In an Overstock.com quarterly conference call yesterday, CEO Patrick Byrne said he does not post anonymously on internet message boards like the detestable Rahodeb Mackey, a claim Gary Weiss proved fallacious long ago.

What’s interesting about yesterday’s call, which ran for over an hour in the late morning and early afternoon, is that Byrne actually posted under his sobriquet, Hannibal, while the call was in progress. He wrote, “ thanks dude” at 11:43 on the Investor Village message board.

We suspect that the overstock board of directors are all Byrne creations as well. Joseph J. Tabacco, Jr., come on.

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne Posts on Internet During Conference Call [Gary Weiss]

Although Gary Weiss has been on to him months, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne admitted to “pulling a Mackey” last night, writing on the Overstock website that, like Whole Foods CEO John “Rahodeb” Mackey, he posted on company-related message boards pseudonymously.

Byrne’s admission comes in response to this New York Times article, where he told reporters that unlike Mackey, “he never hides his true identity and always signs his name when he posts under his online handle, ‘Hannibal.’” But it appears that Byrne has occasionally let the sobriquet stand alone. Last night, Byrne wrote in an open letter to Times reporter Brad Stone,

Please provide a citation for this claim: “Mr. Byrne said that he never hides his true identity and always signs his name when he posts under his online handle, ‘Hannibal’”. Is it your claim that I used the words “always” and “never” in some message board post (and if so, please cite that post), or is it your claim that I stated this in our interview? I know for a fact that the claim is false as regards our interview, and believe it to be false with regard to any online posting, but I stand ready to be corrected.

Just how prevalent is this anonymous executive posting phenomena? If you frequent these boards, please share every suspicious nom de plum you come across. Be particularly wary of anagrammed names of an executive’s mother, sister, wife or daughter, famous military commanders and Republican presidents.

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne Admits He Posted Under Pseudonyms [Gary Weiss]
Take 5 With Patrick [Overstock.com]

Against all odds, the story of Overstock continues to get worse. The company has been a laughing stock to almost anyone who can be bothered to think about it anymore. It’s the focus of an SEC investigation. It is run by a chief executive whose name—Patrick Byrne—long ago became synonymous with wacky conspiracy theories. It regularly deploys nasty tactics to defame reporters who dare mention its deterioration. An it’s bleeding directors.

The latest news hit on Thursday when Ray Groves resigned from the board. Groves, who once ran Ernst & Young, was the head of Overstock’s audit committee. He was, in the eyes of some observers, the last and best hope the company had to maintaining a sense of credibility. His departure comes as only the latest of a series of resignations by board members. The past year has seen also seen departures by directors John Fisher and John Byrne, the CEO’s father. When your father bails on your company, you know you are in trouble. Or rather, you would know. Patrick Byrne seems to think it’s a sign of his company’s strength. Or something. We’ve long ago given up trying to figure out anything about what goes on inside of Byrne-the-younger’s brain.

But other’s have not. After we took off for the long-weekend, Gary Weiss, Sam Antar and Herb Greenberg all looked into the latest resignation. What’s behind the latest departure? Well, the same thing that was behind the departure of Fischer and Byrne-the-elder: the CEO’s ridiculous “jihad” against the “sith lords” on Wall Street he claims are behind a naked shorting conspiracy that is depressing his company’s stock price.

“In a letter contained in an SEC filing this morning, Groves told the company, ‘My resignation relates to the company’s prime broker suit.’ That’s Overstock’s suit alleging that prime brokers are somehow involved in a naked shorting conspiracy,” Greenberg reports.

[But is it more than the Overstock’s lawsuit against prime brokers? Read more after the jump.]

Overstock.com’s Judd Bagley is now waging smear campaign agaisnt Bloomberg’s Susan Antilla for calling him a liar, speaking truth, etc.

This one is typical of the tactics that Bagley and his boss Patrick Byrne deploy, in their frenzied campaign to keep people from writing about or criticizing their actions. I call it the IAS — Intimidate and Smear — strategy.

First Byrne tried to bully Antilla and Bloomberg by publishing her questions and his slippery, evasive responses on the Internet.

That failed, so they have now moved into the Smear phase of the strategy, in a post that Bagley published on the Investor Village message board this morning. It is titled “A wee bit of context on Susan Antilla.”

Said Bagley:

The conventional wisdom has been that her husband, Dennis H Leibowitz , is with Credit Suisse First Boston. Wrong. In 2002 he left SCFB to start his own hedge fund. It’s called Act 2.

Act 2 specializes in investing in the media space. Included in Act 2’s portfolio is several million dollars worth of News Corp stock. You may also know News Corp as the company that owns the New York Post.

As usual with a Bagley smear on behalf of his wack-a-doo employer, he takes a faux-factual nugget and fashions it into a paranoid fantasy and lie.

This latest Overstock smear not only illustrates the intimidate-and-lie tactics used by this failing company, but also again focuses attention on Bagley’s chosen forum for his smears — the Investor Village Overstock message board.

On a more interesting note:

Happy Valentine’s Day, Gary Weiss. The SEC has dropped an investigation into Gradient Analytics, a research shop previously accused of “deliberately skewing its research to benefit short-sellers,” and has offered to issue Gradient a “rare” “No Action” letter, reports the Post. Gradient has been embroiled in a legal battle with saintly people at Overstock.com (accused of “abetting so-called stock counterfeiting”). From the man himself,

No surprise here. Overstock and its loathsome CEO Patrick Byrne are the latest in a long line of cruddy companies and inept CEOs that have blamed short-sellers for their own shoddy performance.

That is why this is such a huge embarrassment for the SEC, which should have known better. At one low point a year ago, the SEC subpoenaed several journalists who had fallen afoul of Overstock’s dipsy-doodle CEO Patrick Byrne. Byrne denied that he had prompted the subpoenas or the investigation, but his greasy pawprints were all over it.

One of those real problems is Overstock.com itself, which is the subject of an informal SEC investigation itself. Time to see some SEC action on this disgraceful corporate train wreck.

A Wild Goose Chase Ends [gary-weiss.com]
SEC KILLS PROBE OF GRADIENT [NYP]

You remember AntiSocialMedia.Net, right? No? Yeah, we were doing out best trying to forget it also. It’s the website hosting what the New York Post describes as “bitter attacks … on the message board critics, accusing them of participating to various degrees in a conspiracy to malign the anti-naked short selling movement that Overstock.com supports.”

Well, it turns out that there was very good reason that AntiSocialMedia.Net was supporting the same causes as Overstock.com. It was being anonymously run by Overstock.com’s director of social media Judd Bagley.

Gary Weiss, who has been all over this story, wants to know:

Only one question arises in my mind: What laws were broken? Not “were laws broken?” but “what were the laws that were broken?” The new federal cyberstalking law comes to mind, obviously, but what others? Regulation FD is another good possibility, given the ASM Lie Machine was created after Bagley became a corporate officer. (And speaking of corporate disclosure, shouldn’t Overstock file an 8-K disclosing its involvement in ASM?)

Bagley is trying hard to distance himself from his employer, Patrick Byrne, which brought him on as “director of social media” in August with all the fanfare that you and I would use in buying a can of Raid cockroach spray. Nice try, but too late. Byrne himself promoted the site and contributed to it, and has indicated that he has advance knowledge of its disclosures. Once again, Byrne’s big mouth has landed him in deep doo-doo.

Judd Bagley Fesses Up [Gary-Weiss.com]

One of the great non-mysteries of the internet was (kinda, sorta) resolved today when the New York Post’s Roddy Boyd revealed that senior executive’s of troubled online retailer Overstock.com were connected to a new website attacking the company’s critics and shortsellers. Actually, the story behind AntiSocialMedia.net is still a bit conjectural. While Boyd notes that Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne and its new media adviser have been supportive of the website, he stops short of accusing them of actually setting up and running the site. It’s been widely suspected that Byrne’s soft-hands were all over the AntiSocialMedia, thanks in large part due to the work of Gary Weiss, a frequent critic of Patrick Byrnes and the anti-naked shorting conspiracy theorists.

Today Weiss notes that anonymously attacking critics is not usually a good idea for corporations.

This corporate smear campaign is a kind of clumsy, low-rent version of General Motor’s effort to harass, stalk and discredit Ralph Nader in the sixties.

Anonymously harassing people over the Internet is a federal crime — even when, as in this instance, the anonymous stalkers are cowering behind a sheet of cellophane.

GM wounding up eating crow, apologizing to Nader and paying damages. Given the miserable state of Overstock’s business, as reflected in its share price, I doubt that there will be much left of Overstock when the smoke clears — except the stench.

Update and correction: As a reader pointed out, the correct URL is antisocialmedia.net. An earlier version of this story used a dot com address.

Overstock.com lashes out at its critics on the web [New York Post]
Overstalk.com?[GaryWeiss.com]

Gary Weiss, the author of Wall Street Versus America, picks some choice excerpts from Overstock.Com CEO Patrick Byrne’s blog and issues a promise to be the internet’s personal Patrick Byrne watchdog.

Rest assured that there is no need to actually visit Byrne’s blog or stay up late to follow his fave message board (where he was still posting at 8:28 tonight) to keep up to speed on his latest thoughts.

I will personally monitor the dog food, miscreant, bimbo, conspiracy, self-immolation and unfair-press situation, and will post further excerpts as developments warrant.

The (Recent) Wit and Wisdom of Patrick Byrne [Gary-Weiss.Com]

Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne was one of the few CEO’s we know who regularly wrote essays on the internet. And by “essays” we mean defensive, semi-paranoid rants attacking short sellers and his company’s detractors. Sometimes this stuff got so batshit insane overheated that some readers thought it was a prank or doubted Byrne was actually writing the stuff.

Now it’s gone. The entire section “Deep Thoughts by Patrick Byrne” seems to been erased from Overstock’s website. (And we never got to find out whether the section was in fact named for Jack Handy’s “Deep Thoughts” segments on Saturday Night Live.)

Fortunately, we’ll always have the Google cache. [Update: As our readers have pointed out, the cache sadly just gives evidence of how many deep thoughts Byrne had, but not the actual posts themselves.]

Byrne Nukes His Own Immortal Words [Gary Weiss]

Update: We hadn’t seen this before so maybe it is the replacement for Deep Thoughts. The Patrick Byrne blog!

Gary Weiss, author of Wall Street Versus America, listened to the Overstock.Com conference call so you wouldn’t have to. Not surprisingly, CEO Patrick Byrne found time to talk about things other than his company’s $0.78 per share net loss in the second quarter. Things like dastardly short-sellers and how shareholders might prevent them from pushing the value of their stock down even further.

We’ll leave the details for you to read by clicking through to Gary’s blog on the link below. But if you’re as lazy as we are on Fridays, you might appreciate skipping right to the conclusion.

Byrne’s gambit won’t work, by the way. History has proven that the only proven method of pushing up the share prices of bad companies is that they stop being bad. And Byrne just hasn’t figured out a way to do that.

Burn! (As DealBreaker cub reporter Bess Levin likes to say.)

Byrne’s Latest Gambit
[Gary-Weiss.Com]

Jeff Matthews asks a completely reasonable question: what is going on with the Board of Directors of Overstock.Com? At least a few of the directors seem to be sensible, well-regarded folks. Are they celebrating yesterday’s subpoena news with CEO Patrick Byrne? Or are they just bored with being directors and not really paying attention?

I cannot imagine that being a director at Overstock.Com is boring. To the contrary, shouldn’t being a lightsaber wielding jedi preparing to do battle with the Sith be just about the best job ever?

I mean, what else could a director ask for? Other than a Harley, obviously.

Bored of Directors? [JeffMatthewsIsNotMakingThisUp]

RECAP: The OSTK call was less eventful than what we’ve come to expect from Byrne, but there was the usual hint of conspiracy and gratuitous media bashing (see Roddy Boyd, swipes at; Wall Street Journal, accusations of fabricated quotes). Byrne also says that one of the “big three” bulge bracket banks has been calling up some of OSTK’s partners and telling them to drop OSTK. And guidance: next quarter will look exactly like this quarter.

11:59 - final comments. Jason: we stumbled and we know we stumbled and don’t let anything we say make you think we’re making excuses.. but in the long run it might be a good thing for the business… when we had the debacle we had, replacing all of our systems this year, and we shrunk a lot… it’s given us time to take a deep breath and harden our systems. [our core business] is getting a lot of attention. As bad as the systems got, i think the core shopping business, as far as somebody orders a product and they get it on time, i’m not sure our business has ever been better… i think investors should be pleased and in the next 6 months to a year, you’ll see a big difference in our financial performance. Byrne - to me this is all a function of bad decisions i made in the first half of ‘05, both in that they were belated, and that… we stumbled… To jason’s point… we couldn’t have gotten better or more refined looks at inventory or more refined looks at marketing… travel beat budget for the quarter, auctions was just a little behind budget…we don’t really have any great new businesses planned. we’re just refining what we have… i’m sure you welcome having Jason back to provide adult supervision… Expect that same thing for one more quarter..

A few months ago, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne got into an exchange with Jeff Matthews about the supposed existence of an Israeli mafia. (This discussion pre-dates his defense against more recent allegations of anti-Semitism.) In a post about the exchange, Matthews points out that Byrne is on record pointing to the “Israeli mob” (presumably among others—Sith Lords, etc.) as one of the conspirators in the alleged naked shorting movement against him. Byrne responds:

Jeff omits precisely the part of the quote that makes the connection, and that is, after I mentioned the Italian, Russian, and Israeli mobs, and the discussed the Russian mob, the interviewer said/asked, “I didn’t know Israel had a mob?” To which I replied that, yes it does: for example, it is widely thought to control the US ecstasy trade.

The relevant quote from the transcript of an interview Byrne did with the Christian Financial News Network:

The Israeli mob—in fact I was just reading Ha’aretz, which is an Israeli newspaper, ah, and a very good one, and you can Google this—If you Google “ectasy Israeli mafia” you’ll find articles that basically the Israeli mob…is thought to control 75% of the ecstasy trade in the U.S.”

Which begs the question: why would Byrne be Googling “ecstasy Israeli mafia” in the first place? Possibly because of this: [From the Salt Lake Tribune, May 26, 2002]

In another Utah case, Holly McDonald-Korth was allegedly receiving shipments of Ecstasy from Antwerp Belgium, according to a search warrant filed by Salt Lake City police investigators… On paper, McDonald-Korth appears nothing like a drug dealer. She was enrolled in private school as a teen and then attended the University of Michigan before graduating with honors from the university of Miami with a degree in finance, according to court documents. After graduation, McDonald-Korth went to work for the Federal Reserve in Washington. The 25-year-old came to Utah 18 months later after obtaining a job as an analyst for Overstock.com

The ecstasy dealer who presents the biggest threat to Overstock isn’t, as it turns out an Israeli mobster. It’s their current SVP in charge of Overstock Auctions.

$$$ Credit where credit’s due: we all have Overstock’s Patrick Byrne to thank for making conference calls fun again. But let’s face it: they’re even better when you record them and have them read by monkeys in wigs and sunglasses. (See also here and here.)

$$$ What’s the first result when you type “finance” into Google? Uh… Yahoo! Someone’s getting fiiiiiired. [via Going Private]

$$$ The 80,000 volt electric briefcase. Where the hell was this when we were dropping off piles of cash on behalf of Equatoguinean dictators in Dupont Circle for Riggs Bank in ‘04? Now they tell us! [via BoingBoing]

$$$ The first rule of Hedge Fund Polo Club is that no one talks about Hedge Fund Polo Club.