Kingpin 2.0?

Then, a few weeks before the opening, the guy he hired to manage the new club asked for a ride to the airport. Scott let him drive his new Mercedes. En route, a fully loaded semitrailer truck going sixty-five miles an hour T-boned the car on the passenger side. It took emergency workers three hours to cut Scott out of the wreckage and he lost twenty-six units of blood at the scene. The driver walked away, but Scott’s back was broken, his optic nerve was cut, and a severed carotid artery flooded his brain with blood. He spent three months in a Tempe hospital, in and out of consciousness, his head swollen to twice its normal size.

Chris Smith with his father and son last year.

Scott says the family was never the same after the accident. Returning home after experimental surgery at UCLA during which doctors plugged the damaged artery with a tiny balloon, Scott and his wife slept in separate bedrooms. “Candace never touched me again,” he says. “And when I’d have seizures, she would hiss, ‘Not in front of the kids’ ”

A year later, the couple separated, and they eventually divorced. It was a nasty, costly settlement—Candace sued Scott, he says, for half of his insurance money from the accident—and, though both of them went on to remarry, to this day the former spouses badmouth each other to anybody who will listen.

Scott’s seizures were eventually controlled with medication, but the accident left him blind in his right eye and with some memory loss. He lost both Graffitti’s and Schieks, spending hundreds of thousands on legal fees, and he says his accountant betrayed him, failing to pay back taxes, which left him owing $190,000 to the IRS. Through it all, he remained an entrepreneur with a chip on his shoulder—and the primary example for his precocious son. In spite of the problems, Scott recaptured some of his former success with Diaper Deck, which he founded in 1987 in a Cannon Falls warehouse and had grown in value to $3 million. He bought two homes on Lake Minnetonka and a vacation home in Vail and indulged his children, buying Corbin an American saddle-bred show horse and Chris whatever new video game console or computer model he wanted.

During that period, Corbin and her gigantic horse, CH L.A. Times, were the stars of the Chanhassen horse scene. Corbin was the golden girl, a national champion, often going home with trophies bigger than she was. Chris, meanwhile, took on the role of a loner. During his sister’s shows, he could be found in the parking lot, blasting Tupac in the flashy white Land Rover Discovery his daddy gave him for his sixteenth birthday. Still, Chris wasn’t your typical spoiled rich kid. Sure, he spent hours in front of a computer screen playing Doom, but from the age of eleven he worked hard though he never had to. He loved making money.

His first “real jobs” were mowing the neighbors’ lawns in the summer and running a snow-blowing service come winter. Money, he will tell you to this day, has always been the most important motivator in his life. “Growing up,” he says, “I saw that my dad always had businesses and was always successful. And I thought that was my job as the son—to earn money.”

He found ways to make more and more money, bringing home $150 to $200 a gig as a magician at kids’ birthday parties. “Dude, these were just rinky-dink magic shows,” he recalls with a laugh. “This wasn’t, like, Cardini the Great.” Then he bought a cart (“My dad gave me a loan”) and sold minidoughnuts and cotton candy at Burnsville’s RiverDays and other festivals and parades. When he turned sixteen, his dad helped him open a car radio warehouse, Ultimate Audio, next to one of the Diaper Deck warehouses in Cannon Falls. “At first it was just to trick out my own ride,” he explains. “I had an extra alternator installed I was running so much juice—I was basically running the equivalent of a second air conditioning system the entire time. So I figured if I bought in bulk, I could actually make money on this by beating stereo shop prices in the city.”

Finding a lower price online became a competitive strategy. By the time he was seventeen, Chris was selling radar detectors online—“But I never sold them in Minnesota, because I knew that was illegal,” he says—and then parts for cable television pirate boxes.

In 1997, at the age of seventeen, Smith started his first online marketing company, Rivernet Internet Services, also based in Cannon Falls. Later that year, he met Anita, twenty-one, at the town Dairy Queen, then, despite the protests of both of his parents, moved her and her daughter into his condo. They had a son of their own in 2001 and were married in August 2003.

Chris supported his instant family by becoming one of cyberspace’s most notorious spammers. He was proud of his online handle, which had a supervillain ring to it: “The Rizler.”

At this point in the Information Age, somebody who sends spam is regarded with only slightly more esteem than the dudes entrapped on that late-night TV show trying to “meet” thirteen-year-old girls online. But back in 1998, when Chris Smith was an eighteen-year-old computer genius running a business out of his bedroom, spamming wasn’t illegal or even widely despised. It was regarded as merely the cyberspace version of annoying but effective direct mail and telephone marketing. The results were better back then too, because people’s inboxes weren’t inundated with the crap.

But crap it was. Smith admits to selling “naturally extracted pheromones” that made you smell like rotten fish and “herbal penile enlargement pills” that, uh, probably didn’t work. But he made the business work for him—at one point writing a program that trolled so effectively for e-mail addresses that a company would pay him $60,000 for an afternoon of work.