Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

They pulled into Kim’s rented palace around dawn. His wife and children were long asleep in another wing. Kim walked to his upstairs chambers, showered and changed into his customary all-black sleeping costume, grabbed his customary chilled Fiji water from the upstairs fridge, and settled before the monitors of his work bed. Then he heard the noise.

  A low, wavering bass, it seemed to be coming from outside. Kim couldn’t tell—the cavernous stone labyrinth of rooms swallowed and scattered sound, and the thick velvet blackout curtains blocked out everything else. Kim guessed it was his helicopter. He didn’t bother with details, he had a staff for that, but he did know that VIPs from the entertainment world were expected in from LA in celebration of his thirty-eighth birthday. Maybe they’d arrived early and Roy, his pilot, had been dispatched to meet them. A moment later the helicopter theory was confirmed by the sound of rocks from the limestone drive raining against the windows. Fucking Roy! He’d been told not to land too near—the thought was interrupted by a boom, echoing and close.

  This noise was coming from the other side of his office door. It was heavy hardwood several inches thick, secured by stout metal bolts in the stone casement. Kim struggled to his feet as the door shook and heaved on its hinges. Someone or something was trying to break through. Now Kim heard other noises, shouts and bangs and the unmistakable stomping of boots on stairs. Intruders were in the house. Kim Dotcom realized he was under attack.

  Across an ocean, hours before Operation Takedown began, the U.S. Department of Justice had already tipped off a select group of journalists about the raid’s planned highlights. If you know nothing else about Kim Dotcom, about the federal case against him and his former online business, Megaupload, you’ve probably heard about the raid. The story played out like a Hollywood blockbuster. And it was a great story.

  The scene: New Zealand. Lush and Green and Freaking Far Away. It’s the Canada of Australia, Wales in a Hawaiian shirt, a Xanadu habitat for hobbit and emu.

  And harbor home to the villain: Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, aka Tim Vestor, Kim Tim Jim Vestor, Kimble, and Dr. Evil. A classic comic-book baddie millionaire, an ex-con expatriate German ex-hacker lording over his own personal Pirate Bay just thirty minutes north of Auckland. Kim Dotcom was presented as a big, bad man, larger-than-life, larger than his 6’ 7", perhaps 350-pound frame. We saw him posed with guns and yachts and fancy cars. We watched him drive his nitrox-fueled Mega Mercedes in road rallies and on golf courses, throwing fake gang signs at rap moguls and porn stars, making it rain with $175 million in illicit dotcom booty.

  His alleged fifty-petabyte pirate ship was Megaupload.com, a massive vessel carrying, at its peak, 50 million passengers a day, a full 4 percent of global Internet traffic. Megaupload was a free online storage locker, a cloud warehouse for files too bulky for e-mail. It generated an estimated $25 million a year in revenue from ads and brought in another $150 million through its paid, faster, unlimited Premium service.

  The DOJ maintains that the legitimate storage business was only a front, like a Mafia pork store; the real money was made out back, where Megaupload was a mega-swapmeet for some $500 million worth of pirated material, including movies, TV shows, music, books, videogames, and software. Kim, they contend, was the Jabba the Hutt–like presence running this grand bazaar of copyright criminality with impunity from his Kiwi Tatooine, protected by laser break beams and guards and guns, CCTV and infrared and even escape pods—including a helicopter and high-performance sports cars. The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that would wipe his servers all across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his doomsday button.

  Operation Takedown was carried out by armed New Zealand special police and monitored by the FBI via video link. Descriptions of the raid varied from one news outlet to another, but most included the cops’ dramatic helicopter arrival on the expansive Dotcom Mansion lawn and their struggles with a security system fit for a Mafia don.

  We read that police were forced to cut their way into Dotcom’s panic room, where they found him cowering near a sawed-off shotgun. That same day, similar raids were under way in eight other countries where Megaupload had servers or offices.

  This was justice on an epically entertaining scale, topped by a final cherry of schadenfreude: the rich fat bad man humbled and humiliated, the boastful pirate king brought down. He was cuffed and put in jail, his booty seized, his business scuttled upon the reefs of anti-racketeering laws. If all went as planned, he and his six generals would be extradited to the United States to face a Virginia judge and up to fifty-five years each in prison. The message was, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone. Look upon these works, ye BitTorrenters of Dark Knight trilogies, sneak thieves of 50 Cent, and despair in your pirate bays. Justice was served, the end, roll credits. Yes, it was a great story.

  The only problem was, it wasn’t quite true.

  Kim Dotcom’s head of security is waiting for me at the Auckland airport on a gray day last July. Wayne Tempero is easy to spot. Amid the limo drivers and families with Mylar balloons is one deadly serious shave-headed New Zealander with a lantern jaw—a tattooed wall of muscle wearing a tight black hoodie. Before working “close protection” for the most famous man in New Zealand, Tempero had protected other big faces and names, from David Beckham to the royal family of Brunei. He specializes in military hand-to-hand combat and looks like a very nice person who’d be very handy with a knife.

  The car is waiting just outside. Not the Lamborghini or pink Series 62 Cadillac or any of the three retrofitted Mercedes CLK DTMs with extra-wide seats—the cops had impounded those. This is just a modest black Mercedes G55 AMG Kompressor with the license plate kimcom. “I think I was followed on my way here,” Tempero says. In fact, everyone in Kim’s entourage assumes everything is monitored, including all their communications. Tempero is the one facing gun charges after the raid—the shotguns were registered in his name—and he doesn’t need any more problems with the police. “Maybe we’re all a little paranoid these days,” he says with a grin as he edges up to the speed limit for the drive.

  The Dotcom Mansion is impossible to miss, mostly because of the chromed industrial-park letters spelling out dotcom mansion across the gatehouse in blue backlighting. It’s said to be the island nation’s most expensive home, located in the lush hills of the town of Coatesville. The limestone drive winds up to a $24 million suburban castle with ponds, a tennis court, several pools, a Vegas-style stairstep fountain, and a hedgerow labyrinth. The surrounding sixty acres of lawn are manicured and impossibly steep.

  Until just two months ago, Kim couldn’t live in his own home, as a condition of his house arrest following a month of jail time. For three months he was confined to the guesthouse, a prison of black lacquer and black leather, black Versace tables and wall-sized LCD flatscreens. The walls are adorned with poster-sized photographs of Kim and his beautiful twenty-four-year-old wife, Mona, but mostly just Kim: Kim in front of a helicopter, Kim on the bow of a luxury yacht, Kim reeling in a great fish or in front of a European castle holding a shotgun and a limp duck, or straddling a mountaintop, eyes pinned on the distant future. The effect is more Kim Jong-Il than Kim Dotcom. Dotcom—or the iconic character of Dotcom—is everywhere here, but most of the fifty-three members of the household staff that once maintained the larger estate are gone with his seized fortune.

  Outside the windows there are no humans to be seen or things to do. The grounds are gray and cold, winter in the southern hemisphere. The perimeter fences warn of electrocution. Closed-circuit cameras take in every angle from stations in the trees and rooftops, sending flickering images to the panels monitored by the skeleton staff still manning the distant guardhouses. My suspicion of surveillance by the FBI or New Zealand anti-terror forces—or perhaps even by the millionaire former hacker himself—prevents me from logging onto Kim’s wireless network or even making a phone call. I feel like I’ve been kidnapped and held as a “guest” by a Bond villain. A Bon
d villain who is asleep. In fact, Tempero tells me, the boss had just gone to bed shortly before I arrived at dawn. There’s no telling when he’ll be awake.

  Kim has surrounded himself with luxury, but what he prizes above all other indulgences is pure, deep sleep. He simply doesn’t always like to get up in the morning, and he doesn’t always like going to bed at night, and—here’s the kicker—he doesn’t have to. The sun is up or down—who cares? The clock is numbers in a circle, duodecimal nonsense. It is a guilt machine, a metronome for the normal lives of normal people. But it is always dark somewhere. And it is always night in the Dotcom Mansion. Great black curtains shut out the light, thick stone walls block the sound. The $103,000 horsehair Hästens bed is waiting. In his sleeping chamber there are no electronic things, no humming or beeping devices, no leaking of LED, no sigh of capacitor or fan. For sleep of the finest quality, for epicurean, luxury slumber, total silence is required and enforced.

  The gardeners do not mow, the cleaners do not clean. The cooks chop quietly in other wings, the nannies tend the children in another house. When he sleeps the mansion holds its breath. Kim can’t provide a schedule. He doesn’t have to. It’s his house.

  When Kim sleeps, he is flying. He’s not sweating, he doesn’t have health problems, bad knees, or a bad back. He’s not on trial or fighting for recognition. He’s not a kid afraid of his father coming home or more afraid that he won’t. He’s not being extradited to a place where jailers mark day from night with a light switch. When Kim sleeps, he is free.

  “I usually just watch his Twitter,” Tempero says. “That’s really the only way to know when the boss is up.”

  It’s late afternoon before Kim’s tweets start pouring forth. He tweets a lot, announcing updates on the coming court hearings, plugging his new pop single—a catchy duet with his wife called “Precious”—and a music video featuring home footage of the five Dotcom kids, including hospital shots of the arrival of his new twins only five months before. Other messages in the stream address Julian Assange or Internet freedoms or the tyranny of the FBI. A few minutes later, Tempero is at my door. The boss is up.

  I find Kim behind the wheel of his golf cart, layered in his usual uniform of black vest over diaphanous black shirt and three-quarter-length pants, a black scarf and heavy black leather ball cap. He is a large man and fills most of the front seat. Despite his blue-tinted Cartier sunglasses, his eyes squint against the sunlight. Spotting me, he motors over and extends a fist bump.

  “Wow, you look like a Viking,” he says, meaning probably that I’m blond and tall like him. His English is precise and tinged with a German-Finnish accent. “Cool!” Then he zips away on a golf cart that has been hacked to top 30 mph.

  I follow along the limestone trail to what Kim calls his hill, where he can soak in a few minutes of precious winter sun.

  At this time of year Kim and family would usually be based out of their floor-wide residence in the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, or on a rented yacht off the shores of Monaco or St. Tropez. The raid has enforced a Hotel California–style house arrest: stuck in a mansion on an island paradise, but still stuck.

  “We will win the extradition trial eventually,” Kim says. “But what’s the point of that?” They’d still be stuck in New Zealand or vulnerable in any country with an extradition treaty with the United States. The only real victory would be to face the charges in the States and win. But so far, the U.S. Department of Justice has refused to allow them to use frozen Megaupload assets to relocate to the United States and to pay lawyers. Their legal bills are already in the millions of dollars and rising.

  But Kim has reason to hope that his adopted home might aid his cause. In a few days he will be in court for a much-expected showdown with prosecutors about the excesses of the raid on his home. It’s a sideshow ahead of the extradition hearing in March—but a sideshow that might determine Kim’s fate.

  Kiwis still recall with pride their government barring American nuclear-powered warships from their harbors. Kim is not a New Zealand citizen, but many here took the FBI-instigated raid on his home quite personally, as a COPS-style American invasion.

  In recent weeks, New Zealand Crown judges have pushed back against the DOJ, ruling that the search warrant on Kim and the removal of his personal hard drives under the guidance of the FBI were illegal. Still, the jeopardy is daunting—up to fifty-five years in jail for alleged crimes including conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering. “They’re treating us like a mafia, man!” Kim says. “It’s unbelievable. It’s only because they cannot extradite us to the U.S. just for copyright violation. If they treat us as some sort of international criminal conspiracy, they can.”

  The “us” Kim is referring to are his six codefendants, his partners in Megaupload. Andrus Nomm, a resident of both Turkey and Estonia, was captured in Holland; Sven Echternach escaped to his home in Germany (which does not extradite its citizens); and Julius Bencko of Slovakia remains at large. The other three were, like Kim, nabbed in New Zealand. Two now arrive atop Kim’s hill in golf carts, young men in jeans and untucked oxford shirts.

  First Bram van der Kolk, who oversaw programming for the Mega websites and at thirty looks something like a Dutch Matt Damon. Then Finn Batato, Megaupload’s chief marketing officer. Batato is a thirty-nine-year-old half-Palestinian, half-German from Munich, a mellow chain-smoking playboy with a taste for wine and watches. And finally, snaking up the hill on an all-terrain Segway, is Mathias Ortmann, Megaupload’s chief technical officer, cofounder, and director, the Spock to Kim’s Teutonic Kirk, and the 25 percent to Kim’s 68 percent ownership of Megaupload. Ortmann is a forty-year-old German ex-hacker and looks like it, with a dark V-neck over his thin frame and square glasses.

  “He’s a genius, you know,” Batato says, lighting a cigarette. “Not because he speaks four languages, but an Einstein-type genius.”

  Ortmann looks up from his iPhone and blinks.

  “Mathias, please, at least admit that—it’s true.”

  Ortmann just looks back at his screen, setting up a Skype call with his girlfriend back home in Germany.

  “Please, tell the world,” Batato says to me, “these are normal people here.” Usually he would be in Europe, perhaps in the south of France, drinking Opus. Instead he is stuck in winter, facing jail, borrowing cigarette money, and living with van der Kolk. Batato is worried folks back home might think he is some kind of gangster.

  “I mean, look at us,” van der Kolk says. He’s not some mafia pirate. He’s a programming nerd with a Filipino ex-model wife and a three-year-old son. “It’s bullshit. We seem to be an easy target with this lifestyle. But driving around with license plates that say ‘mafia’ and stuff—it’s just our kind of humor.”

  In the distance, Tempero appears in a golf cart. He works his way up the steep hill and hands a fresh bottle of Fiji water to Kim.

  “Everything good, boss?”

  “Yeah,” Kim says, wringing the cap off the bottle. The guys watch him as the dying sun signals the end of another day in their life in this island paradise. Their Elba.

  At this point, all that stands between them and their fate are legal teams and Kim himself. Sure, the DOJ case cites a handful of seized e-mails that sound damning, but it was Kim who got them here. Dotcom has compared himself to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Julian Assange, and Martin Luther King Jr. He was the team’s visionary. Now he’ll need to think his team out of this jam. Kim promises he will. He has a plan.

  And something even bigger and better in the works. More Mega than Megaupload. A technology nobody can touch. One that will change the world. They’ll beat the Department of Justice, humiliate them. And then, Kim promises, they shall have their vengeance.

  The sun sets early in winter. The men file back down the hill to the warmth of Kim’s house-sized kitchen beside a sixteen-foot saltwater fish tank. A young Filipino maid brings Kim a fresh facecloth and water. Batato leaves for his usual spot on the back porch, t
o smoke and brood. The rest of the men stare silently into their iPhones, studying news blogs for hints of their fate.

  Lately the news has been about donations Dotcom made to a New Zealand parliamentarian named John Banks—the deciding vote in the prime minister’s majority. When cornered, Banks insisted he didn’t remember the source of the donations or the ride in Kim’s helicopter or other allegations that might get him indicted. There have been calls for his resignation or impeachment.

  “What do you think, Mathias?” Kim asks. “Should I give them an interview about the donations?”

  “Did you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, go ahead,” Mathias says. “But I think it’s a sideshow.”

  “But it would be interesting, no?”

  “What, toppling a government?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s focus on toppling the bigger government.”

  That government, of course, would be the United States. Kim and his associates are convinced that their company was targeted by the Obama administration for political rather than legal reasons. So, while twenty-eight lawyers for Megaupload fight those charges around the world, Kim is taking on the Obama administration as well.

  He’s starting with the music video of his single “Mr. President” and an online drive to collect promises not to reelect him.

  Social media is new for Kim, but he already has more than 130,000 followers on Twitter and after only a few days has reached Facebook’s 5,000-friend limit. “Oh it’s stupid,” he says. “The interface is terrible. I’m bombed with news from people I don’t know—why does anyone put up with it?”

  Kim is soliciting real friends too, inviting startled admirers to “swim at Kim’s” events at his pool and hosting Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak only a few weeks earlier in a show of Electronic Freedom solidarity. He’s reframing the issue: It’s not the DOJ versus Dotcom, it’s Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.