AS MEDIA MYSTERIES GO, the UrbanExposé affair probably won't rate too many pages in the history books. It's not "Who shot J.R.?" It's not "Who wrote Primary Colors?" It's not even "How much longer can I be expected to care what the fuck Ginger is?" Still, over the last half year it has vexed enough of the East Coast new-media-world's players, player-haters, and straight-up yentas to qualify for at least a footnote. The mystery: Who is the wig-wearing muckraker behind the Web's premier black-media-biz gossip site, UrbanExposé? Who is the man signing his Negro-revolutionary pseudonym to all those acid-tongued dissections of the Web portals, cable channels, and niche magazines that work the melanin-fortified content space coyly known as "urban"? Who, in short, is Crispus Attucks, and where does he get off?

A lot of wrong answers have accumulated since UrbanExposé debuted last June. An instant hit with both netslaves and honchos at urban-flavored new-media ventures like 360hiphop, Urban Box Office, and hookt.com, the site quickly filled up with smart, smack-talking user commentary, which became as much of a draw as Attucks's scandalously well-informed profiles. Trying to figure out who Attucks was was part of the fun, of course, and pretty soon the game got serious. Detectives were hired. Media reporters beat the bushes. In July, having gotten a glimpse of Attucks when he showed up for an interview disguised in dark glasses and a colonial wig, Inside magazine ran an article fingering thirty-four-year-old cyberkind McLean Greaves, founder of Café Los Negroes, as the man behind the mask. Bzzzzt. Greaves's attorney got the story retracted the following week. But the speculation continued full-tilt everywhere else. At last count, the list of named suspects has at one time or another included the ubiquitous Omar Wasow (MSNBC commentator and blackplanet.com executive director), rap journalist Ronin Ro, and the entire management of Urban Box Office.

Oddly enough, the list has never included twenty-nine-year-old Fort Greene resident John Lee. Not that he'd be an obvious suspect. His urban-media credentials, strictly speaking, include work on a few low-budget rap videos and some under-the-radar film and television scripting. But in other ways, Lee fits the bill to a T. For one thing, just as you'd expect of Crispus Attucks, he knows new media from the inside out -- understands from long, hard experience the logic of digital networks as well as the alchemy of buzz and clout -- and has a complicated relationship to the entire enterprise. For another thing, just as you'd expect of Crispus Attucks, he happens to be Crispus Attucks.

I know this not because I beat any bushes but because Lee called me up the other day and told me. He's ready to go public, he says: ready to expand the UrbanExposé franchise into print and into broader media coverage, ready to start collecting on the good and bad karma the site has earned him so far. And I guess he figured I'd be a good person for the job -- after all, it wouldn't be the first time I'd blown his cover.

The first time was eleven years ago. Lee wasn't calling himself Crispus Attucks back then -- his handle was Corrupt. He was eighteen years old, living with his mom in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and logging in regularly to a local dial-up bulletin board called Phuck the Pheds, a hangout for computer hackers and phone phreaks that I was spending time on for a Spin magazine assignment. Corrupt wasn't like most of the other guys on Phuck the Pheds. It wasn't just that he was black, a rarity then and now in the computer underground. He was also an "elite" hacker who really was -- a go-to specialist in cracking DEC Vax machines (aka Vaxen), the corporate and government mainframes of choice in those days.

The Spin article was Corrupt's first appearance in print, but not his last. By the time it came out, Lee had hooked up with the legendary hacker group MOD, whose accomplishments, by some accounts, would eventually include penetrating nearly every telephone-company system in the world. "I hate to be all bragging about it," Lee says today, "but we did redefine what hacking was. That's when things went from, like, dudes trying to guess passwords to actually monitoring networks and understanding the whole topology. Big-picture hacking… It was ill."

MOD's legend, however, owes almost as much to their flair for press relations as it does to their hacking skills. I eventually wrote a cover story on them for the Village Voice, but it was hardly an exclusive. Reporters were lined up around the block for a chance to cover these personable, articulate, multiethnic, technoexotic felons. And as such coverage can do, it probably redoubled the legal system's eagerness to put these personable, articulate, multiethnic, technoexotic felons behind bars. When Lee finally got hauled in to talk to the investigator who got him and four other MOD members indicted on federal charges, he saw on the man's office wall a framed copy of the Village Voice cover photo: Lee and the others striking gangster poses, not very effectively disguised with bandido-style kerchiefs. "He loved that shit," Lee recalls, laughing. "And I think he said something like, 'We was going to leave you alone till you threw it in our face.'"