Acknowledgements Page of DADDY'S LITTLE FELONS

Following is the Acknowledgements section at the end of Daddy's Little Felons. The project was a long time coming, and these are the people without whose seminal influences it wouldn't have happened:

The dead guys come first. At the top of the list is my wife’s late uncle John Fretwell, who spent years researching the murder of his great grandmother Olive Olivia Combs at the hand of George Wood. John was a gentle, decent guy who politely but firmly knocked down one stone-walling bureaucrat after another until he could confirm the details of George Wood’s conviction, sentencing and then pardon for the murder. 

Then comes my friend, the late Frank Herbert (author of Dune), who talked me into running for congress. He said I reminded him of his character Jorj X. McKie in his short story The Tactful Saboteur (my paperback copy is worth a whopping $551.73, according to Amazon). Frank pretty accurately forecast our present day, when a lone individual with advanced technology could bring the planet to it’s knees (see my tribute to Frank here). Luckily, I lost my race for the U.S. Congress and had to go get work. Data General hired me to head up advertising and public relations, and to get tax-limitation passed in Massachusetts.

In Massachusetts, I was on the four-man steering committee that hired the late Tony Schwartz, master at guerrilla warfare and the man whose single commercial that ran one time on only one network destroyed Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. When I knocked on Tony’s New York City brownstone, I fully expected Satan himself to answer the door and slice my head right off my shoulders. After all, Tony had represented every Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson, and I had run for Congress as a conservative Republican. I asked him if he had a problem working on a conservative political issue, and he said, “You’re going to pay me $25,000; I’ll be what you want me to be.” That began a multi-year friendship, where he and the still-living Dick Morris taught me Guerrilla Warfare.

Dick Morris also taught me the importance of honesty in politics, a frequent topic whenever I teach a Sunday School lesson to adults. I also used Morris in a note I published to the whacky hackers at LulzSec (see my posting here). 

No acknowledgement would be complete without expressing my appreciation to Oracle’s Larry Ellison, for whom I spent a couple of afternoons a week for about six years as his one-man ad agency, creating ads that took Oracle from $15 million to over $1 billion in sales. I also made Larry the captain of my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team (see my nomination here). I’ve begged Larry for years to let me introduce him at his next speech, somewhere. Alas, he hasn’t taken me up on the offer. Click here to see how I would introduce Larry should the opportunity ever arise.

I also add my thanks to Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, who let me do his pre-IPO guerrilla warfare attacking Siebel. I also put Marc on my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team (see Marc’s nomination here). 

My real education in the cyberwar currently taking place came from David Appelbaum and the BIGFIX management team, the endpoint security whiz kids for whom I created ads attacking Microsoft, Symantic, Altiris, and McAfee. Of course, I attacked myself right out of a job, since BIXFIX was acquired by IBM, who had no need whatsoever for a guerrilla warrior. My first ad for BIGFIX features my first cyber privateer alter ego (see the ad here).

I owe the insights used to create the 22 Principles for the Perfect Virus to ex-Oracle/ex-TenFold wizard Jeff Walker (see the 22 Principles here). I’d worked with Jeff during his time at Oracle, and again to serve on the board of directors for publicly traded TenFold. When Jeff and I re-engaged and he explained the applications technology at TenFold, he said, “Rick, you wouldn’t know a good application if it bit you in the ass.” Rather than get all huffy about it—after all, I was a mathematician who had actually written a real-time operating system in an earlier incarnation, not to mention inventing the Hagoth voice stress analyzer that had gotten me on every major television news broadcast as well as on the front page of the big national newspapers—I figured I’d better shut up and learn. It turns out, Jeff was right. He created 22 principles for the perfect application. I just modified them as they would apply to The Perfect Virus. Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks also to my friend Joseph “Yossi” Elad, a former Israeli naval commando who not only gave me a SEAL Team Six baseball cap, but whose Quantum Leap Innovations’ technology has given me “situational awareness” of currently breaking trends that shows up in my cell phone alerts long before anyone in even the tech media pick up on them, let alone the mainstream media. Full disclosure: I sit on the Quantum Leap board of directors.

I’ll leave solving real-world problems to politicians like President Obama’s former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman and Obama’s first director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, who The New York Times reported on May 21st as urging ‘Counterattacks on Hackers’ (see the NYT story here). Thank you two for coming up with the right solution to, as the Tony Stark character said in Iron Man II, “…successfully privitazing world peace.”

I’ve must also thank world-class PR wizard Steve Coltrin (and his lieutenant Zachary Allen) for introducing Daddy’s Little Felons to the New York media crowd. I’ve known Steve since we served together on the TenFold board of directors. Steve actually put Mitt Romney on the map by doing his PR when then-governor Romney took over the scandalized Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. Steve, I owe you big time for your help.

And finally, thank you Rita. During the forty-seven years of our marriage, you’ve kept me grounded in what’s truly important. And you let me hang the pirate skull in my den. Hopefully, my setting the record straight about George Wood, the man who murdered your great-great-grandmother, doesn’t offend your sensibilities. 

Rick Bennett

July 4, 2013