With constant staff turnover and an eviction from its offices, at this point it would be more surprising if Red Herring managed to put together an event at all. Its Canadian startup showcase was originally scheduled for this week; citing a conflict with a Canadian venture-capital conference, the Herring moved it to June. Publisher Alex Vieux missed a poorly attended "introductory cocktail" party for the event in March; his staff put his absence down to a missed flight connection. Now the event has been rescheduled for September — the same month as the Herring's hastily postponed wireless conference in Beijing, and its Asia conference in Hong Kong. Vieux will have plenty of opportunities to miss flight connections — if any of the events happen at all.

Alex Vieux's Red Herring isn't just poorly managed; it's unlucky as well. I just got off the phone with Vassil Mladjov, CEO of Blogtronix, the blog-software company which hosts RedHerring.com. He blames the site's outage — which comes the same week as the Herring's eviction from its offices and the cancellation of a Herring event in China — on a bug involving log files, and says the site will be back up shortly. Mladjov adds that unpaid bills aren't the issue; Blogtronix arranged to get paid through a barter deal.

Red Herring's magazine has not been regularly printed in ages. Today, its its website has been displaying error messages — not that readers are missing much of the understaffed RedHerring.com's output. Herring's conference business alone has been sustaining Alex Vieux's rocky tech-publishing empire. But that, too, seems to be falling apart. A commenter has posted what he claims is an email from Vieux announcing the cancellation of next week's Red Herring Wireless conference in Beijing. At first it struck me as ludicrous that Vieux would cancel one of his cash-cow events. But I called the host hotel, the Ritz-Carlton Beijing, and staff there confirmed that the event was off. Vieux's email cites "difficult personal family health problems" as the reason. If true, it is most unlucky for Vieux that these health issues just happened to coincide with an eviction from Herring's Belmont headquarters.

A call to Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux through his old office line, 650 428 2900, was answered today by a man with an Eastern European accent who said Vieux wasn't there. Why was anyone there to answer the phone? Yesterday, the Herring's landlord sent a locksmith, an attorney, and sheriff's deputies to evict Vieux from the building, prompting a hasty exit. Vieux claims he has a new office, but wouldn't give out its address. If so, it's possible Vieux had the phone line forwarded there. But it's also possible, a former employee says, that Herring employees broke into their former office: "I wouldn't be shocked if Vieux & Co. just went in through one of the side doors that is not well secured." Wouldn't that be trespassing, though?

The news of Red Herring's eviction from its office has not given the Valley's PR machine even a momentary pause. At last count, 89 press releases have hit Google News touting some startup's listing on the Red Herring 100 North America. What none disclose: Whether they paid Red Herring to be included on the list. Several companies have told Valleywag that publisher Alex Vieux emailed them after naming them as "finalists" for the Herring 100, suggesting that they buy event tickets or pay for a promotional video. Vieux's landlord must be flabbergasted that despite these surely lucrative quid-pro-quo awards, Vieux still wasn't able to pay his rent.

The delusional Alex Vieux's powers of spin are prodigious. He has characterized the eviction of Red Herring, his tottering tech-publishing enterprise, from its Belmont office to News.com as an "economic decision." An economic decision which involved a locksmith, the landlord's attorney, and assorted sheriff's deputies. Normally, working out a rent dispute doesn't require officers of the peace. Were Vieux to be convicted of a crime and jailed, would he describe his sentence as a "period of voluntary seclusion"? (We speak theoretically, of course.) He also told News.com that he had secured a new office, but would not say where it is.

Red Herring, the once-storied, now marginal tech publisher, was evicted from its Belmont office at 19 Davis Drive at 3:04 p.m. today, a spokesman for the San Mateo County Sheriff's office confirmed to Valleywag. This is a phenomenal comeuppance for publisher Alex Vieux, who has heretofore displayed an amazing ability to dodge creditors and talk his way out of paying bills. We're told that employees left through the back door and gathered in the parking lot, hoping that the sheriff's deputies would not confiscate their laptops, too.

At Red Herring, every startup is a winner — but publisher Alex Vieux is the one who takes the prize. Indeed, handing out prizes seems to be the main way Vieux is keeping it afloat. The once-vital technology publisher, which Vieux has all but run into the ground, no longer prints a magazine. A tipster says healthcare for its workers has been cancelled for nonpayment. Its website, which used to mostly carry wire copy, now produces a pitiful handful of stories each day. But the Herring is still flopping around with an events business. The next one, Red Herring 100 North America, due to be held in San Jose later this month, will celebrate 100 startups of Vieux's choosing. And how does he select them from a list of 204 finalists? A come-on email and phone call one startup received is revealing:

Why is Red Herring hiring five videographers for its already launched Red Herring TV? Because the current team, led by journalist Sean Wolfe, pictured here mid-interview, quit on publisher Alex Vieux. The mass resignation was prompted by another one of Vieux's tirades, but Wolfe and his colleagues also cited erratic pay and a decline in journalistic standards. Their claim: Vieux was trying to turn the video group into a production house for promotional clips custom-made for event sponsors. Anyone thinking about taking the video gig at Red Herring TV would do well to read their resignation letter:

The longevity of troubled tech publisher Red Herring was a mystery until one ex-employee enlightened me: Publisher Alex Vieux simply doesn't pay his bills. What a brilliant way to achieve positive cash flow! Alas, Vieux has encountered a creditor who won't be stiffed: the IRS. The agency is looking into Vieux's Herring for what may be $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes, ex-employees who have been contacted by investigators have told me. Vieux is experienced at dodging the taxman: Farley Duvall, a longtime lieutenant, told colleagues he'd fled French police seeking to seize company documents in Paris, and drove in the middle of the night to Switzerland, where he rebuilt the Herring's European operations. Now Swiss authorities are asking questions about — you guessed it — unpaid taxes. But it's the American taxman who may put Vieux behind bars.

Paying bills is for the little people. Not Alex Vieux, publisher of the Red Herring, who has left a trail of stiffed vendors behind him — hotels, software makers, and consultants. The latest to go unpaid: Red Herring's dental and vision insurance plan. A former employee still getting benefits through COBRA tells us that on a visit to his eye doctor, he was told he no longer had coverage. A plan administrator told the ex-Herring that even though his COBRA bills had been paid on time, Red Herring hadn't paid the insurers — so forget seeing dentists or optometrists. For now, Red Herring's current and former employees still have regular medical coverage, but that's it. Oh, and what's this we hear about unpaid taxes? A sick business indeed.

A tipster tells us that he was approached by Red Herring to work as a reporter from his "home office," probably something similar to the job listed on the Herring website for a wireless reporter. He turned the job down very quickly, but says that he later talked to the fellow who ended up taking the job who was having "difficulty" getting paid. No surprise there, given the "difficulties" the magazine has had recently. "What pissed me off most was that they were approaching people when they had to know they were in such financial straits."

When Red Herring, the troubled tech publisher, got an eviction notice, editor-in-chief Joel Dreyfuss tried to pass it off as a quirk of publisher Alex Vieux's financial-management strategy. "That's just how Alex pays his bills," said Dreyfuss. Or rather, doesn't pay his bills. Already, Vieux's Herring has been ordered to pay Comerica Bank $180,457 plus interest for an unpaid loan. But now, it looks like he don't even have the time, money, or inclination to dispute his debts. A look at San Mateo County Court records reveals that two recent cases brought against Red Herring, Inc, have been awarded to the plaintiffs in default judgments. In other words, Vieux's legal representatives didn't even bother to show up in court.

Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of Red Herring's website, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux, whose mismanagement is driving the once-storied tech-magazine brand into the ground. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.

Through her Demo conference, Chris Shipley strands some of the most important people in tech together in the desert and forces them to pay attention to strange new ideas. It's like Burning Man without the playa dust and with much fancier drinks, or so I'm told. The experience is apparently scarring enough to bond people for life, judging by the palsy-walsy crowd of past Demo participants and guests who crowded into Palo Alto's Zibibbo restaurant Tuesday night to mingle and mix with other "alumni."

To date, I've mostly told you about the mayhem on the masthead of Red Herring, the troubled tech publication whose finances are so dire that it recently received an eviction notice. And sure enough, there have been further departures since our last report. But the business side, it seems, is in equal disarray. David Dolnick, a longtime right-hand man of Herring owner Alex Vieux. Dolnick ran the conferences business for Vieux, and, rumor has it, acted as a "fixer" for all kinds of matters on Vieux's overseas trips. Also gone: Herring president Gordon Haight, who headed up sales. With both conferences and ad sale in disarray, the Herring's next payroll run should be, as they say, quite interesting.

I'm sure that for people at Red Herring, the troubled tech publication that has difficulty paying its bills, updating its masthead has long been the lowest priority. The list of staffers has seemed out of date every time I've checked. It has changed recently, I note — but not fast enough to track of the latest round of departures. Red Herring board members got an eyeful of the shrinking masthead when they arrived at the office last Friday and were greeted by a nearly empty newsroom. Even people still on payroll — whatever "payroll" means at the Herring — are often absent, ostensibly for "health reasons" (translation: job interviews). After the jump, a list of the fish who we hear have jumped out of the pond — or are trying to do so.

Olive Software, a Santa Clara-based company that may, quite possibly, be almost as badly run as the Red Herring, has teamed up with the troubled tech publication to announce a Herring digital edition. It's supposedly a faithful copy of the print Red Herring, which has been missing from newsstands for month. Unsurprisingly, there's no link to the digital edition in the press release, and it's nowhere to be seen on the Red Herring website. "Viewing Red Herring on the Web is now as compelling and easy as reading the magazine in print," Olive boasts. True enough. Neither one can be found by readers. And I suspect neither one really exists, excepts in Herring owner Alex Vieux's fevered imagination.

Still on deathwatch, Red Herring, the once-storied tech publication, is displaying its straitened circumstances even in its copy. The few articles on its website that aren't Reuters wire stories seem to be written by a skeleton crew, with equally skeletal thought behind them. Take, for example, Cassimir Medford's puff piece on Ooma, the also-doomed VOIP startup. Medford, ostensibly Red Herring's "telecom and wireless reporter," includes this doozy:

Last week, as we continued Red Herring's deathwatch, we got a particularly vivid tale of one salesman's departure from the troubled tech publication. But now, another eyewitness tells us we missed the salesman's best line, as he and Herring owner Alex Vieux nearly came to blows over a withheld commission check. "Go ahead, put your hands on me," the salesman reportedly told Vieux. "It will be the best business decision you ever made." Vieux, of course, kept his record of achievement intact: the pair never actually came to blows.