Inside baseball. Niman is a failed scientist turned internet stock tipster. He has been very active on the internet promulgating the notion that Steven Hatfill is the anthrax killer, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with left-wing busybody Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and deranged JDO activist and Bob Dylan "garbologist" Alan J. Weberman, who maintains the web site DR STEVEN "MENGELE" HATFILL NAZI SWINE. (See the the Weekly Standard article The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill for some amusing details on Weberman.)
Niman has a track record of paranoia and internet trouble-making. For example, some years ago he was kicked off Prodigy over an e-mail spam campaign he waged against the company:
Henry Niman, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who was kicked offline, said he does like Prodigy--he even persuaded several friends and colleagues to sign up. He said his motive in protesting the email rates was to try to keep Prodigy a good system.Source: Prodigy: Where Is It Going?Without naming anyone, Prodigy officials have charged that Niman and the others are really a small band of ``hackers'' who used devious software to flood the mailboxes of other users and advertisers with increasingly nasty harangues. In November, it posted new regulations forbidding the use of "automatic" mail forwarders and barring users from contacting advertisers online except to make orders or inquire about orders.
Niman says he compiled a list of about 900 people interested in the email issue by using Prodigy's own membership-list function, which lets one search for members by city and state, and that he and others simply collected the addresses of advertisers from their email responses.
In his internet stock picker incarnation, Niman has pushed the stock of a company called Ligand Pharmaceuticals, which he has or had a considerable financial stake in ("He calls his holdings sizable, but not in the range of whole percentage points"):
While Niman and his site are independent of Ligand, he does, as an investor, have a vested interest in Ligand's well-being. So far, Niman says, this potential conflict of interest hasn't affected what he puts on his site. "I try to put up a pretty objective analysis," he says. "It doesn't help to distort the situation."Sadly, it appears that unwary, scientifically-naive investors impressed by Niman's trademark snowstorm of jargon and technical buzzwords have lost a lot of money on Ligand:Readers of Ligand's site say they simply take Niman's bias into account. "I think most people understand he's totally bullish on the company," says one Boston-based Ligand investor. He adds that while he doesn't think Niman would post anything misleading or inaccurate about Ligand, he might not create a link to a negative Ligand story.
Source: Web home brew
Niman claims that the company's stock market nose-dive has been driven by a conspiracy:
Beginning last March, Niman started getting "flamed" or attacked in messages from other posters on web sites. That's somewhat par for the course in chat rooms. But then Niman says forged messages began to appear on Yahoo! under the moniker "Henry Niman, Ph.D." requesting child pornography. As months went by, the attacks got nastier, following Niman into the Usenet forum, misc.stocks.invest and stock chat room Raging Bull. Somebody joined Silicon Investor with a version of his name and identical biographical data, although SI canceled the account after being notified by Niman. Niman found himself under siege by groups of people with hard-to-trace pseudonyms and no history of posting in Ligand chat rooms. Unlike the prompt attention he got from SI, multiple complaints to Yahoo! had no effect.Oh dear!Source: 'Links to Ligand' takes it lumps
I had the displeasure of interacting with Niman at some length on a private e-mail list, anthrax_fans, last year. When I brought up certain similarities between his internet campaign against Steve Hatfill and the Prodigy and Ligand debacles, he demanded to know my personal information and threatened to sue me. Shortly afterwards, he left anthrax_fans (or maybe the moderator banned him, I forget now), and started another private anthrax board, which I believe is called real_anthrax. This is primarily for believers in the Steve Hatfill Nazi Swine hypothesis. I'm not a member of that forum.
Niman's babbling about Morton D. Ballard and Louis Mason pertain to my choice of the screen name on anthrax_fans, which reflects my rather morbid, Hitchcockian sense of humor. AnthraxProfiler is a newcomer to the internet anthrax whacko club who has developed an obsession with my internet postings and built a five-page web site to showcase them and imply that I am involved in the anthrax killings. Apparently, it was all an attempt to manipulate the stock price of some biotech companies, you see. Is AnthraxProfiler another incarnation of Niman? Dunno. Someone suggested to me, based on the IP address of AnthraxProfiler, that he might be in Folsom penitentiary. I've no idea, but he's certainly someone with a lot of time on his hands.
BTW, I have no association with ImClone, I own no stock in the company, don't live in New Jersey, never went to Penn, my PhD thesis has nothing to do with silicon dioxide, and my real name isn't Vic. Niman's batting .000, but, when you look at his history, that's just par for the course.