The man on the log was David J. Thornton. He is 73, and runs a website called CrimeBustersNow, a one-man vigilante regulatory force bent on taking down pyramids and Ponzi schemes. In conversation, Thornton comes off as erratic, abrasive and unnervingly fixated on the sins of the con men he calls “dream stealers”; when we spoke, he had difficulty relaying information chronologically, or even in linear fashion, and broke down crying more than once. He has been arrested many times — for harassment, disturbing the peace and assault, he said. In 2010, for example, he got into an altercation with an elementary-school girl while handing out CrimeBustersNow literature outside a school near Toronto. According to court documents, Thornton grabbed at the girl’s wrist to get her to pay attention. The school’s vice principal had to intervene. (Thornton was convicted of assault and breach of probation but later won an appeal on procedural grounds.) Thornton told me that he was living off a pension, rent-free in the basement of a friend in Quebec, and he seemed almost debilitated by the impassioned tunnel vision with which he goes after his enemies. “I’ve lost everything,” he said. And yet he was one of the first people to see through Galbraith’s operation.

Thornton began investigating Pigeon King in the summer of 2007 after being tipped off by a Mennonite nut grower. “It was just like Madoff,” he told me. “I saw this thing could destroy all the farming communities in North America.” He knew the only way to stop a scheme like Galbraith’s was to choke off new investment. So he posted screeds about the company online, then started phoning bankers and feed companies in agricultural areas around North America, urging them to spread the word. (To reach Amish farmers, he called blacksmiths.) He contacted television stations and law enforcement and visited the federal prosecutor’s office near Pigeon King’s headquarters, where he was escorted out by the police. He then stood outside with a bullhorn, shouting about Pigeon King.

By the fall of 2007, almost in spite of himself, Thornton was starting to hamstring Pigeon King. Bankers referred farmers to the CrimeBustersNow site when they came in for pigeon loans. Many farmers called Thornton, and Thornton began collecting numbers and cold-calling others pre-emptively. He apparently talked many people out of investing. But because he often phoned late at night, and also asked for money to fund various CrimeBustersNow campaigns, it was hard for many farmers to take him seriously. “He sounded like he was on a tirade against anyone and everyone,” one American investor told the police. A farmer in Ontario named Dale Leifso told me, “He sounded slightly unhinged.” Leifso was already skeptical of Pigeon King when Thornton called him late one night, but Thornton sounded so unbalanced that Leifso thinks he may have even wound up defending Galbraith. Leifso eventually cut a check to Pigeon King for $125,000. The company folded before he could sell back any birds.

In early December 2007, Pigeon King was attacked again. Better Farming, a magazine with a full-time editorial staff of three, working out of an office on the editor’s own farm in eastern Ontario, published a 16-page “special investigation” of Pigeon King International, by far the longest piece of reporting the magazine had ever tackled. Its editor, Robert Irwin, told me that Better Farming was stonewalled by provincial and federal authorities. (“The police had no interest in what was going on,” he said.) Even so, Irwin’s team assembled an exhaustive and devastating exposé, a heroic piece of public-interest journalism that pulled together all kinds of agricultural data and quotes from pigeon fanciers and squab processors to undermine Galbraith’s claim that there could be a market for so many birds.

The bad press crippled Pigeon King. Farmers were showing the Better Farming article to salesmen, asking for explanations. One salesman, Mark DeWitt, drove out to Better Farming’s office — Irwin’s farmhouse — to photograph it; he seemed to think that showing investors the magazine’s unimpressive headquarters would undercut its credibility. There was an altercation. In a letter Galbraith sent to breeders, DeWitt said that Irwin “went absolutely ballistic,” jabbing a shovel in his face. (Irwin told me he put the shovel up to block DeWitt’s camera, and DeWitt grabbed it through the driver’s side window of his truck and wouldn’t let go.) DeWitt explained that he then drove off with one end of the shovel still in his truck. Irwin says he was dragged for several yards; DeWitt denies this. Eventually, Better Farming published an investigative profile of DeWitt, reporting that he was a disbarred lawyer who swindled clients out of at least $100,000 in the 1980s and that he still owed Better Farming for some classified ads he took out years earlier. DeWitt denies these allegations. Documents provided by Better Farming show that the disbarred lawyer, Mark DeWitt, and the pigeon salesman, Mark DeWitt, happen to have the same middle initial and date of birth.

Until then, Galbraith had dealt with his critics calmly. Earlier that year, an influential Amish figure, David Wagler, warned farmers about Pigeon King in a prominent Amish newspaper, Plain Interests. Galbraith’s responses in The Pigeon Post were breezy: “Judge not lest ye be judged yourself,” he wrote, adding, “We at the office have sure had lots of good laughs about these rumors.” But as David Thornton, and then Better Farming, piled on, Galbraith hit back harder. He railed in The Pigeon Post against the “destructive purveyors of fear” out to destroy innocent farmers. And though he resisted divulging all the details of his business plan — “Toyota did not become the world’s largest carmaker by publicizing all their plans in advance” — he announced his intention to build a processing plant at Sacred Dove Ranch, a property he had purchased in far northern Ontario, so he could start delivering squab to the masses. In the past, Galbraith insisted his birds were racing pigeons and dismissed squab as unprofitable, but now he described the birds that Pigeon King farmers were raising as part of a long-term breeding program to create a superior meat bird. At this stage, Galbraith was merely building up his flocks, he said, working to achieve the quality and scale he would need to capture a chunk of the chicken market — if the “fear mongers and envious critics” didn’t destroy him first. He would call his brand Hinterland Squabs.