CAUGHT IN THE WEB

BYLINE: Andrew Friedman

Looking at the story one way, you could say a Klingon battle knife cut down Frank Virga.  It was a majestic, futuristic thing with a firm grip and a gleaming blade.  When you pushed a button, two other blades that sandwiched the first slashed outward, like the black wings of a beetle.

Virga was in the movie memorabilia business.  He sold what he called "studio props" from Star Wars, Star Trek and elsewhere in the sci-fi universe.  He ran a few companies based in Wantagh that went by the names Creative Robotic Systems, Video Memories and, finally, International Memorabilia Brokers.  He was a savvy entrepreneur, a money-maker and a grand planner, but Captain Kirk and his crew still knew something that Virga did not.  While Klingon knives are quite beautiful and technologically advanced to be sure, they are sharp and they are deadly.  And if you are human, they can catch up with you in all kinds of unpleasant ways.

Virga surely didn't think twice about one little Klingon knife back then.  Or how, through a complex network of channels on the Internet, it would come back to cut him down.

The birth of an idea: Look sharp

It was 1992 when it started.  A 29-year-old guy named Fabian Pappa was trying to cobble together a life for himself in a machine shop in Patchogue.  Born in Argentina, Pappa had lived in Buenos Aires while people were being "disappeared" by the military.  He had jet black hair and a goatee and often wore black jeans and a black leather jacket over his stocky frame.  He had gone to grade school in Hauppauge and went back to Buenos Aires to a boarding school run by monks.  When he came back, he decided to make a go of it in the manufacturing industry, as one of the little independent gears who operated in the shadow of Grumman.

Pappa rented a small garage for $100 a month.  All he had were the basics: a milling machine, a production lathe and a tooling lathe.  He lived in an apartment on the second floor of a house next door, and next door to that, his father ran a tooling plant.  They persisted, and life moved along.

One day, Frank Virga approached Pappa about a job.  Pappa headed down to the pristine middle-class neighborhood where Virga lived in a brick shingled house with a bay window, on Holiday Park Drive in Wantagh.  Virga was of medium height, in his 40s then, balding and reportedly missing at least one finger on one of his hands.

Pappa remembers it playing out this way.  That day, Virga told Pappa he wanted him to make a knife. But not just any knife.  A 23rd-century Klingon battle knife with gleaming blades.  A knife the aggressive alien race in Star Trek wielded with menace and decision, the kind seen in The Search for Spock, the third Star Trek film.

There was no original prop to work from.  A raging fire had engulfed the prop, along with the blueprints, in a freak accident in Pennsylvania years before.  Virga swore he had exclusive rights from Paramount to manufacture the knife.  He even produced a contract that said Creative Robotic Systems held a "license and copyright" for the product, complete with a seven-digit number from the Library of Congress. Pappa would be his man, the sole designer.  Virga gave him a consulting fee of about $280 that he deposited. Virga promised $1,000 more upfront and the shimmering allure of up to $20,000 before the whole thing was done.

"Can you do it?" Virga asked.

Pappa knew he could.  He and his father hacked the thing together on the fly within a few days.  Pappa drew sketches for it on old graph paper. Completely improvising, working from a picture on a flyer Virga had shown him, he and his dad--who had "a genius IQ but the mentality of a caveman"--crafted it from a toothed rack and two gears, using a spring to release the blades.

Pappa drew up a contract, carefully covering all his bases.  Virga promised to come by to sign it, deliver the first payment and pick up the knife.

When Virga came to the small garage in Patchogue, he kept sending Pappa out of the room, like a schoolteacher who keeps riding a student with petty after-school duties.  First it was to print final copies of the contract.  Then it was to polish the knife.  Then it was to polish the knife just a little shinier, with just a little more alien sheen.  And then that was it.

He wrote Pappa the check for $1,000 and he hugged him warmly.

"We're going to make a lot of money," he said.

That was the line Pappa will always remember, because that was the last time they would ever see each other.

Pappa got busy.  He ordered the blades, the handle parts and the short flat cut gears, and he went to his bank that afternoon, feeling pretty good about himself.  It had all worked out rather nicely.  He endorsed the check and handed it over to the cashier.

"Fabian," she said.  "There's a stop payment on this check. You know that, right?"

"What do you mean?" he said.  "I got it today."  It was Wednesday.

"Fabian, there's a stop payment for Monday," she said.

You have seen scenes like this in movies, so you can imagine what happened to Pappa's face when he heard this.  He raced home.  He stormed into his shop. He turned it upside down searching for the contract.  It was gone.  He spun around.  He saw the light flashing on his answering machine.  Filled with dread, he pushed the button.  He heard Virga's voice, "Fabian, this isn't going to work out.  I'm not going to be able to sell this."

A few days later, he got Virga on the phone.

This is what Pappa remembers Virga saying: "I got the contract.  You don't got dick.  You don't got a legal leg to stand on.  Goodbye."

There is no such thing as some things going wrong.  When things go wrong, all things go wrong.  And that's what happened.  All things went wrong.  Pappa had screaming fights with his father about the mess.  He couldn't pay for any of the parts he'd ordered.  He fell into debt.  His credit was destroyed. He couldn't afford the costs to file a civil suit.  He didn't even have enough money to file for bankruptcy. Soon after, his father died.  He had always had heart problems, but it was a stressful time for them all.  Pappa stopped trusting people so much.  He grew paranoid.  He grew up.

That was in 1992, and Fabian Pappa was a powerless person.  All he had was the story of what happened. And all he could do was post a message on a local computer bulletin board he frequented back in the infancy of Internet communication.  Embroiled in frustration, wounded and seething at the injustice, he booted up his PC and posted a short message warning others to watch out for Frank Virga.  He hoped that what went around would come around.

"It makes me sick to talk about it," Pappa says.  "It upset me.  It upsets me.  You know what's upsetting?  That this guy stopped and thought, 'This kid is a schmuck.  I'm going to screw him and get away with it and there'll be nothing he can do 'cause I'm smarter than him.'  That's what gets me."

In cyberspace, SOMEONE can hear you scream

Fabian Pappa's message to the world: "Greetings.  Fraud alert.  If anyone has done business with Frank Virga of Wantagh New York and has been deceived, read on.  This person is a vendor at the many Star Trek conventions around the country.  He has had several vendors manufacture and prototype items with agreements (written) and then pays with bad checks.  If you have any information please email.  Thank you."

Picture that message as you would a message in a bottle that bobs along in the great green ocean on the whim of the currents.  Pappa slapped his message onto a computer bulletin board system, a BBS.  Although not hooked up worldwide, these systems would periodically relay their messages onto other local networks.  At regulated intervals, one local BBS network hub would dump to another and then another and another, all through local calls, expanding outward to far-flung shores.

The message bobbed along in the great green ocean of early Internet communication.  Small bulletin board systems ushered it onward.  It floated through invisible channels until it found its way to the Web in 1995, when Pappa re-posted it on a Star Trek newsgroup.

No one responded for a few years.

Then one day Pappa opened his e-mail and found a message from Trekboy66@aol.com.  The subject line read, "Frank Virga."  The body of the message said, "If the subject of this message interests you, please reply.  Otherwise, I'm sorry to disturb you."

"Does it interest me?" Pappa said.  "Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls?"

He e-mailed back.  Trekboy told him tales that boiled his blood.  Turns out, a lot of people had reasons to be angry with Frank Virga.

Trekboy said he was part of an online group of collectors interested in movie props and memorabilia.  Familiar with the conventions Virga would attend to sell his products, Trekboy said Virga was a well-known scam artist.  Trekboy said Virga would pass off toys, costumes, fan-made replicas and reproductions as real props used in films and mark them up to exorbitant prices to hoodwink innocent, over-enthusiastic buyers.  In one story that floats around the Web, Virga supposedly took a toy AT-AT, the gangly white, giraffe-legged attack vehicle from Star Wars, scratched off the Kenner label and sold it as an actual prop used in the film.  Virga dealt in vagaries that made things seem real, Trekboy said, with certificates of authenticity carefully worded to say "we believe" it is authentic.

Pappa didn't know much about Trekboy.  But a few calls around the collectors' industry, a rather small, tight-knit group, where most of the respected dealers know each other and their sources, could have confirmed his story.  Virga wasn't high profile, but many knew of him and his activities.  Collectors who saw him at shows described him as a "Las Vegas Bob" or a "used-car salesman" type of guy who wore gold bracelets, watches and chains.  He was not very popular.

"He's not a good person," says Cordelia Platt of Fort Lauderdale, who has dealt in autographs and other memorabilia with her husband, Tom, since 1971.

Platt says Virga started buying good, authentic items from them while they were still in Jersey, where they were based until about three years ago.  He would pay on time.  Then, one day, he told her he had come by a "huge collection," mostly of autographs, including sleeves and album pages signed by The Beatles and Jimmy Stewart.  He faxed her the papers, asking her to authenticate them.  She called him back and told him 99.9-percent of the material was fake.  She told Virga the signatures were forged and not to buy them.

Time passed, and she saw Virga at the high-profile "Atlantique City" show in Jersey selling the fake material.  With some other old-time dealers, she complained to the promoter and threatened not to come back if Virga was allowed to return.  He wasn't, she says.

"People go into this business thinking they'll make a fortune," Platt says.  "No one makes a fortune.  You can make a nice living and have fun.  But if you don't mind the store and work hard and understand simple math, you're going to lose money."  She says people tend to start selling fakes when they get in over their heads by purchasing expensive items and not making their money back.

Soon after the Atlantique City incident, she says, he called the Platts and other dealers and shouted threats.  She says they kept tapes of his calls.

"We used to laugh that he always had a different threat for each different dealer," Platt says.  "He would break your legs or scratch your eyes out.  We'd laugh because he's a little man and he didn't scare anyone.

"All we said was that his material was not authentic, and it wasn't," she says.

About a year later, in December 1996, Tom, a 33-year-old toy collector from the Buffalo area, had a run-in with Virga.  On the cusp of buying a new house, Tom traded Virga a canceled check bearing Bruce Lee's signature that was framed and matted with a Green Hornet photo signed by the other stars of the TV series for a rifle from the movie Aliens.  About a year later, when he tried to sell the rifle on eBay, the online auction house, he discovered it was fake.

"I was a moron, in hindsight," says Tom in a phone conversation.  He does not want to give his last name because he is afraid of Virga.  "I was sucked in by his display.  He had a lot of great stuff.  But he had too much great stuff.  Planet Hollywood doesn't have stuff that great...  He gave me a certificate of authenticity, but it expired in ten days.  I should have seen the red flags, but the gun was really cool."

Virga apparently hoped that disclaimers appearing beneath his magazine ads, "These items are a depiction of 25th Century Culture.  No copyright infringement is intended," would help him slide by.  It didn't quite work out that way.  Collecting and Autograph Collector, two industry magazines run by the Corona, Calif.,-based Odyssey Group, required him to remove a "huge" paragraph disclaiming authenticity from his ads before they ran, according to Odyssey CEO Bill Miller.

"We require dealers to give a lifetime guarantee of authenticity," Miller says.  "When it originally ran, it was not acceptable.  We do our best to protect our readers.  We made him change the wording.  It was that or not advertise."

Through all of this, Virga said that he was the one being hassled.  But he was catching the attention of the wrong people.  Now it wasn't just a young machinist from Long Island trying to make a buck. People with power were watching Frank Virga.  And, to ice the cake, Paramount sued him in federal court in Manhattan.

Lawyers for Paramount lodged nearly 100 claims of copyright infringement against Virga, accusing him of selling and producing fake Star Trek phasers and communicators, authentic but pilfered scripts and sound clips from the shows and films, and computer software featuring images of the starship Enterprise, the Romulans and the Vulcans in action. Paramount wanted more than $10 million in damages.

Through his lawyers in that suit, the Melville- and Manhattan-based Neufeld & O'Leary, Virga denied everything.  He filed for bankruptcy.  The court forced him to hand over to Paramount any equipment used to make the props and software he was selling, along with any of the props he still had.  He promised never to advertise, manufacture or sell the material again.  In the end, he paid $30,000 to Paramount, and the studio left him alone.

But collectors say he kept selling Star Trek and sci-fi memorabilia.  And in early 1998, he made what might have been his worst mistake in a long line of legal and karmic mistakes: Frank Virga got on the Web, and he became a spammer.

Going postal online: And now things get nasty

For a certain segment of netizens, there is nothing worse than spam, or junk e-mail.  You know the annoying pyramid scheme ad-mail, promising to "submit your site to over 1,000 search engines," explode your business or make you money without your having to get out of bed.  The companies use e-mail blasters, open relays and software that parses sites for e-mail addresses to hit as many unwitting potential consumers as possible.  But unlike your real-world mailbox where you pay for stamps to send mail, the logic goes, an e-mail inbox functions in reverse.  You pay for access time.  You pay to read your mail.  Spam costs you money.  It invades your space.

Konrad Roeder received a spam one day in February 1998.  A systems engineer for cell-phone company Omnipoint in Colorado, Roeder opened the message.  This is what it said:

"We are International Memorabilia Brokers Inc. A New York Based Corporation. Please Excuse this e-mail, but your email address appeared in a collectors list that we have obtained. We will try to send this message only once to you. We would like you to visit our site at: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/chariot/index.html, to see a sampling of the most incredible movie and T.V. Props and Costumes Collection ever assembled in one company.  This is but a small part of our over 60,000 item inventory.  We can also be seen in Todays Collector and Collecting magazines.  Thank you for your indulgence."

It was Frank Virga's company, using the techniques he was proud of.  Virga was aggressively advertising his business online, where he hawked items like Marilyn Monroe's bra for $25,000, a shotgun from Terminator II for $8,500, the Back to the Future hover board for $10,000 and Clark Gable's coat from Gone With the Wind for $250,000.  He'd give your money back if you could prove a certified item was fake within 10 days.  In a resume he posted on the Web in September 1998 while searching for a new job through the online service JobBank USA--aiming for a $90,000 to $100,000 salary, incidentally--Virga noted proudly how he had "instituted direct-mail, advertising and mail-order as well as telemarketing programs to spur business."

But Roeder didn't have much indulgence for spam, and he received this one six times.  The first two times, he sent back a simple note saying that he didn't want the e-mail and asking to be removed from the list.  The third time, he wrote back, "This is the third time you sent me the same Unsolicited Bulk E-mail or SPAM.  I am not interested.  PERIOD.  Nor will I ever be.  Since you can't remove me from your mailing list, I have no choice but to get you removed from Angelfire.  Sorry. Y ou are in violation of Angelfire's terms and agreements..."

He copied the message and sent it to Angelfire, which booted International Memorabilia Brokers off its server.

The next e-mail to Roeder from Virga was typically ungrammatical and said, among other things, "if you make trouble for our firm with angelfire as sure as you live and breath our attorneys will decend upon you like locust...and we will find you if we have to."  Less than a week later, Roeder says, someone forged an e-mail in his name and blasted out tens of thousands of them to people that read, "if you are interested in gay avtivities sic of all sorts please e-mail me...I want to here from you."

It was a reverse spam, and it yielded a litany of responses--many angrily homophobic, some featuring naked photos and favorite sexual positions--that jammed Roeder's inbox with up to 14 megabytes, maybe 230,000 e-mails, filling a good portion of his hard drive with trash and blocking him from using his e-mail. The bombs continued for more than a month.  He checked the headers that route a message from server to server.  He says it had originated from the same server Virga used.

In the coming weeks, Virga called Roeder's bosses at Omnipoint and told them Roeder was using company computers to terrorize a small, up-and-coming business. Omnipoint investigated Virga's complaint.  His bosses had to take Virga's accusations seriously, and Roeder felt nervous about whether he'd be able to keep his job.  Roeder also maintained a Website where he posted a photo of himself with his wife and daughter, then 2-1/2 years old.  Around the same time, he started to receive strange e-mails accusing him of molesting his daughter.  He suspects Virga had seen the Website and reported him to child abuse watchdog groups.  It went on and on.

Roeder was not a powerful person.  He couldn't afford to file a civil suit. Attorneys in the office of Eric Wenger, head of the Internet Bureau for the New York state attorney general, told him his claims did not constitute a criminal case.

All he had was the story of what happened.  And all he could do was post the dialogue on the NANAE newsgroup, news.admin.net-abuse.email, a community dedicated to fighting spam and Net-abuse.  And one day, Roeder opened his e-mail and found a message from Trekboy66£aol.com.

"Because I knew some details about Virga and his practices, I decided to help Fabo and Konrad as much as I could," Trekboy wrote the Long Island Voice in an e-mail.  "Soon, as we recounted our adventures with Virga on the newsgroup we began to receive a lot of support from other concerned 'netizens.'  Interestingly, Virga, a man who once was infamous only in the esoteric world of prop collectors, soon became a well-known symbol of net abuse and net kookiness for untold numbers of folks online."

The word spread.  After Trekboy contacted him, Fabian Pappa got on NANAE and saw what people were saying Virga was up to.  He read it all, back through the Deja News archive of chatter about Frank Virga, which now stretches to more than 3,000 posts.  He thought about the Klingon knife, and he thought about what happened six years ago, and he thought about karma, and he paid very close attention to all of it.

Loss of composure: When worlds collide

What are the odds of this?  Think about the story Pappa tells.  A guy from Wantagh screws you over in Suffolk County over a machine shop contract.  Somehow, over the next six years, you get on the Web.  You even become a computer consultant.  You meet others who've had run-ins with him. Somehow, over the next six years, he gets on the Web.  He gains a certain notoriety.  You meet again in cyberspace.

And you face off.

Pappa decided to start the Frank Virga Loss of Composure Page during a particularly hot time in the NANAE newsgroup.  Virga was getting skewered every which way by spammer-hating folk from all over the country.  They nominated him Kook of the Month.  He won an unholy place on anti-spam watchdog lists.  He started posting angrier messages railing at the whole process.  By about that time, in the spring of 1998, Pappa, Roeder and Trekboy had formed something of a Net squad to deal with Virga.

Still online in several incarnations, the page compiles tales of their colorful run-ins with him, each piece of spam and each case of alleged fraud they could unearth.  They monitored his Web activities and entered them diligently in the cyber-journal.  They tracked the appearance of his Web pages, called his Internet service providers and told them about his background until he got kicked off.

"It was not about revenge," Pappa says.  "It was about righting a wrong.  If a guy is annoying or obnoxious, it's your duty to your fellow human, your duty to fuck him, or you just pass him on to your fellow human.  It's your duty.  Just saying, 'No, Virga, you're wrong.  You're a con.  You're a liar.  You're a thief.  You're wrong.  You have to understand what you did to me, and the consequences.' "

Virga maintained that they were harassing him, inhibiting his ability to do business online.  He promised legal retribution, saying his lawyers "will be coming after each and everyone of you for your malicious attacks against my company, our products" and "my personnal life."  He continually said he would be suing them for slander and libel.  He threatened ISPs that carried the Frank Virga LOC page with lawsuits until they nuked it.  He coaxed li.net, Pappa's homebase, into canceling his account.

"I have made mistakes in my business I payed for those mistakes and have not made anymore nor to [sic] I intend to make anymore," Virga wrote in a March 29 e-mail. "I run a legit business and I ask for signed letters from the consigners on all items. no letters? we dont handle the Item."

Suddenly, an impossible, arcane web of obscure voices popped up knowing a whole lot about the online battle.  They slammed Pappa, Roeder and Trekboy, and accused them of everything under the sun, often while lauding Virga and International Memorabilia Brokers.  Using names like Jerry Spano (notably the last name of the fake "millionaire" who scammed the Islanders) and Cindy Loftler, the newcomers would lambaste the trio, calling them "cyberstalkers," "cyber thugs" and "net terrorists."  "Net jerks" Web pages accused Pappa of evading taxes and facing a heroin charge and said Roeder molested his daughter.  Reading the extensive headers that come attached to e-mail convinced them that the posts were coming from Virga.

"Let's put it this way," Trekboy says.  "They all possessed knowledge that only he could have, or they established that they were his 'friends' or worked for him, or they responded to a particular e-mail sent to Virga's known address."

Trekboy, meanwhile, was driving Virga nuts.  To his constant consternation, Virga could never figure out who the hell he was.  He guessed.  He raged.  He said he had it.  He dropped hints, calling him by different names to see if he'd take the bait.  But, Rumpelstiltskin-style, Virga could never quite name him.  He threatened Pappa and Roeder with lawsuits and said the only way they could get out of it was to reveal Trekboy's identity.  His lawyers at the time, Neufeld & O'Leary, sent Pappa a letter demanding the same.  But they would never tell.  And Virga could never find out.

"I'm careful and good ;-)," replied Trekboy when asked about his craftiness.  He describes himself this way: "Let's just say I am a prop and memorabilia collector with a background in the law and law enforcement."

Whoever he was, it was through Trekboy that the FBI got deeper into the game.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the agents came into the picture.  Trekboy says he first contacted the agent investigating the case in March 1998.  Soon after that, the FBI started ghosting through the dialogue on Frank Virga, as is the way with the FBI.  Tight-lipped about their case, agents contacted a string of collectors, asking for information about Virga's activities.  As recently as three weeks ago, they called magazines his ads had run in and asked them to fax over copies.  Gears were grinding.  Powerful gears.

Things heated up.  Pappa filed harassment complaints with Officer Michael Wilken of the Suffolk police's Fourth Precinct.  Virga called the Nassau First Precinct police and said Pappa had called him with death threats.  Both sides inundated Assistant Attorney General Eric Wenger with complaints.

Wilken remembers calling the FBI around that time.  "They told me they were actively investigating it and that they'd appreciate it if we didn't interfere," he says.  "I said, 'Knock yourself out.  You got it.  Not a problem.' "

The indictment: It cuts like a knife

Oct. 22, 1998 was much the same as any other day, a full six years since the Klingon knife had ruined Pappa's credit and likely helped launch Virga's aberrant career in movie memorabilia.  On that day, Frank Virga was arrested at his home in Wantagh.  The news didn't hit the newsgroup for nearly a week, but when Pappa read it, with wide eyes and bated breath, he couldn't believe it.

A federal grand jury had indicted Virga on 39 counts of mail fraud for selling fake movie and TV memorabilia from Star Wars and Star Trek.  Delivered by federal prosecutors and FBI agents based out of New Jersey, it detailed how he'd accepted orders from a customer in Jersey and others for authentic studio props through the mail and how he delivered them fakes through a private and commercial carrier.  All told, it says, he made more than $100,000 charging the props to his victims' credit card accounts.

This all happened around the time of the Paramount suit, the indictment says, between Sept. 18, 1994 and May 5, 1996.  Virga started small in September of 1994 hawking an Anakin light saber for $700, graduating the next month to a $1,000 Han Solo blaster and in December to a $1,200 thermal detonator from Star Wars.  In January 1995, he sold a Star Wars royal guard helmet, a Greedo helmet and gloves and an X-wing fighter miniature for $3,400.

He sold the AT-AT model for $1,200 in March of 1995; a model of Han Solo trapped in carbonite (along with a Star Trek: The Next Generation phaser and other items) for $2,000 in May; Soran's phaser from the film Star Trek: Generations went for $3,800; Yoda and Salacious Crumb, Jabba the Hut's cackling sidekick, for $3,700 in June.  This went on, through Star Trek medical tricorders with scanners, the Millennium Falcon, a Darth Vader helmet and Capt. Kirk's laser rifle, all for thousands.  An I Dream of Jeannie purple bottle went for $12,000.  So did Darth Vader's costume.

Virga pleaded not guilty.  He posted a $100,000 bond.  The case is set for trial in April in front of U.S. District Judge John Bissell in Newark.  If convicted on all 39 counts, Virga faces a maximum of 195 years in federal prison and $9.75 million in fines.  In reality, the judge would determine the actual sentence based on an equation taking into account the severity of the crimes.

The harassment charges that Pappa, Trekboy and Roeder had leveled weren't anywhere in the suit.  But it's safe to say they felt vindicated.

Search for Virga: The denial

Virga's lawyer Frank Gangemi, of the Brooklyn firm Gangemi & Gangemi, would not allow his client to speak to the Long Island Voice.  "The case is highly fabricated," Gangemi says.  "It's absolutely ridiculous."

Gangemi says the unnamed New Jersey customer in the indictment is John Azarian, whom the lawyer describes as a well-known collector of movie memorabilia.  Azarian, who did not respond to e-mails, pops up as a major Lost in Space, Batman and superhero memorabilia collector on the Web.  Gangemi says that at no time did Virga represent the items as original movie props.  He cites the fact that they had an ongoing relationship as proof that Azarian knew what was up.

"For some reason Azarian now states he was under the impression that they were original items," Gangemi says.  "He's an expert.  He knew they were not originals.  A lot were replicas or duplications. Frank Virga never gave him certificates of authenticity.  He wouldn't represent them as originals if they weren't.  That's the bottom line."

When asked about the high price of some of the material, such as the $12,000 Darth Vader costume, he said, "From the mold that made the original Darth Vader costume, a person could run off thousands of them. They're authentic, but they're not 'the costume worn by the character in the movie.'  That would go in the high five figures, or the low six figures, not for $12,000."

The 51-year-old Virga has disconnected the phone number he used to conduct business.  He responded to an e-mail request for an interview with a curt, "No comment."  But on a recent afternoon, he could still be found at that same home on Holiday Park Drive in Wantagh.  His indigo '95 Ford Windstar minivan sat in the driveway in front of his one-car garage.  The spiny trees in front of his house stood bare.  Rust crept along the black metal banisters of his stoop.  Virga answered a knock on his door wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and glasses.

After a request for a comment about his indictment, he said, "Get out of here, will ya?" and slammed the door.  Moments later, noticing a photographer shooting pictures of his house, he swung open the door again and shouted, "Didn't you hear what I said? Get out of here, you asshole!"

Nowhere to hide: Lessons from a wired world

The other day, Fabian Pappa pulled up to the Blue Dawn Diner in Central Islip, near where he lives now.  He was driving a Saturn with a bumper sticker that read, "I love your computer."  Wearing all black--leather gloves and jacket, black jeans, black shirt, black goatee--he took a seat at a booth.  He reflected on this bizarre chase through Long Island industry and invisible computer connections and how it shifted into the realm where people without power, once screwed in silence, can speak.

"That's the positive side of the Net," Pappa says.  "That's the non-hype, non-bullshit part of the Net.  The whole dynamic is incredible.  It didn't surprise me.  You know how I see the Net?  When I was a kid, the first contact I had with the outside world was a Childcraft encyclopedia our folks bought us.  Then it was the World Book encyclopedia.  The Net is one big encyclopedia.  Everyone on the Net can be easily catalogued as having like attributes.  In this case, the like attribute was Frank Virga.

"It was not just a lone nut who had a problem with him.  These were like-minded people who got fucked and wanted to see a wrong righted."

Pappa was not powerful.  Roeder was not powerful.  But the FBI was powerful.  The Internet was powerful.  And so was the legacy of a knife.

Looked at a certain way, that 23rd-century Klingon battle knife cut down Frank Virga.  From another angle, the vast networking power of the Internet stopped him cold.  But any way you look at it, no matter how the trial comes out, Frank Virga, a sci-fi memorabilia dealer from Wantagh, took on the future and lost.

Postscript: In September of 1999, Frank Virga pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal copyright infringement.  He faces sentencing in December of 1999.
 

Copyright 1999 Stern Publishing, Inc.
The Long Island Voice

February 3, 1999, Wednesday

Reproduced under the fair use provisions of copyright law.


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