Who Is Crispus Attucks?

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http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1601

02.05.2001

The mastermind behind UrbanExpose, an irrevcerent Web site covering
hip-hop culture and media, has long been a mystery. Julian Dibbell
unmasks the man, and his message.

AS MEDIA MYSTERIES GO, the UrbanExpos affair probably won't rate too
many pages in the history books. It's not "Who shot J.R.?" It's not
"Who wrote Primary Colors?" It's not even "How much longer can I be
expected to care what the fuck Ginger is?" Still, over the last half
year it has vexed enough of the East Coast new-media-world's players,
player-haters, and straight-up yentas to qualify for at least a
footnote. The mystery: Who is the wig-wearing muckraker behind the
Web's premier black-media-biz gossip site, UrbanExpos? Who is the man
signing his Negro-revolutionary pseudonym to all those acid-tongued
dissections of the Web portals, cable channels, and niche magazines
that work the melanin-fortified content space coyly known as "urban"?
Who, in short, is Crispus Attucks, and where does he get off?

A lot of wrong answers have accumulated since UrbanExpos debuted last
June. An instant hit with both netslaves and honchos at urban-flavored
new-media ventures like 360hiphop, Urban Box Office, and hookt.com,
the site quickly filled up with smart, smack-talking user commentary,
which became as much of a draw as Attucks's scandalously well-informed
profiles. Trying to figure out who Attucks was was part of the fun, of
course, and pretty soon the game got serious. Detectives were hired.
Media reporters beat the bushes. In July, having gotten a glimpse of
Attucks when he showed up for an interview disguised in dark glasses
and a colonial wig, Inside magazine ran an article fingering
thirty-four-year-old cyberkind McLean Greaves, founder of Caf Los
Negroes, as the man behind the mask. Bzzzzt. Greaves's attorney got
the story retracted the following week. But the speculation continued
full-tilt everywhere else. At last count, the list of named suspects
has at one time or another included the ubiquitous Omar Wasow (MSNBC
commentator and blackplanet.com executive director), rap journalist
Ronin Ro, and the entire management of Urban Box Office.

Oddly enough, the list has never included twenty-nine-year-old Fort
Greene resident John Lee. Not that he'd be an obvious suspect. His
urban-media credentials, strictly speaking, include work on a few
low-budget rap videos and some under-the-radar film and television
scripting. But in other ways, Lee fits the bill to a T. For one thing,
just as you'd expect of Crispus Attucks, he knows new media from the
inside out -- understands from long, hard experience the logic of
digital networks as well as the alchemy of buzz and clout -- and has a
complicated relationship to the entire enterprise. For another thing,
just as you'd expect of Crispus Attucks, he happens to be Crispus
Attucks.

I know this not because I beat any bushes but because Lee called me up
the other day and told me. He's ready to go public, he says: ready to
expand the UrbanExpos franchise into print and into broader media
coverage, ready to start collecting on the good and bad karma the site
has earned him so far. And I guess he figured I'd be a good person for
the job -- after all, it wouldn't be the first time I'd blown his
cover.

The first time was eleven years ago. Lee wasn't calling himself
Crispus Attucks back then -- his handle was Corrupt. He was eighteen
years old, living with his mom in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and logging
in regularly to a local dial-up bulletin board called Phuck the Pheds,
a hangout for computer hackers and phone phreaks that I was spending
time on for a Spin magazine assignment. Corrupt wasn't like most of
the other guys on Phuck the Pheds. It wasn't just that he was black, a
rarity then and now in the computer underground. He was also an
"elite" hacker who really was -- a go-to specialist in cracking DEC
Vax machines (aka Vaxen), the corporate and government mainframes of
choice in those days.

The Spin article was Corrupt's first appearance in print, but not his
last. By the time it came out, Lee had hooked up with the legendary
hacker group MOD, whose accomplishments, by some accounts, would
eventually include penetrating nearly every telephone-company system
in the world. "I hate to be all bragging about it," Lee says today,
"but we did redefine what hacking was. That's when things went from,
like, dudes trying to guess passwords to actually monitoring networks
and understanding the whole topology. Big-picture hacking It was ill."

MOD's legend, however, owes almost as much to their flair for press
relations as it does to their hacking skills. I eventually wrote a
cover story on them for the Village Voice, but it was hardly an
exclusive. Reporters were lined up around the block for a chance to
cover these personable, articulate, multiethnic, technoexotic felons.
And as such coverage can do, it probably redoubled the legal system's
eagerness to put these personable, articulate, multiethnic,
technoexotic felons behind bars. When Lee finally got hauled in to
talk to the investigator who got him and four other MOD members
indicted on federal charges, he saw on the man's office wall a framed
copy of the Village Voice cover photo: Lee and the others striking
gangster poses, not very effectively disguised with bandido-style
kerchiefs. "He loved that shit," Lee recalls, laughing. "And I think
he said something like, 'We was going to leave you alone till you
threw it in our face.'"

Convicted, Lee did six months in penal boot camp, got out, finished up
his Brooklyn College film studies (senior project: the romantic
live-action short Crackhead Love), became the first and last black man
featured on the cover of Wired (for an excerpt from Masters of
Deception, Josh Quittner and Michelle Slatalla's book on MOD) -- and
then got popped again on a parole violation and did a year in New York
City's federal Metropolitan Detention Center, an experience he says is
still painful to talk about. "After that, I got a serious distaste for
computers," says Lee. His life as a hacker celebrity was over.

And probably never would have gone much further anyway. Just one week
out of his first jail term, Lee had come down the steps into the
Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in downtown Brooklyn and seen the
writing on the wall. A movie crew was shooting there, and Lee,
curious, sidled up to the production assistant and asked what the film
was. The answer: 1995's Hackers, a film every hacker in New York
already knew was based loosely but transparently on the kids of MOD.
"I had heard about the movie, and I knew it was going to be fucked up.
I knew they marginalized the black character," Lee says. And now here
he was himself standing uninvited on the margins of the production.
Lee couldn't begin to convey to the PA the layers of irony in the
situation, and didn't try. "That shit was like, mad Kafka," he says.
"I'm sitting there waiting for the train to go home and shit, and I'm
looking at these motherfuckers shooting the hacker movie.
Unbelievable."

It would be too tidy to imagine that that sad, surreal moment was
where the seeds of UrbanExpos were planted. The site's deepest roots,
after all, lie not in bitterness but in Lee's love of the culture he
grew up with and has been standing up for ever since the days of Phuck
the Pheds (where he sometimes had to defend hip-hop's right to exist
against the hordes of hacker metalheads). Once hacking stopped being
an option for him, Lee's path from the digital underground to the
creative milieu of Fort Greene (home of Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a
Mule production company and ground zero of New York black bohemia) was
a natural one. Shopping his script ideas around at places like BET and
40 Acres, networking at launch parties, trading gossip in Fort Greene
watering holes, Lee was working his way into a scene he probably would
have fallen into eventually even if the feds had never forced a career
change on him.

He was also, of course, compiling the mental Rolodex he would later
depend on to keep UrbanExpos well-stocked with inside dope. Not that
he was planning on any such thing. The idea for the site was a
late-blooming epiphany, sparked by the infusion of corporate money
into the urban online space early last year. At first Lee was thrilled
to see the Web suddenly bristling with hip-hop sites and other signs
of pop-cultural urban-centrism. "I was like, wow, urban blew up," he
says. "I was really happy for it." But he couldn't help noticing that
a lot of the best-funded sites "failed to impress," as he gently puts
it (having put it far less gently elsewhere). It was time, he decided,
for an "honest critique" of urban media, something that would help
keep the scene from choking on its own hype, and over late-night
drinks with friends last June, he worked out just what that critique
might look like. His distaste for computers behind him, he spent the
following weekend hacking the UrbanExpos code. "And then, I just
launched it," he says, "phantomlike, into the night."

The rest, of course, is new-media history -- or anyway at least a
footnote. And if there's a single clue to be found among the pages of
Crispus Attucks's Web site that connects his little piece of history
with Corrupt's, it has eluded me so far.

Even so, maybe it's not stretching things too far to think of Lee's
new career as at least partly a revision of his old one -- an attempt
to fine-tune the mix of fun and fame and risk that went so sour the
first time he ran around getting into other people's business under
cover of a pseudonym and a bad disguise. Certainly it's hard for me to
think why else he would have come to me again with his story -- I
hadn't heard from him in years, and the urban-media scene isn't
exactly my beat. But if he thinks things celebrity might treat him
more kindly this time, I'm happy to help out. After all, the last time
he let me take him public, I got a cover line out of the deal, and he
got six months. I think maybe I owe him one.

Julian Dibbell is the author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a
Virtual World.

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