The idea had come, as they often do, by seeing something new, and realizing what he could do with it. It came one day when he was in his office taking orders for Los Altos Technologies. At first, many of the orders came in over the fax, but they also began taking them via the burgeoning platform of email—still relatively uncommon, given that, in 1992, only about 23 percent of U.S. households had computers. As the emails began coming in, Kremen felt naturally curious about the people on the other end, particularly when he got one from a woman. “Do you think she’s cute?” he asked Dubin.
“What does this have to do with anything?” asked Dubin, who was more interested in the size of the transaction. “Look,” Dubin said, “this is a $500 purchase order for the software, this is good.”
“Yeah,” Kremen went on, in his excited nasally voice, “but do you think this one is cute?”
And there was a new way he could find out. The year before, computer scientist Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein, a researcher at Bell Communications, wanted to come up with a way to email pictures of his grandchildren to his family and friends, but this was not yet possible. So he went about creating an email format called the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, which allowed someone to attach a file to an email message. Earlier that year, on March 11, 1992, he sent the first one—a photograph of his barbershop quartet, four long-bearded programmers at Bell who called themselves the Telephone Chords, along with an audio clip of them singing their own harmonic tune, “Let Me Send You Email,” to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Innovation often follows a similar path: someone fills a personal need that also meets a universal need. And email attachments would be just that. As Kremen and other pioneers knew, this was a huge deal—the email equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call message: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” The fucking world is going to change, Kremen thought. People could do more than just trade pictures of their grandkids, they could trade pictures of each other. So that if he wanted to know what this mysterious woman looked like on the other end of the internet, all she had to do was go to a copy shop, scan a picture of herself on a disc, put it on her computer, and attach it as a file to him. “I wonder if I can convince her to find the closest Kinko’s and scan a picture of herself?” he joked to Dubin.
The ideas came in a cascade, one leading to the next, a flash of succession, like firecrackers sparking each other to explode. What if I can have her send the picture? Kremen thought, and what if there are other guys who were interested in her picture? He could send the photo to them and see if they thought she was cute too. And if he could do that, he realized, What if I could charge single people to get each other’s pictures?
There was a problem, Kremen realized, that needed to be filled: dating. And he knew this from firsthand experience. Like a lot of busy young people, dating had always been a challenge for Kremen—finding the time, the right person, the magic. Kremen had dated enough to have met and connected with his share of women, but never found his perfect match. Dubin tried to encourage Kremen to change his habits to increase his odds. Stop eating a dinner of just bacon, Dubin would suggest. Don’t pretend that swallowing a shot of Scope for breakfast constituted morning hygiene. Oh, and next time you go on a date, you might want to make sure your stained T-shirt isn’t inside out.
But Kremen had a different tack. Instead of changing who he was at heart, he wanted to find someone who would accept him. And so, like a lot of people, he tried personals: spending a couple hundred dollars a month on taking out ads in the San Francisco papers, and using the 900 number party lines. He approached it creatively—such as taking out an ad with his friend Simon Glinsky.
Glinsky had become a management consultant, or as he put it, a “corporate therapist,” helping companies get along better and make decisions. But, like Kremen, he was also looking for love. Since Glinsky was gay, Kremen had a novel idea of how they might work together to find relationships: by placing an ad for the two of them seeking an opposite pair: a gay guy for Glinsky, and a straight woman for Kremen. Glinsky thought it was a stroke of marketing genius because it would, as he put it, “take the edge off meeting the stranger.”
“Double Date, Double Fun,” read the headline of their ad in the San Francisco Bay Times, “Two friends: gay man looking for gay man, and straight man looking for straight woman, seek fun and supportive double date. . . . Both are successful entrepreneurs; enjoy music, food, hiking, and are in touch with their feelings.” Even better, the plan worked. Kremen and Glinsky had several dates—dates that had a built-in buffer that made them all the more easygoing and fun. But no matter how clever Kremen was in his marketing, personal ads had problems of their own. With classifieds, there was no way of knowing what the person actually looked like. Plus, the profiles were so small and limited in scope. With this new technology though, he realized, there could be a way to change all that.
People could also write their own personalized profiles, and include them along with their photos. He could harness the internet for human relationships in a way that no one had done before. He could build a business from a new frontier of dating: online. This is insane, he thought, this is bigger than the vacuum cleaner! And, of course, if he built it, then he could use it too. As his friend Phil Van Munching put it, “That became part of the mythology, the guy who couldn’t get a date invented this love machine.” And, Kremen hoped with all his heart, this machine would finally help him meet his match.
CHAPTER 3
THE CON MAN
In the late 1980s, one of the most valuable properties in America and “home to some of the most filthy rich people around,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, was Cowan Heights, a tony enclave in Southern California. Nestled in the foothills of Tustin about an hour southeast of L.A., the 10,400 residents treasured their sweeping canyon views, their first-class schools, and their exclusive privacy. As local Sharon Thompson, a proud mother of three who’d been living there for fourteen years, told the Times, “We’re the best kept secret in Orange County.”
But there was another secret there too. One summer day in 1998, a grandfather was pushing his grandchild in a stroller along Brier Lane, one of Cowan’s main winding roads, when he saw something shocking: a couple having sex behind the window of a sprawling, gray ranch home, in plain view of anyone who happened to pass by. The other windows of the tract home were blackened or covered with aluminum foil. Neighbors began noticing a strange pattern on weekends, as lines of expensive cars began parking out in front of the house, and dozens of couples came and went into the wee hours of the morning. “These are not your run-of-the-mill sleazy people here,” Orange County sheriff’s investigator Gary Jones later told the Los Angeles Times, after receiving complaints about the frequent parties. “We watched Rolls-Royces and Corvettes pull up,” he said, “and some very good-looking people.”
On February 9, 1989, Jones launched an undercover investigation, dispatching two sheriff’s deputies, Charles Daly and Karen Bruner, who, posing as a couple, attended a party at the home one weekend night. After paying an initial $50 membership fee and $40 entrance fee, Daly and Bruner found what appeared to be a makeshift disco inside. The dining room had been converted into a dance floor, with couples boogying under the lights to thumping beats. Homemade porn films were projected on a wall. A short, stocky man in his early forties bragged to Daly and Bruner that the films had been shot right there inside the house.
Daly and Bruner followed the crowd streaming in and out of the garage, which had a wet bar, couches, and tables with pizza and takeout chicken. Many of the women dancing were topless. As they headed toward the bedrooms of the 2,600-square-foot house, they could hear what Daly described as “a lot of moaning and groaning.” They followed the thick beige carpeted halls toward rooms lined in aluminum foil and illuminated by red lights. The bedrooms had been divided into smaller cubbyholes, mattresses on the floors, and couples having all variations of sex inside.
As they made their way into the backyard, they found more couples lounging by the pool and in the Jacuzzi, nude. Daly panicked, not wanting to blow his cover. So he did the only thing he could do. He removed his clothes and slipped into the Jacuzzi, where he made idle conversation with the portly man, the host of the swingers parties here at “The Club,” as it was called, and the subject of the police investigation: Stephen Michael Cohen.
* * *
“My whole life was based on sex,” as Cohen would later put it. And though it’s hard to believe anything a lifelong con man says, this much about one of the shrewdest hustlers in the history of the internet was true.
Born on February 23, 1948, he grew up in Van Nuys, California, the heart of the porn industry, this self-described “Valley boy” had plenty to fire his imagination. Foremost was his father, David, a flashy Beverly Hills accountant who drove a Rolls-Royce and ran away with his young secretary when Cohen was a boy. He was left with three sisters and an overbearing mother, Renee, who often told him, “You’ll never amount to anything.” Cohen both despised and admired his father—rebelling against him at every opportunity, while devoting himself to winning the same rewards, though by considerably less scrupulous means.
While other kids in high school were playing ball or hitting the library, Cohen’s favorite haunt was a neighborhood strip joint—or, as he put it, a “beaver place”—called the Cue Club. That’s where, in the mid-1960s, he got introduced to the sex business. The club owner’s son, inspired by the dawning hippie age, had recently started a loose-knit organization called the Los Angeles Free Love Society, with the hopes of a sort of dating service for casual sex. When Cohen learned that the guy hadn’t done anything with it, he took it over—placing ads in the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternative newspaper distributed on Sunset Avenue.
The $20 membership fee would get buyers a catalog of the Los Angeles Free Love Society members who were looking for action. Ostensibly, at least. “Between you and I,” as Cohen later said, “it was a scam.” It didn’t take long before Cohen saw that the memberships coming in from the ads were almost entirely from guys. He realized the problem facing any dating service, or club for that matter, was how to get the women.
The answer came to him during a psychology course on the power of manipulation. Cohen listened intently as the teacher began explaining how “you can take words and twist them to where it makes them sound like something, when in reality there was no substance to them,” Cohen recalled. “I had a hard time knowing what the fuck this guy was talking about.” But it crystallized. “I got the concept,” he went on, “you can entice people to take something that’s not actually what you’re selling.”
In other words, he could sell bullshit as long as people were willing to buy it. In this case, he knew guys wanted to get laid, so he needed names and numbers of women. He devised a quick fix: getting the names of the girls at a couple local sororities, and putting them on the list. Cohen had taken out a post office box, and eagerly checked it every day for responses. Day after day he waited, but none came. Perhaps he didn’t have a future after all. But one afternoon when he went in to shut down the P.O. box, the mailman handed him a bag of mail—dozens of envelopes with $20 checks inside.
The scam worked well enough for the entrepreneurial high schooler to make his first small fortune, until the inevitable exposure. “All these horny guys started calling them and they didn’t know what the fuck it was,” he later recalled. The sorority girls’ fathers got wise and chased Cohen down—but not before the aspiring sex peddler had made his first small fortune, and completed his first lesson in what would serve him a lifetime: the art of the con. And no matter how he felt all those years after being abandoned by his father and denigrated by his mother, he found a way, he resolved, to amount to something after all.
* * *
Eighteen hundred miles away from Los Angeles, on January 25, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago that would transform the life of Stephen Cohen and generations to come. Nicknamed the “White Hurricane,” the storm paralyzed the region for days: burying homes, killing dozens, and stranding tens of thousands inside their homes, including thirty-year-old IBM programmer Ward Christensen. So he decided to spend his snow day working on a side project for his club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, or CACHE.
Christensen had recently imagined a novel way to replace the bulletin board at their club. Instead of tacking 3x5 cards on the cork board with messages like “need ride to next meeting” or “let’s get a group purchase of memory chips,” what if they had a computerized way of doing that instead. Innovation isn’t just about invention. It’s about vision—understanding the available tools and seeing a way they can be used together to make something new.
At the time, the idea of an online community was like science fiction—it did not yet exist. These were still the larval days of what would become the internet. Computers were largely refrigerator-sized mainframes. But in 1978, there were two recent innovations on Christensen’s mind: the Hayes internal modem, an early hobbyist device for exchanging data between computers, and the S-100 microcomputer, a personal machine that preceded the introduction of IBM and Apple PCs. The challenge was to bring these tools together in what he described as a “Computerized Bulletin Board System,” or CBBS. And with the White Hurricane, he had time on his hands to finally do it, so he called up CACHE buddy Randy Suess to help with the hardware.
Working through the storm, they had it up and running in two weeks. Sitting at a computer, someone would simply dial up a phone number through her modem, which would connect her to the CBBS machine. Once there, she could leave her own text messages, which would get displayed on other hobbyists’ home computers when they dialed up. There were no photos or videos or audio files, just text. Though the system could support only one caller at a time, it achieved Christensen’s original mission: bringing the old idea of a cork board and thumbtacks into the dawning digital era.
After several months of testing among the CACHE crew, they introduced it to a national audience in an article they cowrote in the November 1978 issue of Byte, a hobbyist magazine. “The Computerized Hobbyist Bulletin Board System,” they wrote, “is a personal computer based system for message communication among experimenters. People with terminals or computers equipped with modems call in to leave and retrieve messages.” It marked nothing less than the birth of the online community. With a modem, a microcomputer, and some phone lines, anyone could create a BBS. For the first time the technical means of online community had been created and described for the masses, or, at least, the early adopting “experimenters.” And one of the first was a thirty-year-old con artist in California who saw just the way to exploit this new technology, with sex. And his name was Stephen Cohen.
By the time he heard about the invention of the BBS in the fall of 1978, Cohen was in need of a fresh start. Since his first con with the Los Angeles Free Love Society, he had spent the next decade in broken relationships and breaking the law. He was already on his third wife, Susan Boydston, after two short, failed marriages that left him with bitter ex-wives and three estranged kids. Some of what he claimed to be doing at the time seemed too outrageous to believe. If asked, Cohen would claim he’d spent time studying law at (unaccredited) schools such as the Southern California School of Law, and Western State. He claimed that he also had traveled to Panama, where he’d taken the bar and become admitted as an attorney. He insisted, even more, that he had several meetings with Panamanian military leader Manuel Noriega, offering legal advice.
One thing, however, was certain, he was running afoul of the authorities. There were a string of cases: he got convicted of petty theft, forgery, pled guilty to writing bad checks, and served a year in state prison. And yet, with his old persuasive skills, he always managed to win over the judges enough that their hearts went out to him. “I think it is a terrible shame that a boy like you finds yourself in this predicament,” a judge told him during a hearing in 1977, when he was
convicted of grand theft and forgery. “I don’t know anything about your background,” the judge went on, “but I strongly suspect that you come from a good family. . . . I think you can make it and be an awfully nice citizen if you will just work at it.”
Alas, Cohen didn’t. The chip on his shoulder was too big to give in anymore to anyone else’s idea of who or what he should become. He would prove himself according to his own terms. He would fulfill his own sense of empowerment, his belief that he alone was smarter than everyone else, able to outwit them, out-invent them, and out-hustle them. So just as soon as he could get to it, he looked for his next scheme.
Since he was a kid, Cohen had always been something of a geek, tinkering around with gadgets and taking a couple of computer programming courses at local colleges. He was among the early phone “phreaks,” hobbyists who circumvented the telecommunications system to get free long-distance calling, among other things. Though he wasn’t, by even his own accounts, much of a programmer, he had a hacker mind-set in that he could see where and how to exploit new systems to his advantage. And so, when he read about this new innovation of Bulletin Board Systems, the thirty-one-year-old had just the idea for how to cash in: by launching a kind of Free Love Society for the dawning computer age in the summer of 1979. He called it the French Connection BBS.
The Players Ball Page 3