If you knew someone was involved in organized crime you would probably avoid getting to know his wife, but, well, sometimes, things just seem to happen.





Steven Michael Cohen



I used to work in the ski resorts of Southern California. I would ditch high-school at least two days per week to drive my step dad's Jeep over to Big Bear. I would ski all day and into the night until they closed the resort, sometimes at midnight, when they would finally shut down for the day. I loved skiing so much. I had dreams about being born in Colorado and raised by another family living in the Rockies, all of us growing up on skis, to become a skiing legend like my heroes, Franz Klammer, Bill Johnson and the like. I wanted to race in the Hahnenkamm, a huge downhill ski event and rocket down the hill at 80 mph on skis. However, being a southern California kid, living in Big Bear, at the ripe old age of 17, everyone had told me that I was too old to start. Foolishly, I believed them.





Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake, California



Tracina walked into the store where I worked one day, located immediately adjacent to the parking lot of Snow Summit. She came in looking for skis to rent. I fitted her boots and helped her get the gear across the parking lot, over to the snow, close to the lowest ski lift. She liked the Eurythmics. She did not say it, but I could tell that she had a rich father. She was 16.

My dad had an Alpha Romeo sports sedan. So, the next summer I borrowed it and drove down to Cota de Casa to pick her up. I decided to take her to San Diego for lunch. We made the 2 hour drive in 45 minutes, down from Orange County to San Diego. You could do that back in those days.

We enjoyed a romantic one-day adventure in beautiful San Diego. I brought her home safe and sound that night.

The next year I started college in San Diego. My skiing adventures had not helped my High School GPA, so I opted for Mesa College in Linda Vista, located on a hilltop above downtown. I called Tracina up one day and her mother answered the phone. She told me that Tracina was out on a date with her new boyfriend, who was a consierge at the local sporting and tennis club. Well that was too bad, I thought to myself.

Her mother wound up being rather talkative and friendly. We conversed for a while. I called her back a few days later, and we spoke again. We agreed to meet in San Clemente, about half way between Cota de Casa and San Diego. We got a cheap hotel. I made it home as the sun was coming up over San Diego.

Over the next semester I tried to cram in as many classes as I could. I would take 20 units of accelerated classes in a 3 month period, each full semester class lasting just one month. That was the only way that I could stay awake. I think I got all As in my classes except for creative writing. The teacher gave me a C+. I remember that.

Anyway, I noticed that Susan was frightened much of the time and kept talking about her husband. She smoked a lot of pot and knew a lot of people. I would drive up for a date almost every weekend. She told me many stories. Her husband was into some really big, bad business adventures in Orange County. I was young and impressionable. I thought all that stuff sounded cool.

She told me that her husband did not care that she was dating me and that he was tape recording our phone conversations. Apparently, he had a permanent tap on his home telephone and also on the judges and the police of Orange County too. He sold phone equipment to the court houses and police stations of Orange Country. She told me that she only married him because, as the story goes, while playing a hand of poker one night in Tijuana - he had raised the pot too high and she could not continue. He told her not to fold her hand, but to bet the money in the pot against becoming his wife. She took the chance but lost, and found herself quickly married to Steven Michael Cohen.

He drove a Rolls Royce which, apparently, he had bought brand new, driving it off the showroom floor in some state, or another somewhere. She told me that he made quite certain that it had been legitimately paid for. Apparently, there were a great many other things that he had not paid for, and had written a lot of bad checks. He was a scammer. But he was rich.

At the end of the college semester, I moved back to my mothers house in the mountains near Big Bear where I had gone to high school. My father did not want to pay for my San Diego apartment when I was out on summer break, so I had to vacate. Susan would drive up in the middle of the night and sneak in the back driveway with her head lights off. I lived in a converted barn with one big skylight over the bed. Susan had been a nurse and did percussion therapy on my back numerous times to help me to get over the walking pneumonia, which I had contracted during the previous ski season. When you go to sleep at your friend's cash pad, and find out that the floor that you were sleeping on had been frozen solid all night, after having skied until midnight, well, I guess that sort of abuse takes its toll on one’s body after a while.

One night a knock came at my front door. It was the middle of the night. I opened up and there was a man holding a gun pointed right at me. I invited him in. He told me that he was Steven Michael Cohen, and that I was dating his wife. I told him that I had figured that.

I asked him what he wanted. He told me that he had some government friends who knew some things about me. He said that he wanted to talk to me about it. Then he told me to stop dating his wife. I told him that I would. He put the gun away.

He started dropping secrets about me, saying that I had been some sort of "wonder kid" who could figure almost anything out. Apparently, he had learned this from some of these government people friends of his. Susan had told me that Steven was part of the mafia and that he knew people, high up in banking in Orange County. His father had been a heavyweight banker. I had first encountered "these people" when I was just three years old, at UCLA, where my father had sent me for a "one time" brain experiment. I had scored highly in the test that they had run during the experiment. Subsequently, I had contributed a few things now and then, in the way of ideas to solve various problems. It had been at the height of the cold war and, well, that is another story.

Not sure exactly how Steven had found out about all this, but he told me that he may have some work for me. I asked him what kind of work. He told me computer hacking stuff mostly. He wanted to get information on people. He would use the information as a kind of get out of jail free card and the like. He also wanted to know who was doing what for various other unspecified reasons.

After he left, I reflected upon the visit and what we had talked about. I had left my childhood home of Palos Verdes just 3 years earlier to move up into the mountains hoping to get far away from these people. I had hoped that by living in the mountains, some distance from Los Angeles and the Rand Corporation, I would finally be left alone, alowed to prosper and to chose my own destiny. Now, somehow they had found me again and brought me back in. Well, at least I could make some money now. I supposed that if I wanted out I could just leave and perhaps move somewhere else.

I drove my white VW Rabbit down to Orange County the following week and met with Steven. He would drive his Rolls Royce down from Cota de Casa each morning and then got shuffled around in limozines all day. It seemed to be a pretty good life. Anyway, he gave me assignments and I went to work. He owned a large chain of travel agencies. Each travel agency store location would get a free unlimited world travel pass each year called, IOTA pass. He gave those passes out to his friends in government. He wanted those people's offices hacked and access to their private information.

I noticed that Mr. Cohen had a talent for finding things and linking them together to form powerful unions. He could talk a person into doing, signing or accepting almost anything. He realized that I could operate a computer in any manner that he could conceive and I quickly solved any problems that he encountered. He felt my abilities were going to waste in this small town and connected me with Microsoft. It was at that time that I began to contribute efforts to this corporation, mostly through its leadership, although, I would also visit during technical meetings. The Start Button in Windows 95, particularly its presentation, being nothing else on the screen in that first release, that was a concept that I contributed. I wanted to dispel the confusion and leave people with no alternative action, but to click on that one big, inviting button.

After a few years of this somewhat chaotic existence and moving around quite a bit, I met my future wife and settled down to follow my new passion in life, the Triathlon. I wanted to start a computer software company, so I would work on the computer at nights and on the weekends. Much of the day, I would train for Triathlons. I did about 10-15 races per year. After five years I was getting pretty good. My wife and I moved to the northern part of Santa Barbara to find peace and live in the country. We were happy there and it was the best time of my life. We would travel all over the Western United States and do Triathlons together. Once, we even went to New Zealand to do the Ironman in Auckland City, on the north island.

Mark Williamson - Individuals - IRONMAN New Zealand Check out the results for Mark Williamson - Individuals - IRONMAN New Zealand

Santa Barbara Sprint Triathlon 2000

My software company started to take off, so I moved into the closest big city, Santa Barbara, and rented an office.


Williamson Software 1995

It had been 10 years and I had forgotten all about about Mr. Cohen, and my juvenile hacking adventures down in Orange County, until, one day, a knock came at my door. It was a Saturday afternoon and the regular workers had all left for the day and were off until Monday.

I invited Steven into my office suite. He looked terrible. I asked him what was wrong. He said that they had just let him out of Lompoc prison, and he was looking to get things going again. Apparently, he had pushed the envelope a bit too far. I think that was perhaps Steven's weakness, he liked to go to extremes.

It was 1995 and this new thing was finally starting to take off. I had first learned about the Internet, or the DODs interest in a more robust network approach, when I was just five years old. At that time, they were taking me two days per week out of my preschool to UCLA and were doing some leading edge brain enhancement work on myself and other young children. They told me that they would make me smarter. They had, just, sort of, failed to mention any of this to my parents. Apparently, they had fixated on the intense creativity and boundless limitations of a child's mind, or some such thing. Two times per week they would take me out the back gate of my preschool in Santa Monica and drive me over to UCLA. I remember the little tree in the back yard of the preschool, the grass and the gate and the waiting car.

At the height of the cold war Rand was tasked with building a communications network that could survive a nuclear holocaust. They wanted to build a siloed communications network with a singular major network node as a centralized hub. I thought that was a dumb idea, looking at a model on a man's desk at the Rand Corporation one day. It looked like a missile silo, only with networking computers, underground offices and a networked system out to various agencies. The Russians would find your secret silo, blow it up with one nuclear bomb, and then you would be without communications. Others were already working on an alternative, many nodal system, which seemed a lot smarter to me. It seemed better to build a complex mesh of cheap, ubiquitous relay nodes that were far too numerous to knock out, something that looked like a chain-a-link fence. Even a big hole in the middle of such fence would not stop one end from communicating with the other end. The Internet started life at UCLA, where I had also begun my life, just a few years earlier.

Well, anyway, back to Williamson Software and Steven who had just gotten out of prison, looking like shit, on parole and visiting me in Santa Barbara. He was apparently seeking advice. I felt that things had come full circle. I was no longer the pimple faced teen, wide eyed and curious about the world. Now, I was sitting behind a big desk in my downtown Santa Barbara office, beside the serenity of the lawn bowling club, being asked for advice by this now disgraced businessman.

I told him to get into anything Internet. I had just joined RAIN, the Santa Barbara initiative to link up with this new and emerging network. I had an ftp account and a website on their servers for my software company. This was before Google, and long before Facebook. I think maybe Yahoo was just starting or just about to start.

He asked me to explain it to him. I told him that, on the Internet, you can share anything with anyone, and no one can stop you, because it was so redundant and highly resistant to attacks, even from the biggest governments. I told him that if he were cleaver, no one would be able to find him on the Internet. But one needed to have a domain name in order to make any money. The better the word/s you chose in your domain name the better your chances for success.

He went back down south and promptly stole sex.com from someone who had legitimately registered it, I would find out some years later. He had simply used a fax machine and a forged letter to fool Network Solutions into giving him control of the very valuable sex.com domain name. This tactic was classic Steven Michael Cohen. He quickly went on to became one of the first porno kings of the Internet. He got rich, again, and moved his money offshore before the real owners of the domain name could stop him.

By 2007 I was developing a new company called InfoShare with some local attorneys acting as angel investors. I invented a new file system that stored files in a decentralized manner using something I called the iBlock that incorporated a cryptographic hash and time stamps to verify the integrity of the iBlock item. This would be the missing piece for Hal Finney, a Santa Barbara neighbor and tech expert, to build his peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Bitcoin, using a simplified iBlock design called blockchain. I was then approached by someone from the NSA in 2008 and ordered, not asked, to move to Texas to help an ex president and various three letter agencies to work on a data collection project.

I finally left Santa Barbara in 2010 and moved to Texas. They lied to me, however, promising me that this would be the last time that I would have to help them. I then decided that I had enough with the smarmy doings of the American government and made my choice to start over in Mexico. At least the corrupt are honest about their own corruption down here. The latin American system of corruption seems a bit more transparent and civilized than the dark and heavy US corruption manner.

Steven continued on with his adventures and I am not sure where he wound up, but I learned a lot though my adventures in Orange County, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I learned that in order to keep anything that you build in life, you must built it honorably and pay careful attention to your reputation always. This is something that my father had tried to instill in me from a young age, and a value that I hold dear today. Now, I am watching my new home country grow and looking forward to what is next for myself and world in Mexico.