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run by someone he called the ā€œSith Lord,ā€ in reference to the villain in the Star Wars movies. In Byrneā€™s own words:

As this went on I started realizing that there was actually some more orchestration here being provided, by what Iā€™m calling here is the Sith Lord or the mastermind. Now, can I tell you who that designated bottom feeder was who was supposed to end up with our company? Can I tell you? I can. But Iā€™m not going to today. The Sith Lord is, can I tell you who that is? Well, I could tell you itā€™s a name that everybody on the phone, every single person on the phone would recognize this personā€™s name. Heā€™s one of the master criminals from the 1980s, and heā€™s back in business. But Iā€™m not going to. Iā€™ll just call him the mastermind today.

A few moments later, Byrne continued, ā€œThe man Iā€™ve identified here as the Sith Lord of this stuff I just say, you know who you are and I hope that this is worth it, because if the feds catch you again, this time theyā€™re going to bury you under the prison. And Iā€™m going to enjoy helping.ā€

Though we were not part of his lawsuit, as Byrne went through his list of ā€œmiscreants,ā€ first my name came up and a few minutes later my wife, Cheryl, joined the ā€œBall.ā€ Byrneā€™s bringing me up in his public harangue was out of all context, except for one: Allied. Our fight with Allied had become so public that Byrne lumped me in with a cast of who he considered evil-doers trying to undermine perfectly good companies and ruining America.

ā€œDavid Einhorn runs a fund in New York called Greenlight Capital,ā€ Byrne said in about his only truthful statement about me. ā€œGreenlight, Iā€™ve been in Greenlight, and they told me sort of a founding myth of Greenlight, which was that David Einhorn was a Cornell guy who found some arb and traded it from his dorm room and that turned into Greenlight over time,ā€ he continued.

Byrne had never been ā€œinā€ Greenlight. I didnā€™t find an ā€œarbā€ in college or trade it from my dorm room. This does sound like the story of Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, who did just that at Harvard. It seemed that Byrne conjured up various stories and stereotypes about hedge fund managers and depicted me as an amalgamation of a bunch of them.

He next turned to Cheryl. ā€œThen thereā€™s Barronā€™s,ā€ Byrne said. ā€œAnd Barronā€™s, anybody on the ā€˜Streetā€™ understands Barronā€™s more or less as just being a group of quislings for the hedge funds. . . . There has been until recently an editor there named Cheryl Strauss, married name Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, wife of David Einhorn. And if you trace the articles around, which Iā€™m going to talk about in a minute, youā€™ll see that both entered these very odd relationships.ā€

This did not take a lot of detective work. At Barronā€™s, Cheryl always wrote and published as ā€œCheryl Strauss Einhorn.ā€ Byrne went on to say that if people checked, they would find that a reporter who had recently written a negative article about Overstock in Barronā€™s probably knew Cheryl. That was probably correct, but so what? It was hard to tell because all he had was Joe McCarthyesque innuendo. Possibly, he wanted listeners to believe Cheryl fed a story to the reporter on our behalf at a time we werenā€™t even short his stock. In Byrneā€™s paranoid view of the world, reporters blindly accept assignments from former colleagues.

He also saw a conspiracy between Kroll and me. I guess Allied told him Greenlight had hired Kroll to investigate Allied and BLX loans. Now, according to Byrne, Kroll was investigating him. Thatā€™s all the evidence he needed to think this was my doing.

Byrne continued, ā€œKroll has been investigating me for a number of months, trying to come up with dirt on me. The generalā€”well, I had trouble nailing that down until I discovered the personal relationship between Jules Kroll and David Einhorn.ā€

Though we retained the firm to investigate Allied, I have never met or spoken with Jules Kroll, the founder. Byrne seems to have made the connection because Kroll went to Cornell about twenty-five years before I did and also lives in the same town as my family.

Enter Jim Carruthers.

Byrne said:

Jim Carruthers is an interesting fellow. Heā€™s up at Eastbourne Capital, north of San Francisco. Eastbourne has an ā€œEā€ at the end. Itā€™s funny because thereā€™s a fellow holding himself out in a nearby location by the name of Jim Karruthers, with a slightly different spelling, holding himself out as a private investigator from Eastbourn Investigations, no ā€œEā€ at the end. I know that couldnā€™t be this Jim Carruthers, because that would be a felony for a person to hold himself out as a PI when heā€™s not. And that PI has a very interesting relationship with a certain lawyer in Detroit, who has some very odd practices that maybe weā€™ll have time to get back to.

I suspect the part about the lawyer in Detroit referred to Carruthersā€™s getting information about the fraudulent BLX loans in Detroit. Plainly, Byrne spoke with Allied.

Before the show ended, he put my picture up on the screen next to a picture of David Rocker under the heading ā€œShort-sellers.ā€

David Einhorn is the guy who is, of course, obsessive about his [security] concerns. They literally told me in Greenlight how heā€™s got six cell phones and swaps SIM cards and takes a different route to work. And when I was in Greenlight, they were explaining how you canā€™t even, I couldnā€™t even go into this part of the office and see him. Heā€™s extremely shy and careful, wonā€™t be seen in public, have pictures taken, anything like that. So if you ever see this man in public, do not take his picture because heā€™s evidently extremely concerned about it being known or on the Internet.

Again, Byrne has never been ā€œinā€ Greenlight, nor has anyone at the

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