Pushkin. 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 Tilman borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from Wall Street bankers to buy up porn sites around the world. He called his global porn empire Man Win. That's all you need to remember for today's show. This episode begins in December twenty twelve. 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 lear jette is waiting to take him to London, where he's meeting some bankers, the kind of people who helped him become the under disputed king of world pawn. 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 store. Fabian never mixed London. Instead, he's arrested for suspected tax evasion and taken into custody.
How long we are in the prisons block eighteen days? I think eighteen days before charge yeah. See, years before charge they didn't have anything. They didn't charge me. German authorities had raided Fabian's company, Man Win, 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 letness were very confused. You bet. Fabian's Wall Street backers had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his
roll up of Pawn. They believed Fabian was a tech wonder kind sitting on steady cash flow, not some scandal prone pornographer behind bars. The man who convinced Wall Street that Pawn was a safe bet started to look like a liability, and fabian superpower raising money became the weakness that brought him down. The money man turned against him. His slanders didn't pull out, but they told Fabian, when these lands expire, you won't get more, not even at
twenty percent 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. An sell man one, 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. Report 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 this identity at secret for close to a decade until that is, Patricia came along and rumbled his game. I'm Patrice Nelson and I'm Alex Barker from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times. This is hot money, Act one. 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 Fabian's pawn empire would not why because he left no trace. Even by the secretive standards of the pawn world. The an who wanted to buy the world's biggest pawn company was like a ghost. When I
saw the company, my bank said, this person's thick. You're not selling this is all thick. This person's exist. Who was paying this money? This is the person that's paying the money doesn't exist. What I mean, doesn't exist. Yeah, he's thick. We kind of 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 the spuyer who didn't exist, the new owner of Fabian's company. I remember
when I first heard his name. I was perched on the window sill of my bedroom talking on the phone with a source about the company. By this time it had been renamed from man Win to Mine Geek. Just remember the m and this source said something that every journalist dreams of hearing. Let me tell you something that no one knows. Mine Geek has a secret owner and his name is Bernard Bergomar. I typed a name into Google while still on the phone. Nothing. I asked my sores,
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 Bergomar, a court case from about a decade ago. It named him as a director of porn cite called red Tube. We'll be hearing a lot more about red Tube 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 wasn't true that Fabians sold the company to his management team, as the official story goes. No. They all told me that some 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 Read two years ago, and he 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 managed to stay hidden for so long? We looked at mine Geek'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 chair at the heart of it all. It effectively gave Bernard control and the lion's share of profit, but most important of all, it allowed him to stay hidden. We published a story and it was a pretty big hit. Turns out that people love reading about Paul and Patricia. She had the scoop of her career. A couple of days go by, a colleague of ours on the FT'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 Bergomar is a cover name, a persona that he uses for his dealings in the porn industry. His real name is Burnt Burned Burgmier. Somehow he had managed to use a fake name in court, so to recap fake name Bernard Bergomar, real name Burned Bergmyer. This may or may not be just about the worst poor name and the whole history of porn. We just
started calling him BB and nicknamed. That covers all basis. But the key thing here was that while Bernard Bergemar had gone to great length to make sure that there was no trace of him, Burnt Bergmire 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 porn Hub Fabian one, and BB lost. When Fabian was arrested, the pawn gods smiled on BB and gave him the chance
to get his own back. We kind of sat around Biden this time, opus a newspaper You're in prison, and he's like, oh, yes, yeah, lucky him. B B understood that Fabians 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 Fabians deal, and this ex
banker turned pornographer, came with a neat financial plan. He would merge his own porn company, this cycled red tube, with Fabian's empire, and raise enough money to buy him out. Fabians lenders handed him five hundred million dollars in total and the crown of porn Land. So do you remember and we found this picture? Yeah, I do some obscure Chicago booth, business school alumni magazine and a get together
in Vienna. Yeah, from two thousand and two. And at first we couldn't work out who is but here he is wearing a short sleeved blue shirt, big smile, looks kind of shy, hands class 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. Yeah, what his real name was, right? Yeah? Suddenly we have email addressed to him. We have an address to his penthouse suite, and 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 it was ringing. It was a Hong Kong phone number and 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's this burnt 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 state to get to Goldman Sachs. And then there was that massive gap, which was how did he get into Paul? I mean, how did mister Goldman become mister Sex. We hadn't met lots of people in the porn industry who knew him, 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, a man who had to convince the bank that BP actually existed, still doesn't really know what made him switch from Goldman to Pawn. 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 shore. He went thought ashore with us once. He didn't want anyone to All years like, we didn't tell people. We were the only ones that know who this guy is. Do you think he disliked the idea that he was actually in the pawn industry. No, I don't think he cares. BB's distance from the world of pawn would have pretty profound consequences. He took a hands off approach and that would matter not just for mine geek, but for how pawn was delivered to the world.
You could say it set the tone for an industry where pawn 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 pawn career, but we did not speak to the man himself. Like lots of other secretive millionaires, BB has
a place in London. A patricious 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 while you were doing it, what you were trying to do. How is Bernar 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 only doesn't care, absolutely not. He's just he's making money. He's not active in this company in any shape or form. BB the small town Oustian 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 and porn. Back then, he was running things and he had absolutely no clue what
he was doing. Neither Chicago business school or a Goldman Sachs had taught him how to make money of free porn. So this powerful banker had to turn to a couple of guys half his age. Act to 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're saying one computer and there was just sake. We're taking turns at couding it
that 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. They watch girls Demi Moore, Jerry Halliwell 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 ten most popular adult websites from your school exactly if from a high school for like eighteen back then, god school was ending at five where to take the metro, go home, open the door for employees work from like five PM to one or tween in the morning, going to bed up at seven. I tried to do homework in the
metro on the way to school. One there o Mom comes over and she's like, Hey, what's that you know, seventy thousand dollars check you know, from the mall that's like addressed to you. I'm like, well, you know, it's better you sit down. Clems 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 twenty one. By the mid two thousands, tub sides
were exploding online. Clem saw the transformation. It was a threat to his business, which charge 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 or 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
their relationship and losing everything and also getting sued. I think they could have goot on 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 pawn. The year was two thousand and eight. Clem was by now in his twenties doing well in the business, and he was chatting to the founder of one of the top pawn tube sites when they 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 you know I was interested in buying a retribe dot com, which am I gonna for the price that he wanted? I mean, it was a very attractive purchase. It was called red Tube and it was one of the world's most visited tube sites for porn. Red Tube 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 at Christian social media site. How much was he looking for at that point, I think he wanted around like five million dollars. 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
shube bads from BB later that year. So we met at a hotel in Beverly Hills and you know, just had a lunch together, and you know, I was surprised. He was like a lovely, very well mannered, gentleman and like very deper very well dressed. He was a you know, 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 one person that I was dealing with, they were mostly take one
master in adults. I mean to me, he was a financial manager that 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. Surprise me, because I'm like, why did you even by this in the first pass issue? Didn't really know what to do with it though I
had to run it. I mean, to have basically just taken on a site like that, probably one of the top fifty in the world at that stage. Yeah, I definitely think it was like top fifty for sure. And not to have run a site like this before in any way, that's a big ample to take, right, That's a big game ball. I mean, it's a it's not something that you you know, you pick on like in a couple of days, I was like, oh, I can
run this noment, 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 put 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 the 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 my website, within five years he was
running the world but poor company. Yeah, I think he's a good investor when it comes down, especially after what happened with Red Too. But I think he knows what a good opportunity looks like. I mean, Clem helped us understand that when BB bought Read Too, that was his first movement to 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 Goldms sax
banker find himself running one of the world's biggest porn sites. Yeah, it took us a while to even piece together an explanation for how he 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 whereas 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 he 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 adviser 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 pawn 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 dealmaker saw a bargain and decided to buy himself. Yeah, and we know that Bbe was quite hands on in the early days of read tube, but even though he was using his porn name, he kind of wanted to remain in
the shadows. 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 Red Tube at various conferences, etc. And we managed to find one of the people who did this for him. That's after the break act three BB's show. So just to recap, it's two thousand and eight. BB has bought red Tube, one of the world's biggest pawn tube sites. He's not making pawn 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 codas tech people specialists in video streaming. But he also needed a frontman, so Red Shube 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. You 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. Are you feeling good? Feeling fine? How are you feeling empowered? Alan had just got a boot from one station and he was well struggling to get work. Red Tube contacted him to make videos and ride 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 bosses are going to cream in their pants, as would say in the UK, because I had bree us in here. Oh you're pissing me? Do you want me to piss in you with? This is when the biggest starts. You are gonna find here at the AVIA. 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 know
where these people were based? I mean, did you get to a point where you were basically meeting your colleagues? I didn't meet anyone for a year, but then One day, Red Tube decided to host a company get together and 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, but 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, you'll walk on the beach. Who was probably with one of the most successful and prolific pornographers of the ditchal age. Do you know what?
That half surprises me? And then the other half dozen'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. He 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 pawn site on the planet. He had big plans. He wanted control over the adult industry, but the first step was sending Alan to pawn conferences to tell the world what they were doing. We had a 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 to see,
you know, red Chube was the place to bait. That seemed to be the only goal I could fathom at the time. Remember, Red Tube was a success, a big name, but Babe did not have his top people represent the company at industry events. The reason was porn people still hated tub sides because they were giving away videos for free, so they sent Alan instead to take the flak to
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 a bit some bobs and telling us about other stuff. You were looking absolutely stunning. Check out this bay. Wow, I could just eat you alive right now. And all of a sudden I gets pushed, 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 red Tube, the more his concerns grew about the content, not just the kind of videos on there, but the fact that a lot of the pawn 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 brought up any content in the past being ripped off, then you would get slapped down. You would get a slap down and you get told no, we don't do that.
We all knew it did. The hands of approach to moderating the content, the tiny secretive teams working for companies parked and 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 raped 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 Fabians stole from the pawn 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 weird when wrong with complacency. Yeah, they just didn't care, thought they
didn't have to care. This was a big mistake. And then when they started to get approached by people they can't 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 tub sides 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 sides that hosted. To answer that, we have to go back to the twentieth century, to the age of the modem. The only thing people will pay for is sex. People are horny, people are purient, 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 or reported by me Patricia Elson and me Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov at The Financial Times and Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Bart
and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to a similar Web 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. Your first month is free, and it's ninety nine cents a month for six months after that.