"So one day I get a call out of the blue from this guy," says Danno. "He says, 'I'm a friend of Nici's [embattled madam Michelle Braun] and I need some background checks done, plus I need my phones swept. Can you do that?' So I said, 'Let's meet.' I think I called Nici back up before I did anything and said this guy gave you as a reference, is he okay? She said, 'Oh, yeah, he does stuff with me once in a while, he's okay.' So we meet at the McDonald's on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Sunset Blvd.' [Across the street from Shelter, the official Thursday night hang of Darnell's crowd.] "So I meet him there, and he pays me cash. I suspected at the time that he was actually giving me his real name. He wanted to see what I would turn up. I do my searches and everything, and when I meet him again, I say, 'Nice try - you gave me yourself to do a background check on.' He said, 'You're real good.' I said, 'Yeah, that's what I do.' So then he started saying, 'Can I trust you?' Blah blah blah. He wanted me to run some checks on some guys. He was trying to feel me out and use me.

"So then he called me to come sweep his house, plus he wanted me to install some software on his computer. He wanted PGP software, which stands for 'Pretty Good Privacy' - it's the top encryption software around. So I went over there [late 2002]. I put in four cameras: He wanted a camera by the front door, one along the side of the house - because he lived in a duplex where the back part was other people. And then he wanted a camera in his bedroom, hidden, looking at the bed. I looked at him, and he said, 'Okay, so it's not for security.' No judgments. I told him, 'You just tell me what you want and I'll put it there.' And as I'm there installing security cams, he's bragging about how he has Playboy Playmates in his stable of girls. How he's going to be as big as Nici. And he said with this guy [Fred] Durst [lead singer of knucklehead hard rock band Limp Bizkit], 'I've got a direct pipeline into the Playboy Mansion.'"

Never one to overlook the opportunity for profit, Danno asked Dillon if he could pop down to the nearest Taco Bell and bring them back lunch. (Dan is a man of apparent appetites.) Left alone in the house, he took the opportunity to clone Dillon's hard drive. "I knew he was working with Nici, and I knew there was a buck in it in finding out who all his clients were," says Danno. "Business was slow. I was essentially performing the same function for him that the technician did on Tom Cruise's computer who stole all the pictures off it to sell. The only difference is, I didn't try and sell them on the Internet. Any time you surrender your computer to a technician, you know shit will happen."

Back home, perusing the contents at his leisure, Danno was horrified to discover the trove of material he had inadvertently brought back with him. "When I opened up his files and started looking through there," he says, "I started seeing movie files, QuickTime files and jpegs and bit maps that were all children from maybe 3 to 10 years old, and it was child porn. It's the most disgusting stuff I'd ever seen. It made me want to puke, that anybody could do this to a child. I thought at the time: I'm a guy who's been involved in a lot of slimy fucking shit in my life, and I just cannot fathom that people could do this to children. The ones that weren't child porn had him with very young girls. And then I recalled that when I had been at his house, on his shelf, he had his video collection of porn, and his favorite titles were a Hustler series called Barely Legal. Even if they're legal, he wants them to look like they're 12. The minute I saw it, I shut down my computer completely. I called my guy in the FBI; he called this woman and her partner, and they came to my apartment and literally took my hard drive out of my desktop. Once you've opened up an image on your computer, you might delete that file, but unless you scrub your hard drive, it's still there. When I cloned his hard drive, I didn't use a flash drive; I had taken a cable and run it to my computer. So they took my laptop. They just gave me money to go buy a new hard drive."

Before the FBI was able to move on Dillon or his confederates, Danno received word that he had been arrested in Havana on child pornography charges. "I get a call from some childhood friend that he'd known since high school," says Danno. "He said that Dillon had somehow gotten a message to him through the Swiss consulate, and that guy had called the family friend. He thought I could pull some strings or something - that I had some juice that I didn't have. I basically told him I'd look into it. I told him, 'You realize his computer had a ton of pornography on it?' And the guy said, 'I'm his family friend, I know his father. But as far as I'm concerned, he can rot in hell.' He told me a cop had been acting as his escort, and that he'd come back to the hotel room and caught the guy going through his wallet and flipped out, and then the next thing you know, he's being raided. Duh. I believe I called the FBI back and told the woman who was working the case that he was under arrest down in Havana."

Dillon was fairly well known in the club scene. He promoted events at Dome Billiards at Santa Monica and Fairfax and promoted the Gate on La Cienega (later Prey). His address book (containing over 1,000 names) includes dozens of well-known figures (David Arquette, Esai Morales, Glenn Plummer, Jamie Kennedy, Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello), as well as many who appear elsewhere in this story (Scott Caan, Shannon Doherty, Kevin Connelly, Pauly Shore, Cliff Kanter (sic), Tommy Alastra). Adam Goldstein, aka DJ AM (Nicole Richie's ex), was apparently a friend, as evidenced by I-M chats archived on Dillon's hard drive. (In one, trying to talk Dillon into forwarding a link to some of his online escorts, Goldstein says, "That's [sic] why I like hookers - they get GONE after your [sic] done. No trying to kick it and get all up in your shit." "Spoken like a buda," Dillon replies.)

Darnell knew him. Alex Vaysfeld claimed to know his story. Louis Ziskin was a mentor of sorts to him, and the first name "Louis" shows up in his documents as a potential investor in various business propositions.

"That fucking pedophile," says incarcerated former drug kingpin Louis Ziskin when I mention his name. He tells me Dillon was also close with his old friend Damon Kidwell (last seen escorting club promoter Tommy Alastra's stolen Rolex back from parts unknown), and that it was Dillon who drove Damon to Canada so he wouldn't have to testify on Louis's behalf. When I mentioned the name to model-actress Kristen Williams, she was at first delighted to hear of him (she knew him through Louis), and then stunned when I finished the story. "I want to puke right now," she says, her eyes welling up with tears.

In the personal photos from his hard drive, the non-pornographic ones, what stands out are these extremely intense eyes, which really do seem infernal - like Barrymore as Svengali, or any actor as Rasputin. In some, he wears eye shadow. One whole series features him in black Neoprene bondage gear on his way to a Halloween party, and another photo labeled "Dills & Pitt" is of him with his arm around actor Brad Pitt. (To be fair, it looks like your standard ambushed-in-a-bar shot.)

Born Daniel Maurice Hatton II in North Hollywood in 1973, Dillon lived with his father, a schoolteacher born in Caracas, Venezuela, and his younger brother, now a professional skateboarder. He graduated from high school in Redondo Beach, a seaside community just south of Los Angeles, in 1993. That same year, he had a daughter, born to Jeannie Theobald, when she was 17 and he was just shy of 20. (Theobald died of a heroin overdose at age 26 in November 2001, a year before his arrest.) After earning a business degree at Santa Monica City College, Dillon ran several vanity companies, most prominently Diablo Entertainment (more devil imagery), described in generic boilerplate as "a promotions company doing party planning and corporate events," was his generic explanation online, but that extended to (adult) pornography, escort services, themed sex parties and a host of other interrelated ventures.

D.J. Morty Coyle, an old friend of mine who still works the clubs and records with his band All Day Sucker, says of Dillon, "He was a party guy. Everyone liked him.  He looks like the devil - he even went to a Halloween party as Satan. But Dillon is dead to rights since he got busted in Cuba.  He got his teeth kicked in, his testicles smashed in Cuban prison.   He went down there, and filmed himself fucking a young girl, got caught and that was it for him. His family can't get him out.  He will die in Cuba.  Even if Castro dies, he'll die there."

With very few exceptions, no one knew this secret side to Dillon until after he was arrested - least of all Michelle Braun and the women who worked with him. One person who openly knew of Dillon's predilections was Brandi Young, a long-time friend who provided him with legal services and so was bound by attorney-client privilege.

"I was going to actually handle the child custody paperwork for his daughter to come stay with him permanently, because she had been living with the deceased mother's parents," she says. "I was supposed to do that right when he came back from Cuba. And then he never came back. I knew some of the things he was doing and I just never would have said anything. At the time I still liked him, so I think he felt comfortable that he could tell me, knowing that I couldn't say anything.

"I knew that the Feds came to the house after he had been arrested in Cuba - they showed up when friends of his were trying to clear out his house. People who knew were trying to take stuff out of his house. People were running into each other going in and coming out. Some people were trying to protect him, and others just knew that he wasn't coming back. I know there were tapes taken out, and I know there was cash in a safe that was taken. Computers and that sort of thing. Not necessarily looting, because some people were taking stuff out because he had asked them to. Damon [Kidwell] had been in contact with him when he first got arrested, and he was trying to move some of the stuff out of his house. When we first heard about it, we didn't know how serious it was going to be, or how long it was going to be. There was talk that he was going to be able to buy his way out of it, but then one of the girls had come back and taken a bunch of money out of his safe, so they didn't have the money all together to be able to do that.

"He went down there with a few different girls - Playmate girls, for a long weekend. They all made it back. Summer Altice and a couple of other girls [were] with him. Rumor has it that she was actually the first one who knew Dillon wasn't coming back, and she went straight to his house and was the one who actually took the money out of the safe. From what I understand, he had gotten in a fight with a kid whose family was politically connected. The family was pissed off about it, and basically set him up by planting a tape on him in his luggage. And they stopped him from going through customs, and used that as evidence to say that he had done whatever crimes he was convicted of down there. That's the most prevalent story I've heard. I don't think Dillon would bring cameras, set them up and then try and bring them back into the country with him. I mean, he wasn't stupid."

But then, that just begs the question, why would he travel to Cuba with Playmates in the first place?

DJ AM: "That's [sic] why I like hookers - they get GONE after your [sic] done. No trying to kick it and get all up in your shit."

FBI Special Agent Greg Scott of the Child Porn Task Force confirms that Dillon is still incarcerated in Cuba. Sprinkled throughout the files from his hard drive are advertisements for "evidence eliminators," spec sheets on Yahoo privacy protocols, calls to arms from user group aficionados with ominous titles like "There Are Things Happening on Yahoo." (There are numerous links to Yahoo briefcase documents - encrypted photo archives with names like "bendoverandholdon" and "arapistofcheerleaders" that must be user enabled - that I can't get into and probably don't want to.) Yet not long before his final voyage to Cuba, Dillon also acquired software that allowed him to capture Instant Messenger chats in real time. One such chat with an unidentified female correspondent dated November 2002, the month he left, includes the admonition, "Turn it off when we talk about your favorite subject. U know what I mean. It's evidence in your computer."

This software also preserved three long chats with Braun in the months before Dillon's last trip to Cuba. In them, they haggle over prices, handicap clients ("Teddy" shows up at one point, as does Mark Yagalla), orchestrate mutual business ("Are we still doing that Dubai thing after Ramadan?" he asks her), and leverage embarrassing gossip (at one point, he has to explain to her what a hemorrhoid is. Don't ask.) She dings him for trying to sample the merchandise (with porn star Rayveness), he accuses her of downright meanness. ("It's tax time," she says in her defense. "You write a check to [Uncle] Sam for $200k and tell me if you're in a good mood.") All the while, Dillon is alternately charming and manipulative, at once immodest and flattering. "You have to admit, I am pretty good," he tells her at one point. "I could not even pay my damn rent when I met you, and now I have $300k liquid." Along the way, they compare notes on "the Bentleys" as well as Playboy Playmates Summer Altice (August 2000), Brande Roderick (April 2000) and Dalene Kurtis (September 2001), the latter having just been named Playmate of the Year (or POTY in the nomenclature). In a folder marked Playmates, Dillon has separate archives for all of these by name (sans the Bentley Twins), as well as Nicole Lenz (March 2000) and Jennifer Rovero (July 1999), Paris Hilton's erstwhile roommates, Layla Roberts (October 1997) and Neferteri Shepherd (July 2000). (It should be noted that unlike any of his other "models," who are identifiably photographed in his house - save for the ones he shot in Prague or Cuban hotel rooms - the Playmates alone are represented exclusively by their centerfold shots or published photos from other commercial magazines - all presumably readily available online.)

Michelle Braun (aka "Nici"): Purveyor of fine Playmates

"Those were all of the girls that I was banging," says investment banker Holt Gardiner. "I know Jen Rovero well - she was a hooker. Playmate/Hooker. Dated Fred Durst for awhile. Got knocked up by him, I think." (Darnell tells an elaborate story about Jennifer Rovero as well - how she came home with him after Timmy's birthday party in August 2004, the same night he met his soon-to-be girlfriend, Ruby; how their sex kept the neighbors up all night; and how after his arrest, the police showed Ruby a video of Rovero giving him a blowjob, in hopes of turning her against him. He claims Rovero got pregnant by Rick Salomon at Sundance 2000.)

"I know Summer Altice well too," says Holt. "High-fly girl. Hooker. Big money, but more than that, she tried to date every major player in town. I went out with her for awhile. You know, she is what she is - same thing. A bad person." He tells the following story to sum her up: "At my 30th birthday in Vegas, a blowout with about 500 people, Summer was my date.  I had won a lot of money playing craps and baccarat.  Another chick - I called her 'the fluffy-haired broad' - won about 25 grand, and overnight it turned up missing.  I was told by a couple of people that Timmy [nightclub manager Timmy Iannello] and Summer were behind that." (Darnell claims that Summer dated Mickey Rourke, and they show up together in some of his photographs.)

Holt confirms there was a pipeline of girls coming out of the Playboy mansion via Fred Durst. He knows Brande Roderick as well, but says she's "probably sweeter" than the other two.

Also a friend of the Mansion, Danno decided to intercede after reading the Michelle Braun chats on Dillon's computer. "I made a phone call to Hef's secretary," he says, "and I tell her, 'I've got this file, the feds are going to bust this guy, he's got a ton of child porn on his computer, but he's also got a lot of Playmates on there - at least a half a dozen.' And she says to me, 'Can you come up to the Mansion with that? Hef would probably like to talk to you.' I mean, Dalene Kurtis, the girl they were putting up as Playmate of the Year - she's a working girl. Well, I get up there, I don't get greeted by Mary [Hef's secretary], I'm greeted by Mary's assistant, and she says they're all busy, but can he make a copy while I wait? So I said okay. And that was the last time I've had any contact with them. And I was shocked and surprised to see Dalene Kurtis go on to become Playmate of the Year. I don't know the internal politics of Playboy. I was told by someone in corporate that what the girls do on their own time is their business, as long as they're not operating their business out of the mansion. They only crack down on girls that are dealing drugs or who are doing porn."

"Very rarely did Michelle actually talk to me over the phone," says Danno. "But because of this thing that had happened with Dillon, I didn't know if it had gotten out that I had talked to the FBI. I had told her, as a matter of caution, that Dillon Jordan was into child porn. And I tipped her off that he had been busted in Havana. So she got Summer Altice on the phone as a conference call, and then called me with the two of them on the line. And I was trying to tell Summer, 'Look, you'd probably make a nice friend out of this FBI agent, and it wouldn't hurt if the material you took out of [Dillon's] house somehow ended up in their possession. She told me she threw them out the car window while they were driving down the freeway. She had the keys to his safety deposit box, and she threw them out the car window."

In the phone call itself, as recounted by Danno, Summer says she gave everything back to Damon - presumably Kidwell. Braun had been contacted independently by a lawyer who Dillon had allegedly been in touch with. He said that Dillon was taking clients to Cuba with him - as many as 10 - and that he had paid the father of an underage girl to sleep with his daughter. Damon had also allegedly called one of Braun's regular clients, a procurer for wealthy Middle Easterners, and asked him for money, which predictably didn't go over well. As recounted by Danno, Summer's quote was, "Everybody who knew him in L.A. knew that he had cameras all over the place and taped girls and shit. And I always knew he was a total psycho-sicko-weirdo, so I never wanted anything to do with him, but I never suspected this." After significant lobbying, she agreed to speak to the FBI in the presence of her attorney. With the exception of Danno, all of the above are no longer available for comment.

Taken as a whole, the items copied off of Dillon's hard drive create a forensic portrait of someone living in several different worlds, whose life has led him down a path where the lure of darkness is often rewarded as a kind of social currency, but at the end of which lies true, unequivocal darkness, of a kind that is difficult to fathom for the civilian or casual observer. Hidden in with the Internet chum, Unabomber Manifesto, lists of hourly rates for porn stars, parody of Eminem's "Slim Shady" titled "Slim Anus" and Bush-Cheney Recount Team/Victory 2000 badge can be found glimmers of that other world. One in which, as his e-mails auto-respond, "I am in the study with Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard doing things to Miss Scarlet with a rope." Where he can jettison his given name, and even the sleek new manufactured name he's known by, for the screen names "madtricky" or "filthymcnasty," where his password is "collegegirlpimp," and where to his fellow pedophiles, he's known simply as "spooky."

"Is that u spooky?" says someone identified only as jandjgz. He's 28, getting his bachelor's degree in geology with plans to major in paleontology. Dillon's on his way to London the next morning - late November 2002, not much time left - but he stops to catch up with an old friend. "I am so happy you are online," he says.

"Okay, so what did you want to talk to me about?" says his old friend. He's up late doing his homework. Dillon shows him his new escort site. He's proud of the layout, proud of the girls he's collected. "So what did you want to ask me?" says his friend, a little less patient.

"Just a few things that I can't really get into right now," Dillon says. "It's a longer conversation. Let's just chat."

They make small talk. "So have you retired from looking at naughty stuff?" his friend says, practiced in the arts of seduction.

"I just got bored with it," says Dillon. He's just gotten rid of 30 megs of videos. I just wanted to get it off my machine," he says.

"I haven't had much time to do much with my site, but I still collect," his friend says. "Have actually received some private pix too. Do you wanna look at my site? I have so many pix to add, but haven't had the chance. What username do you want?" Dillon chooses "little kitty." "Would you mind letting me send you a vid?"

"What's on the vid?" asks Dillon.

"It's just what you like - anal," says jandjgz, whose real name is Jose Guerra, who attended Cameron University in southwest Oklahoma, who was born in Mexico and lives in Houston, Texas and attended MacArthur High School, where he was on the chess club, who as of mid-2008 has his own channel on YouTube, which he accessed 15 hours ago. "This one is a short 2 minute preview of a longer 5 minute vid I have. It's called 'babyj_captive.'" (A film by the same name was seized at a private residence in Washington State on August 25 of that year, discovered beneath a false bottom in a bathroom vanity, resulting in a child pornography conviction in April 2005.)

"I'll be back on Tuesday," says Dillon. "We can do it then. Cuz I have to get so much done. We are so gonna catch up."

"If you like," says his old friend.

But Dillon signs back on two hours later. "You still around?" he asks.

"Yes. I am watching a girl on cam. She was making me wanna cream in my shorts. I'm watching a 14-year-old girl on cam rubbing her slit... We'll chat when you get back." 

"It seems I have this strange talent for looking into the eyes of a person and reading their soul," Dillon confesses in a document entitled "Deep Thoughts." "This is no more apparent then when I meet women... No woman is unreachable. I used to look around at clubs and say, 'I would love to have this woman and that woman,' but now I say to myself, 'What woman do I want tonight?' Since I returned from Europe, I have slept with twenty-five women, six in the last nine days" - all of whom he identifies. This is someone who has recently discovered his power over other people, and likes what he sees.

A letter from an ex-girlfriend - perhaps his ex-wife, the author isn't identified, although she claims to have known him for six years - makes glancing reference to "the pain you went through as a child." She remembers staying up all one night at his house in Santa Monica while a roommate recounted the stories from his past - living in a car with his father and brother, begging on the streets for food, his father beating him "until you were a bloody mess" - stories that made them both weep. She saw the file from his psychologist, the pictures from his childhood. "You have been through things that I can't imagine 90% of the population could handle," she says. "How you made it through what you did and are not sitting on a clock tower with a rifle is truly one of today's modern miracles."

Those details are recounted in a 6,500-word document titled "Lethal Verses" in which Dillon apparently tries to put down on the page - at times ornately, and at others dispassionately - what had happened to him in his brief life, as he repeatedly calls it. He is 27 years old. He recalls the time when he was six, being sexually abused by his mother , one of his only clear memories of her, and her telling him and his brother the next morning, "You are such cute little boys - would you like to visit me when the diamond flying saucer comes to take me away?" He remembers the ritual beatings by his father, begging for food on roller skates on the Sunset Strip with his face streaked with dirt, relocating to Redondo Beach at 10 and becoming "pier rats," living in a van, he and his brother kneeling at the foot of a bed, watching their father turn tricks, because the mark always paid extra for them to watch.

And then there was this.

"I am in my living room of my apartment on Pier Ave. watching the cars go by on the street below, wondering if this is ever going to get any better. I am too young for life to be this hard, yet I seem to have the bigger understanding of the world around me. My Dad just came home from the pier, and he and Kink the chiropractor have stumbled upon this runaway all of about 16, and they are laughing and talking to this girl as if she were a long lost high school pal. I watch this and I know what is coming; she has no idea what she is in store for. I watch her as she tries to impress my Dad and Kink with her tales of the adventures she had traveling through Europe. She is at a total mental disadvantage with them and stands no chance. My Dad calls another friend, Dan, his childhood friend, to come over at the discounted rate. Then he places another call to a rich doctor friend of his and tells him that he has a package waiting for him at the shipping price of $200 for the hour. They start getting her all fucked up on weed and blow, and then the real mastery starts: My Dad starts pressing his massive cranium on her psyche until she does not even know what day of the week it is. She is now being told that she has to take all her clothes off or she will be brought to the authorities for truancy. Which was really a waste of time - this girl would have fucked a football team for a line. Kink slaps her face and says to suck his cock, and she timidly engages his request. Now the door knocks and it's Dan; he immediately takes his dick out and points at her and tells her she better be good or else. They are so skilled at misdirection, by this time they seem to be all working together at an almost ballet-style pace. This is when they do the most vicious thing to her: In every way, they take her the way they want, and no matter how hard she tries to stop them, she has no chance. Me and my brother watch this with such a sadness for this girl, but I almost don't feel any pity for her because I look at her with total disgust for her lack of intelligence.

"She is on top of my Dad now riding him, with tears running down her face because of the feeling of pain from having her ass raped. Then the grand finale is when the Doc comes over and watches all of this, and after they do all of this to her, he takes her into the bathroom and gives her all his cock, and then you start to hear this loud slapping. See, the Doc doesn't just like to fuck them, he likes to hurt them badly. I have seen him do some of the cruelest things imaginable to girls, and it doesn't bother him in the slightest. He just pays them extra and tells them to keep their mouth shut because no one would believe the word of a whore over a doctor. And you know what? He was right.

"Sometimes I wonder how anyone could live like this, and then I'm reminded that my creator is the deadliest of all the demons out there. This scene has played out for me in some variation too many times to even remember. The reason I remembered her was that her ass was bleeding and that did not even stop them, it only seemed to turn them on even more. They kept her around for almost a week abusing her this way. And of course, after everyone had their way with her, my Dad would do the customary thing to me and David.

And like always, I just said, 'No, it's alright, Dad. "My son's gonna grow up to be a faggot - watch." Sometimes, I would actually want to take them in a way, but not now, not her. I would not let my Dad give me anything that he had defiled like he did. In a way, it made me long for something normal. I was starting to wonder what effect all this was going to play on me as I got older and started to really want to be sexual. Up until now, I had only dabbled with random women here and there. I was seriously starting to have some sense of my sexuality and what it meant to me. On one hand, I saw women in this disgusting light that my father had painted for me - a light that showed all the ugliness in people. But through all that, I found such a unique beauty in women, and tried to find anything that was beautiful in those women, as an act of defiance towards my father. He wanted to show me what whores women were, and I wanted to show him what angels they were if he would only look. This is where I really started to realize that I was different than most - I looked for different things in life. I always had to find something beautiful in the trash."

FOR MORE "SIX DEGREES," GET THE BOOK.