Sex, Lies and the Dirty (5 page)

My best friend at the time was in a band.

The band was called Hey Stroker, and even though I didn’t particularly care for their music, I couldn’t deny that they were getting big in Orange County. They had a pretty decent following. Their shows usually sold out. They were going to make it; I knew that much. And I wanted to be part of this thing, but again, I didn’t like the music and I didn’t know how to play an instrument. What was clear to me was that being in the music industry was a hell of a lot more interesting to me than psychology. I enjoyed the scene. A lot of girls usually came out to see the band. It eventually got to a point where I was going to more shows than classes, and I had stopped checking in with the frat some time ago. The Greek system is based a lot on doing what you’re told (usually ridiculous things), and I’ve never been very good at taking orders. I’ve always been the type of guy that needs to be in charge. A bunch of random dudes in a frat wasn’t going to change that. When it came down to it, I’d rather go to a Hey Stroker show than a frat party any day of the fucking week. Freshman only get the leftovers of the upperclassmen. At least at the shows I had a decent selection, and the members of the band weren’t nearly as pretentious.

It finally clicked that Hey Stroker needed a manager, and since I couldn’t be in the band, I figured running it would be the next best thing. I quit the frat. Dropped out of school. My father was pissed off that I wasn’t following “the plan,” but I knew this was the right move for me. I was going to get
these guys signed and make it in the management business. Hey Stroker was going to be the first of many, and that would put me back on the path to becoming a rich man again.

The music business, however, never works out the way you think.

I managed Hey Stroker for about a year.

I was taking meetings with Elektra and Sony but it was clear that they saw me for what I was: a kid with no experience. It just so happened that I had stumbled upon the opportunity to speak on behalf of the band. I was a bullshit artist pretending to know what the hell I was doing. They knew it. The record label guys could see that within the first five minutes, and there was always talk about why the band didn’t have a better manager.

Everyone kept asking why some kid was repping Hey Stroker.

People were interested, but not in working with Hooman Karamian. This was why the meetings never went well. It’s also why the band never agreed to sign any contracts with me. If I found them a deal, they’d be willing to commit to me and me alone. Until then, they were going to keep their options open. So I hustled. I wanted to prove that I could make it in the business. I even responded to talent-seeking ads in the back of magazines like
Rolling Stone
and
Spin.
To me it was just a numbers game. That’s all a music contract was: getting lucky. Being in the right place at the right time. I still didn’t care for the music.

In hindsight, neither party was every truly committed to the other.

That made parting ways easy.

The scam worked like this:
Talent2K placed ads in the back of magazines essentially guaranteeing record contracts. Music magazines like
Rolling Stone
and
Vibe
and whatever else aspiring bands were reading. All you had to do was send over $400 and Talent2K would get your music out to all the major labels. That’s what they said, anyway. The reality is that Carlo Oddo, the guy who ran Talent2K, was cashing the checks and trashing most of the music. I had sent him some Hey Stroker material about four months prior, so it was a little odd he called back on it. If you knew Carlo, you knew that he was never one to actually try and get someone signed. That would involve legwork and taking meetings. Carlo was more the type
to sit in his bedroom all day, hitting on young girls through MySpace while the money rolled in. Or he watched mafia movies while smoking dirts.
¹⁴

I’d learn this after he talked me into working for him.

The dream of being a doctor was over. Hey Stroker didn’t work out and I really didn’t feel like going back to school. At the time, joining Carlo’s operation didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. He promised a commission if I could close deals over the phone.

“I’ll shop and you sell,” he said.

That was the arrangement.

It didn’t even really bother me that Carlo was running a scam. The music business had left a bad taste in my mouth, and I was willing to fuck a few people over if it meant making money. In my mind, I had already paid my dues during the whole Hey Stroker deal. The entire industry felt dirty to me.

So I met Carlo in Chicago. He was older than me: mid-thirties. Bald. Fat. He kind of looked like a child molester, but the financial opportunity made me see past all that. He explained how everything would work: I’d try to sell these bands on our packages. Depending on the amount a band spent, that would determine what services Talent2K would provide. In the end though, it didn’t matter if you spent $300 or $3,000. Carlo never actually did anything. He cashed the checks, but that was about it. My job was to help him get more checks to cash.

Carlo bought me a cell phone and I went back to California. I wasn’t even listening to any of the music. All I had was a contact name and the name of the band. I’d call these guys up telling them that I was the VP of A&R at Talent2K out of Los Angeles. I’d say that we loved the material they sent and if we could get them on a bigger package (the $995 tier) we could get their music out to all the major labels. We could get them a deal. All they needed to do was provide a little bit more cash and they’d be rock gods in no time. Think of it as an investment, I said.

I sold them, scammed them. I fucked these people over the way the industry fucked me, and I was good at it. The problem was that Carlo had yet to pay me any of my commission. He was already in the hole to me for a few grand when he brought up the idea of Sun City. His grandparents lived there in Arizona, and apparently one of them had died or had a health problem. Something like that. He was going to Sun City and wanted me to come with him to set up the operation.

“We’ll have an office and everything,” he said. “I just need you to get on a plane.”

“Dude, I don’t have any fucking money. You haven’t paid me yet.”

“Just get here, man. Drive if you have to.”

I was about to find out who Carlo really was.

Carlo lived with his parents out in the snowbird
¹⁵
community of Sun City.
Everyone was old. Dying. These people rode around in golf carts because they were either too scared to drive or lost their licenses. All day you’d hear the distinct whine of those carts lugging groceries or heading to the pharmacy. In Sun City, hardly anything moved faster than ten miles per hour, so Carlo and I were the minority. The outcasts. We were kids again, and he was training me to scam.

Inside the apartment, everything smelled like old people except for Carlo’s room. It was filled with brimming ashtrays and junk food wrappers. Clothes were never folded. The bed was never made. The guy was a fat fucking slob, but I got over it pretty quick once he started paying me. We started making a lot of money, and in between the scamming and bogus contracts, Carlo would make me watch mafia movies. Scorsese movies like
Goodfellas
and
Casino.
Or we watched movies about salesmen like
Boiler Room
or
Glengarry Glen Ross.
We quoted them. Acted them out. In my early twenties, the most impressionable years of my life, I was hanging out with Carlo Oddo, the fat fuck scam artist. A gangster wannabe. A guy that hooked up with fourteen-year-old girls online. He had absolutely no moral compass, but I didn’t seem to mind that as long as he paid me.

I bought a Porsche Boxster.

I blew $30,000 on strip clubs over the course of a year. The operation got so big that we hired a couple girls to do some of the bullshit work. Young girls. Carlo had a thing for young girls, so he scouted the tanning salons and hired mostly on appearance. They were sixteen and still in high school, but that didn’t mean anything to Carlo. He just liked having young girls around that did what he told them to do. And drugs. One day Carlo asked my assistant, Morgan, if she knew any drug dealers.

As it turned out, Morgan had a guy that she led on from time to time in order to get free pot. Some kid named Anthony. He was this sketchy little drug dealer that started hanging around. He was either hitting on Morgan
or getting up in our Talent2K business. The kid latched on to us and it irritated the shit out of me.

I never intended to be friends with the guy.

And I never thought he’d work for me.

I realized it was only a matter of time until Carlo scammed me.

In a way he had already been doing this. When he paid me the checks were always short. Money was being withheld (typically a grand or so), and he never got around to fixing it. I was also running most of the Talent2K operation by this point. Occasionally, I’d bolt. When he didn’t pay me, I’d go back to Orange County and wait for Carlo to call and beg me to come back. He needed me. We both knew it. So I used that to leverage more money into my pocket—or at the very least, the money he hadn’t paid me yet.