Millionaire Hacker Gets 9 Years In Death of Man Building Nuclear Bunker Tunnels 175
A wealthy stock trader and "skilled computer hacker" was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison for the fiery death of a man who was helping him secretly dig tunnels for a nuclear bunker beneath a Maryland home. Baltimore Sun reports: Daniel Beckwitt, 28, had faced a maximum of 30 years in prison when Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Margaret Schweitzer sentenced him. In total, Beckwitt was sentenced to 21 years but the judge suspended all but nine years of the sentence. In April, a jury convicted Beckwitt of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the September 2017 death of 21-year-old Askia Khafra. During the trial, Montgomery County prosecutor Marybeth Ayres accused Beckwitt of recklessly endangering Khafra's life. Beckwitt ignored obvious signs of danger and sacrificed safety for secrecy while they dug a network of tunnels beneath a home in Bethesda, a suburb of Washington, D.C., the prosecutor said.
Defense attorney Robert Bonsib had told jurors the fire was an accident, not a crime. Firefighters found Khafra's naked, charred body in the basement of Beckwitt's trash-filled house, only a few steps from an exit. Prosecutors said the extreme hoarding conditions in the home prevented Khafra from escaping. Hours before the fire broke out in the basement, Khafra texted Beckwitt to warn him it smelled like smoke in the tunnels. Ayres said Beckwitt didn't respond for more than six hours before telling Khafra that there had been a "major electrical failure." Instead of getting Khafra out of the tunnels, Beckwitt told him that he "just switched it all over to another circuit," according to the prosecutor. Bonsib said Beckwitt screamed for help from neighbors after the fire broke out and tried to rescue his friend from the blaze before heavy smoke and flames forced him to retreat. A prosecutor described Beckwitt as having "a paranoid fixation on a possible nuclear attack by North Korea."
The tunnels that Khafra was working on were kept a secret, so much so that Beckwitt "tried to trick Khafra into thinking they were digging the tunnels in Virginia instead of Maryland by having him don 'blackout glasses' before taking him on a long drive," the report says. "Khafra had a cellphone with him in the tunnels, but Beckwitt used internet 'spoofing' to make it appear they were digging in Virginia."
Defense attorney Robert Bonsib had told jurors the fire was an accident, not a crime. Firefighters found Khafra's naked, charred body in the basement of Beckwitt's trash-filled house, only a few steps from an exit. Prosecutors said the extreme hoarding conditions in the home prevented Khafra from escaping. Hours before the fire broke out in the basement, Khafra texted Beckwitt to warn him it smelled like smoke in the tunnels. Ayres said Beckwitt didn't respond for more than six hours before telling Khafra that there had been a "major electrical failure." Instead of getting Khafra out of the tunnels, Beckwitt told him that he "just switched it all over to another circuit," according to the prosecutor. Bonsib said Beckwitt screamed for help from neighbors after the fire broke out and tried to rescue his friend from the blaze before heavy smoke and flames forced him to retreat. A prosecutor described Beckwitt as having "a paranoid fixation on a possible nuclear attack by North Korea."
The tunnels that Khafra was working on were kept a secret, so much so that Beckwitt "tried to trick Khafra into thinking they were digging the tunnels in Virginia instead of Maryland by having him don 'blackout glasses' before taking him on a long drive," the report says. "Khafra had a cellphone with him in the tunnels, but Beckwitt used internet 'spoofing' to make it appear they were digging in Virginia."
Dude’s a millionaire (Score:4, Insightful)
So that makes him eccentric, not crazy - and this is one of the rare times not being crazy is a liability.
Re:Allow me to gently correct you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course it is. In the same manner that the ways in which wealthy people trick poor people out of their wealth are protected and even enforced by law and when poor people exploit vulnerabilities to get one up on wealthy people it is prosecuted by law. Rich people are crazy aren't called crazy, they are called eccentric, eccentric is just code for rich and nuts.
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If you say so but the common saying and jest akin to "when you have that kind of money you don't go crazy, you're eccentric" goes back at least least several generations possibly further.
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+wealthy+are+eccentric
Everyone knows people who are nuts are nuts whether rich or poor but courts and the law don't seem to have gotten the message.
Admittedly this one is something of a mixed bag since it is likely he was persecuted in part because of the nutty thing he hired the guy for.
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Ummm...
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 1957. Pg. 6: There is an old English saying to the effect that “a poor man is crazy, but a rich man is just 'eccentric.'”
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A whole page of citations.
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/poor_people_are_crazy_rich_people_are_eccentric
Or even:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Eccentric
Though it is odd it is listed as 7 when it is the most common way eccentric is used. In practice it sometimes isn't just the wealthy but other figures who are distinguished or of note. A professor at MIT might be eccentric, a doctor, an engineer, etc whereas a fry cook would be "a little bit crazy" or "a little bit
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And that leaves you who is so pathetic you are trolling on the 8th layer of this thread having proven what about the worth of yours?
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To have wasted so much of your valuable time on this, lol. Certainly, you have proven your life is worth living. /s
He's just being "eccentric."
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Yes, as in the wealthy and distinguished typically do not get seen as being crazy but only "a little off"/eccentric/abnormal.
"I'm sorry, a Trump supporter redefining crazy?"
Trump is off topic but I don't recall any Trump support here just random inject of anti-trumping. Not frothing at the mouth and joining in hate and propaganda isn't the same as supporting. Trump is a mediocre President with a record better than the past three which were terrible presidents and roughly on par with the few preceding that.
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If you say so but the common saying and jest akin to "when you have that kind of money you don't go crazy, you're eccentric" goes back at least least several generations possibly further.
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+wealthy+are+eccentric
Everyone knows people who are nuts are nuts whether rich or poor but courts and the law don't seem to have gotten the message.
Admittedly this one is something of a mixed bag since it is likely he was persecuted in part because of the nutty thing he hired the guy for. If he'd been working on something to avoid some invention being stolen by a competitor or the like I doubt there would have been charges. A civil suit maybe.
The difference is rich people can act out their nutty antics and be noticed for being eccentric. Poor people just think you know what would be really fun but some are crazy enough to try it anyway and become noticed as nuts.
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SHUT THE FUCK UP! Holy hell, what is it with you retarded fuckwits and your constant need to bring politics into EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION.
Why do you think it's Americans doing it?
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Convicted had but one wish: can the prison cell be installed in his nuclear bunker?
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So that makes him eccentric, not crazy - and this is one of the rare times not being crazy is a liability.
Technically, if you want to look at it from a sociological viewpoint, the difference between eccentric and deviant is whether or not they are considered a threat to society. Deviancy includes criminal acts, and by the fact that somebody died and it was his fault, he goes from being an eccentric to being deviant. Whether he is crazy or not would be a different psychological criteria.
This is what pisses me off about (Score:5, Insightful)
You got a similar effect in the 80s and 90s with the scares over drug gangs. Drug gangs then and now mostly kept the violence to themselves (and wouldn't be a thing if drugs were legal and addiction treated as a medical condition) but watching TV you'd think there was a drive by every 5 minutes in Kansas. Meanwhile we've got more folk in prison than China thanks to that crap. I'm especially sore because my mom bought into that crap and spent a good chunk of my childhood not letting me go out and play because the scary crap she kept seeing on TV. But hey, gotta fill those private prisons.
Fuck the mainstream, establishment media for pushing bullshit scares on unstable people.
I think you misunderstand (Score:2)
This is not about "scaring" anyone, that the media publishes details about a "millionaire nutter who is now a convicted manslaughterer" -
Whoa...dude. You totally missed what he was saying!
He was talking about the scare-mongering that goes on re: North Korea, such to the extent that some unhinged millionaire starts digging a secret fall-out shelter.
I would say it is a very easy claim to make that if the media had not promoted 24x7 stories about how North Korea was going to nuke as all because ORANGE MAN BAD
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I would say it is a very easy claim to make that if the media had not promoted 24x7 stories about how North Korea was going to nuke as all because ORANGE MAN BAD, that there would be no tunnels and this poor worker guy would be alive today.
There is an old saying, "born in the night" to indicate someone was a bit "naive" so to say.
I would say that phrase applies to you.
media had not promoted 24x7 stories about how North Korea was going to nuke as all
Really?
Wow, bro, I don't know if you know what history is or have read any, or even perhaps experienced it first hand, but there was this episode in American/Soviet history called the "Cold War", where we were under constant threat of nuclear attack. During the early 1980s it was particularly bad because of the constant change in leadership in the Soviet Union. However the
Re: I think you misunderstand (Score:1)
Seriously? So youâ(TM)re just going to pretend that Trump never talked up North Korea as a huge threat, then only later claimed to have fixed that threat, despite not actually having accomplished anything?
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Tell me again why we shut down most of the mental institutions about 40 years ago, and how was the "community is going to take care of them"?
Because people were being institutionalized and treated against their will, and the courts decided that the only constitutional justification for that is if the person is a danger to others. The early 20th century was a dark, horrible time in mental health, where institutionalization was justified for the purposes of eugenics and to eliminate "idiots" from society.
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Well to be fair, China has less in prison because they cull the population for organs often it seems...
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Well to be fair, China has less in prison because they cull the population for organs often it seems...
Well, we are going to start chemically castrating prisoners in the US, so we are kinda sliding in this direction (okay, it's only Alabama so far, but still).
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False equivalence is noted, snowflake.
This argument died when some crazy
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This argument died when some crazy dude in China knifed a couple dozen people on the same day as the Sandy Hook shootings but nobody died. Copied and pasted for stupid people clinging to zombie talking points.
Re: This is what pisses me off about (Score:1)
Yeah, I'm still not seeing the part where the gun dragged the guy out, loaded itself, forced his finger on the trigger, and fired itself over and over while the guy was begging people to help him put down the evil murderous gun. You can argue the level of damage all day long, but someone has to fire a gun. Guns don't have legs, they can't drive, and they won't even put bullets in themselves. Hell, most won't even fire if you drop them. But don't let me stop you, keep trying to push those windmills over. Gi
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Neither did the knife for the crazy guy in China - but nobody died. Stupid.
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That your argument is not just invalid but insults your intelligence. Trying to argue "it's all just the same man" after China/Sandy Hook is like a creationist who continues to insist that atheism is a religion after being hit with "yeah like 'off' is a TV channel" or "like bald is a hair color". You don't see stories in the news every few months of a toddler who digs mommy's knife out of her purse and accidentally blows a hole in someone with it. You don't see stories of mass scissorin
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Yeah, except I'm right and you're wrong. If you really think knives are equal to guns, then you would be picking up your Buck knife to:
Go to the opener of deer hunting season
Defend yourself from a home invader
Get together with your fellow Wolverines and defend the USA from invading commies
But you would never grab a knife over a gun in any of those situations. Because you don't actually think they're the same thing, anymore than an antiabortion
Always leaving out the first sentence... (Score:2)
...from the second amendment. It's your bible, yet you ignore half of it. It's like y'all gun cultists learned how to be consistent from this guy. [tattoospedia.com]
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...from the second amendment. It's your bible, yet you ignore half of it. It's like y'all gun cultists learned how to be consistent from this guy. [tattoospedia.com]
As courts and scholarly evaluations of what the writers meant, the first phrase is a justification, not a limitation. You'll see a similar sort of thing elsewhere in the Constitution, IE: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
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You first, clown shoes. Even the second part is clearly referring to a collective right, not an individual one. So go on and join a well regulated militia if you unironically want to cart around your dick extender. [bushmaster.com]
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Wrong wrong wrong wrong. [youtu.be] In order:
The Founding Pricks [theconversation.com] practiced gun control themselves, and the Federalist Toilet Paper is just one set of asses & opinions from some of the slave owners who signed their names to parchment. SCOTUS has a long history of in-your-face-bullshit rulings, and Heller is one of them. This is mostly the same group that decided that it's constitutional to force people to buy health insurance, then turn around in a few years, and ignore the equal protection clause to say they have
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You mean eight? Compared to:
26 for Sandy Hook
49 for Pulse night club
58 for Vegas concert
69 in Norway school shooting
Stop trying to make the guns to knives comparison happen. It's not going to happen.
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Oh, you mean like Afghanistan and Iraq. They are well-armed and their citizens are very respectful of each other due to the guns. Why, it's a regular paradise over their, dogs and cats living together in mindful, well-armed peace.
Re:This is what pisses me off about (Score:4, Interesting)
" the media encouraged those delusions because they're hoping for a fresh war to feed our military industrial complex"
What are you talking about? Every article I've ever read from the media always talked about the horror of a war with N. Korea and how there was no way to win it. The media is supposed to be filled with left wingnuts, they'd hardly be likely to support the military-industrial complex in your head. Hint: it died in the 2000s when big companies realized the rest of the economy made military economy look like peanuts. They concentrate on the rest of the economy because there's no big money to be made on the military. Hell, even the Pentagon has people studying how to keep the industrial base they require as an industrial base they can rely upon. It comes down to using more of the regular economy's baubles because they cannot force their own baubles to be produced.
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There is exactly one way to win a war in Korea - convince the Chinese that Dear Leader (or whatever he's called these days, Dear Leader might have been his old man) is someone who really needs to be removed. And then the Chinese will deal with the problem.
Otherwise, the Chinese will look at the US Military carrying ordnance near their borders, freak out, and WW3 follows....
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The media is supposed to be filled with left wingnuts, they'd hardly be likely to support the military-industrial complex in your head. Hint: it died in the 2000s when big companies realized the rest of the economy made military economy look like peanuts. They concentrate on the rest of the economy because there's no big money to be made on the military.
This [worldbank.org] doesn't look "dead" to me. And in fact the line goes up pretty significantly starting in the 2000s. Not quite sure what alternate history you've been reading.
Left wingnuts lean authoritarian (Score:2)
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establishment media fearmongering.
Drama sells. That is human nature and nothing new.
No one is making you or anyone else consume "fearmongering".
If you choose to consume it and fixate on it that is your choice...
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Now... paranoia about child predators / home invaders / carbohydrates? That's less political, more media. (Some media. Let's not paint with too broad a
What a real sack of crap. (Score:1)
Doesn't meet goal (Score:2)
You are a millionaire hire a good contractor.
But what if you want to make sure no-one else knows where the tunnels are?
Pretty much the only way is to do what this guy did, find some poor worker willing to go through some bullshit to get to the work site.
If you hire a real contractor they are going to want to know where the site is and there Weill be quite a lot of people who will end up knowing a lot about it.
Maybe better off buying one of the Boring Companies machines and get training to use it yourself?
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Or just ask Superman for a favor. Okay maybe he had the cave before he ran into Supes, I don't remember anymore.
I never read the comics, but in the Nolan movies, the cave system already existed. He did some drilling, but otherwise wasn't excavating, mostly just running power down into the caves for the things he put down there.
Supposedly, the batcave was used by Bruce Wayne's ancestors. As a child, Bruce fell through a hole in the ground into the cave, where he was scared by bats.
kill a man and only get 9 years? (Score:3)
kill a man and only get 9 years?
10 years for an DUI that killed someone (Score:2)
https://www.al.com/news/2019/0... [al.com]
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Accidentally kill a man and get 9 years. How long do you want to go to jail for when your tire pops and you take out a biker? Your car manual says to double-check your tires every time you get gas. Is there even 0.02% of the population who does that?
It depends on whether you're being criminally negligent.
Re:kill a man and only get 9 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall the words of Ambrose Bierce:
There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
https://www.brainyquote.com/qu... [brainyquote.com]
Now he's likely being a bit hyperbolic with that last one in the list but it does make a rough equivalent to how we treat homicide in criminal law. There's premeditated (or first degree, or aggravated, or some other modifier indicating its gravity) murder, murder in the second degree (or simply "murder" without a modifier), manslaughter, and justifiable homicide. This is manslaughter, a crime of acting in a way of extreme negligence in which a death occurred. This is common for people that caused a death in a traffic accident when the person was driving at high speeds, drunk, or in other ways in which they had no intent to do harm but had to be knowledgeable that harm to others was quite likely.
I'm no lawyer but I believe just short of a decade for him to sit in a corner to think about what he did is about right. I could perhaps be convinced of a shorter sentence. Those that acted out of malice to others needs to sit in a corner far longer, 15 or 25 years perhaps. Those that acted with knowing intent that another would die should never be reintroduced to society, or until they are so feeble that they could not likely harm another.
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How about instead of just saying I'm wrong you provide an actual correction?
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Not once have you ever strayed from whatever opinion you originally barfed onto your keyboard.
That makes me unique in some way? I'm pretty sure that's par for the course.
The common denominator in your posts is for you to push your conservative ideas.
Right, how dare I comment how I wish on a web forum that is built specifically to collect comments on new items of the day? And in opposition of the norm? This is not a place for free and open discussion! Slashdot is supposed to be an echo chamber!
Or something.
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Keep in mind he was convicted of both intending to kill and NOT intending to kill, the same person, at the same time.
I'm confused by this. How does that work? Isn't there an obvious automatic appeal needed here?
Nuclear Attack (Score:2)
I wouldn't say there is zero chance of a nuclear attack.
On the other hand, it seems basically impossible that North Korea can land anything beyond the west coast of the US. If you're on the east coast your biggest worry should be hurricanes and socio-political collapse.
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The tell for that will be:
The CIA and NSA workers will take a "holiday" in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, parts of Oregon/Washington.
When the really wealthy fly to New Zealand with their staff.
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That doesn't imply that they wouldn't do it.
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that did not end in a permanent regime change for them.
On the contrary, I think it suggests exactly that.
The Kims' primary objective in all things seems to be maintaining their dynastic power.
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Right. Till the great leader's sister refuses to suck his cock any more, or he gets even more drunk than usual, or final stage syphilis sets in ...
tl;dr You're assuming rationality. When dealing with humans, that's a bad assumption.
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That doesn't imply that they wouldn't do it.
Having visited the country, they have no interest in attacking another country, especially South Korea, who they consider as their brothers under the thumb of the US. They are rabidly prepared to defend themselves, however.
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Re:Nuclear Attack (Score:5, Insightful)
They want it as a deterrent. For a deterrent to be effective, the governments needs to be crazy enough that it would be willing to use the weapon - or at the very least, be able to convince the rest of the world that they are crazy enough.
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If they did, Pyongyang would immediately be turned to glass and the whole DMZ would be on like Donkey Kong.
Why would you assume they are rational actors that think about the consequences or the welfare of their country? If Kim Jong-un could escape to a tropical island during the nuclear war, do you think he cares what happens to his country? The end goal for the Kim family was never about ruling the world, so you working out the war strategy in such a scenario is pointless.
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, it seems basically impossible that North Korea can land anything beyond the west coast of the US
Nonsense. Even if they don't subvert a commercial flight they can just stick a big bomb on a large ship and take the slow route.
Khafra Should have Left When he Smelled Smoke (Score:2)
From the article: " Khafra texted Beckwitt to warn him it smelled like smoke in the tunnels. Ayres said Beckwitt didn't respond for more than six hours before telling Khafra that there had been a "major electrical failure." "
Khafra should have left when he smelled smoke. People need to take responsibility for their own safety.
Re:Khafra Should have Left When he Smelled Smoke (Score:5, Informative)
From the various articles on the case, Khafra was at the bottom of a 6m deep shaft with no ropes or ladders to climb out. Beckwitt's paranoia trapped him in there until Beckwitt came to get him out or feed him and haul out a bucket of shit.
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This seems like a pretty stupid arrangement to agree to. What if the one person who knows where you are gets in a car crash?
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Dude was probably desperate for money and possibly an illegal immigrant. That's pure speculation based on his name, and I could be completely wrong on that. I've known many people here "illegally" and they weren't all from Mexico or Central America.
youtube video of him from ShmooCon? (Score:1)
Is he this guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Another source no region blocked (Score:3)
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
The man himself talking nonsense in a fire suit at conference to protect himself from radiation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This was just on the Darknet Diaries podcast (Score:2)
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/39/ [darknetdiaries.com]
Building codes are written in blood, libertarians (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite a lot of government regulations started after unnecessary funerals. Buiding codes are an example of this. The trouble with millionaire libertarians is that relearning this for them costs labourers their lives. What if this guy hit a natural gas main in his dig -- neighbouring homes could have been demolished.
Why Millionaire Hacker lost his case (Score:2)
He thought he was Gus Fring, but he (1) didn't hire Germans to build his bunker, and (2) didn't have Saul Goodman as a lawyer.
Questions (Score:2)
Bethesda? (Score:1)
If he was really concerned then he should have been to the west of Washington, away from the prevailing winds.
Clueless guy, multiple levels.