Seeking Profit With a Poison Pen

Seated in a swivel chair in front of the computer screen in his study, Ralph Andrews scanned the latest e-mail from a customer.

It was a plea for help. A woman was walking around her bedroom at night stark naked, the client wrote, in full view of the neighbors. Could Andrews make her stop?

Andrews, a.k.a. The Trouble Maker, had to weigh the problem carefully. Although he likes to use humor to soften the message, Andrews knew he had to be sensitive to the woman’s self-image.

Suddenly he had it. His fingers danced across the keyboard.

“Almost every night when you are preparing for bed, you undress and do your exercises in front of a window that is not covered by either drapes or curtains. Apparently, the fact that you live directly across from a huge vacant hillside lot has lulled you into a false sense of privacy. Unfortunately, your undressing has become a ‘show’ for many of the youngsters in the neighborhood, most of whom are under 15 . . . I believe that you could (and should) simply eliminate the temptation by closing your drapes or blinds.”

The letter concluded: “Bear in mind that I was simply hired to bring this matter to your attention. Please remember that old saying, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ Very Truly Yours, The Trouble Maker.”

Andrews, a 72-year-old former TV game show producer, journalist and filmmaker, is another guy trying to strike gold on the Internet. His angle: sending anonymous complaints to unsuspecting strangers, along with suggestions for how to make amends. And all for a mere $20.

Since launching the business last year, Andrews has handled a wide array of annoyances. There was the well-groomed company supervisor whose nose and ears bushed with unsightly hair. There was the man who had 10 dogs that relieved themselves everywhere but their owners’ lawn. (Neighbors built fences to keep the dogs off, but they couldn’t fence off the driveways.) And there was the guy who mowed his lawn bare-chested, to the disgust of a neighbor who really didn’t want to see.

The Trouble Maker comes across as a curious, slightly hyperactive, good-natured adolescent, alert to the world’s possibilities.

He started his service last fall, after brainstorming with two of his computer-savvy sons, James and Rick, about niches for Internet business. Writing nasty letters, they decided, would be a perfect occupation for him.

“He’s good at writing. He’s good at making people really mad,” said his 32-year-old son, James Andrews, who works as a Web master for a health-care company in Oregon. “I grew up in the courts with him. In the field he was always being sued left and right.”

James Andrews said that for as long as he can remember, his father liked to put his opinion out there, just to provoke. Like the time he had T-shirts made that read: “Kissing a smoker is like licking a dirty ashtray.”

“That right there is The Trouble Maker,” said James Andrews. “He would just wear it around town to see how people would react.”

Before the dawn of e-commerce, such a business might not have survived. But in this era of wild online speculation where anyone with an idea and a computer can join the dot.com gold rush, Andrews can wait indefinitely for success--with few bills to pay.

“Theoretically, it is possible to start a business on the Web without any money at all,” said William B. Gartner, a professor in the Entrepreneur Program at USC. “But I think it is going to be just as hard to make money on the Web as anywhere else.”

Gartner said many people with hobby businesses like Andrews’ have had their ideas picked up by larger companies. While there is no guarantee of success, the Internet “makes it possible to offer a business out into the world to see if it flies or not,” Gartner said.

So far, Andrews’ idea has not flown.

Andrews estimates he has sent 75 letters since last fall. He has dropped his price three times--from $35 to the current $20--to drum up business, and he has spent weekends handing out fliers promoting it.

Most recently he plastered three sides of his pickup with huge signs that read: “Need a Good Hit Man? www.saveyouthetrouble.com”.

Go to The Trouble Maker’s site and a grinning caricature of Andrews with a huge head stares at a computer screen.

“Click on the Big Bald Head to enter my site,” invites the home page.

*

Andrews is not the first to come up with the idea of writing nasty letters for profit. In his best-selling memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt recounts how he got a job writing threatening letters to people who owed money to old Mrs. Finucane to help pay for his passage to America.

Like Andrews, the 15-year-old McCourt discovered he had a talent for writing nasty letters, but the memory of his missives later haunted him.

“Often I have to write threatening letters to neighbors and friends of my mother and I worry they might discover me,” McCourt wrote. “They complain to Mam, ‘That oul’ bitch Finucane, below in Irishtown, sent me a threatening letter. What kind of demon outta hell would torment her own with a class of letter that I can’t make head nor tail of anyway . . . The person that would write that letter is worse than Judas or any informer for the English.’ ”

McCourt soothed his soul by promising that when he became a rich Yank he would send home hundreds of dollars so his family would never have to worry about threatening letters again.

But Andrews is beset by no such guilt. On the other hand, he does not have to sit chatting with those who have received his letters.

A man who received a Trouble Maker letter agreed to talk to a reporter--anonymously--about the service.

The West Hollywood man said he was enraged when he received the letter complaining that he threw too many loud parties, and created parking nightmares for his neighbors.

His response: He ripped up the letter, and vowed to throw bigger and louder parties.

“If somebody came to the door and asked me to keep quiet, lower the noise, first of all I’d invite them in,” he said, still fuming. “I’m a good neighbor.

“It’s like people don’t want to tell you what they feel to your face,” he added. “They want to be nice on the surface and then they stab you right in the back with a big poison knife.”

But an Orange County man who hired The Trouble Maker to collect an old debt from a friend praised the service.

Four months later his friend paid back half the money, and he is now on a payment plan to pay the rest. The sender said the resolution has helped him renew his friendship.

“I was a little nervous at first that the fellow would figure it out,” he said. “Because if I’m the only one he owed money to, he would know.”

His friend called a week after receiving the letter and asked him directly, “By the way, did you send something to The Trouble Maker?”

He paused, and the friend backed down.

The letter sender said the service worked because it tapped into an American tendency to be cowardly.

“That’s the American way,” he said. “We pay someone else to do the dirty work.”

But not always. Andrews, who has a dog and whose house address is 5021, said a neighbor came to his door the other day with a beef.

“I’ve got a letter I’d like The Trouble Maker to write,” the neighbor said. “It’s to the guy at 5021. His dog is always getting out.”

’ T hat’s the American way. We pay someone else to do the dirty work.’

A customer who used The Trouble Maker to collect a debt from a friend.