by Nik Richie
My father was an engineer.
I was going to be a doctor.
My uncle, who owned multiple medical practices, was a radiologist and my personal role model. He drove a Jaguar. Owned beachfront property. He had money and everyone’s respect. People were envious, and my father never missed an opportunity to point this out to me, if only to remind me what was waiting at the end of the road.
“This is what you get when you become a doctor, Hooman,” he said.
My plan to go premed, to follow in my uncle’s footsteps, was more about materialism than it was pleasing my father. The quality of work didn’t factor in much, either. It was all about money. If I had money, I could be like my uncle and have the things he had. This goal would be instilled in me around the age of five, and over the years, would become more of an obsession. I would graduate high school, graduate college, become a radiologist, and one day take over CIG 13, which was the name of my uncle’s practice. My high school friends, especially the Caucasian ones, were not nearly as regimented when it came to their future. So I took a certain amount of pride in knowing exactly what I was doing, but more importantly, that I was going to be rich.
My brother, Brian, changed all of that.
I was seventeen. Brian was seven. He was in the kitchen sawing through a baseball with a steak knife. Like most kids his age, he was curious about everything. Brian wanted to see what was under the leather and stitching. He was slicing away at this thing when his hand slipped. He screamed. Blood everywhere. The knife sliced into his wrist and he started bawling, screaming, gripping his wrist while blood crept through his fingers. My parents weren’t home. I was listening to my seven-year-old brother scream as I called 911. I told them that my brother cut himself. Cut deep. I gave my address and told them to hurry, watching my brother yell, cry, bleed. I started to get light-headed watching the blood. The blood seeped through his fingers. It pooled on our kitchen floor. I watched the blood snake down his arm in deep red lines, dripping steadily from his elbow.
The last thing I remember was blood.
I had a phobia.
If I saw blood I fainted.
This would happen two more times in the form of a soccer cleat injury and during the dissection of a small pig in anatomy class. I had dissected a frog before, expertly making incisions with the scalpel and pinning its stomach flaps to the rubber bottom of the operation basin. All major organs were correctly identified. This gave me a bit of confidence back after the baseball incident with my brother. The pig, however, proved to me once again that I had a legitimate problem. Unlike the frog, it started bleeding when I cut into it. Gushing, actually.
I woke up in the nurse’s office a few hours later.
My plan was ruined. I couldn’t be a doctor.
I graduated from Mission Viejo High School, enrolling in Cal State Fullerton with little to no direction. I picked a major: psychology. I joined a frat. The plan I had for the last twelve years had been botched, so my approach to college was keeping to the things that conformed to standards. Everyone wanted to join a frat. Everyone was doing psychology. Although my father continued to preach the advantages of going premed, psychology seemed like a safe bet, even though I had no passion for it. Psychology let people know that I had a plan. The frat let people know I was a part of something.
The reality is that I was trying to find my way but I couldn’t. On the surface, it appeared that I knew what I was doing. Hooman had it figured out, people thought. He was on the path. Years from now, I was going to have a doctorate just like my father wanted. I would find that American dream. It even got to the point where I started setting monetary goals: first million by twenty-five. I’d be a multi-millionaire by twenty-seven. Psychology wasn’t going to allow me to do that, though. I wanted to get rich quick. I wanted to cut corners, and college seemed like the biggest corner of all. It was going to take at least seven years to earn my doctorate. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to devote myself to something I had little interest in. I had the same problem that most people my age had: I wanted to work very little and get a lot of money for it. It wasn’t an issue of being lazy. I was impatient, so I jumped at the first opportunity that came my way.
My best friend at the time was in a band.
The band was called Hey Stroker, and even though I didn’t particularly care for their music, I couldn’t deny that they were getting big in Orange County. They had a pretty decent following. Their shows usually sold out. They were going to make it; I knew that much. And I wanted to be part of this thing, but again, I didn’t like the music and I didn’t know how to play an instrument. What was clear to me was that being in the music industry was a hell of a lot more interesting to me than psychology. I enjoyed the scene. A lot of girls usually came out to see the band. It eventually got to a point where I was going to more shows than classes, and I had stopped checking in with the frat some time ago. The Greek system is based a lot on doing what you’re told (usually ridiculous things), and I’ve never been very good at taking orders. I’ve always been the type of guy that needs to be in charge. A bunch of random dudes in a frat wasn’t going to change that. When it came down to it, I’d rather go to a Hey Stroker show than a frat party any day of the fucking week. Freshman only get the leftovers of the upperclassmen. At least at the shows I had a decent selection, and the members of the band weren’t nearly as pretentious.
It finally clicked that Hey Stroker needed a manager, and since I couldn’t be in the band, I figured running it would be the next best thing. I quit the frat. Dropped out of school. My father was pissed off that I wasn’t following “the plan,” but I knew this was the right move for me. I was going to get these guys signed and make it in the management business. Hey Stroker was going to be the first of many, and that would put me back on the path to becoming a rich man again.
The music business, however, never works out the way you think.
I managed Hey Stroker for about a year.
I was taking meetings with Elektra and Sony but it was clear that they saw me for what I was: a kid with no experience. It just so happened that I had stumbled upon the opportunity to speak on behalf of the band. I was a bullshit artist pretending to know what the hell I was doing. They knew it. The record label guys could see that within the first five minutes, and there was always talk about why the band didn’t have a better manager.
Everyone kept asking why some kid was repping Hey Stroker.
People were interested, but not in working with Hooman Karamian. This was why the meetings never went well. It’s also why the band never agreed to sign any contracts with me. If I found them a deal, they’d be willing to commit to me and me alone. Until then, they were going to keep their options open. So I hustled. I wanted to prove that I could make it in the business. I even responded to talent-seeking ads in the back of magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin. To me it was just a numbers game. That’s all a music contract was: getting lucky. Being in the right place at the right time. I still didn’t care for the music.
In hindsight, neither party was every truly committed to the other.
That made parting ways easy.
The scam worked like this: Talent2K placed ads in the back of magazines essentially guaranteeing record contracts. Music magazines like Rolling Stone and Vibe and whatever else aspiring bands were reading. All you had to do was send over $400 and Talent2K would get your music out to all the major labels. That’s what they said, anyway. The reality is that Carlo Oddo, the guy who ran Talent2K, was cashing the checks and trashing most of the music. I had sent him some Hey Stroker material about four months prior, so it was a little odd he called back on it. If you knew Carlo, you knew that he was never one to actually try and get someone signed. That would involve legwork and taking meetings. Carlo was more the type to sit in his bedroom all day, hitting on young girls through MySpace while the money rolled in. Or he watched mafia movies while smoking dirts. 14
I’d learn this after he talked me into work
ing for him.
The dream of being a doctor was over. Hey Stroker didn’t work out and I really didn’t feel like going back to school. At the time, joining Carlo’s operation didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. He promised a commission if I could close deals over the phone.
“I’ll shop and you sell,” he said.
That was the arrangement.
It didn’t even really bother me that Carlo was running a scam. The music business had left a bad taste in my mouth, and I was willing to fuck a few people over if it meant making money. In my mind, I had already paid my dues during the whole Hey Stroker deal. The entire industry felt dirty to me.
So I met Carlo in Chicago. He was older than me: mid-thirties. Bald. Fat. He kind of looked like a child molester, but the financial opportunity made me see past all that. He explained how everything would work: I’d try to sell these bands on our packages. Depending on the amount a band spent, that would determine what services Talent2K would provide. In the end though, it didn’t matter if you spent $300 or $3,000. Carlo never actually did anything. He cashed the checks, but that was about it. My job was to help him get more checks to cash.
Carlo bought me a cell phone and I went back to California. I wasn’t even listening to any of the music. All I had was a contact name and the name of the band. I’d call these guys up telling them that I was the VP of A&R at Talent2K out of Los Angeles. I’d say that we loved the material they sent and if we could get them on a bigger package (the $995 tier) we could get their music out to all the major labels. We could get them a deal. All they needed to do was provide a little bit more cash and they’d be rock gods in no time. Think of it as an investment, I said.
I sold them, scammed them. I fucked these people over the way the industry fucked me, and I was good at it. The problem was that Carlo had yet to pay me any of my commission. He was already in the hole to me for a few grand when he brought up the idea of Sun City. His grandparents lived there in Arizona, and apparently one of them had died or had a health problem. Something like that. He was going to Sun City and wanted me to come with him to set up the operation.
“We’ll have an office and everything,” he said. “I just need you to get on a plane.”
“Dude, I don’t have any fucking money. You haven’t paid me yet.”
“Just get here, man. Drive if you have to.”
I was about to find out who Carlo really was.
Carlo lived with his parents out in the snowbird 15 community of Sun City. Everyone was old. Dying. These people rode around in golf carts because they were either too scared to drive or lost their licenses. All day you’d hear the distinct whine of those carts lugging groceries or heading to the pharmacy. In Sun City, hardly anything moved faster than ten miles per hour, so Carlo and I were the minority. The outcasts. We were kids again, and he was training me to scam.
Inside the apartment, everything smelled like old people except for Carlo’s room. It was filled with brimming ashtrays and junk food wrappers. Clothes were never folded. The bed was never made. The guy was a fat fucking slob, but I got over it pretty quick once he started paying me. We started making a lot of money, and in between the scamming and bogus contracts, Carlo would make me watch mafia movies. Scorsese movies like Goodfellas and Casino. Or we watched movies about salesmen like Boiler Room or Glengarry Glen Ross. We quoted them. Acted them out. In my early twenties, the most impressionable years of my life, I was hanging out with Carlo Oddo, the fat fuck scam artist. A gangster wannabe. A guy that hooked up with fourteen-year-old girls online. He had absolutely no moral compass, but I didn’t seem to mind that as long as he paid me.
I bought a Porsche Boxster.
I blew $30,000 on strip clubs over the course of a year. The operation got so big that we hired a couple girls to do some of the bullshit work. Young girls. Carlo had a thing for young girls, so he scouted the tanning salons and hired mostly on appearance. They were sixteen and still in high school, but that didn’t mean anything to Carlo. He just liked having young girls around that did what he told them to do. And drugs. One day Carlo asked my assistant, Morgan, if she knew any drug dealers.
As it turned out, Morgan had a guy that she led on from time to time in order to get free pot. Some kid named Anthony. He was this sketchy little drug dealer that started hanging around. He was either hitting on Morgan or getting up in our Talent2K business. The kid latched on to us and it irritated the shit out of me.
I never intended to be friends with the guy.
And I never thought he’d work for me.
I realized it was only a matter of time until Carlo scammed me.
In a way he had already been doing this. When he paid me the checks were always short. Money was being withheld (typically a grand or so), and he never got around to fixing it. I was also running most of the Talent2K operation by this point. Occasionally, I’d bolt. When he didn’t pay me, I’d go back to Orange County and wait for Carlo to call and beg me to come back. He needed me. We both knew it. So I used that to leverage more money into my pocket—or at the very least, the money he hadn’t paid me yet.
Eventually, I brought in Anthony and his best friend, Andy Conlin. I showed them the ropes, taught them how to work the phones, and delegated some of my stuff to them. Having them on freed up a lot of time. Sometimes I’d drive around in my Porsche at night and think about things: about leaving college, the Hey Stroker debacle, about Talent2K and where it was going. Online message boards were firing off about how we were a scam, how the company actually didn’t do anything except cash the checks. For the most part, they weren’t saying anything that wasn’t true. It was starting to look like I was on a sinking ship, but the thing that made me even more nervous was Carlo’s thing for young girls. Any one of these girls could be a cop running a sting operation. He was a sex predator. I was working for a fucking sex predator fat fuck, and he was going to get caught sooner or later. If Carlo got busted, I didn’t put it past him to drag me down too.
That’s when I decided to start my own company.
I named the company CIG after my uncle’s medical practice.
At the time, I had roughly $40,000 saved up because the cost of living in Sun City was cheap. It was all going to be put toward the company, and for the most part, it was established while I was still with Talent2K. Everything had to be done behind Carlo’s back. He’d seen too many fucking mafia movies to just let me go and do my own thing. I was in the Talent2K “family,” so starting my own company was going to piss him off. I knew that, but I actually wanted to try and go legit. No more scams. No more fucking people over.
The CIG business model was going to be different from what Carlo had been doing. Since the magazine advertisements worked, I kept that part the same. CIG was actually going to be two musical entities under one umbrella: Rap Vibe and Alternative Spin. Naturally, I placed the rap ads in Vibe and the alternative rock ads in Spin, playing off name recognition.
The main divergence was going to be how CIG approached the music industry. Carlo mailed the proposal packages out to the record labels. That’s what the bands thought, at least. Even if he did mail them out, they probably would have wound up in their junk file. Or the trash.
I wanted to actually get the bands in the same room as the record label people: have them meet, have the acts perform live. It was going to be my own personal Russell Simmons hip-hop summit. In my mind it was a numbers game. If I got the record label people to come out, and if I was able to show them enough acts, one of them was bound to get signed.
So the ads were printed up. I ditched Carlo again, and this time no amount of begging was going to get me back. I even flipped Andy and Anthony. Andy came to CIG directly while Anthony stayed behind as my spy. If Carlo was going to try and fuck me, I at least wanted a little advance warning.
I had my own label, my own business model, and I even had my own team. The only thing that remained was the name. Hooman Karamian was the guy that worked with Carlo Oddo the child fucker. It
also didn’t sound right in the hip-hop world.
That’s when I became Corbin Grimes.
Corbin Grimes was actually someone I was friends with over the summer, and when he found out that I stole his name, he was more than just a little pissed off. So was Carlo. Once he put everything together—that I not only ditched him, but I set up another company behind his back—the guy flipped shit. The thing about Carlo is that he’s not the kind of guy to physically confront anybody. Despite all the mafia movies, I wasn’t worried about a car-bomb strapped to my Porsche or any bullets flying my way. Carlo’s a fat fuck. A statutory rapist coward. He’s the lowest common denominator. He did the only thing he could do in that situation: talk trash.
So while I was getting things rolling on the CIG front, Carlo hit the message boards saying that Hooman Karamian is Corbin Grimes, and that was followed by a variation of lies: that I was the guy running the Talent2K operation, that he had to fire me, that Corbin Grimes and CIG are just covers for another scam. All those people that he fucked over before Carlo and I even met—my fault. After we met: still my fault. All day and night the fat fuck trashed me online, and this would be my first official encounter with the workings of the Internet and just how much it can affect a reputation.
That part stuck with me.
The first CIG event took place in Chicago in a convention hall at the Hilton. In order to get the A&R people out to the event, not only did I have to pay for all their travel and hotel, but they wanted a fee for coming out, too. Each one of these guys was costing me around $1,500, but I didn’t care as long as one of my acts got signed. It was still a numbers game in my head. More record label people meant it was more likely one of them would offer a contract. The more acts I could get out, the more likely it was that one of them would be good enough to get signed.
