Speaker 1: Pushkin. Not every episode in this series will contain explicit
Speaker 1: sex talk. This one doesn't. This one is about the
Speaker 1: kinky finance. Last time on Hot Money, a guy named
Speaker 1: Fabian Tilman borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from Wall
Speaker 1: Street bankers to buy up porn sites around the world.
Speaker 1: He called his global porn empire Man Win. That's all
Speaker 1: you need to remember for today's show. This episode begins
Speaker 1: in December twenty twelve. Think of a rainy day in Brussels,
Speaker 1: which is about any day in Brussels. Fabian Tillman is
Speaker 1: about to walk out of his mansion in a leafy suburb.
Speaker 1: A lear jette is waiting to take him to London,
Speaker 1: where he's meeting some bankers, the kind of people who
Speaker 1: helped him become the under disputed king of world pawn.
Speaker 1: But just as Fabian is about to leave, he gets
Speaker 1: a visit, one that pretty much ends his porn career.
Speaker 1: The police knock on his store. Fabian never mixed London. Instead,
Speaker 1: he's arrested for suspected tax evasion and taken into custody.
Speaker 1: How long we are in the prisons block eighteen days?
Speaker 1: I think eighteen days before charge yeah. See, years before
Speaker 1: charge they didn't have anything. They didn't charge me. German
Speaker 1: authorities had raided Fabian's company, Man Win, but at this
Speaker 1: point the investigators leading the case they didn't have enough
Speaker 1: evidence to charge Fabian. They just held him. But still,
Speaker 1: my letness were very confused. You bet. Fabian's Wall Street
Speaker 1: backers had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his
Speaker 1: roll up of Pawn. They believed Fabian was a tech
Speaker 1: wonder kind sitting on steady cash flow, not some scandal
Speaker 1: prone pornographer behind bars. The man who convinced Wall Street
Speaker 1: that Pawn was a safe bet started to look like
Speaker 1: a liability, and fabian superpower raising money became the weakness
Speaker 1: that brought him down. The money man turned against him.
Speaker 1: His slanders didn't pull out, but they told Fabian, when
Speaker 1: these lands expire, you won't get more, not even at
Speaker 1: twenty percent interest. They just openly told me, listen, this
Speaker 1: is going to be very difficult with you there to
Speaker 1: do this, It could get very expensive. Fabian really only
Speaker 1: had one option. He had to let go abandon the
Speaker 1: empire he had built. An sell man one, don't feel
Speaker 1: too sorry for Fabian. He made a tidy sum. He's
Speaker 1: never said exactly how much, but for a company this size,
Speaker 1: it would be in the hundreds of millions. Report at
Speaker 1: the time suggested Fabian sold the company to a consortium
Speaker 1: led by management two senior executives who still run the company.
Speaker 1: Thing is, that wasn't the full truth. We found out
Speaker 1: that Fabian sold his empire to a different man, a
Speaker 1: man who'd learned his trade at Goldman Sachs. Not a
Speaker 1: techie like Fabian, but a true financier, someone who could
Speaker 1: keep the lenders sweet. A man who somehow managed to
Speaker 1: keep this identity at secret for close to a decade
Speaker 1: until that is, Patricia came along and rumbled his game.
Speaker 1: I'm Patrice Nelson and I'm Alex Barker from Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and the Financial Times. This is hot money, Act one.
Speaker 1: The buyer who didn't exist. If Fabian was an old
Speaker 1: school pornographer, the fallout from his troubles with German tax
Speaker 1: authorities might have been different. He was eventually hit with
Speaker 1: a bill for millions in back taxes and a penalty,
Speaker 1: and he might have got away with just paying that
Speaker 1: and keeping his company. Fabian ended up the subject of
Speaker 1: scandalous headlines all over the world. But the mystery buyer
Speaker 1: who took over Fabian's pawn empire would not why because
Speaker 1: he left no trace. Even by the secretive standards of
Speaker 1: the pawn world. The an who wanted to buy the
Speaker 1: world's biggest pawn company was like a ghost. When I
Speaker 1: saw the company, my bank said, this person's thick. You're
Speaker 1: not selling this is all thick. This person's exist. Who
Speaker 1: was paying this money? This is the person that's paying
Speaker 1: the money doesn't exist. What I mean, doesn't exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's thick. We kind of find anything on him. It
Speaker 1: is impossible that we cannot find anything on him. I'm
Speaker 1: going to step away from Fabian for a moment to
Speaker 1: tell you how I first came across the spuyer who
Speaker 1: didn't exist, the new owner of Fabian's company. I remember
Speaker 1: when I first heard his name. I was perched on
Speaker 1: the window sill of my bedroom talking on the phone
Speaker 1: with a source about the company. By this time it
Speaker 1: had been renamed from man Win to Mine Geek. Just
Speaker 1: remember the m and this source said something that every
Speaker 1: journalist dreams of hearing. Let me tell you something that
Speaker 1: no one knows. Mine Geek has a secret owner and
Speaker 1: his name is Bernard Bergomar. I typed a name into
Speaker 1: Google while still on the phone. Nothing. I asked my sores,
Speaker 1: can you spell it again? Nothing, but he was adamant,
Speaker 1: that's your guy. I got off the phone and kept searching,
Speaker 1: and then I found one hit for Bernard Bergomar, a
Speaker 1: court case from about a decade ago. It named him
Speaker 1: as a director of porn cite called red Tube. We'll
Speaker 1: be hearing a lot more about red Tube later in
Speaker 1: this episode. But that was it. I mean, it didn't
Speaker 1: make sense. If this guy really owned the world's biggest
Speaker 1: porn company, how could there be nothing on him except
Speaker 1: for this one court record. So I asked a ton
Speaker 1: of people in the industry, even other journalists, have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of this guy? Have you ever thought that
Speaker 1: maybe wasn't true that Fabians sold the company to his
Speaker 1: management team, as the official story goes. No. They all
Speaker 1: told me that some was pulling my leg I started
Speaker 1: to feel a bit crazy. But then a few weeks later, Jackpot,
Speaker 1: I found a guy who had worked at Read two
Speaker 1: years ago, and he he had worked for Bernard. Bernard
Speaker 1: was real. This is the point my curiosity really kicked in.
Speaker 1: Before I knew it. I was rooting around Luxembourgish company
Speaker 1: records trying to make sense of it all. How could
Speaker 1: the owner managed to stay hidden for so long? We
Speaker 1: looked at mine Geek's corporate structure and it was totally
Speaker 1: Byzantine and Patricia's reporting that provided the clue that unlocked
Speaker 1: its secrets. What we realized was that there was a
Speaker 1: single golden chair at the heart of it all. It
Speaker 1: effectively gave Bernard control and the lion's share of profit,
Speaker 1: but most important of all, it allowed him to stay hidden.
Speaker 1: We published a story and it was a pretty big hit.
Speaker 1: Turns out that people love reading about Paul and Patricia.
Speaker 1: She had the scoop of her career. A couple of
Speaker 1: days go by, a colleague of ours on the FT's
Speaker 1: investigative team tells me she's heard something that will probably
Speaker 1: interest me. A source who read our story called her
Speaker 1: up and said, not only did he know Bernard, but
Speaker 1: he knew his biggest secret. Bernard Bergomar is a cover name,
Speaker 1: a persona that he uses for his dealings in the
Speaker 1: porn industry. His real name is Burnt Burned Burgmier. Somehow
Speaker 1: he had managed to use a fake name in court,
Speaker 1: so to recap fake name Bernard Bergomar, real name Burned Bergmyer.
Speaker 1: This may or may not be just about the worst
Speaker 1: poor name and the whole history of porn. We just
Speaker 1: started calling him BB and nicknamed. That covers all basis.
Speaker 1: But the key thing here was that while Bernard Bergemar
Speaker 1: had gone to great length to make sure that there
Speaker 1: was no trace of him, Burnt Bergmire hadn't. Fabian, by
Speaker 1: the way, knew of BB even before he snatched his
Speaker 1: empire away. They had history years earlier. Fabian and BB
Speaker 1: went after the same company, the owner of porn Hub
Speaker 1: Fabian one, and BB lost. When Fabian was arrested, the
Speaker 1: pawn gods smiled on BB and gave him the chance
Speaker 1: to get his own back. We kind of sat around
Speaker 1: Biden this time, opus a newspaper You're in prison, and
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, yes, yeah, lucky him. B B understood
Speaker 1: that Fabians lenders would be on the lookout for someone
Speaker 1: else to take over the business. He went straight to
Speaker 1: them and they liked the look of him. He was
Speaker 1: one of their own. BB had worked at Goldman like
Speaker 1: the guys who had packaged Fabians deal, and this ex
Speaker 1: banker turned pornographer, came with a neat financial plan. He
Speaker 1: would merge his own porn company, this cycled red tube,
Speaker 1: with Fabian's empire, and raise enough money to buy him out.
Speaker 1: Fabians lenders handed him five hundred million dollars in total
Speaker 1: and the crown of porn Land. So do you remember
Speaker 1: and we found this picture? Yeah, I do some obscure
Speaker 1: Chicago booth, business school alumni magazine and a get together
Speaker 1: in Vienna. Yeah, from two thousand and two. And at
Speaker 1: first we couldn't work out who is but here he
Speaker 1: is wearing a short sleeved blue shirt, big smile, looks
Speaker 1: kind of shy, hands class in front of him. I
Speaker 1: mean this was literally one of the first things we
Speaker 1: found once we got that call from the ft investigations team. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what his real name was, right? Yeah? Suddenly we have
Speaker 1: email addressed to him. We have an address to his
Speaker 1: penthouse suite, and some luxury hotel in Hong Kong. But
Speaker 1: the most amazing thing there was a phone number. And
Speaker 1: I decided to call the phone number, and I remember
Speaker 1: it was it was ringing. It was a Hong Kong
Speaker 1: phone number and was so old. I just didn't think
Speaker 1: anyone would pick up. But there's this voice of a
Speaker 1: man and he just says hello, and I say, oh Hi,
Speaker 1: my name is Patricia's this burnt and he hangs up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could find quite a lot about his life. We
Speaker 1: could work out. You know, he came from this kind
Speaker 1: of little town in Upper Austria, that he must have
Speaker 1: been precocious enough to make it to a big business
Speaker 1: school in the state to get to Goldman Sachs. And
Speaker 1: then there was that massive gap, which was how did
Speaker 1: he get into Paul? I mean, how did mister Goldman
Speaker 1: become mister Sex. We hadn't met lots of people in
Speaker 1: the porn industry who knew him, worked with him, or
Speaker 1: had seen him much. At that point. The only thing
Speaker 1: we knew was that he had been associated with Red Tube,
Speaker 1: his first porn site. Yeah, and even Fabian, a man
Speaker 1: who had to convince the bank that BP actually existed,
Speaker 1: still doesn't really know what made him switch from Goldman
Speaker 1: to Pawn. He was always much more secretive than I am.
Speaker 1: He never wanted to talk about this stuff ever. He's
Speaker 1: a very private person. The only time I met him
Speaker 1: ever was in Las Vegas, and I saw him two times.
Speaker 1: He didn't go to the shore. He went thought ashore
Speaker 1: with us once. He didn't want anyone to All years like,
Speaker 1: we didn't tell people. We were the only ones that
Speaker 1: know who this guy is. Do you think he disliked
Speaker 1: the idea that he was actually in the pawn industry. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think he cares. BB's distance from the world
Speaker 1: of pawn would have pretty profound consequences. He took a
Speaker 1: hands off approach and that would matter not just for
Speaker 1: mine geek, but for how pawn was delivered to the world.
Speaker 1: You could say it set the tone for an industry
Speaker 1: where pawn platforms were passive hosts of videos more than
Speaker 1: active moderators. I wish I could give you his view,
Speaker 1: but he's never explained his choices, let alone be held
Speaker 1: to account. We've constructed a portrait of BB by talking
Speaker 1: with people who worked with him at key moments in
Speaker 1: his pawn career, but we did not speak to the
Speaker 1: man himself. Like lots of other secretive millionaires, BB has
Speaker 1: a place in London. A patricious story ran in the
Speaker 1: FT A news site called Tortoise Media confronted him outside
Speaker 1: his mansion, but he refused to talk. He's never given
Speaker 1: a single interview. You've outlined to us, you know, your
Speaker 1: mission while you were doing it, what you were trying
Speaker 1: to do. How is Bernar different? His mission is make money.
Speaker 1: That's his mission. That's the only mission he has really.
Speaker 1: That is literally, in my opinion, the only mission he
Speaker 1: has is make money. It only doesn't care, absolutely not.
Speaker 1: He's just he's making money. He's not active in this
Speaker 1: company in any shape or form. BB the small town
Speaker 1: Oustian boy turned Goldman banker, ultimately became a passive porn baron.
Speaker 1: He reaped the rewards of ownership without worrying about day
Speaker 1: to day troubles. But that's not how it was at
Speaker 1: the beginning of his life and porn. Back then, he
Speaker 1: was running things and he had absolutely no clue what
Speaker 1: he was doing. Neither Chicago business school or a Goldman
Speaker 1: Sachs had taught him how to make money of free porn.
Speaker 1: So this powerful banker had to turn to a couple
Speaker 1: of guys half his age. Act to the invisible man.
Speaker 1: It's a millennium, the Internet is just coming to life.
Speaker 1: And Clem pk is at high school with his identical
Speaker 1: twin brother Toma, a school just outside Paris. We had
Speaker 1: a computer in his bedroom. We're saying one computer and
Speaker 1: there was just sake. We're taking turns at couding it
Speaker 1: that making it. You've got mail. So they're messing around
Speaker 1: with computers, setting up Star Wars websites, normal geek stuff.
Speaker 1: Then comes another teen fixation sex. Their first websites were
Speaker 1: celebrity pictures. They watch girls Demi Moore, Jerry Halliwell and
Speaker 1: the Spice Girls, the kind of thing that fills the
Speaker 1: mind of a horny teen, and it took off before long.
Speaker 1: Their website was definitely more than just a bedroom hobby,
Speaker 1: and so you were running one of the top ten
Speaker 1: most popular adult websites from your school exactly if from
Speaker 1: a high school for like eighteen back then, god school
Speaker 1: was ending at five where to take the metro, go home,
Speaker 1: open the door for employees work from like five PM
Speaker 1: to one or tween in the morning, going to bed
Speaker 1: up at seven. I tried to do homework in the
Speaker 1: metro on the way to school. One there o Mom
Speaker 1: comes over and she's like, Hey, what's that you know,
Speaker 1: seventy thousand dollars check you know, from the mall that's
Speaker 1: like addressed to you. I'm like, well, you know, it's
Speaker 1: better you sit down. Clems mom got used to it.
Speaker 1: She even had to sign him into his first porn
Speaker 1: conference in Las Vegas because he was under the age
Speaker 1: of twenty one. By the mid two thousands, tub sides
Speaker 1: were exploding online. Clem saw the transformation. It was a
Speaker 1: threat to his business, which charge people to view videos.
Speaker 1: How could he compete against sites that were ripping porn
Speaker 1: DVDs and effectively giving them away for free. Did you
Speaker 1: ever think of starting a tube site yourself or to us?
Speaker 1: There was just like too much risk because we were
Speaker 1: working with the studios that we're buying content from, so
Speaker 1: we just didn't want to take the risk of losing
Speaker 1: their relationship and losing everything and also getting sued. I
Speaker 1: think they could have goot on us in a lot
Speaker 1: of trouble. Clem was once offered the chance to buy
Speaker 1: a tube site. We're going to tell you about it
Speaker 1: because this deal turned out to be BB's gateway to pawn.
Speaker 1: The year was two thousand and eight. Clem was by
Speaker 1: now in his twenties doing well in the business, and
Speaker 1: he was chatting to the founder of one of the
Speaker 1: top pawn tube sites when they he just told me
Speaker 1: that I think he thinks he's done. I think he
Speaker 1: wanted to do something else. And he asked me, if
Speaker 1: you know I was interested in buying a retribe dot com,
Speaker 1: which am I gonna for the price that he wanted?
Speaker 1: I mean, it was a very attractive purchase. It was
Speaker 1: called red Tube and it was one of the world's
Speaker 1: most visited tube sites for porn. Red Tube was founded
Speaker 1: by a couple of Austrian guys who were now looking
Speaker 1: for a change of career. One of them found God
Speaker 1: and wanted to get out of porn so he could
Speaker 1: set up at Christian social media site. How much was
Speaker 1: he looking for at that point, I think he wanted
Speaker 1: around like five million dollars. It was an attractive deal.
Speaker 1: But Clem didn't want to take the legal risk of
Speaker 1: messing with user generated content, so the owners of red
Speaker 1: Tube sold to a fellow Austrian, a former banker who
Speaker 1: called himself Bernard, BB's cover name. Clem started buying red
Speaker 1: shube bads from BB later that year. So we met
Speaker 1: at a hotel in Beverly Hills and you know, just
Speaker 1: had a lunch together, and you know, I was surprised.
Speaker 1: He was like a lovely, very well mannered, gentleman and
Speaker 1: like very deper very well dressed. He was a you know,
Speaker 1: very nice gentleman. Did he seem like the other kind
Speaker 1: of businessman you'd meet in the adult industry? No, No,
Speaker 1: not at all, because most of the other one person
Speaker 1: that I was dealing with, they were mostly take one
Speaker 1: master in adults. I mean to me, he was a
Speaker 1: financial manager that he wasn't technical whatsoever. Bernard was now
Speaker 1: in charge of one of the most highly trafficked porn
Speaker 1: sites in the world, but at that lunch in Beverly Hills,
Speaker 1: he asked Clem for basic tips on managing a platform.
Speaker 1: Turns out he didn't really know the nitty gritty of
Speaker 1: running a porn site. Surprise me, because I'm like, why
Speaker 1: did you even by this in the first pass issue?
Speaker 1: Didn't really know what to do with it though I
Speaker 1: had to run it. I mean, to have basically just
Speaker 1: taken on a site like that, probably one of the
Speaker 1: top fifty in the world at that stage. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: definitely think it was like top fifty for sure. And
Speaker 1: not to have run a site like this before in
Speaker 1: any way, that's a big ample to take, right, That's
Speaker 1: a big game ball. I mean, it's a it's not
Speaker 1: something that you you know, you pick on like in
Speaker 1: a couple of days, I was like, oh, I can
Speaker 1: run this noment, you know. No, Biggie Clem kept watching
Speaker 1: BB and he saw that he did manage to keep
Speaker 1: it going and start to make decent money. That might
Speaker 1: be why he put it in the first place, because
Speaker 1: he saw that he could make his money back in
Speaker 1: like a year and anything after this is just going
Speaker 1: to be gravy. But I think on the top of it,
Speaker 1: he kept on growing. Yeah, it's it's pretty impressive play,
Speaker 1: right to go from having never been in this industry,
Speaker 1: having never run my website, within five years he was
Speaker 1: running the world but poor company. Yeah, I think he's
Speaker 1: a good investor when it comes down, especially after what
Speaker 1: happened with Red Too. But I think he knows what
Speaker 1: a good opportunity looks like. I mean, Clem helped us
Speaker 1: understand that when BB bought Read Too, that was his
Speaker 1: first movement to porn and he, you know, he had
Speaker 1: no idea what he was doing, and that obviously raises
Speaker 1: the question of why how did this former Goldms sax
Speaker 1: banker find himself running one of the world's biggest porn sites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it took us a while to even piece together an
Speaker 1: explanation for how he got into this by talking to
Speaker 1: old friends of his from his life before porn who
Speaker 1: told us about his early days at Goldman Sachs whereas
Speaker 1: in Frankfurt and doing reasonably well. You know, he had
Speaker 1: a fast car and a big apartment. But curiously in
Speaker 1: this big apartment was would sleep on a mattress on
Speaker 1: the floor and one person we spoke to said he
Speaker 1: didn't quite fit with the kind of rigors of Goldman
Speaker 1: at that time, and after a couple of years he
Speaker 1: ended up leaving and finding love and returning to Austria
Speaker 1: where his family was the farming family, and he started
Speaker 1: working as a bit of a freelance financial adviser for
Speaker 1: a wealthy Austrian family, kind of advising on deals and
Speaker 1: money in general. And that's what brought him to these
Speaker 1: two Austrian gentlemen who were desperate to sell a pawn
Speaker 1: site so one of them could go and launch a
Speaker 1: social media platform for Christians. And bb was brought on
Speaker 1: to advise on the sale to find a buyer, and
Speaker 1: he clearly looked at it, and ever the dealmaker saw
Speaker 1: a bargain and decided to buy himself. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: know that Bbe was quite hands on in the early
Speaker 1: days of read tube, but even though he was using
Speaker 1: his porn name, he kind of wanted to remain in
Speaker 1: the shadows. I mean, he definitely didn't want to be
Speaker 1: the face of the company, and so he needed to
Speaker 1: find someone else who could do that for him represent
Speaker 1: Red Tube at various conferences, etc. And we managed to
Speaker 1: find one of the people who did this for him.
Speaker 1: That's after the break act three BB's show. So just
Speaker 1: to recap, it's two thousand and eight. BB has bought
Speaker 1: red Tube, one of the world's biggest pawn tube sites.
Speaker 1: He's not making pawn but hosting it, and he's basically
Speaker 1: learning on the job. He does what any banker out
Speaker 1: of his depth would do. He hires people codas tech
Speaker 1: people specialists in video streaming. But he also needed a frontman,
Speaker 1: so Red Shube hired Alan Lake. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what I was doing. I had no idea what I
Speaker 1: was doing. I got employed because they liked the content
Speaker 1: I was doing on the radio. Alan was a freelance
Speaker 1: radio presenter. You worked for a bunch of local stations
Speaker 1: in the UK, it's actually hard to find one. He
Speaker 1: hasn't been on. Hello everybody, welcome to the show. Are
Speaker 1: you feeling good? Feeling fine? How are you feeling empowered?
Speaker 1: Alan had just got a boot from one station and
Speaker 1: he was well struggling to get work. Red Tube contacted
Speaker 1: him to make videos and ride a blog. The money
Speaker 1: was good, so he went for it. It was a
Speaker 1: very strange place to work. It felt shady. Everybody used
Speaker 1: their first names. It was really really secretive, which was
Speaker 1: really intriguing. He got a big title head of Marketing
Speaker 1: and Communications. My bosses are going to cream in their pants,
Speaker 1: as would say in the UK, because I had bree
Speaker 1: us in here. Oh you're pissing me? Do you want
Speaker 1: me to piss in you with? This is when the
Speaker 1: biggest starts. You are gonna find here at the AVIA.
Speaker 1: That's what you guys say, though, don't you like you're
Speaker 1: taking a piss on me? But this wasn't an average company.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even an average porn company. Do you know
Speaker 1: where these people were based? I mean, did you get
Speaker 1: to a point where you were basically meeting your colleagues?
Speaker 1: I didn't meet anyone for a year, but then One day,
Speaker 1: Red Tube decided to host a company get together and
Speaker 1: crete Alan was finally invited to meet his colleagues in person,
Speaker 1: and it was there on the shores of the Aegean
Speaker 1: that he encountered bb for the first time. Bernard was
Speaker 1: a mystery to me, but I definitely knew absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: about Bernard. He showed up and I remember walking down
Speaker 1: the beach with him. He was asking me what I
Speaker 1: want in life. I just want to make really good
Speaker 1: content and be known for that. And then he started
Speaker 1: to explain to me how really good content was great
Speaker 1: and all that, but we had to make sure everything
Speaker 1: within the business made money. He was telling me, basically,
Speaker 1: if my content doesn't make money, you'll walk on the beach.
Speaker 1: Who was probably with one of the most successful and
Speaker 1: prolific pornographers of the ditchal age. Do you know what?
Speaker 1: That half surprises me? And then the other half dozen't
Speaker 1: you know? I was always intrigued. I knew I wasn't
Speaker 1: getting the full story from anyone in that business. But
Speaker 1: that guy, Yeah, he seemed to be behind a couple
Speaker 1: of barriers. He certainly couldn't call Alan a big mover
Speaker 1: and shaker at Red Tube, but He had a worm's
Speaker 1: eye view of BB's empire, the layers of secrecy, the
Speaker 1: tiny operation, the curious role that BB played. He even
Speaker 1: handled Alan's expenses occasionally. Yeah, he literally queried his receipts.
Speaker 1: But alongside the bookkeeping, there was ambition. BB wanted to
Speaker 1: make Red Tube the most well known pawn site on
Speaker 1: the planet. He had big plans. He wanted control over
Speaker 1: the adult industry, but the first step was sending Alan
Speaker 1: to pawn conferences to tell the world what they were doing.
Speaker 1: We had a big budget because they wanted we were
Speaker 1: We were their face. You know, we were walking around
Speaker 1: an expo with a Red Tube T shirt on. They
Speaker 1: gave us everything we wanted because they wanted to see,
Speaker 1: you know, red Chube was the place to bait. That
Speaker 1: seemed to be the only goal I could fathom at
Speaker 1: the time. Remember, Red Tube was a success, a big name,
Speaker 1: but Babe did not have his top people represent the
Speaker 1: company at industry events. The reason was porn people still
Speaker 1: hated tub sides because they were giving away videos for free,
Speaker 1: so they sent Alan instead to take the flak to
Speaker 1: the industry. Alan was the face of the company and
Speaker 1: we went round and we spoke to a few people,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people would point blank tell us
Speaker 1: to just do one don't want to speak to you.
Speaker 1: On one occasion, we were interviewing some lady and she
Speaker 1: was showing us a bit some bobs and telling us
Speaker 1: about other stuff. You were looking absolutely stunning. Check out
Speaker 1: this bay. Wow, I could just eat you alive right now.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden I gets pushed, end up,
Speaker 1: falling over, stand up, and I'm like, hey, you know
Speaker 1: what's going on? And this guy says, you guys have
Speaker 1: ruined the industry. You have ruined everything we're doing. Everyone
Speaker 1: here today, no one should speak to you because of
Speaker 1: what you guys have done to this industry. You've stolen content,
Speaker 1: and we just don't want to see you here. And
Speaker 1: then I got a bit of a whack. How did
Speaker 1: it make you feel? Awful? Absolutely awful? And it happened
Speaker 1: a number of times. The longer Alan was working with
Speaker 1: red Tube, the more his concerns grew about the content,
Speaker 1: not just the kind of videos on there, but the
Speaker 1: fact that a lot of the pawn just looked like
Speaker 1: it had been ripped from a DVD. I was told
Speaker 1: point blank there was no content at all on the
Speaker 1: website that was stolen and it was all legit. Ever
Speaker 1: brought up any content in the past being ripped off,
Speaker 1: then you would get slapped down. You would get a
Speaker 1: slap down and you get told no, we don't do that.
Speaker 1: We all knew it did. The hands of approach to
Speaker 1: moderating the content, the tiny secretive teams working for companies
Speaker 1: parked and far off jurisdictions like Hong Kong. They were
Speaker 1: effectively untouchable the owners behind the scenes. They never stepped
Speaker 1: up to take responsibility. They ran things on the fly
Speaker 1: and raped in the cash. All these choices for BB
Speaker 1: they would eventually backfire in spectacular fashion. The empire he
Speaker 1: managed to wrestle out of Fabian's hands would be brought
Speaker 1: to its knees. Some say Fabian was as guilty as
Speaker 1: BB or any other of the Tube site guys, that
Speaker 1: Fabians stole from the pawn industry and didn't care about
Speaker 1: what kind of stuff he posted on his sites. There
Speaker 1: might be some truth to that, but looking back now,
Speaker 1: Fabian thinks that it could have been different. That profound
Speaker 1: choices were made in the years after he left, big
Speaker 1: misjudgments with big repercussions. I think that's really weird when
Speaker 1: wrong with complacency. Yeah, they just didn't care, thought they
Speaker 1: didn't have to care. This was a big mistake. And
Speaker 1: then when they started to get approached by people they
Speaker 1: can't They thought they didn't have to care about them,
Speaker 1: and that was their mistake. And then it just blew up.
Speaker 1: Why didn't they have to care? Why didn't tub sides
Speaker 1: have to care about hosting pirated videos or care about
Speaker 1: what was in them. We've been really caught up in
Speaker 1: the question of who rules porn in the digital age?
Speaker 1: Is it fabian BB? But we've been neglecting a bigger
Speaker 1: question hiding behind that one. How is so much porn
Speaker 1: online at all? And how is it making so much
Speaker 1: money for the sides that hosted. To answer that, we
Speaker 1: have to go back to the twentieth century, to the
Speaker 1: age of the modem. The only thing people will pay
Speaker 1: for is sex. People are horny, people are purient, people
Speaker 1: want to see images of other naked people. It's just
Speaker 1: human nature. That's next time on Hot Money. Hot Money
Speaker 1: is a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: It was written or reported by me Patricia Elson and
Speaker 1: me Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and
Speaker 1: sound designer. Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Karen Shakurji. Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music
Speaker 1: composition by Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov at The Financial
Speaker 1: Times and Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Bart
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to a
Speaker 1: similar Web for providing our web traffic data, and a
Speaker 1: big thanks to Cynthia Omerhu who helped us a lot
Speaker 1: with reporting for this episode. If you want more from
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