Sewers of Babel : kerinth

Great character piece on pastor/PhD-by-mail/upstanding citizen John Worley, who felt compelled to aid the government of Nigeria (or its good agents in exodus) by providing a stateside bank account, cashing checks, and keeping a share of the proceeds. The main slant of the article is the degree of Worley's complicity in the scheme - how aware he was of the scam (especially after two and a half years), and how much credulously humanitarian feeling he had for the political evacuees.
It saves us all the trouble of starting a communique with this particular brand of spammer to find their motivation. Yet, it could have been done differently - perhaps somewhere out there a deposed government has only one small band of soldiers and a Yahoo account to save the nuclues of their country that could be scattered into a chain reaction of freedom!
If Worley is not a believer, he faiths a good game:

“What if they sent you a check?” Barbara demanded. “Would you put it in the bank to see if it cleared again?”

“Yeah.”

“John!” she said.

“I don’t know,” Worley said finally, sounding defeated. “I have to have time to think about what I would do in that situation.”

“My husband is naïve,” she explained to me. “He trusts people.”

A month later, moments after dropping off Worley at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, Barbara called me in tears. “They knew they couldn’t go after the Nigerians, so they just get the person they can reach. They’re trying to stop people in America from getting involved in it by making an example of my husband,” she said. “Why don’t they assign an F.B.I. agent to go after the people who scammed my husband? Where’s the justice?”

Background on the bard of the dust-bowl.

An excerpt from the bio - final success through championing a populist iconography that conflicts with success' rules:

For the first time in decades, Woody was not living in poverty. Another change was the unaccustomed pressure of having a steady job that required conforming to others' standards and this restriction weighed heavily on him. Soon, he wrote, "I got disgusted with the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all of my songs and ballads, and drove off down the road across the southern states again."

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