by Nik Richie
Beyond legality, the other issue was that I knew nothing about the Internet, outside of checking my e-mail and playing fantasy football. I had no clue how to build, maintain, and manage a site on my own. It was all uncharted territory, but the allure of the idea and my dissatisfaction with my personal life combined to be a great motivator. I needed the escape, an outlet. And no one could know. It was going to be my secret vacation away from the world, and I didn’t want anyone along for the ride. Didn’t want to share it because I had something—I knew that much, but wasn’t sure as to the scope of how it would affect the world.
So I began the process of building this thing with the little information that I had, oftentimes Googling basic questions regarding hosting and templates and stuff like that. GoDaddy.com was sponsoring Danica Patrick, and since my wife was friends with her, I was familiar with what it was beyond the name and Danica posing in a bikini. At that point in time, the commercials didn’t give you much more than tits and a web address, but Danica brought up what the business actually did during a previous conversation.
The first thing required was the selection of a domain name, and Dirty Scottsdale was the one I had in mind going into it. Jim Schaffer, a friend of mine, used to joke about how we should start a clothing line called Dirty Scottsdale for the club kids to wear. Maybe lingerie, too. He even bought the domain name for it, but that’s about as far as it went. I got busy with the NPMG scam and Jim got busted for some Internet porn scandal, and the last I heard about the site was that he let the domain expire.
So I bought Dirty Scottsdale for $19.95 with this package deal called “website tonight.” It was a basic three-page layout. A starter kit, really. There was never any intention to have millions of visitors, so the whole thing started out small and janky: basic fonts, crappy layout, a gay-ass Lamborghini at the top of the page. At the time I thought it was cool, though, because I was building a voice. A persona. This was going to be the place where I could say the things that were on my mind and people could respond. Right at the top, I wrote, “First ever reality blogger.”
I researched sites like TMZ and Perez Hilton and noticed that they had this kind of funny, snarky tone to them. Perhaps if I’m funny and sarcastic and just say what’s on my mind, I thought, maybe it’ll work. I was going to be the TMZ for civilians and non-celebs. Fame-chasers. The name was missing though. My name. My Internet handle. The Simple Life61 was big at the time, and Perez had already ripped his name from one of the girls. Paris was that hot chick that just wanted to be loved and fucked. Nicole was darker. So maybe I could be the cool and edgy Nicole Richie, I thought. A Yin to Perez Hilton’s Yang. He could do the celebrity bullshit; I would be underground.
And that’s how Nik Richie was born.
I found pictures of Alexa Carlson.
She was at the clubs every night: Pussycat Lounge, Suede, and 6. They were the same clubs I was going to, but we were there for different reasons. She went to be seen, to be photographed and adored. Alexa was one of the “it girls” of Scottsdale. Everybody knew her, or at the very least, knew of her. So I made her an example. On the site, I put up her picture and said, “She looks like a gorilla. We should call her G-Girl.”
I said what was on my mind. No filter.
No regard for how she’d react or feel.
Meanwhile, at NPMG, I was officially checked out. Sean was trying to weasel his way back in from the field and I had lost all motivation to stop him. At any given point of the day, I was either job-hunting on the company’s computer or working on my blog: posting another club promoter, another socialite. I was posting these people and I noticed the comments field was steadily growing in numbers. It was going viral right before my eyes. Not even a few days later, I woke up and had over two hundred comments, saying things like:
“I’m going to kill this Nik Richie guy.”
And: “Who the fuck is he?”
People were talking, and not just online. I would go out to the clubs and the tone had changed. Guys were pissed off; girls were worried they’d be next. It was the first time in my memory that photographers were being turned away for fear that the picture would end up on my site. There was speculation and paranoia. There was laughter. Bartenders were asking me, “Dude, have you been to Dirty Scottsdale yet? It’s fucking hilarious.”
To which I’d say, “Nah man, haven’t seen it. I’ll have to check it out.”
The intrigue around Nik Richie and who I was going to post next took over the nightlife scene. People either loved me or hated me, but no matter what, I was the center of conversation. A point of distraction. A voice people listened to. There was finally someone calling out the guidos and tool-tards62, all those guys trying to buy popularity with overpriced liquor and Ed Hardy shirts. People had always had unfavorable opinions, but it took a Nik Richie to actually come out and say them. Nik was the ego-check that Hooman Karamian couldn’t be, and the reactions varied from mild amusement to violence.
People were getting jumped in bathrooms. There was a $10,000 bounty being offered to the person who discovered my identity. I was still going out at night to interact with these people, to study them, but the air had clearly changed. The state of decadence that had once defined the city was slipping, and it was all Nik Richie’s fault.
At NPMG, I set the meetings up for the next two weeks. Good meetings, the kind that our SAEs could close half-assed and hungover. I even hired on Anthony and Andy from my CIG days, telling them it’s just like the music scam but with credit card processing. It was sort of my last-ditch effort to do the job right, even though it was about to be taken away from me. While I was building my name as Nik Richie, Sean was doing everything in his power to ruin Hooman Karamian, and after enough lies and gossip, he got his way. The call came in that I was to go back out in the field and that Sean would resume his position as the floor manager. By that point, I didn’t care. Being Nik Richie was proving to be more satisfying than any career ambitions I had. Even though my wife hated it and the site made no money, it became the only thing I looked forward to during the day. So I went back into the field, closing one or two meetings a day to keep afloat—basically, doing the bare minimum not to get fired.
Shortly after Sean got his job back I’d learn that we had made the most money in company history, and it had nothing to do with him. It was me. My meetings. That didn’t stop Sean from taking the credit, though. All the bosses were convinced that this guy just saved the company when all he really did was vulture my numbers, but I was sick of fighting with him. Sick of trying to prove myself to these people. Dirty Scottsdale made NPMG feel like a job, not a career. It was temporary, a way to make money for the time being instead of for the rest of my life.
My hour a day as Nik Richie far exceeded anything I had ever done as Hooman Karamian. It was a high. A release. I spoke and the people, the city, they hung on every word. At the time, I thought you couldn’t put a price on that kind of power. That’s right when the bill came.
Server fees. Go Daddy wanted $6,000 for something called “server fees.” At first I thought it was some kind of bullshit charge in the vein of an NPMG scam, but my wife explained that they were legitimate. Traffic kept pushing the server past the maximum bandwidth level so the bill and the charges were real. She finally had the ammunition she needed against me.
“It’s done,” she said. “It doesn’t make any money. All you’re doing is staring at half-naked girls all day and talking shit on people. Shut it down.”
My wife was jealous, but it had nothing to do with the half-naked women or what I said on the site. The bill for $6,000 wasn’t an issue, either. It was the fact that I made something that was more successful than anything she had done. My wife was a businesswoman, and a cutthroat one at that. Although her ambition was one of the things that drew me to her, the drawback was she never stopped competing. Even with me, her husband, she couldn’t help but think of me as an opponent. An enemy. And I could have dropped Nik Richie at that point, but I loved it too
much. More than I loved her. In my mind, Nik Richie was bigger than our marriage, so I was going to do everything in my power to keep him alive.
I invested more into him. More time. More money. I bought the domains for Dirty Newport and Vegas. I made a MySpace account, friending chick after chick. Networking. Spreading the message. The Scottsdale market was getting so big that it caught the attention of Bob Parsons, the owner of Go Daddy. He wanted to interview me for his radio show, and I said, “I’ll do it under two conditions: no one can know who I am, and we need to take care of these server fees.”
That would be the first time I used the Nik Richie persona for personal gain. Bob and I cut a deal: I’d do the interview and he’d drop the fees and put me on a more affordable plan. That wasn’t a normal practice for Bob, but he was a fan of the site and wanted to meet Nik Richie so badly that I could have asked for anything. He just so happened to catch me at a time where I wasn’t aware of my own power. I knew I had influence, but I had never been one to make demands or flaunt myself.
Self-awareness slowly crept in as time went on. There was a correlation between how much traffic the site got and the amount of times I heard my own name out at the clubs. Nik Richie was a celebrity, but he was also a ghost. No one knew where he was or what he looked like, so he could be everywhere or nowhere. He transcended the limitation of being a person, and the site played off that anonymity with its users. People could say what they wanted without guilt or consequences. Without fear. Free speech had always existed; I just happened to invent a new version of it, and people couldn’t get enough.
Once it got to the point where people were refusing to take pictures, I could no longer go to the nightlife websites like I had been doing. The well had run dry. If the site was going to continue, the users were going to have to step up and help, so I opened the floodgates. At the top of the site, I made my intentions known, typing, “I’m looking for civilian paparazzi. If you have photos or intel, please submit by clicking the link.”
At a casual glance, it looked like I was asking for help.
In actuality, I was forming my own army.
Traffic was up. Submissions were rolling in so fast and frequent that I could barely keep up with them—most of which were people I had seen already at Suede or 6 or one of the other clubs in Scottsdale. The diversity of douchebags and cokeheads and pretend models went through the roof, familiar faces that finally had names and backstories to go with them. Popularity grew as did adversity to the site. Those on the receiving end, the people being submitted, were pissed. They either wanted to kill me, sue me, or both. Death threats were being made in the comments, and there were rumors going around that I was the guy, but I was more concerned with losing my site. Losing my voice.
I became convinced that the lawyers were going to swoop in at any moment and shut me down, so I called the only guy I could trust with my secret for legal advice. His name was Ben Quayle: future congressman and son of former vice president Dan Quayle.
On the surface, that sounded prestigious, but the reality was that Ben was a fun guy to hang out with. He was a drinking buddy. Someone to chase chicks with. Never did we get into his political background or anything he did over at Snell & Wilmer, which was the law firm he practiced at. I never talked about NPMG or the site. If we were out, it wasn’t to talk about work. Not extensively, anyway. So when I called him about the potential legal issues I had, it was more or less out of the blue.
I told Ben I was Nik Richie, asking him to check out the site and see if there was anything that could land me in a courtroom. Claims were being made that the site was libelous and invaded people’s privacy, so I asked Ben to find out if those claims were valid. He agreed to do it, intrigued by the idea that I was living a sort of double life. Up until that point, I think Ben had only heard about Dirty Scottsdale in passing.
I never thought he’d want to write for it.
Ben got back with me to let me know I was legally in the clear, and he also referred me over to a different lawyer to help me incorporate the site into an LLC. What I didn’t expect was for him to want in, to want to work with me.
He said, “Hooman, this site is awesome. I want to write for it.”
“Well, I’m kind of the only guy writing as Nik Richie. I don’t know how it’d go over with someone else doing it.”
“No, you keep doing that,” he said. “I’ll do funny little articles about Scottsdale and the scene and everything, and I’ll go by a different name. I’ll go by Brock Landers.”
“Okay, but if we do this, no one can know,” I told him.
“Deal—okay, so what do you want me to do first?”
“Okay…well, you’re Brock Landers,” I said, “and your job is to find the hottest chick in Scottsdale.”
The Legend of Brock’s Chick (and the reason that is her name):
As I wrote in my first post, every once in awhile I will post a picture of a foxy lady who resides in Scottsdale. I requested submissions from the DS readers, and thanks to all of your emails, I received a whopping zero pictures. Jesus…I almost feel like the kid who eats paste in elementary school…almost.
Fortunately, after spending a night sitting on my couch, in the dark, with a bottle of whiskey, rhythmically flicking the switch on my table side lamp on and off, I remembered that I had the entire DS picture vault at my disposal. Flush with this realization, and coupled with the fact that I have a king-sized ego that can overcome any emotional setbacks, I pored through the numerous pictures on file at the DS headquarters and found the first lady worthy of some recognition.
This girl seems awfully popular since DS has received tons of pictures of her and she’s all over the worldwide Internets. Obviously this girl friggin loves to be photographed–it’s like crack to her. In fact, I’m fairly certain that she purposefully runs red lights so she can get her picture taken by the red light cameras.
Because of this, I was a little hesitant to choose her as my first foxy lady of Scottsdale. And, truth be told, I’m more of a brunette guy, so blonds have to be all the more stunning to gain my attention and admiration. That being said, this lady definitely passed the rigorous requirements that this site sets forth, and she is definitely foxy. See for yourself: (photos were embedded in the post of Brock’s Chick, most of them in her blonde phase)
I think she looks smart. I imagine us sitting around debating the modern implications of Sun Tzu’s teachings in “The Art of War,” except replace the first part of this sentence with “tickle fighting while listening to Kelli Clarkson” and you get a gist of the message I’m trying to convey.
Unfortunately, such dreams will never happen because we will never be able to date. The Arizona legislature recently passed a bill that forbids me and this young lady from being an item because we’re too good-looking. The debate surrounding this bill was very heated because our classic good looks are polarizing, but I understand their line of thinking. If we were to be seen together, our level of attractiveness would be a combined 142–and that’s on a scale of 1-to-5. There is a distinct possibility that persons in the general public would keel over and die from being inundated with such a high level of concentrated beauty. So, for the good of the public health, it is probably better if this lovely lady and I stay apart. I think we both deserve some sort of medal.
Latro,
Brock
We were like Batman and Robin.
Office drones by day, bloggers at night.
Nik Richie continued to produce snappy one-liners and Brock Landers came out with a new article every couple of weeks that usually got the comment boards in a frenzy. We had always been those guys at the clubs who enjoyed the people-watching aspect, but now it had a purpose. If we saw a chick with stripper streaks63 or a guy all tatted up, chances were Brock Landers was formulating another article. Another breakdown of the Scottsdale scene. We weren’t just hanging out anymore as drinking buddies. We were casing the place, gathering material. There was something about having Ben in on the joke t
hat made it all the more funny to me.
Being outed was still an issue, but I thought it was cool that people were on a wild goose chase to find out our identities. Every time we waited in line at the club to get in or at the bar to get a drink, the names Nik Richie or Brock Landers were rolling off someone’s tongue. Dirty Scottsdale was on everybody’s mind, even if they didn’t say it. We were the reason people waved away photographers and declined bottle service. If I said people were fake-tanning too much, the next weekend all the girls in the club were pale. If a post went up saying Ed Hardy or Burberry sucked, everyone would stop wearing it.
We were cleaning up Scottsdale, Ben and I, and we were doing nothing more than giving our honest opinions. The site was popular, so much so that the mainstream news stations were doing stories about us. That’s when Ben said he couldn’t do it anymore.
“It’s getting too big,” he told me. “I’ll never out you, but I’ve got to distance myself from this and focus on my career.”
I didn’t like it, but I understood. He had explained to me more than once how if anyone found out it about Brock Landers it could kill his family’s political name, so I didn’t fight him on it. Nik Richie continued on, and Ben Quayle broke ties with both him and Hooman Karamian.
It would be the first of many occasions I’d lose a friend over the site.
Ben’s secret, however, would not stay hidden for long.
It’d come out at the worst possible time.
61Reality series starring Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton that aired from Dec. 2003 through Aug. 2007. The first three seasons aired on the Fox network with the final two airing on E!
62A combination of “tool” and “retard.”
63Multi-colored hair extensions typically worn by strippers.
Ben Quayle
