The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  But it wasn’t just the meth that was fueling him in this next round of his fight. It was his new girlfriend: porn star Kym Wilde. A tall, tough, chestnut-haired thirty-two-year-old, Wilde had escaped an abusive childhood in New Jersey, bouncing between boarding schools and foster homes until running away to California at seventeen. While working at a hotel, a modeling agent recruited her for a shoot—which turned out to be for Larry Flynt Publishing. By twenty, she was starring in adult films.

  In the decade since, she’d starred in more than two hundred adult films, many of the sadomasochistic variety (Red Bottom Blues, Just Beat Me, Catfighting 5, and so on). After they met through a mutual friend, Kremen’d hired her as what he called the “industrial relations specialist” for Sex.com. In essence, she was the company spokesmodel, someone who could sign autographs at conventions, pose for fans, and chat up potential advertisers.

  Despite their radically different backgrounds, they liked each other from the start. Wilde was charmed by Kremen’s smarts, his sweet disposition, and eccentric personality. He was the kind of guy, she thought, who needed someone to help him pick out a clean shirt and make sure his pants were zipped before a meeting. Kremen appreciated Wilde’s wild streak, but also her maternal nature, how she took care of him when he needed it. They also shared a taste for drugs, but Wilde had one benefit there for him too: she was the only person who seemed capable of making sure he didn’t take too much. Before long, they were dating, albeit with discretion. “I wasn’t someone he was going to take home to mother,” as Wilde later recalled.

  Instead, she became the den mother at the Dogpatch. With Crab’s help and Kremen’s enthusiasm, they decided to build her an S&M dungeon in the basement where she could shoot videos and pose with Sex.com clients. And so soon enough, among the dust and debris, Crab was bringing in shackles and whips and hammering steel restraints into the wall. They installed a big wheel, where clients could be strapped, arms and legs spread, then spun in circles. They hammered a long stretching table in front, like some medieval torture device. One by one, reporters writing about Kremen’s amazing case would be ushered in to the Dogpatch dungeon, given a tour by Wilde as Kremen snickered and mapped out his plan to clean up Sex.com and transform it into a mainstream site.

  “It may be kind of dumb of me, but I think I can actually do it,” Kremen told Wired. “I think I can make more money by transitioning it into a more mainstream kind of thing . . . the old site was so obnoxious people wouldn’t come back,” he went on. “My bet is they’re going to come back here.”

  It wasn’t bluster. He’d already severed contracts with explicit advertisers. He’d jettisoned Cohen’s more garish advertisements, and replaced hard-core banners with discreet text-only links. Still, as reporters noted, a homepage pawning links to Foot Fetish and Watersports sites was hardly innocent. “It’s still very definitely a porn site,” as Wired wrote of Sex.com, “and it’s probably not something that most people would call mainstream.”

  But then the reporters would be gone, Wilde would be sleeping, and it was just Kremen again, jacked up on speed, surfing on his computer for anything he could find on Cohen’s fugitive life in Tijuana. After working with private eyes and lawyers, he’d acquired plenty of details: his address, his associates, and the rest. And that’s when, one night, he got an idea. If he wasn’t succeeding at smoking Cohen out of his hole, then maybe he could offer a reward for someone who could.

  Kremen grabbed his keyboard. “WANTED,” he typed in large bold letters, “Stephen Michael Cohen.” He included Cohen’s phone numbers, his email, and a description. “Stephen Michael Cohen was born on February 23, 1948 in Los Angeles, California,” he wrote. “Cohen is a white male, 53 years old, with brown thinning hair, brown eyes, a gray/brown mustache, high forehead, and is approximately 5′6″ to 5′8″ in height. Cohen weighs approximately 220–230 pounds (perhaps more), has a florid face and nose, and is partial to wearing imprinted t-shirts.” He listed Cohen’s properties, the home at Rancho Santa Fe, a list of fifteen known associates. And he offered $50,000 for any information leading to Cohen’s arrest.

  With that, on May 30, 2001, he posted the Wanted ad on Sex.com. “I want to see to it that this doesn’t happen to anyone again,” Kremen told the Register, an internet news site. “I’ll gladly pay out anyone per the legal terms and conditions, if it means putting the man who stole millions from me behind bars once and for all.”

  * * *

  It seemed like something out a movie about the cartels. A team of bounty hunters busting down doors in Mexico. Stephen Cohen, in a panic, staring down the kidnappers who wanted to bring him back to Kremen for $50,000. But then, somehow, shots are fired, two people taking bullets, blood spilling into the battle over Sex.com.

  Or, at least, that’s how Cohen’s attorney put it in a letter to Kremen’s attorney, claiming the reward had led to a shooting in Tijuana. “What your client may have thought to be a prank has backfired,” Dorband wrote. “Seven people have been arrested in Mexico attempting to abduct Mr. Cohen. Two have been shot. There is now blood on your client’s hands, and I sincerely trust that you have previously advised him, based on my letter to you several weeks ago, that the reward offer should be immediately withdrawn. Your client has now exposed himself (and those acting in concert with him) to serious civil, and possibly criminal, liability. I trust you will take the appropriate action to prevent further bloodshed and even greater exposure to liability on the part of your client and his agents.”

  Whether it had really happened or not, no one would ultimately say. But Cohen was sure about one thing: he wasn’t going to sit idle while Kremen was enlisting bounty hunters to come after him for his money, or his life. While Kremen was up in the Dogpatch working his computer to find out whatever he could on Cohen, Cohen began plotting ways to fight back. There was just one problem: he was cornered, afraid to come back into the United States since fleeing to Mexico. So whatever he was going to do had to be hatched from Tijuana. With his family out of the Rancho estate, he tried, unsuccessfully, to cancel the home insurance—again violating the order of the court against meddling with what was now Kremen’s property. He had also tried to falsify and backdate a lease to Brownfield on the guesthouse to make rendering the judgment even more tricky.

  One day, Marco Moran, a young associate of Cohen’s, got a call from his boss to come to his office, where he found the Toad was waiting. The twenty-seven-year-old had been working with Cohen on his various ventures, and was something of a whiz with spamming: owning blocks of network addresses, buying bandwidth, and pulling other tricks to send mass emails online in bulk.

  “Gary is going to take that property,” Cohen told them, referring to the house in Rancho. From what Moran could gather, as he translated their conversation, Cohen and El Sapo were hatching a scheme to make it appear as if the house was in fact owned by someone other than Cohen: a fictitious uncle of Rosey’s whom Cohen named Enrique Suárez, after a real lawyer he knew in Mexico. If Cohen could prove this fake rich uncle was the real owner of Rancho, then Gary wouldn’t get it because it wasn’t his in the first place.

  But as time passed, Cohen’s plan was going nowhere—and instead he turned to more desperate measures. “At that point we already knew by him that he was losing the property,” as Moran later recalled, “and he was really mad . . . he was screaming.” Cohen dispatched a few other of his associates to take a trip up to Rancho. Soon after they set out for the border. They went through the grimy streets of Tijuana, across the border, up the coast, past San Diego, and into the winding roads of Rancho Santa Fe, the scent of lemons and eucalyptus in the air. They parked the car, and stepped out on the grounds—taking in the tall palms, the glistening pool, the guesthouse, the red-tiled roof. Jack Brownfield met them, acting as the contractor for what Cohen had in mind. And then they got to work.

  * * *

  “This is what I’m talking about right here, man,” said rapper Snoop Dogg, dressed in a purple suit and black fed
ora, clutching his wireless microphone as two women in purple bikinis and purple boas shimmied against him. Dozens of men in pimp gear and half-dressed women crowded the stage behind him. “Keeping it real player for y’all,” Snoop went on, “for the two thousand plus one at the Players Ball!”

  It was June 29, 2001, at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and the biggest party in Sin City was under way. The Players Ball was a homage to the notorious party for pimps in Chicago that dated back to the early 1970s. But the players gathered this night were the rulers of a different industry: online porn. They were in town for the summer edition of Internext, the adult internet convention. It was like the quintessential inside joke. The original innovators and moguls of the digital age weren’t the wannabes in Silicon Valley in the mainstream industry. The real players on the internet were the misfits and outlaws, pariahs and pornographers partying this weekend in Vegas. They had established the rules and practices that others were now racing to imitate. The party had always been theirs.

  The Players Ball, started by promoter Darren “D-Money” Blatt and cohosted with his brother, the adult marketing schmoozer Kevin Blatt, had become an annual tradition. The invite-only soirees had all the trappings one would expect: blowjobs in the hallways, coke in the backrooms, porn legends Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson making the rounds. Rapper Ice-T and funk master George Clinton had performed at the event. The Ball culminated with the presentation of the Big Woody Award—a giant wooden penis—for biggest player of the night. This evening it was going to the featured performer, Snoop. “I’m truly honored to be holding this motherfucker right here,” he said, hoisting the Woody high.

  But the ultimate player of the weekend was the chubby goateed guy with dominatrix girlfriend mingling out in the crowd, Gary Kremen. And it was all because he had the biggest Woody of all, Sex.com. Everyone wanted a piece of him: the porn stars, the advertisers, the credit card processors, the Blatts. Though he’d taken Sex.com back more than six months earlier with the specific intention of keeping the site, and himself, clean, the temptations were getting the better of him.

  He and Wilde had become the prom king and queen of the weekend, arm in arm, fake spanking each other for show, then slipping into the darker corners for a hit of blow.

  The cocktail of sex, drugs, and money, however, couldn’t keep Kremen’s mind from his singular obsession: getting Cohen, and his $65 million. Yes, he was the toast of the sex industry, and already earning a half million a month. But, deep down, it meant nothing without victory over his rival. The power and paranoia sank their talons into his brain, guiding his every move against Cohen.

  As the days and weeks blurred by, he worked overtime on his phone and laptop, firing off missives to Wagstaffe and digging up what he could on Cohen and his assets. Cohen’s money, he found, was everywhere—a shell game with clues around the world. They subpoenaed the Bank of N. T. Butterfield of Bermuda; ATU General Trust British Virgin Islands; VP Bank Gruppe of Liechtenstein; Liechtensteinische Landesbank Aktiengesellschaft of Liechtenstein; Allgemeines Treuunternehmen of Liechtenstein; ABN Amro Bank of the Netherlands; Banco Internacional S.A. of Mexico; Banco Nacional de México S.A. of California; Banque Internationale à Luxembourg S.A. of Belgium; Rabobank International/Rabobank Utrecht of New York; and Rabo Robeco Bank S.A. of Luxembourg.

  And then, finally, Wagstaffe delivered something tangible: the keys to Cohen’s mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. Elated, Kremen drove down from San Francisco alone. By the time he got there, night had fallen, and with no street lamps he found himself lost in the winding roads. Tired and weary, he pulled over instead, shutting his eyes until the sun came up. When it did, it was spectacular, the golden orange hues spilling over the trees, the smell of lemons and eucalyptus in the air. Kremen had his bearings now, and continued on his way with the help of his map, until he saw it: his new home. He could hardly believe it as he parked in front of the three-car garage, and walked along the stones to the large wooden door. He could see the tennis court in the back, the kidney-shaped pool, all his.

  The moment he unlocked the door and stepped onto the Mexican tile floor of the large, empty foyer, he felt his eyes search the room and his brain struggle to process the incoming data. The house had been trashed. The room was gutted: electrical sockets ripped from the walls, ceiling fans gone, wires hanging from the walls. The farther he walked, the more wreckage he registered: the door handles were ripped out, the ceiling lights gone, so too the cabinets, the shower doors, and more. In the study, the shelving looked like it had been pulled out by King Kong; in the bathrooms, the sinks were stripped down to the piping, the toilets were gone too. Then Kremen felt something underfoot—the squish of water on the carpet.

  The breeze he felt wasn’t coming from the air conditioner, it was coming from all the wide-open windows and doors, the screens gone, tiny black turds of four-legged visitors poppy-seeding the tile. He ran outside, to find the lemon and eucalyptus trees pulled out of the soil, the potted plants overturned, the sprinklers ripped out of the lawn, even the tennis net gone. The only furniture left outside was in broken pieces floating in the pool. As he stood there, alone in his trashed new palace, there was only one word pounding in his head: Cohen.

  It was the first time he felt more than anger, he felt fear. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the ransacked home. But the first moment he could, Kremen went online, surfed over to Usenet, and bought himself a gun.

  CHAPTER 12

  COME AND GET IT

  La Cruz de Loreto, a sleepy fishing village on the southwestern coast of Mexico, wasn’t known far beyond the couple thousand locals. It was so remote, two hours southwest of the nearest tourist town, Puerto Vallarta, that the main place to stay in the area called itself Hotelito Desconocido, the “Unknown Hotel.”

  But for those in the know, the village was a hidden gem. They could spend their days on the gently lapping shore of the Peñitas de la Cruz Point beach, and take in an evening stroll through the quiet streets around the town square. Tucked between the Pacific and the Sierra Madre mountains, the area teemed with more than 150 varieties of wildlife, designated by UNESCO as an aquifer paradise. The Hotelito Desconocido drew ecotourists from around the world to stay amid the palm trees in wide, round palafitos, thatched cottages on stilts with their own unique names: La Pera (“the pear”) or La Chalupa (“the boat”).

  But to Cohen, La Cruz de Loreto meant one thing and one thing only: camarones, shrimp. Thanks to the urging of his confidant, Jack Brownfield, he now owned 40 percent of Productora Camaronera del Mar El Ermitaño, a shrimp farm built on the estuaries here. It had been done as an appeasement to Brownfield, a bone thrown his way that meant little to Cohen but the world to his friend.

  As Brownfield began work on the estuaries, he assured Cohen that his investment was going to pay back in spades. With water temperatures averaging an ideal 27 degrees Celsius, fishermen in the Cruz de Loreto Cooperativo were catching more than 10,000 pounds from the estuary every year—numbers that Brownfield expected to triple by 2003. He was getting larvae from the best sources in Mexico, he insisted, at what he said was a steal—about $5 per 1,000 larvae.

  The juvenile shrimp, he went on, generally grew to about one gram in size after five weeks, safe in their predator-free nurseries, before being released into the estuary for grow-out. All in, they were sitting on a million-dollar gold mine of shrimp, easy. And for Cohen, it was all part of his plan to keep Kremen from getting the money. He was living in a big house, with a private driver, a strip club, a shrimp farm, and it was all out of Kremen’s grasp. “There’s nothing that Gary can do because he’s never going to get the assets,” Cohen told Brownfield.

  But the two didn’t have the luxury of talking shrimp for long. Not long after Kremen had found the house in Rancho Santa Fe trashed, the court came calling. With Cohen on the lam, the court tracked down Brownfield and asked him to send a message to his boss: if Cohen didn’t return what he’d taken from the house, then the court would have
no choice but to pursue his wife, Rosey, whose name was on the Rancho lease. Brownfield didn’t need any more trouble with the law, and obliged. “Steve,” he told Cohen, “wherever that stuff is, you’ve got to get it back because if you don’t, they’re going to arrest Rosey, you know, and that’s not right because she doesn’t have anything to do with this thing.”

  Cohen considered his options. As much as he despised Kremen, he didn’t want his wife or her daughters to suffer. Even Cohen had his limits. He drew the line at his family. “Okay,” he told Brownfield. “I’ll give the stuff back. But they have to come and get it.”

  * * *

  After finding the Rancho house trashed, Kremen enlisted some new help to resolve the problem: Margo Evashevski, a Stanford MBA he knew from Silicon Valley who was now working as a private eye. Bright and inquisitive with shoulder-length brown hair, Evashevski had quit the dot-com race for a higher pursuit. “What’s going to make me work hard? It’s not money,” as she later said, “it’s the truth.” Evashevski had been working as a corporate investigator, gathering information for Silicon Valley companies. She enjoyed the work, solving puzzles, searching for the truth, and was known for her unrelenting work ethic.

  Evashevski had met Kremen through a mutual Stanford friend, interned with him for a bit after his Match.com days, and considered him a mentor—albeit an eccentric one at that. “My peers are more conservative, but he’s a risk taker,” she recalled, “and he’s not afraid to take a crazy idea and go ahead with it, even if everybody else is telling him that it’s stupid.” As friends, Kremen had a habit of calling in the middle of the night, and did so with an offer: he wanted to hire her as his private eye to dig up as many of Cohen’s hidden assets as she could find.