Sex, Lies and the Dirty (33 page)

“It’s no big deal. Go take some pics on the red carpet and hang out,” I said. “We’ll be up in the balcony watching.”

So I waited in line and paid the $20 cover. Meanwhile, John Carlo was exiting a limo to news cameras and photographers in his face. He was walking the red carpet with two black security guards and the hottest chicks in Scottsdale. There was twenty of these chicks (all blondes) just hanging on the guy. All the douchebags I made fun of were there. G-Girl was there. John Carlo was popping bottles and getting photo-bombed while the real Nik Richie watched silently from above.

We had invested $25,000 into the event.

We made back $25,000, but we did a little better than just breaking even because now
The Dirty
had another, more tangible element to it. Even though the real Nik Richie was hiding up in the balcony, the party added another dimension to the persona. He was a less of a ghost now. There was a face to go with the name, and quite honestly, John Carlo is a good-looking dude. It dispelled all the rumors that Nik Richie was some fat fuck hiding behind a computer. There was a lot of chatter that I was a guy that talked shit because I had no money and couldn’t hook up with girls like Alexa Carlson or Brock’s Chick, and John Carlo put an end to all that. Not only did Nik Richie understand what the scene was really about, but he could bang any of these chicks. He was the real deal.

In the wake of the party’s success, I told Saroosh that if he wanted to stick around and try selling ads that I’d give him a commission. Honestly, we thought that it would be like shooting fish in a barrel because Nik Richie had just sold out two clubs, and on a Thursday night (which was usually dead). What we found out was that the site wasn’t so much popular as it was infamous.

Saroosh went after clubs to run promo ads on the site, but the clubs didn’t want anything to do with me because Nik Richie made fun of their clientele, and sometimes the clubs themselves. The last thing they were going to do was pay a guy that may or may not speak badly about them or their customers, so everyone passed. Even the guys Saroosh had connections with said they wanted nothing to do with it, that it would be bad for business. People loved Nik Richie, but only to an extent. Even though I was popular at the time, no one believed that Nik Richie would last or become a
functioning business. The media also discovered our little actor trick when they interviewed John Carlo and he knew nothing about the site.

I had to let Saroosh go. There were no hard feelings; it was just business. He promised to keep Nik Richie a secret and we went our separate ways.

I was back to the drawing board.

I got an e-mail from Harry Morton.

Harry was famous for a couple of reasons. The first is that he was the son of Peter Morton, who owned all the Morton’s Steakhouse restaurants. That meant that the guy had money to burn. The other reason people knew Harry is because he was banging Lindsay Lohan during that period in her life where she wasn’t too crazy and getting arrested all the time. She was still big from doing
Mean Girls
, not from all the DUIs and bad press.

So Harry emailed me, introduced himself (even though I knew who he was), and told me that he was a big fan of the site and wanted to meet with me. About business. He wanted to meet in Scottsdale, in person, which meant that one more person was going to know that Hooman Karamian was Nik Richie. And the threats hadn’t died down. They had actually increased now that all five markets were booming. Everyone kept saying that if they saw Nik Richie out they were going to kick the shit out of him, in Scottsdale or otherwise. The cease-and-desist letters were coming in, too, so I started making all these weird demands.

I told Harry that I’d meet with him, but only if the meeting was completely private and there was a partition at the table that kept us from being viewed by everyone but the waiter. David Gingras from Jaburg & Wilk came with me so I could look like I knew what the hell I was talking about. I liked David. I liked him a hell of a lot more than that cunt Maria, and it mostly had to do with why he became a lawyer in the first place. He told me that when he was younger, a cop punched him in the face for absolutely no reason. David said that when that happened he felt so violated, so absolutely helpless, that he never wanted anyone to have to go through that again. As a lawyer, David had to keep my confidentiality, but as a person, he was completely trustworthy.

We arrived at the restaurant, walking in the rear entrance and through the kitchen like that movie
Goodfellas
. A back booth was waiting on the other side, curtained off just as Harry said it would be. He was already
seated, having a drink by himself and doing something on his phone. The gist of the meeting was this: Harry liked the site, liked me. He saw the humor in it, but he also saw all the untapped potential in it as well. It was something he wanted to invest in, but he had to pitch it to his dad because Peter Morton was the money man. They had flipped another site for $200 million and that’s what he wanted to do with mine, so I left the meeting on cloud nine because it looked like I was finally going to get a serious investor.

This is when I learned that you never get excited about money until the contracts are signed and the check has cleared your bank account.

Harry Morton really had no interest in turning Nik Richie into a profitable business.
It was more about bragging rights for him. It wasn’t enough that he was banging Lohan. He wanted to be able to say that he owned
The Dirty
, owned Nik Richie. The problem was that he couldn’t convince his dad to get on board with the idea, and without Peter, there was no deal. It fell through and everything was rocky again.

I had a cushion, but the cushion was running out. The site made no money, had no infrastructure, which gave my wife all the more ammunition in her argument that I had pissed away twenty-five grand. We were already in a bad place, but the site’s inability to capture an endorsement put an even bigger strain on our marriage. The love was gone. I was sleeping on the couch with my dog and we had become more like roommates than husband and wife. She hated Nik Richie, so by extension, she started to hate Hooman Karamian. They were the same person in her mind.

This was right around the time I got an e-mail from Jay Grdina. He was famous for being married to Jenna Jameson, and those two pretty much ran Scottsdale together right up until they decided to split up. Before that, anytime they walked into a club people would just start giving them bottles of Cristal or Dom, all for the sake of being able to say they partied with Jenna. So Jay said he wanted to meet but didn’t give any specifics beyond that. After the Harry Morton deal fell through, I wasn’t as optimistic that it would be about anything beneficial to me or the site. For all I knew, he just wanted to get a drink with me and bullshit. Back in those days, some of the more affluent people in town wanted to meet Nik Richie just to be able to say they met him. It was being part of some secret club.

I brought David Gingras along again, this time to a place called Mastro’s in North Scottsdale. No backdoor this time. No partition. I wasn’t as
paranoid anymore. Jay showed up in a $250,000 Bentley, which made Gingras and me feel like we were at the kids’ table. We were out of his league. Jay gave pretty much the same pitch Harry Morton did: loved the site, saw the potential, was interested in investing so he could flip it later for more money. Jay had followed the same business model before with Club Jenna, and they sold it to
Playboy
for nine figures.

“I think we could flip
The Dirty
for $100 mill,” he said.

It sounded good in theory, but I could tell that Jay’s idea was to make Nik Richie a celebrity like Jenna, and I didn’t want that. In fact, all I was looking for was a $5,000 per month salary. That, and keeping my identity a secret, because I only wanted to be Nik Richie for a few years. It was fun, an escape, but I ultimately wanted to sell everything off for nine figures and retire somewhere down in Mexico. Maybe open a little beach bar. I could train some kid, some young version of myself, to do the job and hand the legacy over. That was more or less my plan: sell high, retire young, pass on the persona.

In order to bring that plan to fruition, I was going to need an investor.

The Grdina brothers put up $500,000, and
The Dirty
finally had funding.

We moved into the old Club Jenna offices at the air park in Scottsdale,
which we referred to as the Pentagon. Everything was brushed steel. There were phones and computers in every cubicle. We had a break room, a conference room. A parking lot. We had everything a real office was supposed to have. Essentially, Nik Richie finally had a real infrastructure and
The Dirty
became less of a garage operation and more corporate.

Jay sat me down and said, “We’re going to take care of the business side. All you need to do is blog. Just be Nik Richie and we’ll take care of everything else.”

We had sixteen employees that checked submissions all day and put together the posts for me to review, comment on, and publish. For $5,000 a month we paid a publicist to get the brand out there, scheduling radio interviews for Nik Richie and getting press. We finally got ads: from clubs, plastic surgeons, and titty bars. For twelve hours a day I was reading and commenting as Nik Richie. He came up with new local vernacular and terminology. He broke down your clubs, your fame-chasers. His reputation was spreading beyond the five markets, but the work was too much.
There were far too many submissions for me to get to, and the investors became aware of it.

Jay said, “It’s going to be impossible to keep up with two hundred cities at this rate. We’re going to need more Nik Richies.”

I said, “Jay, that’s perfect. No one knows it’s me.”

We got two guys to be Nik Richie clones, and I thought they had read enough of the posts to become familiar with the language: the syntax, the tone, the vernacular. The two clones and I were posting as Nik Richie, but it didn’t take long before we started getting called out in the comments section.