdoin, who apparently forgot he’d told the Secret Service that ASD had $1 million in a bank on the Caribbean island nation of Antigua before later claiming ASD needed emergency funds to operate, is “delusional.”
Bowdoin, a defendant in a separate racketeering lawsuit to which he never has responded, claims a former Miss America is one of the inspirations behind his renewed litigation efforts against the government. He’d press on, he said, because Miss America didn’t give up after being denied the title in four previous bids to earn the crown.
She finally won in her fifth attempt, Bowdoin explained to ASD members.
He also explained that he was trying to get the government to return money the Secret Service seized from members, even though he always has maintained in court filings that the seized money belonged to him.
By August, dozens of pro se litigants who sought to paint the prosecution as an unwanted Orwellian Big Brother had joined in the fray. An ASD upline shared a litigation template in which names were swapped in and out. Filers claimed they had been victimized by the government, not ASD.
Cowden’s name was misspelled as “Crowden” in each of the fill-in-the-blank claims that began to flood the courthouse in August. They were still coming in last week, despite the fact Collyer already had denied the argument contained in the litigation template.
With a new administration now in power in Washington, new U.S. Attorneys are being appointed and some assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) are leaving government service.
There are reports today that William Cowden, AUSA, has left the Justice Department to join the private sector. We wish him the best in his pursuits — and propose a special honor for his exceptional service to the victims of AdSurfDaily.
We were unable to determine immediately if “Gomer Pyle” had a middle name on either The Andy Griffith Show or a spinoff, Gomer Pyle, USMC.
Regardless, it would be nice — if only for today — if the thousands of ASD victims Cowden so capably represented would honor his government service by ascribing the middle initial “R” to the name of the character played by Jim Nabors.
“Gomer Rakestraw Pyle” has a nice ring to it. “Gomer R. Pyle.”
No one should be confused: Adding Rakestraw to the noble name of Gomer Pyle is a gesture of high esteem for William Cowden, who has been vilified, ridiculed and scorned by people who said nothing when it was suggested that he be placed in a rack, that straws be drawn and that a winner be declared to carry out the medieval torture.
Delusional does not begin to describe this behavior. Some of the apologists appear to be constitutionally incapable of accepting the premise that Andy Bowdoin involved them in a criminal enterprise. At the same time, they have displayed the ceaseless constitutional capability of conflating one reality after another to provide cover for a fraudster and to smear one of the career prosecutors trying to bring him to justice.
In the end, Bowdoin’s apologists could not even get their insults to make sense. Gomer Pyle, USMC, indeed, was a very good man — one held in the highest esteem.
To the ASD critics of William Cowden, AUSA, we say, Honi soit qui mal y pense.
And to William Cowden we ascribe the highest titular honor — “Gomer Pyle, AUSA” — and pay our highest regard:Â Shazam!
May there be many more Gomer Pyles at the Department of Justice in the years ahead.
You see, “Gomer Pyle, USMC” went off the air as a prime-time TV show in 1969. But the character of Gomer Pyle went on to become synonymous with virtue, a trait sorely lacking among Andy Bowdoin’s apologists.
In 2001, 32 years after the fictional Private First Class Gomer Pyle left prime time, the real U.S. Marine Corps promoted him to lance corporal. In 2007, Gen. John F. Goodman, commander of the real U.S. Marine Corps Forces in the Pacific, promoted the fictional Gomer Pyle to full corporal.
Real Marines stood at attention during the ceremony. Gomer Pyle was lauded for honesty, loyalty and devotion to duty.
You have done well and were in good company, Mr. Cowden.
