E-mergency

The Inquirer hunts for an e-mail prankster.

Inquirer Editor Walker Lundy and assistant managing editor Lillian Swanson are the latest victims of an e-mail prank that’s been plaguing Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (PNI) for months.

According to a real e-mail from deputy managing editor Hank Klibanoff, on March 14 an e-mail with the subject line "The Color of Crime" — not coincidentally the same name as a controversial 1999 report on the supposed epidemic of hate crimes against white people — was sent to Inky staffers from an address similar to Lundy’s.

The lengthy e-mail (City Paper ’s print-out was 23 pages) begins with some statistics from "The Color of Crime" report ("Of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence involving blacks and whites, 90 percent are committed by blacks against white") and a link to the website of American Renaissance newsletter; both are the work of New Century Foundation, a Virginia-based pro-white-rights group. The report was largely ignored by the mainstream media when it was released, but it is quoted extensively online — mostly by like-minded individuals (David Duke) and organizations (the Ku Klux Klan).

The e-mail also contains several news articles about crimes in which white people were the victims and members of minority groups the perpetrators, including the recent case in Fort Worth, Texas, in which a black women allegedly struck a white man with her car, causing him to become lodged in her windshield, then parked in her garage and left him to die.

How many Inquirer staffers received the e-mail isn’t clear. Klibanoff says he learned of it from an African-American colleague, then promptly issued his own e-mail to the entire staff to set the record straight: "There is a bogus e-mail going around, which purports to be from Walker. It is not from Walker. Some of the e-mails give a return address for Lil Swanson. There is no need to respond to Lil about the offensiveness of the e-mail. She already knows about it and, like Walker, has nothing to do with it."

Lundy did not respond to a request for comment.

This is not an isolated incident. In his e-mail, Klibanoff says, "someone is maliciously impersonating the names of some of our staffers and sending spam e-mail."

PNI in-house counsel Katherine Hatton says the "Color of Crime" e-mail was just the latest in a series of bogus missives. Late last year, she says, members of the Inquirer and Daily News sports departments learned that someone was e-mailing "nasty" sports-related comments, mostly about the Phillies, outside the company under their names. Those who wrote to the papers to complain received a statement from the paper informing them that parties unknown were "maliciously impersonating the names of our sports writers and newspapers and sending spam e-mails."

Hatton declined to comment on whether the incidents involving the sports staffs and Lundy appear to be related. She also would not say whether these appear to be inside jobs, or whether any law enforcement agencies are involved in the investigation.

Klibanoff’s e-mail suggests they have; he describes the illicit e-mailing as "criminal mischief. … The situation is under intensive investigation and we hope to put a stop to this soon."