Episode 3: Mr. Goldman, Mr. Sex

Pushkin.

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Not every episode in this series will contain explicit sex talk.

This one doesn't.

This one is about the kinky finance.

Last time on Hot Money, a guy named Fabian Tillman borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from Wall Street bankers to buy up porn sites around the world.

He called his global porn empire Manwin.

That's all you need to remember for today's show.

This episode begins in December 2012.

Think of a rainy day in Brussels, which is about any day in Brussels.

Fabian Tillman is about to walk out of his mansion in a leafy suburb.

A Learjet is waiting to take him to London, where he's meeting some bankers, the kind of people who helped him become the undisputed king of world porn.

But just as Fabian is about to leave, he gets a visit, one that pretty much ends his porn career.

The police knock on his door.

Fabian never makes it to London.

Instead, he's arrested for suspected tax evasion and taken into custody.

How long were you in the prison Zeit Block?

18 days, I think.

18 days.

Before charge.

Yeah, before

three years before charge.

They didn't do anything.

They didn't charge me.

German authorities had raided Fabian's company, Manwin.

But at this point, the investigators leading the case, they didn't have enough evidence to charge Fabian.

They just held him.

But still.

My lengths were very confused.

You bet.

Fabian's Wall Street backers had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his roll-up of porn.

They believed Fabian was a tech wanderkind sitting on steady cash flow, not some scandal-prone pornographer.

Behind bars, the man who convinced Wall Street that porn was a safe bet started to look like a liability.

And Fabian's superpower, raising money, became the weakness that brought him down.

The moneymen turned against him.

These lenders didn't pull out, but they told Fabian, when these loans expire, you won't get more.

Not even a 20% interest.

They just openly told me, listen, this is going to be very difficult with you there.

To do this, it could get very expensive.

Fabian really only had one option.

He had to let go.

abandon the empire he had built and sell Manwin.

Don't feel too sorry for Fabian.

He made a tidy sum.

He's never said exactly how much, but for a company this size, it would be in the hundreds of millions.

Reports at the time suggested Fabian sold the company to a consortium led by management, two senior executives who still run the company.

Thing is, that wasn't the full truth.

We found out that Fabian sold his empire to a different man, a man who'd learned his trade at Goldman Sachs.

Not a techie like Fabian, but a true financier.

Someone who could keep the lenders sweet.

A man who somehow managed to keep his identity a secret for close to a decade.

Until that is, Patricia came along and rumbled his game.

I'm Patricia Nelson.

And I'm Alex Barker.

From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is hot money.

Act 1.

The Buyer Who Didn't Exist

If Fabian was an old-school pornographer, the fallout from his troubles with German tax authorities might have been different.

He was eventually hit with a bill for millions in back taxes and a penalty, and he might have got away with just paying that and keeping his company.

Fabian ended up the subject of scandalous headlines all over the world, but the mystery buyer who took over over Fabian's porn empire would not.

Why?

Because he left no trace.

Even by the secretive standards of the porn world, the man who wanted to buy the world's biggest porn company was like a ghost.

When I sold the company, my bank said, this person is fake.

You're not selling.

This is all fake.

This person doesn't exist.

Who's paying this money?

This is the person that's paying the money.

Doesn't exist.

What do you mean, doesn't exist?

Yeah, he's fake.

We cannot find anything on him.

It is impossible that we cannot find anything on him.

I'm going to step away from Fabian for a moment to tell you how I first came across this buyer who didn't exist.

The new owner of Fabian's company.

I remember when I first heard his name.

I was perched on the windowsill of my bedroom, talking on the phone with a source about the company.

By this time, it had been renamed from Manwin to MindGeek.

Just remember the M.

And this source said something that every journalist dreams of hearing.

Let me tell you something that no one knows.

MindGeek has a secret owner, and his name is Bernard Bergamar.

I typed a name into Google while I was still on the phone.

Nothing.

I asked my source, can you spell it again?

Nothing.

But he was adamant, that's your guy.

I got off the phone and kept searching, and then I found one hit for Bernard Bergamar.

A court case from about a decade ago.

It named him as a director of a porn site called RedTube.

We'll be hearing a lot more about RedTube later in this episode.

But that was it.

I mean, it didn't make sense.

If this guy really owned the world's biggest porn company, how could there be nothing on him except for this one court record?

So...

I asked a ton of people in the industry, even other journalists, have you ever heard of this guy?

Have you ever thought that maybe it wasn't true that Fabian sold the company to his management team, as the official story goes?

No.

They all told me that someone was pulling my leg.

I started to feel a bit crazy.

But then,

a few weeks later,

jackpot.

I found a guy who had worked at Red Tube years ago, and he

had worked for Bernard.

Bernard was real.

This is the point my curiosity really kicked in.

Before I knew it, I was rooting around Luxembourgish company records trying to make sense of it all.

How could the owner manage to stay hidden for so long?

We looked at Meingeek's corporate structure and it was totally Byzantine.

And Patricia's reporting?

That provided the clue.

that unlocked its secrets.

What we realized was that there was a single golden share at the heart of it all.

It effectively gave Bernard control and a lion's share of profit.

But most important of all, it allowed him to stay hidden.

We published the story and it was a pretty big hit.

Turns out that people love reading about porn.

And Patricia, she had the scoop of her career.

A couple of days go by.

A colleague of ours on the FTU's investigative team tells me she's heard something that will probably interest me.

A source who read our story called her up and said not only did he know Bernard,

but he knew his biggest secret.

Bernard Bergamar

is a cover name.

A persona that he uses for his dealings in the porn industry.

His real name is Bernd.

Bernt Bergmeyer.

Somehow, he had managed to use a fake name in court.

So, to recap, fake name, Bernard Bergmar.

Real name, Bernd Bergmeyer.

This may or may not be just about the worst porn name in the whole history of porn.

We just started calling him BB, a nickname that covers all bases.

But the key thing here was that, while Bernard Bergmar had gone to great lengths to make sure that there was no trace of him, Bernd Bergmeier hadn't.

Fabian, by the way, knew of BB

even before he snatched his empire away.

They had history.

Years earlier, Fabian and BB went after the same company, the owner of Pornhub.

Fabian won and BB lost.

When Fabian was arrested, the porn gods smiled on BB and gave him the chance to get his own back.

He kind of sat around, bided his time,

opens the newspaper, you're in prison, and he's like, oh.

Yes, yeah, I know.

Lucky him.

BB understood that Fabian's lenders would be on the lookout for someone else to take over the business.

He went straight to them and

they liked the look of him.

He was one of their own.

BB had worked at Goldman, like the guys who had packaged Fabian's deal.

And this ex-banker turned pornographer came with a neat financial plan.

He would merge his own porn company, this site called Red Tube, with Fabian's Empire and raise enough money to buy him out.

Fabian's lenders handed him $500 million in total and the crown of porn land.

So do you remember when we found this picture?

Yeah,

I do.

Some obscure Chicago booth business school, alumni magazine, and a get-together in Vienna.

Yeah, from 2002.

And at first we couldn't work out who he is.

But here he is, wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt, big smile, looks kind of shy, hands clasped in front of him.

I mean, this was literally one of the first things we found once we got that call from the FT investigations team about

what his real name was, right?

Yeah.

Suddenly we have email address to him.

We have an address to his penthouse suite in some luxury hotel in Hong Kong, but the most amazing thing, there was a phone number.

And I decided to call the phone number and I remember it was ringing.

It was the Hong Kong phone number and it was so old, I just didn't think anyone would pick up.

But there's this voice of a man and he just says, hello.

And I say, oh, hi, my name is Patricia.

Is this Bernd?

And he hangs up.

Yeah.

You could find quite a lot about his life.

We could work out, you know, he came from this kind of little town in Upper Austria, that he must have been precocious enough to make it to a big business school in the States, to get to Goldman Sachs.

And then there was that massive gap, which was, how did he get into porn?

I mean, how did Mr.

Goldman become Mr.

Sachs?

We hadn't met lots of people in the porn industry who knew him or worked with him or had seen him much.

At that point, the only thing we knew was that he had been associated with Red Tube, his first porn site.

Yeah, and even Fabian, the man who had to convince the bank that BP actually existed, still doesn't really know what made him switch from Goldman to porn.

He was always much more secretive than I am.

He never wanted to talk about this stuff, ever.

He's a very private person.

The only time I met him ever

was in Las Vegas.

And I saw him two times.

He didn't go to the show.

He went through the show with us once.

He didn't want anyone to know who he is.

Like, we didn't tell people.

We were the only ones that knew who this guy is.

Do you think he disliked the idea that he was actually in the porn industry?

No, I don't think he cares.

BB's distance from the world of porn would have pretty profound consequences.

He took a hands-off approach, and that would matter.

Not just for MindGeek, but for how porn was delivered to the world.

You could say it set the tone for an industry where porn platforms were passive hosts of videos more than active moderators.

I wish I could give you his view, but he's never explained his choices, let alone be held to account.

We've constructed a portrait of BB by talking with people who worked with him at key moments in his porn career.

But we did not speak to the man himself.

Like lots of other secretive millionaires, BB has a place in London.

After Patricia's story ran in the FT, a news site called Tortoise Media confronted him outside his mansion, but he refused to talk.

He's never given a single interview.

You've outlined to us, you know, your mission, why you were doing it, what you were trying to do.

How is Bernard different?

His mission is make money.

That's his mission.

That's the only mission he has.

Really, that is literally, in my opinion, the only mission he has, is make money.

It's not he doesn't care, huh?

Absolutely not.

He just, he's making money.

He's not active in this company in any shape or form.

BB,

the small-town Austrian boy turned Goldman banker, ultimately became a passive porn baron.

He reaped the rewards of ownership without worrying about day-to-day troubles.

But that's not how it was at the beginning of his life in porn.

Back then, he was running things, and he had absolutely no clue what he was doing.

Neither Chicago Business School nor Goldman Sachs had taught him how to make money off free porn.

So this powerful banker had to turn to a couple of guys half his age.

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Act 2.

The Invisible Man.

It's a millennium.

The internet is just coming to life.

And Clem PK is at high school with his identical twin brother, Toma, a school just outside Paris.

We had a computer in his bedroom.

We were showing one computer and it was just like, we're taking turns at coding it, at making it.

You've got mail.

So they're messing around with computers, setting up Star Wars websites, normal geek stuff.

Then comes another teen fixation, sex.

Their first websites were celebrity pictures.

Baywatch girls, demi-more, Jerry Halliwolf and the Spice Girls.

The kind of thing that fills the mind of a horny teen.

And it took off.

Before long, their website was definitely more than just a bedroom hobby.

And so you were running one of the top 10 most popular adult websites from your school?

exactly from my high school we were like 18 back then god school was ending at five we had to like take the metro go home open the door for employees work from like 5 p.m to one or three in the morning going to bed wake up at seven try to do homework in the metro on the way to school

One day our mom comes over and she's like, hey, what's that, you know, $70,000 check from the mail that's like addressed to you?

I'm like, well,

you know, it's better you sit down.

Clem's mom got used to it.

She even had to sign him into his first porn conference in Las Vegas because he was under the age of 21.

By the mid-2000s, tube sites were exploding online.

Clem saw the transformation.

It was a threat to his business, which charged people to view videos.

How could he compete against sites that were ripping porn DVDs and effectively giving them away for free?

Did you ever think of starting a tube site yourself?

To us, there was just like too much risk because we were working with the studios that we're buying content from.

So we just didn't want to take the risk of losing that relationship and losing everything and also getting sued.

I think that could have gotten us in a lot of trouble.

Clem was once offered the chance to buy a tube site.

We're going to tell you about it because this deal turned out to be BB's gateway to porn.

The year was 2008.

Clem was by now in his 20s doing well in the business.

And he was chatting to the founder of one of the top porn tube sites.

One day he just told me that I think he thinks he's done.

I think he wanted to do something else.

And he asked me if I was interested in buying RedTube.com, which I'm not going to lie, for the price that he wanted, I mean, it was a very attractive purchase.

It was called RedTube, and it was one of the world's most visited tube sites for porn.

RedTube was founded by a couple of Austrian guys who were now looking for a

change of career.

One of them found God and wanted to get out of porn so he could set up a Christian social media site.

How much was he looking for at that point?

I think he wanted around like $5 million.

It was an attractive deal, but Clem didn't want to take the legal risk of messing with user-generated content.

So the owners of Red Tube sold to a fellow Austrian, a former banker who called himself Bernard, BB's cover name.

Clem started buying Red Tube ads from BB later that year.

So we met at a hotel in Beverly Hills and, you know, just had a lunch together.

And it's, you know, I was surprised.

He was like a lovely, very well-mannered gentleman, like very diaper, very well-dressed.

He was a very nice gentleman.

Did he seem like the other kind of businessman you'd meet in the adult industry?

No, no, not at all, because most of the other, you know, person that I was dealing with, they were mostly like tech, webmasters, in adults.

I mean, to me, he was a financial manager.

He wasn't technical whatsoever.

Bernard was now in charge of one of the most highly trafficked porn sites in the world.

But at that lunch in Beverly Hills, he asked Clem for basic tips on managing a platform.

Turns out he didn't really know the nitty-gritty of running a porn site.

Surprised me, because I'm like, why did you even buy this in the first place if you didn't really know what to do with it or how to run it?

I mean, to have basically just taken on a site like that, probably one of the top 50 in the world at that stage.

Yeah, I definitely think it was like top 50 for sure.

And not to have run a site like this before in any way, that's a big gamble to take, right?

That's a big gamble.

I mean,

it's not something that you, you know, you pick on like in a couple of days of like, oh, I can run this.

No, man, you know, no biggie.

Clem kept watching BB and he saw that he did manage to keep it going and start to make decent money that might be why he bought it in the first place because he saw that he could make his money back in like a year and anything after this is just going to be gravy but i think on top of it he kept on growing yeah it's it's pretty impressive play right to go from having never been in this industry having never run a website within five years he was running the world's segment sports site uh a poor company right yeah i think he's a good investor when it comes down especially after what happened with red tube i think he knows what a good opportunity looks like

i mean clem helped us understand that when bb bought red tube that was his first move into porn and he you know he had no idea what he was doing

and that obviously raises the question of why

how did this former golemas axe banker find himself running one of the world's biggest porn sites.

Yeah.

I mean, it took us a while to even piece together an explanation for how we got into this by talking to old friends of his from his life before porn who told us about his early days at Goldman Sachs, where he was in Frankfurt and doing reasonably well.

You know, he had a fast car and a big apartment, but curiously, in this big apartment was would sleep on a mattress on the floor.

And one person we spoke to said it didn't quite fit with the kind of rigors of Goldman at that time.

And after a couple of years he ended up leaving and finding love and returning to Austria where his family was the farming family and he started working as a bit of a freelance financial advisor for a wealthy Austrian family kind of advising on deals and money in general and that's what brought him to these two Austrian gentlemen who were desperate to sell a porn site so one of them could go and launch a social media platform for Christians.

And BB was brought on to advise on the sale, to find a buyer, and he clearly looked at it.

And ever the deal maker saw a bargain and decided to buy it himself.

Yeah, and we know that BB was quite hands-on in the early days of Red Tube.

But even though he was using his porn name, he kind of wanted to remain in the shadows.

I I mean, he definitely didn't want to be the face of the company.

And so he needed to find someone else who could do that for him, represent RevTube at various conferences, etc.

And we managed to find one of the people who did this for him.

That's off to the break.

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Act 3.

BB's Show

So, just to recap, it's 2008.

BB has bought Red Tube, one of the world's biggest porn tube sites.

He's not making porn, but hosting it.

And he's basically learning on the job.

He does what any banker out of his depth would do.

He hires people, coders, tech people, specialists in video streaming.

But he also needed a front man.

So Red Tube hired Alan Lake.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I got employed because they liked the content I was doing on the radio.

Alan was a freelance radio presenter.

He worked for a bunch of local stations in the UK.

It's actually hard to find one he hasn't been on.

Hello everybody, welcome to the show.

Hope you're feeling good.

You're feeling fine.

How you feeling empowered?

Alan had just got a boot from one station and he was, well, struggling to get work.

RedTube contacted him to make videos and write a blog.

The money was good, so

he went for it.

It was a very strange

place to work.

It felt shady.

Everybody used their first names.

It was really, really secretive, which was really intriguing.

He got a big title, Head of Marketing and Communications.

My boss is going to cream in their pants, as we'd say, in the UK, because I had Bri Orson here.

Oh, you're pissing me?

You want me to piss in you with it?

This is one of the biggest stars you are going to find here at the ABM.

That's what you guys say, though, don't you?

Like, you're taking a piss on me.

But this wasn't an average company.

It wasn't even an average porn company.

Do you you know where these people were based?

I mean, did you get to a point where you were physically meeting your colleagues?

I didn't meet anyone for a year.

But then one day, Red Tube decided to host a company get-together in Crete.

Alan was finally invited to meet his colleagues in person.

And it was there, on the shores of the Aegean, that he encountered BB for the first time.

Bernard was a mystery to me.

I definitely knew absolutely nothing about Bernard.

He showed up and I remember walking down the beach with him.

He was asking me what I want in life.

I just want to make really good content and be known for that.

And then he started to explain to me how really good content was great and all that.

But we had to make sure everything within the business made money.

He was telling me basically if my content doesn't make money.

Your walk on the beach was probably with one of the most successful and prolific pornographers of the digital age.

Do you know what?

That half surprises me.

And then the other half doesn't.

You know, I was always intrigued.

I knew I wasn't getting the full story from anyone in that business.

But that guy,

yeah,

he seemed to be behind a couple of barriers.

You certainly couldn't call Alan a big mover and shaker at Red Tube, but he had a worm's eye view of BB's empire.

the layers of secrecy, the tiny operation, the curious role that BB played.

He even handled Alan's expenses occasionally.

Yeah, he literally queried his receipts.

But alongside the bookkeeping, there was ambition.

BB wanted to make Red Tube the most well-known porn site on the planet.

He had big plans.

He wanted control over the adult industry.

But the first step was sending Alan to porn conferences to tell the world what they were doing.

We had big budget because they wanted we were we were their face you know we were walking around an expo with a red tube t-shirt on they gave us everything we wanted because they wanted people to see you know red tube was the place to be that seemed to be the only goal i could fathom at the time remember red tube was a success a big name but bb did not have his top people represent the company at industry events the reason was porn people still hated tube sites because they were giving away videos for free.

So they sent Alan instead to take the flak to the the industry.

Alan was the face of the company.

And we went round and we spoke to a few people but a lot of people would

point blank tell us to just do one.

Don't want to speak to you.

On one occasion we were interviewing some lady and she was showing us her bits and bobs and telling us about other stuff.

You are looking absolutely stunning.

Check out this bait.

Wow.

I could just eat you alive right now.

And all of a sudden I get pushed.

I end up falling over stand up and i'm like hey you know what's going on and this guy says you guys have ruined the industry you have ruined everything we're doing everyone here today no one should speak to you because of what you guys have done to this industry you've stolen content and we just don't want to see you here and then i got a bit of a whack how did it make you feel

Awful.

Absolutely awful.

And it happened a number of times.

The longer Alan was working with RedTube, the more his concerns grew about the content.

Not just the kind of videos on there, but the fact that a lot of the porn just looked like it had been ripped from a DVD.

I was told point blank there was no content at all on the website that was stolen and it was all legit.

Ever bought up any content in the past

being ripped off, then you would get slapped down.

You would get a slap down and you'd get told, no, we don't do that.

We all knew it did.

The hands-off approach to moderating the content, the tiny secretive teams working for companies parked in far-off jurisdictions like Hong Kong, they were effectively untouchable.

The owners behind the scenes, they never stepped up to take responsibility.

They ran things on the fly and raked in the cash.

All these choices?

For BB, they would eventually backfire in spectacular fashion.

The empire he managed to wrestle out of Fabian's hands would be brought to its knees.

Some say Fabian was as guilty as BB or any other of the tube site guys, that Fabian stole from the porn industry and didn't care about what kind of stuff he posted on his sites.

There might be some truth to that.

But looking back now, Fabian thinks that it could have been different.

That profound choices were made in the years after he left.

Big misjudgments, with big repercussions.

I think that's really

where it went wrong.

The complacency.

Yeah, they just didn't care.

They thought they didn't have to care.

This was a big mistake.

And then, when they started to get approached by people that cared, they thought they didn't have to care about them.

And that was their mistake.

And then it just blew up.

Why didn't they have to care?

Why didn't tube sites have to care about hosting pirated videos or care about what was in them?

We've been really caught up in the question of who rules porn in the digital age.

Is it Fabian?

BB?

But we've been neglecting a bigger question hiding behind that one.

How is so much porn online at all?

And how is it making so much money for the sites that host it?

To answer that, we have to go back to the 20th century, to the age of the modem.

The only thing people will pay for is sex.

People are horny.

People are purian.

People want to see images of other naked people.

It's just human nature.

That's next time on Hot Money.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson, and me, Alex Barker.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Edith Russolo is our associate producer.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Amanda K.

Wong is our engineer.

Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cusado.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley.

and Jacob Goldstein.

Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Rula Khalov at the Financial Times.

Enmia Obel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.

Thank you to SimilarWeb for providing our web traffic data.

And a big thanks to Cynthia Omerhu, who helped us a lot with reporting for this episode.

If you want more from the FT, try our new app featuring eight essential stories every weekday.

Search FT Edit in the iPhone App Store.

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