The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  Before Kremen could respond, the legal teams took their places, and the camera started to roll on Cohen, who smiled enough to show the space between his teeth. He had been in this position before, of course, over decades of cases, and he rose to the occasion, deploying his bag of tricks. When he answered questions, it was with what Carreon and Kremen could only describe as a shit-eating grin, as Cohen responded like Abbot and Costello in their “Who’s on First” bit.

  “Okay. Mr. Cohen,” Carreon said, “you’re under oath. You’ve been under oath before, right?”

  “Yes, I’ve been under oath many times.”

  “Does the oath constrain you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “You mean you can say whatever you want under oath? Did you understand my question?”

  “I understand your question . . . I’m here to tell the truth.”

  “Right. But for every one that you can recall, you understood the oath to mean the same thing that you understand it to mean today?”

  “For every one that I can remember, yes.”

  “Okay. And which ones can you remember right now?”

  “I can’t recall.”

  “You can’t recall even the first time that you were under oath?”

  “No.”

  There was a lot Cohen couldn’t remember: names of schools he’d attended, his age when he’d graduated high school, what he’d studied during his short stint in college, what businesses he’d had as a young man, when he’d suffered a heart attack that kept him from taking the California State Bar, or why he’d shown up to the deposition essentially blind—because he’d broken his glasses—and was therefore unable to read the documents handed to him. It got more bizarre from there. With a calm, almost patronizing tone, Cohen recounted the most incredible tales as if he was describing the lunch he’d had that day at his favorite restaurant, TGI Fridays. He spoke of being a lawyer for a computer company at one point.

  Among his many outrageous claims, perhaps the most outrageous was that he was licensed to practice law in Panama. What was he doing visiting Panama? Carreon wanted to know. “Visiting Manuel Antonio Noriega,” Cohen matter-of-factly replied. Kremen burst out laughing, just picturing the absurd scene of Cohen smoking cigars with the notorious dictator. Cohen was such an intrepid liar, Kremen believed, and an imaginative one at that. But Cohen insisted it was true, saying he had visited Noriega “several times” and had had many business dealings with him, though he wouldn’t get into specifics.

  All the while, he spoke like he was addressing a child—even when Carreon pressed him on impersonating a lawyer in California, where he had never even applied to the bar. Unshaken, Cohen began bragging about his legal prowess when he was setting up businesses in Mexico, the Virgin Islands, California, and Nevada. Cohen remained inscrutable but steadfast about other claims in his life. But when it came to answering questions about his days running the swingers club in Orange County, his steeliness gave way to sentimentality. As Carreon handed Cohen a copy of an old newsletter he had made for The Club, Cohen’s eyes misted over. “It’s nostalgic?” Carreon asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Cohen said, as he read over his newsletter and slipped into the past. He could recall himself in his robe, the disco ball twirling, the Jacuzzi bubbling, the bodies writhing, he’d been so happy, so adored, it was all he ever wanted, a perpetual party of lust and loins and, in his own way, a feeling of love. “Thank you,” he told Carreon, blinking out of his reverie. “Can I have this?”

  Carreon said he could, but when he asked Cohen about other documents he’d written, Cohen remained cagey. “I’ve been the author of many documents,” he said, including one that was in the Library of Congress. Carreon asked the title. “Excuse my French,” Cohen replied, “ ‘How to Eat Pussy.’ ”

  “That was your—that was the title?”

  “That is the title.”

  “We can get you the catalog number of that if you’d like,” Cohen’s attorney Dorband offered.

  “That’s all right,” Carreon replied.

  But it was the story of how he allegedly obtained Sex.com that remained the most confounding. Cohen maintained that Sex.com had been the name of a discussion board on the French Connection since the 1980s, despite the nomenclature not existing at the time. It had originally been called Sex.communications, he explained, and lectured Carreon like a high school computer teacher. In an old operating system, Cohen explained, “you were allowed to have eight characters in the front separated by a period with three characters at the end. And Sex.com was the name of the particular chat system that certain users went to have general chat.”

  As Kremen listened, he couldn’t believe Cohen’s balls—it was not just that he was lying, they thought, but how calmly he spun his web. When Carreon asked if Sex.com was available to everyone on the French Connection, Cohen didn’t flinch. “It had limitations,” he explained. “We’d only let certain people into the—into that particular area. It was password protected. And the reason for it was, we had a lot of problems back in that day and age. We at one time opened it up to the general boards, and we had a lot of guys that would come onto the general boards and would see these girls and see that they were swingers, and some of the girls got treated like—as though they were prostitutes. And it caused a lot of animosity among the users, and we had to further restrict it as a result.”

  “You had to further restrict what, Sex.com?”

  “The Sex.com portion of it, yeah. And the same with all the other areas outside of Sex.com, like fetish.com, like—oh, we had a nudist area. We had an area—I don’t even remember what the nudist area was called.” He spoke pedantically about the technical details, how the BBS migrated from a VAX 11750 to an IBM PC. He said he’d discovered that it had been registered by Kremen after doing a WHOIS search on the site, and brushed off Carreon’s question as to why he hadn’t just called Kremen immediately. “What was the purpose in talking to Gary Kremen?” Cohen asked.

  “You knew that Gary Kremen was the system’s administrator,” Carreon went on. “He was the only person authorized to transfer this domain name.”

  “Says who?” Cohen snapped. He explained that once he saw that Kremen’s old company, Online Classifieds, wasn’t registered in California or any other state, he dispatched his old friend, Vito Franco, to pay Sharyn Dimmick, Kremen’s former colleague whom Cohen claimed had the power to assign him the rights to Sex.com, a visit. “Find out all the information,” Cohen said he’d told Franco. “Find out what it would take for us to get it.” Franco, Cohen went on, was an ex-cop in Hawaii, a private eye, and an L.A. movie producer who also worked in construction—most recently in Mexico for Cohen. He’d also set up the live porn feeds for Sex.com. “He ran the live sex, the sucking and fucking that went on in the rooms,” Cohen explained. Cohen said he didn’t know how Franco had found Dimmick, just that he had driven up to San Francisco to meet her, gotten the letter signed, and paid her $1,000 in exchange.

  Carreon pressed Cohen on the strange inconsistencies that followed. Cohen admitted that Franco had typed the letter on Online Classifieds letterhead, but had no explanation as to why Dimmick was unable to type it herself. “You did not think it suspicious that Mr. Franco found it necessary to create the letterhead for the letter to be written on?” Carreon asked.

  “No,” Cohen said, who didn’t think it was suspicious that the president didn’t have her own stationery for her company either. As for Carreon getting in touch with Franco, that wouldn’t be possible, Cohen told him. “He’s in heaven.” He had died the previous October, Cohen went on. They’d last seen each other in a Jacuzzi in Tijuana. The next night, Cohen flew to Vegas for Comdex, and grew angry when Franco had failed to phone him as planned. “I called his house, because I was upset because he didn’t call me,” Cohen said, “and then I found out that he had passed away.” Carreon asked if Franco had managed to put his meeting with Dimmick on tape or in writing before he passed away. “No, he did not,” Cohen s
aid, which was such a shame. “He was going to be one of our witnesses.”

  Cohen arched his back. “Mr. Kremen told the reporter that I identified myself as a trademark attorney and had called him, which was false. Mr. Kremen also told him that I had stolen the name Sex.com, which is absolutely false. Mr. Kremen also told him that I had engaged in criminal acts, specific criminal acts that were false. To make it very, very short, Mr. Kremen and his attorney have engaged—or attorneys, I should say, have engaged in everything from perpetrating a fraud to the court, in my opinion, to simply outrageous conduct, including fabrications of stories about me, making statements, issuing press releases that are just ‘fly by the night make them up’ stories in order to ruin my reputation in the community, that have substantially hurt the entities that I have worked for, including my reputation.”

  “Had you ever spoken to Mr. Kremen prior to Mr. Kremen’s lawsuit being filed against you?”

  “I’m not sure of the answer to that. I received a phone call from somebody that identified themselves as Kremlin.”

  “Kremen?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Kremen?”

  “Yeah. Kremlin.”

  “Kremen, K-r-e-m-e-n.”

  “Yeah, Kremlin.”

  “No. K-r-e-m-e-n. No L.”

  No matter, Cohen said, the whole conversation only lasted a matter of seconds, and “the person on the other end of the phone sounded very elusive. He just didn’t sound like he was all there. And I don’t know if I ended the conversation or hung up on him. I probably did.”

  “Is it your testimony that you did not steal Sex.com from Mr. Kremen?”

  “I just testified to that.”

  “Well, I don’t think you answered the question directly.”

  “I’ll answer it again.”

  “I’ll ask it again so it’s clear.”

  “I understand the question.”

  “I’ll ask it again.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you steal the domain name Sex.com from Gary Kremen?”

  “The answer is no. If anybody stole it, it was Gary Kremen stealing it from me.”

  * * *

  Two weeks after the deposition, Cohen sued Carreon and Kremen for libel, and wanted $50 million in damages. But by the summer of 2000, they had a powerful new addition to their team: James Wagstaffe, one of the most powerful lawyers in San Francisco. Growing up in Menlo Park and educated at Stanford, Wagstaffe made his name in high-profile media cases. When Kremen approached him for help, he thought the underlying stakes were compelling enough to get him on board. Compelled by this basic idea, as he put it, “the issue of whether a domain name was like tangible property and therefore you could steal it.”

  In July, Wagstaffe in tow, they met with Cohen again for his remaining deposition. As Wagstaffe listened skeptically, Cohen painted himself as the international mogul, splitting his time between his homes in Tijuana, Amsterdam, Vegas, and Rancho Santa Fe. His travel was making it difficult to schedule his next deposition. He said he had to go to Europe, though wouldn’t say where, to meet a pornographer named Bjorn Jorgenson. But, regardless, he claimed, he wasn’t in it for the sex anymore.

  “I haven’t logged on to Sex.com in a period of time,” he demurred. “I’m in the sex business, sir. A lot of this stuff is intriguing to a lot of people that are outside of this industry. I’ve been in the sex business for many, many years, and some of the things that turn a lot of people on today are just not so important to me in this day and age. You know, I used to run a swing club and I lived a very precarious life. I’m very happily married and live a monogamous life at this point.” Still, he bragged, of the five thousand emails he received a day, “there’s a certain percentage of those emails where people want to have sex with me.”

  But then, in the middle of his spiel, he became paranoid. He accused Kremen of making faces at him. “Would you please stop?” he said to Kremen, then to Wagstaffe. “Ask your client not to give me looks when I’m testifying. I know he’s got a drug problem and it bothers me.” Wagstaffe arched his brow. What was Cohen talking about? This just seemed another absurd ploy for reasons he couldn’t understand. Though Wagstaffe said he hadn’t noticed Kremen mocking Cohen, he said, “I suggest that if Mr. Kremen is making a face or some other action that quietly disturbs Mr. Cohen, that Mr. Cohen focus somewhere else.”

  And yet, before long, Cohen was at it again. He kept glancing over at Kremen, who seemed to him to be snickering at his every claim. Cohen could feel his anger seething at his rival. Kremen, he thought he was so smart, so savvy, he thought he could just sit there and laugh at him when he was the one who’d be laughing last! “I’m having a problem with your client, you know, smiling,” Cohen told Wagstaffe.

  “Well,” Wagstaffe replied, “let me just for the record indicate that we have been joined by Charles Carreon, one of Mr. Kremen’s attorneys. And Mr. Kremen smiled a hello in salutation to Mr. Carreon. That seems appropriate to me. But let’s continue.”

  Cohen barked back at Wagstaffe. “This has been continuous for the last ten minutes!”

  “I think that you’re—you’re not accurately portraying what’s going on in the room.”

  “That’s where we agree to disagree.”

  When Cohen wasn’t acting paranoid, he was trying to impress Wagstaffe with his genius at turning Sex.com into one of the biggest empires online. “What you see today is my creation,” Cohen said, “and without my abilities to have created that and built that into what it is today—that’s what gives it its innate value.” The related rights to the site—marketing, television, fiber optics—were worth at least $2 million, he said. Sex.com was getting a whopping forty million hits a day, with nine million people paying $24.99 per month for memberships. He’d said he turned down one offer of $48 million, cash, “because if the company follows my logic and builds this fiber infrastructure, this company will have a product that will be worth between $60 and $100 billion.”

  As for his checkered past, Cohen stiffened his back and accepted responsibility, martyring himself. “I was engaged in a lot of criminal activity,” he said. “I have a very bad past. You are aware of my bad past. There is nothing I can do to make up for my past. If you want to take me out in the wood shack and beat me, that’s all I can say. I can only go on, when I came out of jail, I tried to correct my life. And I assume that when I signed this document, I did it honestly, but I cannot represent to you or—and to this court that I was not engaged in criminal activity at the time I did this, because I certainly was.”

  “When you say you did bad things, you did bad things in business, right?” Carreon asked.

  “Sir, as I’ve already testified, I was a criminal.”

  “Yeah. And you were a business criminal. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  “I don’t make the distinction. I was a criminal. I committed criminal acts and I was judged by a court to be a criminal. I was a criminal. I’m remorseful about it. There’s nothing I can say about it.”

  “Okay. Well, no, actually I’m sure there’s some things you can say.

  “You know, what you’re telling us, what you’re telling the judge and the jury, is that you kind of have undergone a conversion, right?”

  “I would like to think so.”

  “Okay. And that conversion is evidenced by the fact that you live your life differently now. You get up in the morning, you comb your hair, you like yourself because you know you are honest, you’re not lying or cheating to get money, right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You were in the sex business,” Carreon concluded, “you ran the swing club and you ran French Connection BBS, and that included services that helped people hook up sexually. Is that it?”

  “I had a very active sex life. I’m proud of that.”

  “And so the question is, you’re really still in the sex business.”

  “I’ve never gotten out of the sex business.”

  �
��So if we were looking for things about your life before prison that were different from your life now, we wouldn’t find it in the area of a chosen occupation, right?”

  “I don’t understand it. Say it again.”

  “Okay. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to see—because you’ve kind of made it important. I’m trying to see the old Steve Cohen and the reformed Steve Cohen, and I kind of have a list of ideas about what the old Steve Cohen was doing, and I’d like to complete my list of what the new Steve Cohen is doing. Now, the old Steve Cohen was in the sex business and the new Steve Cohen is still in the sex business.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And, in fact, the business you are in is all based around the continuity of business efforts that started in 1979 with French Connection BBS and continued uninterruptedly until the present day and now is your baby, Sex.com.”

  “It’s my baby, Sex.com.”

  “So bottom line is your current employment, your current business activity, is just completely continuous all the way back to 1979. You’ve been in the sex business.”

  “I’m a man,” Cohen replied, “and I’ve been a man all my life. When I was in the swinging business, I was engaged in parties where I’d fuck and suck 30 women at a time or 20 women at a time. That is not the business I’m in today.”

  By the time they were done with the deposition, the teams were huddling in the hallway, doing their postmortems. But Carreon kept noticing that Cohen was catching his eye, smiling in a kind of taunting way, like he had something on him or something else up his sleeve. Finally Carreon had enough, and approached the small man in the purple and black tie. “Where are you going for dinner?” Carreon asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Cohen replied, “where are you going?”

  Kremen thought having dinner with his rival was a crazy idea, but Carreon convinced him it’d be a prime opportunity for recon. “We don’t have to say anything at all, if we’re afraid of giving up some advantage,” he told him, “we could just listen. If we keep our ears open, we could probably learn some things.”