HOME

 

Dave Marshlack built a real estate business in Florida during the 1980s, starting up offices in Pinellas County, Tampa and Orlando.His "ERA National Realty & Development" brokered homes owned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sometimes, however, Marshlack paid late. Sometimes not at all. A federal grand jury indicted him in July 1991 for pocketing check totaling $184,000 for the sale of two houses in Hillsborough County. Dave plead guilty to embezzlement and received a six month sentence to a halfway house in Pinellas County.

A year later, he was in trouble again. In February, 1993, federal agents charged him with taking part in a small-time cocaine ring. Marshlack plead guilty to conspiracy, admitting he brought $20,000 to an associate in Miami who bought a kilogram of cocaine to sell in St. Petersburg. He received a 58-month sentence for conspiracy and violating probation. Marshlack spent the next three years in prisons in Pensacola and Talladega, Ala. (St. Petersburg Times, 8/13/00)

When Marshlack got out in 1996, he had no money and no credit.

An intense guy fond of wearing dark business suits, Marshlack put into action a $99 VIP club card operation he thought up at the halfway house. The card got holders into member nightclubs without a cover charge.

From the St. Petersburg Times, 8/13/00:

But Voyeur Dorm, the Web site broadcast from a Tampa house where six college-age women live under the unblinking eyes of 75 video cameras, brought Marshlack and [Bruce] Hammil wealth, a degree of notoriety and a growing network of related businesses.

Entertainment Network, the private corporation they own with Marshlack's father, Dan, will take in about $15-million in revenues this year, they say. The three also own an Internet service provider, City-Guide, and a Web site hosting company whose customers include the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and an online ministry that fields prayer requests 24/7.

Marshlack and Hammil have launched two Voyeur Dorm spinoffs, a bilingual site from a house in Costa Rica called Voyeur Casa, and Dude Dorm, a male house broadcast from a condo in Pinellas Park. The three sites have nearly 75,000 paying subscribers combined, they say. Last month, they created a national media stir with a new site featuring O.J. Simpson. Subscribers paying $9.95 questioned Simpson online.

Marshlack, 37, and Hammil, 35, say they each make more than $1-million a year from the combined businesses. That helps finance the trips Marshlack makes to Las Vegas about twice a month, flying first-class and staying on the house at casinos where he plays the craps tables. Since October, he has bought three homes in Treasure Island's Isle of Palms, ranging from $260,000 to $285,000.

1/31/01

Seth Warshavsky Wanted

XXX writes: "[Seth Warshavsky] was supposed to be paying off Dave Marshlack of Candid Cam & Voyeur Dorm $10,000.00 per month but his first Check Bounced and Marshlack filed charges with a Seattle detective and when they found out it was Mr W. they imediately went to work..."

I interviewed Dave Marshlack Wednesday afternoon.

Dave: "I'm not in that little clique where you talk to everybody on the chatboards... Your site is an easy way for me to get information.

"Seth Warshavsky owed us money for content. We settled with him about two months ago, with his CFO... They were supposed to send $10,000 twice a month to us. The first check came and it bounced. We called Seth up and said, 'Hey, Seth, we made this deal with you. We compromised everything. We didn't charge interest.' He said, 'I'm sorry about that. Our processing was down. Just redeposit it.'

"So I redeposit it and lo and behold it came back this time, account closed. So I called Seth up, and his attitude was, I'm sorry. I don't have the money. I'm getting sued by everybody. Get in line. So, we have an inhouse counsel and I gave them the green light to go to work.

"First we sent him a certified letter... Then we called the Seattle Police Department and the conversation started off with, 'Oh, we're so understaffed. We don't have many people who work on this. We can't guarantee anything. How much is the check. We told them. What's the name on the check? We told them. They said, hold on, and put the seargeant on the phone. And the seargeant said, we know this guy. We know his MO. We definitely want to get to it. And he also gave us the number of federal agent working on the case against Warshavsky.

"A few days later, we got a call from a detective working on the case. And he wanted to know our background with Seth... Next thing I knew, I got a phone call from a friend saying that Seth had called from Asia, and he was afraid to return to the States...

"He frantically called everybody he knows, including myself. We sent him a letter saying, 'Don't call me. It's witness tampering.' At this point, he's made offers trying to give us domain names and this and that. And up until now, we have not settled with him.

"He called me saying, 'Why are you being such a jerk?' And I told him, 'I'm not trying to be a jerk. You owe me almost $300,000. He said, 'we're out of business.' I said, 'That doesn't matter. Why should I suffer that you collected credit card money off of people and didn't pay your bills. You're still driving a Jaguar and a Porsche and you still own a million dollar condo and that isn't right.

"We own VoyeurDorm.com. We own Dudedorm.com. A big part of our business right now is Candid Hosting. We're doing a lot of adult hosting. We also offer the live voyeur cams on Candid Cam. We have about 150 employees.

"We're very multifaceted. We don't only do one thing with our retail sites. We also take the content and redistribute it to other people's web sites. We also made videos. We take the product and keep making multiple things out of it so that we have multiple revenue streams coming out of the same product.

"That's how we got into the hosting business. Nobody else could handle our hosting. We run 170 live cameras. We need to be very hands on with these cameras. So we started a hosting facility, and now many of the big guys have come to us because we're so experienced at what we do. And they want somebody who's on staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Luke: "Are you scared of Ashcroft and Bush?"

Dave: "I'm not because we don't do hardcore stuff. We're torn about Bush. You don't want him in office because of the business we're in yet you want him in office because we want his tax relief.

"We've just taken over a public company, YSeek.com or WhySeek.com. The company name is FWNT. The stock symbol is YSEK on Nasdaq. It's time for the adult guys to give Yahoo a run for their money. Ron Levi's one of the big investors."

Luke F-rd Apologizes To Seth Warshavsky

It has come to our attention that the there is no absolutely no truth to the claim that a warrant has been issued for Seth W's arrest. A complaint has been made to the Seattle Police Department but no decision has been made as to whether or not a formal charge will be filed. Just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you hear.

Luke Interviews Seth Warshavsky

I talked to IEG owner Seth Warshavsky Wednesday afternoon by telephone.

He spoke from Seattle on his cell phone. It was a conference call with a prominent Seattle pornographer Ian Eisenberg on the line as well.

Seth: "Luke, I don't mind if you publish things about me as long as they are accurate and true. With the incident several weeks ago when an employee attacked me, the person there who witnessed it, sent you an email saying that your story was untrue, and you never published that email."

Luke: "I promise you that I published that email. I know which one it was."

Seth: "I think that you should, in the future, investigate... The warrant thing. You could've called the Seattle Police to see if there was a warrant for my arrest. For statements like that, they could be really damaging. I know that my reputation is not the greatest right now but statements like that could really damage me in the future."

Ian: "I told him that I wouldn't hang out with him anymore. He's not my friend anymore."

Luke: "You're right. I was wrong. I apologize."

Seth: "I'm actually moving in with Ian.

"I met Ian at the very beginning... In 1991, I was running my 800 phone line through his brother in law's long distance carrier."

Luke: "What's going on with Seth Warshavsky these days?"

Seth: "I've got a lot of things that I am working on. IEG is having some serious cashflow problems because we've had a tremendous amount of trouble processing our credit cards. We've found several different processors who were going to process for us. And one or two of them stole our money. We have proof and we've contacted the federal government about it. The other two just haven't come through.

"We were on top. We were getting a lot of positive publicity. I had three employees. One of them was Evan Wright. They left me to start a competing business. We found in my office documents about the contacts they had with these other competing companies. I fired them and I sued them.

"Their response was to go to the Washington Post and make allegations that I was double and triple billing customers. They attacked me with completely erroneous statements because they thought it would get them out of it [the suit]. And it did. We settled. We dropped it. We showed the Washington Post VISA and Mastercard statement substantiating our revenue and completely eliminating the possibility of their story being true...

"That's where everything got affected. Our credit card processing got affected and we sporadically processed after that. And then Evan Wright wrote some article for Rolling Stone... Some of it is true. But 80% is fabricated. I'm not saying that I haven't made mistakes in my business and personal life... That furthered our processing problems. I still have four or five people in the office. We're still trying to secure merchant processing relationships. We've had no cash flow for four months. Obviously we've been very slow paying our vendors."

Luke: "I talked today to Dave Marshlak from Voyeur Dorm."

Seth: "Dave was my partner in Voyeur Dorm. We started Voyeur Dorm with him four years ago and then sold it to him because he told us it was going out of business. We were having problems with his reporting to us. We thought that he was charging us for his other business's bandwidth and his other business's costs. We had auditors go down there. We got into a debate about it and he told us that he was just going to shut it down after we sold it to him.

"We figured it was better to sell it to him to get what we could. Part of the deal was that he would provide us with feeds for ten months for free and then after that, he was supposed to charge us market price. He was charging us $16,000 a month for the same feeds he was selling to other people for $2-3,000 a month that have higher bandwidth usage than us.

"We got taken to the cleaners... We owe him a lot of money. I'm not a very detailed oriented guy. Our problem is that when stuff like that happens, nobody catches it for six or seven months because employees don't give a s---. The Evan Wright story is the prime example. The employees are just out to get whatever they can however they can. Ian and everybody knows that 90% of employees don't care. And unless you're extremely detail oriented, or have someone who is extremely detail oriented, s--- like that happens.

"There is no warrant out for my arrest. Dave contacted the Seattle Police over a bounced check. My lawyers contacted the Seattle Police. There's no warrant for my arrest. There are no criminal charges. You can call the Seattle Police. They'll tell you if there's a warrant out for somebody."

Luke: "It seems that the Seattle Police have a detective on your trail?"

Seth: "We've had no dealings with the Seattle Police at all. Other than Marshlak calling them and saying that we wrote him a bad check. But we've gotten so much negative press, and 90% of it is not true, there's got to be agencies that are looking at that. They wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't."

Luke: "What about the FTC?"

Seth: "We have no FTC problem. We're dealing with some other people investigating allegations made in that [Rolling Stone] article. And we believe that we have evidence substantiating that none of it is true. I'm not worried about it. I know that we did not do anything illegal. We may have made mistakes. We just have a lot of stress and a lot of lawyers fees.

"I haven't left the country. I haven't moved to whereever..."

Ian: "I hear that you are fleeing the country."

Seth: "I'm fleeing the country with your wife. We're going to Japan.

"You've got to understand that a lot of people don't like me. I got a lot of positive attention. I'm not a very people oriented guy. I'm very quick to make decisions. The reason I get so much done is because I push people to their absolute limits. I don't think about how I talk to people. I just say what is on my mind. And I offend a lot of people. And when I go overseas to work on something, people say that I fled the country.

"When the James Brown incident [ex-Warshavsky employee beat him] happened, it got greatly exaggerated. That's inevitable. In some senses, I wish that we didn't get all that positive press because then I wouldn't be getting all this negative press."

Luke: "Dave Warshlak says that even though you owe people a lot of money, you're still driving a Jaguar and a Porsche and own a million dollar condo."

Seth: "I don't think that my personal life is anybody's business."

Luke: "Ian, why have you chosen to stay by Seth?"

Ian: "I already told you. I think he's a very sharp dresser."

Seth giggles: "He doesn't really like me. We have this abusive relationship where we beat each other."

Ian: "But only in a playful way."

Seth and I then talked about various porn stars that we'd seduced. Seth denied seducing any. Ian did not believe him. Ian wants to be set up with some porn stars to pursue intimacy and depth.

Luke says that this is not the true road towards lasting happiness.

Seth Warshavsky Correction

Dear Mr. Ford:

I am attorney representing Seth Warshavsky. On your website on January 31, 2001, you posted the following: "XXX writes: I heard that there was a warrant out for Seth W's arrest in Seattle. He was supposed to be paying off Dave Marshlak of Candid Cam & voyeur Dorm $10,000 per month but his first Check Bounced and Marshalck filed charges with a Seattle detective and when they found out it was Mr. W. they immediatley issued a warrant."

Specifically, I represent Seth in regard to the matter referred to in this paragraph. The quotation contains information which is absolutely false. While there is a police investigation pending, no decision has been made by the prosecuting authority in this County to file a charge against Mr. Warshavsky and no warrant has been issued. As you are no doubt aware, citizens are frequently investigated for crimes that they haven't committed and the pendency of an investigation is something quite different than the statement implied on your website that a charge has been filed and a warrant issued.

Mr. Warshavsky has asked me to investigate the possibility of a defamation action against your company. In Washington, issuance of a warrant is a matter of public record and could have been easily ascertained by you prior to publication. While I do not wish to prejudge the outcome of my investigation, it would obviously be to your advantage to set the record straight as soon as possible. I respectully urge you to publish a retraction at once.

Sincerely, Gilbert H. Levy Attorney at Law
Suite 200 Market Place Two 2001
Western Avenue
Seattle WA 98121 (206) 443-0670