by Nik Richie
65Dirty Celeb best known for his association with Scooby Snack in the Vegas club scene. It’s rumored that he is her pimp, although this has never been substantiated.
66Age 13; bullied in person and through Instant Messenger.
67Age 12; bullied in person and through Instant Messenger.
68Age 17; bullied in person and through MySpace.
69Age 13; tormented through a fake MySpace account.
70Age 18; ex-boyfriend circulated nude photo.
71Age 15; bullied in person.
72Age 17; cyber-bullied through Facebook.
73Age 18; was filmed without his consent by roommate performing homosexual acts.
Origins (Part 4)
When Ben Quayle resigned from Dirty Scottsdale, it meant more than losing the contributions of Brock Landers. My legal connection over at Snell & Wilmer was also cut. It couldn’t have come at a worse time because I had actually just received my first cease-and-desist letter, and back then those seemed much more threatening than they actually were. I freaked out about them, so I was looking for legal representation the very next day.
There was a really popular site called Ripoff Report that was always in legal trouble. The reason they were on my radar is because my company, NPMG, was always on there, so I made a habit of checking it out to see what people were saying about us, the scam, and all that. Most of the claims were fairly accurate. It was a chop shop. The word had gotten out, but I continued working there because it was a steady paycheck that allowed me plenty of Nik Richie time while I was on the road as an SAE.
My thinking was, whoever Ripoff Report was getting representation through had to be good, so I did some poking around and found out who their lawyers were.
This is how I came to meet David Gingras.
Nik Richie was the sword; David became the shield.
I met with David and another lawyer named Maria over at the offices of Jaburg & Wilk. Maria was a cunt. Abrasive. Anytime David tried to answer one of my questions she’d cut him off mid-response. We were sitting in one of the offices, and I asked if I was doing anything legally wrong on the site, anything that might be considered harassment, invasion of privacy, libelous, etc.
David said, “No—”
“—What you’re doing is 100% legal,” Maria cut in.
“So what’s with the cease-and-desist letter?” I asked. “How do I deal with this?”
David said, “Yeah, you’re probably going to get a lot of those, however—“
“—however,” Maria cut in again, “you’re protected by something called the C.D.A.74 So, for example, this person is saying that you’re the author of the post, correct?”
“Right.”
“But all you did was publish it. The content came from a third party, and the legal system recognizes that difference,” she explained. “Anything said in the comment board, you’re not liable for. Anything that comes in from another person, you’re also not liable for. That’s how the C.D.A. works.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to need you guys,” I said. “The problem is the site doesn’t make any money.”
“That’s definitely a problem,” David said.
“Even if you’re legally in the right,” Maria told me, “you’re going to drown in legal fees trying to defend yourself.”
The meeting made one thing explicitly clear: if the site was going to continue, I needed to turn it into a profitable business. Otherwise, it was going to sink.
I needed money.
I needed investors.
The site was so popular that even the people at NPMG were talking about it in their cubicles. That’s when it hit me that I was doing something positive: stealing time from the man and giving it to the poor. I was making people laugh, providing a distraction from their shitty jobs. It was the first time I considered turning the site into more of a business and less of a recreation.
I sat down with my wife to tell her that I was going to take $25,000 to invest in the site, that I was going to turn it into a business and start cashing in on its popularity. We currently had about a $50,000 nest egg, and my wife had drawn from it before for her own business endeavors. I wanted to do the same with Dirty Scottsdale.
“But I need your blessing,” I said. “Can I have your blessing?”
Without even thinking about it, she answered, “No fucking way.”
I loved the site more than I loved my wife, so I went ahead and took the money. I quit my job at NPMG and didn’t tell her. We were so distant from each other at that point that I wasn’t worried about the consequences: divorce or anything else she could throw at me. Nik Richie made me happier than the marriage, so I risked it.
Everything escalated.
The site was in five markets: Chicago, Newport, Dallas, Vegas, and Scottsdale. I went hard. Before I was making two or three posts a day. Suddenly, I was putting up eight or nine in each market. I made MySpace pages for each of them, friending more girls, seeing more douchebags and fame-chasers. All these club kids were checking it out. It was going viral again. More and more people from around the country were becoming aware of me, the site, the message. Nik Richie was spreading just like he had done in Scottsdale.
If you were in Vegas about to get your photo taken, you thought twice about it.
All those buxom Dallas girls doing coke in the bathrooms got a little bit paranoid.
Once again, people were asking, “Who the fuck is Nik Richie?”
And: “I’m going to fucking kill this motherfucker!”
Just as I thought, the method worked, but I still needed money. It wasn’t a business yet, just something people went to and commented on between Facebook and MySpace. I needed someone with some real business sense, and as much as I didn’t want to, that meant telling another person who I really was.
I ended up going with a guy named Saroosh.
We had become friends because he was the only other Persian dude that I saw out, and we had been traveling in close circles for a while out at the clubs in Scottsdale. I was in the calm circle of married guys and his people did drugs and fucked all the bottle rats. They were out of control and I wanted no part of it. Saroosh was a cool dude, though, the guy that wanted to take care of people: get them deals on bottles or tables or getting them into the VIP. He was always hanging with rich people and getting the highest-priced shit on the menu, but what I liked about the guy was that he was never flamboyant or in your face about it. Saroosh was lowkey, and that’s a big part of why I thought I could trust him with my Nik Richie secret.
So I let Saroosh in, told him who I was and how well the sites were doing on traffic. I asked him straight up, “You know rich people. Do you think any of them would be willing to invest in this?”
Saroosh knew nightlife—he had been living in it for quite some time, and Dirty Scottsdale’s core demographic was the people in the scene. He simply added two and two together and pitched the idea of doing a party, explaining, “We’ll call it a pull wool party and charge $20 a head.”
I said, “Saroosh, no one is going to fucking come to this thing.”
“Yeah, they will. You’re doing this as a business, so just out yourself.”
“No fucking way,” I said, “but I got an even better idea. How about we get an actor to play Nik Richie at the party?”
The buzz was out.
Nik Richie was going to host an event at Axis Radius. I put it up on Dirty Scottsdale that this was going to be my coming out/pull wool party and you could buy tickets off the site. At the time, I was making fun of Southwest Airlines (referring to them as Southworst) so I had these tickets with the letter “C” on them. Southwest had that A-B-C seating policy, and I always used to say that it was better to get the C group because no one likes to sit in the middle and you could get next to the hot chicks on the flight.
The party sold out.
So many tickets were bought that it went over Axis Radius’ 1,200 occupancy limit and they had to open up Suede across th
e street to handle the overflow. Everyone wanted to see Nik Richie, but anyone who came out that night and thought they were speaking with me or taking a picture with me really wasn’t. It was my buddy John Carlo from Orange County.
He was one of the few people I told that I was Nik Richie, and I basically tricked him into doing it under the premise that it’d be cool to see how many chicks tried to get with him.
“It’s no big deal. Go take some pics on the red carpet and hang out,” I said. “We’ll be up in the balcony watching.”
So I waited in line and paid the $20 cover. Meanwhile, John Carlo was exiting a limo to news cameras and photographers in his face. He was walking the red carpet with two black security guards and the hottest chicks in Scottsdale. There was twenty of these chicks (all blondes) just hanging on the guy. All the douchebags I made fun of were there. G-Girl was there. John Carlo was popping bottles and getting photo-bombed while the real Nik Richie watched silently from above.
We had invested $25,000 into the event.
We made back $25,000, but we did a little better than just breaking even because now The Dirty had another, more tangible element to it. Even though the real Nik Richie was hiding up in the balcony, the party added another dimension to the persona. He was a less of a ghost now. There was a face to go with the name, and quite honestly, John Carlo is a good-looking dude. It dispelled all the rumors that Nik Richie was some fat fuck hiding behind a computer. There was a lot of chatter that I was a guy that talked shit because I had no money and couldn’t hook up with girls like Alexa Carlson or Brock’s Chick, and John Carlo put an end to all that. Not only did Nik Richie understand what the scene was really about, but he could bang any of these chicks. He was the real deal.
In the wake of the party’s success, I told Saroosh that if he wanted to stick around and try selling ads that I’d give him a commission. Honestly, we thought that it would be like shooting fish in a barrel because Nik Richie had just sold out two clubs, and on a Thursday night (which was usually dead). What we found out was that the site wasn’t so much popular as it was infamous.
Saroosh went after clubs to run promo ads on the site, but the clubs didn’t want anything to do with me because Nik Richie made fun of their clientele, and sometimes the clubs themselves. The last thing they were going to do was pay a guy that may or may not speak badly about them or their customers, so everyone passed. Even the guys Saroosh had connections with said they wanted nothing to do with it, that it would be bad for business. People loved Nik Richie, but only to an extent. Even though I was popular at the time, no one believed that Nik Richie would last or become a functioning business. The media also discovered our little actor trick when they interviewed John Carlo and he knew nothing about the site.
I had to let Saroosh go. There were no hard feelings; it was just business. He promised to keep Nik Richie a secret and we went our separate ways.
I was back to the drawing board.
I got an e-mail from Harry Morton.
Harry was famous for a couple of reasons. The first is that he was the son of Peter Morton, who owned all the Morton’s Steakhouse restaurants. That meant that the guy had money to burn. The other reason people knew Harry is because he was banging Lindsay Lohan during that period in her life where she wasn’t too crazy and getting arrested all the time. She was still big from doing Mean Girls, not from all the DUIs and bad press.
So Harry emailed me, introduced himself (even though I knew who he was), and told me that he was a big fan of the site and wanted to meet with me. About business. He wanted to meet in Scottsdale, in person, which meant that one more person was going to know that Hooman Karamian was Nik Richie. And the threats hadn’t died down. They had actually increased now that all five markets were booming. Everyone kept saying that if they saw Nik Richie out they were going to kick the shit out of him, in Scottsdale or otherwise. The cease-and-desist letters were coming in, too, so I started making all these weird demands.
I told Harry that I’d meet with him, but only if the meeting was completely private and there was a partition at the table that kept us from being viewed by everyone but the waiter. David Gingras from Jaburg & Wilk came with me so I could look like I knew what the hell I was talking about. I liked David. I liked him a hell of a lot more than that cunt Maria, and it mostly had to do with why he became a lawyer in the first place. He told me that when he was younger, a cop punched him in the face for absolutely no reason. David said that when that happened he felt so violated, so absolutely helpless, that he never wanted anyone to have to go through that again. As a lawyer, David had to keep my confidentiality, but as a person, he was completely trustworthy.
We arrived at the restaurant, walking in the rear entrance and through the kitchen like that movie Goodfellas. A back booth was waiting on the other side, curtained off just as Harry said it would be. He was already seated, having a drink by himself and doing something on his phone. The gist of the meeting was this: Harry liked the site, liked me. He saw the humor in it, but he also saw all the untapped potential in it as well. It was something he wanted to invest in, but he had to pitch it to his dad because Peter Morton was the money man. They had flipped another site for $200 million and that’s what he wanted to do with mine, so I left the meeting on cloud nine because it looked like I was finally going to get a serious investor.
This is when I learned that you never get excited about money until the contracts are signed and the check has cleared your bank account.
Harry Morton really had no interest in turning Nik Richie into a profitable business. It was more about bragging rights for him. It wasn’t enough that he was banging Lohan. He wanted to be able to say that he owned The Dirty, owned Nik Richie. The problem was that he couldn’t convince his dad to get on board with the idea, and without Peter, there was no deal. It fell through and everything was rocky again.
I had a cushion, but the cushion was running out. The site made no money, had no infrastructure, which gave my wife all the more ammunition in her argument that I had pissed away twenty-five grand. We were already in a bad place, but the site’s inability to capture an endorsement put an even bigger strain on our marriage. The love was gone. I was sleeping on the couch with my dog and we had become more like roommates than husband and wife. She hated Nik Richie, so by extension, she started to hate Hooman Karamian. They were the same person in her mind.
This was right around the time I got an e-mail from Jay Grdina. He was famous for being married to Jenna Jameson, and those two pretty much ran Scottsdale together right up until they decided to split up. Before that, anytime they walked into a club people would just start giving them bottles of Cristal or Dom, all for the sake of being able to say they partied with Jenna. So Jay said he wanted to meet but didn’t give any specifics beyond that. After the Harry Morton deal fell through, I wasn’t as optimistic that it would be about anything beneficial to me or the site. For all I knew, he just wanted to get a drink with me and bullshit. Back in those days, some of the more affluent people in town wanted to meet Nik Richie just to be able to say they met him. It was being part of some secret club.
I brought David Gingras along again, this time to a place called Mastro’s in North Scottsdale. No backdoor this time. No partition. I wasn’t as paranoid anymore. Jay showed up in a $250,000 Bentley, which made Gingras and me feel like we were at the kids’ table. We were out of his league. Jay gave pretty much the same pitch Harry Morton did: loved the site, saw the potential, was interested in investing so he could flip it later for more money. Jay had followed the same business model before with Club Jenna, and they sold it to Playboy for nine figures.
“I think we could flip The Dirty for $100 mill,” he said.
It sounded good in theory, but I could tell that Jay’s idea was to make Nik Richie a celebrity like Jenna, and I didn’t want that. In fact, all I was looking for was a $5,000 per month salary. That, and keeping my identity a secret, because I only wanted to be Nik Richie for a few years. It was
fun, an escape, but I ultimately wanted to sell everything off for nine figures and retire somewhere down in Mexico. Maybe open a little beach bar. I could train some kid, some young version of myself, to do the job and hand the legacy over. That was more or less my plan: sell high, retire young, pass on the persona.
In order to bring that plan to fruition, I was going to need an investor.
The Grdina brothers put up $500,000, and The Dirty finally had funding.
We moved into the old Club Jenna offices at the air park in Scottsdale, which we referred to as the Pentagon. Everything was brushed steel. There were phones and computers in every cubicle. We had a break room, a conference room. A parking lot. We had everything a real office was supposed to have. Essentially, Nik Richie finally had a real infrastructure and The Dirty became less of a garage operation and more corporate.
Jay sat me down and said, “We’re going to take care of the business side. All you need to do is blog. Just be Nik Richie and we’ll take care of everything else.”
We had sixteen employees that checked submissions all day and put together the posts for me to review, comment on, and publish. For $5,000 a month we paid a publicist to get the brand out there, scheduling radio interviews for Nik Richie and getting press. We finally got ads: from clubs, plastic surgeons, and titty bars. For twelve hours a day I was reading and commenting as Nik Richie. He came up with new local vernacular and terminology. He broke down your clubs, your fame-chasers. His reputation was spreading beyond the five markets, but the work was too much. There were far too many submissions for me to get to, and the investors became aware of it.
Jay said, “It’s going to be impossible to keep up with two hundred cities at this rate. We’re going to need more Nik Richies.”