Sex.com: A URL -- All Crime And No Sex

he only thing missing from the Sex.com story is a dead stripper found with a rubber alligator lodged in her throat -- though, by all estimates, to add this to the URL's outrageous legacy wouldn't be a huge shocker. It would only be adding some sex to the mix -- especially considering the Sex.com story includes a fugitive seized by U.S. marshals, hard-luck convicted felons hiding millions in Mexican shrimp farms and strip clubs, the fugitive's daughter caught smuggling over 200 pounds of pot, one multimillionaire dot-com scammer speed fiend with a Stanford MBA, a bizarre bid to buy Caesars Palace and a recent Tijuana gangland-style assassination attempt on a lawyer (nicknamed "The Toad") that left a Mexican cabbie and a 4-year-old boy wounded.

Like mobile-home scammers in Florida and billboard plastic surgeons in Los Angeles, URL grifters are part of the sleazy yet entertaining Bay Area tech-industry zoo. And so when a guy like Gary Kremen snags URLs like Match.com and Sex.com and dabbles in brokering far-reaching Web page patents and "Internet consulting" while (according to a 2005 CNN interview) working on a nice speed habit, he just sort of blends in with the rest of the money-grubbing, VC-chasing dot-com herd. Like most startup cowboys, Kremen sat on the Sex.com URL as an undeveloped property -- until a con man named Stephen M. Cohen came along and swindled VeriSign/Network Solutions out of Sex.com with fast talk and forgeries.

High school could not have been a kind experience for Cohen. A fairly unremarkable-looking man (when last seen by authorities upon release from a Tijuana prison two weeks ago), he attended Van Nuys High, whose alumni include Paula Abdul and Robert Redford. Maybe that's what gave him an unquenchable thirst for fame and fortune, the kind that makes one think that crime is a perfectly acceptable means to success.

As if he were spending his life getting ready for the dot-com boom, Cohen amassed a history of odd jobs, including operating an old-fashioned cord-board telephone answering service in the early 1980s and a stint posing as a bankruptcy lawyer that landed him two years in the federal clink. Cohen next found his calling in the heyday of the Bay Area's mid-'90s Internet Wild West, grabbing Sex.com in 1995 after wearing down Network Solutions employees with a barrage of phone calls and one (delightfully retro) forged document.

After that, it was the Gold Rush for Cohen (who built a porn empire on the URL's name alone) and a nightmare of litigation for Kremen. Cohen kept hold of Sex.com until late 2000, developing it with aggressive advertising strategies and making a mint off porn advertising. It's estimated that Cohen made over $100 million off the URL in the years he had it, even making a 1999 bid to buy Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and was only forced to give it back to Kremen when a San Jose court awarded the URL (and $65 million in damages) to Kremen in 2001. It had been a five-year struggle for Kremen, both in battling his speed addiction and in trying to raise funds for his own litigation. Even though his dot-com boom resume boasted typical startup-style impressive credentials, Kremen was only able to afford the court bills when bitter Sex.com porn industry rivals helped fund the case.

Not one to let himself get cleaned out by some greedy Internet porn peddlers -- the competition -- Cohen hightailed it out of the country and took his loot with him. Landing in Mexico, he lived a colorful life on the lam. According to Matthew Boyle, writing for CNN in 2005, Kremen's advisers believed that Cohen's millions were thoughtfully invested in hopeful, high-minded ventures such as "[a] Mexican shrimp farm, a Tijuana strip club called the Bolero, and a Napster-like file-sharing site operating out of the Gaza Strip, and in various offshore bank accounts and front companies with names like Sand Man and Ocean Fund." And according to Red Herring, "Mr. Kremen's legal team also identified banks linked to Mr. Cohen in Latvia, Luxembourg, the Isle of Man, Mexico, Vanuatu, and the British Virgin Islands, but lawyers were unable to recover any funds."

Somehow, Cohen had managed to flee to Mexico, avoiding the hassle of paying the court-stipulated damages to Kremen, and to live the quiet, dignified life of a fugitive in a golf course penthouse until 2005, when, in a stroke of bad luck, his daughter was arrested smuggling a couple of hundred pounds of pot. That signaled the authorities to keep their eyes peeled for Cohen. Later in the year, Cohen was captured and turned over to U.S. marshals after attempting to renew his work visa -- apparently necessary for a bilingual life of crime. Arrested in the United States, he was jailed on civil contempt and spent time becoming friends with his cellmate, junk-bond king Michael Milken.

Clearly, someone is still annoyed about not getting their cut from Sex.com. On Dec. 5, Cohen was released from jail after "failing to remember" where he put his money. Cohen is on the lam again, and his lawyer in Mexico was attacked in a old-school Mafia-style whack attempt a day after Cohen's release from jail. The attack, in which the lawyer's vehicle was boxed in by two other cars and riddled with bullets, left the driver and a young boy wounded. The lawyer, Gustavo Cortés Carvajal (evocatively known as "El Sapo" or "The Toad") supposedly has access to some of Cohen's assets -- the two jointly own property -- and it's thought that Carvajal has been behind threatening letters and phone calls received by people helping Kremen over the years.

In the meantime, not to let a good thing go to waste, Kremen aggressively ran Sex.com in a style similar to Cohen's: selling ad space to any and all takers, and allegedly giving ad reps a cut good enough to make them persistent with even adult businesses that had little interest in partnering with the domain. This was the early signal of a sea change in conventional wisdom about URLs -- that the name of a URL was having less and less to do with the value of a site -- just having the Sex.com URL was no longer enough to make it worth an ad investment if the site wasn't about anything but sex ads.

Thomas Roche remembers working for San Francisco sex-toy retailer Good Vibrations in 2002 and dealing with pushy local Sex.com ad people: "When you work for a major adult retailer, you get used to very aggressive advertising reps contacting you to advertise in publications that are about as far from your demographic as could possibly be -- for the obvious reason that many people want your money and don't care if their ads deliver customers. The reps for Sex.com were definitely on the more aggressive side."

Now all we have to do is wait to see if Cohen shows up for his February 2007 court date in San Jose, where he's supposed to divulge the location of his assets. Earlier this year, Kremen sold Sex.com for $14 million to Escom LLC, which inked a quick deal with Playboy to run the site -- so maybe now the Sex.com story will finally have some sex in it.