In the nineties, he operated Mailboxes and Partylines and was known for logging and reading all traffic to gain knowledge about current weaknesses of software. During a house search "hundreds of faked credit- and phonecards" were found.
He later cooperated and gave a lot of the info he gathered to the police. He worked closely with Günther von Grevenreuth, a very well known - but not highly regarded - attorney in german hacker circles.
Now, I appreciate that this is a rather sketchy description for a decade, but don't ask people from that time about Dotcom and expect to hear praises. He's neither well-liked, nor to be relied on or trusted.
Dotcom also wrote: "I made mistakes when I was young and I paid the price. Steve Jobs was a hacker and Martha Stuart [sic] is doing well after her insider trading case. I think over a decade after all of this happened it should NOT be the dominating topic. I am 37 years old now, I am married, I have three adorable children with two more on the way (twin girls – yeah) and I know that I am not a bad person. I have grown and I have learned."
Many of the above mentioned individuals run large foundations on the side, doing good. Many of them are married and have children. Some acknowledged bad behavior in the past.
You'll meet a lot of persons that don't give something about that excuse, as the damage is done. That statement looks like he tries to get away like school bullies do, just that he didn't bully at school, but at a later stage.
What did he do to make those words ring true? (except getting kids and saying he's wiser?)
The controversy around House of Coolness went beyond selling
access to a site that largely hosted other people's intellectual
property. Around 1993, House of Coolness was targeted by Günter
Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a German lawyer who made a career of
suing copyright infringers. But rather than face legal attacks
from Gravenreuth, associates of Schmitz tell me he instead began
supplying Gravenreuth with names of other figures in the bulletin
board scene involved with pirated content. According to the journalist
Lars Sobiraj of the German tech news site Gulli.com, Schmitz was
allegedly paid for every pirate bust he helped to facilitate. His
cooperation with Gravenreuth was also mentioned in a 1997 lecture at
a conference of the German hacker Chaos Computer Club by the group’s
former spokesperson Andy Muhler-Maguhn, who labelled him an "agent
provocateur" not to be trusted.
From your links, Kim Dotcom's "criminal career" seems to involve the Entertainment Industry like the RIAA and MPAA. Those organizations are questionable themselves. Best to be even handed about it and put those organizations on the same list as Kim Dotcom and Bill Gates.
