During the last few days of October the Internet empire of one Donald K. Winner, who had boasted that he controlled Panama's English-language email groups, came crashing down to nearly nothing. Using the Americans in Panama (AIP) email group that he had started and the Viviendo en Panama (VEP) group that he took over from Melodye Taylor about a year and one-half ago as his flagships, Winner also owns a few smaller specialized discussion groups and the Panama Guide website.

Winner had set up Panama Guide with the public representation that it was nonprofit and to come under control of a Panamanian nonprofit foundation to be set up imminently. But that was from the start a fairly obvious fallacy, because Panama won't allow non-profits to have foreigners on their boards of directors, let alone give them the absolute control that Winner always retains. Still, he put together a supposed editorial board that included some fairly reputable people in Panama's American community --- folks like theater director Bruce Quinn and dentist Dr. Charly García.

Winner aimed his publication straight at The Panama News, repeatedly threatening that he was going to use the Panama Guide to “expose” this reporter as a leftist, going around to advertisers in this publication and offering them free advertisements, and presenting himself as the “unbiased” (right-wing) challenger to The Panama News among circles in the American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM), the American Society, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and leaders of Panama’s ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party where he might find sympathy. Except for the offer of free advertisements to lure away business --- a classic and very illegal monopolistic practice, no offense was taken at any of this.

One of Winner's practices, monopolistic and still highly illegal even were it not, did draw this reporter's early notice and emphatic condemnation. Don Winner's Panama Guide has been competing with The Panama News using stolen property. Using very little of his own actual labor, Winner scans the Internet for stories that others write about Panama and publishes them on his website, usually with misleading attibutions and never paying or obtaining permission. The recipients of this stolen property --- those who put their advertising on the work Winner steals from others --- include a list of prominent businesses, probably most prominent of all Altos del Maria, which is owned by Arturo Melo, the president of the PRD's Frente Empresarial.

When first called on this practice of copyright infringement by this reporter and by Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein, the proprietor of Noriegaville, Winner said that he had the right to use copyrighted material on his website because it was nonprofit. It's a legally specious argument by whatever copyright laws one cares to refer, and not only because the website in fact carried advertising from the start.

(Winner's first advertiser was the Tucan development under construction at the old Horoko golf course. The Panama News had exposed that project's ties with one Gilbert Straub, a former operative in jailed financier Robert Vesco's pyramid schemes and the individual who personally delivered Richard Nixon's hush money to the Watergate burglars. Straub claimed on the Internet that he was one of the principals in the business, and Tucan's spokesperson was at the time using an email address subsidiary to the website of a business owned by Straub. Winner, not for the first or last time siding with hoodlums and in the process questioning this reporter's honesty, rallied to Tucan's defense --- on the sole basis of Tucan's word.)

Quickly the Panama Guide took Winner's attention away from the Internet groups he controlled, so he got volunteers to moderate those and would, sometimes several times a day, send out teasers for stories that he had uploaded onto his own and several other people's email discussion groups. Each time a person would click onto a particular story, it would count as a visit in Panama Guide's download logs. The Panama News and Noriegaville also did this, with a bit more restraint than Panama Guide, which typically cross-posted to half a dozen or more groups.

(Winner's penchant for embracing hustlers first became an issue between himself and this reporter a couple of years ago when a Mr. Khemlani posted a notice on AIP advertising an unspecified investment opportunity that he'd discuss with those who qualified. This reporter, then a member of that group, made a disparaging remark about that sort of spam, whereupon Winner leveled a blast, saying that he had specifically invited Khemlani to advertise. Khemlani responded in his own defense that it was a legitimate telecommunications company. And in a way it was --- OPTYNEX, a startup which had a few months before received a concession to operate in Panama. A search of the English-language section of the company's website, however, claimed success “year after year” though it had not been in business for one year. In other words, a real company with a real service to sell, using a material misrepresentation about its history to attract investors. That's securities fraud. But to Winner, it's the free exercise of anybody's right to make money.)

The usual things for one who expressed an idea different from Winner's on a board that he controlled were caustic public rebukes followed by a banning or moderation that allowed no response to Winner's last word. This methodically obnoxious behavior led to the creation of alternative groups, especially after Winner took over VEP, which was at the time by far the largest of the English-language discussion groups about Panama. Winner went further and started to ban people from his groups for things that were written in other places.

After one such ban this reporter stayed away from AIP permanently and VEP for about a year, removed Winner's groups from the email groups links in The Panama News and began to promote, through links in the letters section, the two principal groups founded by people offended by the Winner groups, the raucous Panama Current Events and the World (CEW) and the more sedate Panama Forum.

Don Winner's embrace of scam artists, his overreaching attempts to smear The Panama News and Noriegaville, his intolerance of criticism, his flagrant copyright infringements and his relentless self-promotion began in September and October to crumble the foundations of his little cyber-empire.

First, Okke Ornstein broke a story about the Canadian developers of Capira Valley, a purported residential project outside the town of Capira in the Panama Canal's Western Watershed. The developers were asking people to plop down $36,000 for their lots, and showing a pretty drawing of what the gated community would look like. The problem is, the Panama Canal Authority won't approve a development of that size and nature in the watershed.

Winner took the side of the developers and vowed to prove Ornstein a liar. To date he hasn't. Winner interviewed the Panama Canal Authority official in the best position to confirm or deny Ornstein's version, but in that part of the interview which Winner published the subject was not broached. The circumstances would suggest that the matter did indeed come up, Winner didn't get the answer he wanted, so that question and answer were never published.

The issue flared again when a glossy new real estate and tourism-oriented magazine, which was widely distributed at this year's AMCHAM tourism forum, included a couple of pages of the Panama Guide. The magazine also hyped Capira Valley, and in Noriegaville Okke drew a connection among the shady development, the glossy magazine and Winner.

This reporter, in the Panama Forum, noted that the magazine is but another example of tourism propaganda that purports to portray Panama as an overwhelmingly white society --- full of blonde models with hardly a black face to be seen and an indigenous ornament here or there. Winner defended the pervasive racial discrimination in Panama's media, modeling and advertising industries and dismissed the criticism of the magazine as a matter of “Black Panther” politics. But a number of people, especially a number of women, reviewed the magazine and differed with Winner about the clear biases in that publication and Panamanian media in general. One of the people who sided against Winner in that little controversy was Susan Guberman Garcia, who had sometimes contributed to the Panama Guide and was at the time the owner of Panama Forum, its founder having had to leave the country for specialized medical treatment earlier in the year.

Both Winner and this reporter attended the AMCHAM forum where the magazine in question was distributed, the latter to report and the former, who lacks the Spanish skills to cover the presentations which were almost entirely in Spanish, to schmooze. And Winner took the opportunity in his Internet groups to accuse this reporter of “eavesdropping” on him --- something that just didn't happen, and had it happened would have had to have taken place at a refreshment table in the hallway with at least a dozen people within earshot or in the meeting room where there were hundreds of people.

To this reporter's denials, Winner responded “liar.” To Okke Ornstein's criticisms, Winner responded with a ban.

Meanwhile, someone spammed the Panama-oriented English-language groups with an ad of the miracle cure variety, in this case for snoring, for something that was allegedly FDA-approved but not a product. Over at AIP, moderator Henry Smith deleted the post and put up a message about why that sort of spam was inappropriate. Whereupon Don Winner posted a scathing rebuke, reiterating his oft-made argument about how it's legitimate to try to make a buck and prompting Smith to quit.

Winner would regularly throw out these stereotypes about Ornstein being an anti-American Dutchman and this reporter being by definition anti-American due to leftist politics (notwithstanding having been elected to public office in the United States and having been appointed to other public offices by both Democrats and Republicans). Winner is more likely to brush off his female critics with sexist remarks. But Henry Smith is a conservative of a somewhat libertarian bent, the past master of the District Grand Lodge of American freemasonry in Panama and a former US Navy chief petty officer and retired Department of Defense employee. An inability to get along with Henry Smith, with the issue underlying the rupture being Winner's support for online medical scams, did not cause any immediate earthquakes. In retrospect, however, it did a great deal to erode the base within Panama's American community that Winner had been trying to build.

Over at VEP, Winner's moderators Leslie, Melodye and Dennis were appalled with Winner's banning of Okke Ornstein and after consultation among themselves reinstated him. Winner promptly banned Ornstein again.

Then on October 22, Don Winner sent one of his “PG Bundles” of links to Panama Guide stories --- so-called --- to his and a bunch of other people's email groups. One of those stories, at the top of the page identified as submitted by Don Winner, was the Reuters story about Portobelo's Festival of the Black Christ. This reporter pointed out the piracy on VEP, CEW and Panama Forum, all of which (along with other groups) had received the missive.

Winner responded by banning this reporter from VEP, arguing that he had some right to use Reuters stories without paying for them so long as he provided a link, and accusing The Panama News of widespread plagiarism and copyright piracy.

Calling Winner's main bluff, his assertion of a right to take other people's copyrighted work for his own commercial website, this reporter contacted Reuters about it. Diana Elazar of the Reuters office in New York didn't buy this argument at all: “I have contacted them via their website asking them to either license the content or remove it immediately,” she wrote back. (Winner did neither of these things.)

On Panama Forum and CEW (now being banned on VEP), this reporter also pointed out the following recent history:

But Winner accused The Panama News specifically of pirating from Venezuela's English-language electronic newspaper VHeadline and from Honduras This Week, another English site from Tegucigalpa. In the former instance, The Panama News from time to time shares content with other English-language online papers in Latin American, most frequently VHeadline and AM Costa Rica. In the latter case both Honduras This Week and The Panama News ran a column sent to both of us by W.E. Gutman, a journalist who contributes to much of Latin America's English-language press and retains residual rights to his work.

Winner also accused The Panama News of plagiarism (though he didn't use the word, and conflated the concept with copyright piracy) because when the briefs or articles with a byline that indicates “other media” as sources and a fact was reported in more than one medium we do not specifically acknowledge the various sources. When something comes to us from but one medium, such as from El Panama America or TVN news, we do credit that as the source.

The attack mode wasn't too effective. Winner had already overplayed his hand by then.

Leslie, Melodye and Dennis resigned en masse as VEP moderators, issuing a call to board members to quit VEP and join Panama Forum, which they had come to own when Susan Guberman Garcia volunteered to give it up to them.

Winner responded with another attack that got personal about some private domestic troubles that Melodye had been through, sneered that ailing Panama Forum founder Lily had “bailed” and asserted that “Avoiding hypocrisy is going to be your biggest challenge, Leslie.” In another missive to CEW, Winner called the latter a “backstabbing bitch.”

And thus Don Winner demonstrated that while he's an unprincipled wannabe monopolist, thief of copyrighted material and killer of straw men when dealing with male adversaries, he's just a two-bit bully when dealing with women who cross him.

And people poured out of Don Winner's groups in their hundreds --- either canceling their memberships or going inactive --- and joined Panama Forum. As this story was written it had been several days since VEP had 10 messages posted, and Panama Forum has several times the traffic of all of Winner's email groups combined. To compare the traffic on VEP and Panama Forum on the first nine days of November, it’s 66 messages posted on Winner’s group as against 781 on Panama Forum.

(It’s harder to compare meaningful readership statistics between The Panama News and Panama Guide, as until very recently Winner put sexually oriented meta tags on his website to attract people to click onto in expectation of pornography, thereby falsely padding the statistics he reported. But even so, from the occasional figures that Winner reports The Panama News gets about five times as many visits as his site does.)

So now the former self-proclaimed owner of Panama's English-language Internet goes to CEW and Panama Forum to bash his critics --- and since he got too obnoxious about it for Panama Forum's standards, to CEW to complain that he's being unfairly censored by the moderators who mutinied against him.

On Panama Forum, after several days of heady “Come The Revolution” jubilation, things are calming down a bit. It's the scam-free and dictator-free site of choice for newcomers and people thinking of coming to Panama about so many of the details of living here. It's also a prime spot for long-time residents and more recent arrivals to talk about the big and small events of the isthmian way of life.

Make the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
Find the boat of your dreams through Evermarine --- http://www.evermarine.com
Is Bocas your retirement haven? --- http://www.KodiakBocas.com

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