Cobra Killer (34 page)

In the Navy

Cuadra said he joined the U.S. Navy after graduating early from his Homestead, Florida High School in order to escape conditions at home.
⁽⁵⁾
Although he was only seventeen at the time, his mother signed the Navy permission papers. “I flat out lied to my mother and I told her I would never go to war, I would wear a pretty white uniform and I would be out of harm’s way.”
⁽⁶⁾

Cuadra said he knew he was gay at the time he entered the Navy, but did not disclose that fact under the military’s existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. “I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it is a straight man’s military,” he said. “That’s the way it is set up. That is the way it is.”
⁽⁷⁾

Despite concerns of being caught for engaging in homosexual activity, Cuadra said he met an ensign officer while working at a Marine-Navy medical clinic in 2000 and they started a brief flirtation that led to a “non-sexual” relationship.

It was also during his work at the medical clinic that a fellow sailor, who was serving more openly than Cuadra, began engaging him in online chats during down or slow times at the clinic. Through that, Cuadra ended up meeting Joseph Kerekes who had been in a chat room trolling for guys to meet for his escort business.

Over time, Cuadra said, Kerekes seemed to take it as a personal challenge to try and get Cuadra out of the Navy. Kerekes himself had lasted only a month as a Marine. Kerekes even suggested that Cuadra go AWOL from his Naval assignment, something he refused to do. Cuadra said he refused to try and slip out of the Navy on anything other than an honorable discharge. “One day I came home and (Joe) said, ‘Come on, come with me,’” Cuadra testified. “I went in (Joe’s) car to a really high-powered attorney and (Joe) gave him a stack of thousands of dollars, like about five grand, and (Joe) said, ‘I need you to get him out of the Navy and he’ll only do if it’s an honorable (discharge).’”
⁽⁸⁾

Cuadra believes the lawyer enacted a policy under the National Intel Conditions that allowed him to depart, especially since Cuadra had good evaluations from his superiors and had had no disciplinary problems in the Navy. “(The lawyer) had me sign a letter saying that I was a practicing homosexual and that I was in love with another man and that the relationship would not end,” Cuadra said. The letter asked the military to “please understand that I need to be separated from the Navy.”
⁽⁹⁾

It wasn’t too long after he signed the letter that his Naval colleagues at the clinic knew he was gay and that he wanted out. Cuadra said persistent, several-times-a-day phone calls from Kerekes to the clinic asking for Cuadra helped tip off his fellow sailors. “It was getting really difficult to hide (being gay), and people just (said), ‘Oh God, Harlow is gay.’ I got the third degree and picked on and what not.”
⁽¹⁰⁾

Honorable discharge—dishonorable career moves

Once relieved of his Navy obligations and with an honorable discharge in hand, Cuadra said he set his sights on enrolling in Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Cuadra said Kerekes even promised to help pay for his college education.
⁽¹¹⁾

It was not to be, however, as Kerekes continued to dominate his personal time and behave in an increasingly jealous manner about Cuadra’s comings and goings. Despite such concerns, Cuadra said he moved into Kerekes’ apartment. Shortly after that, Kerekes said he didn’t want Cuadra going to college. “In typical Joe fashion, he changed his mind,” Cuadra said. “Everything (at Old Dominion) was a go, and then all of a sudden he says, ‘I don’t want you to go to school.’”
⁽¹²⁾
Cuadra said Kerekes expressed concern that he would meet another man at college and fall in love with him. Cuadra was devastated, he said, facing the reality that he gave up his dream of a military career for Kerekes, and was now giving up his plans to go college and earn a degree.

The months passed and perhaps not surprisingly, Kerekes recruited Cuadra to join him in the male escorting business. But Kerekes created an interesting caveat for Cuadra: he was not to have sex with his clients or allow them to touch him. Instead, Kerekes pointed Cuadra toward clients who wanted escorts to carry out fetish or “sex scenes” with them—scenes that only played out under strict rules Kerekes had set for Cuadra to follow regarding contact with clients.

One client, he testified before amused jurors, only wanted to play with his feet, fully clothed. Another client wanted Cuadra to dress in a “leatherman” outfit and liked torture scenes, including cracking a whip. “People like to role play and stuff like that,” Cuadra told the conservative Pennsylvania jurors. Cuadra said he found the whole thing “weird” but added, “I was making all right money. (Joe) was happy, and I was kind of curious about it.”
⁽¹³⁾

“Little by little” Kerekes grew more comfortable having his boyfriend out on escort calls and agreed that clients could now start performing oral sex on him if Cuadra did not reciprocate.

To ensure his “rules” were followed, Cuadra said, Kerekes would insert himself into escort calls where the client had only requested Cuadra, not both men. “It was very awkward,” Cuadra said. “He was forcing himself into the call, but then after that, (the client) would never want to see me again with him. It was just very awkward.”
⁽¹⁴⁾

Even though he was earning up to $160 an hour for his services, Cuadra said he never personally kept any of the funds, instead turning them over to Kerekes. “I don’t think that out of the years I’ve been with (Joe), I’ve maybe written a dozen checks. I never paid bills…(Joe) took care of everything, car bills, electric bills, everything,” Cuadra testified.
⁽¹⁵⁾

Kerekes would try to give some of the couple’s escort earnings to his parents, Cuadra said, but because Kerekes’ parents were aware of how their son made money, they often did not want to accept the funds. As a result, Cuadra said, Kerekes would give his mother a $100 bill for a small item from the store, and then refuse to take the change.

Cuadra “a battered spouse”?

Cuadra’s comments about Kerekes’ role in controlling the couple’s funds was just the start of a lengthy soliloquy in which he attempted to show Kerekes as the dominant, controlling member of their relationship. Cuadra and his attorneys needed to drive this point home if their attempts to cast doubt on Cuadra’s role in the Kocis killing were to succeed, and it was doubt they wanted shifted instead onto Kerekes. Kerekes even held on to Cuadra’s personal ID and credit cards, Cuadra said. “If I did happen to go somewhere without him, he would pull (my ID) out of his pocket. I never carried a wallet at all. I didn’t own one.”
⁽¹⁶⁾

Cuadra suggested in his testimony that his stepfather’s influence over his adolescent life, including alleged routine sexual intimacy between the two, left him open to Kerekes’ heavy influence over his adult life.

Cuadra also testified that from 2001-2007 he was isolated from his own family, partially by his own choice, and moved more and more toward Kerekes’ extended family in the Virginia Beach area. As he testified that he had resisted encouragement from Kerekes’ parents that he should reconcile with his mother, Cuadra began to sob. “I’m sorry, Momma,” Cuadra said, looking to the gallery where his mother continued to weep loudly. “That was my thinking, (Joe’s) parents were all I had. Joseph was all I had. That was it.”
⁽¹⁷⁾

It wasn’t until he sat more than a year isolated in a jail cell, ignored or harassed by other inmates because of the nature of his crime and his sexuality, that he began to “discover exactly how much you could get played for years.”
⁽¹⁸⁾

Acknowledging that he had all the comforts of a regular life, he revealed though that he had none of the freedoms of a regular life. Shopping or going out on his own were unheard of, he said, with Kerekes always insisting that he be at his side.

Perhaps expanding the uneven nature of their relationship, Cuadra said, was the fact that customers rarely called to book Kerekes for an escort call. Most of the BoisRUs clients wanted Cuadra, he said. “(Joe) only escorted when he was able to get into one of my calls.”
⁽¹⁹⁾

Whether it caused Kerekes to be jealous is uncertain, but Cuadra began developing a regular set of reliable clients. “Everybody that I met, it didn’t matter if they worked at a burger joint or were a senator, everybody that I met, they just called me again,” he said perhaps too proudly in front of jurors.
⁽²⁰⁾

Kerekes’ behavior, Cuadra said, also scared off young men they had recruited to work for them, and even some customers. Cuadra said the other boys working in the escort service “were probably my only friends, and I only saw them right before a call or right after a model shoot.”
⁽²¹⁾

Kerekes also fell into an almost daily habit of getting drunk and refusing to answer the BoisRUs phones once he was happy with the amount of money made that day. “When he achieved the $2,000 limit, it’s party time,” Cuadra said. “Anything else that came in after that, he would just give it to other guys, other escorts, or he would just simply turn off the phone.”
⁽²²⁾
The $2,000 daily limit had been reached and Kerekes was drinking heavily on the day of the shooting incident referred to by other witnesses, the one that drove Justin Hensley to leave for good.

Cuadra said on the day of the alleged shooting, Kerekes was “stinking drunk” by 2:00 P.M. and called his former pastor, Ronald Johnston, and left a troubling voice mail message. Cuadra said Kerekes “goes into this rampage and I basically, you know, Justin (Hensley) is in the house and he’s embarrassing me and I’m, like, ‘Joe, chill, you know?’”
⁽²³⁾

Trying to escape his raging, Cuadra said he went into his bedroom and put a NASCAR race on the large plasma TV. Kerekes wasn’t having any of it, and walked in and unplugged the TV. As Cuadra attempted to plug it back in, Kerekes fired at the TV, Cuadra said.

He said Kerekes went back to get another ammunition clip to reload his handgun, but Cuadra was able to talk him down. Kerekes then set about destroying computers, chairs, and tables in the loft area of the couple’s home, and threatened Hensley who had entered the room when he heard the shots. The incident ended, Cuadra said, as “Joseph collapses on the floor crying and that was the end of that temper tantrum.”
⁽²⁴⁾

Cuadra assesses the competition

During his testimony, Cuadra provided somewhat inconsistent testimony about his knowledge or awareness of Bryan Kocis’ company, Cobra Video. In some instances, Cuadra said he had rented or purchased Cobra DVDs only because he found the guys on the box covers attractive. In other instances, he seemed to notice specific details about the increasingly popular porn fare offered by Cobra. “I had several of (Cobra’s) movies,” he said. “The covers looked good quality…but back then, I didn’t even care who Cobra was.”
⁽²⁵⁾

He expressed similar disinterest in inquiries he said he and Kerekes received from Lockhart and Roy via the LSG Media enterprise. Something about their inquiry, though, caught Kerekes’ eye, Cuadra said, as he later discovered Kerekes had added Lockhart to Cuadra’s “friends” section on his MySpace page. Cuadra continually maintained in his testimony that he never personally e-mailed anyone and that the e-mails prosecutors had shown as part of their case were all written by Kerekes (even ones going out under Cuadra’s name).

Cuadra did admit to writing one e-mail to Lockhart that assessed other gay porn producers in the market. Cuadra, who still claimed to have little or no knowledge of the business of his own BoyBatter site or of Cobra Video wrote:

The problem with those companies is that they are ran by dirty old men that dont (sic.) give a shit about the newer generation.they want to keep us down. Glad I didnt.(sic.) I have gone broke twice already finaly (sic.) the site is making a decent amount of income for itself. I checked the cobra vids (sic.) that you did, and can’t believe the way they are marketing them.

Plus their edit work sucks. Anyways, co-producing sounds cool!
⁽²⁶⁾

Lockhart and Roy had made it clear that no productions with Cuadra and Kerekes could start until matters with Kocis were settled. That didn’t stop the back and forth communication, though, with Cuadra acknowledging that Lockhart had “politely told me to get toned. When he says, ‘get toned,’ that basically means lose weight. He wanted my abdominals to look better. You don’t pop your abdominals out by gaining more weight.”
⁽²⁷⁾

Cuadra said he only communicated with Lockhart via one live online chat. “I swear, I only had like one chat with him on that MySpace, that was it. I mean, Joe was a very jealous person and he would never just let me talk to people like that, you know.”
⁽²⁸⁾

Performing in a porn video with Lockhart was something Cuadra was excited about, though. “We were going to be a perfect contrast to each other,” he said. “That is what Grant (Roy) said, the pairing was so perfect because I was slightly a little taller than he was, a little bit better defined, and so it would be a good contrast to one another.”
⁽²⁹⁾

Meeting Lockhart meant Cuadra had “butterflies” in his stomach and so he and Kerekes took several drinks in the casino bar before Lockhart and Roy arrived for dinner. “They had a very nervous smile on their face,” Cuadra remembers. “So the first time they meet me, they’re kind of, you know, I can tell that they’re nervous.”
⁽³⁰⁾