The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  The next thing Kremen knew, he was sitting at a white-tablecloth-covered table in a chop house called Rainwater’s, sharing a bottle of red wine with Cohen himself. Cohen kept egging Kremen on throughout the dinner. “You didn’t invent online dating,” he told him, “I invented it.” He went on and on about the French Connection, The Club, his innovations, so much so that Kremen began feeling dizzy from it all. He thought Cohen was a genuine sociopath, someone who believed his own lies, who had a compulsion to impress. He believed he was a lawyer. He believed he invented online dating. He believed he created Sex.com. “You don’t understand trademark law,” Cohen told him, “you stole it from me.”

  Kremen searched Cohen’s face, the smug smile, the glint in his eye. Jesus, what if this guy was right? And the craziest thing of all: Kremen felt himself beginning to believe it too. “Cohen is a brilliant con man,” as he later put it. “He’s so convincing that, after twenty minutes of talking to him, he had me believing that I stole it from him.” He couldn’t help himself. Kremen was starting to lose his sense of reality. Maybe Cohen knew something he didn’t. Old insecurities crept back into his mind, like he was getting beat. And Cohen, sensing the vulnerability, tossed him a lifeline. The Sex.com business was going into the toilet, Cohen told him, the real future was in telecommunications, like the internet service he was beaming to Mexico. Cohen told Kremen he could tell he knew what he was talking about, with technology at least. He was an old-timer online, like him. And so Cohen was going to take pity on him and offer him a deal.

  He would give Kremen $500,000 to settle this case, in addition to a piece of his telecom company, Omnitech. All Kremen had to do was to let him keep Sex.com and walk away. But Kremen took one look at him and knew exactly what he wanted to do: fight. Fight to the end, because the most valuable website online was rightfully his. And no one, especially not Cohen, was going to take it away. If Cohen wanted a smackdown, he was not only going to lose, he was going to be convicted of stealing from him. “I’m not going to settle,” Kremen told him, “and you’re going to jail.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE DOGPATCH

  There was the Castro, the Mission, North Beach, Cow Hollow. And then, SoMa, Embarcadero, Telegraph Hill. But while the origins of the nicknames behind San Francisco’s many colorful neighborhoods were widely known, the story behind the Dogpatch, the eastward enclave of grimy warehouses and gritty streets, remained a mystery. Some traced it to the Li’l Abner days of the Depression, when poor shipyard workers in the area were likened to hounds. Others figured it got its name for the scavenger dogs that would wander the slaughterhouses for scraps.

  By 2000, the Dogpatch teemed with homeless people and drug addicts. And Gary Kremen, who felt like his life was going to the dogs, was more than comfortable living that way. While Cohen was enjoying the fruits of his Sex.com millions in his Rancho estate, Kremen had moved into a two-story, run-down old building in the Dogpatch that he bought for $500,000 cash. Kremen had always lived and felt like a pioneer, happy to be alone in the desert or prospecting on the new frontier online.

  But still, living in the Dogpatch was extreme. The “war,” as Carreon kept calling it, was taking its toll. Kremen was sleepless and weary, crashing on a mattress on the bare concrete floor, subsisting on takeout burritos and antidepressants. Chasing Cohen had become a full-time job, a 24/7 obsession, plotting all day with Carreon and Wagstaffe, then staying up all night searching the web for anything he could find about Cohen, his money, and his burgeoning empire. Kremen had turned into a kind of DIY detective, unearthing documents that he’d then turn over to Carreon, who’d subpoena them—to put added pressure on not only Cohen but his associates. Cohen wasn’t just making money, Kremen realized, he was among the most successful businessmen online. According to a U.S. House of Representatives report, online porn was the most lucrative product online—averaging $2.7 million per day in earnings. Everyone was rushing to make money online, but few were actually showing profit. Cohen seemed to be beating them all.

  Soon after, Carreon showed up one morning in his royal blue Jeep Grand Cherokee. They were going to take the deposition of Román Caso, an employee of Cohen’s who was working as his vice president of YNATA Corporation, down in Ensenada, Mexico. As the rolling hills passed by, Kremen’s cell phone rang. It was Cohen. He knew they were coming and was calling to taunt Kremen personally, to remind him that he was going to jail, that his trip was futile, that he was the original inventor of online dating, and so on. Carreon listened in awe as Kremen took the bait, taunting Cohen back that he was going to be the one relegating him to prison in the end.

  As the day turned to night, Kremen’s cell phone kept ringing from Cohen. As they settled in their motel room, Carreon on the couch, Kremen kept talking with Cohen, poring over the case, talking about the online porn business, and, to Carreon’s amazement, trading ideas. Kremen was probing Cohen about the banner ad business, sharing strategies he’d learned running Match. Cohen would talk about how much smarter he was than the pornographers who populated the underworld. One minute they’d sound like old friends—swapping stories of their Jewish upbringings—and the next threatening to sue the other into oblivion.

  After being up all night, Kremen slept through the deposition the next day—waking to find Carreon return, more incensed than ever. The deposition with Caso had been a bust. Carreon had to speak with him in broken Spanish. To make matters worse, Cohen had shown up too, and was insinuating himself in the questioning—cursing at Carreon in Spanish for Caso’s benefit. “Pinche pendejo,” he said to Carreon, “fucking asshole.” Fed up, Caso ultimately cut it short, saying in Spanish, “I’m not sure who’s the asshole here,” then refused to answer more questions, and left.

  When Kremen heard the story, there’s just one place he wanted to go. So the two of them drove up past the Mexican border and veered off Interstate 5 until the strip malls gave way to rolling hills and luxury homes. They turned along the orange groves, past the horse trails and estates until they came to 17427 Los Morros Road: the address they had for Cohen’s home in Rancho Santa Fe. No one was home, but no matter. Kremen just wanted to see it firsthand. Carreon grabbed a disposable camera and climbed into a eucalyptus tree to take pictures for their records. But Kremen just stood there, frozen, soaking it all in. The tennis court, the kidney-shaped pool, the scent of the lemon trees filling the air. Kremen was in the Dogpatch now, but one day, he resolved, this would all be his.

  * * *

  “Gary’s coming after you, see?” Jack Brownfield, a silver-haired Texan with leathered skin and sharp blue eyes, told Cohen one afternoon as they sat poolside at the Rancho estate. “He’s just going to start taking all your stuff,” Brownfield went on, gesturing to the lavish home, “and you’ve got one big plum hanging out here.”

  There weren’t a lot of people Cohen respected, let alone listened to, but Brownfield, one of his closest business associates and oldest friends, always had his ear. An ex-Marine and Vietnam vet turned lawyer, Brownfield had first met Cohen in 1972, when Cohen was renting office space in the law firm where Brownfield was practicing. Brownfield soon learned of Cohen’s business selling bootleg software. His first impression of Cohen never changed. “He’s a con man,” as Brownfield later put it, and one who seemed always haunted by the specter of his father’s disapproval over his schemes. “His father told him he didn’t want to ever see him again,” Brownfield recalled. “I don’t know what his father got upset with him about, but I know it always bothered Steve because he was always trying to show his father that he was doing better financially.”

  Brownfield had his own criminal past. As a young man, he had gotten mixed up with drug smugglers in Mexico, running coke and speed across the border—only to get arrested and sent to prison for a year. Not long after he got out, he was watching the evening news one night when a report came on about the owner of Sex.com who had offered to buy Caesars Palace, Stephen Cohen. That son of a bitch, Brownfield thought with a chuckle.
The next day he was at work when the secretary buzzed him. “Hey, you got a phone call,” she said, “your lawyer.”

  It was Cohen. “Hey, were you watching the news?” Cohen said.

  “Yeah,” Brownfield replied, “what are you doing over there?”

  Brownfield had heard decades of schemes from Cohen—The Club, French Connection—and, as Cohen went on about Sex.com, it sounded like his typical approach. “He never has a plan,” as Brownfield put it, “he takes off and goes.” Sex wasn’t the motivation, Brownfield knew, it was money and ego. “He wanted to show people that he was doing well,” Brownfield said. “It was very, very important to him.”

  When Brownfield told him he was skeptical of the online porn business—“look at the scumbags you’re dealing with”—Cohen pushed back. Sex was fueling the internet more than anything, people were just too embarrassed to admit it. But anyone with a brain knew where the money was sitting. Google, Yahoo!, America Online, how did Jack think they were making money? By people searching for porn. By driving traffic. By selling ads based on that traffic. And so on and so on and so fucking on. “Jack, this is the business to be in because it never goes out of style!” he told him. “You plant yourself solidly in this business, it’s a good business.”

  Though Cohen had long pretended he was a lawyer, he knew Brownfield was the real thing—and wanted his help with Kremen. When the two got together at Rancho, Brownfield pored over the documents, including the letter Cohen had sent to Network Solutions. Cohen was street-smart, he thought, but bookishly dim. Brownfield shook his head in disbelief. “Steve, this doesn’t make any sense,” he said, pointing out the typos and inconsistencies. “How come all these letters and everything are all, you know, spelled wrong and everything?”

  Despite Cohen’s insistence that he was beating Kremen in court, Brownfield suggested he keep as much from Kremen’s paws as possible—starting with the house in Rancho Santa Fe. “You need to go and get a loan on this house, Steve,” he said. “You get a big mortgage, as big a mortgage on it as you can, so if he takes it, he gets nothing.” And just like that, Brownfield was in business with him—securing the loan, and becoming the advisor for his burgeoning empire.

  With Cohen now pocketing about a million a month from Sex.com, there was money to go around. Brownfield moved down to Tijuana, renting a place and spending his days with Cohen, who ran his empire from his office, dressed in sweatpants and T-shirts. He helped him with personal matters. Cohen’s mother had financial problems in Vegas, and was losing the equity in her house. Cohen had Brownfield give her money every month, collect her bills, and try to analyze how much she was spending and where the money was going.

  Cohen was traveling back and forth to Amsterdam, trying to provide porn for the numerous new sites popping up online. Cohen had figured out that the best way to make money online wasn’t to create content at all. “He said it’s easier to just steal the content from other people,” as Brownfield later recalled, “and edit it so it looks like original content, and then reproduce it that way rather than trying to hire the people to do the directing.”

  Back in Mexico, Cohen was busy building his fortune there. Brownfield drove with Cohen across the border to see the small shack with the microwave dishes. Cohen, cigar between his teeth, described how he was building the biggest telecom in Tijuana. Brownfield didn’t pretend to be technically savvy, but he knew enough to see red flags. Cohen’s system seemed like basically a big hack, allowing customers to make international calls and get online service outside the regulatory system.

  Before long, Brownfield grew weary of giving Cohen so much advice without getting something more substantial in return. “You know, you’ve got to give me something,” he told Cohen, and he had just the thing in mind: a shrimp farm. Brownfield had already been studying aquaculture, and researching the business in Mexico. He’d spent time studying shrimp farming in Culiacán, a city in northwestern Mexico, and getting licensed. The fishing industry in the country had long been nationalized, Brownfield explained, but with NAFTA this was no longer the case. And there was big money to be had.

  “The differential between what you can buy the shrimp for in Mexico and what you can sell it for in the United States is over a dollar a pound,” he explained. “You could ship everything that you could load on a plane you could make a dollar on. If you’re selling five tons a day, you’re making $5,000 a day, right?” Drawing from his old drug smuggling days, he devised a way to ship the shrimp by plane instead of the usual boats—so they could increase deliveries to make even more cash. And with shrimp consistently outselling other seafood, investing there would be a no-brainer.

  Cohen was dubious. “Why do you want to do that, man? We could do anything.”

  “No, Steve,” Brownfield replied, “this is what I want to do.” He didn’t want to make money from sex or drugs or anything outlaw anymore, he wanted the camarones. And so, Cohen agreed to invest in one for Brownfield. But in the meantime, there was the Kremen problem, and Cohen had just the plan for making him go away.

  * * *

  His name was Crab. Just Crab, a human crustacean, a wily, clawed scavenger of the Dogpatch who latched himself to Kremen’s side. Kremen’s industrial home had assumed the nickname of his grimy neighborhood, and street urchins such as Crab were coming with the territory, insinuating themselves inside the walls of his house and mind. It had begun, at some point, when he let a homeless guy start passing out on his couch. Before long, there were others coming and going, rifling through his fridge and shooting the shit while he hunched at his PC, trying to dig up what he could on Cohen. Though he had way more education and money than they’d ever know, he identified more with them than the MBAs and dot-com wannabes he left behind at Stanford. They were survivors, salt of the earth, scrappy pariahs clawing for scraps just like the crab that he too had become. And when Crab, the ruler of them all, offered Kremen a pipe late one night, he didn’t hesitate to take a long drag of what was inside: crystal methamphetamine.

  Kremen’s history with drugs, until that point, had been fairly run-of-the-mill for someone of his socioeconomic class and culture. Never much of a drinker, there’d been weed in high school, acid and mushrooms at Dead concerts, cocaine now and then, and that was pretty much it. But meth just grabbed him on a lark out of nowhere like nothing he’d tried before. From the moment the sweet sizzling burn hit the back of his throat, he was up again, a mad rush of dopamine and energy and confidence mainlined to his brain, a fat pipe of bandwidth streaming in the necessary connection to keep him awake and alive and fucking focused, so focused he could do anything, could stay at his PC for fucking hours, Grateful Dead on the stereo, Crab laughing about something, a hot burrito in his paw, and then, when he felt himself dipping, another hit of the pipe.

  Kremen always heard the sound of his mother’s voice in his head, telling him to do better, work harder, beat Cohen. But that voice took on a darker obsession now. He needed more energy, more fuel, and he found it in meth. When Carreon showed up to work, he could tell that something was amiss. Kremen was always a nervous guy, but seemed increasingly so now—hair matted down with sweat, eyes shifting. But then again, he was a grown man, he could make his own choices, and seemed, nevertheless, functional despite whatever he was consuming. And, if anything, he was turning up even more on Cohen—financial documents, bank accounts, associates. Carreon didn’t know how or where Kremen found it all, but had a strong feeling that Kremen was not only a deft researcher on a computer, but someone capable of hacking into places he wasn’t intended to go.

  By the fall of 2000, Kremen was still investing in other start-ups, hoping they’d cash in. But his full-time passion was getting back Sex.com. Between his sleuthing and his lawyers’ subpoenas, served with the help of a network of private eyes, they were getting a clearer picture of just how much money Cohen was making, and where he was stashing his cash. This wasn’t just about winning Sex.com, after all, this was also about Kremen getting the cash that Co
hen had made from the stolen site. Every clue they found showed them what money was to be had: the house in Rancho Santa Fe, his bank accounts, his securities accounts, Citibank, Charles Schwab, his corporations, Sandman, Ocean Front. They had tax returns, stock certificates, letters from the French Connection to Wanaleiya, papers in and papers out, bank documents in, bank documents out. Kremen’s desk in the Dogpatch grew with stacks by the day, as he hunched over them with his red pen, circling points, and scribbling in the margins.

  In September 2000, they were waiting for details on Cohen’s essential bank accounts at Wells Fargo, which they had finally tracked down. They were due to be sent to a Kinko’s copy shop in Chula Vista, California, they had been using to process the subpoenas. But when one of Carreon’s assistants called the Kinko’s to see if the paperwork had come, she received a surprising reply: the Kinko’s manager told her that one of Kremen’s lawyers had already picked up the documents. When she asked for a description of the lawyer, the manager told her he was a stout, short, graying man with a receding hairline.

  Kremen was in Wagstaffe’s San Francisco office when he got the call from Carreon: “Cohen stole the documents!” he said. Why he would go to such lengths, they had no idea. After all, he could have simply requested his own files from the bank at any time. Weirdly, soon after, a FedEx arrived at their offices without a return address. Inside were Cohen’s Wells Fargo records—with two hundred pages missing. It seemed Cohen must have wanted to intercept the documents, remove some key pages, they assumed, then mail them along as if they had come straight from the bank.

  All they needed was proof. And, soon enough, they had it in surveillance footage from Kinko’s that showed, in grainy black and white, Cohen, in an oversized sweatshirt, coming to the counter, and leaving with the stack of bank documents. A few moments later, he came back into the store, grabbed a large FedEx envelope—the same one they now held in their hands.