Kim Dotcom starring in Kimble goes Monaco #1

JOURNALISM, VIDEO 2 Minutes

Kimble, our internethero goes to Monaco with his friends, spending a good $10.000.000 during one Formula 1 weekend!

Kimble, also known as Kim Dotcom is currently being indicted for copyright fraud as owner of Megaupload.

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. 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 5th in U.S. 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. He was busted the day before his 38th 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.

Schmitz is six-foot-six, per Wikipedia, and weighs 285 pounds. 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. 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. The indictment (posted as a PDF here) is 72 pages long and packed with amazing details. 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.)

Commissioning 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. 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.

You can find both “Kimble Goes to Monaco” and “Kimble Goes to Monaco Part II” on Google Video. They’re in German, without subtitles, but you’ll get the gist: Look at how much fun we’re having. Imagine how much it costs.

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