So a judge has unsealed the evidence supporting the search warrant on [alleged] receiver of stolen G4 iPhone Gizmodo ‘editor’ Jason Chen who paid Brian Hogan thousands of dollars for the ‘lost’ prototype … and, as well as a pretty incriminating narrative of events, buried in it was a lovely line about ‘consciousness of guilt’ … as Wired reports.

Stolen goods. image: nzherald.co.nz

Police were preparing a search warrant affidavit for Hogan’s apartment two days later, when Martinson phoned them to report that Hogan and a second roommate, Thomas Warner, were in the process of removing evidence from their Redwood City apartment: a desktop computer, stickers from the iPhone, a thumb drive and a memory card. Police raced to the apartment, but by the time they arrived, Hogan and Warner had left in separate cars with the evidence.

The police headed to Hogan’s parents’ house, also in Redwood City, and were let in by Hogan’s father. They found Brian Hogan sitting on his bed with his girlfriend. When the cops told Hogan that removing evidence implied “consciousness of guilt,” Hogan agreed to cooperate, and phoned his friend Warner, who had taken the computer gear and the stickers away in his car.

Warner directed the police to the nearby Sequoia Christian Church, where the cops recovered Hogan’s black desktop PC and flatscreen monitor outside an administrative office. Warner initially claimed he didn’t know where the other evidence was, but eventually told police where they could find the thumb drive and memory stick hidden in a bush.

That ‘consciousness of guilt’ is a nice concept that I think must apply even to hardened con-artists — or do they overcome it with practise, like excess alcohol apparently suppressed the vomit reflex in a student who tragically died this week after reportedly downing a full bottle of vodka?

Some spruikers, as we have seen, over-compensate with voluminous public statements about their own innocence, integrity and moral purity — sometimes invoking their religion. Are they too, stashing evidence of their crimes in a local church? Makes you wonder.

You can download the full documentation (22 pages PDF 2.5 MB) through a link on the Wired article page.

Brian Lam: blackmailer or just an idiot?

Also of interest in those released documents is the personally-I’d-call-it-blackmail approach Gizmodo’s Brian Lam [shame on him] took to a request from Apple boss Steve Jobs for the return of their property. Very dodgy, even smelly, in my view.

From: brian lam {blam @brianlam.net}
Date: April 19, 2010 4:08:07 PM PDT
To: Steve Jobs {sjobs @apple.com}
Subject: Let’s see If this goes through.

Hey Steve, this email chain is off record on my side

I understand the position you’re in, and I want to help, but it conflicts with my own responsibilities to give Ihe phone back without any confirmation that its real, from apple, officially.

Something like that — from you or apple legal–is a big story, that would make up for giving the phone back right away. If the phone disappears without a story to explain why it went away, and the proof it went to apple, it hurts our business And our reputation. People will
say this is a coordinated leak. etc

I get that it would hurt sates to say this is the next iphone I have no interest in hurting sates That does nothing to help Gizmodo or me.

Maybe Apple can say it’s a lost phone, but not one that you’ve confirmed for production -that it is merely a test unit of sorts. Otherwise, it just falls to apple legal, which serves the same purpose of confirmation. I don’t want that, either.

Gizmodo lives and dies like many small companies do. We don’t have access, or when we do. we get it taken away. When we get a chance to break a story, we have to go with it or we perish. I know you like walt and pogue, and like working with them, but I think Gizmodo has
more in common with old Apple than those guys do. So I hope you understand where I’m coming from.

Right now, we have nothing to lose. The thing is, Apple PR has been cold to us lately It affected my ability to do my job right at iPad launch. So we had to go outside and find our stories like this one, very aggressively.

I want to get this phone back to you ASAP And I want to net hurt your sales whan the products themselves deserve love. But I have to get this story of the missing prototype out, and how it was relurned to apple. with some acknowledgement it is Apple’s.

And I want to work closer with Apple, too. I’m not asking for more access – we can do our jobs with or without it – but again, this is the only way we can survive while being cut out of things. That’s my position on things.

B

Gee, does anyone think these adolescent crooks will get their wish to ‘work closer with Apple’ after this extortion? I don’t. GIven his smart-arse reply to Apple’s letter asking for their property (and thus confirming what was obvious about its ownership), I double-doubt it.