In dispute with spammer, AOL hunts gold

In his junior year at Westwood High School, he walked into his history class, a Confederate flag pin on his chest, and declared, ``The South should have won!" In the hallways, he handed neo-Nazi leaflets to classmates . His senior year, he refused to participate in a graduation rehearsal because he would have had to march next to a black student.

Ever since he was a thin, chess-playing teenager in suburban Massachusetts, Davis Wolfgang Hawke has been finding ways to provoke authority and upset nearly everyone who knew him. At Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., where he collected knives and launched a neo-Nazi group, he drew the attention of groups that track hate, and they became increasingly concerned that Hawke was becoming a leader in the burgeoning world of online racism.

That was 1999, the year word spread that Hawke was not the Aryan he claimed to be, but Andrew Britt Greenbaum, the son of a Jewish father, who grew up in Westwood and once ran for junior class president. His reputation among hate groups ruined, Hawke reinvented himself as an online spammer who made millions of dollars selling ads for penis enlargement pills, home lie detector tests, and other alleged scams.

Now, in the latest twist in his strange path, Hawke is in the sights of AOL, the Internet giant, and his schemes are coming back to haunt his home.

AOL plans to dig around Hawke's parents' house in Medfield, contending that Hawke buried gold and platinum bars there. AOL is trying to collect a $12.8 million judgment the company won against Hawke last year when a federal judge found that Hawke's online pill and trinket business violated state and federal laws against spam.

According to court documents unsealed yesterday, Patricia Lingenfelter, Hawke's former girlfriend, told investigators that he ``mentioned once about burying some money in his mother's garden." And Miles Coggan -- president of J.J. Teaparty, a rare metals and coin shop in downtown Boston -- told investigators that he sold Hawke $350,879.50 worth of gold between August 2003 and March 2004.

Hawke, 27, has not been seen for more than a year.

``This is a kid who always had an incredibly inflated and cartoonish view of his own importance," said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracked Hawke. ``He told us he intended to rule the world. It was like something out of a Batman comic. So I think when he was destroyed in the white supremacist movement, he simply looked around for ways to become rich and famous fast, or at least rich. For a while, it worked."

In Westwood, this latest chapter in Hawke's life is sparking dismay but hardly shock.

``I'm horrified, but I'm not surprised," said a woman who graduated from Westwood High with Hawke and asked not to be named because she fears for her safety. ``We always thought he was going to grow up to be a terrorist or be in the news doing something notorious."

He started espousing racism in high school, classmates said. The son of Hyman Greenbaum, a Georgia native, and the former Peggy Davis of New Mexico, Hawke started calling himself Lance Davis, classmates said, before legally changing his name to Davis Wolfgang Hawke in 1996, as he headed to South Carolina for college.

``I thought, `Gee, what's that all about?' " Hawke's mother, Peggy Greenbaum, told investigators last year, according to the court documents. ``And he told me that, going down South, it wasn't a good idea to have a Jewish name. And I said, `OK, if that's the way you feel.' "

Hawke asserted that his real father was a visiting German businessman and that Hyman Greenbaum was his stepfather, an assertion his parents vehemently denied. ``I didn't want people to think I'm Jewish, when I'm not Jewish," Hawke told the Globe in a 1999 profile, when he was a rising activist in the online hate scene.

At Wofford, Hawke delved into neo-Nazism. He hung a poster of Hitler in his room, listened to German military music, and started an online hate group that attracted 200 followers, Potok said.

In 1999, his junior year, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mongtomery, Ala., publicized Hawke's former name, and his neo-Nazi allies ostracized him as the ``Kosher Nazi," Potok said. Hawke left campus that year without graduating.

``He disappeared from the scene," Potok said. ``This guy was completely and utterly discredited."

Four years later, Hawke resurfaced with a new plan. Between 2003 and 2004, he and a friend, based in Rhode Island, sent ``hundreds of millions" of unsolicited e-mails to AOL subscribers, advertising pills, porn, and other scams, said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman.

In one 90-day stretch in 2004, AOL received 130,000 complaints about Hawke's e-mails, Graham said. The alleged scams, meanwhile, earned Hawke millions of dollars, Graham said, before the company shut him down and won the judgment in May 2005, its largest ever against a spammer.

Based on the statements made by Hawke's former girlfriend and his mother, AOL won permission from a judge in Massachusetts to dig for gold and platinum at Hawke's parents' home and on other relatives' property, Graham said. No date has been set, but the company plans to use equipment that can detect buried metal and ``dig in a responsible and professional manner," Graham said.

``The hope and expectation is that we would use a very small shovel," Graham said.

No one was at Hawke's parents' tidy brown house on a quiet street in the woods yesterday. But his father has vowed to fight any attempt to dig on their property, and the couple have said they do not believe any gold is buried there.

``I never saw it," Peggy Greenbaum told investigators last year. ``I never saw any gold."

Globe correspondent LeMont Calloway contributed to this report. Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.