Lawsuit alleges Apple helped Mafia to send threats via iPod

There's no shortage of conspiracy theories, but rarely do we see one that involves the police, the FBI, the DOJ, an auto repair shop, a private investigator, and Apple all conspiring with the Mafia to harass one individual.


Apple's $30 billion cash hoard makes it a popular target for lawsuits, especially from patent trolls and numerous class action groups alleging various product flaws. But every once is a while, Apple is named in a lawsuit that defies all logic. Such a case was recently filed in Missouri Eastern District Court, which alleges that Apple aided and abetted the Mafia to transmit death threats directly to Gregory McKenna's iPod mini.

The case is hardly bizarre for the blame that McKenna lays at Apple's feet. Try to follow me here: McKenna worked briefly for a modeling agency in New York, which he claims is a front run by the Mob. After McKenna stopped getting paid, he quit and moved back home to St. Louis in 2000. Alleged Mafia members showed up at a St Louis nightclub to threaten McKenna to return to work for them, both as a model and a homosexual sex slave. These Mafia members then proceeded to "stalk, harass, threaten, extort, attempt rape, and kidnap" McKenna.

Naturally, McKenna called the cops. However, he says the St Louis Police Department repeatedly ignored his pleas for help. When the STLPD wouldn't listen to him, he called the FBI. When they wouldn't listen to him, he called the Department of Justice—they wouldn't listen to him either. All three are named as defendants in the case since their complacency aided the Mafia in its supposed campaign to ruin McKenna's life.

McKenna is also convinced that the Mob has his home and car bugged, and named both a auto repair shop and a private investigator that he hired to find the bugs as aiding the Mafia in its nine-year quest to harass McKenna. And here's where Apple's alleged culpability comes into play—McKenna says Apple adds illegal receivers to its iPods to allow the Mafia to send clear, audible death threats through the portable media player.

McKenna claims that an iPod shuffle he bought in 2005 via eBay and an iPod mini that he claims he bought in 2006 new from an Apple Store (note that the mini was discontinued eight months before he bought it) both contain illegal receivers that Apple built in the devices, ostensibly at the request of the Mob. He claims in his lengthy, 124-page complaint that, in 2008, he was able to record Mafia members sending death threats to his iPod mini stating, "I'm about to kill him," in "unison" with a song he was listening to.

The complaint is so bizarre, so elaborate, I'm not sure whether to laugh at its absurdity or feel sorry for McKenna, who is representing himself in the lawsuit. However, here in Orbiting HQ we think this may top a lawsuit last year claiming Steve Jobs and Apple conspired with South Carolina correction officer to sexually harass an inmate with a prolific history of filing "creative" lawsuits.

McKenna is demanding $14.3 million in total damages from all ten named defendants, including $550,000 per year in lost wages that are the direct result of the elaborate conspiracy against him, and a variety of compensatory and punitive damages.

In Star Trek, not only do we get nigh-magical technology, but we get technobabble to explain how it works and none of it makes any fucking sense. "We have a container of photonic energy". Wait- you have a jar of light? Can you catch lightning in a bottle too? "Tripolymer plasma"? Look up the definition for polymer. Then try to explain how you can have a highly ionized gas (plasma) that is also a fucking polymer. Impossible. "50 isoton yield"? That means your torpedo has a yield of 50 tons. Iso means "equal to" or "the same as". They keep inventing new trans-uranic stable elements. There's a reason the table of elements only goes so high- anything after that decomposes or annihilates itself almost the moment it's formed! It makes as much sense as discovering that there's another planet in the earth's orbit, it's just always on the opposite side of the sun from us. Impossible.

In Star Wars, the only instances of bad engineering are the exhaust port on the Death Star (which was immune to energy weapons, couldn't be shielded against torpedoes because that would trap the heat inside, and the rebels only knew about because they had the fucking blueprints for the thing.) and the lack of guard rails on a lot of high spaces.

In Star Trek, we rarely see GOOD engineering. Their warp core is always on the verge of exploding whenever anything goes wrong. Their computer has a virus? The warp core is about to explode! Some alien shot a completely unrelated part of the ship? The warp core is about to explode! A 19th century fictional character on the holodeck has gained sentience? The warp core is about to explode! And their safety systems to shut it down never work. The Enterprise-D tried repeatedly to eject the warp core and the system failed every. Single. Time. On Voyager, they had to eject the warp core every other episode. Smart engineers would have designed the warp core so it barely had enough matter-antimatter to sustain the reaction rather than filling it with so much that it'll explode any time you sneeze or poke it with a stick. Smart engineers would have had an active restraint system, meaning you have to actively prevent the warp core from ejecting. The moment a failure in the system occurs, the warp core gets chucked out of the ship so it can explode at a safe distance. A shot to one part of the ship will completely disable the shields, weapons, sensors, or engines, even if the part of the ship that got shot doesn't HAVE any of those located there. Haven't these clowns ever heard of decentralization? Exploding bridge consoles? Why does shooting the ship on deck 91, aft cause a console on deck 1, forward to explode with enough force to bodily hurl a crewman across the bridge? What's in them that's exploding, anyway? That's fucking stupid.

They keep inventing new trans-uranic stable elements. There's a reason the table of elements only goes so high- anything after that decomposes or annihilates itself almost the moment it's formed!

On Voyager, they had to eject the warp core every other episode