The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  She agreed, driving down to Rancho to meet Kremen in his new lair. What she found shocked her, even for Kremen. The bare house had turned into a fancier version of the Dogpatch, with Kym Wilde, Crab, and the others moving in alongside Kremen. Though they cleaned up the house, Kremen didn’t bother to decorate, choosing instead to sleep on a mattress on the floor. Crab, the intrepid carpenter, was building a new dungeon for Kym to match the one back in the Dogpatch. Kremen let Evashevski set up her own detective’s office in the house.

  Kremen would be there all hours of the day and night, reveling in Evashevski’s pursuit of Cohen, as she tracked down his assets, interviewed his associates, and pieced together what she could about his life. “He’s a master at hiding things,” she said. The way he put his things in other people’s names was just the start. “He knows the exact countries to hide things in, how to move things,” she went on. In all her years, she’d never encountered someone like Cohen: “He could be charming, he’s very persistent when he wants something,” she later recalled, but he was pathological. “He didn’t seem to be able to tell the truth,” as she put it. “He was so against telling the truth that he didn’t even make sense. It was very difficult for me to see this skilled con man, but I knew from people that knew him back in the day that he was very good.”

  The more Evashevski learned of Cohen—his companies, his knack for exploiting new technologies—the more he reminded her of someone in particular. “In a lot of ways, I think he’s similar to Gary,” she later recalled. They both had their hands in a lot of different pots, and knew how to exploit new technologies before others. “Gary is kind of mainstream, Cohen would do everything to fuck the system,” she said. “I think Cohen could have been absolutely successful if he had not always trying to skirt the law.”

  The law, however, was on Kremen’s side when he received news that Cohen had agreed to return the property he’d stolen from the house in Rancho Santa Fe. There was just one catch: Kremen had to come get the stuff himself. Though Cohen had been ordered to turn it over, Kremen heard that Cohen had no plans to go to such efforts. So Kremen took along Evashevski and, for security, a hulking handyman named Mark to retrieve his things. They drove to the designated address, a storage shed near the Mexican border. But when they arrived, they were not alone.

  Standing out front was a silver-haired Texan with narrow eyes and a Southern drawl who’d been dispatched by Cohen to hand over the goods, Jack Brownfield. Brownfield took a long look at Kremen, heavy and sweating, and thought he seemed scared. “They thought I was going to come in there with an AK-47 or something and kill everybody,” he later recalled. He wasn’t far off-base, regarding Kremen at least. But when Evashevski heard his name, she knew she had his number—having studied up on him in her research, where he traveled, where he shopped—and used it to her advantage. “You like to get your hair cut at Supercuts,” she said, knowingly, “just north of L.A.”

  Brownfield eyed Evashevski. “That freaks me out a little bit,” he told her. But he admired her gumption. Kremen, however, seemed a bit odd—and yet oddly familiar. His loose clothes, his sweatpants, the way he boasted about how much he was making from Sex.com. He sounds a lot like Stephen Cohen, thought Brownfield, who put Kremen in his place. “Look, Gary,” he said, “you know, you got Sex.com, but you didn’t do it, so don’t be gloating to me because I know what happened.” Brownfield went on, “You fell into this thing. If Steve Cohen hadn’t done that and built this business, you wouldn’t have got shit for that thing.”

  Kremen didn’t care what he said, he just wanted the stuff. Brownfield opened up the storage shed, and they took a long look inside: the doorknobs, the sprinklers, the cabinets, everything Cohen had stripped was there, including the suit of armor he used to keep in the foyer. When Kremen got back to Rancho with the stuff, the first thing he did was call Cohen, whose number Evashevski had dug up, to gloat. “Hey Steve,” Kremen said, in his nasally voice, “I’m sitting on the toilet in your bathroom!” Then he held up the phone so Cohen could hear him flush.

  * * *

  By early 2002, Cohen was growing more desperate. It was hard for him to think about anything but the one man who was angling to take his camarones—and everything—away: Gary Kremen. As preoccupied as Kremen had become with getting Cohen, Cohen had become consumed with keeping Kremen away. They were like two pro athletes locked in battle, Federer–Nadal, cat and mouse, catch me if you can. But just when one got a leg up on the other, the other would fight back. Cohen would be up one day, and down the next.

  Despite ransacking the house in Rancho, hiding some of Sex.com riches offshore, and laundering other piles of it through the strip club and the shrimp farm, Cohen couldn’t rest. His life was that of a fugitive, he couldn’t even return to the country of his origin without fear of getting arrested because of the open warrant and the $65 million tab he refused to pay.

  In a series of filings, he tried to get the court to drop the case. He complained of Kremen’s wanted ad—that was still sending bounty hunters his way—insisted his faxes to the court were being mysteriously destroyed. As for the $65 million order, he equated it to a “death warrant,” as he wrote in one declaration, saying that it violated his constitutional rights, specifically the Thirteenth Amendment—the one that abolished slavery. “Just how is the defendant expected to live?” he wrote. “How is the defendant expected to purchase the necessities of life, such as toilet paper, food, clothes and etc.? It’s saying for the rest of my life that everything I own must go to Gary Kremen.”

  And the thing he wanted to do most was ruin every trace of anything of his before Kremen could get his paws on the goods, starting with the Rail Court property in San Ysidro, on the U.S. side of the Tijuana border, that served as his microwave internet hub. By now, Cohen was servicing thousands of customers in Tijuana, earning tens of thousands of dollars a month. As sociopathic as Cohen seemed, he really was brilliant in his own way: seeing the potential early on for dating on the net, and now as an internet provider to an underserved population. It seemed like a perfect scheme from the start. But with Kremen closing in, he could feel it all slipping away.

  Dejected and prepared for the worst, Cohen called Marco Moran, his young associate, into his office one day for help. “The property in Rail Court is no longer mine,” Cohen told Moran. “Gary is going to take possession of that property no matter what.” If that happened, Cohen feared, Kremen would own the heart of his telecom enterprise, sending internet access to Mexico, and ruin the empire he’d so deftly engineered. He needed to buy some time, and Moran could help. First, he wanted to lease the empty lot next to the property on Rail Court. And then, Cohen said, he wanted to hire a company to put up a fence around his equipment and the Rail Court property.

  Moran didn’t understand what Cohen was doing, but soon went up to the property. The dusty plateau held the old shack, dotted with white microwave dishes. A metal container sat nearby with the microwave equipment inside, connected to the shack by lines of fiber. As Border Patrol cars streamed by, Moran inspected the adjacent empty field, and arranged to lease it. With the land in place, he followed Cohen’s other plan, hiring a company to install a large, high fence that encircled the Rail Court property but extended far into the empty field he’d just procured. Under the sweltering sun, they sandblasted the new fence to make it look old. Then they cut the existing fence to the ground, and buried it under the dirt. As far as Moran was concerned, he was just following orders. What Cohen was up to now was anyone’s guess.

  * * *

  Tijuana. Kremen could see the red, white, and green flag waving over rooftops just past the several lanes of cars heading toward the Border Patrol gate. But he wasn’t there to wait in line to cross into Mexico. He had driven down around an hour from Rancho Santa Fe to claim his next piece of Cohen’s bounty: the shack on Rail Court that Cohen was using to unlawfully beam internet access from the United States into Mexico. Kremen didn’t just want the property, he wanted the busines
s, which, according to their research, seemed to be generating tens of thousands of dollars a month.

  In a parking lot near the border, he met up with Chris Jester, a mountainous, affable hacker from San Diego who’d been making his living in and around the border in the internet business. Jester had crossed paths with Cohen at one point, and helped him with the technical setup at the Rail Court property. After Margo Evashevski tracked him down, Kremen showed him the court order for the property and asked if he’d help him get inside and get it up and running again.

  Jester already viewed Cohen skeptically, and was more than happy to help—considering the litany of people he claimed had been burned by Cohen already. “My understanding of everything from the horse’s mouth,” as Jester put it, “is that he didn’t pay anyone anything. He basically created it with the plan ‘oh, do this for me and I’ll pay you after it makes money,’ right? So he got everyone to work on that promise.” Plus, the whole setup was skirting regulations, as Jester gathered, sending the microwave internet over the fence to TJ constituted “an illegal border crossing,” as he put it.

  Jester was savvy to the ways of the border, and had brought along a U.S. marshal to oversee them taking the property. Supposedly, some rich family had originally owned it, planting palm trees to accentuate a house with sweeping views of Mexico. Photos existed of it with Model Ts parked outside. More recently, it had been an old used car lot at one point, Kremen learned, before Cohen had taken it over.

  They turned a hard left before the Border Patrol, crossed a railroad track, and drove along a rocky dirt road alongside the tall border fence with barbed wire circling the top. As they drove slowly up the brown hill dotted with cacti, Kremen could see a run-down shack surrounded by a few dying palm trees, fiber optic cables, and, on the roof, microwave dishes pointed toward Mexico. Nearby, the word Pacnet, Cohen’s name for his internet company, was painted on a marker. A large fence encircled the property.

  Kremen eagerly bounded out of the car with his bolt cutters. With a strong squeeze he closed the jaws of the bite over the chain, feeling the satisfying snap as the links broke away before him. When he opened the shack, he and Jester were bowled over by an overwhelming smell. There was rat shit everywhere, and dead rats too, like no one had been inside for weeks, or, perhaps more likely, bothered to clean it in the heat. Covering their noses, they found a light. Racks of equipment reached to the ceiling. Jester followed a large black cable snaking through the room up to the roof, and out to a microwave dish. He and Kremen followed the direction of the dish, over the fence, over the hill, and, with binoculars, could see where it was pointed: to another dish on a black building in downtown Tijuana. They figured out that he was beaming to that location where it was distributed throughout the city—to clients including a golf course, who were paying an estimated $10,000 a month. It was the same address where Cohen had a penthouse, his mission control on the top of the black building.

  Both Jester and Kremen figured that Cohen was violating all kinds of laws by smuggling internet access across the border. But seeing this in action now, the two dishes pointed to each other, the reality of what Cohen had engineered filled them with the kind of awe that two geeks like them would feel when in the presence of someone who out-geeked even them. “Motherfucker,” Jester said, “this guy is pretty damn smart.”

  Kremen couldn’t wait to shut off the service quickly enough. Back inside among the tangle of shit, dead rats, and computer equipment, Jester spotted a telephone. “I bet you if we turn off the internet somebody is gonna call,” he told Kremen. Sure enough, about five minutes after they turned off the power, the phone rang. The equipment must have had some kind of alarm that notified Cohen, who was the one calling. “Hey Steve,” Jester said, with a smile. Cohen assumed he was there fixing something or other. “What are you doing?” Cohen asked. “Are you working on the servers?”

  “No,” Jester replied. It didn’t take long for Jester to start telling Cohen that he was there with Kremen when they heard the squeal of tires. They came out to see a police car and a car of Mexican men, including Marco Moran, who claimed to work for Cohen. “You vandalized the property!” one of them screamed at Kremen, pointing to the microwave dish. When the cops intervened, Kremen showed them his court order for the property. But the Mexican men did their own parceling of the area.

  “This is Montano’s land,” one of them said, pointing to the shack, “and this is our land,” he went on, pointing to the side they were on near the fence, and showing their lease. Kremen, they insisted, was trespassing here, and had no right to go inside, let alone deactivate Mr. Cohen’s microwave dishes, and interrupt the internet service throughout Tijuana. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” one of the men told Kremen, “you just turned off Mexico.”

  Kremen’s mind reeled. “We have a court order, this is a civil dispute,” he told the cops. “This is a con man we’re dealing with here.” But the cops decided this was a civil matter, and left the scene. Kremen called his most recent high-powered attorney for help, Richard Idell, a San Francisco behemoth in a bow tie who’d cut his teeth representing rock promoter Bill Graham. “This is bad,” Idell told him, when he heard that, assuming their map was correct, Kremen had in fact vandalized their property. “Something’s wrong,” Kremen said, “why would Cohen lease the property when he had all the other land?”

  Kremen found out the answer after he called a master surveyor to take a look at the property. The surveyor’s crew got to work, referring to maps, and using GPS gear to mark the boundaries. One of the crew worked the grounds with a metal detector, searching for any markers in the ground when his equipment picked up a signal. Brushing back the dirt, they called Kremen over and showed him what they’d found: the top of a fence, which had been cut off and covered.

  Kremen realized what Cohen had done. He had extended the fence so that Kremen would be tricked into committing the crime of vandalism. Kremen was awed by Cohen’s gamesmanship. He felt the worst possible feeling, the trigger that had haunted him his whole life, from his mother, from Sheldon (his childhood nemesis), and now, from Cohen. He felt outsmarted. And if Cohen outsmarted him here, he wondered, “what other things am I missing?” There was only one place he could go to find out: down the hill and across the border into Mexico.

  CHAPTER 13

  SEX, DRUGS, AND “CAMARONES”

  “What was the look on his face?” Cohen asked. “What was his expression?”

  It was shortly after Kremen’s confrontation at the Rail Court property, and Cohen was in his office in Tijuana, grilling Marco Moran for details. It was the delicious payoff to his plotting, after all, how he had cut down the old fence, leased the other land, put up a new fence. He wanted Moran to tell him just how angry and frustrated Kremen had become. As Moran later recalled, “Steve obviously was very happy that he was accomplishing what he planned.”

  The cat and mouse game with “crazy Kremen,” as Cohen had taken to calling his rival, had continued to escalate. He tried to make it a kind of entertainment, calling Kremen now and then to taunt him, or shoot the breeze. But Cohen, despite his ingenious efforts to outsmart Kremen, was getting cornered. Though he was living a comfortable life in a penthouse in Tijuana, it would have been hard to go through a day without worrying that Kremen, or a bounty hunter, might be around the corner. It wasn’t just his own safety and security he had to fear, it was his wife, Rosey, and her two daughters. He couldn’t even enjoy the simple pleasures of life without the possibility of it all coming to an end.

  To Cohen’s dismay, some of the most powerful players were aligning themselves with Kremen in his case against Network Solutions, which ruled over the domains business for years. Network Solutions was only getting bigger too, having been bought for $21 billion by another internet registration company, Verisign. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading civil liberties group based in San Francisco, filed a brief on Kremen’s behalf, asserting that by handing over Sex.com to Cohen, Network Solutions had
recklessly abused its power. “A court has ruled that Network Solutions can screw up its monopoly on dot-com domain name management and face no consequence for its actions,” EFF attorney Robin Gross said in a release. “We hope the appellate court will recognize the danger in eliminating all accountability for this key component of Internet governance.”

  In another blow, Cohen saw that the American Internet Registrants Association, the Washington, D.C.–based group that represented the most powerful domain owners online, had also filed a brief on Kremen’s behalf. William Bode, the AIRA attorney, called the case against Kremen “fundamentally unfair” with “very substantial” stakes for anyone who wanted to establish property on the internet, whether it was a business or an individual. “There are cases like that of Kremen’s in which names are lost because appropriate procedures to prevent domain name hijackings were absent,” Bode went on.

  On August 30, 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals thwarted Cohen’s attempt not to pay Kremen the $25 million. “In light of Cohen’s status as a fugitive from justice and his egregious abuse of the litigation process, we exercise our discretion to dismiss his appeal,” the three-judge panel wrote in their ruling. Fugitive from justice. Egregious abuse of litigation. The phrases sounded like what he’d been hearing his whole life. You’ll never amount to anything. To clear his head, he liked to go to his favorite spot for lunch in Tijuana: the Costco, where he ordered himself a hot dog or two. He would sit there at his table, watching the Mexican families come and go, pushing their trolleys of oversized tuna cans and towers of paper towels. He felt at peace here in his sweatpants and polo shirt, his cell phones clipped to his belt, cutting coupons for TGI Fridays, where he might have dinner, the hot dog satisfyingly snapping between his teeth.