Wayne Nugent

Hey, you there. You look pretty smart—you’re reading The Observer, after all. What would you say if I told you there are ordinary New Yorkers out there making more money in a year than you’ll make in a decade? I’m not talking about bankers and movie stars. Heck, I used to be a waiter for 20 years—now look at me. You must have noticed how shiny my shoes are. Want to work for yourself? Go on vacation every month? Retire at the age of 29, then retire your mother? You didn’t wake up this morning planning to start a new life, but opportunity just knocked—you don’t want it to move to the next door. Did I mention you get a free BMW?

On an evening in June, in a nondescript, white-walled room in Williamsburg, a small crowd of sundry millennials in folding chairs listened to a variation of the above script. The opportunity knocking was WorldVentures, a six-year-old company based in Texas with a sales force of tens of thousands in 21 countries that pulled in $91 million in revenue last year. WorldVentures is ostensibly a travel club that grants members access to discounted vacations, but its sales reps are selling more than cheap hotel stays. In fact, they seem to expend most of their energy shilling for WorldVentures itself.

The pitch hinges on a video of average-looking people partying in exotic locations, followed by a stream of babbling from semi-suave pitchmen who claim to be making thousands, tens of thousands, more than a million a year, working for themselves. There’s a jumble in the middle of the presentation about “left and right teams”—a reference to WorldVentures’ complicated, pyramid-shaped payout system—but the main point is that you can “make a living by living,” if you act right now.

Pete Eggers, a tall, blond 29-year-old from Iowa, paced in front of the little room and down the aisle. He’d flown in to star in the massive WorldVentures training convention scheduled for Queens the next day. The small crowd seemed unnaturally jazzed, cheering and whooping like an MTV studio audience and guffawing at all the cheesy jokes. Such “biz op meetings” are customarily filled with plants, one former WorldVentures pitchman told The Observer. Indeed, it seemed as if about two-thirds of attendees were already in the fold, surrounding a half-dozen or so obvious new recruits.

“You know what mailbox money is?” Mr. Eggers asked them. “It’s money you get in your mailbox. I open my mailbox and I get usually a check for usually $5,000. Then I walk inside, and then I take a nap.”

Like Amway and many other direct-selling schemes, WorldVentures compensates its reps for sales made by people they recruit. It’s called multilevel marketing, or MLM, and it’s the legally sanctioned cousin to the pyramid scheme. You can sign up to get access to WorldVentures’ discounted trips, which are of arguable value, for a $199.99 sign-up fee on top of $26.99 a month. But wait—if you recruit just four people, your monthly fees are waived.

“Direct selling is the best-kept secret in the business world,” said Mr. Eggers, claiming to paraphrase Warren Buffett. Join WorldVentures as an “independent representative” for a $99.95 sign-up fee and $10.99 a month, and you’ll have the opportunity to make residual income through WorldVentures’ elaborate, cross-pollinating compensation plan.

WorldVentures says it pays out up to 65 percent of its sales revenue in compensation. There’s a direct commission, a weekly sales bonus and a monthly residual commission. Reps get paid a $20 commission for selling a basic membership to the travel club. But the easiest way to earn “mailbox money” is to recruit new reps.

The rapid-fire pitch made The Observer’s head feel fuzzy, so we sat down with the company’s 26-page compensation plan. WorldVentures has a virtually inscrutable payout schedule comprising seven ranks and two pyramid-shaped hierarchies. The first pyramid is called the “lineage.” You sit at the top and everyone you’ve personally recruited is added directly below you, and everyone they’ve recruited is below them, and so on. Lineage is factored into rank, which is factored into compensation. The second pyramid is the “binary organization.” Here the pyramid spreads out by twos—the top spot sits directly above a left and a right spot, each of which sits above its own pairs, and so on.  You can then earn bonuses based on sales made by the binary organization, which is comprised of the reps you recruit, and the reps they recruit.

In order to start earning monthly commissions, a rep must be “30/30,” which means having 30 actively-involved customers and/or reps on each side of his or her binary organization. Reps who achieve this can earn up to $500 a month. The next level is 90/90, which can earn up to $2,000 a month. The top level, International Marketing Director, must have at least 3,000 people in his or her lineage, and must continue to average $56,250 in income in the three preceding months in order to maintain that rank. The list of requirements for each rank goes on for pages, with various exceptions and stipulations.

But multiple lawsuits have alleged that WorldVentures frequently bends its own rules in order to favor a small, elite group. According to one ongoing lawsuit, the top three spots onthe pyramid, which earn the most residual income, are owned by the two WorldVentures founders. The lawsuits claim that lucrative spots are given out as rewards to recruit “MLM superstars” like Matt Morris, author of The Unemployed Millionaire and founder of the distance learning MLM Success University.

The WorldVentures presentation in Williamsburg closed with nine reps who went up to the front of the room and described how they’d lifted themselves out of poverty, as if rising from their wheelchairs after a gulp of snake oil. “My name is Jay, I’m from Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. At first I thought it was a scam—I was doing scams, I thought it was a scam,” said one young man who claimed to be making mailbox money and driving a WorldVentures BMW. “When I saw that all I had to do was pop in a DVD and make money, I said ‘let’s do it.’”

WorldVentures reps do have the ability to earn residual income, get credit toward a BMW lease, and even a home bonus; but it’s much harder than the company makes it sound. MLM is a grind. When reps fail to make money, they’re taught to blame themselves. Reps are also heavily encouraged to spend their own money on WorldVentures’ myriad training events, which can range from $29 to hundreds of dollars to attend. WorldVentures has a tendency to sue its former employees who move to competing MLMs or speak negatively about the company, squashing public dissent; Google results for “is WorldVentures a scam” are overwhelmed with pro-WorldVentures websites and videos created by reps to give the appearance of legitimacy. “The reality is, it’s impossible for someone to realize the dreams that they’re pitching,” said one former high-level WorldVentures employee who asked not to be named.  “The only people actually making money are the people the founders are manipulating the compensation plan for.”

Training events are among the key techniques by which the MLM industry keeps its sellers motivated. At WorldVentures, company executives work hard to maintain the image of a fun-loving, globetrotting family. Flawlessly-produced recruitment videos show people drinking, dancing, and playing in the sand in various vacation destinations. “You should be here! You should be here!” they chant at the camera. Reps are encouraged to go on DreamTrips, vacations that turn into pilgrimages to Las Vegas or Cancun that include company pep rallies and one-on-one dinners with higher-ups. WorldVenturesTV has uploaded 113 videos to YouTube taken on vacations and at company conventions like Millionaire Bootcamp 2012 and WorldVentures UNITED! 2012.

Wayne Nugent is the co-founder and “Chief Visionary Officer” of WorldVentures. “Ernst & Young is the second-largest audit company in the world. They gave us the Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010,” Mr. Eggers told us. Actually, Mr. Nugent and his co-founder Mike Azcue were two of 38 entrepreneurs nominated in the Southwest Area – North region, which includes North Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Before starting WorldVentures, the two worked together at GT Trends, another travel-based MLM with a less-than-stellar reputation. “After a short involvement, they disagreed with the business methods practiced by GTT and both men voluntarily resigned,” according to a WorldVentures-owned website. In 2011, they both admitted to willfully evading  taxes from 2004 to 2007: Mr. Azcue owed $18,340, and Mr. Nugent owed $60,712.

Smooth-faced, tanned, and broad-shouldered, Mr. Nugent appeared on stage in Las Vegas for WorldVentures UNITED! 2012, dressed in a pink suit jacket with his black hair in an Elvis puff. He improvises his speeches. “There’s a real world, but there’s our world,” he riffed in the closing of  his keynote to the WorldVentures faithful. “And that’s a world I get excited about my little girl being born into. And I get excited when we travel around the country! And I get excited when we’re traveling around the world, and there’s these WorldVentures babies! And we’re getting together. That’s what I’m seeing and feeling. Why? Because that’s what I’m experiencing in real life. It’s happening right now. And if you’re right here at the beginning, maybe you’re not seeing that all now. But it’s there and it’s good.”

The rambling speech earned a roaring, standing ovation from a crowd of more than 4,000, most of whom paid $199 to attend. Mr. Nugent apologized for skipping the afterparty, and ran offstage to catch a flight.

In their time with WorldVentures, Los Angeles couple Roger Yack and his wife Sabine drank “little sips of the Koolaid,” Mr. Yack said. They estimate they spent about $30,000 on conventions like UNITED! and other “training” events before they stopped working and were dismissed by the company. “I believe that the line is that people that attend those trainings earn five times more than people that don’t,” Mr. Yack said. “Those 1,000 people spend $298 just to hype and ‘rah, rah!’ like crazy. What WorldVentures was really good at was creating a culture.”

WorldVentures’ training director, Marc Acetta, is known for dressing up in costumes—dealing out cards and sipping whiskey as a character he calls The Gambler, or muzzling a woman’s breasts as Jim Carrey’s character from The Mask in a performance enhanced by a strobe light and cheap pyrotechnics. “You want to get in my business?” he asks an actor. “It’s a travel business. You’ll make a shitload of money. Want to do it?” When the man hesitates, Mr. Acetta spritzes him with a water gun. “Sit down, John. You don’t qualify.” Even one WorldVentures detractor described Mr. Acetta, despite his dopey stage antics, as “brilliant.”

“It’s basically the most expensive high school pep rally you’ll ever see,” said Steve Hilger, an attorney representing a former WorldVentures high earner, Randy Ostram. Mr. Ostram is involved in a lawsuit against WorldVentures in Louisiana. His claims include that WorldVentures allowed a pair of reps, Eric Allen and Chris Dorgeat, to swap people in and out of lucrative places in the upper echelons of the pyramid. The pair also created a “straw man” position for Mr. Dorgeat in the name of his brother, Mathieu, in order to reap the benefits of having two spots, the lawsuit says. Later, Chris Dorgeat placed one of his personal recruits, James Lee, into “Mathieu’s” spot, according to the suit.

Although claims in multiple lawsuits allege that WorldVentures promotes its top reps even when sales goals aren’t met, the company positions itself as a meritocracy. Boosterism is central to the MLM ethos. WorldVentures biz op meetings are “invite-only,” which confers a sense of magic and mystery and filters out any uninvested strangers who might break the spell. “You get paid what you’re worth,” Mr. Eggers told prospective WorldVenturers. “If you’re lazy, you get paid nothing. If you work hard, you get paid a lot.”

The sparkling pitchmen of WorldVentures alternately empower and undermine their flocks. There is no limit to the fun you can have! The riches you can reap! Those who are skeptical are “negative;” those who drop out are “losers.” Sadly, there are a lot of negative losers out there. According to WorldVentures’ own income disclosure statement, an unaudited document that the company puts out as a show of good faith and a hedge against regulators, 73.7 percent of reps fail to earn a commission and only .102 percent earn a yearly income above the poverty level. The average rep earns $325 in a year. That doesn’t account for the price of joining or the cost of training events.

Ninety-nine percent of WorldVentures reps lose money, according to an independent study by Dr. Jon M. Taylor, an anti-MLM crusader based in Utah, one of the MLM industry’s biggest hubs. That figure is in line with the 500-some MLM companies he’s scrutinized, largely depending on data provided by the companies themselves. “A good MLM is really an oxymoron,” he told The Observer.

There are people who make a living from WorldVentures, although perhaps not as many as claim to do so. The need to recruit more sellers provides a built-in incentive to inflate one’s own success, and “there’s a lot of self-deception going on,” Dr. Taylor said. He surveyed reps who lobbied for a federal rule change that favored MLMs. “Even though they thought they were making money, if you asked them directly, ‘if you took the money you paid to the company, and subtracted what you paid to the company in products or services, which would be greater’? Most of them didn’t even know.”

A lawsuit filed by one of WorldVentures’ minority co-founders, Robert Oblon, alleges that some top reps were paying the fees for some of their downline recruits themselves in order to maintain a high rank and appearance of success. According to the lawsuit, WorldVentures propped up one of its star couples, Dave and Yvette Ulloa, by “grandfathering” them into the highest rank in the company even though they hadn’t earned it. Jennifer Taylor, the WorldVentures employee who was responsible for making the rank changes in the company’s MLM payroll software, iMatrix, said in a sworn statement that she personally made that change and others like it at the request of WorldVentures executives. It was then announced at a WorldVentures convention that the Ulloas had achieved the rank of International Marketing Director, Ms. Taylor said, for the benefit of impressive entry-level reps: “It would be important because it gives them the image that these ranks are attainable in the natural sense of attaining them. So, you know, they wanted it to appear to a new person in the business that this could be you. You can achieve this rank and make this money.”

WorldVentures maintains it is not a pyramid scheme. Because it sells a product—vacations—it stays within the law. “We pay commissions to our Representatives for selling our DreamTrips Membership products,” a representative for WorldVentures said in an email. “There’s no compensation whatsoever tied to Rep recruitment. But if they recruit additional Representatives, they can earn bonuses and commissions off the retail sales made by those Reps.”

The Federal Trade Commission draws a distinction between MLM schemes and pyramid schemes, and actually lightened proposed regulation on MLMs in 2008 after fierce lobbying by the industry. Still, the FTC warns, “It’s best not to get involved in plans where the money you make is based primarily on the number of distributors you recruit and your sales to them, rather than on your sales to people outside the plan who intend to use the products.” A federal database shows 25 bankruptcies in which an individual or couple was a WorldVentures rep.

So far, WorldVentures has kept out of trouble with attorneys general, shamed or litigated former reps into silence, and successfully parlayed its rating from the Better Business Bureau up to a C. But the two most damning lawsuits from former reps may soon be joined by a third. Jeffrey Ostrove, a former WorldVentures rep who was involved for seven months, is preparing a class action suit against the company. More than 200 people have signed on, he said. “This is really ethically wrong, it’s morally wrong,” he told The Observer. “It’s taking advantage financially of people without them knowing about it.”

editorial@observer.com

Occupy Wall Street, Oct. 13, 2011. (Photo: David Shankbone)

All along, the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York has been comprised mostly of white kids. Not to say the movement is or was all white kids, but despite the existence of a committee for people of color, there are and were a lot of white kids occupying Wall Street. But Occupy Wall Street won't tolerate divisions based on race, class or gender at Occupy Wall Street. There will be a meeting.

"Race, Class, Gender, Privilege and Power at Occupy Wall Street (A Real Discussion and Plan to root it out and EVOLVE from it!)!)" is one of the events listed in today's edition of the email newsletter sent out sporadically by the Occupy Wall Street group New York City General Assembly. "Almost no one will deny that racism in our society exists, but what's not so clear is the depth of its presence within the Occupy Wall Street Movement," reads the description.

The meeting is scheduled for Friday at "Liberty Plaza," the site of the original Occupy Wall Street protest. Sixteen people have RSVP'ed on Facebook; 14 said maybe. "Everything from the lack of diversity in this movement to the framing of questions, structures and culture has often been called into questions from the De-colonization Movement to even other Occupies within New York City," the organizers wrote. The Decolonization Movement is a push to include "decolonization" in the list of Occupy Wall Street's demands.

The Friday meeting is being called to discuss these intra-movement issues and figure out "steps to systematically address."

When she’s not traveling for her day job as a shoe designer for women and tweens, Ms. Anantharaman spends her weekends doing taxidermy. She answered the door in high-waisted black shorts, oversize glasses studded with rhinestones, sparkly green stick-on fingernails and bare feet—a bit of Brooklyn, where she lives, meets Miami, where she grew up. Ms. Anantharaman, who is dark-skinned, curvy and full-lipped, is gorgeous enough to pull this garish combination off—even as she clears a model of a human skeleton from the dining room table. “Last night I had some friends over and we were going to do taxidermy stuff, but we ended up just playing with my anatomy model,” she apologized.

Ms. Anantharaman has stuffed about 50 animals, and collected many more off eBay and from friends, who know that animal remains make an ideal house gift. The young fashionista tried to stuff her first mouse about four years ago on a whim, an experiment that evolved into an obsession with the rite of animal preservation. She’s using her winnings from Lifetime’s 24 Hour Catwalk, a grand prize of $10,000, to create a new line of taxidermy-themed footwear: high-heeled bunny slippers with real bunny heads, pumps covered in white mouse skin, that kind of thing. She has yet to name the collection. “Probably either ‘Ampoule’ or ‘Friends Forever,’” she said.

Her collection won’t be out for another two months, but there’s already plenty of haute roadkill littering the runway. We don’t mean mink stoles either—that stuff is for Grandma. Today, the truly fashion-forward lean more toward the German designer Iris Schieferstein, who famously produced a collection of heels made out of horse hooves, stuffed doves and snakes, for which she won approval from Lady Gaga. Another Gaga favorite, Alexander McQueen, awed fashion-watchers with his 2006 autumn and winter collection, Widows of Culloden, which featured antlers, bird cadavers and a pheasant-feathered dress. If you need something below the ankle to go with one of the pigeon head-pieces from London hipster goddess Reid Peppard, check out Alexander Fielden’s delicate hedgehog heels, or Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe’s moleskin mole slippers, complete with eight sets of claws.

Those seeking more affordable taxidermy-chic can shop on Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, where hundreds of such items are for sale. Brooches and necklaces are popular, as are tableaux of animals wearing uniforms (anthropomorphic taxidermy) and mad scientist, stitched-together, Human Centipede-style creations (rogue taxidermy). A winged rat is $275. A two-headed duckling is $70. Raccoon with one fist in a box of Cracker Jacks? $310. And on.

As an art, taxidermy is edgy, ecologically-friendly, lo-fi and crafty, which helps explain its popularity in the funkier pockets of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest in Park Slope just held its sixth annual event in December. The same impulse driving do-it-yourselfers to brew their own beer and cobble their own instruments together from recycled goods is, apparently, driving some young people to stuff their own cadavers. When it comes to artisanal taxidermy, off-the-gun-store-rack won’t do. Creative strongholds Observatory and the Brooklyn Brainery both recently hosted taxidermy classes, unleashing cohorts of amateur taxidermists into the wild. Nightclubs like Freemans, Home Sweet Home and the Jane all sport taxidermy decor—“hunting lodge hipster,” as a friend put it.

At this time last year, Animal Planet was airing American Stuffers, which focused on a pet taxidermy business, and the History Channel was running Mounted in Alaska, which focused on more Sarah Palin-esque game. Taxidermy frequently appears on Discovery’s Oddities, which revolves around Obscura Antiques & Oddities in the East Village. In January Jack White turned up on the History Channel’s American Pickers to haggle over a taxidermied elephant head.

While the goal of traditional taxidermy is to mimic nature, rogue taxidermy is out to scramble it. Weirdness is the thing.

The artist Damien Hirst, whose famous taxidermied-shark sculpture, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, sold for a reported $8 million, tried in 2003 to buy a collection of oddball taxidermy. Tableaux of a kitten’s wedding party, a group of hamsters playing cricket, a two-headed goat and so on, created by the Victorian-Edwardian artist Walter Potter, perhaps the first notable practitioner of rogue taxidermy. Mr. Hirst offered £1 million for the collection, but it was auctioned off, and Mr. Potter’s whimsically macabre pieces scattered. “It is,” Mr. Hirst wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian, “a tragedy.”

Kelly Owen, a Manhattan taxidermist who sells her work on Etsy under the name Morbid Curiosities Taxidermy, has a steady stream of orders for custom pieces. “I think it’s because it’s so niche,” she said of taxidermy’s recent popularity. As cute as such pieces can be, she added, “at the end of the day, it’s dead animals. That’s the main medium. I think it can only go so far as a trend.”
Ms. Owen just finished a commission for two cameo-style mouse-head brooches, and she’s working on a large winged rat. “People either like it or they don’t,” she said. “If I wanted to do something that everyone liked, I’d be knitting.”

THE OBSERVER ASKED MS. ANANTHARAMAN for a demonstration of her craft, and she was happy to oblige. She’s given many such exhibitions; her friends are “very into it,” she said, and the guy she’s dating doesn’t mind her hobby a bit. She selected the larger of the chilled birds from the baggie and placed it on a heart-shape paper plate decorated with Snow White and Princess Jasmine. She gets a lot of her supplies from the dollar store, she explained.

Ms. Anantharaman’s Ditmas Park apartment is well decorated and dimly lit. Two red chaise longues squared off the living room. Atop the coffee table, a little white mouse stood in front of a miniature full-length mirror, holding a wand and peering into a book of spells. Nearby, a fluffy gray bunny was tucked between the legs of a bobcat that was frozen in mid-yowl. Two new, black guns were mounted on hooks made of hooves. Two long shelves held titles ranging from Ornithology and Taber’s Cyclopedia of Anatomy and Physiology to Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland, Ms. Anantharaman’s favorite book, bookended by a faux human skull. The two uppermost shelves held animals in various states of preservation: freeze-dried, like the still-born deer; pickled, like the tiny mice; or mummified, in the case of a frog resting on a bed of dried roses, swaddled except for its curving webbed feet. Adjacent was a white paper packet containing the creature’s organs.

The majority of the animals, however, were stuffed: there was a fanged duck in a pink bow, and another mouse dyed to look like a bright yellow Pokemon. “Like Edward Gorey at a rave” was how Ms. Anantharaman described her aesthetic sensibility. Or Zooey Deschanel through the looking glass, The Observer thought, as we glimpsed a mouse with plastic blue eyeballs embedded in its back.

Ms. Anantharaman's cat, Fugazi, was curled up on one of the couches, glowering at us as Ms. Anantharaman brushed one of the finches clean. Fugazi has been known to eat the taxidermy, Ms. Anantharaman said. Emotionally, however, “he’s cool with it,” she insisted. “He knows it’s going to happen to him someday.”

The finch at hand was felled with a pellet gun, “probably by some asshole kids,” before Ms. Anantharaman found it during a hiking trip upstate. She scavenges her materials (occasionally in Prospect Park), but she recently got her hunting license and plans to shoot a turkey with a bow and arrow sometime next month.

Ms. Anantharaman is mostly self-taught, using clay-making tools and store-bought chemicals to fashion her creations. The only taxidermy-specific widget she owns is a guillotinelike device called a “tail stripper.” She also hopes to incorporate another hobby, perfumery, into her work—which seemed like a good idea given the sour, wet-earth smell coming from the finch.
Although Ms. Anantharaman appeared on an episode of TLC’s My Strange Addiction last summer, taxidermy isn’t really an addiction—just her favorite thing to do.

After her television appearances, she started getting fan mail, including a request to stuff a pet bunny. She’s had commissions from friends as well, including a hamster in her freezer that she plans to mount in a bowl of cherries. Once, a guy from her jiu jitsu class called, emotional in the tender moments after the family dog had passed. He asked about preservation. Ms. Anantharaman urged him to put the dog in the freezer if there was a chance he’d want it stuffed, but to think it over carefully. “Your dog’s going to be staring at you every day in the face,” she told him. He eventually decided against it. She has considered opening a pet taxidermy service, but she got hung up on the paperwork.

Taxidermy is heavily regulated. Ms. Anantharaman had to pass on a hawk once, because it’s illegal to take one home in New York. To work as a commercial taxidermist, she’d have to get certified; as a hobbyist, she can stuff as many small creatures as she likes.

She removed the bird’s guts to the princess plate and padded down the hall to the trash chute. She walked back quickly: “Shit, somebody was out there.”
Seated again at the dining room table—which is totally bleachable, she reassured us—she cooed over the dead bird’s pretty wings. “Aww, I’m so sad that he got shot,” she said as she removed the fatal pellets. “He’s so rumply! He looks like he had a rough night.”

After removing the eyes with tweezers, she stuffed the body with cotton and wire and sewed it up the front with plain black thread.

Some traditional taxidermists think it’s “disrespectful” to dress deceased animals in costumes, glue their claws to props, sew their body parts together to create recombinant circus freaks, or to incorporate them into footwear, Ms. Anantharaman said. In her opinion, rogue taxidermy is just another way of seeing the world. “It’s like the Impressionists,” she said.

The bird now resembled a bird again. Ms. Anantharaman had given it a fierce look with a pair of gold eyes made from sewing pins. She moved the bird to the closet to dry where Fugazi couldn’t get it.

“I’ll probably put a little top hat or something on him tomorrow,” she said.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of April 25, 2012.

Angela was included in a 1,000-pack of allegedly single, supposedly American women, which Betabeat purchased for $35. Her profile is one of a purported 14.9 million for sale on SaleDatingProfiles.com, where the inventory also includes 10,000 U.K. profiles for $200; 15,000 Russians for $240, and 70,000 Australians for $95. A pack of 2,500 lesbian profiles goes for $120, or 4.8 cents apiece; gay men are .003 cents each and are sold in a pack of 410,000. “High quality Gays adult dating profiles for sale with multiplay photos located in USA, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries,” the offer states. At the time of writing, SaleDatingProfiles was having a 75-percent-off spring sale.

Angela, who asked that her last name be withheld, has been dating online for years. But she never imagined her profile was for sale on the open market, or that it now appears on MeetGirlsGuys.com, which she never signed up for. “I have never even heard of that site!” she said, adding that she lives in Texas, not Alabama, and the photo is at least seven years old.

Online dating is a fast-growing industry, with current revenues estimated to run between $1.5 and $3 billion a year. But every new dating site faces the same problem: finding souls to mate. Recruiting new customers is expensive; industry experts put the customer acquisition price at $1 to $5 per person.

SaleDatingProfiles and its competitors BuyProfiles.com and DatingProfilesSale.com offer a shortcut. They sell bulk packages of profiles that seem to include a fair number of actual singles alongside somewhat more questionable Russian beauties, Nigerian bankers and half-empty profiles, which sometimes sell for less than a dime a dozen. Read More

Mr. Greenberg. (Getty Images)

Back in February, Josiah Boatswain, a 26-year-old from Flatbush, Brooklyn, and a few friends were pampering themselves at Fontainbleau: a $600-per-night resort that bills itself as the most luxurious hotel on the strip, promising high-end shopping, celebrities at every table, “24-7 glamour,” and an “expansive poolscape” on the stretch of Miami Beach known as Millionaire’s Row. Mr. Boatswain spent his vacation sipping Champagne, nibbling tiny chocolate cakes, and buying armfuls of couture, which he arranged in tableaux in his hotel room and photographed for his Facebook page.

In one picture, a silver wristwatch served as the understated centerpiece before a wall of Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo boxes; another is simply a lineup of 11 shopping bags, like a Real Housewife’s walk-in closet. “My bro always want to do it big!” a friend commented approvingly.

According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Mr. Boatswain, “Siah” or “Pepsi” to his friends, was financing his taste for Gucci and Moët with other people’s money, and not just any other people’s money, but that of billionaire investor Ira Rennert, former AIG chief Hank Greenberg’s Starr Foundation, and the Wasserman family trust, among other high-profile philanthropists, financiers and New York personalities. No fewer than 55 people were indicted and arraigned two weeks ago in a case the city and the police have dubbed “INSIDERS,” so named because low-level employees allegedly stole financial account information from patrons of four institutions, including about 150 donors to the United Jewish Appeal-Federation and about 900 customers of an Audi dealership in Coney Island. The case has not been tried and the proceedings will likely take more than a year. But according to the DA, the final victim list included Eric Zinterhofer, son-in-law to cosmetics heir Ron Lauder; Paula Sarnoff Oreck, the niece of former RCA head David Sarnoff and ex-wife of Oreck vacuum-cleaner big David Oreck; and, according to the New York Post, NBA commissioner David Stern.

Billionaires. Cyber crime. Insiders. Did the investigators realize they had a very sexy case right away? “Oh, yeah,” said Assistant District Attorney David Szuchman. “Very early on, when we realized there was an insider at UJA; we realized that the amount of information that was being compromised was large,” he said. “Then we realized that the group had to be working with others and it was a very, very large group to investigate. The fraud was so prolific.”

Basically, the cops were tipped off when the swindlers cashed one too many money orders. When you get access to a stolen debit card, one way to milk more cash out fast is to take it to the post office. With ATMs, you have withdrawal caps; money orders come in denominations of $1,000 and the fee is just $1.55.

Banks are hip to the money order racket, however. When debit cards that had been used to buy money orders were later flagged for fraud, the banks complained to the postal service. Mr. Szuchman couldn’t go into specifics, citing trade secrets of the cyber crime unit. But the gist is this: After the USPS saw about a dozen bogus money orders, mostly in Brooklyn and within a short time, the NYPD made a few arrests, which led to a search warrant for a cell phone or two, which led to the epiphany that the money orders were coming from high-profile philanthropists, which eventually led back to the UJA, where the investigators found their first “insider” in an elaborate plot that was as much a jackpot for the cops as it allegedly had been for the bad guys.

“We’re working a normal case and we’re going to handle it the same way either way,” Mr. Szuchman said. “But we were aware of some of the individuals that were named in the indictment as victims—we’re aware of the size of some of those donors.”

There are no signs, however, that Pepsi and his co-conspirators realized they were pilfering from the über-elite. The big-name victims are listed in the court filings alongside less fabulous surnames of unlucky doctors, lawyers and realtors. The thieves didn’t care if a particular UJA donor had ponied up $18 or a million-dollar check, as long as it was attached to a valid checking account number or credit card.

The alleged conspiracy appears to have been almost leaderless, and it’s still unclear who started the scheme. Most of the defendants are under 30, some have gang affiliations, and all but five are from Brooklyn. “It’s very hard for us to figure out who started it and when they started it,” Mr. Szuchman said. “We don’t really know.”

The list is an ethnic and demographic mix: a Polish bank teller, a 37-year-old Hispanic UPS worker, a 19-year-old from Florida. Five defendants are still unidentified, known just by their pseudonyms: “King Joffy,” “Michelle Brown,” “Paul None Livingston,” “Kevin None Rodriguez” and “Chuck.” The Post made much of the case’s alleged gang roots: “Street gangs target the charitable and rich,” the paper reported, but the defendants are associated variously with the Bloods, Crips and a hyperlocal East Flatbush gang called the Outlaws—suggesting it wasn’t an organized street crime operation, as gangs don’t typically collaborate. Two persons of interest turned up dead during the 18-month investigation, but there is no evidence that the murders were linked to the conspiracy or the investigation.

The main force behind the investigation, which involved multiple cell phone taps and subpoenas for text messages, was the District Attorney’s Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau, of which Mr. Szuchman is the chief. The former Eliot Spitzer acolyte took the job after a brief stint as head of the New Jersey State Division of Consumer Affairs under Jon Corzine. He now supervises a crack team of prosecutors, cyber-crime analysts and digital forensic analysts who snoop through confiscated iPads, smartphones and computers for a damning digital trail, things like the Google history of Justin Waller, a man who killed his roommate last year and reportedly searched, “How long does it take for a dead body to smell?”

“Cyber crime” generally calls to mind a cunning geek in a Guy Fawkes mask, typing out the recipe for a dangerous virus or phishing up Bank of America passwords from his parents’ basement. The perpetrators of the INSIDERS case had no such savvy (and indeed, neglected to make their Facebook photos private).

“This is a cyber crime because of the way the crimes were committed,” Mr. Szuchman said in an email. “BlackBerrys and smartphones were key components to committing the crimes from communicating to trafficking the personal identifying information.”

Even so, the investigators were arguably the ones doing most of the cybering. Investigators eavesdropped on the suspects’ phone calls, read their text messages and of course peeked at their social media profiles (with a bag of popcorn, we imagine, based on portraits of Pepsi pouring bottles of Champagne and liquor onto the floor at a night club). The indictment even cites emails the conspirators sent each other with credit card account numbers. “It’s a strong case,” Mr. Szuchman said.

Pepsi was one of seven accused “buyers,” who paid for the stolen personal data, then used it or resold it. These buyers, with nicknames like “Gucci,” “Chin,” “Tugs” and “Tigga,” tied together what would otherwise have been a set of similar but disconnected crimes.

The other commonality was the source of the credit information: lowly employees at institutions who happened to have access to the finances of strangers.

One of the reputed four key “insiders” was Tracey Nelson, a 24-year-old who pushed papers at the UJA. Ms. Nelson snapped pictures of donor information with her BlackBerry or simply walked out with papers in her purse; she sobbed openly during her arraignment.

Glenn Abolafia is the court-appointed attorney for Ms. Nelson, who pleaded not guilty. “We’re just at the beginning of the case and there is a lot of investigation to do to see if any of the accusations make any sense,” he said.

Ms. Nelson’s live-in boyfriend, Robbie Millar, 26, worked at Audi and was “a big player,” according to the DA. The other two, smaller fries, were Nicola Bennett, a pretty 30-year-old employee of residential property manager AKAM Associates, and Karen Chance, a 32-year-old teller at Chase Bank at 36th Street and Seventh Avenue.

The DA has divided the conspiracy by roles: insiders, identity buyers, accomplice recruiters, check-makers and collusive account holders. The thieves had to get access to a bank account or credit card information and then cash out as fast as possible before the account was flagged for suspicious activity. Therefore, some conspirators allegedly printed fake checks at home and forged signatures. Other defendants cashed counterfeit checks and accepted fraudulent transfers through their own legitimate bank accounts from sources that, to any observer, would seem incredibly unlikely. In a typical transaction from the indictment, an unnamed conspirator used a debit card belonging to a defendant to deposit a fake check for $9,536 from hedge fund Paulson & Co. on June 18, 2010. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants paid out $2,769 to defendant Cassilda Mitchell via a counterfeit check; defendant Nicole Leach Vitalis received a phony $9,000 bank transfer from viral marketing company Oddcast. The crew also bought electronics and other big-ticket items, which they got cash for from their 33-year-old fence, Younis Abidar, who sold them on the black market.

Others like the appropriately named “Treasure,” one 25-year-old Umar Credle, cashed USPS money orders, the practice that eventually got the ring busted.

Insiders stealing identities got hundreds of dollars per account, although rates varied. Chase accounts could fetch a higher price because the ring had at least three insiders working behind the counter who ensured the fraud didn’t set off internal alarms. Collusive bank account holders got perhaps a $100 or $200 cut per transaction.

In the end, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Rennert, Ms. Oreck and the estimated 200 or so victims were reimbursed by the banks for their losses. “The Manhattan DA’s office informed us that this type of breach can happen in any organization, no matter how stringent its controls,” UJA said in a statement issued after the indictment; the organization declined to elaborate beyond its press release to The Observer. Calls to Open Road Audi were not returned.

The 55 defendants are being charged with various degrees of conspiracy, possession of stolen property, grand larceny and identity theft. As the DA tells it, JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank, Citibank, Discover and American Express took the hit for the $2 million or so that paid for flights, movie tickets and electronics and kept the defendants in Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent. Prosecutors say they have stacks of evidence against the accused, whose first pretrial hearings are scheduled for February. If convicted, at least they got to do it big for a while.

Mr. Ruprecht?

So far the art workers and their supporters have tried pranks, picket lines, an Occupy Wall Street alliance, a legal appeal to the National Labor Relations Board, and traditional negotiations, all to no avail. But perhaps a Christmas card will do the trick.

Sotheby's has yet to let its locked-out workers back in after more than four months off the job due to disagreements over their union contract. So now the workers of the Local 814, the Teamsters union that includes art handlers at Sotheby's high-end auctionhouse, have launched an email campaign comparing Sotheby's CEO William Ruprecht to Scrooge and claiming the Teamsters have no money to care for their Tiny Tims. The catalyst? The locked-out workers are on the verge of losing their health insurance.

The "Sotheby's: Bad for Art" campaign blasted out an email this morning: "How Sotheby's Stole Christmas," directing people to sign an online petition addressed to Mr. Ruprecht:

Sotheby's: Don't be a Scrooge

Dear  Sotheby's CEO William Ruprecht,

Sotheby's just celebrated its most profitable quarter in the company's history, and yet, you have locked out your hardworking, loyal art handlers--some have worked at Sotheby's for more than 40 years.

Not only are your employees now forced to face the holidays without jobs, but they will also be forced to ring in the New Year by losing their health care.

Stop being a Scrooge and end the lockout of your art handlers before January 1, 2012. Every working American deserves job security and health care.

(stern.nyu.edu)

Undergraduate tuition at New York University is around $41,000, but parents can be assured their bright young things are still getting The People's Education, reports the student newspaper The Washington Square News. NYU plans to offer not one, but two classes on the burgeoning social movement known as Occupy Wall Street, so that the 1 percent may study the 99 at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

NYU, you may recall, had its own occupation in 2009. About 70 students barricaded themselves inside the cafeteria. According to the New York Times:

The students passed their first night chatting, reading and playing cards. They ate food they had brought, including apples, oranges, hummus and peanut butter. Some joined in an exercise session they called the “calisthenic dialectic workout,” stretching and jumping in place before adjourning for a discussion of Hegel’s philosophy that lasted nearly until daybreak.

The occupation ended after 40 hours when school security guards removed the barricade and suspended 18 students.

But next semester, NYU students can engage their predilection for revolution without the risk of getting kicked out. The sophomore level class, "Cultures and Economies: Why Occupy Wall Street?" counts for American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Metropolitan Studies majors. The course description (emphasis ours) is as follows:

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are catching on across the United States, linking with popular discontent with economic inequality and financial greed and malfeasance around the globe. This course is designed to provide a background for these momentous events. We will examine the long history of finance, the impact of financialization on empires and regimes historic and present, and thesources and impact of economic, political, social and cultural inequalities. We will also investigate the conditions for challenges, uprisings and change. In addition, this course focuses on the relationship of “the economy” to broad histories of U.S. and global political cultures. Each week we will explore a set of issues, events, theories and approaches to economic topics, as we also consider the impact of social cleavages of race, class, gender, sexuality, region, religion and other factors. We will collaboratively analyze different ways of understanding U.S. cultures and economies in a global context, working to identify the factors that have shaped the world we now inhabit.

Yes, but what are the goals?