Penrose information

Message ID: 232680
Posted By: al_petrofsky
Posted On: 2005-02-05 18:19:00
Subject: Penrose information

(After I wrote the message below, but
before posting it, I saw that Bob Mims
has now broken his silence on the issue:
www.sltrib.com/business/ci_2556061
)

When I read in the Salt Lake newspapers
that Canopy's IT director Rob Penrose
had died at the age of 40, two days
after the Canopy management shake-up was
publicly confirmed, the thought occurred
to me that he may have been murdered.

I did not think this was very likely,
but I did think it was worth at least
looking into the cause of death. I
then obtained a copy of the
publicly-available redacted version of
the Salt Lake County Sheriff's case file
2004-138958.

The case is classified as a suicide.
Although there were apparently no
witnesses to the moment of death, the
information in the redacted report was
enough to persuade me that there was no
reason to continue to look into the
possibility of murder (other than to
order a copy of the final report when
it became available, and to provide a
copy of the initial report to Mims).

I didn't mention this publicly because I
didn't want to spark a lot of pointless
speculation that might upset the
survivors. However, now that:

(1) Canopy's lawsuit has named Penrose
as a beneficiary of Yarro's alleged
malfeasance.

and

(2) Reportedly[*] Yarro's lawsuit has
named Penrose as a victim of Kreidel and
Mustard's alleged harassment and
intimidation;

it seems that, in the absence of facts,
speculation is now inevitable. So here
are some facts, if you really want them:

scofacts.org/penrose-sheriff-2005-01-12.pdf

The basic story is "Dispatched to the
Penrose home on threats in progress. Ms
Penrose said her husband Robert was in
the bathroom with a knife cutting
himself. Dispatch then stated the
suspect was looking for his
gun. ... Shortly before my arrival
Dispatch advised Ms Penrose reported
hearing a gunshot". After some
confusion as to whether he was in the
house or the garage, "Entry was made
into the home and Sgt. Winder discovered
Robert had shot himself in the bedroom".

The investigating detective's report was
due on Wednesday (Feb 2). I have
ordered an updated copy of the file and
should have it in a couple weeks. I
expect it will include confirmation from
the Medical Examiner that the death was
consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.

By the way, it seems likely that Penrose
had access to SCO's data servers, and
thus it would have been possible for him
to be the "anonymous whistleblower
inside SCO" that Eric Raymond said gave
him the Anderer email that established a
connection between SCO and Microsoft.
www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.html
That possibility seems quite unlikely to
me now, but I mention it because it
prompted me to ask Raymond last month if
perhaps there was an understanding that
he could reveal the identity of the
source upon his death. Raymond replied
that he doesn't even know who leaked it
("He did a good job of covering his
tracks").

[*] Yes, I am also anxious to read
Yarro's complaint myself, rather than
rely on Mims's and O'Gara's
characterizations of it. Unfortunately,
it now appears that I will not get the
copies of the court filings I have
ordered until Tuesday at the earliest.
However, the case history listings
indicate that both Yarro's and Canopy's
complaints were mailed to Pamela Jones
on the same day, and the later one was
published on groklaw.net on Thursday, so
I imagine we might see the earlier
complaint show up there at any time now.

Message ID: 232684
Posted By: br3nsc
Posted On: 2005-02-05 18:35:00
Subject: : al_petrofsky

please email me
thanks
br3n

Message ID: 232701
Posted By: walterbyrd
Posted On: 2005-02-05 20:47:00
Subject: Re: Penrose: Yarro is a........

>> Maybe Ralph Yarro is feeling guilty about it, as well he should. But he should be a man and accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions, not blame others for them<<

Ever watch the Soprano's? Could you imagine Tony, or one of his gumbas "being a man about it and accepting responsibility."

I have long viewed this entire scox-scam as am organized crime racket.

Message ID: 232718
Posted By: karl_w_lewis
Posted On: 2005-02-06 05:35:00
Subject: Re: Penrose: Yarro is a........

>> Ever watch the Soprano's? Could you imagine Tony, or one of his gumbas "being a man about it and accepting responsibility."

I have long viewed this entire scox-scam as am organized crime racket. <<

This fiaSCO bears some resemblence to an organized crime protection racket, however, I would not dignify it by comparing it to a "business" model, that whatever its flaws, at least works.

As wanna-be mobsters Yarro and his gang fail on every score. It doesn't take a great deal of smarts to run a protection racket, but apparently it takes more than Ralph, Darl, and the rest of the Calderiosi can muster.

One of the things that marks a good protection scheme is the credibility of the threat, and the threat has to be *way* out of proportion to the compensation being sought. As in: Pay us a few hundred dollars a month, or we'll perforate your skull with little bits of metal, moving at high velocity. And, (this is *key*), you have to put the potential victim in enough fear that they believe they can find no safety in the police or, *the courts*. The SCOundrels' scheme threatened corporations with the courts. They tried to frighten the Nazgul with the courts. As in: Tell the fish to pay up or we're gonna throw him into the river. Duh.

The cool part about all this is, from my point of view, is that no one can really be given full credit for the undoing of this disaster except the originators of this half-baked scheme. And it is not entirely inconceivable that Ralph and Darl might wind up in Club Fed over this, too, which is the same risk they'd have faced had they come up with a *working* protection racket.

KWL

Tom Frayne could tell us for sure - but I believe that stupidity and incompetence are not an excuse, under the law, for this sort of crime.

The texts of these Yahoo Message Board posts have been licensed for copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board users "al_petrofsky", "br3nsc", "walterbyrd", "karl_w_lewis" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.