The Players Ball

by David Kushner

  Aging and weary from his health problems, he was in a reflective mood late one night in 2015. “I lived a very good life,” Cohen said. “I had ups and downs, but I had good times, I had million-dollar homes, I had fancy cars, I had boats, I had airplanes, I’ve been to just about every country.” And he admitted that he hadn’t always achieved these things by admirable measures. “I haven’t lived the perfect life,” he said. “My morals haven’t been exactly up to par.”

  At times, he felt remorseful. “Everybody has regrets,” he went on, “and I certainly have regrets. If I can look back and change things, I’d do that. With the knowledge that I have today, there are many things in my life that I could have done and would be drastically different. But unfortunately by the time you really come to realize what life is all about, you’re old enough that time passed you by. And that’s the problem.”

  But no matter how much time had passed, he still hadn’t been able to completely get Kremen off his mind—particularly with Kremen and Dillon still firing shots at him across the bow to collect. One day Brownfield confronted Cohen about this. “Steve,” he said, “you always tell me that Gary’s water under the bridge, but every time you talk to me, you’re talking to me about Gary.” After finding out that Kremen was now in politics, he told Brownfield he hoped that he’d be busy enough so that “now he’ll just leave me alone.”

  * * *

  It was a hot summer day in California not long ago, as Kremen stood at the gate of yesteryear: the security entrance to his old Sex.com mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.

  He wore baggy jeans and a gray T-shirt from Mount Whitney, the 14,505-foot-high mountain in the Sequoia Sierra Nevada range (the highest peak he’d ascended according to his California County High Points ranking on Peakbagger.com, a site for “summit-focused hikers”). He’d driven here from Palo Alto in his Jeep on a little tour through his past. It was the first time he’d been back since he’d sold it years before, but it still seemed the same. “I put so much money into the landscaping here,” he said with a sigh, as he looked across the lemon and eucalyptus trees.

  Later that afternoon, he drove forty miles south to San Ysidro, where he met Chris Jester, the cowboy hacker who’d worked with Cohen and helped Kremen take over the internet hub on Rail Court. Jester had since bought the internet hub himself. “See that dish over there?” he said, pointing to a large white dish on the rocky hill, “that’s serving a five-star hotel in Tijuana.”

  Kremen excitedly eyed the wires along the poles. “Is this the new fiber?” he asked. “Ohhh ho ho! That looks beautiful! Oh wow!”

  He pulled up to the top of the hill, where the Rail Court hub baked in the sun behind a barbed wire fence marked “Danger Restricted Area.” A few dying palms stood alongside. Jester motioned to the nearby hills along the border fence. “Just in the past eight months, about seven people were shot right here,” he said with a laugh. “They had a big gang fight where cartel guys came through a hole over there and they chased them up here.”

  But Kremen couldn’t be more excited to be back. He looked for the spot where Cohen had moved the fence, eyed the old shack nearby where Cohen had set up a data center. Inside a small, one-story new building nearby, his eyes widened when he saw the tall black metal racks holding the computer servers, linked together in a spaghetti of blue, red, yellow, and orange cables. “You get the fiber all the way from L.A.?” Kremen effused.

  “Yeah!” Jester replied. “There’s 144 strands of fiber here!” Jester later said that he solicited help from the Border Patrol to operate here by giving them free Wi-Fi, which he also is able to monitor—for laughs. “It’s the funniest thing,” he said. “They stay up late at night surfing porn.”

  At dusk, the two men headed over the border to Tijuana to see if they might find Cohen himself. Jester said Cohen had been purposely keeping a low profile around town. “He’s a hard guy to read,” Jester said. “If you bump into him in the street he’s so inconspicuous, he’s usually wearing a pair of jeans and a baggy T-shirt.” He still liked to eat his hot dogs at Costco, and clip coupons for TGI Fridays. “He uses coupons all the time so that people think that he doesn’t have money,” said Jester, “but I know he has money.”

  They drove past the strip clubs and taco stands, the zebra-donkeys pulling in red-faced tourists in cheap sombreros. As night fell, cars filled the streets, Mexican disco pumping from the nightclubs, palm trees rustling in the warm breeze, until finally they came to a small strip mall with the TGI Fridays out front. “That’s his booth right there,” Jester said. The booth was a few tables back by the window. They saw a Mexican family behind it, enjoying their burgers and fries.

  Over dinner at a nearby steak restaurant, sharing shots of local tequila, Kremen and Jester reminisced about the old times. By the time they got out, TGI Fridays was more crowded—except for Cohen’s booth, which remained conspicuously empty, as if it were reserved for the man who had made it famous. Kremen eyed it silently for a few moments, then said to no one in particular, “Maybe I should just let this go.” Perhaps he had finally reached Maslow’s peak on the Hierarchy of Needs, and was Self-Actualized enough to move on.

  Kremen wouldn’t say. But the past is easier to let go when you have someone special waiting for you now. Though his marriage to the Bulgarian doctor had proved short lived, he came out of it with two boys of his own he couldn’t wait to get back to playing with—taking them on hikes, and showing them his old ham radio. And the man who still claimed to have brought more love to the world than anyone else had finally found love again for himself. She was a bright-eyed, ebullient Appalachian poet getting her master’s in creative writing on a fellowship at Stanford when they met on the very place he had started long ago: Match.com, where he was still listed as the founder.

  The irony of meeting her online wasn’t lost on Kremen. He had started the site decades ago to find true love, after all, and twenty years was better late than never. She’d read him poetry, he’d take her camping. What the future held, he didn’t know. The present was enough that, at least for now, he could leave the past behind. So he climbed back into his Jeep, eased out past TGI Fridays, and headed north across the border for the next frontier, wherever it might lead.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1994, when Kremen was creating Match.com, I was working at one of New York City’s first internet start-ups. I had to show up to the office building with a chunk of cement in my hand. The company, SonicNet, which hoped to become the Rolling Stone of the nascent online world, operated out of the owner’s loft in Tribeca just off the Hudson. The desolate, cobblestone streets teemed with rats—big, vicious punk rock rodents who traveled in gangs.

  To make matters more complicated, some genius, or sadist, had positioned the building’s garbage cans right next to the main door. Rats love garbage, especially the oozing, stinking pizza- and condom-crusted New York variety, which meant I was greeted by a frenzied cyclone of them snapping their jaws by the door whenever I arrived. I learned quickly that to make it inside unscathed, I had to find something huge on the street to throw at the door to scatter the rats away.

  Such were the lengths we had to go to at the time to get online. These were still the Wild West days of the internet, before the release of the first web browser. SonicNet existed as a Bulletin Board System. What few users we had dialed up from their modems to slowly—oh so slowly—access our album and concert reviews. It took about an hour and a half to download an Aerosmith song. My job was to convince rock stars to come down to the loft to “chat,” as we now call it, online, only then there was no word for such a thing. I’d spend my days haplessly calling music publicists begging them to send an artist downtown to go on the internet. Invariably, this would be followed by a long silence on the other end of the phone, and then the question: “What’s the internet?”

  As a journalist and author, I’ve been answering variations of that question ever since. I’ve written about gamers and whiz kids and moguls and hackers and socia
l media stars. I interviewed twenty-one-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his one-bedroom walk-up in Palo Alto—sparsely furnished with just a guitar, an amp, a mattress on the floor, and a teapot—when he was still handing out business cards that read “I’m CEO . . . bitch.” I fielded cryptic late-night calls from an elusive Australian who’d recently launched a whistleblowing site called WikiLeaks. When I asked Julian Assange his age, he demurred because of the people who’d inevitably be coming after him, telling me “why make it easy for the bastards?”

  But after writing dozens of articles and a small shelfful of books, there was still one story that I hadn’t told, or seen told by someone else, yet: the Wild West years of the internet, when rats swarmed the doorways, and just getting online at all was an adventure. But what story to tell? When writing a book of narrative nonfiction, it’s not enough to just say “I want to write about [blank].” There has to be a story, characters, conflict, an arc, and all that literary stuff. Oh, and it needs to sustain itself over a few hundred pages or so.

  I spent several years trying to figure out what the story—or at least my version of the story—of the Wild West online would be. The process of discovery was in itself an adventure. I went to Vegas for Defcon, a hacker convention. I went to Dundee, Scotland, to meet the creator of the video game Grand Theft Auto. Eventually, I found myself back in Vegas for the Players Ball, the annual soiree for the purveyors of online sex. Yes, legendary porn star Ron Jeremy—aka “The Hedgehog”—was there, along with the predictable gaggle of starlets, rappers, rockers, and celebs). But, more importantly, there was something else here: a story. How did the internet, in all its facets today, grow out of this dirty, strange aquifer?

  Seeking that answer, I soon found my way to Gary Kremen, the one person who, IMHO, personified the rise of the online underground more than anyone. And from Kremen, the path led to his archnemesis, Stephen Cohen (the conflict, the arc). This book is the result of all that—a decade of reporting, dozens of interviews, cross-country flights, and late nights.

  Thanks to all those who chronicled this saga as it was unfolding. Kremen’s lawyer Charles Carreon captured his inside experience in his memoir The Sex.Com Chronicles, and journalist Kieren McCarthy tracked the case in his 2007 book, Sex.Com. Special thanks to Jim Wagstaffe, for providing me with several boxes of court documents and videotapes, as well as Carreon and Tim Dillon for sharing their records.

  Telling a story this broad means spending a lot of time chasing down and talking with sources—including Kremen, Cohen, and others too numerous to list here. Thanks to each of you for taking the time to talk with me. All the dialogue in this book comes from court documents, articles, books, and my own interviews (for the sake of brevity and keeping myself out of the story, when I write that Kremen or Cohen or others “later said” something, that often means they said so to me directly).

  I’m grateful to my editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, for reading/commenting/being there, and Jonathan Karp, my longtime mentor, for encouraging me to pursue this story. Thanks to the many magazine editors who put me on the road. This book isn’t possible without my literary agent, David McCormick, at McCormick Literary Agency. My team at the Gotham Group—Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson, Shari Smiley, and all—you’re the best. And to my friends and family, nothing but love.

  More from the Author

  Alligator Candy

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © GASPER TRINAGLE

  David Kushner is an award-winning journalist and author. His books include Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture; Jonny Magic & the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb; Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto; and Alligator Candy: A Memoir. Kushner is also author of the graphic novel Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, illustrated by Koren Shadmi; and the ebook, The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice. Two collections of his magazine stories are available as audiobooks, The World’s Most Dangerous Geek: And More True Hacking Stories and Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories.

  A contributing editor of Rolling Stone, Kushner has written for publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Esquire, and GQ, and has been an essayist for National Public Radio. His work is featured in several “best of” anthologies: The Best American Crime Reporting, The Columbia Journalism Review’s Best Business Writing, The Best Music Writing, and The Best American Travel Writing.

  He is the winner of the New York Press Club award for Best Feature Reporting. His ebook The Bones of Marianna was selected by Amazon as a Best Digital Single of 2013. NPR named his memoir, Alligator Candy, one of the best books of 2016. He has taught as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.

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  ALSO BY DAVID KUSHNER

  Alligator Candy: A Memoir

  The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice

  Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto

  Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb

  Jonny Magic & the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas

  Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

  GRAPHIC NOVEL:

  Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D (illustrated by Koren Shadmi)

  AUDIO BOOKS:

  Prepare to Meet Thy Doom:

  And More True Gaming Stories

  The World’s Most Dangerous Geek:

  And More True Hacking Stories

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

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  Copyright © 2019 by David Kushner

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcoverpaperback export edition April 2019

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  Interior design by Carly Loman

  Jacket design by Alison Forner

  Jacket art by Babkina Svetlana/Shutterstock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kushner, David, author.

  Title: The players ball : a genius, a con man, and the secret history of the Internet’s rise / David Kushner.

  Description: New York : Simon and Schuster, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018032968| ISBN 9781501122149 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501122156 (trade pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Inte
rnet industry—United States—History. | Internet domain names. | Dating services—United States. | Online dating—United States. | Swindlers and swindling—United States.

  Classification: LCC HD9696.8.U62 K87 2019 | DDC 384.30973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032968

  ISBN: 978-1-5011-2214-9

  ISBN: 978-1-5011-2216-3 (ebook)