Copyrighted Material
Wired FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING INCORPORATING PROFILE WRITING
If Kim Dotcom hadn’t invented himself, it would have taken somebody like Terry Southern to do it for him. Charles Graeber went to New Zealand to meet the six-foot-seven, 350-pound Dotcom in his Dotcom Mansion soon after he was arrested by Kiwi authorities. The result was, in the words of its editors, “a fast-paced crime story, an adventure yarn, a legal thriller, and a tearful portrait of a troubled child prodigy who becomes an international robber baron.” Plus, there’s the Filipino ex-model wife, the three-year-old son, and a posse straight out of The Big Bang Theory (or The Hangover, take your pick). In any case, the National Magazine Award judges were impressed, describing this as a “masterly, sometimes hilarious profile that brings its larger-than-the-web subject brilliantly to life.”