Hella Nation - Evan Wright [101]
A physician to whom I described Warshavsky’s behavior suggested his snorting sounded like a classic manifestation of Tourette’s syndrome—though Warshavsky never said he had it. At times the snort came on like an explosive nasal seizure, causing his entire body to shake. Yet in a strange way, the snort was a source of Warshavsky’s charisma. It made it impossible to ignore him. He would radiate boundless confidence and enthusiasm, then become utterly helpless in the throes of a snorting fit. As I got to know him better, the snort seemed to hint at powerful forces working beneath the surface, functioning like a relief valve blowing off some kind of ambient soul sickness.
Warshavsky arrived in the office each morning just before ten in a whirl-wind of ringing cell phones, snorts, barked commands to his secretary. Some mornings he toured the “design pit,” a cramped warren of back rooms where IEG’s innumerable sites were being built by nearly a dozen programmers and designers. He interrogated the employees like a general inspecting the troops. “Do it now!” was his signature command. Once, when a designer balked at some seemingly impossible order, Warshavsky pushed him away from the computer. After typing a few lines of code, Warshavsky triumphantly pointed to the screen, making sure everyone knew that he had bested one of his top designers.
“He’s a formidable presence,” recalls Patrick May, a reporter with the San Jose Mercury News who spent two days following Warshavsky. “It exhausted me being around him. He’s in overdrive all the time.”
Warshavsky often went off on tirades that were aimed at certain employees for no apparent reason. Epithets like “you fucking moron” regularly flew from his mouth. One employee, a middle-aged Chinese man, became, in Warshavsky’s lexicon, a “fucking slant-eyed baboon.” (Warshavsky denies ever saying this.)
“Power is the only thing Seth thinks about, from the time he wakes up in the morning until he goes to bed at night,” says Derek Newman, who served as IEG’s general counsel for nearly three years. You could see this need to dominate even in Warshavsky’s ostensibly lighthearted moments, when a zany but somewhat cruel clownlike side would emerge. After a box of crab legs on dry ice arrived—a gift to somebody in the office—Seth commandeered it, put on a plastic bib, grabbed the wooden mallet that was in the package and started smashing open crab legs atop his secretary’s desk. With shards of crab shell and gobs of cocktail sauce flying around the office, he handed out pieces of crab flesh to his employees, waving the mallet like an overgrown infant with a rattle.
When Warshavsky had trouble sleeping at night he’d call people—friends or employees—at any hour. One night he phoned me at midnight and asked me to drive out of the city with him to look at a house he was thinking of buying. He picked me up in his Porsche 911 moments later, and we drove for forty-five minutes on a winding highway through the Cascade foothills. Warshavsky told me about a girl he’d met on an airplane the previous day. He was intrigued because she was an office worker with no connection to the adult industry. “She’s kind of cute,” he said.
Then he dialed her on his cell phone. “Hi, this is Seth Warshavsky. What’s goin’ on?” He spoke in a coy, flirtatious tone, almost a purr. “Yeah, I’m just driving around. . . . What do I do?” He turned to me, and his face lit up mischievously. “I’m in real estate,” he answered.
Still talking to the girl, Warshavsky veered toward the exit while going at least sixty-five. I reflexively pushed against my seat as the Porsche wandered across the lanes, then shuddered against the guardrail. The car made snapping sounds as plastic, metal and paint were stripped away.
“Hold on. I’ll call you right back.” Warshavsky spoke casually into the phone, then flipped it shut and wrestled with the steering wheel. The car slammed into the curb and screeched to a stop.
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