While most, if not all, of the few dozen BBSs at the time were free services devoted to the conversation of early adopting hobbyists—computer nerds, Grateful Dead fans, sci-fi geeks—Cohen had a distinctly for-profit model. He would charge $18 a month for subscriptions, which would give members access to leave messages for each other on a variety of sexual and special interest discussion boards. Log on and press 6 for “Sexual Discussions,” 9 for “Guys’ Locker Room,” S for “Swing Scene,” and so on. The BBS didn’t discriminate between straight, gay, or anywhere else on the spectrum. As long as a customer paid for the chance to get laid, that was fine by him.
Cohen created the BBS, with the help of some freelancer programmers, and ran it from a computer in a bedroom inside the home he’d recently bought in a gated community of Orange County. To promote the site, he relied on word-of-mouth, posting messages on competing BBSs, such as the popular Los Angeles service West Side. Once again, he faced the same challenge as he had with the Free Love Society—getting women to entice the men. So he offered free membership to women and, more expediently, he logged on under assumed female names. “He would sit there and type in different names and be different people,” Boydston later recalled, “always women. He was trying to attract men customers.”
He would secretly pose as “Tammy,” one of the system operators, or sysop, the title for someone who ran a BBS, or even Boydston herself, leaving messages for horny guys, and dealing with customer service. He began taking computer programming classes at a local college, where he gave speeches about his BBS, as much to show his knowledge as to recruit new members, including his professor.
Slowly but surely, the French Connection acquired members and curiosity seekers. “Tammy” would flirt with them and take their credit card numbers, or checks, which Cohen would have sent to a variety of post office boxes. When he needed a name for the company that owned French Connection, he made a nod to his mother, as if this were all about proving her wrong. YNATA, he and a friend decided to call it, as in “You’ll Never Amount to Anything.” As Cohen later explained, “We were going to build something that would prove to the world we weren’t losers.”
* * *
Despite his outlaw ways, Cohen amounted to something historically significant as a result of the French Connection. He had not only pioneered online dating, he had figured out something that would have huge significance in the decades to come: how to get people to spend money online. The answer was simple, as he told his wife, when she asked why everything he did seemed to have to do with sex. “Sex sells,” he said.
But that wasn’t all he was selling in the early 1980s. While growing the French Connection, he was pulling off a garden variety of small-time schemes. He opened a liquor store in Santa Ana, created a computer timeshare business. He became a repo man, starting a car repossession company, cutting new keys on machines he kept in his garage, then flipping the cars for profit. He got a private eye license, so he could get intel on enemies, created an answering service, a limo company, and travel agency (which he used to hustle free and discount flights for himself and his friends). When Boydston started inquiring about his frequent international trips, Cohen told her, with a straight face, that he was working for the CIA.
Though he burned through businesses and money, often stiffing the people he owed, Cohen always managed to keep up appearances—determined to show to others, if not himself, that he did amount to someone significant, just as his father did. Using Boydston’s money, he got a two-story home near the golf course of Coto de Caza, an upscale, five-thousand-acre community in the Saddleback Mountains in south Orange County. He even leased the same car his dad drove in Beverly Hills: a Rolls-Royce.
It wasn’t just the riches he craved, it was the lifestyle. “He wanted to be Hugh Hefner,” as Boydston later recalled. And, unbeknownst to her, he began living his own version of the Playboy lifestyle. After peopling the French Connection with fake women, including himself, he ended up drawing enough real women to the service that they began holding their own regular meetups in person—gathering for pizza, drinks, and the inevitable more. “I’m sitting at home wondering what could be taking this man’s time so much,” Boydston recalled. “Finally I find out he’s been swinging.”
By 1985, Boydston finally had enough. She had grown to despise the man, considered him short-tempered, easily frustrated, and always looking for a new con game. She felt as if he thought everyone, including her, was less intelligent than him. And when she deigned to confront him, she said, he could be threatening. She considered him a sociopath, unable to process feelings, guilt, or remorse. “He doesn’t know what love is,” she later said, “he only knows what’s working for him.” She divorced him.
Cohen was who he was by now. And his perspective on marriage was either cynical or liberated, depending on one’s point of view. “You got to understand,” as he later said, “in this world where we live in, there are a lot of people that go into relationships, and most relationships don’t last. Most marriages don’t last.” And that’s where he saw a lifestyle, and a business. “People kind of lose sight of how to get back into the game,” as he put it. “I offered an opportunity where they could do that.”
The French Connection was just the start. The opportunity he gave the wealthy residents of Orange County was their very own swingers club. From the moment he opened The Club over the July 4th holiday weekend of 1998, it felt like the fantasy world he’d always wanted had come to life. He had spread the word clandestinely, but effectively, as talk of the jet-set sex parties made its way around the golf courses, health clubs, and PTA meetings in town.
Prospective members had to meet a specially appointed liaison at a grocery store downhill from the house on Brier Lane, where a trusted representative would screen them, then escort them to the house with blackened windows. There, Stephen Cohen, the ebullient host, dressed in his terrycloth robe and a fat cigar in his mouth, warmly welcomed them to the party. Cohen took pains to lasciviously decorate the home as a suburban sex palace: the dance floor, the cubbyhole bedrooms, the red-lit halls. There were buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken at the ready, fresh towels by the Jacuzzi, and satellite TV showing sports and porn.
By early 1989, he had gone from ten couples on a Saturday night to as many as sixty. The growing demand had to be met. Volunteers doing loads of wash, arranging the catering, getting the music, even adding air ducts to the bedrooms to improve the flow, even The Club’s own baby-sitting service, for $15 a night, including a meal. With more people came more rules, which Cohen posted in his monthly newsletter: no drinking, eating, or smoking in “swing rooms,” no nonbiodegradable lubricants, no answering the front door, no sex for husbands after their wives have fallen asleep.
There were monthly themed events: Movie Night (“You get to make that special, private movie with that special person. . . . Please bring an empty VHS”), Sensuous Massage Party, Lace and Lust Lingerie Party, and Dirty Dancing (“Two ladies will do their thing on the dance floor with that special pole”). And for those members with an interest in computers, Cohen offered complimentary memberships to the French Connection. “We are the place where people go,” Cohen promised, “and everyone cums!”
But among those people coming, he learned, were undercover police. After sheriff’s deputies Daly and Bruner secretly attended three parties at The Club, the Orange County team moved in against Cohen, citing him for safety violations—such as the partitioned bedrooms—and then, in May 1991, hitting him with misdemeanor public nuisance. “They acknowledge what they’re doing, and they’re not ashamed,” as one angered resident told a reporter at the time. “They’re rather brazen in their openness.”
Cohen, characteristically, pushed back, arguing that his was a private club, not a business, and therefore the county had no right to legislate them for being swingers. “The sex isn’t the issue,” said Orange County Deputy District Attorney Kimberly Menninger. “This is a very residential area. If you had a tennis club, you�
�d have to get a permit.”
But, of course, sex very much was the issue, and suddenly the man who’d fashioned himself as the Hugh Hefner of BBS swingers was challenging the community to look at their own standards. “Does anyone think it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage?” Cohen’s attorney, William J. Kopeny, who had represented high-profile murderers, rapists, and, soon, the cops accused of beating Rodney King, asked residents during jury selection in the Orange County courthouse. One potential juror said she couldn’t be objective, because her “husband was a cheater.” Another asked to be relieved because he was a schoolteacher. And yet for some, the subject of swinging was not a concern. “I am a Christian. I don’t do it myself,” as one woman said, but “I’m not a judge of other people’s choices.”
During the trial, Cohen likened The Club to the Boy Scouts, a private organization and not a business that violated zoning. Cohen fashioned himself as a freedom fighter, standing up for his “alternative lifestyle” that was being wrongly discriminated against by the county. “This trial has nothing to do with sex,” he told reporters outside the courthouse. “These were lawful activities behind closed doors.” His attorney went on, “They have a lot of moral outrage but very little evidence” that it was a business. After two days of deliberation, the jury had enough people who believed this that they became deadlocked. With a mistrial declared, the charges were dropped. “I think it was proper,” Cohen told the reporters. The county had “put on a lot of interesting evidence,” he went on, cockily, “but none of it had to do with the law.”
But, in fact, there was little victory for Cohen, whose life was spiraling out of control. The scams and schemes were finally catching up with him. The owner of the house he was renting terminated his lease, leaving his swinging days over. Microsoft, Lotus, and other companies sued him for copyright infringement for distributing pirated copies of their software on the French Connection. He was under investigation for bankruptcy fraud, falsifying documents and loans.
He’d even been caught impersonating an attorney. It had happened when, one day in L.A., he walked into the federal courthouse, carrying a briefcase, his clients in tow, as he represented them in front of the judge. In the midst of all this, his father, David, had died of a massive heart attack—the same thing that had killed Cohen’s grandfather. Though the two had become estranged, the loss of his father left him with a permanent sense of failure for never having made his father proud. “My father was a very decent person,” as Cohen later put it, “unfortunately I didn’t turn out that way.”
By the fall of 1991, Cohen had gone from Hugh Hefner to Howard Hughes, a recluse who barely left home, or changed his clothes. The previous year, he’d gotten married at a swingers convention in Vegas to Karon Poer, a single mother he’d met at The Club. At first, she admired him. She thought he was a lawyer with a nice home. He took her to Panama. He told her he had to get someone to sign a document attesting that he was an attorney in that country. She waited in the car while he went into a hospital with his computer, sweltering in the heat. Finally he came back, and told her, with a laugh, that the doctor he was supposed to meet wasn’t there, and no one else spoke English, so he couldn’t get his form completed. Why he needed some doctor to authenticate him as a Panamanian attorney was beyond her.
But then she began noticing unusual behavior. He spent most of his time in his home office. She’d bring him a sandwich, the only time she was allowed in, and find him in his swivel chair, papers strewn around the floor, a small round table holding a copying machine. He ordered a bunch of large cell phones and a strange machine in the mail, and she watched him take it apart. Then he drove with her to a parking lot by a freeway. “We’re going to be leaving in a few minutes,” he told her. “I’m just using this machine.” As cars passed, numbers appeared on the machine, which he wrote down.
He returned home, and she saw him programming the cell phones with the numbers. Then people would come over and buy them for $500. Poer asked one of the women who came by what this was about, and she told her Cohen had programmed the phones with other people’s numbers so anyone who bought them could make free calls. Poer thought she wasn’t smart enough to understand what they were doing, but knew it had to be wrong. She felt like Cohen was wasting himself on bad things. “He’s so smart and could make millions,” she later said. “Why did he always want to do something wrong?”
In less than a year, their marriage was falling apart. Poer barely saw her husband, who spent his days and nights locked in an upstairs bedroom, with his computer, from which he ran the French Connection BBS, and his multiple phone lines. She’d overhear him answering the phone and pretending to be someone else: Steve Johnson one day, Frank Butler the next. When she asked why, as she later recalled, he’d snap “That’s my business!” Paranoid and prone to outbursts, Cohen had outfitted their home with security cameras, and refused to let her answer the phone or the front door. “Steve was a lonely man,” recalled Poer.
Finally she woke one day to find the house surrounded by police. Cohen told her not to be scared. As the doorbell rang, he snuck out the back, and tried to get to his car to escape—but to no avail. Cohen’s run had come to an end. On October 21, 1991, as part of his previous stints impersonating attorneys and attempting to bilk an elderly woman out of $200,000, Cohen was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. During the trial, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Hartwig admonished Cohen for his cocky assurance that he could always wriggle free. “He still thinks he can flimflam and flummox his way out of this,” she said. “He thinks he’s the one that can go into any court and outsmart anybody.” But not this time. Cohen was sentenced to forty-six months in prison.
After a stay at a prison in San Diego, Cohen soon joined the other inmates behind the barbed wire fence inside the gray and red brick penitentiary in Lompoc, California, about an hour north of Santa Barbara. As he sat in his cell, he longed for the days of The Club—the sex, the “sucking and fucking,” as he liked to put it. But there was still something out there at least, something that was his: the French Connection, which was still running online. And he wasn’t about to give that up for anyone.
One day, Poer answered the phone to find Cohen on the other line. He wanted to take care of her, he said, give her the money he owed so that she and her son could live. I’ll give you the French Connection, he told her, you can make money from it. “I have no idea how to run that,” she told him, incredulously.
“I’ll call you and talk you through it,” he assured her.
He had a friend set up the phone lines in her new apartment, and the calls immediately started ringing day and night from angry creditors. They’d ask for Cohen, or one of his many aliases—Steve Johnson, or Tammy. When she told them Cohen was away, they pressed her for the information they could never get from him: Where does he live? What kind of life does he lead? Where does he keep the Rolls-Royce? Cohen told Poer what to say to each person, whom to answer, whom to ignore, whom to say they had the wrong number. People who had bought the cell phones with the fake numbers were complaining that they were no longer working.
When she wasn’t fielding calls from them, she was trudging back and forth to the Lake Forest office where the French Connection was running. He told her how to press a button on the computer to see how many people were online. No one used their real names on the BBS. One person was just called Hot2. Poer’s name on there was 900Babe. Cohen had always told people there were five hundred online at a given time but she saw maybe a few dozen at best. She claimed he told her half the people online at a given moment were fake, to give the appearance of a crowd. He had her offer a lifetime special membership to try to raise extra cash. Despite everything Cohen had always boasted about the French Connection, it was barely making enough money for her to buy groceries, she later claimed.
Cohen was working in the prison library, helping with the computer systems, which gave him access to log into the Frenc
h Connection. Cohen would call Poer and tell her when a computer was acting up, and she’d trudge down to the office at Lake Forest. He’d keep her on the line as he told her how to clean the computer disc to get the system up and running again. But Poer was quickly losing patience. There were too many lines to manage, too many phone bills to pay, it was wasting her time, her money, trying to keep this going with her kid in school. But Cohen had planned for this too—and left a password at the phone company, so that no one but him, certainly not Poer, could turn off the lines without his permission.
When she tried calling Cohen back one night in prison, however, the administrator at Lompoc said there was no way Cohen had been calling her. Prisoners were only allowed five minutes on the phone, she was told, there’s no way it could have been him. “I know his voice,” Poer replied, “he was on the phone.” When the prison checked on Cohen, however, they found him in bed, where he insisted he had been the whole time.
Poer stormed over to Lompoc soon after, and told Cohen she was done tending to the French Connection and his other matters. “If you’re not changing your ways, there’s no more me and you,” she said. Cohen’s arrogance hadn’t left him, despite him sitting there in his prison orange. He laughed, ignoring her. “When they came to my room to check on me when you called,” he told her, “I told them I was sleeping.” He asked her for quarters that he could use for the vending machines.
As Poer would later claim in court, he continued to somehow hack the phone system in prison to call her beyond his allotted time, filling her answering machine and pager. She claimed she was in a tanning booth one day when her pager rang twice with a West Virginia area code. Concerned her family was having a problem, she called back only to find it was Cohen—who’d somehow spoofed the number from which he was dialing. It wasn’t until she turned over her phone records that they believed her. Running a business out of prison was a violation, and Cohen was threatened with solitary confinement.
The Players Ball Page 4