The Hustler Hustles. Or, Let's Help The Little(-ish) Guy

After the Berlin Wall fell, the media was swamped with East Germans coming forward, relaying harrowing tales of their experiences under a terrifying regime of restrictive information control.

Which is my overblown intro to the following: turns out people don't really like Dan Pulcrano.

With our opening up a world of scrutiny on Mr. Pulcrano, publisher of the Metro, people are willing to come forward and share other tales of alleged malfeasance. Like, for example, the sad tale of willowglen.com.

An anonymous tipster relayed the tale to us:

[Pulcrano] tricked the owner of willowglen.com, formerly owned by a glass company, to give him the name so he could use it for the "community good".

Go to it. it is full of pay advertisers only. not much community good. he basically tricked a small business owner into giving it to him for free.

Now, I'm not so stupid as to link to the site and drive up his pageviews, but let's just say it closely resembles one of those ad-filled fake search sites you'll get if you mistype a popular domain name. You know what I mean. You type in amazn.com and, next thing you know, some stock image of a beautiful woman looking over her sunglasses and holding a paperback appears next to 'amazn.com' in big purple letters and there are a bunch of random text links about books. That's what the site looks like. So now you don't need to go there.

The issue was covered in the Willow Glen Resident (which the Merc owns, don't you know) last week. In the article, the owner of the shop clearly expresses frustration at a deal gone bad.

When Virtual Valley [We know them! - ed.], a network of community sites, approached Cullen about gaining rights to the name so it could post information beneficial to the community, he agreed to sell it.

After once receiving millions of visitors at Willowglen.com., the hits on Cullen's new website www.LightingAtWillowGlen.com are now drastically down, and so are his sales.

"It literally dropped overnight," he said.

Long story short, Mr. Cullen was tricked. Saying the new willowglen.com is 'beneficial to the community' is like saying the deals on amazn.com can't be beat. (Side note: I just actually went to 'amazn.com' to see what it looks like. It goes to Amazon. But you get my damn point.)

In the article, the shop owner is running a contest to see who can direct the most traffic to his new, less popular domain. We're not in it for the free lamp products - we're in it for the justice. So, for the immediate future, a link to LightingAtWillowGlen.com will hold a position of prominence - just above the counter tracking how long the media has been ignoring the fraud lawsuit against Pulcrano, and just below the anonymous tips box, where other mistreated community residents can air their greivances.

Karma. It's a beautiful thing.

UPDATE: The lighting shop's contest page has a briefer version of the tale. And, for God's sakes, Danny P. - if you're going to create bullshit knock off sites for every little town, at least change all the names correctly: