Ex-Santa Clara police captain pleads guilty in bizarre cyberstalking of eBay critics
A former Santa Clara police captain has admitted in federal court in Boston that he and several other eBay employees mounted an elaborate cyberstalking scheme to intimidate a Massachusetts couple whose newsletter criticized the e-commerce giant, then interfered with the investigation into tactics that included sending the victims live spiders, cockroaches, and a fetal pig.
Philip Cooke, 55, of San Jose, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a count of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and a count of conspiracy to tamper with witnesses, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Federal prosecutors added that another retired Santa Clara captain implicated in the same ploy, 51-year-old San Jose resident Brian Gilbert, is scheduled to plead guilty later this week.
Along with the two disgraced former lawmen, five other former eBay employees — the company fired all seven defendants once authorities informed them about the plot last year — were charged over the summer. Two other admitted conspirators, San Jose residents Stephanie Popp, 32, and Veronica Zea, 26, pleaded guilty earlier this month. Gilbert will be joined by 26-year-old Redwood City resident Stephanie Stockwell in entering pleas Thursday, according to prosecutors.
Cooke is scheduled for sentencing Feb. 24 and Popp and Zea are scheduled to be sentenced the following day. The maximum penalty for each charge is five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and restitution.
There was no indication in the U.S. Attorney news release Tuesday that remaining defendants James Baugh, 45, of San Jose, and David Harville, 48, of Gilroy and New York City, have signaled intentions on how they will plead.
According to the charging documents, Cooke supervised security operations at eBay’s European and Asian offices when in August 2019, he and the other defendants orchestrated an intimidation scheme targeting a Natick, Mass., husband and wife after their newsletter published a critical article about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers.
“The defendants and their coconspirators believed that the cyberstalking campaign would curtail both the newsletter’s coverage of eBay and the anonymous comments beneath it, and thereby please eBay’s senior management,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Their methods, as outlined by authorities, consisted of anonymous threats and deliveries to their home of items including a fetal pig, a bloody Halloween pig mask and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse. Prosecutors asserted they also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on them to their neighbor’s house, hatched a plan to put a GPS device on their car, and posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising events like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on their door.
Prosecutors contend that Cooke specifically approved the creation of two Twitter accounts, one of which used a prominent eBay seller’s name, and used them to exchange threatening tweets about one of the victims, “all to give the impression that several eBay sellers were upset with the victims over their coverage of eBay.”
“Guest (sic) I hav (sic) to pay (the victim) a visit,” one of the defendants allegedly posted in a tweet with the sham account.
Gilbert’s role in the campaign was to separately contact and “rescue” the victims from the harassment to earn their good will, which prosecutors dubbed the “white knight strategy.”
The scheme began to unravel when the couple spotted surveillance being conducted by the group, prompting them to contact Natick police, which launched an investigation that eventually grew to involve federal authorities. Prosecutors further allege that Cooke and several defendants discussed presenting Natick Police with a false lead to divert them from uncovering video evidence that could tie them to the illicit deliveries, and that as the investigation was underway, the defendants deleted digital evidence linking them to the plot.
After the charges against Gilbert and then Cooke — who last worked for SCPD in 2018 and 2017 respectively — Santa Clara city officials announced that even though they had no indication the two engaged in similar behavior while working for the city, they were commissioning an independent review of their decades of police work.
The city did not immediately respond to an inquiry Tuesday about the status of that review.