Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Patrick Frey has an unusual night job.
After returning to his cliffside Rancho Palos Verdes home from his day at the office, where he prosecutes hard-core gang homicides, he ties on his blogger's cape and morphs into the controversial "Patterico" — a nickname his father gave him as a child.
On Patterico's Pontifications, the conservative deputy DA rips apart all things left of center — from Obama to Occupy — and uses his familiarity with the legal system to unofficially solve complex mysteries in the news.
"Here at patterico.com we have been covering the Weiner scandal from Day 1," he blogged in 2011 after former Congressman Anthony Weiner accidentally Tweeted a photo of his penis to the entire Internet.
Weiner quickly deleted the Tweet, but too late: His dirty photo was frozen into the NSFW history books by the late, conservative L.A. media giant Andrew Breitbart, a friend of Frey's.
In the weeks following the nationwide flap over Weiner, Frey shoveled through the congressman's rich Twitter history for more signs of debauchery, eventually claiming to find evidence that Weiner had "engaged in communications with underaged girls."
The deputy DA believes his widely followed revelations about Weiner's online escapades made Frey the target of a dangerous, unnerving hoax: a false 911 call that put Frey, his wife, Christi —a high-end sex-crimes prosecutor for the District Attorney — and his two young children in the crosshairs of armed officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
On July 1, 2011, Frey, in his nighttime blogger role, was talking to a source over his cellphone just after 12:30 a.m. — his wife and kids fast asleep upstairs in their Rancho Palos Verdes home — when he heard a thunderous pounding at his front door.
"I was sitting right here in this chair," he says, re-enacting the haunting experience as he sits at his kitchen table, the South Bay harbor gleaming up through hot glass.
"I jumped up to the counter ... and peeked around the corner," he says. Five or six armed deputies on his porch were barking, "Come out with your hands up!"
As he opened the door, Frey, afraid to set down his cellphone — any quick move could be deadly — prayed they wouldn't mistake the device for a gun.
But the cops were cautious, and no shots were fired. Deputies handcuffed the longtime deputy DA and hustled him into a patrol vehicle. His stunned wife, Christi, was patted down against the garage wall. The couple's two young children tell L.A. Weekly that police burst into their bedrooms with flashlights to make sure they were safe. The Freys' neighbors, awakened by the spectacle, watched the dramatic midnight raid play out.
"People can turn other people's lives upside down just sitting in front of a keyboard," Frey says. "There's just something strange and disquieting about that."
Frey knew, even as the scene unfolded, that he'd just been SWATted — a dangerous game being played by provocateurs who falsely report to cops a murder or violent attack supposedly committed by someone they hate.
In Frey's case, a man pretending to be Frey called the L.A. County Sheriff's station in Lomita, declaring: "I shot her — my wife!" Frey has obtained the call, which he labels "one of the most bone-chilling pieces of audio you will ever hear."
Almost a year later, in May 2012, he posted the call on YouTube. It has since been played more than 40,000 times.
Frey says that the week before the incident, he'd received a disturbing, anonymous email warning: "Stop digging into [Rep. Weiner]. I cannot insure [sic] your safety if you continue."
Special agent Kevin Kolbye in Dallas, the FBI's point person for the SWATting phenomenon, says SWATters manipulate technology in order to mimic the caller ID of their targeted victim, the goal being to "incite fear and intimidation into the person that they're SWATting."
The potentially deadly pranks, which can be traced back to about 2002, are named for the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams employed by police agencies — and used by SWATters as remote revenge pawns.
They were first used mostly by teens as a passive-aggressive method for punishing their video-game opponents or chat-room adversaries
Although the FBI won't confirm or deny that it's looking into the cases, Kolbye does partly blame copycats who see SWATtings in the news.
He says that "a lot of these SWATters are sharing their crimes on social media."
Over the last few months in L.A., SWATters have victimized Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber — all of whose mansions were stormed by police.
Less publicized is the fact that over the last year and a half, four prominent, conservative bloggers have been SWATted across America. All four found themselves surrounded by local cops with guns:
Mike Stack, of New Jersey, had been Tweeting various predictions about Rep. Weiner's downfall when he was SWATted in 2011 — about one week before Frey.
"Um, I killed my wife ... I shot her in the head," the caller falsely muttered to police.
Then, last May, a SWATter targeted Erick Erickson, conservative managing editor of Redstate.com and a CNN contributor.
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