The spine collector saga (VI)

THIS is the sixth and final instalment of The Spine Collector series, an investigation by Reeves Wiedeman, with Lila Shapiro, on the theft of manuscripts. The long-read article probes a mysterious figure that has been stealing books for years before their release. The article was first published on August 17, 2021, and has been reproduced by the Vulture magazine — an entertainment-andculture outlet of New York magazine. On March 23, 2023, the perpetrator was sentenced.

As the conversation stretched over several days, other strange things occurred. The thief impersonated my book agent for the first time. Anonymous accounts tried to connect with me on LinkedIn. One morning, I woke up to an overnight alert on my phone that someone was trying to log in to an online dating profile that had not been active for years.

Lila, meanwhile, had begun her own exchange with the thief. Our approaches diverged. While I was happy to methodically collect e-mails, hoping the next exchange would provide a case-breaking clue, Lila was eight months pregnant, and every time she returned from a doctor’s appointment, she grew more exasperated at my increasingly chaotic Homeland wall.

She wanted to be more direct.

“Would you be up for a phone call?” she wrote to the thief. The thief suggested an inperson meeting instead. When Lila said she lived in Brooklyn, the thief said they did, too. Lila then suggested meeting in Cobble Hill, at which point the conversation turned.

“How about Fuck You Hill?” the thief wrote back. “Or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?”

The message went on.

“Take my advice,” the thief wrote. “Drop this stupid article and stop with it immediately!!!”

The thief wasn’t the only one who wanted me to stop. Two of this magazine’s editors sat me down and said that I couldn’t spend all year investigating a crime with no real victims. The world was sick and on fire with actual cyberattacks knocking hospitals and pipelines offline. It was time to write the ending.

In the course of reporting this story, more than a dozen people in publishing told us they believed a single suspect was behind the whole thing: the person I had been told about at the outset. Most people couldn’t tell me much about him, but the details they shared fit the thief’s profile. He was from another country, and his English wasn’t great. His manner, in person and in writing, could be brusque. His client list was small, and his scouting business was sometimes a struggle: one former client told us that after parting ways with the scout, he sent her so many texts she had to block his number. He wasn’t on the literary social scene, which made people presume he was resentful.

Then again, one scout admitted to me, “Do we all just think it’s him because he is weird?”

The smoking gun — the mistaken domain registration teased by my friend — was meant to provide more substantial proof. After a seemingly endless game of tag, we finally got to the source. In the summer of 2017, Laila Lalami, the award-winning novelist, had been approached by the thief, who was impersonating someone at her literary agency. Lalami figured out something was wrong, and her husband, an IT engineer, looked into the domain and found that it was registered to a particular Gmail address. When Lalami shared the address with her agency, they saw the e-mail seemed to belong to a scout — our original suspect.

But upon closer inspection, I found the proof was a mirage. The address wasn’t the suspect’s. It was yet another fake e-mail, missing a single letter, the same one the thief had used to impersonate the suspect himself all the way back in 2016.

Lila and I scrambled for an explanation. Wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that the thief had used this particular address? Maybe our suspect was being framed? What a twist!

But when I showed the evidence to Chad Anderson, a senior security researcher at DomainTools, he scanned some of the thief’s other domain registrations from the time and found that almost all of them were registered with fake Gmail accounts loosely connected to people and companies in publishing. Our smoking gun had misfired.

I had come too far not to close the loop. In early August, I spoke to the suspect on Zoom. He was sitting in the garden of his home wearing a blue polo shirt with the sun setting behind him, causing the screen to flare around him. He was shocked to hear that his colleagues in the industry suspected him and denied the accusation.

Over the next 24 hours, he sent me 64 emails that showed he could get books legitimately. an e-mail exchange from when he was impersonated and considered paying US$2 000 to an anonymous hacker-forhire for help, and several notes he had sent to the thief at the time: “I hope the new year brings you the end of your career and a big lawsuit. In other words, all you deserve.”

The suspect said he had a simple explanation for why people thought there was something odd about him. He was, by his own admission, kind of an odd guy. He was shy and had never fully assimilated into the New York scene he was supposed to become a part of. His clients couldn’t spend big money, which meant sometimes agents ignored him, and he admitted that his position in the industry was sometimes frustrating. He had chosen a profession he thought was for bookish people like him, only to realise that in publishing, as in everything else, the extroverts still ruled.

“Even if I’m an introvert,” he said, “I’m not a hacker.” This felt like the final chapter. The suspect’s manner had been strange, but he had also presented more evidence in his defence than anyone had mustered in his prosecution. I felt less like Lisbeth Salander than one of M. Escher’s monks, wandering endlessly in circles. Maybe the thief was right. This was pointless.

Or … was the pointlessness the point? The one thing that seemed to tie all these tiny acts of deception together was a sense that the thief was in it for the pleasure of the act itself. Whoever they were — a disgruntled scout, a basement full of hackers laughing to themselves — they cared enough to keep at it for years, devoting countless hours to sending endless e-mails — all seemingly for nothing. I imagined that some in publishing could feel a certain empathy for a person engaged in an effortful obsession that produced little profit; after months of fruitless investigating, I certainly did.

“If you try to find financial and economic gain, it’s of course hard to see,” said Daniel Sandstrom, the literary director of a Swedish publisher hit many times by the thief. “But if the game is psychological, a kind of mastery or feeling of superiority, it’s easier to visualise. This is a business full of resentment as well, and in that sense, it becomes a good story.”

Last week, in one final attempt at cracking the case, Lila and I sent an e-mail to 89 different addresses the thief has used. Did they care to comment?

The thief hasn’t written back. But just a few minutes after the message went out, I got an unusual text from someone hoping to talk off the record — a person in publishing equally obsessed with solving the case.

“It’s me!” they said, jokingly admitting guilt, after I asked whether they had just received my e-mail. “Wouldn’t that be the best twist of all?”

I wasn’t kidding. I had walked so deep into the dark labyrinth of this mystery. Just last month, the thief expanded their scheme yet again: For the first time I knew of, they were impersonating someone in Hollywood rather than a book person. And now, here was this source, beckoning me to join them even deeper in the maze. They were calling to tell me a story they hadn’t told anyone else. For two years, they had harboured a suspicion about a widely respected figure in the industry. The suspicion was based on one curious moment that could only make sense, they thought, if this new suspect were the thief. It could mean everything, my fellow obsessive said.

Or it might mean nothing at all.