Telephone Terrorist

She was wrong.

A few weeks later, she was sitting in her new home in Michigan when the phone rang. "Gotcha," said a voice that sounded suspiciously like Michael Knight.

Scared, Beth called a chat-line friend. "Don't go to bed tonight," the friend warned, relating rumors she'd heard about Knight's swatting gang.

For the next few hours, Beth sat on her front steps chain-smoking, hoping her presence would calm police. It didn't.

At 2:30 a.m., a team of officers surrounded her house. Beth ran to meet them. But before she could open her mouth, there were shotguns leveled at her head and handcuffs around her wrists. Officers stormed the house, waking up her sleeping boyfriend to see if he was hurt. Beth sat crying in the front yard and yelling that it was "all a mistake."

Police eventually realized they'd been had. But Beth's boyfriend was irate. "You lied to me," he screamed. "You said you stopped calling those lines. I want you gone. Call your mom."

Beth sat on the floor and sobbed. A few days later, she was on a bus to New York. She hasn't been on the phone line since.

"I hope that guy rots in hell," she says of Rosoff.

In the course of three years, Rosoff's gang called out SWAT teams on more than 100 people, according to the FBI. The victims were phone-line chatters or their families. Many were young girls who refused to have phone sex and were too scared to go to police.

The cavalry reveled in its power. "They took this seriously. It was the extent of their mission in life," says JJ, a chatter who started taping the calls for evidence. "They had no social life."

In a taped conversation from 2005, cavalry members are heard laughing about a swat Jason Trowbridge had done in Canada. "It was really funny," Rosoff is heard saying. This was the third time the cavalry had swatted the house. Police had taken the victim's children into temporary custody.

"I wish they would do that in the states," Rosoff says wistfully.

In New York, one panicked middle-aged man took off running when police surrounded his house. Believing they were after an armed suspect, police tackled him, resulting in injuries.

In Florida, one chatter told her grandfather about the phone harassment. When police arrived at the house, the grandfather mistook the officers for harassers and scuffled with them.

But since the swats were spread across the country, police departments were only seeing their local incidents. No one noticed the larger pattern. The swats might have gone on forever — if Rosoff's gang hadn't begun to focus their wrath on each other.

They were more like "frenemies" than true friends — just partners of convenience. Though they worked in tandem to conduct pranks, "They had no problems stabbing each other in their backs," says Lucky225, a longtime caller. After all, there could only be one king of the line.

"Stuart E. Rosoff is going to get on his knees and suck my pole, dude . . . suck my throbbing cock," L'il Hacker, a blind 17-year-old from Massachusetts, announced one night. Though the two occasionally partnered in pranks, Rosoff had turned off his phone service and was threatening to do it again.

"You won't get it back on," Rosoff responds in the recording of the conversation.

"Yes I will, little girl," L'il Hacker fires back.

The joust rambles on through a series of uninventive taunts, with L'il Hacker finally swearing revenge.

"You're not going to find me," Rosoff says with assurance.

He was wrong.

The Michael Knight persona had gone to his head — to the point where he claimed to be "unstoppable." But his ego gave fuel to foes. Now others were plotting against him, becoming citizen detectives. They dug up Rosoff's personal information, then they dispersed it over the phone lines.

Soon, Highland Hills police were being flooded with complaints about Rosoff. The Ohioan, victims claimed, had shut off their phone and water lines. He'd sent SWAT teams to their homes on false alarms. Police Chief James Cook had never heard of anything like it before.

In June of 2003, officers arrived at Rosoff's apartment. They found not the Michael Corleone of the phone lines, but a demure man with the body of a teddy bear. Rosoff denied any involvement, blaming the complaints on "enemies."

But after two more months of fielding calls from around the country, Sergeant Ferrell Ridgeway had probable cause to search Rosoff's apartment. He found a three-ring binder filled with hundreds of people's personal information, like addresses and bank account numbers. Some of the names were familiar. They were the same people who'd complained of harassment.

Rosoff was arrested. Suddenly the intimidator was shaking like a hypothermic child. He told Ridgeway he felt faint, and asked to see a doctor. He insisted that the information in the binder came from "friends" who wanted him to have it.