Jonathan Lee Riches is a real piece of work. I came across him while I was doing some research. The first thing you should know about Riches is that he’s currently serving time at the Federal Correctional Institution Williamsburg in Salters, South Carolina, for wire fraud. Apparently he was involved in an identity theft ring. (He’ll be released in 2012).
Jonathan Lee Riches sues everybody.
According to court records, a spam e-mail created by a juvenile in Dallas was sent to tens of thousands of America Online customers asking for their personal identification information. That information was sold to Jonathan Lee Riches who used it to obtain cash from victims’ credit card accounts and to buy merchandise using other people’s credit card information.
So what does Jonathan Lee Riches do to pass the time in prison? Well, some prisoners read, others lift weights, etc…
Riches likes to file lawsuits.
In fact, he has filed over one thousand lawsuits in federal district courts across the country.
Some of the people Jonathan Lee Riches has sued are:
Bill Belichick
The New England Patriots coach was sued for “illegal surveillance”. The rambling document, which states that Belichick bugged the home of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, placed a listening device “in Donovan McNabb’s Chunky Soup”, surveilled the home of New York Jets quarterback Chad Pennington, and planted a recording device on San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawn Merriman’s sleeve, finally tells at the end that Belichick illegally taped Riches’ prison phone calls and sold the tapes to CNN.
Source: Smoking Gun:
My heart is broke forever…I’m terrified of defendant Belichick…He told me that if I expose his wiretaps he would get the owner of the Patriots, Mr. Kraft, who owns Kraft Foods, to put poison in the Kraft cheese I eat at prison
Martha Stewart
The entrepreneur who did some jail time herself was sued for supposedly violating Riches’ rights in a real estate deal. Jonathan Lee Riches seeks $3.5 million in damages from Stewart for “emotional, mental, psychological distress.” Riches says he will donate any damages he collects to television cook Rachael Ray.
According to boston.com:
He claims the real estate listing for the property falsely claimed it was painted with Dutch Boy paint. The suit also states that while touring the property (although records indicate he would have been in incarcerated at the time) Riches contracted poison ivy, was scratched by pricker bushes and fell in a groundhog hole.
Jonathan Lee Riches also claims he saw Stewart’s turkeys playing football with Vick’s jerseys and that the birds attacked him. And, recently resigned Bush political strategist Karl Rove has found a new job working on Stewart’s estate as her gardener.
Jeff Gordon
The NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon was sued for, in Riches’ words, “Recklessly Drivin’ My Life Crazy.”
Source: WSOCTV:
The handwritten, 3-page complaint goes on to accuse Gordon of a litany of other crimes–from poisoning fans with chemical weapons, to wrecking other drivers by dropping Tic Tacs and oil on the track through a secret trap door under his race car.
In one section Riches states, “Gordon tied me to his bumper during the Talladega race.” Elsewhere he complains, “Karl Rove left the White House to work as Gordon’s tire changer.”
Man, Jonathan Lee Riches must really dig Karl Rove. He also states that “Gordon told me secret plans to put wings on the #24 car and fly it into Ft. Knox.”
So how is a convicted federal inmate able to keep filing all of these frivolous complaints and wasting time, money and manpower in an already swamped legal system? Simply put, anyone is allowed to do it.
There is one line though that is telling of a man’s mental condition, “Plaintiff seeks 22,000,000,000.00 Billion dollars…” That’s just greedy, not crazy.
Michael Vick
According to the AJC, the infamous Atlanta Falcons quarterback (along with PETA, the Humane Society, a prison warden, and a federal judge) was sued for being the ringleader of a “vast conspiracy to kidnap my mind, hijack my soul.”
He said Vick ordered the warden to chemically induce his food, causing him to lose almost 50 pounds. Riches said it was all done as revenge because he caught Vick, whom he called a “NASA creation,” betting on Falcons games in 2005.
This particular lawsuit was tossed out, but there’s another lawsuit, where Jonathan Lee Riches says Vick stole his dogs for fighting purposes, opened credit cards in Riches’ name and stole his copyrighted property. The suit even claims Vick sold some of Riches’ dogs on eBay and “used the proceeds to buy missiles from the Iran government.” Riches is demanding $62 billion in gold and silver.
Steve Jobs
The favorite guy at Apple, who helped bring us the iPod, got sued by Riches for employing O.J. Simpson as a hitman.
Source: Apple Insider:
The 3-page handwritten complaint alleges that Simpson has been Jobs’s “hitman” since the “1985 MOVE house bombing in Philadelphia, which Jobs started with borrowed pyrotechnics from Great White.”
Also: “O.J. has been providing Jobs with food blenders since the midwest flood of 1993” and that O.J. also “paid Jobs to clone Dolly the sheep on April 20, 1998.”
Jobs is charged with aiming nuclear missiles at Riches’ brain and Lance Armstrong’s bicycle, as well as price gouging iPhone customers. “On May 10th, 2007, I bought an Apple iPhone for $922.01 at the FCI Williamsburg commissary,” Riches wrote. “Now Jobs sells that same iPod for $199.”
“A cursory review of the complaint is sufficient to establish that it is nothing more than fanciful nonsense,” US District Judge Gregory Presnell wrote in his order for dismissal. “The whole thing reads like a cross between Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ and a Dr. Bronner’s soap label, if Dr. Bronner had been a first-year law student with untreated paranoid schizophrenia.”
“Several weeks ago, he filed suit against Elvis Presley and Neverland Ranch for, inter alia, ‘WAR CRIMES Rock N Rollin My Brain’,” the Judge wrote.
While it’s unclear whether Riches’ cockamamy pleadings are products of actual mental illness or simply a hobby akin to short story writing, all complaints filed with the US court system have to be processed, filed and dismissed.
