Episode 3: Mr. Goldman, Mr. Sex

When Fabian Thylmann ran into trouble with the law, a former Goldman Sachs banker swooped in to buy his porn sites. But nobody knew who he was. He managed to keep his identity a secret for years --- until Patricia rumbled his game. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
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

(00:35):
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

(00:59):
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,

(01:26):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:27):
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.

(03:52):
I'm Patrice Nelson and I'm Alex Barker from Pushkin Industries
and the Financial Times. This is hot money, Act one.

(04:30):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:58):
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,

(06:18):
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

(06:42):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:48):
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.

(08:10):
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

(08:31):
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

(08:56):
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.

(09:19):
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

(09:42):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:29):
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

(10:55):
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

(11:18):
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

(11:40):
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

(12:03):
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

(12:24):
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,

(12:44):
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.

(13:07):
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

(13:29):
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

(13:52):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:35):
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

(14:57):
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.

(15:18):
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

(15:40):
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

(16:03):
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

(16:26):
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

(16:46):
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

(17:08):
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

(17:28):
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

(17:50):
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

(18:13):
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

(18:35):
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

(18:56):
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,

(19:18):
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.

(19:42):
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

(20:04):
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

(20:24):
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

(20:46):
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

(21:08):
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

(21:31):
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

(21:51):
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

(22:14):
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

(22:35):
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

(22:56):
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

(23:17):
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,

(23:43):
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

(24:05):
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

(24:26):
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,

(24:46):
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

(25:07):
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

(25:28):
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

(25:49):
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

(26:10):
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

(26:31):
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

(26:51):
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

(27:11):
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,

(27:32):
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

(27:53):
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

(28:14):
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

(28:35):
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,

(28:57):
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

(29:19):
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

(29:40):
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

(30:05):
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

(30:28):
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

(30:52):
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

(31:30):
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

(31:50):
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

(32:13):
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
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Your first month is free, and it's ninety nine cents

(32:36):
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