The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  Crazy Kremen could go fuck himself. He wasn’t going to get a penny. And Cohen wasn’t going to sit around and wait any longer for him to try. After his years in the online sex business, he’d made contacts in Monte Carlo—the jewel of the French Riviera—who wanted to get into the casino business with him. He could just picture himself spending his millions there, living in a mansion by the sea, chewing on one of his favorite cigars, far from Kremen’s greedy paws. Okay, he decided, adiós Tijuana, bonjour Monaco.

  * * *

  After infiltrating Cohen’s internet shack in San Ysidro, Kremen headed down to Mexico with his private eye, Margo Evashevski. Their mission: to find as much as they could about whatever assets Cohen was hiding down there, so that he could take them back. But they couldn’t just go and get him. They had to continue to build their case—and the last thing they wanted to do was tip him off to their snooping around. So they came to TJ on the down-low. This was still the art of war he was practicing, and he was on a mission. “You want to know what your opponents are doing,” as he later put it.

  For added security, he brought his muscle, Mark the Handyman, and the gun he’d bought online. “I listened to enough rap to know that it’s better to be judged by twelve than to be carrried by six,” he quipped. They were also joined by Kremen’s ever-expanding team of attorneys: Tim Dillon, a San Diego–based attorney, and Alejandro Osuna, a lawyer in Tijuana. But that didn’t put Evashevski any more at ease. She had learned too much about Cohen, and suspected that some of his associates in Tijuana were connected to the cartel. It didn’t help when Osuna told them he’d been getting anonymous messages telling him “watch out what you’re doing, we’re looking at you, bad stuff can happen to you.”

  As they passed the sex clubs and seedy bars along Tijuana’s infamous strip, Evashevski could feel her heart beating faster. For someone who was used to the dot-com scene in Silicon Valley, she felt way out of her element. They were going to meet a possible source who worked for an internet broadband provider in the city. But the meeting felt like a visit with the mob. Parked outside a modern office building, they were told to wait in their car until the employees had left after work. We don’t know what we’re doing, Evashevski thought, this seems way over our head.

  Around 5 p.m., they were ushered inside, where a handsome young Mexican man introduced himself with a sly grin as the head of sales and marketing for the ISP. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Román Caso.” The second he said his name, Evashevski gulped. Caso, she knew, was one of Cohen’s main associates. She had come across his name again and again in her research, linking him to Cohen’s complex web of Mexican business and intrigue. Of all Cohen’s associates, she considered him “target number one,” as she later put it, which sent fear flashing through her brain. “I thought for sure we were going to get shot,” she later recalled.

  But, in fact, he wanted something else: to cooperate. There had been an unexpected benefit to the Wanted ad that Kremen had posted online. Caso was another one who had been betrayed by Cohen’s shady dealings, and wanted to help feed them information—if in part to cover his own hide. And Caso had just the place he wanted to take them. Down a busy street teeming with gringos, they came to a spot near the raucous nightclub Señor Frog’s: it was the Bolero, the strip club that Cohen co-owned, and was now, Caso presumed, ready to meet the new owner, Gary Kremen.

  As they went inside, Kremen looked at the ravenous customers and dancers of questionable age, and felt his stomach churn. The whole thing made him uncomfortable, even pursuing this asset at all. And the fact that he had a 9mm Glock, which he’d never had to use before, didn’t make him feel any safer since he knew he probably wasn’t the only one packing. His nerves didn’t rest any easier when he was confronted by the men who worked there. “It’s my club,” Kremen said, a bit too boldly, “forty percent!”

  But when word got back to Huerta, one of the owners of the Bolero, Huerta wasn’t upset—like Caso, he was ready to help. Huerta never liked Cohen, and was happy to help get him out of his hair. He told them everything he could about how Cohen was getting paid, the cash deals, the credit cards. According to Dillon, a man even suggested a way they might apprehend Cohen: by having someone slip him a roofie, put him in a car, then drive him across the border. Kremen said thanks, but no thanks.

  While his team began looking into taking over the Bolero business, Kremen. Margo, and Mark the Handyman hit the road for one more destination in Mexico: La Cruz de Loreto. Back in Rancho Santa Fe, he had found some of Cohen’s binders tossed aside in a pile of papers, but was mystified by what he found inside: pictures of shrimp, prices of shrimp, scientific data on shrimp larvae. Kremen took to his computer, and began searching for more information. And that’s when he found it. There among the long list of websites that Cohen owned were links to Productora Camaronera del Mar El Ermitaño. Holy camarones, Kremen thought, now I own a shrimp farm too.

  When they pulled up to the small fishing village, they were overcome by its beauty. The lapping waves against the large bay, the families playing on the beach. And there was a familiar person there to greet them: a lanky Texan with a weathered face, Jack Brownfield. Since meeting Brownfield at the warehouse to get back the goods from the house in Rancho Santa Fe, he had become the latest of Cohen’s allies to flip, at least somewhat, their way. Brownfield still considered Cohen an ally, but he cared even more about his passion: the camarones. He wanted to get them into Whole Foods, to help build the local fishing community, but it was falling into disarray, plagued by theft and corruption. “You know,” Brownfield said, “Steve’s my friend and all, but he’s not helping me with the shrimp farm.”

  Kremen looked out across the bay, as Brownfield began telling him about the bounty of shrimp swimming in the waters. The sun was sparkling on gentle waves. The palms swayed in the warm breeze. To calm his nerves, he’d popped a Xanax, which bathed his brain. In a lot of ways, he still felt like the fat kid from Skokie, jumping trains, stealing Playboys, and going on the ham radio with his dad. But life could take you as far as you could take yourself. And his life had led him here: ruler of the online porn business, owner of a mansion in one of the most expensive suburbs in America, a Tijuana strip club, a bootleg microwave internet company, and now an organic Mexican shrimp farm.

  But it doesn’t matter how much you have if there’s something you’re missing. And Kremen couldn’t rest until he had what he wanted most of all, Cohen, and he could feel himself closing in. Because Cohen, he had concluded, had one fatal flaw. The more people he rubbed the wrong way, the more people Kremen could enlist to help him in his fight. “He screws over every single person around him,” as Kremen later put it. “He’s incapable of having a relationship with anyone.”

  “In my opinion,” as Brownfield put it, “Steve has a list and you’re on his list and depending on how desperate he is depends on whether you was gonna get burnt. You were high up enough on his list and you don’t have any problems. He is a great guy, but he can use your name, use whatever he can to get whatever it is that he wants.” But if Kremen would help Brownfield with the shrimp farm, he was willing to help Kremen get Cohen in return.

  * * *

  By 2003, the gold rush online was facing a formidable problem: piracy. It had started four years before with the release of Napster, a music-sharing service created by Northeastern university student Shawn Fanning. Before long, more robust alternatives flooded the net—Gnutella, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and others—allowing people around the world to share not just songs, but movies, games, and software. The phenomenon was threatening all the major media businesses, from the recording to the movie industries.

  It was also triggering a debate about the future of media and the freedom of being a consumer. Some believed that people should be able to share what they wanted online, regardless of copyright. Others insisted that the file-sharing services themselves should not be punished for the actions of the pirates who used them. After all, people could be sharing their own
music or films or games on these services as well. Why should the people suffer?

  Few people, however, suspected that the latest hub for online pirates was coming out of the Middle East. Jenin, a Palestinian city in the northwestern corner of the West Bank, was mainly known for its violent clashes. The Jenin refugee camp had come under fire in April 2002 by Israel Defense Forces after it had spawned a rash of suicide bombers. But in early 2003 the Jenin refugee camp was making waves across the internet underground as the home of a controversial new file-sharing site with the retro sci-fi name Earth Station 5. A press release sent to a variety of file-sharing forums described it as a foolproof answer to the recording and motion picture industry’s attack on piracy, safely tucked away far beyond their lawyers’ reach.

  Unlike the other services, it offered something else unique: anonymity, so that surfers could download without worrying about retribution. “Users can now freely share their music and movies online without the threat of a lawsuit from the RIAA because our technology hides each user’s identity,” said president Ras Kabir in a press release. “Our motto is share . . . share . . . share to your heart’s content because no one can stop you.”

  It wasn’t just a home for freedom fighters, it was a model of community. “Our group is made up of many people, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indians, Americans, Russians and Israelis,” the press release went on. “Some of us are Jewish, some Christians, some Hindus and other of us are Muslim. Believe it or not, we all love and respect each other. We all work and play together. Our families on many occasions eat at the same dinner table. We trust each other and are very close friends with each other. As a group, the most important thing in our life is our children, our families and loved ones and of course our friends.”

  When the RIAA and MPAA threatened to sue the service for copyright violation, Earth Station 5 declared “war” on the groups, “and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policies have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE.” The site claimed it was being used by more than nineteen million people around the world, and, while free, planned to make money eventually by offering online gambling and ads.

  In a subsequent interview with Salon about their defiant stance, spokesperson Steve Taylor boasted that when faced with the most powerful media conglomerates in the world “we tell them to go fuck off.” He went on with a laugh, “They can try [to sue us in the United States]. What are they going to do? Why don’t they sue us in China? Let’s say they did sue us and did win a judgment. What are they going to do, wipe their ass with it? How do they enforce it?” Matthew Oppenheim, senior vice president of legal and business affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, responded, “Earth Station 5 is trying to get press by throwing stones at us.”

  But as word traveled across the internet about this enigmatically rebellious new file-sharing service, it seemed that Steve Taylor might in fact be an alias for someone else after all: Stephen M. Cohen. Though Cohen claimed to be living in Monte Carlo helping to run a casino, others suspected he had his hands in these pockets too. It would make sense. To Cohen, file-sharing was just the latest twist in the ever changing path of the internet. It was unstoppable, just as sex online had been inevitable before. Rather than fight the file-sharing services, why not try to own them and monetize them?

  While investigating the site, technology reporters in Germany discovered that the notorious fugitive of Sex.com shared the same phone number and email as Taylor. When contacted, however, Taylor told The Economist that this was simply because they were using Cohen’s Mexican internet provider for access. “Almost everything about Earth Station 5 may be fiction,” the magazine concluded. “Perhaps the only certain thing is that, at least for The Economist, it works.”

  A reporter for an Israeli paper, Yediot, came to a similar conclusion. After contacting Taylor, the reporter was told that it was impossible to meet with Kabir, who is afraid for his safety, you probably understand, as an Israeli. Journalists are not allowed to visit ES5. Subsequently, Ras Kabir put out a press release confirming that the company had in fact hired Cohen to help their cause. “Let me make something very clear,” Kabir wrote. “We offered Mr. Cohen an executive job with our company. He initially turned us down; however after several telephone calls, he finally gave in and agreed to help us in the capacity of a consultant. We now have Mr. Cohen’s permission to disclose his identity.”

  But this did not allay the doubts. In fact, when The Washington Post sent a reporter to investigate, the story unraveled further. A spokesperson for the Palestinian territories phone company had no record of Earth Station 5, nor did the Palestinian Information Technology Association. The claimed location seemed to be some sort of ruse for reasons unknown. “I’ve never heard of the company, and I should have heard of it,” said Yahya Salqan, general secretary of the association. When the reporter began asking around Jenin if anyone had heard of the company, not only did no one know them—but they found it comical. As he wrote, “Questions about its founder and president, who calls himself Ras Kabir—Arabic for ‘Big Head’—drew laughter.”

  * * *

  While Cohen was running Earth Station 5, Kremen had become the life of the party. Gone were the baggy jeans and stained sweatshirt, replaced with a black leather jacket and sunglasses. Kremen sure seemed to have reason to celebrate. He was living what many guys would imagine to be the ultimate life for someone turning forty: sex, money, and the most valuable site online. Kremen was the Sex.com king, and everyone wanted a piece of him. The pornographers wanted his business. His old Stanford buddies wanted to date the porn stars. His ever-expanding team of lawyers, private eyes, and hackers wanted money to help him get Cohen. And they all wanted the hottest ticket in the business: a trip to the house at Rancho Santa Fe, the Playboy Mansion of online porn.

  When Wired reporter Chris O’Brien paid a few visits, he found an odd mash-up of Valley moguls and sleaze masters. As DJs spun records, Kym Wilde lolled topless in a thong in a hot tub, tweaking her nipples as Stanford geeks gawked. “My God,” O’Brien heard one of Kremen’s friends ask him, “where did you find her?”

  Kremen demurred, as he pounded a tequila shot. “You have to have a porn star on the payroll,” he said. “It’s all part of the image.” By way of explanation to O’Brien, Kremen likened himself to Tony Soprano. “He’s like a CEO,” Kremen says, “a businessman who’s got business problems.”

  Despite the parties, Kremen was having plenty of problems of his own. The sleaze and corruption of the porn business was increasingly hard for him to stomach. The violence of some content, the misogyny, the depravity. He was never a prude, but he was earnest, in ways that people didn’t understand, about trying to do what was right. Fed up with the industry’s inaction, he founded a group, Adult Sites Against Child Pornography, to create more means of keeping child porn off the web.

  As for his own site, he doubled down on his plan to make Sex.com a health and education destination. But transforming it into what he called the “Google of porn” wasn’t making anyone rich. Cohen had been earning $500,000 a month, more than double what Kremen was making now. It was like he was in denial that he was in the porn business, and, worse, failing to deliver the gobs of money that Cohen had funneled to the adult webmasters in the past. “His mission was to do something clean and not dirty,” as Jonathan Silverstein, Warshavsky’s former marketing director, later put it. “People thought Gary was crazy with the direction he went with the domain.”

  All the while, Kremen railed against Cohen. At one party, Silverstein was beckoned into Kremen’s bare bedroom and handed a phone. “Jonathan!” Kremen said in his nasally yelp, “I want you to speak with someone!” He handed him the phone, and there, on the other end, was a familiar voice: Stephen Cohen. Silverstein’s head spun. Kremen had a bounty on this guy, why would they be talking? “Holy fuck,” Silverstein shouted, “what’s up, Steve?”

  Later he asked Kr
emen why he’d bother with this, and Kremen insisted it was all part of his plan—the more they spoke, he hoped, the more information he could glean to help him collect. “I’m trying to get to him!” But Silverstein suspected there was some other psychology at play, some kind of twisted respect between the two in this strange cat and mouse game. “No matter how much he hated Stephen,” as Silverstein later recalled, “he admired Stephen.”

  And he couldn’t quiet the chase. When he wasn’t at the Rancho mansion, he was on the trail, down to Rail Court in San Ysidro, where Wilde convinced him to let her shoot a bondage video. There in the shack, she and another woman spanked each other under the microwave dishes, filming videos to pawn online. From there, it was over the border to Bolero, Kremen in his leather jacket and shades, the Clyde to Kym’s Bonnie, watching her with delight as she saddled up alongside the customers to milk whatever information she could on Cohen and his whereabouts.

  From there, it was a short flight to Puerto Vallarta, where they’d be met by a local security guard who’d drive them down to the shrimp farm. Kremen was as much a celebrity there now as he was among the Stanford dot-commers and online pornmasters, a gringo, it seemed, who would be good fortune to the fishermen in town. One day, the mayor held a welcoming ceremony for Kremen, gathering at the estuary among the locals. Kremen’s translator filled him in on the speech. “They’re welcoming you,” he said, “as a new investor trying to save the town. And they’re looking for you to help out the town under the scourge of drug traffickers.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on Kremen, who was battling with addiction of his own. The drugs were fueling his frenetic behavior, shortening what was already a huge lack of patience. Kremen couldn’t keep track of it anymore: the meth, the blow, the Xanax, and whatever else came his way. Those closest to him were beginning to take notice. To his friends and family, Kremen was increasingly obsessed and dark.