apt pinning to blacklist a package

[Rob Owens <rowens@ptd.net>]

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong...

I want to prevent a particular package from ever being installed.  In /etc/apt/preferences I have:

Package: somepackage
Pin: version *
Pin-Priority: -1

But the package can still be installed by either command:

apt-get install somepackage
apt-get install otherpackage (where 'otherpackage' depends on
'somepackage')

I thought maybe the 'version *' was throwing it off, so I replaced '*' with
the actual version number and the package still gets installed.

Any ideas how to achieve my goal of blacklisting this particular package?

-Rob