Socks

Found this, who is this guy? For real?

Source: The Sun-Herald

Five years ago Greg Lasrado drove a $500,000 black Lamborghini Diablo, rubbed shoulders with high-powered people such as US president Bill Clinton, lived between multimillion-dollar penthouses and bought racehorses for fun. Today his sole asset is a rusty ute, he lives in his parents' spare bedroom and spends most weekends helping his mum with the housework.

During the 1990s, Lasrado went from being a university student drop-out to Australia's No.1 internet porn tycoon, accumulating a $60million fortune along the way. But an extravagant lifestyle and poor business management sent him on a downward spiral to a broken marriage, heroin addiction and, finally, bankruptcy.

Today Lasrado, 38, reveals for the first time his dramatic rise and fall as an international porn baron.

"Up until five years ago, I was living every man's dream," he told The Sun-Herald in a Brisbane restaurant last week. "I'd wake up on a day like today, have lunch, buy a car, then head to the airport and be in another country by the close of play.

"I was convinced it would last forever. Now, I've lost the lot. If you were to turn me upside down, 10 cents would not fall out of my pocket."

The Australian Tax Office is hot on his tail, chasing $5million, but Lasrado says that is "the least of my worries". If found guilty of dangerous driving charges in September he could find himself in jail, with even more time on his hands to reflect on how it all went wrong.

Lasrado was born in Horsham, Victoria, in 1970 - a year after his parents migrated from India in search of a better life. He grew up in Moree, in country NSW, and has fond memories of his school holidays "driving tractors and working on the local farms".

In 1988, he moved to Brisbane and, wanting to make his "parents proud", enrolled at university, working in ice-cream parlours and pubs to make ends meet. After dropping out of university, he then started a business buying and selling computers from a basement beneath his house. Through "computer contacts" and "a random sequence of events", he suddenly found himself becoming a major player in the rapidly emerging world of online pornography.

The self-described "naive youngster" launched more than 200 individual adult websites, one by one. "It was a crazy time," he says. "I was still this country boy at heart, finding my feet in the world. I remember saying to my business partner at the time, if this makes us $100,000 for the year, we'll be laughing. We ended up making that in our first month."

Lasrado acknowledges there was "no secret" behind his success: "There were people worldwide who had never felt comfortable entering a newsagent's and buying an adult magazine. Then along came the internet and all of a sudden, in the privacy of their own home, they could access it all, including specific fetishes like bondage, big boobs or whatever."

By the mid-1990s, the online porn phenomenon was in full swing and more than 100,000 adults worldwide had subscribed to Lasrado's many sites. With the same number of monthly cash-debits pouring in off customer credit cards, he was suddenly a multimillionaire.

"It was a unique time," he says. "You have to remember, the internet was still in its infancy back then. While there was this huge growing demand for online porn, only a very small number of people were supplying it. We were all young, free and single. We socialised together and of course, we had pocketfuls of cash.

"We didn't give it a second thought at the time but we had just revolutionised the porn industry in a way nobody had ever done before."

With the world at his feet, Lasrado started to live the life of an international playboy. He hosted several weekend-long parties in Las Vegas for friends and web masters who had developed his many porn sites. "The bills for those parties often exceeded $100,000 which, at the time, seemed like nothing," he says.

In 1999 he fell in love - aged 29 - flying his girlfriend, Melissa Croskery, then 21, from Brisbane to Paris so he could propose to her over dinner. On their return he paid $2.88million for a riverfront block of land at Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, as an "engagement present". The engagement did not last.

Over the next few years, Lasrado ploughed his cash into stocks and property. His homes included a $7million Palazzo Versace penthouse on the Gold Coast and a landmark $6million pink house at St Lucia, Brisbane.

At its peak his property portfolio was worth $30million. While he also bought race horses "for the fun of it", his real passion was fast cars. "At various stages along the way, I owned four Lamborghinis and seven BMWs," he says. "Looking back now that was was a bit over the top, by anyone's standards."

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