The Smoking Gun That Misfired

Jeffrey Archer's Honor Among Thieves weaves a mesmerizing beach-chair-paperback-tale of the forgery / theft / replacement of the Declaration of Independence. In the book, Saddam commissions the theft with intent to burn the original on the 4th of July - in front of a bank of live CNN cameras. Anyway - the only distinguishable difference between the original Declaration and the fake was that the forgery corrected misspellings present in the original Declaration.

In the middle of a recent multi-million dollar trial, opposing counsel approached us with an envelope his client claimed to have received in the mail. Inside the envelope was an anonymous note accompanying a printed email ostensibly sent from our client's VP to another executive within the company. In one neatly packaged email paragraph, all of the opposing party's defense theories were given life. Off the record, opposing counsel was substantially skeptical as to it's authenticity - but faced the possibility of a malpractice suit if he failed to use the "evidence" and subsequently lost the case.

I was asked to scour our client's Lotus Notes databases, searching for any indication that this might be a legitimate message. None found. Next, I began a forensic review of the document - scanning it in at 1200 dpi and dissecting it character by character. I discovered a number of anomalies. The most profound had to do with the confidentiality notice at the bottom of the message.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of messages contained in the Notes database, this was the only one that had double spaces following each period in the confidentiality notice. The original confidentiality notice was in HTML format - an environment in which multiple spaces are truncated down to a single space. In the "smoking gun" email printout, the periods in the confidentiality notice were always followed by two spaces. When you enlarged the text to 800%, the difference was dramatic. It became demonstrably clear that "someone" had copied a legitimate message into Word, made changes and printed the "smoking gun". What they didn't count on was Word's Auto Correct feature - which dutifully changed those single spaces to double spaces.

In the end, the fake email never saw the light of day, we won an $11 million verdict, and the opposing party put a gun to his head. Whoever said there wasn't honor among thieves?