A former Santa Clara police captain who was part of a group that orchestrated a bizarre campaign of harassment won’t spend any more time behind bars.
Brian Gilbert, 56, of San Jose, was the last in a ring of seven former eBay employees to see sentencing for cyberstalking. The group targeted a Massachusetts couple that published a newsletter critical of the company.
Many of the most disturbing aspects of the terror campaign included items mailed to the Natick, Mass. couple, David and Ina Steiners. Among those items were a fetal pig, a bloody pig Halloween mask, a book on coping with a spouse’s death and live cockroaches and spiders. Craigslist announcements for sex parties at the couple’s home and death threats rounded out the litany of horrific deeds committed by the ring.
A terminal colon cancer diagnosis shortly after Gilbert’s guilty plea in October 2020 will now allow him to avoid jail time. Until 2017, Gilbert was a captain with the Santa Clara Police Department before going on to become a senior manager on eBay’s global security team.
In a sentencing memo, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Joshua Levy wrote that Gilbert should be given “compassionate release,” adding that “under ordinary circumstances,” the commonwealth would demand jail time.
“But Brian Gilbert’s circumstances are far from ordinary,” Levy wrote. “Nothing can diminish the seriousness of the defendant’s crimes. While a jail sentence might well underscore the seriousness of the defendant’s offense … that sentence would fail to account for Brian Gilbert’s grave diagnosis.”
Not only did Gilbert offer to use his SCPD contacts to obstruct the investigation, he also approached the couple claiming he could stop the harassment. Gilbert spent only one day in jail prior to his sentencing last week, according to Law&Crime. In addition to avoiding contact with the Steiners, he will need to pay a $20,000 fine and will be on probation for a year.
Gilbert was not the only SCPD officer tangled up in the conspiracy. In late 2021, the court sentenced Phillip Cooke, another former SCPD captain, to 18 months in prison and another year of house arrest. Seeking leniency, Cooke’s lawyer blamed his involvement in the series of disgusting deeds on post-retirement boredom and alcoholism.
Despite Jim Baugh, eBay’s former director of safety and security, being billed as the ringleader, Levy wrote that Gilbert bore more responsibility than most of the others because of his police background.
“In many respects, the defendant was among the more culpable of the seven convicted codefendants,” Levy wrote. “He had visibility at various times into the threats, the deliveries, and the surveillance that made up the campaign. He also had life and professional experience that distinguished him from Jim Baugh’s younger reports — experience that should have led him to stand up to Baugh and to stop the campaign before it started. Even worse, other co-conspirators reported taking comfort in the involvement of two former police officers in the campaign.”
In September 2022, the court sentenced Baugh to 57 months in prison.
