Hella Nation - Evan Wright [104]
Warshavsky sighed. “Earl, you can’t fly out of here with twenty thousand dollars on you. Where are you gonna carry it?”
“Right here.” Earl opened up the gym bag in which he’d brought the alleged prizefighter sex tapes. “Put the money in here.”
Warshavsky shook his head, as if explaining the obvious. “Earl, it’s a federal crime to carry more than ten thousand dollars in an airport. It’s against the law.”
Earl stared at Warshavsky, thinking hard. “What do you mean, against the law?”
“Earl, there are signs all over the airport.” Seth was in his milieu, improvising a string of bald-faced lies. “They arrest you, Earl. You pay penalties, extra taxes. If you really want cash, I’m not going to be responsible.”
“Okay,” Earl said. “But how they gonna know I got twenty thousand in my bag?”
Warshavsky stood. His snorting disorder completely vanished, as it did in moments that demanded a great performance. He strode over to his black leather overcoat hanging across from his bronzed Wall Street Journal article. He pulled out his wallet and produced a twenty-dollar bill, one of the new designs just released that spring.
“Earl, have you seen the new money?”
“Yeah.”
Warshavsky held the twenty-dollar bill up to the light and tore at the fringes. “See. There’s metal threads in it. You see them?”
There were no metal threads in the money, since Warshavsky was making the whole thing up. But Earl nodded, as if seeing them.
Warshavsky looked into Earl’s eyes. He flashed his boyish grin, like a trusted friend. “If I give you cash, you’ll set off the metal detectors at the airport.”
“Yeah.” Earl nodded.
“You see what I’m saying, Earl? I’m writing you a check for your protection.”
Earl agreed to take a check.
Around that time, Warshavsky flew to New York to appear on The View, the chat show cohosted by Barbara Walters. Walters began the show on the offensive, but Seth was ready. He won the audience over with a rousing speech about protecting children from pornography on the Internet. Despite Warshavsky’s claims about the elaborate measures that IEG had taken to protect children, his company was host to a site called HardcoreCarnival .com. Its free splash page, accessible to people of all ages, presented a photo of a woman with a fist inserted in her anus.
DESPITE THE CIRCUS ATMOSPHERE, IEG managed to attract employees with impressive credentials. Warshavsky hired designers away from organizations like Microsoft and Intel, and retained prestigious headhunting firms like the Dallas-based Snelling Personnel to recruit executives. (In a typical postscript, IEG refused to pay the company for its services and was in turn sued by Snelling’s Seattle office. That suit was settled, but Snelling pursued additional claims against Warshavsky for misrepresentation and fraud.)
Nothing ever seemed to get done. During my ten months at IEG, the company lost two general counsels, three chief financial officers, a vice president of development, two network administrators, its entire marketing department, a chief technology officer and three of its four staff accountants, as well as half of the design department and a dozen tech-support staffers. Some mornings there was no telephone service. Employee paychecks bounced. The company was engaged in more than a dozen lawsuits with creditors seeking to collect unpaid debts. One day a photographer came in demanding $1,100 and claiming that Warshavsky had called him a “cocksucker” on the phone. He chased Warshavsky down the hall, shouting, “Give me my money, you little prick!”
IEG relied on its infamy as a purveyor of celebrity-scandal materials like the Pam and Tommy video to attract headlines and customers. But most of what it offered on its flagship website, Clublove.com, consisted of put-ons like “a dramatic re-enactment” of an alleged Kelsey Grammer sex video, using a model dressed as the TV star. The adult-content areas of the site included nude-picture galleries, the “101 Fuck Videos”—clips from XXX tapes—and supposedly “live” feeds of nude performers (these were often taped). Few of the