Why I wrote Evil Shadows
I would like to share with you a few words on my motivation
for writing Evil
Shadows, which at its core is a story about identity theft, but which
encompasses so much more that I believe is, or should be, important to every
American citizen.
In the first spring of the new millennium I and my family
were living a fairly normal life, living the dream as it were, with me employed
as a consulting computer software engineer operating my business from our home
in the little burg of Mohawk New York. I considered it to be a normal life,
normal that is until that dreadfully day of Thursday, June 8 2000 when my, our,
world came crashing down with my learning from fifteen armed federal and state
agents, who had invaded our home and my business that day, that I had become
the focal point in a worldwide federal investigation. It was after the fact of
the invasion that I discovered my being selected as the primary suspect in
their investigation was the result of identity theft that had occurred several
months earlier. But there was no stopping the federal juggernaut, once it had
started and gotten up to speed, with something as flimsy as “my identity was
stolen and used”. In very quick succession, and at the hands of federal agents,
I lost all of my consulting contracts, lost all of my software product dealer
network, lost all of over twelve years accumulation of intellectual property
and writings, stood by and watched as my business was forced out of business
and, with no income and open contracts I was forced to default on, was forced
to suffer through the ultimate of indignity, bankruptcy, to protect myself from
breach of contract lawsuits. It is this nightmare and my discoveries as to the
root cause of it that prompted me to write Evil Shadows.
From this dreadful experience I learned several things and
in Evil Shadows I share what I learned in the form of a story that conveys what
actually happened to me over a span of a few years. I felt it was important for
me to share this with readers as a way to educate, inform and forewarn. This
dreadful event can and is repeated all too often, entrapping innocent American
citizens just like me. It could happen to you too but there are ways to reduce
and manage the risk and Evil Shadows does propose and share many ideas and
suggestions in this regard.
In Evil Shadows I wanted to tell my story, of course, but
also I wanted to document how easy it was, how easy I had made it, for someone
to steal and use my identity and I wanted to document how terribly difficult it
is to prove your identity had been stolen after the fact of the theft. It was
also my goal to show that a coincidence is not an accident at all but rather
should be treated as a planned event until proven otherwise and had I followed
that simple advice perhaps, just maybe, I may have been able to avoid the
destruction I was subjected to. Overriding the identity theft angle of the
story is the story within of how federal agents and prosecutors go about their
business of persecuting innocent Americans in their zeal to secure an arrest
and conviction and how, once you become a focal point of theirs, you are
presumed guilty until proven innocent with no effort whatsoever made by the
investigating entities to prove innocence. Finally, and with twenty/twenty
hindsight, I wanted to document the things I could have done to avoid, detect
and recover from the identity theft which is at the core of my story.
In the end I wanted to document a true story about our
times, a time in which it is so easy to lose perhaps the only thing we can
truly call our own, our identity.
Some
quotes from 5 STAR reviews so far:
·
A nonfiction true crime – “that reads
like a thriller”
·
“His recommendations on how to protect
oneself from identity theft are invaluable”
·
“Hallock’s book is highly recommended
for its ability to awaken readers”
·
“Hallock's
book, Evil Shadows, is an important work, one that should be read, if not
studied”
·
“Evil
Shadows is a scintillating account of a heinous crime”
·
“The
great thing about Evil Shadows, …, is the fact that Rick Hallock
knows how to tell a story”
