Gary Bowser
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So the original PS1 ships wouldn't shut down. They would just keep injecting the signal. So Electronics Arts, they added code in their game itself to check to see if that signal was still being injected. Then they realized, well, it must be modified because we're not sending a signal anymore from the disk. Why is the signal still there? So then newer ships had to come out.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They were called stealth ships that would shut down after a little while. And that got bypassed the original Shecks of EA dip. Let's back up a second.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Did you get one? No. What about the Enigma? The Enigma? I think I had an Enigma at one time. It was a lot of wires to solder into the Xbox.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Messiah was for the PlayStation system. It was one of the first ships that allowed a DVD to boot on a PlayStation 2.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They came out with a BIOS that added new features, allowed you to put in bigger hard drives, unlocked the system. I hated the way they had to modify the system, I mean, with the wires and everything. My solution at the time was, I would actually just take the flagship off and just reprogram it and then solder it back on.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Since I was in the business before manufacturing hardware, I had the programming equipment and the soldering tools. So for me, it was quicker just to desolder the flagship, reprogram it on my PC, and then solder it back in. I could do that whole operation within less than five minutes, which was a lot. quicker than actually sitting there and soldering a bunch of wires in.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I did for a while. During 2004 to about 2008, I did do some modifying of consoles for people as a service.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
No, they didn't. Do you think they cared? I think so. They were actively monitoring the forums even back then and watching the information.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The video game companies, they wanted to protect the quality of the system. And that's where Nintendo actually started that. They would put labels on their boxes that they sold, being quality-assured, certified. Because what killed the systems in the 80s was one of this shovelware. There was just too much stuff. The Atari 2600, the Timex Sinclair, even the Texas Home Computer. There was tons...
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
of stuff being developed, and a lot of it wasn't worth the $89 or the $69.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
In the 90s, I didn't do too much piracy, actually. I bought almost all the games that came out that I was interested in. The only piracy I did a little bit was actually on the computer side.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I was more popular originally on Xbox Hacker BBS. I was a very popular poster on there. I started then posting on Xbox-Scene, posting news for the administrators on there. And then on another site for the PlayStation, it was called PSX-Scene. I was a very popular poster on there, and I started working with the administrator at that site.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And I was there when GeoHot, if you remember George Holtz, he found the original, what they called a root key for the PlayStation 3. He posted it publicly on PSX Staff Scene. And that caused that site to take off, skyrocket, go from 100,000 users per day to a million users per day. There was lawsuits involved. By the time that happened, I was actually hosting that website for the administrator.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And then Sony cracked down hard. They went after GeoHalt. There was court orders. I started posting all of what was happening in the court case. There was actually at one time a movie deal being worked. People thought that George Halt would fight Sony, go all the way. And unfortunately, he decided to settle. And that was the end of it.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I never met him in person. Not ever, ever? Never. No, never seen him in person. I know what he looks like from his Instagram and Facebook posts, and I know what his voice sounds like from phone calls I had with him, but I've never actually met him in person. But I was introduced to him via the original owners of PSX Scene. They...
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They knew him, so they introduced me to him, and we had some phone calls, and then he said, look, I need someone to run the site. You can do whatever you want with the site as long as you're available to post news when I give you information about new products that I'm going to release.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, that was one of the first resellers out there that was selling devices from Team Executor and other companies and third-party controllers and stuff. There were... I actually used them myself to buy some mod chips back in the day.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah. The original idea was I could do whatever I want with the site, keep 100 percent of the ad revenue, but he wanted a couple of spots on the site just for his products. So like the top banner spot would be for his products, and whenever he had a press release made for a new product, But I had to be a variable on call, post it right away.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
That way, that site would have the news first, and then everybody else would have to link to that site because of the exclusive news.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
There was this craze of bringing back the older systems, the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo, the PlayStation, the Sega, many versions of those original consoles that people loved. But those systems were locked down again, and that they only had a certain selection of games. Like the PlayStation 1 Mini only had like 20 games on it.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The PlayStation 1 actually used an open-source emulator and just added their own little skin to it to select the game. So they were just taking someone else's work that they had made, an emulator that they could find on GitHub, assemble it themselves, add their own skin, and use an Android board from China above the battery or the screen to run the emulator.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I forget the prices. The Classic 2 Magic didn't have no games. It was mainly... to allow you to plug the original cartridges in. So it added the cartridge slot itself. I forget what the price was, like $59 or $79 or something.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
No, Max, like for me, I was the PR man to get the internet, to get the post out there on the internet, to get people to know about it, to find people to review their products, to get the reviews published. Max was more on the marketing side, coming up with ideas. He came up with the names for the products. He came up with ideas of the websites and how to market it to the people.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
He dealt with all the... finding the resellers to sell it, to get all the background stuff. But he was not a techno guy. He was smart. He knew how technology worked and stuff, but he wasn't an engineer or anything.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I didn't help any of the newer devices. I had no... helping create them. I knew some of the developers that were working on it. I would chat with them a little bit. I would get advanced copies of the product for testing, sometimes to do a product review so that before they started shipping, it was like, this is how it works.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
But I was mainly to do the PR, to do the press releases, which I didn't even write myself. I would be given the press release pre-written, and then I would just add my own words to it and post it.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
No, I never had those discussions with him. I mean, I would post the news on what was happening. He made those decisions on what he would do business-wise, on what he would do next. Sometimes I wouldn't even know. Like when he was working on the Switch, I didn't even know he was working on the Switch. He would just tease me saying there's something else coming up, something coming up.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Until something was actually concrete, a lot of times I was over the loop too. I didn't even know about it.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, well, that's a problem that's going on with everything, even recently with Red Hat. Oh man, I didn't think about that.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So, Uberchips.com was another place that you could... It was one of the resellers in the United States that got sued by Nintendo for selling the device. They were one of the first resellers that was going to be selling the SX Lite and the SX Core for the Switch.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
It's interesting. I mean, it's a lot of getting used to. the things that I've taken for granted. Today, just sitting outside waiting to come here, and the rain had stopped, and watching the squirrels and listening to the birds sing. It was like smelling the flowers in the garden. It was like I never even felt that in three years. So that was like a new experience to me all over again.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
At the original beginning, during the early 2000s, I was just a user posting on the forums and helping other people out. In the end, I was just a PR guy posting the news and making sure that the testers... could get information on what was happening with the products over to the developers. But I was never on the actual development side of doing actual exploits of the coding.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Not really. I wasn't... I could just say I was like an in-between guy. I was more than a tester, but not a developer. More of just a go-between guy.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
He never really wanted me to get too involved. He knew I could, but he wanted me to be arm's length away from it in case something did happen. He said, just stay as a PR guy because that way freedom of press, not directly connected. If anything does happen, it won't hurt you.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, there was actually a lot of rules. I would not allow links to pirated stuff. I would take down ads that advertised SD cards full of ships. There was a few times resellers would try to do that. I would send them a letter and say, hey, you can't do that. I'm taking down your ad. There's no refunds. You can advertise a product, but you can't advertise games.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I would actually take action if I got an actual enforcement letter. When I used to publish mods for Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar would send me a letter and say, hey, don't talk about mod packages for GTA, please. I would say, okay, no problem. I took down the post. When the Activision stuff got hacked and the Skyliners, which were a very popular toy, Activision contacted me.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They sent me a cease and desist. I took down the information. When the leaks of the Sony SDKs came out, And I posted about it. Sony would say, hey, it's okay, but take down any links to it. I would take down the links. So there was some back and forth that way, too. There was not supposed to be any links to any ROMs on the site.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
There was a couple posts that I missed that were in the Classic II Magic area that had links, again, to this ROM bank site. But they weren't supposed to be on that at all. Hmm.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, that is true. But with the True Blue, those were basically for older systems. The PS1, the Sega Genesis, the Commodore 64.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah. I mean, we didn't sell the devices on the MaxConsole website. We talked about it. It was up to you to find the devices. I didn't profit off of it either.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Not really. I mean, people come up with estimates and stuff. Attendo themselves came up with an estimate. They estimated around $500,000. SX OS licenses were sold at the time. So you can think of $500,000 times $25 for the license fee, and that's not on the hardware, that's just pure profit. So that's not counting the Gateway 3DS or any other devices.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, that's a long time ago, actually. I was born in 1969. And by 1979, I was already working on computers and stuff. So by 1984, I had already started my own company and was manufacturing software at that time for the Texas home computers.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
What happened to me is on September the 27th, I was looking forward to wake up that day because where I was living was in Dominican Republic. And we were under a COVID lockdown for the longest time. When COVID hit Dominican Republic, the president there put the country into basically martial law. You couldn't be outside your house after five o'clock at night. You couldn't leave your neighborhood.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
There couldn't be more than 10 people into a grocery store or pharmacy or a bank. Those were the only three things that were allowed to be open. Everything else was shut. It was total lockdown. In fact, so hard that where I was living, I couldn't even leave my apartment and go into my little office I had, which was right next door.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So I actually broke a hole through the wall instead of having to be able to walk outside and walk in so I could actually work at night. So I was looking forward to September the 27th because that was going to be the end of the lockdowns. The airports were going to reopen. You'll be able to go outside all day long. The bars will be open again. The beaches will be open again.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
It was going to be the end of the extreme lockdown. So I was looking forward to it. But at 5 in the morning... Instead of waking up at 7 in the morning and going outside and enjoying the outside at 5 in the morning, I woke up with shotguns pointed to my head and a bunch of people in my place. At first, I thought I was getting robbed. I didn't know what was going on.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
There was a lot of crime during COVID. And all I knew is I'm getting dragged out of my house early in the morning and there's a bunch of people in the place looking at all my electronics, grabbing all the computers. I try to talk to them to find out what's happening.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They refused to talk to me in English or Spanish and acted as if I was speaking Russian or German, looking at each other like, whoa, what's this guy talking? Even when the girl that I knew lived above me came downstairs, they even didn't tell her what's going on. They were just saying, oh, he's being taken to have his papers checked. And once his papers get checked, we'll release him.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So they took me over there, brought me to the Interpol office. I sat down on a couch. They still continued to refuse to talk to me. I was screaming that I wanted to talk to the Canadian government.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And after about a day of just sitting on the couch, the next day on the 28th, they drove me to this cage in the middle of nowhere of a bunch of other Haitians that they had rounded up and threw me in there. And I spent like two or three days in that cage, still not knowing what's going on.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Luckily, I got a little bit of food from someone else that got food brought to them, another Haitian, an old guy that took pity on me. He gave me some of his food, shared it with me. Because in Dominican Republic, when you go to jail, you don't get fed. Your family has to show up and bring your food. Otherwise, you just starve. So I spent like three days like that.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Come October the 1st, they take me out of the cage and they said, we're taking you to see the Canadian government. I said, well, finally, about time someone listened to me. But instead, they drive me to the airport. I start yelling and screaming at the airport again and saying, hey, where's the Canadian government? Well, they can't make it. You can find out when you get back home.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They handed me my passport. They handed me 3,000 pesos. They handed me a plane ticket to Toronto. And they said, once you're on the plane, you get to Canada, you can figure it out. You have to leave the country. I said, well, am I under arrest? They said, no, you're not under arrest. You're just being kicked out of the country. Your visa's expired. You're not welcome anymore in the country.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So I said, well, I want to talk to the Canadian government. They said, no, you can talk to them when you land. I got on the plane. It was one of the first airplanes after the COVID lockdowns ended. So it was just packed with people. It was an unbelievable amount of people on the plane.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
It flies and gets to New Jersey, and then it has to land in New Jersey real full again, and then it would take back off and go to Toronto. But after 9-11, any time an airplane lands in America, everybody has to get off, scan their passport before they can get back on the airplane. Before 9-11, you would just sit in the terminal in what they call a transit area.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
You didn't actually enter the country. Of course, the moment I scanned my passport in New Jersey, that's when an indictment showed up. And I got taken to secondary inspection. And from there, I was told I was actually going to be arrested. And they drove me to the Essex County Jail, which was the nearby jail. The FBI drove me there.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
They said, you're going to stay here overnight, and then we're going to take you to where your case is. I still don't know what I'm being arrested for or what it is anything about. October the 2nd came, I got read my rights by a judge over the telephone when I was in county jail.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And that's when I found out I had 13 specific charges on me with money laundering, wire fraud, and bypassing technology measures and all that.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The home computer world crashed in the 83, 84 period. Everybody went belly up. Commodore, Atari... TI, Timex Sinclair, the whole industry collapsed. So there was a huge market of people that wanted to support the machines. Now the manufacturers weren't making them anymore, but there was hundreds of millions sold. So that's where
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I get more paperwork. I ended up getting sued civically by Nintendo on an actual lawsuit. And by then I actually had lawyers working for me. So then we had to worry about the civic lawsuit and the criminal lawsuit, and the criminal charge and the civic lawsuit. So they had the two going back and forth.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Well, how that comes up with that figure is, going back to Nintendo, their experts testified that they estimated around 500,000 licenses were sold. And their experts testified that their studies show that when a system is hacked, that people buy 2.41 less games. So there's, let's say, the top 10 games, Zelda, Mario Kart, Super Mario, stuff like that. All of those top 10 games, 2.41 less sales.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So when a system is hacked, someone will buy maybe only seven games or eight games, not the full 10 games. So they take the $500,000 times the 2.41 times the value of the game, $59.99, comes to around $72 million. There is then three people on the indictment, me, the guy in China, and Max.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So my share of it being approximately one-third, that's just rounded off to $10 million, which is usually the max that you can get in Washington state anyway for a civic lawsuit.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yes, I looked at it about fighting it. I discussed that with my lawyer. It's like, well, let's fight their studies. Let's fight their estimates. And basically the reply back would be, well, we're only giving you a bare minimum of $500,000. There's probably more licenses sold. And we're just talking about the Switch. We're not talking about the Gateway 3DS.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
We're not talking about the Classic 2 Magic. We're not talking about all the other devices. We're just talking about one thing that got done. Now, if you want to fight that, then we'll add in the millions of Gateway 3DS devices were sold. We'll add in all the Classic II Magic devices were sold. That figure will then multiply into, well, could have been into 100 million, 200 million, maybe more.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, yeah, fine. We'll just cap it at $10 million. Forget about it.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The original hobbyist market came out and people were grouping together, trying to figure out how to program the machines themselves, make new hardware, and continue supporting the equipment. So that's one of the areas where my company fitted in. I was manufacturing devices, originally just software, and then eventually hardware.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Once that was settled, the key was to settle the civic one first. And then it was a lot easier to work on the criminal side. And by then, the FBI was... They knew they couldn't get the other co-defendants into the country. Other victims were not coming forward. PlayStation, Sony didn't care about the true blues. Sega, of course, didn't care about the true blues.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
But there was only Nintendo left as a victim. And ESA also... representing some of the other smaller software developers that may have got affected. They were the only two victims left.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
But they weren't interested. And the PS1 was a failure on their part anyway. I mean, it was being sold for $19.99. It was a disaster. The PS1 Mini. Yeah, the PS1 Mini. So they were not really interested in flying lawyers down and presenting evidence. The only people that were interested in the end was Nintendo and the ESA.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
There were only two people that showed up in February for my assessment to give victim impact statements.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, that was the only thing I couldn't get rid of. If I hadn't collected any money at all, I might have been able to get away with that. But it still was the hard part of getting around. Nothing I could do about it. And I was already spent a couple years in jail by now anyway, so... What can I do? I couldn't get that time back. So you pleaded guilty to those charges?
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Those charges, because I knew the maximum that the judge could give me was five years. And the government went in to the assessing hearing on February with that, saying he needs to get the full max of five years. But my lawyer fought it back with saying, well, he went through a hard time with COVID. Because of that, the probation people recommended 40 months.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And my lawyer was trying to go for 20 months, basically time served. But then the judge turned around and said, well, I can't just give him time served because I have to send a message that people that do this crime will face consequences. hard time. And I'm going to agree with the probation and say 40 months.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And that continued keeping the machine alive, waiting until new ones came out. So it was a very profitable business when I started in the 80s until it started to die out in the 90s when Windows came out.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Yeah, that's correct. When I was in prison, once they got sentenced, I was able to get a job in prison. I was working in the education department, running a library and stuff. And I wasn't paying much. I was paying $12 to $25 a month. But some of that percentage had to go towards my $4.5 million.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The reason that had to be done, no matter what, was if I refused to do that while I was in prison, then the prison could turn around and refuse to give me my good time or my first step back credit because it wasn't a violent crime. and there was no actual victim as a person, a human being, just a company, for every month I spent in jail, I could get between 10 to 15 days off.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So that was able, because of that, at my good time, I was able to get out after 30 months, getting released in March, instead of waiting until July or sometime in 2024. I didn't have to do the whole 40 months. I got 10 months off in total.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I was sourcing the parts from the company, the video processors and the memory. But I was actually making the... I designed the circuit boards myself and I had a... a contract manufacturer, and then bringing the parts in from like Aero and Future. And then I had employees that were hand soldering the devices together and we were shipping them out by mail order once the orders came in.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
I didn't actually start making the hardware until about 1990. The first part of the 80s was just concentrating on software. So it was around 1989, 1990, I started actually manufacturing hardware. I had a lot of inside contacts and text instruments that had released information on how the video processors work. And TI licensed the original code to Yamaha.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So I just piggybacked on using the processor from Yamaha and finding a way to make it compatible with the text instrument, which required some changes in the operating system. And I actually went back to the text instrument and got a license from them to modify the original operating system so that it would support the newer graphic systems.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Back then, I never owned a Super Nintendo or a Nintendo or even an Atari. I wasn't interested in it. But when Windows came out, things started to change. My business started to go downhill. People were moving on. They were starting to build PC computers. There was no more a market for tech system and stuff. So I switched my business with another partner.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
We formed a company called GenX Computers, and I started building custom PCs based on people's orders. And from that type of business, I started repairing video game systems. So by 2001, there was a lot of video game consoles. People were coming in with PlayStation 1s, original Xboxes. And it went from building computers to fixing the video game systems.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So that's where it slowly slid because there was no more market for the tech systems during that time period.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
The biggest difference with the video game systems is the original computers that were manufactured in the 70s and the 80s, they allowed you right out of the box to do programming. They came with a language. They came with a manual that told you how it worked.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
You could just sit down and start typing code and using it, recording it to cassette tape if you didn't own a floppy drive or recording it to floppy drive yourself. But with the video game systems, That wasn't possible. So that's where the slide came in. It's like, well, why? This is a computer. It has memory. It has everything in it. Why can't we just sit there and program it ourselves?
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
So that's where I slowly started switching to the dark side. I wanted to see these systems unlocked. And it was difficult to repair the systems, too, because you couldn't just source the parts. The computer, it was easy. You could order new memory chips from Future. You could order new processors from the original company. You could remove them and put them in. Now they had custom stuff.
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
And you couldn't just put a new device in. So there was more of an intrigue there. It's like, well, how come I just can't replace the lens in the PlayStation 1?
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
Not originally. I mean, the original stuff that was done like on the PS1 and the original Xbox, there was no pushback whatsoever. They looked at it as just a percentage of loss in business. And they would take more protection on their discs if piracy started happening. Like in the PlayStation 1, when the first ship started to come out,
Darknet Diaries
136: Team Xecuter
that bypassed their boot up system, they added more checks on the game itself to look and shut it down. Electronic Arts, the publishers themselves were the ones that were more into locking out system. Electronic Arts was one of the first ones that started adding anti-piracy stuff on the PS1.