Reply All - #30 The Man In The FBI Hat

Episode Date: June 29, 2015

When successful internet entrepreneur Robert Hoquim died, the people who knew him found out they actually didn't know him at all. For more about John Aleshe, go here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/PERSONALITIES/ALESHE/ For tickets to Cast Party, go to www.castparty.org Check out Death, Sex & Money at www.deathsexmoney.org Sponsors: The Outlook app for iOS and Android Mailchimp (www.mailchimp.com/replyall) Harry's Razors (www.harrys.com/reply) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, reply all listeners. This is Alex, and I'm actually coming to you with a podcast recommendation. If you like our show and you like Gimlet shows and you feel like you need more great stuff to listen to, then I cannot recommend death sex and money more highly. Death sex and money is a podcast that's hosted by our friend Anna Sale, and it's really good. She has this crazy superpower where she can get people to be honest with her in a way that is very, very rare. This week's episode is all about siblings and how they get under your skin. My siblings and are barely speaking. For whatever reason, I find it harder and harder to get them to say anything towards me.

He would tell a stranger to check out more than he would tell me. And I'm not really sure why he suddenly looked at me with such disdain. It's a tough thing because, man, we were so close. I listened to this episode this morning, and I can attest to the fact that it is a very heavy listen. And in some ways, it hit kind of close to home. Anyway, check it out. Death Sex and Money. Subscribe on iTunes or find it at deathsexmoney.org. We'll put a link to it in our show notes. All right, enjoy the show. When the cops first showed up at the scene, it seemed like a completely routine death.

On the night of May 22, 2000, a man had died of a heart attack, alone in his basement apartment in Noblesville, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis. His name was Robert Hocom. Robert Hocom was the successful founder of a local internet service provider and a beloved member of the Noblesville community. He was a multimillionaire, known for his fondness for racing cars and being charitable with his money. But all of that began to unravel

the moment that Lieutenant Tom Madden of the Noblesville Police Department examined Robert's driver's license. Back then, we were just, Indiana was just changing from kind of the paper licenses. They're somewhat paper plastic to plastic licenses.

And he had one of the older licenses, the paper plastic. And as I was looking at it, I thought this just doesn't, Something looks strange about this. His colleague, Detective Brett Reichert, had the same kind of license, so he pulled his out and compared it to Hokam's. It became obvious there were several problems.

One was that the corners were square on Hokam's and on Brett's, the one we know to be a valid license, they're rounded. The second thing was to type, the printing on the license. Back then they used, it was little dots to be the letters. You had to look real close, but you can see the little dots to be in the letters. His were like just a typewriter. They ran Hocom's social security number.

It belonged to a woman in St. Louis. One of Hocom's neighbors called his lawyer, Gordon Wischard, who came to the police station to talk to Tom. Gordon said, hey, he has a storage unit. He had keys to it. So we went down there and opened it up. And inside the storage facility was a bunch of old computer equipment, stuff that I don't even know what it was. I mean, the only thing I really recognized in there was a modem. There were checkbooks, boxes of documents, there was an old truck.

And in the glove box of the truck, there was another driver's license under the name John Paul Olishie. And then when we ran that name, that's when the bells and whistles went off. Okay, so I was 17, and I had a bulletin board system. This is Jason Scott. He's an archivist, an internet historian, and he introduced me to the story of Robert Hocke. A.K.a. John Alicia. It's a story he's personally been fixated on for about 30 years. And Jason first heard of the guy way back in his early days online. Back then, information was shared between online bulletin boards in the form of text files. And there was one particular

text file that caught his attention. There was this alert. And the alert said, look out for this guy. This guy has completely swindled us, taken all this money. We have researched him. He is a criminal on the run, do something, please help us. And at 17, that's a pretty weird thing to get across a bulletin board system. You don't think about federally wanted criminals going through bulletin boards. It's not that kind of a place. Bulletin boards were little worlds under themselves, where people blindly and willingly trusted each other.

They were small, tight-knit, like a small town, a community. In the early 90s, I basically lived my entire social life on a bulletin board. system called MNet. It was a local computer with four phone lines, which meant I could call it all day without worrying about long distance fees. I mean, there were people that I liked and people that I hated, but for the most part, it was too nerdy and arcane for truly bad people to find their way to it. For the most part. This is a story of a man who made his home in this brand new world of the early internet, where he underwent a strange transformation from notorious criminal John Paul Elishi to beloved entrepreneur, Robert Hocom.

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. I'm Alex Goldman. To understand the path from John Alishi to Robert Hocom, I decided to start at the very beginning. Good morning. Hey, you're about you Alex. I am. Are you, T.J.? How you doing? Nice to meet you.

Here you go. This is T.J. Alicia, Robert Hocom slash John Alishi's younger brother. I visited him at his graphic design and app development business. outside of Orlando. John and T.J. grew up in Las Vegas, the adopted sons of a PTA chairwoman and a casino boxman, the guy who manages the chips.

And he says that as long as he can remember, his brother has been really smart about electronics. He took on projects that were way above his time and his speed. I mean, you don't build ham radios from scratch when you're 12, 13 years old, bottom line. He had a little small room in the back of our house, and that's where he spent all of his time, literally all of his time.

He was pretty much of a genius in his own respect. T.J. admired his brother, but trusting him was really difficult. He says at one point, after he got his driver's license, he asked John about buying a car. One of the first cars I really wanted to get, he had a beautiful yellow transam. And he said he would sell it to me, and I had about two grand from savings just over the years. And gave him the money. I kept bugging him and bugging him and bugging him and bugging him and bugging him. And then he said, no, I can't get it.

Where's my money? Don't have it. Okay. that would have been my first car. Instead, I ended up with a Ford Pinto. T.J. says it got worse. John wrote bad checks from his dad's checkbook, stole from every job he had,

and after high school, he disappeared for a while, told T.J. that he was working on the Alaskan pipeline. T.J. doesn't know if that was true or if it's just another John story, as he called them. What he does know is that by 1986, John was in Texas. He ended up in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, where he'd a run in with this fella, Thurmond.

You have to excuse me, I've got a sinus issue, so I'm having a hard time talking. In 1986, Ned was a police officer in Irving, and he says that he came across John Alishi when he was working as part of a special task force looking for stolen cars and parking lots. While driving by one of Irving's seedyer hotels, Ned saw a Porsche in the parking lot and ran the plates. It had been stolen. So he knocked on the door of the guest who was driving the Porsche, and John Alishi answered the door. And laying on the table in plain view, from the doorway was a quantity of cocaine. Ned arrested John, buckled him into the front seat of the cop car,

and they began driving to the police station. I stopped at a stop sign, and he was fidgeting the whole time. I looked to the left to check traffic, and when I turned back to the right, he had slipped his hands out of the handcuffs, reached across the seat, and was pulling my weapon out of my holster. He pointed the gun at my head.

Oh, my God. Tried to pull the trigger. Ned stuck the webbing of his hand between the hammer and the cartridge of the gun. So when John fired, the hammer came down on the webbing instead of the bullet. I was able to turn the gun towards him trying to discharge the gun into his leg, thinking maybe that would stop him from fighting. The gun did discharge, but his index finger was over the barrel. and when the gun discharged, it blew his finger off.

I've never heard anyone describe nearly being murdered so calmly. But Ned has a real Sam Elliott, Texas cool. At the time, it's more of an anger issue, you know, getting mad that, you know, somebody's trying to take your life. And I obviously wanted to come out on top of that situation more than he did. John Alicia was charged with attempted capital murder, a charge which can carry a life sentence. In his mug shot,

Alicia is bearded, bald, heavy-lidded, wearing a hospital gown. His left arm is in the air, cocooned in gauze. My mother-in-law lived in Texas at the time, saw the article that he was arrested. T.J. was living in New Orleans. So I checked with the jail, found out what it was, and he was there on attempted capital murder, possession of cocaine, stolen theft.

He had the Porsche. But he was my first. brother. So I basically took every amount of money I had in savings at that point. I went down to Dallas, Texas, and I found the attorney. And doing that, he bailed my brother out of jail. After T.J. bailed his brother out. He took John back to New Orleans to help him get ready for trial. So, long story short, my brother calls me up. Listen, can I, you know, can you get me a car? You know, I need to, you know, get my affairs in order before I go to court and everything else. No problem. And I went down to Hertz and I rented him a car with the anticipation that he would be back.

sometime soon. We went out to Fat City, played pool the night before he left. That was the last time I saw my brother John until the day that the FBI called and told me that they had found him in Noblesville, dead from a heart attack. But yeah, that was the last time I saw him. They found the car in Washington State, I think, about a year or two later. Since T.J. had rented the car, he was responsible for its disappearance,

and he was eventually arrested for Grand Theft Auto. The arrest cost him his job. John Alicia ended up on the FBI's most wanted list, but Ned says the FBI was always one step behind. One time they told me they thought he was in England. Another time they called and said, we think we have him in California somewhere, and we're going out there to try to catch him now.

They called back several hours later and said, we just missed him. You know, there was coffee brewing on the stove, and, you know, look like he was living there, but he's gone. John Alicia resurfaces in 1987 in Minneapolis, sometimes going by the name John Richard. And he finds his way to that trusting community of bulletin board enthusiasts, a community totally unprepared for someone like him.

Hello. Are you, Don? Yep, I'm Don. Nice to meet you. I've already got this thing recording. Okay. This is Don Seaford. He knew John back then.

And like John, he's been into a lot of life. electronics his whole life. From the time I was 12 years old, I was etching circuit boards and making my own electronics gadgets in my basement at 12 years old. I did notice something that looks sort of like a quadcopter back there. Yeah, that's one I 3D printed back there, and this is also one that I built. Back in 1987, Don was part of a network of bulletin boards called Phytonet. It was pretty complex, but if you think of bulletin boards as these one-horsetown

throughout the world, Phytonet was like a highway system that would connect them all together. The scale and ambition of Fidonet was pretty crazy, but John Alishi was really excited to be a part of it. There was a group of computer individuals that would meet for brunch Saturday mornings at a local restaurant, probably 15 to 20 people, and I think I met him in person there. He was actually very well-spoken, very intelligent. The John Alishi that Don knew was nothing like the John Alishi that T.J. Ornett had known. We were both interested in being part of FidoNet and just kind of became friends from there. John told Don that he was in the Air Force and that he worked with the defense contractor Honeywell,

which, looking back on it, sounds a little silly to him. He was very heavy set, which should have been a trigger that he wasn't a pilot in the Air Force, because he was too out of shape to have been that. John poured himself into his bulletin board, setting up a FITO net system with eight telephone lines. and at the time, setting something like that up cost thousands of dollars and required a ton of upkeep. More and more people began using a system,

and John charged $20 a year for a subscription. But if this was some kind of scam, it didn't really make any sense. According to Don, John would never break even at the rates he was charging. What John was doing was like a public service. He'd made a place online

where people could talk about anything and everything. Computer problems, personal problems, politics, music, whatever. John Alicia was making friends, living straight. And so his friends were all on board when he came to them with a business proposition. There was a local businessman that ran a small computer shop, Dave Garner from Cascade Electronics. And he was another one of those people that we met for brunch on Saturdays. So we all kind of knew each other.

And John said that he had this opportunity to supply computers to, I think it was like the Minneapolis Public Library, of some big deal to supply computers. And so he got Dave Garner to provide all the components to build, 25 or 30 computers at the time. It was basically cases, motherboards, power supplies, disk drives, memory, all the components that you would go into building a computer. And he actually brought those computers over to my townhouse. And it was probably like an entire weekend.

We were working long days for probably three or four. four days to assemble everything. Just with piles of parts on the floor, cobbling everything together. Yeah, and then he packed them back up in his truck and hauled him away. John was supposed to go straight to the library and drop these computers off. But instead, he disappeared. The phone lines for his bulletin board became all busy and I was unable to reach his bulletin board. My girlfriend and I, who's at all my wife, drove over and sat out of his apartment for an hour

or something waiting to see if we saw anything. We didn't see anything. and then Dave did some research and found there never was any deal to sell these computers. It was basically a fraud. Dave Garner wouldn't talk to me for this story, but in articles from the time, he estimated John had stolen about $68,000 worth of equipment from him. Don said that the whole thing was baffling. He had us all fooled.

We really, you know, were very trusting of him. And it's almost like there were two personalities there. It's almost like he was kind of a good guy that made a bad decision at some point and then was on the run for his life but wanted to do normal activities and do normal things, but because he was wanted, had to hide things and eventually just took off. It was very strange. Don Seaford will never know why his friend disappeared with thousands of dollars. Maybe John Alishi didn't want to leave Minneapolis, but he knew the cops were onto him and needed to fund his escape. or maybe he just saw an opportunity and took it. All we know is that this is the last time anyone saw him

under the name John Paul O'Leishy. Coming up after the break, John Alishi becomes Robert Hocom, and it's more than just a name change. The first record I can find of John Alishi using the name Robert Hocum is in 1989 when he sets up another Phidonet Hub in the Indianapolis area. But before long,

Hocom's ambition grows beyond just building and maintaining bulletin boards. In 1992 or 93, he found an internet service provider called IQuest. I talked to Cindy Dunstan Quirk, one of IQuest's first employees about meeting Robert Hocom. Can you describe him a little bit? What was he like? Well, I kind of wary. Bob always kind of was a little distant until he got to know you a little bit.

And then I guess he determined whether or not you were worthy of his trust in his time. What did he look like? He just was, he's a short little man with uncapped hair kind of balding, missing a finger on one hand and kind of rotund and very uncapped. His hair was just kind of, you think of that picture of Albert Einstein where his hair is just kind of out like a bedhead. That's kind of what Bob was like. The first time she met Robert was at IQuest, and she says that it was less like an office, more like a bunker. The building that he was in was sort of a little strip mall, not far from the fairgrounds. And the front door was, or the back door basically, was a reinforced door like heavy steel,

and then you had to go through a couple of other really heavy reinforced steel doors to get down to where he was and to where all of the equipment was because it was all underground. And his reasoning for that, you know, at the time made sense because, you know, it's these servers that are mission critical and the connections are mission critical. and it needed to be stormproof and bulletproof, and it all made sense. So we never questioned anything. Nobody ever did. Unlike Fidonet, IQuest begins to grow. Cindy was the fifth or so employee, but it wasn't long before it blossomed into a real company.

We had, you know, a lot of customer service people. We had a full operations department. We had HR. We had other salespeople beyond me. It was a big company. Suddenly, Robert Hocom is a public figure. the owner of one of the first internet service providers in Indiana. He's hiring employees, he's making money,

and then he does something totally out of character. He stays in Noble'sville. He doesn't take off, doesn't screw anyone over. Instead, he buys a house in the suburbs right next to a golf course. He becomes a regular Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. He gets into motorsports and starts racing Dodge Vipers. And he starts making friends. Yeah, I mean, once he passed away, you know,

all these stories came out, and it's like, that guy? This is Bobby Archer. In 2000, he was a professional racer of Dodge Vipers. And shortly before his death, Robert Head plans to make IQuest, Bobby's main sponsor. Everything else was above board and invisible. And, you know, they didn't seem to be any concern about that. What was your impression of him?

Understated, very, very intelligent. and he liked to wear his FBI hats. Bobby was not the first person I talked to who mentioned this fugitive from the FBI's penchant for wearing an FBI hat. Cindy told me about it too. Do you remember him wearing an FBI hat a lot? He was just hiding in plain sight.

It turns out he might have actually gotten the FBI hat from the FBI. Internet historian Jason Scott recounted a story that he heard from another ISP owner in Indiana. He told me that for years he and Robert would meet with the local FBI representative for a lunch just to talk about what was up. By what was up, Jason means Robert was willing to talk to the local FBI office about stuff like child pornography or piracy. So he was willing to meet with the local FBI office on a regular basis while technically being on the run from the FBI. That is extremely, extremely balzy.

Bobby Archer says that Robert Hocom was generous with his newfound wealth. He remembers an event for Vipor enthusiasts that the both of them attended. There was a charity auction fundraiser for a kids group to provide facilities for abused kids or something. And it got to be a pretty spirited auction night. And I want to say he bid $30,000 on it. In time, since he... Cindy says that Robert took her under his wing at IQuest. To me, he was a very warm person.

He could be kind of abrasive at times. But for me, he always, he told me that he would teach me everything I needed to know to be successful. And he did. He was a kind man. Even though Cindy says that Robert Hocom was always patient and kind, his trust was difficult to earn, and his suspicious distrustful side manifested in strange ways. One night, it was kind of weird. He asked me to go out to dinner.

and just scared me to death because I told my husband, I said, oh, crap, I'm going to get fired from here. And we had this wonderful dinner at an Italian restaurant in Indianapolis, and he ultimately said, I just want you to know the reason I asked you here tonight is because I have some personal news to tell you. So what is it? He said, well, I wanted to tell you that I'm dying of cancer. and I was shocked, of course, and asked him all about how long he had to live and all that. And he said, you know, nobody, hardly anybody knows, and I don't want to talk about it. So I just wanted you to know because, you know, I trust you.

And I never said anything about it to anybody. And I was just so sad because it's like this wonderful human who had given me this great chance, it was going to die. So fast forward to him passing away and figuring out his double life. And we figured out it was a test to see how much he could trust me. So the trust test was that he told you he had cancer when he didn't just to see if you would tell other people? Correct. Oh, my God.

It's kind of weird. In those last years of his life, Robert Hocom came to be seen as family by his upstairs tenants. They described him in the police report as a father figure. In his obituary, their daughter is listed as Robert's godchild. One of those tenants, Dean Hoover, told the press after he died, quote, He was a wonderful person. That's what we're going to remember, and that's what we want everyone to remember. He was just a really nice man.

Whether he had ulterior motives or not, you know, was in the right place at the right time, and did good things for the Internet in Indianapolis and the state of Indiana. So he did a good thing. Whether he meant to or not, he did a good thing. Even T.J. says that he could barely see his own brother and Robert Hocom. I mean, he was a well-liked guy. You know, he would go to auctions and he would buy things on, you know, just for the hell of it, you know, for charity.

And you know what? If I met him on the street, the way I saw him, I never would have recognized him. Never in God's Green Earth. I mean, he was just so different, unbelievably. How so? well, he was 285 pounds, bald. I mean, if I would have looked at the hand, maybe.

But that's really, that's the only way I could really identify him, even in the morgue. But TJ told me that his brother had never really changed. He was still a con man, still a thief. I hate to say that about anybody, but no matter what I did, including the very end when I bailed him out of jail, it wasn't something that he was going to pay back. It was not something he was going to remember. He was just not that kind of guy.

We'll never know if John Alishi became Robert Hocom as a way to atone for the behavior of his past life, or if he just fell into a job so lucrative that he no longer felt the need to run cons. I want to believe that Robert Hocom became something better than John Alishi, that the internet, which makes it so easy to be whoever you say you are, let him shed his old skin and become the caring, friendly person, people like Bobby Archer and Cindy Dunstan Quirk described. But his brother, the person who probably knew, him the longest and the best, thinks I'm nuts.

And Jason Scott, who brought me this story, says he does too. Part of me just feels like you're looking at a piranha going, but what was the piranhas motivation here? Do you think at some points it kind of considered the life of the cow that had fallen into the river? The people who he hurt were hurt for the rest of their lives up until his death. I mean, they were hurt for decades. There was no contacting them.

There was no quietly sending them things. There was no anything. I just don't want the guy to get another pass, you know? When he died in 2000, John Alicia's remains were given to his brother. You know, when we buried him in, well, I put him in the mausoleum in Las Vegas with my mom and my dad. And we had a service and was in the paper. paper, the obituary. We had the service there and my cousin came and my wife and my kids. And that was it. Nobody else showed, not one person.

2,000 miles away, Nobleville, that same week, friends gathered to celebrate Hocom's life at the Crown Hill funeral home. Well, now, Robert Hocom's funeral, however, huge. Everybody came. Everybody loved Robert Hocom. So the Robert Hocom, the persona that he actually made out of himself, was a well-loved individual. John Alishi that other people knew, nobody would have come, and they didn't. Whoever he really was, we know one thing for sure.

Robert Hulcombe got away with it. Reply all is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnaminani, Fia Bennon, and edited by Alex Bloomberg. Production assistance from Sylvie Douglas. Special thanks to the Noblesville Police Department, Anne Richard Deli, and Emily Kennedy. This episode was engineered by Rick Kwan.

Matt Lieber is that moment where you realize the person you've been crushing on all semester. Might just like you back. Our theme music is by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash reply all, and we put up some DVD extras from this week's episode on dig.com. Thanks for listening.