The great web porno robbery

There can be few less surprising news bulletins than the one which tells us that there are dodgy dealings in the world of the internet. When the part of that world is the one colonised by the sex industry - porno in the vernacular - then the lack of surprise is converted to the status of racing certainty.

The characters that peopled The Sex.com Story were straight out of the bottom drawer. This tale of "dirty deeds and dirty dollars" arrived exactly as advertised, the starring roles all taken by men who were preposterously well-endowed in the roguery department, except, of course, the central part of the chap who was being royally rogered.

Gary Kremen is what is technically termed a geek. He fell in love with computers and the internet at an early stage, and as any self-respecting geek would, he quickly realised that the names given to internet domains were of vital importance. Which is how he came to invent the name sex.com, the most succinct title for a site specialising in the theory and practice of rumpy-pumpy.

Except that Gary was not really interested in rumpypumpy, other than as a way for young married couples to have babies. In his hands, sex.com was scarcely a fig leaf away from the Garden of Eden.

With the inevitably of all the best morality plays, into this world of innocence strode Stephen Michael Cohen, a man with a deficiency in the scruples department that would shame a starving coyote.

Cohen simply walked away with Kremen's baby, by the simple expedient of writing a letter in the third-party mode to the watchdog that guarded the, ahem, integrity of the internet. The letter contained so many spelling mistakes that the watchdog assumed it to be the work of a simple but honest fool, and promptly handed over the keys to a smut fortune.

Now you can say what you like about Stephen Michael Cohen, but he had a far more acute sense of what the customer really wanted to see on his screen than Gary Kremen did.

Those of you of a sensitive disposition might care to turn away now, as I quote the words of Kevin Blatt, an internet pornographer, concerning the peculiar attraction of this form of filthy pictures. "This is what's brilliant about the internet," he informed us. "You turn off the lights, turn on the computer and pull your pants down. It's a great formula."

Cohen understood this and Kremen did not. The former had long harboured a burning desire to become the Hugh Hefner for a new generation of swinging guys and, presumably, gals.

His burning zeal occasionally had to be cooled off by a visit to a state penitentiary, where Cohen availed himself of the opportunity of steeping himself in a rich vat of sinful behaviour. From appearing in the robe and pipe much favoured by his hero Hefner, Cohen swiftly graduated to the emperor's new wardrobe of total nudity.