Speaker 1: Coo Zone Media. In June of twenty twenty four, Michael
Speaker 1: Schuyer had a disagreement with a coworker. It isn't clear
Speaker 1: from the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly
Speaker 1: what was said. He says there was a difference of
Speaker 1: opinion over a workplace matter. But he's in federal prison
Speaker 1: and two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him,
Speaker 1: So I'm inclined to believe there may be more to
Speaker 1: the story than that. But that's all we know. That
Speaker 1: minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job
Speaker 1: was not only financially devastating, it was the death of
Speaker 1: his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.
Speaker 1: And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
Speaker 1: You have to figure out how you're going to pay
Speaker 1: the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're
Speaker 1: going to find new job. I can't speak for everybody,
Speaker 1: but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's
Speaker 1: also embarrassing. It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a
Speaker 1: real hit, and for some people that just isn't something
Speaker 1: they can move on from I'm Molly Conger, and this
Speaker 1: is weird, little guys, This is kind of a silly one.
Speaker 1: Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened.
Speaker 1: I know. I said last week that I ended up
Speaker 1: with the episode that came out because I was reaching
Speaker 1: around for something quick, because the story I was trying
Speaker 1: trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having
Speaker 1: trouble forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where
Speaker 1: we still are this week. I'm still really fighting with
Speaker 1: something I think is going to take a few more
Speaker 1: weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative.
Speaker 1: So here we are again at the eleventh hour, and
Speaker 1: I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds
Speaker 1: and ends about a story that spans fifty years, and
Speaker 1: so I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking
Speaker 1: for your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real
Speaker 1: job where you make something or help people, and my
Speaker 1: job is just telling you a horrible little story. But
Speaker 1: all I can tell you is the truth, and the
Speaker 1: truth is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going
Speaker 1: to force any more words out of my brain and
Speaker 1: into this microphone. So all I've got this week is
Speaker 1: Michael Schueer, And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, until last summer, he had no
Speaker 1: history of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much
Speaker 1: as a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was
Speaker 1: a family man, married for nearly ten years, and the
Speaker 1: father of three young children. But the course of action
Speaker 1: he decided on after he got fired last summer is
Speaker 1: what makes him a weird little guy. And I think
Speaker 1: he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging
Speaker 1: weird little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for
Speaker 1: it yet. I don't really have the weird little guy
Speaker 1: taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in
Speaker 1: these stories. There are distinct types of weird little guy,
Speaker 1: and one of them is a kind of guy who
Speaker 1: can't accept when he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept
Speaker 1: being wronged. And God help you if you have even
Speaker 1: a passing encounter with this kind of guy. For some
Speaker 1: of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's
Speaker 1: not something I think I would ever think about again,
Speaker 1: let alone devote the rest of my life to getting
Speaker 1: revenge over it. If you've listened to the whole catalog
Speaker 1: of this show, you've heard about some of these guys
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about, people like Frank Sweeney from the pair
Speaker 1: of episodes back in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure,
Speaker 1: but mostly he was a con man. He ended up
Speaker 1: in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons,
Speaker 1: things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns
Speaker 1: that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers
Speaker 1: money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life,
Speaker 1: he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold
Speaker 1: them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,
Speaker 1: purebread hale as cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA,
Speaker 1: the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that
Speaker 1: he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy
Speaker 1: that he'd befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob
Speaker 1: lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him
Speaker 1: up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about
Speaker 1: a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with.
Speaker 1: He loved to lie, but more than that, I think
Speaker 1: the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is
Speaker 1: his sense of self righteous indignation. When he felt like
Speaker 1: someone had wronged him, he made it his life's work
Speaker 1: to get back at them, to hurt them back the
Speaker 1: way they'd hurt him, and he did it in some
Speaker 1: really bizarre ways. In the early nineties, when he was
Speaker 1: living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with
Speaker 1: children moved into a neighboring apartment, and once he decided
Speaker 1: that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep
Speaker 1: their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to
Speaker 1: destroy the entire family. He spread rumors that the father
Speaker 1: had HIV and that he'd given it to his children.
Speaker 1: He shut off their power at random. He filled the
Speaker 1: lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't
Speaker 1: get into their home. He had their mail routed to
Speaker 1: a random address in Iowa. And he subscribed to their
Speaker 1: nine year old son to pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior.
Speaker 1: That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a
Speaker 1: noisy fourth grader. And it was all because he felt
Speaker 1: entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience
Speaker 1: from his neighbors, and two decades after that, when he
Speaker 1: was already a very old man, the stranger made a
Speaker 1: passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the
Speaker 1: post parking lot, and instead of just letting it go,
Speaker 1: like almost anyone else on earth would, he spent three
Speaker 1: years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them
Speaker 1: threatening postcards, spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior,
Speaker 1: that they were drug addicts and criminals, and they were
Speaker 1: doing tax fraud. Three years because she commented on how
Speaker 1: he had parked his car. And then there was Walter
Speaker 1: Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November. He was the
Speaker 1: sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse
Speaker 1: in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President
Speaker 1: Barack Obama for treason. And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long
Speaker 1: history of this kind of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been
Speaker 1: banned from his congressman's office after the receptionist had to
Speaker 1: get a restraining order against him because he refused to
Speaker 1: accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial.
Speaker 1: In his Navy court martial. And then there are the
Speaker 1: weird little guys who try to use the courts to
Speaker 1: get their revenge, becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit
Speaker 1: against anyone who says no to them. Guys like Robert
Speaker 1: Moller from a few weeks ago, the one time arms
Speaker 1: dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in
Speaker 1: South Africa. In his quieter older years, he seems to
Speaker 1: work out his anger by filing a constant stream of
Speaker 1: nuisance lawsuits. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that
Speaker 1: didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd
Speaker 1: scheduled it. For lawsuits against the guys from the table
Speaker 1: tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because
Speaker 1: his behavior was frightening. A lawsuit against the state because
Speaker 1: he didn't think it was fair that he got a
Speaker 1: traffic ticket. A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him
Speaker 1: not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here,
Speaker 1: but I think these are all, to some degree, the
Speaker 1: same kind of guy. The common denominator is that they
Speaker 1: can't handle discomfort. They can't handle someone telling them no.
Speaker 1: They can't handle being wrong, they can't handle not being
Speaker 1: the protagonist of reality. This is their story and we're
Speaker 1: just the characters in it. We're supposed to behave the
Speaker 1: way he wants us to, and if we don't, his
Speaker 1: reaction is not going to be normal. And that's the
Speaker 1: mold that I think Michael Schuer fits into. He isn't,
Speaker 1: all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in.
Speaker 1: This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose
Speaker 1: for an episode of this show, because, like I said,
Speaker 1: he wasn't in any kind of hate group and he
Speaker 1: didn't hurt any But I am interested in this kind
Speaker 1: of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a
Speaker 1: pretty normal life event is decidedly not normal at all.
Speaker 1: The kind of guy who showed no other outward signs
Speaker 1: of being violent or hateful, but when confronted with an obstacle,
Speaker 1: suddenly reveals a previously hidden and very peculiar interest in
Speaker 1: mass shootings and swastikas. But I guess we should start
Speaker 1: at the beginning. Michael Scheuer loved Disney. It had always
Speaker 1: been his dream to work for the company after graduating
Speaker 1: from Kent State in Ohio. He moved to Orlando to
Speaker 1: try to get us foot in the door. He started
Speaker 1: as a janitor and worked his way up, and on
Speaker 1: this front, I guess you do have to hand it
Speaker 1: to him, it looks like he did the work. He
Speaker 1: had a dream and he did the work to try
Speaker 1: to make it come true. He had a college degree,
Speaker 1: but he was willing to take an entry level job
Speaker 1: making up trash at a theme park if that's what
Speaker 1: it took to be close to Mickey Mouse. He continued
Speaker 1: working at Disney while he earned his business degree, and
Speaker 1: slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper
Speaker 1: to cast member and eventually got an office job at Disney.
Speaker 1: By twenty eighteen, he was working as a financial systems
Speaker 1: analyst when COVID hit. His job was one of many
Speaker 1: that were cut by the company, and he spent the
Speaker 1: year that he was laid off trying anything he could
Speaker 1: to get back in and he was eventually rehired as
Speaker 1: part of the team doing technical support for computers installed
Speaker 1: on Disney cruise ships, and in twenty twenty four he
Speaker 1: was working on the team tasked with designing and updating
Speaker 1: the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks
Speaker 1: and resorts. In twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave
Speaker 1: birth to their third child. I don't know if Michael
Speaker 1: Scheuer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity
Speaker 1: leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know
Speaker 1: that he took paternity leave because it was just a
Speaker 1: few days after returning from that leave in June of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four that the incident took place. What exactly
Speaker 1: happened is in dispute. According to his defense attorney, his
Speaker 1: version of events is this quote. Shortly after returning to work,
Speaker 1: mister Schuyer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor
Speaker 1: about a new process of menu creation. He believed his
Speaker 1: team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not. He
Speaker 1: met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. Mister Schuyer
Speaker 1: had a panic attack during the meeting. The next supervisor
Speaker 1: up the chain of command stated to mister Schuyer that
Speaker 1: he did not threaten his supervisor, but that mister Scheuer
Speaker 1: was going to be suspended. A sworn statement from the
Speaker 1: supervisor in question, though, reads in June twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against
Speaker 1: me in which he threatened me at work, and the
Speaker 1: government was prepared to present to witness who would testify
Speaker 1: that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening in the
Speaker 1: meeting that led to his termination. And maybe that comes
Speaker 1: down to semantics. Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening
Speaker 1: without him actually making a direct threat. That is technically
Speaker 1: different in the eyes of the law. But I think
Speaker 1: any reasonable person can understand that if you make your
Speaker 1: supervisor feel like she is in danger, you might get fired.
Speaker 1: He was initially just sent home and suspended, but after
Speaker 1: he sent an email to human resources described only as
Speaker 1: quote twenty four questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure had a very normal tone, the decision was made
Speaker 1: to terminate his employment with Disney. And this is the
Speaker 1: point at which he crossed the weird little guy rubicon.
Speaker 1: He was upset. It wasn't fair. This was his dream.
Speaker 1: He loved Disney, he loved working for Disney, and he
Speaker 1: needed that job. He needed the health insurance, he had
Speaker 1: a family to take care of. For God's sake, they
Speaker 1: just didn't understand. If they would have heard him out,
Speaker 1: they would understand that they were wrong to fire him,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't take his calls. He claims that he
Speaker 1: was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take
Speaker 1: his case. He says he quote filed a complaint with
Speaker 1: the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but did not get
Speaker 1: a quick response. He felt isolated and depressed. He did
Speaker 1: not understand why nobody would speak with him. And this
Speaker 1: is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next quote,
Speaker 1: he turned to what he thought would get Disney to
Speaker 1: respond to him. I'm not an expert in employment law,
Speaker 1: but I did look up how long it usually takes
Speaker 1: to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Speaker 1: if you file a complaint online, The law says they
Speaker 1: have ten days to send notice of the complaint to
Speaker 1: your former employer, and then once they do that, the
Speaker 1: employer has thirty days from that date to respond to it.
Speaker 1: The average complaint takes about ten months to resolve start
Speaker 1: to finish. But he didn't even wait thirty days before
Speaker 1: he decided to change tactics. He started trying to get
Speaker 1: Disney's attention his own way less than three weeks after
Speaker 1: he was fired, and so you might be thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: he probably sent some weird emails to his former coworkers, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making
Speaker 1: a lot of phone calls. And those are all reasonable guesses.
Speaker 1: Those are things you might do if your stated goal
Speaker 1: was to get someone's attention. No, what he decided to
Speaker 1: do is much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why
Speaker 1: he thinks we would believe his claim that this was
Speaker 1: the only thing he could think of that would get
Speaker 1: them to call him again. From his lawyer quote, he
Speaker 1: started altering Disney's menus to try to get their attention
Speaker 1: and respond to him. Now, remember that was his job
Speaker 1: before he was fired. He worked on the team responsible
Speaker 1: for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print
Speaker 1: the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels.
Speaker 1: Once the files were approved by the team at Disney,
Speaker 1: the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota based print
Speaker 1: and marketing company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks
Speaker 1: after being fired, Scheyer logged into the online application used
Speaker 1: by the print company to manage the menu files. A
Speaker 1: lot of the news coverage about this case refers to
Speaker 1: what he did as hacking, in which I didn't realize
Speaker 1: is technically the correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily require any particular set of skills or you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping
Speaker 1: on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen. No,
Speaker 1: it just means any unauthorized access to a computer device
Speaker 1: or network. And he definitely was not authorized to be
Speaker 1: logging in. But the company had actually just forgotten to
Speaker 1: change the password to the administrative account, and once he
Speaker 1: logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee
Speaker 1: profile for himself using a fake name, and then using
Speaker 1: that account with a fake name, he logged in and
Speaker 1: he went to town. He replaced all of the font
Speaker 1: files for all of the menus in the system, and
Speaker 1: this sounds like hell. He didn't just change the fonts
Speaker 1: that were used in the text of the menus. He
Speaker 1: changed the source files for all of the fonts in
Speaker 1: every menu, so all of the names of the fonts
Speaker 1: still appeared to be correct, but those names were now
Speaker 1: connected to a corresponding file for a different font, and
Speaker 1: he changed most of those fonts to wing dings the
Speaker 1: font that's just weird little symbols. And because he'd altered
Speaker 1: the files themselves, the system then started pushing out this
Speaker 1: change to every single one of the thousands of files
Speaker 1: ever uploaded to this system, and this rendered the entire
Speaker 1: application completely useless for at least a week. And so
Speaker 1: because this took the entire system offline and rendered every
Speaker 1: single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty
Speaker 1: quickly tracked down the source of the problem and they
Speaker 1: changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again. But
Speaker 1: that didn't really stop him. So now that one avenue
Speaker 1: had been closed off, he just moved to a different strategy.
Speaker 1: If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no
Speaker 1: one else could either. He started small targeting those immediate supervisors,
Speaker 1: the ones who'd fired him, and he used their log
Speaker 1: in names and entered random, incorrect passwords. These repeated bad
Speaker 1: attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the
Speaker 1: accounts to be locked out. At first, he was just
Speaker 1: doing this manually, so you have to imagine him sitting
Speaker 1: alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is
Speaker 1: trying to take care of their three young children, one
Speaker 1: of whom is a newborn baby, and he's just sitting
Speaker 1: there at his computer again and again and again, typing
Speaker 1: in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over
Speaker 1: it over and over again so that his old boss
Speaker 1: can't access her email. Throughout August and September of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, these attacks escalated, and he eventually wrote a
Speaker 1: script to automate the process of making these thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of login attempts. On one day alone, he made
Speaker 1: eight thousand login attempts across accounts belonging to the four
Speaker 1: people that he thought were responsible for firing him, and
Speaker 1: he eventually branched out to fourteen day for An accounts,
Speaker 1: all of which belonged to members of the team he'd
Speaker 1: worked on before he was fired. Over the course of
Speaker 1: about a month, he made one hundred thousand log in attempts,
Speaker 1: locking these employees out of their accounts for days at
Speaker 1: a time. And around the same time he's ramping up
Speaker 1: these attacks on his former coworkers accounts, he found a
Speaker 1: new way to mess with the menus Disney had changed
Speaker 1: all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application
Speaker 1: that was used by the Disney production team anymore. But
Speaker 1: the company that actually prints the finished menu files had
Speaker 1: their own system. All finished menu files had to be
Speaker 1: uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol.
Speaker 1: So he made his own menu files and uploaded them
Speaker 1: directly to the printer. His initial attempt to get Disney's
Speaker 1: attention had made the menus unusable. They had nonsense fonts,
Speaker 1: they would load the image files, or they just came
Speaker 1: up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this. This was
Speaker 1: a very obvious attempt, But this time around he was
Speaker 1: a lot more subtle. If you're just looking quickly at
Speaker 1: these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly,
Speaker 1: they might have even made it all the way through
Speaker 1: a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because
Speaker 1: he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by
Speaker 1: a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed
Speaker 1: the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe
Speaker 1: he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly,
Speaker 1: some of them are kind of funny. I mean, overall, yes,
Speaker 1: this is a bad situation. He should not have done
Speaker 1: any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature
Speaker 1: little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing
Speaker 1: cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a
Speaker 1: cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish
Speaker 1: to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast
Speaker 1: tea from a psalm tea to just ass tea. Is
Speaker 1: a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old
Speaker 1: couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
Speaker 1: It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not
Speaker 1: funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to
Speaker 1: the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations,
Speaker 1: removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food
Speaker 1: allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region
Speaker 1: listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.
Speaker 1: Not a wine snob, so I don't really care where
Speaker 1: the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I
Speaker 1: can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual
Speaker 1: locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred.
Speaker 1: In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He
Speaker 1: swapped out Willamette Valley. On one wine for Appalachi High
Speaker 1: an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that
Speaker 1: it only just happened the week that he did that.
Speaker 1: On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.
Speaker 1: He would later claim that he never actually intended for
Speaker 1: any of these altered files to get printed. He said
Speaker 1: that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that
Speaker 1: they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.
Speaker 1: He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies.
Speaker 1: He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want
Speaker 1: these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just
Speaker 1: wanted attention. But that claim falls apart. By the time
Speaker 1: he switched to a new mode of attack, he uploaded
Speaker 1: altered files directly into the server that functioned as the
Speaker 1: print queue for the company that printed the menus. So
Speaker 1: by that point in the process, the printer is receiving
Speaker 1: what they believe to be a file that has been
Speaker 1: proofed and approved and is ready to print. And they did,
Speaker 1: in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs.
Speaker 1: Although by the time they did print these the investigation
Speaker 1: was coming to an end, and the affected items were
Speaker 1: destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard
Speaker 1: to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected,
Speaker 1: Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this
Speaker 1: process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just
Speaker 1: been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been
Speaker 1: made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address,
Speaker 1: but when they looked further back into company logs, they
Speaker 1: found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed
Speaker 1: his work email from home, and when he did that,
Speaker 1: he had his VPN on, so he managed to mask
Speaker 1: the true IP address of his home computer, but because
Speaker 1: he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using
Speaker 1: an IP address that was provably connected to him. On
Speaker 1: September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of the
Speaker 1: menu production team were locked out of their accounts again.
Speaker 1: Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access
Speaker 1: their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm
Speaker 1: that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door.
Speaker 1: They had a warrant to search his home and seize
Speaker 1: his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of
Speaker 1: login attempts suddenly stopped and it never started again. Two
Speaker 1: minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He
Speaker 1: claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but
Speaker 1: he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell
Speaker 1: him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what that means. That never comes
Speaker 1: up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he
Speaker 1: definitely used his home computer to access systems related to
Speaker 1: his job when he still worked there, and maybe he
Speaker 1: logged into some work related stuff after he was fired,
Speaker 1: just to get his old pays st ubs, things like that,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be
Speaker 1: there asking him questions like that, And when they explained
Speaker 1: to him why they were there and what they were investigating,
Speaker 1: the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And
Speaker 1: then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because
Speaker 1: they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers
Speaker 1: with him that day, but they didn't make an arrest.
Speaker 1: A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and
Speaker 1: checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: FBI was still building their case against him, including getting
Speaker 1: a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October
Speaker 1: twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched
Speaker 1: his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google
Speaker 1: that they'd been served with a warrant for his account
Speaker 1: and they would be complying with the order to turn
Speaker 1: over him account information. Now, I imagine that's a really
Speaker 1: scary email to get. I'm not sure what my initial
Speaker 1: reaction would be in that situation. The right answer if
Speaker 1: this happens to you is to call a lawyer. The
Speaker 1: extremely wrong answer is to then type please explain this
Speaker 1: to me at the top of the email, and then
Speaker 1: forward that email to the FBI agent who was just
Speaker 1: at your house, and then follow that up with another
Speaker 1: email the next day demanding that the agent loop in
Speaker 1: the victim of the crime on the conversation so you
Speaker 1: can get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps
Speaker 1: an even worse course of action in this situation would
Speaker 1: be to then drive to your former boss's house in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night and stand on his front
Speaker 1: porch making a thumbs up at his security camera, and
Speaker 1: then just walking away. It's hard to say what you
Speaker 1: would do in a stressful situation that you have never
Speaker 1: experienced before. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here.
Speaker 1: I like to think that I would just call a lawyer.
Speaker 1: I don't think that I would do all that other stuff.
Speaker 1: But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after
Speaker 1: he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the
Speaker 1: FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline
Speaker 1: they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was
Speaker 1: behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make
Speaker 1: the arrest, probably in large part because he made that
Speaker 1: strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then
Speaker 1: the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors.
Speaker 1: He was held without bond. After two months in jail,
Speaker 1: he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer
Speaker 1: hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six
Speaker 1: months in prison during the three year period of supervised release.
Speaker 1: After he gets out. He's not allowed to have any
Speaker 1: contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen
Speaker 1: co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody
Speaker 1: really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to reprint the affected materials, and Disney estimates
Speaker 1: that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care
Speaker 1: if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.
Speaker 1: If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had
Speaker 1: been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten
Speaker 1: seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schouer,
Speaker 1: he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true.
Speaker 1: It's impossible to say at this point. But again, in
Speaker 1: the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came
Speaker 1: across this case during my regular search for newly filed
Speaker 1: cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I
Speaker 1: think in this case it was the word swastika. But
Speaker 1: I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi.
Speaker 1: I don't have any other evidence that points to that
Speaker 1: swastika being a larger part of his life. When the
Speaker 1: FBI came and took his computer away, there was a
Speaker 1: file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must
Speaker 1: have googled the word swastika and then saved the image
Speaker 1: that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind
Speaker 1: of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't
Speaker 1: mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back
Speaker 1: in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo
Speaker 1: Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were
Speaker 1: just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted
Speaker 1: to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking,
Speaker 1: fucked up stuff they could think of because that was
Speaker 1: funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so, I'm inclined
Speaker 1: to believe he put the swastika on the menu because
Speaker 1: it was the worst thing he could think of, not
Speaker 1: because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's
Speaker 1: the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes
Speaker 1: to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.
Speaker 1: That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I
Speaker 1: don't know that that's something that would come immediately to
Speaker 1: mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing
Speaker 1: preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.
Speaker 1: This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed
Speaker 1: out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin
Speaker 1: that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael
Speaker 1: Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit
Speaker 1: post he made just a few days before the FBI
Speaker 1: showed up at his house for the first time. On
Speaker 1: a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a
Speaker 1: post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long,
Speaker 1: but it reads in part, the people involved in firing
Speaker 1: me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid
Speaker 1: of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
Speaker 1: I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.
Speaker 1: Not one person from work reached out to check on me.
Speaker 1: I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a
Speaker 1: man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe
Speaker 1: the other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I
Speaker 1: have no friends, no work connections, nothing I've already determined
Speaker 1: I will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He
Speaker 1: goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year,
Speaker 1: but when he got fired, he realized it was too late,
Speaker 1: too late for what is unclear, too late to change,
Speaker 1: too late to make anything of his life. It has
Speaker 1: a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a
Speaker 1: desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated
Speaker 1: on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired,
Speaker 1: I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.
Speaker 1: But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's
Speaker 1: everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is,
Speaker 1: isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.
Speaker 1: It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of
Speaker 1: what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his
Speaker 1: house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening
Speaker 1: postcards all those years. He just didmitted it. He said
Speaker 1: that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed,
Speaker 1: and it made him feel better to know that he
Speaker 1: was causing her distress and return. Being a weird little
Speaker 1: guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think
Speaker 1: some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture,
Speaker 1: and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up
Speaker 1: synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war,
Speaker 1: they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot
Speaker 1: it out with the police, or they just want to
Speaker 1: gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are
Speaker 1: the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.
Speaker 1: But there are weird little guys out there who are
Speaker 1: much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but
Speaker 1: only registers a little blit on the radar. And those
Speaker 1: are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet
Speaker 1: one day, God willing, most of us will never meet
Speaker 1: a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the
Speaker 1: kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer,
Speaker 1: so he puts a swastika on the menu at the
Speaker 1: Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of
Speaker 1: cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded
Speaker 1: by me Molly Conger Our Executive producers are Sophie Linterman
Speaker 1: and Mabert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
Speaker 1: talented Mary Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
Speaker 1: You can email me a Weird Little Guys podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
Speaker 1: probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Speaker 1: Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's going
Speaker 1: to make you one of my weird Little Guys.