Voyeurism pays for businessmen

David Marshlack and Bruce Hammil began a host of Internet ventures after the success of the adult site Voyeur Dorm.

By STEVE HUETTEL

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

TAMPA -- It wasn't long ago that Bruce Hammil lived in a $300-a-month garage apartment and traded ads on his self-produced television show for pizza and clothes.

David Marshlack's prospects were at least as grim. Just out of prison and broke, he drove a Ford Explorer his parents bought him and peddled a $99 VIP card that got holders into member nightclubs without a cover charge.

Then the unlikely pair met and hit on an idea that made them rich.

Men will pay to watch women in various stages of dress and to chat with them through the anonymity of their personal computers, they figured.

Internet porn was already an established business, and a young woman named Jennifer Ringley was broadcasting pictures of herself from two cameras in her Washington, D.C., apartment over the Web. Hundreds of thousands of computer voyeurs were dialing up "Jennicam."

"Add the element of beautiful young girls in a house; it's not rocket science," Marshlack says.

Perhaps not. 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 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.

Hammil bought three vintage Cadillacs and spent $30,000 on his collection of autographs from Elvis Presley and other celebrities. He paid off his father's house and bought him a $4,000 Martin guitar.

With Voyeur Dorm, they cashed in on one of the most profitable corners of Internet commerce: adult entertainment.

Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass., research company, in 1998 estimated the online adult industry generated between $750-million and $1-billion in revenues.

A handful of sites raked in $25-million or more, Forrester found. But at least 40,000 mom-and-pop sites collected anywhere from a few thousand to a few million dollars a year. Many others only broke even.

What launched Voyeur Dorm was an avalanche of publicity fueled by Tampa's efforts to close it down. Zoning officials ruled Voyeur Dorm is an adult business that can't operate in a residential area. The company is challenging the ruling in federal court.

Steve Wood, an early investor in Entertainment Network who got out before Voyeur Dorm began, said Marshlack told him the zoning fight, and subsequent coverage by everyone from radio shock jock Howard Stern to ABC's 20/20, made all the difference.

"The reason he made it was because of the negative publicity," Wood said. "He was just in the right place at the right time."

When they met in 1996, Hammil and Marshlack had very different talents and liabilities.

Hammil worked on the edges of show business. He had a music show called Groove Tube that he produced in nightclubs and paid a local television station to air in a late-night time slot.

He became friends with radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem, who hired him to write parody songs for his show at $50 or $100 a pop.

None of the ventures made any money. Hammil held down a variety of dead-end jobs to make ends meet. For a while he lived with Bubba, who made the down payment on his first new car and occasionally supplied him with tacos from fast food joints.

Marshlack built a successful real estate business with offices in Pinellas County, Tampa and Orlando. ERA National Realty & Development specialized in brokering homes owned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

But VA officials found he was late making payments on homes the company sold and sometimes didn't pay at all. A federal grand jury indicted him in July 1991 for pocketing checks totaling $184,000 for the sale of two houses in Hillsborough County.

He pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to six months at a halfway house in Pinellas County. His problems stemmed from a bad investment, Marshlack said. An auto broker who had $480,000 of his money went broke, he said, forcing him to juggle cash to save his business.

About a year later, after leaving the halfway house, Marshlack was in trouble again.

In February 1993, federal agents charged him with taking part in a small-time cocaine ring. Marshlack pleaded 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.

He got out in 1996 with no money and no credit.

Marshlack revived a VIP Club Card business plan he had hatched at the halfway house. Hammil heard about it and tried to sell him an ad on Groove Tube. At first, Hammil didn't click with Marshlack, an intense, no-nonsense type in dark business suits.

"I couldn't stand him," Hammil said.

But they found a way two guys could make money without much cash to invest: adult entertainment on the Internet.

A friend of Marshlack's in Fort Lauderdale was pulling down good money running an X-rated photo site on the Web. With the help of Charles Charmetz, a tech whiz from Hammil's regular job, they experimented with a video site.

It started with Diana.com, a weekend show shot with two cameras from Hammil's one-room garage apartment in St. Petersburg and broadcast from servers in Charmetz's garage.

Topless or nude, Diana would give cooking lessons, do body painting or shave her legs. They sold subscriptions for $19.95 a month. The show never made big money, but Marshlack and Hammil were convinced they were onto something.

They made a big jump in 1998. Marshlack's father, Dan, bought a home in West Tampa for $105,000. They remodeled the interior and placed 26 video cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, pool deck and elsewhere.

Marshlack and Hammil also took on a new partner. Seth Warshavsky and his Seattle Internet porn company were notorious for stunts like distributing the "hard-core and uncensored" video that former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson Lee and rocker Tommy Lee made on their honeymoon.

He put his public relations machine to work. Subscribers could see six college coeds living in an opulent house from cameras mounted in bedrooms, showers and behind toilets, stated a national press release. The cost: $34 a month to watch, plus $16 to chat online. A publicist for Entertainment Network says memberships in the site had exceeded 50,000 by January 1999, thanks to exposure on Howard Stern's television and radio show and other publicity. But the same month, Hammil told a local weekly publication that Voyeur Dorm had 5,000 subscribers.

Later in January, the city turned down an application for a business license for the house. Attorney Mark Dolan asked for a zoning interpretation, and city officials ruled the house was an adult business illegally operating in a neighborhood.

An unsuccessful appeal to the city's Variance Review Board and City Council drew national media attention. Voyeur Dorm women appeared on dozens of radio shows, TV talk shows such as Leeza and Sally Jessy Raphael and news magazines Hard Copy and Inside Edition.

During the dispute, the number of subscriptions topped 50,000, Marshlack and Hammil said.

The huge cash flow opened new business opportunities to Marshlack and Hammil and solidified their hold on Voyeur Dorm.

In January, they bought out Warshavsky's share of Entertainment Network for an undisclosed price. Marshlack says Warshavsky wanted to bring porn stars into Voyeur Dorm. Warshavsky didn't return calls for comment.

Marshlack plays down the adult aspect of the site. Women shower on camera and sometimes flash subscribers. But the attraction is more the looking-through-the-window thrill people get watching television shows such as Real World or Survivor, he insists.

"We've grown out of the adult side. We quickly realized we didn't need that any more," Marshlack says.

The association with adult entertainment hasn't hurt their mainstream ventures like Candidhosting.com, which hosts company Web sites. But customers are quick to distance themselves from the adult side of the company.

"Our site obviously has nothing to do with pornography. Our site's about football," says Reggie Roberts, spokesman for the Buccaneers, which uses Candidhosting. "That's all we're about. What (Marshlack) does in his other business is his business."

Bill Keller of Largo also isn't concerned. Candidhosting handles his site, Liveprayer.com, where people ask for prayers.

He doesn't like Voyeur Dorm. But it was the media hubbub over Voyeur Dorm's fight with the city that made him aware of what Marshlack and Hammil could do with his site.

Keller doesn't hold it against them.

"I think that lightning bolt struck, and they were just savvy enough to run with it," he says.

- Researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

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