Good profile of conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart in Wired. This passage was especially fun:
His first solo Web site, Breitbart.com, got 2.6 million readers in its first month thanks in large part to links from the Drudge Report. But Breitbart needed to turn that traffic into ad revenue, and he wasn’t much of a businessperson. A pair of conservative entrepreneurs volunteered to act as his sales agents. Brian Cartmell, a quiet programmer with money from his own antispam company, offered his coding expertise. Brad Hillstrom, the bearded, garrulous co-owner of a chain of medical clinics, brought contacts. Hillstrom flew Breitbart out to his lavish home on Lake Minnetonka for a weekend with Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Sandy Froman, president of the National Rifle Association. Breitbart was suitably impressed. He figured that his audience, combined with Cartmell’s geekery and Hillstrom’s Rolodex, would make millions.
On November 3, 2005, the three launched Gen Ads, a business that secured the exclusive rights to serve up banner ads on Breitbart.com. By the end of January, they were suing one another. Reuters was paying Breitbart a referral fee for every clickthrough from his site to Reuters.com, which Hillstrom and Cartmell said violated their exclusivity agreement. Breitbart countersued, pointing out that the pair had failed to run any site-specific ads on Breitbart.com and had concealed their own rather lurid pasts. Hillstrom’s company had been investigated by the Department of Labor for paying physical therapists brought in from Poland as little as $500 a month and was forced to pay $460,000 in back wages. Cartmell had been sued by Hasbro in 1996 for turning candy-land.com into a porn site. The legal wrangling dragged into the summer and cost Breitbart “more money than I had,” he says.
With the lawsuits behind him, Breitbart next became a champion of Pat Dollard, a former Hollywood agent turned gonzo war documentarian. Then it came to light that Dollard had doled out liquid Valium to marines in Iraq and robbed a pharmacy there while dressed in US military fatigues.