![]() Then it’s nighttime, and we’re in Monaco, onboard “die zuper-zuper-yacht”-the Golden Odyssey, a 266-foot luxury motor yacht owned by Khalid bin Sultan, now Saudi Arabia’s Assistant Minister of Defense. It’s all very nerds-with-new-money: Kim can afford to buy or rent a helicopter with his URL on it but instead of champagne we see him drinking a can of regular Coke from a 24-pack. Kim and his buddy Keiwan Mirhaidari head-bob and air-guitar to a trance remix of “Rescue Me” while pushing 160 on the Autobahn from Munich to Monaco. Kim rocks a stylish short-sleeved black kimono, shorts and two-tone wingtips Kim poses with his fleet of Ferraris, with his helicopter. The first one (“©2000,” according to the retrospectively-ironic title card at the end-steal this chintzily edited home movie!) opens with the Dallas theme music and a montage introducing Schmitz and the Kimble Clan, including bespectacled “Matthias ‘SCUZZY’ Ortmann” (the future CTO of Megaupload, nailed along with Kim on Thursday), a white guy and a black woman billed as “Fanta & Cola,” and “Vicci and Gitta, the Bunnies.” (Gitta is apparently Gitta Saxx, voted Germany’s Playmate of the Century in 2000, and featured in 2011 on Ich Bin Ein Star, Holt Mich Hier Raus!, the German version of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.) They’re in German, without subtitles, but you’ll get the gist: Look at how much fun we’re having. You can find both “Kimble Goes to Monaco” and “Kimble Goes to Monaco Part II” on Google Video. Way back at the dawn of this century, when he was merely a hacker-turned-entrepreneur known as “Kimble,” before he was arrested in Bangkok and fined €100,000 for embezzlement and insider trading, he made some endlessly entertaining video documentaries celebrating a cash-incinerating lifestyle that looks, in retrospect, like a dress rehearsal for the hyperindulged-international-superpirate role the US government has accused him of playing. ![]() The list of assets the authorities are looking to seize includes 59 different bank accounts, a $15,000 Devon Works Tread 1 watch made of bulletproof polycarbonate (described on Devon Works’ Website as “a big, bold sexy declaration of independence from the status quo”), a statue of the Predator, and a fleet of luxury cars, including Mercedes-Benzes with license plates reading “GOOD,” “EVIL,” “CEO,” “MAFIA,” “GOD,” “STONED,” “POLICE,” “HACKER” and “GUILTY.” (Some perspective: When Time Magazine profiled Napster cofounder and original file-sharing gangsta Shawn Fanning twelve years ago, he was driving a “newly customized” Mazda RX-7.)Ĭommissioning vanity plates to trumpet your Internet-outlaw status on a fleet of Benzes is crazy, but it’s by no means out of character for Dotcom. The indictment (posted as a PDF here) is 72 pages long and packed with amazing details. Evil figure to help them dramatize the inherent nefariousness of copyright infringement, unless Kim had been so kind as to pose for pictures stroking a fluffy white cat. He looks like Augustus Gloop grown up all muah-ha-ha basically, the US government and the entertainment industry could not have asked for a better Dr. ![]() ![]() Schmitz is six-foot-six, per Wikipedia, and weighs 285 pounds. He was busted the day before his 38 th birthday, at a $30 million rented mansion north of Auckland he was allegedly hiding in a panic room with a sawed-off shotgun, like any innocent person celebrating a birthday. District Court, are being charged with “criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale with estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of $500,000,000 and reported income in excess of $175,000,000.” In happier times, Schmitz raced in the Gumball Rally and bankrolled lavish fireworks displays for his adopted homeland of New Zealand and star-studded music videos featuring artists like will.i.am (literally) singing Megaupload’s praises shortly before his arrest, he became the world’s top-ranked Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 player, sitting at #1 on the game’s “Kills” and “Free-for-all” leaderboards as of three weeks ago. The German-Finnish hacker-turned-accused-copyright-infringement-magnate was arrested last Thursday by New Zealand police acting in cooperation with the FBI he and his business associates, referred to, awesomely, as “the MegaConspiracy” in an indictment filed on January 5 th in U.S. It’s not every day that you encounter a real-life practitioner of Bond-villainous ostentation like Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, founder of the now-shuttered file-hosting network Megaupload. ![]()
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