Sex, Lies and the Dirty (27 page)

At NPMG, I set the meetings up for the next two weeks.
Good meetings, the kind that our SAEs could close half-assed and hungover. I even hired on Anthony and Andy from my CIG days, telling them it’s just like the music scam but with credit card processing. It was sort of my last-ditch effort to do the job right, even though it was about to be taken away from me. While I was building my name as Nik Richie, Sean was doing everything in
his power to ruin Hooman Karamian, and after enough lies and gossip, he got his way. The call came in that I was to go back out in the field and that Sean would resume his position as the floor manager. By that point, I didn’t care. Being Nik Richie was proving to be more satisfying than any career ambitions I had. Even though my wife hated it and the site made no money, it became the only thing I looked forward to during the day. So I went back into the field, closing one or two meetings a day to keep afloat—basically, doing the bare minimum not to get fired.

Shortly after Sean got his job back I’d learn that we had made the most money in company history, and it had nothing to do with him. It was me. My meetings. That didn’t stop Sean from taking the credit, though. All the bosses were convinced that this guy just saved the company when all he really did was vulture my numbers, but I was sick of fighting with him. Sick of trying to prove myself to these people.
Dirty Scottsdale
made NPMG feel like a job, not a career. It was temporary, a way to make money for the time being instead of for the rest of my life.

My hour a day as Nik Richie far exceeded anything I had ever done as Hooman Karamian. It was a high. A release. I spoke and the people, the city, they hung on every word. At the time, I thought you couldn’t put a price on that kind of power. That’s right when the bill came.

Server fees.
Go Daddy
wanted $6,000 for something called “server fees.” At first I thought it was some kind of bullshit charge in the vein of an NPMG scam, but my wife explained that they were legitimate. Traffic kept pushing the server past the maximum bandwidth level so the bill and the charges were real. She finally had the ammunition she needed against me.

“It’s done,” she said. “It doesn’t make any money. All you’re doing is staring at half-naked girls all day and talking shit on people. Shut it down.”

My wife was jealous, but it had nothing to do with the half-naked women or what I said on the site. The bill for $6,000 wasn’t an issue, either. It was the fact that I made something that was more successful than anything she had done. My wife was a businesswoman, and a cutthroat one at that. Although her ambition was one of the things that drew me to her, the drawback was she never stopped competing. Even with me, her husband, she couldn’t help but think of me as an opponent. An enemy. And I could have dropped Nik Richie at that point, but I loved it too much. More than
I loved her. In my mind, Nik Richie was bigger than our marriage, so I was going to do everything in my power to keep him alive.

I invested more into him. More time. More money. I bought the domains for
Dirty Newport
and
Vegas
. I made a
MySpace
account, friending chick after chick. Networking. Spreading the message. The Scottsdale market was getting so big that it caught the attention of Bob Parsons, the owner of
Go Daddy
. He wanted to interview me for his radio show, and I said, “I’ll do it under two conditions: no one can know who I am, and we need to take care of these server fees.”

That would be the first time I used the Nik Richie persona for personal gain. Bob and I cut a deal: I’d do the interview and he’d drop the fees and put me on a more affordable plan. That wasn’t a normal practice for Bob, but he was a fan of the site and wanted to meet Nik Richie so badly that I could have asked for anything. He just so happened to catch me at a time where I wasn’t aware of my own power. I knew I had influence, but I had never been one to make demands or flaunt myself.

Self-awareness slowly crept in as time went on. There was a correlation between how much traffic the site got and the amount of times I heard my own name out at the clubs. Nik Richie was a celebrity, but he was also a ghost. No one knew where he was or what he looked like, so he could be everywhere or nowhere. He transcended the limitation of being a person, and the site played off that anonymity with its users. People could say what they wanted without guilt or consequences. Without fear. Free speech had always existed; I just happened to invent a new version of it, and people couldn’t get enough.

Once it got to the point where people were refusing to take pictures, I could no longer go to the nightlife websites like I had been doing. The well had run dry. If the site was going to continue, the users were going to have to step up and help, so I opened the floodgates. At the top of the site, I made my intentions known, typing, “I’m looking for civilian paparazzi. If you have photos or intel, please submit by clicking the link.”

At a casual glance, it looked like I was asking for help.

In actuality, I was forming my own army.

Traffic was up.
Submissions were rolling in so fast and frequent that I could barely keep up with them—most of which were people I had seen already at Suede or 6 or one of the other clubs in Scottsdale. The
diversity of douchebags and cokeheads and pretend models went through the roof, familiar faces that finally had names and backstories to go with them. Popularity grew as did adversity to the site. Those on the receiving end, the people being submitted, were pissed. They either wanted to kill me, sue me, or both. Death threats were being made in the comments, and there were rumors going around that I was the guy, but I was more concerned with losing my site. Losing my voice.

I became convinced that the lawyers were going to swoop in at any moment and shut me down, so I called the only guy I could trust with my secret for legal advice. His name was Ben Quayle: future congressman and son of former vice president Dan Quayle.

On the surface, that sounded prestigious, but the reality was that Ben was a fun guy to hang out with. He was a drinking buddy. Someone to chase chicks with. Never did we get into his political background or anything he did over at Snell & Wilmer, which was the law firm he practiced at. I never talked about NPMG or the site. If we were out, it wasn’t to talk about work. Not extensively, anyway. So when I called him about the potential legal issues I had, it was more or less out of the blue.

I told Ben I was Nik Richie, asking him to check out the site and see if there was anything that could land me in a courtroom. Claims were being made that the site was libelous and invaded people’s privacy, so I asked Ben to find out if those claims were valid. He agreed to do it, intrigued by the idea that I was living a sort of double life. Up until that point, I think Ben had only heard about
Dirty Scottsdale
in passing.

I never thought he’d want to write for it.

Ben got back with me to let me know I was legally in the clear,
and he also referred me over to a different lawyer to help me incorporate the site into an LLC. What I didn’t expect was for him to want in, to want to work with me.

He said, “Hooman, this site is awesome. I want to write for it.”

“Well, I’m kind of the only guy writing as Nik Richie. I don’t know how it’d go over with someone else doing it.”

“No, you keep doing that,” he said. “I’ll do funny little articles about Scottsdale and the scene and everything, and I’ll go by a different name. I’ll go by Brock Landers.”

“Okay, but if we do this, no one can know,” I told him.

“Deal—okay, so what do you want me to do first?”

“Okay…well, you’re Brock Landers,” I said, “and your job is to find the hottest chick in Scottsdale.”

The Legend of Brock’s Chick (and the reason that is her name):

As I wrote in my first post, every once in awhile I will post a picture of a foxy lady who resides in Scottsdale. I requested submissions from the DS readers, and thanks to all of your emails, I received a whopping zero pictures. Jesus…I almost feel like the kid who eats paste in elementary school…almost.

Fortunately, after spending a night sitting on my couch, in the dark, with a bottle of whiskey, rhythmically flicking the switch on my table side lamp on and off, I remembered that I had the entire DS picture vault at my disposal. Flush with this realization, and coupled with the fact that I have a king-sized ego that can overcome any emotional setbacks, I pored through the numerous pictures on file at the DS headquarters and found the first lady worthy of some recognition.

This girl seems awfully popular since DS has received tons of pictures of her and she’s all over the worldwide Internets. Obviously this girl friggin loves to be photographed–it’s like crack to her. In fact, I’m fairly certain that she purposefully runs red lights so she can get her picture taken by the red light cameras.

Because of this, I was a little hesitant to choose her as my first foxy lady of Scottsdale. And, truth be told, I’m more of a brunette guy, so blonds have to be all the more stunning to gain my attention and admiration. That being said, this lady definitely passed the rigorous requirements that this site sets forth, and she is definitely foxy. See for yourself: (photos were embedded in the post of Brock’s Chick, most of them in her blonde phase)