The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  In the meantime, he focused on his plan. As part of it, he was keeping tabs on his domains, checking up on them now and then to make sure everything was in order. But one day in mid-October 1995, his assistant told him that something unusual had come up when checking on one particular domain that Kremen owned, Sex.com. It seemed like it was actually registered under someone else’s name. Kremen hadn’t thought much about that site since he’d registered it the year before, but he figured there just must be some mistake.

  At the time, anyone could go on a site called WHOIS—as in who is—and type in the name of a website to see the name of the registrant. So Kremen typed “Sex.com” in the empty field on the website, and hit enter. Sure enough, his assistant was right. The name on the registration page for Sex.com was no longer his. As he sat there staring at his screen, mystified, he had one thought: Who the fuck is Stephen Michael Cohen?

  CHAPTER 5

  SCREWED

  When Cohen left federal custody in August 1994, after serving three and one half years, he didn’t have much: a pair of shoes with holes, a borrowed shirt, old pants that hung loose around his prison-thinned waist, and a bus token out of town. Most of his property was with his ex-wives. He had spent so much of his time behind bars stewing in anger at Poer for leaving him—the old familiar feelings of unworthiness, betrayal, of loved ones treating him like he had never amounted to anything—but now he wanted to start anew. “I sat down with myself and I realized that being enraged had to end,” as he later recalled. So he decided to rebuild his life with the only two things he ever needed, a computer and a dream.

  It was good timing. The internet had undergone a radical transformation during his time behind bars with the advent of the world wide web. Gone were the hobbyist days of BBSs that he had known. The web was exploding online life into the mainstream. Like Kremen, Cohen had a knack for seeing the business that could come with the technology, and he saw it all as clear as day. In the privacy of their own homes, people could shut the door, turn on a computer, and surf for anything their hearts, and bodies, desired. He knew exactly what they’d be seeking, sex. His vision was the dark side of Kremen’s. It was the opposite of love, nothing touchy and feely like online dating, no nonsense about finding true love, it was about lust and release, pleasure in disconnection. And if anyone was going to cash in, it was going to be him.

  His plan was to bring the French Connection to the web. While he was in prison, he had left his computers at Midcom, the temp agency owned by his friend Steve Grande’s wife, Barbara Cepinko. Now that Cohen was out, however, Grande had no interest in having a sex site run from Midcom. So Cohen picked up his machines, and found the cheapest place he could get: a run-down office in the back of an auto salvage yard. Sitting there among the rusting carcasses of old rides, he set up his computers, pressed power, and heard the comforting rush of the hard drives spin. But when he logged on to the French Connection BBS, the members had long since left, since no one was running it while he was away. All he had left was a ghost town.

  Needing cash, Cohen spent the next several months doing consulting work for Midcom: helping with Cepinko’s collections, fixing her phone system, and keeping her technology up and running. When the vending machine stopped getting stocked, Cohen volunteered to pick the locks, stock them with snacks on his own, and collect the money. Grande and his wife found Cohen to be an odd guy, someone who showed up dressed in ratty jeans and T-shirts, but who maintained an unusual air of sophistication and snobbery. Cohen told them he was a lawyer, and offered to help sort out legal matters. When talking with problem clients, Cohen would introduce himself on the phone as an attorney and then, in a very professional manner, inform uncooperative callers that he would not hesitate to take legal action against them on Midcom’s behalf. If he was talking with lawyers, he would adopt a chummy tone, this was all business, and deftly get the other attorneys on his side.

  When he wasn’t playing fix-it man or lawyer, he was picking Grande’s brain for anything he could learn about the web. Grande had already migrated to the web, and had started TrainWeb, a destination dedicated to “preserving passenger rail heritage.” Special interest sites were among the earliest on the web, fueled on the passion of niche communities—such as gamers and sports fans. TrainWeb was for railroad nerds—with pictures of trains and tracks, reviews of rail lines, and links. And Grande was, to Cohen’s fascination, making money through a new form of advertising online: banner ads, small strips of advertising that, when clicked, would lead to the advertiser’s site.

  In October 1994, HotWired, one of the first online magazines, began selling the first banner ads, and they became an essential part of the emerging economy. When Cohen saw Grande’s banner ads, taken out by other train enthusiast sites, he saw dollar signs. To him, the conclusion was obvious. If someone could make money selling ads to a bunch of locomotive nerds, imagine how much money he could make from porn. What he needed, he realized, was a powerful destination, a website that would attract every horny guy with a computer and an internet connection. And if people wanted to find sex online, he knew, there was one place they’d probably type in first: Sex.com.

  Sitting at his PC in the junkyard one October day in 1995, Cohen surfed over to Sex.com but was surprised to find that there was nothing there: no porn, no ads, just a blank page. What moron would own a site as valuable as Sex.com and do nothing with it? He found out one day when he searched the domain name registration database, and typed in a WHOIS search for Sex.com. Who the fuck, he wondered, is Gary Kremen?

  Shortly after, Grande was sitting in his office, working on his TrainWeb site, when Cohen bounded in full energy. “I acquired a domain name!” Cohen told him, excitedly. “Sex.com!” Though Grande had no interest in hearing about Cohen’s latest sexcapades, he knew enough to wonder why anyone would let go of a domain as clearly valuable as Sex.com. Cohen didn’t go into the details of how he got the site. He just said that the previous owner had simply “lost interest,” and was eager to dump it. Whether that was true, Grande had no idea. This was Cohen, after all. The guy was always getting into weird deals, he figured as he watched Cohen go—anything was possible.

  * * *

  WHOIS Stephen Cohen? That’s what Kremen wanted to know after he found the guy’s name registered to Sex.com that October. There must be some kind of mistake, he figured. But the nascent business and culture of domain names was still unsettled. The past year had seen some contentious battles among the early adopters snatching up domains—but with the rules vague, it remained a Wild West. In 1993, MTV VJ Adam Curry registered MTV.com, informing the company he was staking ground for their future online only to be told, as he later put it, the company had “no interest in the internet.” But the company apparently gained interest by October 1994, when it sued Curry, who’d since quit, for the name. Curry, however, was staking his ground on principle, calling the case the “Roe v. Wade of the internet.”

  Curry eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, giving up the domain, but his point was made. MTV weren’t the only ones missing the boat. At the time, less than one third of Fortune 500 companies had registered their names online. For a May 1994 article in Wired, writer Josh Quittner registered McDonalds.com to prove his point. When he called the company to inform them, a media spokesperson asked, “Are you finding that the internet is a big thing?” Quittner sold them back the domain for $3,500, which he donated to a public school computer fund.

  Kremen didn’t know why or how Cohen had obtained what was rightfully his. Taking a break from the chaos of Match.com one day, he dialed the number on the domain registration page that Cohen had filled out, and was connected with a secretary who announced the name of the company, Midcom. “May I speak with Stephen Cohen?” Kremen asked.

  Cohen was meeting with Cepinko in her office when the secretary buzzed, saying he had a call. Cohen and Cepinko both knew it could be anyone. An ex-wife, an ex-con, some angry creditor, a lawyer, who was it this time? “He sa
ys his name is Gary Kremen,” the secretary replied.

  Cohen always knew when to put on his lawyerly airs, the way he’d threaten Midcom customers with lawsuits if they didn’t play ball. So certainly now, with Kremen, there was no reason to pull any punches. He listened smugly to this excitable guy with the nasally Midwestern accent blabber on about how and why Sex.com was under his name, like a poker player with a royal flush and no hurry to show his hand. “I’m a trademark attorney,” Cohen told Kremen, “let me help you understand.” Kremen believed him, and why wouldn’t he? He had no idea that Cohen had spent years impersonating lawyers and falsifying documents, had served three years in prison, and was now on probation for his conviction. He just knew the guy sounded convincing.

  Kremen listened intently as Cohen pedantically explained why, in fact, he was wrong. Since 1979, Cohen explained, he had operated a BBS called the French Connection. According to Cohen, French Connection had all kinds of discussion boards devoted to different areas of sexual interest: swinging, kink, and so on. But for those who wanted a general interest hot chat, well then, they went to the discussion board devoted to all kinds of sexual communications—or, as it was nicknamed on the BBS for decades—Sex.com.

  To which, Kremen thought: No way. There was no dot-com nomenclature in 1979, let alone 1989. This guy was full of shit. But when Kremen balked, Cohen told him that, because of his Sex.com discussion board on the French Connection, NSI, the domain name registration company, duly transferred the Sex.com domain back to its rightful owner, him. Kremen told Cohen to send him the documents from NSI that proved this, but he wasn’t backing down. “I’m Sex.com!” Cohen snapped, “you’re not Sex.com!”

  And then, like a conductor playing the orchestra, like the lawyer playing the chump, Cohen performed for Cepinko like he always did, showing her who was boss, and how this loser on the other end of the line was the one who would never amount to anything. “Go fuck yourself!” Cohen told Kremen, and slammed down the phone.

  Go fuck myself? Kremen thought, as he sat at his desk, dumbfounded, listening to the dial tone buzz. Who did this guy think he was? He was so smug, so cocky, so dumb but self-assured. He thought he was better than Kremen. Kremen wanted answers, so he called the one place that would have them: Network Solutions, NSI.

  The internet seemed like such an ephemeral thing, all the wires and data, the ones and zeroes, but there was a physicality to it. A business. Building. Bricks. Hallways. People. And across the country in a nondescript office building in Herndon, Virginia, a suburb forty minutes northwest of Washington, was one of the most important ones of all: NSI. The company, which had recently been acquired by Science Applications International Corporation or SAIC, the large, government technology contractor, was still the one stop in charge of the increasingly valuable domain name registration business. And a successful one at that. The company had begun charging $5 per domain name registration in September 1995, and was on its way to making $20 million in the first six months alone.

  The company had a policy that conflicts over domains were to be handled between the disputing domains, but Kremen wasn’t settling for that answer. After speaking with an agent from NSI, he was transferred to Sherry Prohel in NSI’s Business Affairs Office, who assured him she would look into the matter of Stephen Cohen and Sex.com. A few days later, Kremen received a call back from Bob Johnson, who identified himself as the vice president of NSI and SAIC. Finally, Kremen thought, someone who would get to the bottom of this. Johnson was familiar with the issue at hand, and told Kremen, in fact, that Ms. Prohel, whom Kremen had spoken with the other day, had requested a change order to transfer Sex.com back to him. Kremen felt a wash of relief at the words.

  However, Johnson went on, he had overridden her order. “Why would you do that?” Kremen wanted to know. There was a shuffling of papers. Because, Johnson explained, apparently someone at Kremen’s former company, Online Classifieds, had authorized Sex.com to be transferred to Cohen—and even accepted money in exchange. That was absurd! Kremen thought. Online Classifieds? That wasn’t even really a company, he knew. That was just the name he had used back in 1994 when he was first registering domain names out of his old apartment. Who at the “company” of Online Classifieds was Johnson talking about? Johnson couldn’t say, nor would he grant Kremen’s wish of being transferred to a supervisor. That, Johnson demurred, was that. The call was done.

  And again, Kremen thought, what the fuck? He reached out for the paper on his messy desk with NSI’s number, and stabbed the buttons as he dialed right back. “May I speak with Sherry Prohel please?” he demanded. “It’s Gary Kremen.”

  Some clicks, and then Prohel. “Who’s Bob Johnson,” Kremen asked, “and what’s his position at NSI?”

  A pause of confusion, the moment swelling. “There is no Bob Johnson working at NSI,” she replied. Kremen put two and two together. Bob Johnson was Stephen Cohen.

  * * *

  Sixty miles into the desert southwest of Las Vegas, Sheri’s Ranch, one of the many legal brothels in and around Pahrump, Nevada, baked in the sun. For the urgent day trippers from the Strip, Sheri’s had the necessary attractions—ten or twenty prostitutes, depending on the season, lounging scantily clad and ready inside the air-conditioning. Starting in the 1970s, the owner, James “Jimmie” Miltenberger, transformed it into his own empire, successful enough to buy him a private plane, yacht, and mansion.

  But one day in the fall of 1995, he found himself talking with a short, stocky, smooth-talking entrepreneur with graying hair who had bigger plans for the brothel, Stephen Cohen. Cohen’s eye widened as he painted the picture of what he wanted to build, as he put it, “the first-ever sport/adult fantasy resort in America.” It would be high-end, costing $100 million to build, and catering to the jet-set visitors in Vegas.

  Cohen gestured to the hundreds of acres of undeveloped desert surrounding Miltenberger’s dusty acreage. Just picture it: eighteen holes of golf, skeet-shooting, a race track, tennis, squash, convention facilities, and corporate timeshares. Convention center too. But that wasn’t all, Cohen went on, building to the good part. Inside the resort would be what Cohen said would be a sexual paradise. He wanted it to be like the recent movie Exit to Eden, a comedy starring Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell about two undercover cops on a tropical island for swingers and bondage enthusiasts—except this fantasy island would be a short drive from Vegas. Polynesian-themed, with waterfalls and Jacuzzis, it would provide more than five hundred exotic female escorts at the ready to fulfill every imaginable desire—and, for the right price, the ones they couldn’t imagine too. And its onomatopoeic name said it all: “Wanaleiya.”

  Miltenberger, a fixture in and around Vegas recognizable for his smoky sunglasses and jet-black helmet of Wayne Newton hair, had heard a lot of pitches in his time. But this one intrigued him—especially along with the $7 million that Cohen was offering to buy Sheri’s Ranch. On October 27, with an agreed upon $25,000 down and $50,000 monthly payments to follow, Miltenberger struck the deal with Cohen. It “sounded pretty good,” as Miltenberger later recalled. “They said, ‘We want to buy.’ I’m going to listen.”

  By the end of 1995, Cohen was back in action again. It had been weeks since the call from Kremen demanding back the Sex.com domain, a blip on his radar that was already fading to black. He had bigger plans on his mind: building a new empire of sex for the dawning digital age. The French Connection and The Club were just the prequel to what he was hatching now: Sex.com and Wanaleiya.

  He explained the plan one day in Anaheim to the board members of his new corporation, Sporting House Management. The gathering included a real estate agent friend, James Powell, who was already involved, as well as Cepinko and Powell’s ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Hite, the woman who’d once bought computers from Cohen and now ran Orange County Power Wash, a home cleaning service. Hite and Cepinko had no interest in the sex business, but Cohen, as always, was an able and confident pitchman. “I saw great opportunities in the brothel b
usiness, large sources of revenues,” as Cohen later recalled. The Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s most notorious brothel, was doing more than $25 million annually—$5 million from merchandising alone, “great cash,” as Cohen put it. Hite was intrigued—but still skeptical, as she took notes, this was prostitution after all, right?

  When Cohen heard doubters, he had the habit of grinning at their naïveté, and then condescendingly schooled them in what he knew. When he spoke of Wanaleiya, he called it “the island.” He spoke smoothly. “It may not necessarily be the cup of tea of the people sitting in this room,” as he described later during a court case, “but I feel today that there is a need in our society for this type of an entity. The island, I think, is spectacular. I think it would be sold out on a daily basis. A lot of people would pay.” Think of it this way, he went on, “a lot of people want to take vacations, men and women that are engaged in business, that have careers, that are not necessarily looking for long-term relationships, have sexual desires, want to go to a place, a place something like a place of Eden where they—it’s clean, medically, a place that they can engage in wild and crazy sex that’s controlled. For an all-inclusive fee.”

  He compared it to Hedonism II, the notoriously sexual resort in Jamaica. “It is a hotel that—the average person is naked,” he said. “Swinging activity takes place. It’s not uncommon to find people engaging in intercourse in the Jacuzzis and on the beach and various places. People come there that are single and meet other singles or married people.” Wanaleiya, however, would “be more inclusive. Wanaleiya was going to have a section for married people, strictly for married people, an area for swingers, an area for gays, an area for lesbians. It was going to be a five-star-type resort, something with the class that you would find at the Ritz Hotel to—from the food you ate, to your existence at this place.”