Pierce Brock looks like he had the virtual world by the tail in 2005. *
Photo: Bob Croslin/St. Petersburg Times * On a sunny weekend morning in Los Angeles not long ago, I found myself in the passenger seat of a black Porsche Carrera idling in the left-hand turn lane of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, its emergency lights flashing and its driver-side door wide open onto the lushly landscaped road divider. Its owner, 27-year-old virtual-gold-dealing millionaire and former child movie actor Brock Pierce, stood quietly vomiting amid the median-strip shrubbery and the passing traffic.
I regret to say there was a part of me that wanted to savor the moment -- no doubt the closest my life would ever come to anything like authentic, party-like-a-rock-star Hollywood debauchery (which this was not). But mostly I was thinking maybe I should cut my interview with Pierce short and let the poor guy go home and lie down.
"No, I'll be fine," said Pierce cheerfully as he got back into the car, which somehow didn't make me feel any better about obliging him to go on talking about his past. He'd assured me that the sudden onset of cold sweats and nausea had nothing to do with interview jitters (and everything to do, he said, with some mundane medication taken earlier in the morning on an empty stomach, plus maybe an excess of fine wines and cigars the night before).
I could imagine things he might be nervous about -- I'd been keeping track of the guy for nearly half a decade. Our first encounter was a couple years after he founded IGE -- the world's biggest retailer of World of Warcraft gold coins and other virtual currencies -- and in all that time I'd never known him to comment, publicly or privately, on the disastrous, scandal-ridden venture that preceded it. Pierce had co-founded the infamous dot-com blow-out, Digital Entertainment Network, at 17 and co-managed it until its spectacular implosion two years later. As I explained when I showed up at his doorstep moments earlier, I was in L.A. to get the story of IGE, and he must have known there was no telling that story without also telling DEN's: It hung like a cloud over IGE's success from beginning to end.
But did I really want to get into it with him now? Eventually, Pierce would give his version of DEN's demise and aftermath, a largely credible account in which he figures as a hapless and essentially innocent bystander. But though that version showed him in a better light than the various half-told narratives that have trickled out in news reports over the years, the story still is not a pretty one.
DEN fell apart in 1999, when senior co-founder Marc Collins-Rector, 40 years old at the time, settled a lawsuit that accused him of sexually molesting a 13-year-old male employee. Other young men then filed similar suits against Collins-Rector, naming Pierce and 25-year-old DEN co-founder Chad Shackley as peripheral defendants. None of the three DEN founders could be located, and default judgments totaling $4.5 million were handed down.
Pierce says, he had no knowledge of the suits at the time, and when he finally showed up to contest them two years later, the judgments against him were dismissed. As for his police detention alongside Collins-Rector and Shackley in Spain in 2002 -- the dramatic centerpiece of post-DEN gossip -- that, too, was apparently a bum rap. Pierce says it was his bad luck to be lunching with his former business partners at their Spanish home when local cops swept in to arrest Collins-Rector on U.S. criminal charges, detaining everyone present, including the housekeeper, for reasons never fully explained.
I suppose I could have dragged that all out of him if I'd pushed hard enough that day in L.A. But somehow, the sight of Pierce bent over puking in the bright Hollywood sun convinced me this was not the time. We drove on to Greenblatt's, a deli on Sunset that Pierce told me was a favorite hangout for celebrities when they didn't want "to be seen." He recommended the matzoh ball soup, which indeed was excellent, though he barely touched his. Instead he talked and talked about the history of IGE, almost every aspect of it -- except its relationship to DEN. "Anyone who knows me knows I'm an open book," he said.
On the drive back up to his house in the Laurel Canyon hills, he kept talking, telling me about his current list of projects, entrepreneurial and otherwise. He had just sold a casino in the Phillippines. There was an oil deal in Kazakhstan. He was doing philanthropic work with the Clinton Global Initiative. He was working with the family of the president of El Salvador to make some worthy documentary or another. His list was delivered with an almost manic urgency. If I were to presume to have the slightest idea what really goes on inside Brock Pierce's head, I might suggest he was trying to establish by sheer force of talk the irrelevance of anything in his past to all the things he's doing today.
As I left him to get in my own car, he assured me he was eager to help me with the story. "I just ask that you steer clear of the more personal attacks," he told me earnestly, and it was the only moment in which DEN was even alluded to. Since then, I've wondered often: If it mattered to him that much how the story was told, why did he let unfriendly rumors and thinly reported news items define the story for so many years, instead of telling his own more coherent version long ago? But I said nothing, shook his hand, and thanked him for his time.
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The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
