The last eBay executive charged with criminally harassing a Natick couple who reports on the ecommerce industry was sentenced time served and a year of supervised release as well as a $20,000 fine for his role in the bizarre plot.

Brian Gilbert, of San Jose, Calif, served as the senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team at the time of the harassment campaign.

The sentence was a significant departure from the prison time received by his six co-defendants two years ago. U.S. District Court Senior Judge William G. Young in the remote hearing adopted the joint recommendation of both the prosecution and the defense.

The lack of prison time is seen as “compassionate release” as Gilbert suffers from an inoperable tumor. He has spent much of the last two years since he and the others were charged battling cancer.

Crime

“Your conduct is truly appalling. But for me to take time in this sentencing hearing simply to hector you adds nothing,” Young said during the sentencing. “The question I’m left with is, how could you do this? … You achieved the important position you held within eBay precisely because of your exemplary law enforcement skills. Whatever happened to the moral compass that led you to this position?”

“There’s no adequate answer. The best I can do is a warped corporate culture and if corporations are so powerful and their perceived needs are so powerful as to run roughshod over the life’s work of (these defendants), then the country has much to fear from corporations.”

David Steiner, who along with his wife Ina Steiner is the victim in the case, told a federal judge in 2022 that the eBay executives’ “bizarre, premeditated assault on our lives” was “a living hell” and expressed concern that the company would do the same thing to other critics.

Prosecutors say eBay launched a harassment and intimidation campaign in August 2019 against the Natick couple, who cover the industry on their blog EcommerceBytes.com, in retaliation to some articles critical of eBay’s business practices.

That included the executives — led by former eBay Senior Director of Safety and Security James Baugh — shipping disturbing items like live spiders, cockroaches, a bloody pig Halloween mask as well as an actual fetal pig, and a book about surviving the loss of a spouse straight to the couple’s doorstep, according to court filings.

“Brian Gilbert’s participation in this campaign was not coerced. He was not a reluctant member. He embraced it and helped in the planning and, later, the cover-up, he actively, enthusiastically participated,” Ina Steiner wrote in a victim impact statement read at the hearing.

“He set out to paint us as dangerous people to local law enforcement, ruin our reputation with our neighbors and in the industry we covered. He says he is sorry, ashamed and ‘embarrassed,’” she continued. “He refers to his actions as a ‘stupid, hurtful, criminal act’ as if it wasn’t a full fledged conspiracy to ruin us.”

Punishment

eBay, which posted $2.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of this year, agreed to pay a $3 million criminal penalty in January for the ordeal — the maximum allowed by law. The company is also under supervision of an independent corporate compliance monitor, a situation that will last through 2027.

“Many companies find that to be intrusive,” acting U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Joshua Levy told the Herald in a post-sentencing interview of the oversight. “It’s a very significant deterrent for companies to engage in this kind of conduct.”

“I think the message is that the tone at the top of a company really does matter. The tone at the top was horrendous. … It set in motion this series of events,” Levy said.

Prosecutor Seth Kosto told the Herald that “this group of defendants did a lot to keep themselves anonymous on the internet,” including the use of unapproved anonymization software and “burner” phones and laptops. “So unraveling the who of the terrible that that was happening was challenging.”

Both Levy and Kosto said that the Steiners did the right thing by going to their local police department to put an end to it.

“This is another example of how the local police play a critical role in what we do at the department of justice,” Levy said, calling them “the front line.”

Gilbert is one of seven company executives directly charged in the case in June 2020. Gilbert is the last to be sentenced. The rest were sentenced between September and November 2022.

His sentence follows those of James “Jim” Baugh, the company’s senior director of safety and security and who Levy describes as “the ringleader,” sentenced to 57 months in prison; David Harville, the former director of global resiliency, sentenced to 24 months in prison; Stephanie Popp, the former senior manager of global intelligence, sentenced to one year in prison; Philip Cooke, a former senior manager of security operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a year of home confinement; Stephanie Stockwell, a former manager of global intelligence, was sentenced to one year of home confinement; Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year of home confinement.