If you ever wished that a spammer would die, die, die, congratulations — you got your wish. But we hope that hearing the fate of Eddie Davidson doesn't make you feel smugly self-satisfied. Davidson of Benet, Colo., one of several convicted "spam kings," walked away from his minimum-security prison camp and shot himself, his wife, and his 3-year-old daughter, Department of Justice officials said Thursday. Davidson's spam scheme involved sending out massive volumes of emails with manipulated headers to pretend they were from legitimate companies pushing penny stocks.He would earn a fee from an unnamed third-party company based out of Houston based on the number of emails he sent out. In the years that he was active, between 2003 and 2006, the DOJ claims he had over $3.5 million deposited into his bank accounts. Davidson plead guilty to falsifying header information to send spam; tax evasion; and criminal forfeiture. He'd been sentenced to spend 21 months in the minimum-security prison, as well as ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution. Happy with the payback?

Poor Nike just cannot catch a break these days. First all the gays and their blog commenter followers got upset about Nike's new ads featuring a guy with his nuts in another guy's face, which some say are homophobic. (Nike's ad agency would like you all to STFU with your whining about that, BTW). And this controversy is distracting them from the process of pulling all their "Air Stab" shoes out of UK stores because the god damn Brits can't stop knifing each other! The insatiable British appetite for stabbing their fellow citizens caused bad PR levels to rise so high that Nike had to start pulling the shoes last week-even though they've been selling them for 20 years.

If you only read the Washington Post for one thing, read it for its offbeat profiles of weird people in the Style section. Screw politics! Today they profile an author named Max Holland, who's spent the last 12 years—12 years!—working on a book about the Kennedy assassination. His big revelation in that decade-plus of research? That maybe there was a gunshot before the Zapruder film started filming. But, a shot that missed! So who cares, right? Are Kennedy assassination people the most serious-minded crazies in America? Very possibly:

Max Mosley, the British auto racing boss who found himself in a scandal over his Nazi-or-maybe-prison-themed sex orgy video and embarrassed the world's luxury auto makers, has won his privacy lawsuit against the UK paper that published the photos, thereby killing the UK's gossip industry. Slate will find a way to make the whole thing boring. Jalopnik has the tape. Here's how Mosley won:

Just a couple of months ago, Italian con-man Rafaello Follieri was all set to make a clean getaway. He knew the feds were investigating his alleged scheme to defraud investors like Bill Clinton. He was in Europe and could have stayed there. But his then-girlfriend Anne Hathaway kept calling and insisting they needed to talk about their future. Being the sort of dope who writes a $215,000 check against an account with $39 in it, and thus not realizing Hathaway was about to dump him, Follieri said, shucks, why not. A few days after his return to the states, he was in federal custody. And now his friends are wondering if it wasn't a big setup (on behalf of the feds) by an evil Hollywood actress!

Robert Soloway became the third man to get prison time for spamming on Tuesday. Soloway has been sentenced to four years in prison — short of the nine that prosecutors sought. Assistant U.S. attorney Kathryn Warma told reporters that while Solomon had earned far less than other busted bulk mailers — $700,000 over three years, compared to that much in a month at times for recently-sentenced Jeremy James — the prosecution felt it necessary to send a message that the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 can and will be enforced. (This is where I'm supposed to add that spammers are evil and Soloway deserves to drop the soap behind bars for the next 47 months. Sorry, but my honest reaction: The drunk driver who killed my friend got a lighter sentence. My inbox isn't that sacred.)

Robert Novak-respected conservative journalist/commentator and grim spectre of soulless walking death-ran over a guy in his black Corvette this morning. Hilariously, a Politico reporter got the story by walking by. Novak hit the guy and then continued merrily speeding along until a bicyclist stopped him and said "you hit someone." Novak allegedly threw his head back and cackled for a moment before shooting him. There are no details about the pedestrian's condition. Look, we need to share more details about this with you. Just click.

The British press is different from the American press. According to the Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, the American press walks like this: "self-reverential, long-winded, over-edited and stuffy." And the British press walks like this: with making shit up and alcohol! Hah. Another important difference? KNIFE CRIME.

"Three young women suing billionaire Jeffrey Epstein for sex abuse at his Palm Beach mansion want a federal judge to quash the plea deal he made with the state of Florida to serve 18 months in jail in exchange for admitting he solicited a 14-year-old hooker." [Post, Previously]

If you can't do the time, don't post photos on Facebook celebrating the crime. That's the harsh lesson 20-year-old college student Joshua Lipton learned after a judge handed him a two-year sentence for severely injuring a woman while driving drunk. Photographs on Facebook of Lipton partying in an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird" proved he was without remorse, a prosecutor argued, and the judge agreed, calling them depraved. Lipton's attorney, Kevin Bristow, argued that the photos showed Lipton's confusion after the accident and noted that he'd written apologetic letters to the crash victim and her family. Right. What we suspect really confused Lipton: The idea that anyone over the age of 21 might actually know how to use Facebook.

Metro, the free paper best known for causing track fires on the NYC subways, ran a cover story yesterday that is totally indefensible, even by the lowly journalism standards of free morning papers. Radar spotted it: a front page splash about an innocent grad student girl who was supposedly attacked by four wild young black females because she was wearing a t-shirt with the slogan, "OBAMA IS MY SLAVE." The paper's one and only source? The untalented media whore designer who sold the mystery girl the shirt. (We would feel dirty giving him more PR than necessary, but it was this prick). But guess what, Metro: we got that press release too. And if this whole story isn't a hoax, I will personally buy one of those shitty shirts.

Peter Braunstein, the former WWD writer who went psycho and turned into a rapist on the run a couple years back, has been sentenced to 23 years in prison in Ohio. That's after he finishes his 18-to-life bid in NY. He called himself a "Hamlet character," complained about the "absurdist quality" of the trial, and promised to orchestrate his own murder in jail, preferably before Christmas. So, still crazy. [NYDN]

The business of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door is surprisingly shady. It consists largely of crews of young people-some under 18-recruited by (often) criminal characters who haul them around the country in vans, releasing them only to make their way through neighborhoods, using any lies necessary to tug the heartstrings of people enough to get them to buy something. Then all the kids are rounded up again, given their meager cut of the profits, and they all go do drugs. Sometimes they rape people, or drive off cliffs. The Houston Press just put out a monster investigation of the industry, and it shows a long but clear path from the offices of Conde Nast out to the wild kids hustling in the hinterlands. And there are some true horror stories:

The government of France has officially forfeited all the liberal cred it's earned over the past 500 years: yesterday, French prosecutors raided the office of an auto magazine, confiscated its computers and files, and arrested a reporter for the crime of publishing a scoop. A scoop about autos, the subject of the magazine! Because in France, freedom of the press must take a back seat to the concerns of the almighty Renault corporation.

Who knew that robbing the Backstreet Boys could have so many financial rewards, on top of the emotional satisfaction? Lou Pearlman, the sleazebag boy band promoter who managed Backstreet and N'Sync, among others, has been ordered to repay $300 million to hundreds of people that he swindled in a Ponzi scheme that played out for decades. But uh, according to our forensic accounting, he might have a little trouble making full restitution:

Convicted "Spam king" Adam Vitale was sentenced to 30 months in prison Tuesday, for spamming more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers. Vitale had boasted of using 35,000 proxy computers to bypass AOL's spam filters with greater than 80 percent successful delivery to members.

New details on Arden Wohl's arrest in East Hampton last weekend! As you may (or may not) recall, the headband-obsessed socialite was arrested after she defaced the Ralph Lauren store on Main Street, penning the words "Ralphy Lipshits" in red lipstick and stealing a few American flags from the shop. And then? "She was arrested and handcuffed at approximately 2:30 p.m., transported back to headquarters and charged with making graffiti and petit larceny." Not quite as amusing is the maximum penalty she could end up with: A prison sentence of up to a year. [NYO]

The New York subway poster art vandal, despite receiving widespread acclaim from the cognoscenti who determine who's hot these days, continues to work just as hard as when he was not yet being compared to Banksy (who, let's face it, is totally over now that we know who he is, maybe). He's retained his "ironic sloganeering" theme, and is moving strongly into "messing with faces," as well. Here are five of the anonymous subway vandal's latest ad remixes; steal them immediately, as investments:

A city employee, allegedly on the brink of being fired from his $126,735-plus-bonus job wrangling the network of computers that hold email, payroll, and confidential information, has been arrested and charged with four felony counts of computer tampering. City officials — don't those guys have names? — say that 43-year-old Terry Childs gave himself privileged access and locked out other system administrators. The computers are still usable by city employees. But Childs still has exclusive super-user access to many parts of the network, because he won't give up his passwords. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Five days before convicted murderer and former high-tech hero Hans Reiser led police to his wife's body, local writer Stephen Elliott interviewed him for Salon. Reiser defended his innocence and slammed prosecutors and witnesses. Also, he talked about S&M. What many of us still want to know: How does a convicted criminal plea-bargain after he's been sentenced — someone please explain the legal mechanics of that? Some choice quotes from the piece: